Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (30 page)

“Nice place,” I said.

“I like it.”

“The Almighty ever show up to check the till?”

“He never shows his face, but I sense his presence every day.”

I put him at five feet ten, with stringy arms, a sunken chest, and a bowling ball–size potbelly. He wore a red plaid work shirt with a gold cross showing at the neck and a green baseball cap with the words “World’s Best Grandpa” above the bill. It was hard to imagine him as an athlete.

“Tell me more about you, Sal, and Dante,” I said.

“The three of us were wicked sinners. Drunk out of our skulls or high on marijuana most of the time, ’cept on game days, and copulating with every girl what would let us. Being as we were big men on campus, a lot of ’em did.”

“Good times,” I said.

“Sure thing, if hell’s what you’re aiming for. After college I found Jesus and got over the wildness. I guess Sal and Dante never did.”

“The way I heard it, Sal got his start in the pornography business when he was still at Bryant.”

“You heard right,” he said. “Sal shot most of the pictures for his skin magazine in our dorm room. He’d smoke a little weed with a girl and then get her to pose naked on his bed. Sometimes he’d bring in two or three at the same time and talk ’em into pleasuring each other, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“Sal let Dante and me help out with the lighting, not that he needed the help. It was just an excuse so’s we could watch. Afterward, we’d all get to drinking, and sometimes the girl would sleep with one of us. Couple of ’em took on all three of us, God forgive me.”

“Were any of the girls underage?”

“I don’t believe so. Sal was real careful about that, always checking ID to make sure they were at least eighteen. He got real righteous about it after what happened to Dante’s little sister.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Awful thing. She was just eight years old when it happened.”

“When was this?”

“Our junior year. Dante turned white as a sheet when he got the news over the telephone. He put down the receiver, curled up in his bed, and cried like a baby. Sal got down on his knees at the bedside and held on to him until Dante stopped blubbering and told us what was wrong.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“Some animal grabbed her off the playground near her house. The cops found her tied to a tree the next day, raped and beaten, but still breathing, thank the Lord.”

“Where was this?”

“In New Haven, Dante’s hometown.”

“The cops catch the guy?”

“They figured out who did it all right, but they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. Left his DNA all over her, I imagine, but they didn’t know about that stuff back then.”

“Dante must have been pretty angry about it.”

“All three of us were.”

“You do anything about it?”

“I probably shouldn’t talk about that.”

“Dante’s sister. What was her name?”

“Rachel,” he said. “Rachel Elizabeth Puglisi.”

“Know where she is now?”

“Dead.”

“What happened?”

“Way I heard it, she seemed to recover from the attack; but sometime after she turned thirteen, she found the tree she’d been tied to and hanged herself from it, God rest her soul.”

54

The
New Haven Register
’s Web site didn’t include archives, so I called the paper and was told that its news library had never digitized them. Still worse, all its paper clippings from the 1960s and 1970s had been discarded. Fortunately, the city’s public library had all of the old newspapers on microfiche.

Friday, the deputy sports editor called in sick so he could interview with ESPN, and I got stuck editing basketball game stories and laying out sports pages all day. It was Saturday before I could saddle up Secretariat and make the two-hour drive to New Haven. When Secretariat was younger, he could have done it in an hour and a half.

An attendant in the public library’s reading room set me up with a microfiche reader. “It’s not often that somebody asks for these old newspaper files,” she said, “but you’re the second one in the last few weeks.”

“Who was the other one?”

“I didn’t get her name.”

“What did she look like?”

She frowned and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t help you with that. We respect people’s privacy here.”

I started with the September 1, 1966, edition of the
Register,
began scrolling, and immediately got caught up in it.

Red Guards were on the rampage in China.

Senator Charles Percy’s twenty-one-year-old daughter was found stabbed and bludgeoned in the family mansion on Chicago’s North Shore.

A new TV show called
Star Trek,
starring a former Shakespearean actor named William Shatner, debuted on NBC.

Scotland Yard arrested Buster Edwards and charged him with masterminding the Great Train Robbery.

President Lyndon Johnson visited American troops in Vietnam.

The Baltimore Orioles swept the Los Angeles Dodgers to win their first World Series ever.

Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.

A B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

Dr. Sam Sheppard, on trial for murdering his pregnant wife, was acquitted.

The Beatles went into seclusion to record a new album; according to record industry gossip, the working title was
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
.

Stop it,
I told myself.
If you keep this up, you’ll be sitting here for a month.

Ninety minutes after I started, I spotted a one-column headline at the bottom of page one in the October 30 edition:

Girl, 8, Raped and Left Tied to Tree

New Haven—An 8-year-old city girl who was abducted from a playground near her home 12 hours earlier was found tied to a tree about a hundred yards from the Pardee Rose Garden in East Rock Park yesterday morning, New Haven police said.

Police said she was rushed to Yale–New Haven Hospital, where she was listed in fair condition with a broken nose, a fractured left arm, and multiple abrasions and contusions. A hospital examination determined that the girl had been raped, police said.

Police detectives were still in the park late yesterday afternoon collecting evidence.

Out of consideration for the family, the story didn’t mention her name.

I kept scrolling. Over the next few months, occasional updates appeared on inside pages:

Police Vow to Find Girl’s Attacker

Hamden Man Questioned in Child Rape

Police Arrest Child-Rape Suspect

Child-Rape Suspect Released, Police Cite Lack of Evidence

Child Rape Case Still Open

Then nothing until April 3, when the following appeared:

Child Molester Beaten

New Haven—Alfred V. Furtado, 44, of 62 Evergeen Ave., Hamden, a convicted child molester, was found naked and tied to a tree in East Rock Park yesterday afternoon. Police said he had been savagely beaten.

