Part 29 (1/2)
”Yeah. Took off a couple of days ago and won't be back till the end of the week.”
”I'd like to have a word with Sal,” I said.
”What makes you think he's here?”
”His car's right out front, Joseph.”
”Oh, yeah. I told him he shoulda parked in back. Hang here and I'll see if he'll talk to you,” he said, and slammed the door in my face.
I was watching an alarming number of grackles gather on the telephone wires across the street when the opening guitar lick to ”b.i.t.c.h” started playing. I didn't see Keith Richards in the immediate vicinity so I pulled the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.
”You ... f.u.c.king ... b.a.s.t.a.r.d!”
”And a good afternoon to you, too, Dorcas.”
”Today is my birthday, a.s.shole.”
”Shall I break into song?”
”I'm still your wife, you know. You could have sent a f.u.c.king card.”
”Have you checked your mail today?”
”What? No. Hold on a sec,” she said, but Joseph was swinging the door open now.
”Happy birthday, Dorcas. Gotta go.”
Joseph ushered me into a vestibule with peeling green walls and a splintered wood floor. A naked bulb burned in a fixture that dangled by its wires from the ceiling. In front of us was a new steel door with a keypad lock. Joseph punched in a sequence of five numbers. I managed to catch four of them. He turned the handle and led me inside.
There, a young woman in a forest-green business suit sat behind a kidney-shaped gla.s.s desk decorated with a framed family photo and a pink orchid in a ceramic pot. Antique photographs of Rhode Island landmarks, most of them long gone, hung in bird's-eye maple frames on new drywall. The off-white paint was so fresh that I could smell it.
”Please take a seat,” she said. ”Mr. Maniella will be with you shortly.”
I dropped into a red leather couch-probably better than anything that had been in the place when it was a discount furniture store-and Joseph sat beside me in a matching easy chair.
”Where'd you get the gun?” I asked.
”Mr. Maniella give it to me.”
”A Glock 17?”
”Just like his other bodyguards got.”
”Seventeen-cartridge magazine, right?”
”Yeah. Lot more firepower than the Remington Arms piece of c.r.a.p I got at home.”
”Got a permit to carry?”
”It's pending.”
The phone on the desk beeped. The receptionist picked it up, listened for a moment, hung up, and said, ”Mr. Maniella will see you now.” She touched something on the desk, and the lock in a steel door to her right clicked. Joseph and I got up and went through it.
To our left, rusted fluorescent light fixtures, all of them dark, hung over a scarred wood floor lined with rows of makes.h.i.+ft plywood display tables left over from the building's flea market days. To our right, two studio lights on tripods loomed over an unmade bed in a set built to look like a five-star hotel room. Joseph kept walking, so I followed him past another set, this one built to look like a room in a ma.s.sage parlor. Over the ma.s.sage table, bottles of oil glistened on a shelf that also held an impressive a.s.sortment of d.i.l.d.os.
The third and final set had pink walls hung with posters from the latest Twilight movie. A huge teddy bear sat at the foot of the bed. Piles of girl's underwear had been scattered on the floor. A teenager's room. A pretty young blonde who couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds-maybe just a hundred without the implants-was on all fours on the bed's fresh pink sheet. She wore a Hope High School cheerleader's uniform, the top yanked up to expose her nipples and the skirt flipped to expose her a.s.s. An older guy with a handheld camera moved in close to catch the spittle dripping from her lips as she sucked a grinning twentysomething's large black p.e.n.i.s. A young guy with another handheld trained it on an enormous white phallus as its owner doused it with lubricant and then wedged it, with some difficulty, into the girl's r.e.c.t.u.m. Her eyes got wide, and she went, ”Mmmm,” pretending to enjoy it. White phallus saw me watching and winked. I gave him a wave. Dwayne Carter, a lanky murmuring dude who ran the Sh.e.l.l station on Broadway in Providence, had been helping me keep Secretariat on the road for years.
We tiptoed past the set and walked on until we arrived at an oak door in a new off-white wall. Joseph rapped softly, and a deep voice rumbled, ”Come on in.” Joseph opened the door, stepped aside, waved me in, and closed it softly behind me. Inside, the walls were decorated with movie posters from the 1970s, when feature-length p.o.r.n played in theaters all over the country: Debbie Does Dallas, Flesh Gordon, Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Babylon Pink, The Devil in Miss Jones. Maniella was seated behind an enormous cherrywood desk. He could have parked his Hummer on it and had enough room left over for a sorority house lesbian orgy. He rose and strolled across a newly laid rust carpet to greet me, taking my hand in both of his.
”Mulligan,” he said. ”It's good to see you. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable.”
I dropped into a black leather couch, the back of my head inches from the blond tresses of Marilyn Chambers, the all-American girl star of the Mitch.e.l.l Brothers' 1972 gang-rape fantasy, Behind the Green Door. In front of the couch, five AVN awards, the Oscars of p.o.r.n, stood on a spotless gla.s.s coffee table.
”Can I get you anything?” Maniella asked as he opened a small refrigerator and rummaged inside.
”Whatever you're having.”
He took out a bottle of Evian, poured the contents into two crystal gla.s.ses, handed me one, and sat down beside me.
”Are you enjoying the Grant memoir?” he asked.
”I'm nearly done with the first volume,” I said, ”and it really surprised me.”
”How so?”
”I had no idea that he wrote so well.”
”Yes, the prose is quite remarkable. He was a great general, too. It's a shame he wasn't a better president.”
”So,” I said as I cast my eyes about the room, ”I like what you've done with the place.”
”It's a work in progress.”
”Moving your whole operation here, are you?”
”Just part of it. Can you tell me how you found us?”
”It's a small state, Sal. Hard to keep something like this a secret.”
”True, but perhaps we could keep it between us for now.”
”I don't know,” I said. ”The opening of a movie studio is a story for the business pages.”
”I see.”
”Then again, I don't write for the business pages.”
Sal smiled and was about to say something else when the door flew open and a black woman with a narrow waist and enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s burst in. The older man I'd seen holding a camera on the movie set stepped in behind her.
”I told this m.u.t.h.af.u.c.ka I do not do a.n.a.l,” the woman screeched. Except for red high heels, she was stark naked.