Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (24 page)

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “I was in diapers then.”

“The VCR changed all that,” Sal said. “Once people could rent or buy videocassettes, they preferred to watch pornography at home. But the industry still made feature-length films. We employed scriptwriters. Our movies had plots. Then porn went online, and things changed again.”

“How so?”

“Attention spans got shorter. Nobody cared about plots anymore. Ninety-minute feature films mostly disappeared. We still shoot a couple a year, but they don’t make any money. We just make them to maintain our self-respect.”

A half-dozen smart remarks ran through my mind, but I decided to keep them to myself.

“The thirty- and sixty-minute DVDs that replaced them were just compilations of ten-minute sex scenes that could be chopped and posted separately on Internet pay sites,” Sal said. “Turned out even they were too long. Guys just watched the first penetration, fast-forwarded to the money shot, and jumped to the next video.”

“But it was profitable,” I said.

“Very.”

“So what went wrong?”

“The market got flooded. Cheap handheld video cameras made it easy for any fool to shoot a porno. The number of online pay sites exploded. A price war broke out. We used to charge forty-five dollars a month for a subscription to one of our sites. Now we’re asking nineteen ninety-five, and it’s hard to get people to pay even that.”

“Because?”

“Because our videos are being pirated. People download them and then post them by the hundreds on porn-sharing sites where anyone can watch them for free.”

“Like what happened with music,” I said.

“Exactly. Then it got worse. Now guys are shooting videos of themselves having sex with their fat wives and skanky girlfriends and posting them online.” Sal looked at me and shook his head. “I never dreamed people would be giving this stuff away.”

“Sounds like you’re in a dying business,” I said.

“I don’t think so. There are still people out there who want to see beautiful women having sex, and who want their videos to be in focus and well lighted. There’s still a market for our product, but the margins are smaller now, so we have to keep our costs down.”

“Which is why you opened the studio here,” I said.

“That’s right. The rent is lower, and the actors we’ve recruited locally work cheaper. In Southern California, we competed with Vivid, Digital Playground, and a dozen other studios for the best talent, so we had to pay the girls three to five thousand for each sex scene. Here, they take a grand and are grateful to get it.”

“What about the men?”

“In the Valley, they get five to eight hundred per scene,” he said. “Here we’re paying them two hundred, and they’re so glad for the chance to fuck girls like Doreen that they’d probably work for free.”

“Know what all this reminds me of?” I asked.

“The newspaper business?”

“Yeah. Aggregators pirate our news, readers don’t want to pay for something they can get for free, and we keep cutting costs to keep our heads above water.”

“One big difference, though,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The pornography business will survive.” Sal rubbed his face and looked at me for a moment. “How much longer do you think the
Dispatch
will hold on?”

“I don’t know. Two or three years, maybe.”

“What will you do then?”

“No idea.”

“Would you consider coming to work for me?”

“Doing what?”

“You are an expert at digging up hard-to-get information,” Sal said.

“So I’ve been told.”

“I could use somebody like you.”

“What kind of information are you after?”

“That is something to be discussed after you take the job.”

I considered asking Sal about the Chad Brown murders again but then thought better of it. He’d already told me the only thing he knew was what he’d read in the paper. If he wasn’t involved, that was probably the truth. If he
was
involved, he wasn’t going to tell me.

I told Sal I’d think about his offer. I shook his hand, and I was on my way out when I ran into Vanessa in the hall.

“Did Dad offer you that job?” she asked.

“He did.”

“Going to take it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should. You’d look good in front of a camera.”

“Oh God, no!”

She threw back her head and laughed. “Just kidding,” she said, and walked on by. I turned and watched her step into her father’s office.

I continued down the hall, pushed through the door to the outer office, and found it empty. The receptionist had left for the day, or maybe she’d stepped out for a smoke. I walked across the beige carpet and went through the steel door to the peeling green vestibule. Then I stopped, thought for a second, and decided to employ one of those investigative reporting techniques they don’t teach at Columbia. I turned back just as the lock in the steel door clicked shut. I punched the first four numbers into the electronic keypad, guessed at the fifth, and hit it on the fourth try. At the receptionist’s desk, I found the button that unlocked the inner door, slipped inside, and crept back to Sal’s office. Standing outside the door, I could just make out the voices.

