Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (3 page)

Seagulls had strafed here, and the footing was treacherous. My cell played Lomax’s ringtone again, but I ignored it. I crept as close to the edge as I dared, raised my Nikon, and studied the scene through the 135mm lens.

A body, its arms and legs splayed like a starfish, sprawled faceup on a partially submerged, blood-spattered boulder. Three men in plain clothes—I figured them for two detectives and a medical examiner—were squatting beside it, one taking photographs and the others collecting bits of evidence and dropping them into clear plastic bags. The ropes they’d used to rappel down still dangled from the cliff. The tide was coming in, waves tossing foam on the investigators’ trousers. In a few minutes, the scene would be underwater.

I snapped some photos, hoping for one or two usable shots. A real photographer would have done better, but as usual I didn’t have one handy. Our photo department had been depleted by layoffs.

A couple of uniformed state troopers lowered a steel basket down the cliff face. As the detectives lifted the body and strapped it into the basket, I could see that the victim was dressed in a tuxedo. I took a few more pictures, but the Newport uniform who’d been shooing the tourists was heading my way now, his boots clicking on the stone path.

“Good morning, Officer Phelps.”

He threw me a puzzled look, then nodded in recognition.

“Mulligan, right? From last night?”

“The same.”

“You press?”

“Right again.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that when I pulled you over?”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“Ahhh … guess not.”

We stood quietly for a moment, looking out over the sea. Phelps pulled a granola bar from his pocket, tore the shiny green wrapper, and took a small bite.

“Beautiful place to die,” he said.

“That it is. Maybe that’s why people come here to jump.”

“This guy was no jumper.”

“No?”

“Didn’t fall, either,” he said.

“And you know that because…?”

“I could tell right off,” he said, “just from the position of the body.”

“Because he never tried to break his fall,” I said.

“You noticed that, too, huh?”

“Yeah. It’s a natural reaction. Even suicides usually do it. This guy just went over backwards and landed on his spine.”

“There’s some other stuff that seems suspicious, too,” he said.

“Like?”

“Like the through-and-through bullet wound to his throat.”

That explained the state police. They wouldn’t have shown up for a jumper.

Phelps broke a crumb from his granola bar and tossed it into the air. A gull swooped in, snatched it, and dived toward the surf.

“I suppose that just encourages them,” he said.

“Hey, everybody needs a little encouragement.”

“Yeah? Well, the state cops said I should encourage
you
to stop taking pictures.”

“That right?”

“Uh-huh. Also said to confiscate your camera.”

“And?”

“And fuck them,” he said. “They strut in here, bigfoot our case, treat us like errand boys. If they want your camera, they can come get it themselves. Far as I’m concerned, take all the pictures you want.”

“Got an ID yet?”

“We’re off the record, right?”

“Sure.”

“The state cops ain’t big on sharing, but from what I overheard, there was no identification on the body.”

“Who found it?”

“Couple of early morning joggers spotted it and called 911.”

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“Yeah, but it don’t make no sense,” he said. “The staties keep mumbling about salmonella. Seem pretty excited about it. What the hell does food poisoning have to do with anything? This dude got shot.”

“Salmonella? You’re sure that’s what they said?”

“What it sounded like.”

“Dirty Laundry” started playing again. I pulled the cell from my jacket pocket, told Phelps I had to take the call, and strolled out of earshot down the Cliff Walk.

“Mulligan.”

“Been trying to reach you for an hour,” Lomax said. “Why the hell aren’t you answering the phone?”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

“Listen, I need you to get your ass back to Newport. There’s chatter on the state police radio, something about a body at the bottom of the Cliff Walk.”

“Already on it,” I said.

“And?”

“Guy in a tuxedo got shot and went over the edge.”

“ID?”

“None on the body, but the state cops seem to think it’s Sal Maniella.”

“Holy shit!”

“Yeah.”

“So Salmonella finally got what he deserved,” Lomax said.

“Looks that way.”

“ID good enough to go with?”

