“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 sunglasses 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 sunglasses 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 clusters 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 Hampshire 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 Washington 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 Shirt, or maybe it was Gray Shirt, 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” pass 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.
“This is where it happened,” I said.
Sal just stood there for a moment, staring at where the ocean was supposed to be, but in this weather there was nothing to see. Then he bowed his head and prayed:
“God our Father, your power brings us to birth, your providence guides our lives, and by your command we return to-”
It was the kind of rain that muffles sound. I could barely hear the blasts from the foghorn at Castle Hill. Even without the rain, I doubt I could have distinguished between the smacking of the waves and the soft slap of sneakers on wet rock. I didn’t know he had come up behind us until I heard the first pop.
58
I spun toward the sound and saw a hand gripping a little nickel revolver. A thin brown finger squeezed the trigger, and the gun popped again.
Slugs fired from cheap little handguns are low-caliber and have a slow muzzle velocity. When they enter the back of a skull, they don’t come out the front. They just bounce around inside.
Sal crumpled.
The ex-SEAL dropped the funeral wreath and reached inside the flap of his raincoat.
I grabbed for Sal and missed.
A Glock 17 appeared in the ex-SEAL’s hand.
I reached for Sal again.
The Glock cracked, the muzzle flashing in the corner of my eye.
Sal toppled over the edge and vanished in the fog.
I reached for the.45 tucked in the small of my back, but it wasn’t there. It was miles away, hanging on my wall.
The Glock cracked again. The second shot blew the assassin off his feet, the little pistol sailing from his hand and clattering on the rocks. He landed in a broken heap at my feet, blood welling from a hole in his chest. A quarter of his skull was gone, but there was enough left for me to make the ID.