The Strangler

by William Landay

  And Amy’s room was a box, splashed with her blood. By now the blood had been scrubbed off, probably. The walls had been repainted. They would re-rent the room as soon as everyone forgot what happened there. It wouldn’t take people long to forget. Amy’s death had meant nothing. The world still turned, people went about their business. Joe should not have been surprised. How many men had he killed in the war? Germans, Italians. Fifty, a hundred, who knew? Why bother to count? He did not give a shit about them. Not then, not now. He would happily have killed more if he’d had the chance. A person was nothing. A bag of bones. Joe Daley included.

  29

  The consensus among the Daleys was that Ricky, paradoxically, would be the one least devastated by Amy’s murder. He was so deft with his emotions, or maybe just so secretive, that he would slink off like a cat and do whatever it was he did when he was hurt, but he would do it in private. Even to his brothers, Ricky’s composure was a little eerie. He had stood at the wake for hours with a stone face, shaking hands. He had not shed a tear at the funeral or since. It seemed perfectly obvious he would get over Amy’s death. He had loved her, yes, but in the end you did not have to worry about Ricky.

  Kat never bought any of it, all the Daley admiration for Ricky, for the way he kept a cool head. She preferred the hotter emotionalism of Joe’s temper or even Michael’s brooding, which at least signaled a vivid interior life. You had to let off the pressure, wasn’t that what Freud and all them had said? She thought there was something childish about Ricky’s inexpressiveness, and she was determined that he would not go unmothered in his hour of need.

  All this, at least, was the quick summary of things that Ricky formed when he opened his door to find Kat, all put together in her sweater set and space-helmet of black hair, holding a pan covered with tinfoil. Ricky, barefoot and wearing jeans and a T-shirt, unshowered for three days, felt strangely proud of his dishevelment. By comparison with his coiffed and scented sister-in-law, he was natural and unaffected. He was himself.

  “I brought you dinner,” Kat informed him.

  “What is it?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It’s for me, isn’t it?”

  “Ricky, whatever I made, you’ll eat.” She bussed his cheek. “Ingrate.”

  Kat had never been to Ricky’s apartment before and she paused by the door to survey it. Living room in front with a galley kitchen and a narrow hallway leading back to a bed- and bathroom. The living room was furnished with just a threadbare couch that might once have been saffron yellow but now was too dingy to be any color at all, and too ass-flattened to be comfortable. An unfinished bookcase held a hi-fi set, two long shelves of LP’s, and books on the bottom shelves. Jazz music played. Kat bobbed her head to the strolling rhythm.

  “You like it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It’s Miles Davis.”

  “I know who he is!” Kat’s tone was surprised. She must have seen Miles Davis on a late-night show or Ed Sullivan or somewhere. She did not remember much except that he was bald and shuffled around the stage as he played.

  “Here, take it.” Ricky got the dust jacket and offered it to her. The record was Kind of Blue. “Keep it. It gets better the more you listen to it. I’ll get another one.”

  “And play it with what? My finger?”

  “You’re kidding me. You don’t have a record player?”

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “What are you—monks? Who doesn’t have a record player?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “You will not. We don’t need one. Joe wouldn’t go for this longhair stuff anyways. Miles Davis.” She sniffed. “How come you’re giving away your records? You going someplace?”

  “No. This one’s getting scratchy. They’re better when they’re new.”

  “You buy records twice?”

  “You buy milk twice?”

  Kat snorted. Yeah, okay, Ricky. She went to the kitchen, slid the pan into the oven and turned it on, then came back out to clear a dirty dish and a beer bottle from the coffee table. “When was the last time you cleaned this place?”

  “Hm, let’s see, when did I move in…?”

  “Didn’t Amy ever do it?”

  “We tended to hang around at her place.”

  “Her choice?”

  “Mine.”

  “No wonder.” Kat looked around at the bare walls and bare floors. Dust balls gathered along the baseboards. “You think I’m a monk? You’re just a monk with a record player. Look at this place.”

  Back in the kitchen Kat stacked the dirty dishes on one side of the sink and began scrubbing them. “So how you doing here, Rick, all by your lonesome?”

  “Swell.”

  “Swell?”

  “I’m fine. I mean, look, obviously it’s, it’s not—I’m fine. Really.”

  “You’re fine. Well, that’s just great. I’m not.”

  “No?” A ripple crossed Ricky’s face. A confession of sentiment was coming, with the expectation that he would reciprocate. Kat had found his front door locked; now she would rattle the side door.

  “I can’t stop thinking about her. All day every day. Can’t sleep, can’t stop eating, I’m as big as a house. Look at me. I’m a wreck over here.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Yeah? You’re a wreck?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you. You don’t say that like you mean it.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t say anything like I mean it. But I do mean it. I loved her. I just don’t feel like coming all unglued. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.”

  She turned off the water and looked across her shoulder at him. She wasn’t going to fall for one of Ricky’s cons. “Can I ask you something? Did you really love her?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, not ‘of course.’ I mean, did you really love her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I loved her and I want to know. Did you really love her, Ricky?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she loved you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Kat stared a second more, and Ricky quickly inventoried his emotions as if he were checking his shirt for crumbs. He had loved Amy, in his way. Ricky wasn’t much of a lover. He did not really have the knack for it; he tended to shy away from intense emotion of any kind. But he had loved her as much as he’d ever loved anyone. And if the whole relationship, in memory, felt like role-playing, with Ricky cast as the dutiful husband-to-be…well, a lot of Ricky’s emotions felt inauthentic that way. Ordinary experience always felt slightly counterfeit. It was only when he worked—when he actually was role-playing—that he felt truly himself, that he seemed to fill his own skin. Anyway, people used the word love too freely. Who knew that love meant the same thing, felt the same way, to any two people?