“Not even close. I got it secondhand from a Newport cop who eavesdropped on the staties and thought they were talking about food poisoning.”

“Okay, but stay on it,” Lomax said, “and for chrissake stay in touch.”

4

Next morning I took the elevator to the
Dispatch
’s third-floor newsroom and tiptoed through a graveyard. By the windows that looked out on Fountain Street, a couple of technicians were dismantling Dell desktops. I could still picture Celeste Doaks, the bespectacled religion writer, hunched over one of those keyboards, cringing as Ted Anthony, the overweight medical writer, passed gas from his latest burrito. Malcolm Ritter, so damned good he had
me
understanding science, was always hidden behind a tower of books that couldn’t muffle his asthmatic sniffs. Sometimes Mary Rajkumar, the travel babe, breezed in on her way to or from someplace exotic, reminding them that there was a life outside the newsroom. But none of them wanted to be anywhere else. Now two bored techs were pulling the plugs on their life’s work.

I logged on to my computer and was skimming my messages when I sensed someone hovering. Whoever it was waited patiently, hesitant to intrude on my work. Someone genteel, then, and well mannered. Had to be the publisher’s son. Anyone else would have had the sense to butt in. If I ignored him, maybe he would go away. I finished with my messages and reached for the phone.

“Excuse me, Mulligan. May I have a word?”

Aw, crap. “What is it now, Thanks-Dad?”

“I’d prefer that you stop calling me that. My name is Edward.”

“So file a grievance.”

“I just wanted to tell you that your Cliff Walk photographs were excellent.”

“No, they weren’t. Only good thing about them was that they were in focus.”

“Well,
I
liked them.”

“Maybe if your daddy hadn’t laid off most of the photo staff, we could have had some professional pictures to go with the story.”

He sighed. “It’s not like he had a choice, you know.”

Edward Anthony Mason IV was Rhode Island aristocracy, the scion of six inbred Yankee families that had owned the
Dispatch
since the Civil War. A year and a half ago, he’d been awarded a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia, returned to Rhode Island, and moved back into the oceanfront Newport McMansion where he’d been raised. He’d been working as a reporter here ever since, learning the business that would soon be his by birthright. By the look of things, there wouldn’t be much left of it by the time his daddy relinquished the corner office on the fourth floor. Given the size of Mason’s trust fund, I wasn’t about to start praying for him. In fact, I wanted to hate his privileged ass. But I didn’t.

Mason had taken to hanging around me, eager to learn the things about street reporting that they didn’t teach at Columbia—which was just about everything. Sometimes he got underfoot, but he
was
starting to pick up a few things.

“My father,” Mason was saying, “deeply regrets the recent staff reductions, but they were necessary to preserve the financial health of our family newspaper.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s not working. The
Dispatch
is circling the drain.”

“Perhaps, but it’s hardly Father’s fault. Every newspaper is having difficulties.”

“Of course they are,” I said, “and do you want to know why?”

“I’d welcome your opinion on the subject.”

“Because they are run by idiots.”

“A bit harsh, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Newspapers have fallen victim to forces that are beyond their control,” Mason said.

“Bullshit,” I said. “When the Internet first got rolling, newspapers were
the
experts on reporting the news and selling classified advertising. They were ideally positioned to dominate the new medium. Instead, they sat around with their thumbs up their asses while upstarts like Google, the
Drudge Report,
the
Huffington Post,
and ESPN.com lured away their audience and newcomers like Craigslist, eBay, and AutoTrader.com stole their advertising business. By the time newspapers finally figured out what was happening and tried to make a go of it online, it was too late.”

Mason stroked his chin, thinking it over.

“People like your daddy forgot what business they were in,” I said. “They thought they were in the newspaper business, but they were really in the news and advertising business. It’s a classic mistake—the same one the railroads made in the 1950s when the interstate highway system was being built. If Penn Central had understood it was in the freight business instead of the railroad business, it would be the biggest trucking company in the country today.”

“A provocative analysis,” Mason said. “Perhaps you might expand it into an op-ed piece.”

