“Why the hell 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 assignments-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 God, 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 prostitution. 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 sex 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 porn 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 sex, 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’ prostitution 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 hell of a big corruption story.”
“Good.”
“But I gotta tell you, prostitution 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 Massachusetts, 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, asshole.”
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. Nobody drinking in Hopes had the balls to mention it to her.
Attila the Nun excused herself and got up to pee. I checked out her ass (some habits are hard to break) and noticed the brand name on the back of those jeans: True Religion.
6
I collapsed into my ergonomically correct office chair, booted my desktop, checked my messages, and found this from Lomax:
STILL NO ID ON THE BODY?
No, but thanks to Fiona I had enough for an update that might keep him off my back for a while. I opened a new file and banged out a lead:
Authorities believe the man who was shot to death and thrown from the Cliff Walk in Newport a week ago was Salvatore Maniella, the notorious and reclusive Rhode Island pornographer, but so far they have been unable to positively identify the body.
A few minutes later, I was putting the final touches on the story when Lomax plopped on a corner of my desk and read over my shoulder.
“Fiona your source for this?”
“One of ’em, yeah.”
“Who else?”
“Captain Parisi.”
“How’d you manage that? The tight-lipped SOB never tells us anything.”
“I just got off the phone with him. When I asked him how the Maniella murder investigation was coming, he said he had no idea what I was talking about. But when I told him I got the ID from a ‘source close to the investigation,’ he let loose with a stream of curses about ‘fucking leaks’ and hung up.”
“Good enough for me. Listen, you got plans for tonight?”
“I do.” But I really didn’t.
“Cancel them. Todd Lewan called in sick, so I need you to cover the city planning commission again.”
Aw, crap. I checked my watch. Those meetings started at eight o’clock. If I hurried, there was still time to visit my bookie.
I shoved open the door to the little variety store on Hope Street and heard a familiar ding. Ever since I was a kid, that old brass bell had announced my visits to the storekeep, my old friend Dominic “Whoosh” Zerilli. For most of those years, it had dangled over a door on Doyle Avenue. The bell was one of the things Whoosh had salvaged after the arson there last year.