Liam Mulligan: Cliff Walk Part 40

"What about?" Fiona asked.

"s.e.x and religion."

"Oh, that."

"Yeah."

"Welcome to the club."

"You too?" I asked.

"About religion, sure. s.e.x? 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, postHitler 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 prost.i.tution 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 s.h.i.+pped his pedophile a.s.s 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 prost.i.tution 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 p.o.r.n you've been exposed to," she said.

"What's that have to do with prost.i.tution? Men who l.u.s.t after children have no interest in grown women."

"It all flows from the same sewer," she said. "The commercialization of s.e.x 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 bulls.h.i.+t. The church's medieval views on AIDS and contraception have gotten thousands of people killed. The bishops who protected pedophile priests for decades are f.u.c.king criminals. If I had the b.a.l.l.s, I'd indict the sons of b.i.t.c.hes. But I've never turned away from the Word of G.o.d."

"Good for you, Fiona," I said. "Good for you."

56.

"The publisher specifically requested you, Mulligan," Lomax said.

"How come?"

"Apparently he liked the way you handled the Derby Ball story last September. Besides, this soiree is right up your alley."

"How so?"

"It's a fund-raiser for the Milk Carton Crusade."

"What the h.e.l.l's that?"

"Another one of those groups dedicated to finding missing children."

"What's the publisher's interest?"

"I gather he's a contributor."

"Do I have to wear a monkey suit again?"

"You can put in for it."

"Hotel?"

"No. We need to keep expenses to a minimum. You can drive down and back the same night, or if you want you can stay at Mason's place. He already offered."

So Tuesday night after work, I found myself riding shotgun in Mason's restored 1967 E-Type Series 1 Jaguar as it zoomed over Narragansett Bay on the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, Providence a cold glance over our shoulders.

"Hungry?" he asked.

"I could eat something."

So he slipped down a few side streets and parked in front of the White Horse Tavern.

"It's on me," Mason said as we settled into a booth; so I ordered the prime tenderloin beef appetizer and the b.u.t.ter-poached New England lobster, the most expensive items on the menu. For Mason it was the White Horse clam chowder and the chanterelle mushroom risotto. He ordered wine; I wanted beer but figured it was safer to stick with water.

"Still no developments on the missing girl?" he asked.

"Julia Arruda?"

"Uh-huh."

"Not even a whisper."

"Think she's dead?"

"I don't know, Thanks-Dad."

"You've been looking down lately, Mulligan. Are you okay?"

"Never better."

"The fund-raiser doesn't start till eight tomorrow night, so you can sleep in."

"That would be my plan."

"So what do you say we do the town tonight?"

"I'm not really in the mood."

"Come on, Mulligan. We can hit the Landing or the Boom Boom Room, have a few drinks, maybe get lucky with a couple of Salve Regina coeds out for a good time."

"I'm too d.a.m.n old for coeds. I'd rather go to your place, watch CSI: Miami, and turn in early."

Mason still lived on the family estate off Ocean Drive, where he had his own apartment with a separate entrance. Once inside, he opened a couple of bottles of Orval, a Belgian beer I'd never heard of, and joined me on a black leather couch in front of a huge flat-screen. As the CSI: Miami theme began to play, I told my gut to shut up and took a sip.

"Why do you watch this show?" Mason said. "It sucks."

I pointed at the screen and said, "Because of this part right here."

David Caruso, aka Lieutenant Horatio Caine, stared at a naked, impossibly tanned young woman floating facedown in an impossibly blue swimming pool. He slowly raised both of his hands, gripped his sungla.s.ses at the hinges, and ever so slowly slid them off his pasty, pocked face. He studied the girl some more and grimaced as only David Caruso can. Then he raised the sungla.s.ses ever so slowly and, with the deliberation of a surgeon performing laparoscopic liver surgery, slid them on again.

We both laughed.

"He does the same thing every week," I said. "It's his signature move. I wonder if he realizes how ridiculous it looks."

We hung in there for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but when The Colbert Report came on I was ready to turn in. Mason graciously offered me his bed, but I took the couch. Shortly after the lights went out, the little girl with no arms made her nightly appearance. She didn't have anything to say tonight. She just stared down at me and sadly shook her head.

57.