“When did this happen?” Sal said.

“A couple of hours ago,” Vanessa said.

“Where?”

“Pawtucket.”

“Sonuvabitch,” Sal said. “It’s not over.”

Then the phone rang. Sal took the call and started arguing with someone about the price of a new video camera. I tiptoed down the hall, went back out the door, and headed for the
Dispatch
.

I’d just stepped into the newsroom when Lomax grabbed me by the arm and handed me a printout of a story under Mason’s byline:

Nine-year-old Julia Arruda of 22 Maynard St., Pawtucket, was abducted at 3:15 p.m. today and remains missing.

Pawtucket police said the child had been playing with friends outside the Potter Burns Elementary School, which she attends, when she was struck in the face with a snowball and decided to go home. She had just stepped onto the sidewalk when a van pulled up and the back door flew open. A man wearing a black ski mask jumped out, grabbed her, and dragged her inside. Julia’s best friend, Karen Rose, also 9, ran after the van, caught the license plate, and wrote it down in the snow, police said.

Twenty minutes later, police found the van abandoned on a side street a half-mile away. It had been reported stolen yesterday from a U-Haul lot on Harris Street in nearby South Attleboro.

42

Tuesday at dawn, FBI agents raided houses in Fort Worth, Texas; Naples, Florida; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Andover, Massachusetts; and Edison, New Jersey. They arrested five middle-aged men and seized their computers. By Thursday, all five had been formally charged with possession of child pornography, released on bail pending trial, and fired from their jobs. According to Parisi, all five were warned that the charges might be the least of their problems—that someone out there might be gunning for them.

Shortly before noon on Friday, Charles H. Gleason of 43 Carmello Drive in Edison was waiting at a red light at the corner of Lincoln Highway and Plainfield Avenue when somebody driving a stolen Buick Regal pulled up next to him, rolled down the passenger-side window, and fired three shots from a nine-millimeter Springfield XdM. According to the Associated Press account, cops found the Buick abandoned a few miles away on the Rutgers University campus. The handgun, reported stolen from a gun shop in Providence a month earlier, was under the driver’s seat. Gleason’s wife, referring to her late husband as “the pathetic little pervert,” told the AP he’d been on his way to the state unemployment office to apply for benefits.

I didn’t care. I had a date.

43

I liked to go into Boston for the games. Secretariat had memorized the directions to Fenway Park and the Garden and knew to drop me off at a couple of watering holes along the route. The bars on Yawkey Way always served up just what I needed—cheese fries, entertaining loudmouths, and the occasional Yankees or Knicks fan who wandered into the wrong place. I didn’t often bother with the rest of the city. Providence had all the problems I could handle, and it was small enough to fit in my pocket.

Cambridge, just north of Boston, was a schizophrenic little place: halfway houses and mom-and-pop grocers interspersed with pretentious eateries and ivory towers that hummed with possibility. The center of the town was gritty enough to remind me of home.

As Yolanda and I headed to Central Square for Patricia Smith’s poetry reading, I pointed out everything I didn’t like. “Another Starbucks,” I said for the fourth time. “Another grill with an ‘e’ on the end. And there’s another shop with an extra ‘pe’ on the end. Either folks around here can’t spell, or we’ve wandered into an alternate universe.”

Behind the wheel of her Acura, Yolanda shook her head and laughed, and I felt my breath catch on something.

“MIT and Harvard spell money,” she said. “What did you expect?”

The Cantab Lounge was in the middle of a block that lifted my spirits a little. Although it held one of those ghastly fern-filled restaurants, there was also a pizza joint that sold sloppy slices and a 7-Eleven with ancient hot dogs spinning on hot rollers—cuisine for the tipsy, late-night connoisseur.