“Already did. Your daddy declined to print it.”

“Maybe if I had a word with him…”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Writing about it isn’t gonna change anything. What’s done is done, and now thousands of journalists who devoted their lives to reporting the news are paying the price.”

Mason fell silent for a moment, then said, “Did you know this is Mark Hanlon’s last day?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He doesn’t want us to make a fuss.”

“So he told me.”

“Doesn’t seem right.”

“It’s the way he wants it, Thanks-Dad.”

“Lomax says he’s the best feature writer the
Dispatch
ever had.”

“Without a doubt.”

Earlier this week, while perusing the obituary page, Hanlon noticed that the death of a seventy-seven-year-old Pawtucket woman had been given only three lines. It was the shortest obit he’d ever seen in the
Dispatch,
and it offended him. So he talked to her only son, found the friends she worshipped with at St. Teresa’s, tracked down people she once made G.I. Joes with on the assembly line at Hasbro, and wrote a story that celebrated her life. The lead was typical of his elegant, unadorned style: “This is Mary O’Keefe’s second obituary.” It was his final story for the
Dispatch
.

I stood and looked toward his cubicle near the city desk. He was still there, going through drawers and placing a few personal items in a shoebox. At fifty-four years old, he’d reluctantly accepted the paper’s early retirement offer, knowing it was better than the alternative. I watched as he pushed back from the desk, rose on long, storklike legs, and shrugged on his denim jacket. Then he turned in a slow circle, looking the place over one last time.

Mason began to clap, the sound like gunshots in the cavernous space, and my opinion of him ticked up a notch. Lomax looked up from his computer screen, annoyed by the racket. Then he realized what was happening, pushed himself up from his fake leather throne, and joined in. One by one, throughout the football field–size newsroom, the survivors of the latest bloodletting got to their feet for a standing ovation. Marshall Pemberton, our fish-faced managing editor, rarely ventured from his glass-walled office that resembled an aquarium, but for this he made an exception. He waddled out of his door to join the tribute.

Hanlon lowered his head, tucked the cardboard box under his left arm, and trudged to the elevator. He stepped in, and the door slid shut behind him. He never once looked back.

Pemberton shook his head sadly, slipped back into the aquarium, and closed the door behind him. Once, he had managed the news department at one of the finest small-city newspapers in America. Now he was like a physician trying to keep his patient alive while the family debated whether to pull the plug.

5

Attila the Nun thunked her can of Bud on the cracked Formica tabletop, stuck a Marlboro in her mouth, sucked in a lungful, and said: “Fuck this shit.”

“My sentiments exactly,” I said.

“It’s what, a week now? And the state police
still
can’t ID the body? What is this, a
Naked Gun
sequel?” She paused to gulp more Bud. “Who’s running this investigation, Frank Drebin?”

“Far as I know, it’s still Captain Parisi,” I said. “Think he might be stonewalling you?”

She hit me with a steely glare. “He wouldn’t fucking dare.”

Attila the Nun’s real name was Fiona McNerney, but a
Dispatch
headline writer had bestowed the nickname on her, and it stuck. She was a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor religious order. She was also the Rhode Island attorney general. Both roles called for a more discreet vocabulary, but she was always herself around me. We’d been friends since junior high. Over the years, the smiling kid with braces and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose had turned gruff and gray. Cigarettes and a holy determination that damned delicacy had graced her with a growl that rivaled John Lee Hooker’s. Her red hair was chopped short like a boy’s, and she never bothered with makeup. God wasn’t the kind of husband who needed a trophy wife to boost his ego.

“So what’s the holdup?” I said.

“Parisi says Salmonella’s wife and daughter are both out of the country. He’s not sure where and doesn’t know when they’re coming back.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I’ve been checking their place in Greenville every few days. It’s always dark and locked down tight. No one else can identify the body?”

“Apparently not. None of his dirtbag flunkies will even talk to a cop, let alone make an official ID.”

“What about unofficially?”