He was taken to Yale–New Haven Hospital, where he was reported in serious condition with a fractured skull. Police said he also suffered two fractured kneecaps and a broken eye socket. His nose, left clavicle, and five of his fingers were also reported broken, and his sex organs had been mutilated with a sharp object, police said. A baseball bat and a hunting knife recovered beside the tree may have been used in the attack, police said.

Furtado was found tied to the same tree that had been used to bind an 8-year-old New Haven girl after she was beaten and raped last October, police said. They added they are exploring the possibility that the two crimes are linked.

Furtado was initially arrested in connection with the attack on the girl, but he was subsequently released for lack of evidence. Police said he has a criminal record that includes public lewdness and molestation, and that he served 7 years of his 15-year sentence for the violent rape of a 10-year-old East Haven girl in 1957.

When I walked out of the library, it was after seven
P.M
. and raining. I dashed to Secretariat and drove home in the dark. I parked illegally on the street outside near my apartment, trudged up the stairs, shrugged off my damp clothes, and stepped into the shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time. It took the chill off but didn’t do much to wash away the day. Maybe talking about it would help.

*   *   *

“Hi, Yolanda. It’s Mulligan.”

“Hi, baby. You okay? You sound weary.”

“That I am.”

“Tough day?”

“Tough year. Uh … listen, I know it’s on the late side, but I wonder if you’d like to have a nightcap. Maybe grab a little something to eat somewhere.”

“Sorry, but I can’t.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.”

“Mulligan?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve started seeing somebody.”

“Oh.”

“He teaches chemistry at Brown, and he’s a really great guy.”

“What’s he got that I don’t?”

“You know.”

“Oh, that.”

“Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“No, I can’t.… He’s there now, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I better let you go, then.”

“Still friends?”

“Always,” I said.

“’Night, Mulligan.”

“Good night, Yolanda.”

So what. I’d been shot down by women before. Short ones and tall ones. Plump and skinny. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads. White, black, and yellow. Schoolteachers, barmaids, reporters, secretaries, and college professors. Most times, I’d shaken it off with a shot of Bushmills and a good night’s sleep. This was one of those other times. This time, I felt blue drop over me like a shroud.

I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, zipped a windbreaker over it, tromped down the stairs, and stepped out into the rain. It was coming down harder now, but I didn’t care. Like a batter who’d been drilled in the ribs with a fastball, I needed to walk it off. I sloshed two blocks north on America Street and turned right. The bars and restaurants on Atwells Avenue beckoned, but I wasn’t in the mood for food, light, or company that wasn’t Yolanda. I walked east to DePasquale, turned right, and trudged past a long row of triple-deckers and rooming houses all the way to Broadway. There I turned right, walked to the corner of America Street, and turned back toward home.

Outside my apartment, Secretariat shivered in the rain. I climbed in, wrung the wet from my hair, and fired the engine. The drive to Swan Point Cemetery took fifteen minutes. I thought about leaving the Manny Ramirez jersey in the car, not wanting to get it wet, but on a night like this, Rosie would welcome what little warmth it could provide. I draped it over the shoulders of her gravestone, sat in the mud, and rested my back against the cold granite.

“Evening, Rosie. How are you tonight?”

The same. Rosie was always the same now.

“Me? I’ve been better.… Yeah, it’s about that lawyer I’ve been seeing. Remember me telling you that as long as she didn’t say, ‘Let’s just be friends,’ I still had a chance?”

Rosie always remembered everything.

“Well, tonight, she finally said it.”

55

“I’m confused.”

“What about?” Fiona asked.

“Sex and religion.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“You too?” I asked.

“About religion, sure. Sex? Not so much.”

We were sitting at opposite ends of a brown leather couch in her parlor, she with a calico cat in her lap and I with a rolled-up copy of the
Dispatch
in my left hand. An autographed photo of Fiona getting a peck on the cheek from Barack Obama stood on the mantel in the spot where a photo of Joseph Ratzinger in his white-mitered, post–Hitler Youth incarnation used to be. The log fire she’d lit when we came in from the cold had burned low. The red coals hissed and popped.

“Vanessa Maniella gave me the ‘oldest profession’ speech,” I said.

“Let me guess,” Fiona said. “She claims prostitution is older than the Bible, that women have a right to sell their bodies, and that all she’s been doing is providing them with a clean, safe place to do it.”

“Pretty much,” I said, “although somehow she made it seem a little more convincing.”

“Taking your moral guidance from a madam now?”

“Better her than Reverend Crenson. Besides, my old confessor Father Donovan is no longer handy. The bishop shipped his pedophile ass off to Woonsocket.”

“There are other priests.”

“I prefer a lifelong friend to a stranger in a white collar.”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “There’s no denying that prostitution is as old as mankind,” she said, “but so are stealing, abortion, and murder.”

I didn’t want to get sidetracked by the abortion argument, so what I said was, “I see your point.”

“I’ve seen how troubled you are by the child porn you’ve been exposed to,” she said.

“What’s that have to do with prostitution? Men who lust after children have no interest in grown women.”

“It all flows from the same sewer,” she said. “The commercialization of sex debases and dehumanizes us all. It leads people to think of one another as pieces of meat instead of creatures with immortal souls.”

I must have looked doubtful because she added, “And if you don’t believe that, there’s always ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’”

“Says who?”

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

“As I understand it,” I said, “those words were written three thousand years ago by the Hebrew elder of a tribe that treated women as property.”

She shook her head sadly and fell silent for a moment. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper.

“I don’t deny that my faith in the church has been shaken,” she said. “The doctrine of papal infallibility is tyrannical bullshit. The church’s medieval views on AIDS and contraception have gotten thousands of people killed. The bishops who protected pedophile priests for decades are fucking criminals. If I had the balls, I’d indict the sons of bitches. But I’ve never turned away from the Word of God.”