We grabbed a parking spot behind the bar, and I walked behind my date, getting a load of the scenery. Yolanda had tucked a man’s blue oxford shirt into faded jeans that looked poured on. On the back right pocket was a familiar logo—True Religion. I don’t consider myself a prayin’ man, but …

“Mulligan, c’mon, the show’s starting soon. What are you doing back there?” I looked up to see Yolanda smirking at me from beneath the brim of a Chicago Cubs hat. She looked so gorgeous that I’d already decided to forgive her for the ball cap.

She’d finally agreed to go with me because she really wanted to hear Patricia read, didn’t want to go alone, and couldn’t find anyone else who gave a shit about poetry. Her usual ground rule applied: We were just going together, not
goin’
together.

We opened the door to the Cantab and were greeted by the smell of cheap whiskey and old fried food, the sound of heartbreak on the jukebox, and dark the way drunks like it. Before my eyes adjusted, I could barely make out the forms of guys who’d probably been glued to their stools since breakfast.

We followed a stream of people down a narrow staircase to the basement, where the poetry reading was set to start in fifteen minutes. The buzz there hinted at an optimism sorely lacking on the first floor. The room was strung with colored lights. The stage was just a small area cleared at the front of the room. A DJ was playing songs that sounded like drums mumbling.

We found stools at the bar, the last seats left. Yolanda requested white wine. The barkeep, a gravelly-voiced gal named Judy, unscrewed the cap on a green bottle and poured liberally into a plastic cup. I wanted beer, but I asked for a club soda.

“I know why this place is called the Cantab,” I said.

“Why?” Yolanda said.

“In England, a resident of Cambridge was called a Cantabrigian. So were students at the University of Cambridge. And here we are in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

“And just how did you know that?”

“I Googled it this morning while I was looking up ways to impress you.”

The room had grown so crowded that folks were sitting on the floor beside the stage and on the stairs leading to the restrooms. We were approaching fire hazard, and Yolanda already had me a little sweaty. I could feel her thigh against mine.

“So where’s my favorite poet?” I shouted. It was tough to hear.

“How many poets have you actually read?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether Dr. Seuss counts.”

Yolanda laughed again, and my thigh quivered a little. “That’s Patricia over there,” she said.

I followed her eyes to a corner near the front of the room where a Hershey-colored woman was signing a slim volume of poetry. I recognized her smile from the back of her books, but I was unprepared for the rest of her, looking good in black slacks and a blue silk blouse with an African print. She looked up just in time to see me staring, came straight for us, and gave Yolanda a hard hug. Seeing the two of them tangled that way sent my mind into all sorts of kinky places.

“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” I said. “I assumed Yolanda only knew you from your work, and she let me think it.”

Patricia looked at me curiously.

“My name is Mulligan. I’m Ms. Mosley-Jones’s boy toy.”

Patricia looked at Yolanda. Then back at me. Then at Yolanda again.

“In his dreams,” Yolanda said, and they both laughed.

Nobody told me that we’d have to suffer through something called an “open mic,” which consisted of folks reading poems about their cats, poems about their orgasms, poems about their cats’ orgasms, and poems that said over and over that the poet was angry, or in love, or horny, or all three. Then it was time for the main event.

Hearing Patricia was more mesmerizing than reading her. The poems, jazzy and full of language play, gave my emotions a workout. I hadn’t been that close to tears since I’d been forced to give away my dog. The dog wasn’t too thrilled about it, either.

When the reading was over, I just wanted to go someplace with Yolanda and talk about what we’d heard. Preferably her place. Preferably in a horizontal position. But first it was burgers at the fern place. I suffered through a waitress named Ariel, shoestring fries, and parsley on the plate. Yolanda and I talked about Patricia’s poetry, and she suggested names of other poets I might like. I promptly forgot them all.

The drive back to Rhode Island took too long, yet not as long as I wanted it to. We listened to Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker and Koko Taylor and Tommy Castro. We didn’t talk much, but it was a comfortable silence. At least her half of it. I felt sweat trickle under my shirt.

Finally we reached Yolanda’s place, where Secretariat waited like a sentry at the curb across the street. I hoped he’d be waiting there for a while. Maybe until morning.