Mason drove leisurely down Bellevue Avenue past the fairy-tale castles that the robber barons had built. As we slid by Clarendon Court, I saw Officer Phelps parked in the entrance, keeping a sharp eye out for any reasonably priced, and therefore suspicious, automobiles. I was grateful to be riding in a Jag.

Mason joined the procession of supercharged European carriages heading toward Belcourt Castle, and when we reached its gilded gates, he pulled over to let me out.

"Just call when you want me to pick you up," he said.

"Will do, Thanks-Dad."

Inside the walled courtyard, the same Emperor Penguin was manning the mansion's oaken door. I handed him my invitation, and he checked it against the guest list.

"Things must be looking up," he said. "You smell better, and you're using your real name."

The spread on the antique walnut trestle table in the vast first-floor dining room wasn't as lavish as the last time, the charity prudent with its donors' money; but the chicken-pecan finger sandwiches tasted good.

I jogged up the winding oak staircase to the vaulted ballroom, where a string ensemble was playing chamber music at a volume low enough to encourage conversation. About three hundred people, the men in black tie and the women in what I took to be this season's designer originals, stood in cl.u.s.ters and murmured.

Beside the huge hearth a larger group, perhaps a dozen people, had gathered around a slim figure with a lion's mane of pewter-gray hair. A black pirate's patch covered his right eye. The face resembled one I'd seen on more than a dozen book jackets, but it was grayer and more deeply lined than I remembered, so I couldn't be sure.

Andrew Vachss was the author of a series of novels about a career criminal named Burke who specialized in hunting down pedophiles, ripping them off, and putting them in the ground. Vachss was also a lawyer known for suing child abusers on behalf of their victims with more than the customary courtroom vigor. A decade ago, when the defendant in one of his lawsuits was found dead at the bottom of a New Hamps.h.i.+re quarry, the authorities wondered if Vachss had put him there but they quickly dismissed the idea. The complete text of his statement to the police: "I hope his eyes were open all the way down."

He'd be a great interview for tonight's story-if this were actually him.

I strode over, stood next to the man, waited for a lull in the conversation, and stuck out my right hand. "I'm Mulligan, a reporter for the Providence Dispatch. Can I have a few words with you?"

His one good eye slid from my face down to my shoes and slowly back up again. Then he spun on the heels of his black wing tips and turned his back on me. Only then did I notice that Sal Maniella had been in the group around him.

"Was that Andrew Vachss?" I asked.

"If he'd wanted you to know his name," Maniella said, "he'd have told you."

Pressing him wouldn't have gotten me anywhere, so I changed the subject. "Why are you here? Come to make a contribution to the cause?"

"The Milk Carton Crusade was formed by two women from Pittsburgh whose daughters were murdered by the same pedophile two years ago," he said. "The organization doesn't have much of a track record yet, but I thought I'd listen to their pitch."

"Going to hang around and enjoy the Newport nightlife for a few days?"

"No, I don't think so. But before I head back tomorrow, I'm going to go over to the Cliff Walk, say a prayer for Dante, and toss a wreath into the water."

"Don't get too close to the edge," I said. "The rocks are pretty slippery there."

"Given any more thought to coming to work for me?"

"Some."

"Look, why don't you come along tomorrow and show me the spot where Dante was killed? Afterwards I'll buy you breakfast at the coffeehouse in Was.h.i.+ngton Square, and we can talk some more about my job offer."

So at nine thirty the next morning I was waiting at the end of Mason's long cobblestoned drive when a black Hummer rolled up and its back door swung open. I climbed in, sat beside Sal, and saw that Black s.h.i.+rt, or maybe it was Gray s.h.i.+rt, was behind the wheel. I'd never ridden in one of those monstrosities before. Just sitting in it felt ridiculous.

The ex-SEAL parked illegally near the entrance to the Cliff Walk, plucked a Rhode Island State Police "Official Business" pa.s.s from behind the visor, and dropped it on the dash. I didn't ask how he came by it; he probably bought it from the same counterfeiter who sold me mine.

We got out and strolled through the entrance to the Cliff Walk, the ex-SEAL lugging a funeral wreath of hydrangea, chrysanthemums, and gladioli. A light drizzle fell from the steel-gray sky. Below us, fog hugged the surface of the ocean, but I could hear the surf angrily slap the face of the cliff. The footing was treacherous, the wet schist slick beneath our feet. I turned north and led the way. We'd gone about thirty yards when I stopped and studied the rocks.