I swerved south, trespassed across forty yards of very private property, scaled a fence, fought through a tangle of dense brush, and emerged on a slab of rock overlooking the sea. Below, a dozen sailboats tacked in the light morning breeze. Above, a state police helicopter hovered. About thirty yards to the north, a uniformed Newport cop was waving his arms at a pair of tourists, ordering them to turn around and go back the way they had come.
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.