Read Online Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel by Bruce DeSilva - Free Book Online

find a wallet on the body.”
    “In the old days, Sal used to come in here,” Charlie said. “Back before he could afford champagne and caviar for breakfast. Seemed like a decent guy, but I guess he wasn’t.”
    My eggs were ready now, so he turned back to scrape them onto a plate. Outside the diner’s greasy windows, rays of morning sunshine broke through low, scattered clouds and turned the Beaux-Arts façade of city hall to gold. Seagulls had strafed the building again overnight, continuing their war of turds with the current administration. I shoveled Charlie’s masterpiece into my mouth and tried to think things out.
    Poking into the Maniellas’ prostitution business wasn’t getting me any closer to proving they were paying off the governor. The mystery of Scalici’s pig looked like a dead end, too.
    Last night, I’d spent hours Googling investigative stories on Internet porn. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post had unearthed details about some of the big operators, but they’d run into a black hole when they looked at the Maniellas. They were too good at hiding their money and covering their tracks. The Times and Post had far more time and money to devote to the story than I did. If they couldn’t find anything, there was no point in me trying.
    Lomax could see I’d run dry and responded by jamming me up with a diet of obits, press conferences, and weather stories. I was starting to hate the job I’d always loved. I needed to find something big to work on to get Lomax to ease up, but I had no idea what that something might be. Cash for inspection stickers was a scandal, but it didn’t qualify as news. Everybody already knew about it. Besides, for working people trying to keep clunkers on the road, it was a public service. A little graft was the only thing standing between Secretariat and the glue factory.
    I opened the paper to the metro front and read a police story under Mason’s byline. Providence vice cops had kicked in the door to a second-floor apartment on Colfax Street last night and confiscated a computer containing hundreds of child porn videos. The occupants, who had rented the place under a phony name, were nowhere to be found.
    I read the story carefully twice, but I couldn’t see anything in it for me. The Maniellas had never stooped to child porn—as far as I knew. I doubted they had moral scruples about it, but with the millions they were making on adult porn, why would they get involved in something that would bring down so much heat?
    *   *   *
    Back at the office, I went over the computer printouts of the governor’s campaign contributions again, looking for anything I might have missed the first five times. It was still just a blur of hundreds of names, addresses, and dollar figures. I learned nothing. I shoved it aside and started in on the stack of obits Lomax wanted by three o’clock.
    “Hi, Mulligan.”
    “What’s up, Thanks-Dad?”
    “Need help with anything?”
    “Want to try your hand with a few obits?”
    “Not really, no.”
    Hadn’t worked the last time I’d tried it, either. The publisher’s son, surprise surprise, never got stuck with scut work.
    “You know, there is something,” I said, and handed him the computer printouts. “I could use a fresh pair of eyes on this.”
    “What am I looking for?”
    “Any hint that the Maniellas have been funneling campaign contributions to the governor by using their porn actors as fronts. You might as well look at these, too,” I said. I opened a file drawer and pulled out similar lists for the chairmen of the Rhode Island House and Senate judiciary committees.
    He fanned the pages and whistled. “A lot to go through,” he said.
    “It is, but there’s no hurry.”
    “Do we know the porn actors’ names?”
    “No, we don’t.”
    He thought for a minute, then said, “Okay. Let me play around with this for a while and see what I can do.”
    Mason didn’t know all the tricks of the trade, but he