Liam Mulligan: Cliff Walk Part 2

"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.

"Bulls.h.i.+t," I said. "When the Internet first got rolling, newspapers were the experts on reporting the news and selling cla.s.sified advertising. They were ideally positioned to dominate the new medium. Instead, they sat around with their thumbs up their a.s.ses 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 cla.s.sic 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 a.n.a.lysis," 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 wors.h.i.+pped with at St. Teresa's, tracked down people she once made G.I. Joes with on the a.s.sembly 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 s...o...b..x. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 fieldsize 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 gla.s.s-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: "f.u.c.k this s.h.i.+t."

"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 f.u.c.king 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 d.a.m.ned 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. G.o.d 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?"

"Unofficially, yeah, it's him-right down to the Navy SEALs tattoo on his right arm."

"Maniella was in the SEALs?"

"He was," she said. "He enlisted right after college. Ended up getting s.h.i.+pped to South Vietnam, where the SEALs worked with the CIA in something called the Phoenix Program."

"What was that?"

"Code for hunting down Viet Cong sympathizers and slas.h.i.+ng their throats."

I looked at my hands and thought about that for a moment. I hadn't realized Maniella had been such a tough guy-or that he'd served his country before stuffing his servers with s.m.u.t.

"The ID sounds kinda tentative," I said.

"Best I can do, Mulligan. Maniella was so secretive about everything that our crack detective unit can't even find out who did his dental work. And he's never been arrested, so his prints aren't in the system."

"How about the navy?" I asked. "They should have his prints on file."

"So far, they aren't cooperating."

"Why the h.e.l.l not?"

"No idea."

We both thought about that, but it didn't get us anywhere.

"What's happening with Scalici's pig?" I asked. "Frank Drebin and Police Squad! making any progress on that?"

"I think Lieutenant Jim Dangle and the misfits from Reno 911! are working that one," she said.

"Nothing, then?"

"The medical examiner found a couple of intact fingers in the pig's stomach. The crime lab pulled prints off them, but they don't match anything on file."

That figured. Groups like the Polly Klaas Foundation and Safety Kids had been urging parents to fingerprint their kids in case they ever went missing, but few people ever got around to it.

"If you use any of this, don't attribute it to me," Fiona said. "Just say it's from a source close to the investigation."

She took another pull from her beer. I sipped from my tumbler of club soda. I was jonesing for a Killian's, but my ulcer was grumbling.

Hopes hadn't changed much in the twenty-five years since Fiona and I started coming here with fake IDs to get blitzed on cheap draft beer. Same scarred mahogany bar. Same teetering chrome barstools and battered Formica-top tables. Same jukebox crammed with blind black men and fat black women singing the blues. The clientele consisted mostly of street hustlers, loan sharks, bookmakers, ambulance chasers, bail bondsmen, Providence cops, and firemen. Dispatch reporters and copy editors, too, although not nearly as many as there used to be. My favorite poet, a hot black babe who grew up on the West Side of Chicago, has a line about places like this: When a woman rips a man open, this is where he comes to bleed.

Now that Fiona was the attorney general, she could afford better, but she still chose to drink here. Maybe it was the vow of poverty.

Sitting across the table from her, I felt good to be back on a real story again. Lately, I'd been getting stuck with a lot of routine a.s.signments-duller-than-dirt stories that used to be handled by reporters who were now collecting unemployment checks. "Get used to it," Lomax kept telling me. "Unless we can figure out a way to blow up the Internet, it's only gonna get worse." The last week had been a nightmare of weather stories, obituaries, traffic accidents, and Providence planning commission meetings. Almost made me long for the Derby Ball.

"Salmonella's been grooming his daughter to take over the family business, so his murder won't change much," Fiona was saying. "The Maniellas have more money than G.o.d, and they know how to spread it around. The way I hear it, they own the governor, most of the superior court justices, and half the state legislature."

"Only half?"

"Half is all they need."

Fiona got elected last November after turning her campaign into a crusade to outlaw prost.i.tution. Not everyone agreed with her. It was a close election. Since then, she'd made a lot of fiery speeches about the shame of Rhode Island-the only place in the country, outside of a few counties in Nevada, where s.e.x for pay was legal. So far, she hadn't made any headway in persuading the state legislature to close the loophole. She figured the fix was in.

"I've been combing the campaign contribution lists for the governor and legislative committee chairmen," I said, "but I don't see any sign of it."

"And you won't," she said. "Salmonella conceals his campaign contributions by giving each of his p.o.r.n actors five thousand dollars a year in cash and having them write personal checks to the politicians of his choice."

"How many actors are we talking about?"

"A hundred. Maybe more."

"And we don't know who they are," I said.

"No," she said. "Not unless their mothers actually gave them names like Hugh Mungus and Lucy Bangs."

"How'd you hear about this?"

"Can't say, but my informant is reliable."

"Good enough to make a case?"

"No."

"With the millions Maniella makes selling virtual s.e.x, why would he still care about a few Rhode Island brothels?"

"Maybe he's one of those guys who can never have enough money."

I wasn't much bothered by the Maniellas' prost.i.tution business. The way I saw it, women could do whatever they wanted with their bodies, and men could do whatever they wanted with their money. But it bothered me a whole lot that the state government was for sale.

"I'll keep digging," I said. "If I can prove the Maniellas are doing what you say they are, it's a h.e.l.l of a big corruption story."

"Good."

"But I gotta tell you, prost.i.tution seems like a victimless crime to me," I said, and immediately regretted it.

"Tell that to the Johns' wives when they come down with gonorrhea or HIV," Fiona said. "It's a filthy business. It exploits women, it enriches vile people like the Maniellas, and it's an ugly blot on the reputation of our state." Her tone did not invite further discussion.

She took a swig from her beer and added, "I just hope I can hang on to this job long enough to do something about it."

Back in 1980, when a fiery Jesuit priest named Robert Drinan was a Democratic congressman from Ma.s.sachusetts, Pope John Paul II ordered priests and nuns to shun electoral politics. Now, thirty years later, it was still church policy. Fiona had chosen to ignore it.

"Better hurry," I said, "if you want to get the job done before the thunderbolt strikes from Rome."

"I'm hoping the Holy Father will understand that I'm doing the Lord's bidding."

"What's the bishop telling you?"

"That if I don't resign from public office, I could get excommunicated."

"Jesus, Fiona!"

"Don't take our Lord's name in vain in my presence, a.s.shole."

She took another drag on her cigarette and brushed away the ash that fell on her jeans. Last year, the state legislature had finally gotten around to banning smoking in public accommodations. n.o.body drinking in Hopes had the b.a.l.l.s to mention it to her.

Attila the Nun excused herself and got up to pee. I checked out her a.s.s (some habits are hard to break) and noticed the brand name on the back of those jeans: True Religion.

6.