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

was damned smart. Maybe he could find something.

 
    10
    A half hour south of Providence, the little town of Warren clings like a barnacle to the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. Here, the water is sometimes streaked with sewage, and quahogs angry with coliform bacteria pave the mucky bottom. Main Street, several hundred yards from and parallel to the shoreline, is a postcard from the Great Depression—old corner drugstore, red-brick town hall with Palladian windows, and ramshackle wood-frame storefronts with vacant office space on the second and third floors.
    I parked Secretariat at a meter in front of a narrow storefront office two doors north of the police station. The office had housed a three-reporter news bureau until the Dispatch closed it down a couple of years ago to save money. Now, black lettering on the glass front door read “Bruce McCracken, Private Investigations.” I entered and found him alone, sitting behind a computer at an oak desk that had seen better days. For the desk, like the town, those days were ninety years ago. A bank of dented metal file cabinets and an old black safe the size of a minifridge had been shoved against the back wall. The only decent pieces of furniture in the place were the black leather swivel chair he was sitting in and two client chairs lined up in front of his desk.
    I’d known McCracken since our school days at Providence College. After graduation, he’d taken a job as an in-house investigator for a big fire insurance company and stayed for twenty years until he got laid off last spring. For the company, it was a brain-dead move. McCracken was good. Every year, his work had saved his employer hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars.
    He held up his cell phone to show me he was occupied and pointed at one of the client chairs, inviting me to take a seat. Instead, I walked across the warped linoleum floor to the center of the room and scanned the framed autographed photos of Providence College basketball greats mounted on the cracked plaster walls: Jimmy Walker, Ray Flynn, Jim Thompson, Johnny Egan, Vinnie Ernst, Kevin Stacom, Lenny Wilkins, Joey Hassett, Marvin Barnes, Billy Donovan, Ernie DiGregorio. I was still looking when McCracken finished his call, popped out of his chair, and walked over to grip my hand in his customary metacarpal-crushing handshake.
    “When is my picture going up?” I asked.
    “Soon as you get off the bench.”
    Fans of private eye novels have a warped idea of what real private detectives do. Most of their work is routine: delivering summonses in civil cases, locating child support delinquents, investigating pilfering from warehouses, spying on unfaithful spouses, checking the validity of insurance claims, and doing background checks on job applicants. From time to time, they might search for missing persons the police have given up on or help lawyers gather evidence in civil and criminal cases. Some P.I.s specialize, but McCracken, like most of them, did a little of this and a little of that. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, real private detectives rarely investigate murders. Most of them go their whole lives without beating somebody up or gunning somebody down.
    “How’s business?” I asked as I dropped into one of the visitor’s chairs.
    “Great!” he said.
    “Really? Because this place is a dump.”
    “I’m trying to keep overhead down for now,” he said, “but I’m getting so much work that I’m thinking about hiring a spunky secretary and moving into a two-room suite in the Turk’s Head Building in the spring.”
    “Glad to hear it.”
    “Maybe I can get Effie Perine.”
    “She’s spunky all right, but she’s also loyal. You’ll never lure her away from Sam Spade.”
    “Things keep going this good and I’ll need a partner to help shoulder the load,” he said. “You oughta give it some thought. From what I hear, the Dispatch is going down the