  “I was going to marry her.”

  “You were?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I don’t know.”

  “Did she know? Did you ever…?”

  “No. I was still, you know, getting ready.”

  “Hunh.” Kat considered it. “Hunh.”

  Ricky wasn’t sure why he’d said this. He had never actually decided to marry Amy. The words just felt right. They were the objective guarantee Kat was looking for, the currency she could accept. They made Kat feel better, so what was the harm? People wanted you to be something; you only had to intuit what that thing was, then be it, and they were pleased.

  “Did you steal a ring for her yet?”

  “Oh, that’s funny, Kat.”

  She attempted another joke: “What would you do if she wanted to return it?” But her voice caught at the thought of a broken engagement.

  The LP scratched in its catch-groove.

  “Time to change the record.” Ricky smiled. “See? Miles has good timing.�
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  Ricky flipped the record with a practiced up-down motion. Held between his palms, by its edges, the record was precisely the diameter of a basketball. He said, “Don’t you have to get home for dinner?”

  “I thought we’d eat together tonight.”

  “Joe’s workin’?”

  “No.”

  “He’s just out?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  Ricky left it at that. Kat did not need much prodding; if she felt like talking, she’d talk. And talk and talk. It was probably nothing. A spat. Kat and Joe’s marriage was a Ten Years’ War anyway. It was hard to take every little skirmish seriously. Besides, Ricky and Kat had rarely been alone together. They had never spoken about things that mattered; they did not quite know how. They would have to rebuild their relationship now, without Amy to broker between them.

  Dinner was a roast trimmed out with potatoes and carrots. By the end of it, Kat looked exhausted and teary. Her roast was consumed, and the money it had cost, and she was foggy with beer and the obscenity of Amy’s murder and rape and mutilation and whatever else she had not been told about it. She hunched over her plate. To Ricky, the strain had sapped her of precisely the quality that made her attractive: her indomitable straight-backed strength.

  He, on the other hand, felt his emotions streaming in the opposite direction, from resignation to resolve, from confusion to clarity. The meal—the food, the beer, the company—invigorated him. He thought he could answer Kat’s earlier question, and he wished he could go back to it. Yes, he had “really loved” Amy. He loved her still. But love for Ricky was a behavior, a series of actions. The emotion itself was worthless, because it’s internal and immaterial. Even at its intensest and most intoxicating—which, Ricky presumed, was what Kat meant by “real love”—it could only be enjoyed by the one who felt it, not by the partner who inspired it.

  Ricky thought he could clarify that to his sister-in-law, though the whole idea was not quite clear to him yet. It lurked in his mind, unresolved, just beyond articulation.

  But Kat had moved on. She pushed the food around on her plate, distracted. “I made this whole dinner, I came over here to help you, so you wouldn’t be lonely, that was the whole thing—now look at me.” She brushed her finger under her eyes, though no tears had come yet.

  “What’s wrong? You thinking about Amy?”

  “No. Maybe. It’s everything, I guess. I just wish your brother, I wish he’d give me a break. I need his help now, you know? I need my husband. And what do I get?”

  “What did he do, Kat?”

  “Same thing Joe always does. He fucks around. He doesn’t even bother to cover his tracks anymore. He comes home with it on his shirt, in his pockets, the stink of it, and he gives it all to me to wash for him.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “And say what?”

  “‘Keep it in your pants.’”

  “He can’t keep it in his pants. I know that. I knew it the day I married him.”

  “But you married him anyway.”

  “I was crazy about him.”

  “I could threaten to tell Mum.”

  “Oh, Ricky, you think she doesn’t know? You three are such little boys.”

  “Not little enough, apparently.”

  “No.”

  “Can I ask you something? Why don’t you just go cheat on him? Go jump the milkman, isn’t that the way it works?”

  “Ricky!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Because I don’t want any dead milkmen, that’s why. We’ve got enough trouble. Besides, we need the milk.”

  “Well, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself, then. Trust me, you give Joe a dose of his own medicine, you’ll get his attention.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Because I’m crazy about him.” She shrugged. “He’s just not crazy about me.”

  30

  In the days and weeks after Amy’s murder, Michael was trapped in a whirl of activity. There were the wake and the funeral to get through, and interminable condolence calls with Amy’s family, which he took to be the Daleys’ final earthly interactions with a clan that had never much liked them. The Ryans had hoped Amy would do better than Ricky, whose indefinite profession was always fishy. Ricky had told them he was a car salesman. They figured him for a charming loafer who might be on drugs. In the end, the Daleys mourned separately for Ricky’s “wife.” Well-meaning visitors loitered in Margaret Daley’s living room, many of them virtual strangers. Their presence imposed on the entire family the role of hosts. There were multiple trips to the grocery store, the liquor store, to the corner spa for ice and cigs, back and forth to the rear porch with overflowing garbage cans. The death ritual, Michael thought, was all about make-work. The busyness it created was its only purpose, a distraction, like a magician’s handkerchief.

  Only his migraines pulled him away from the group-grieving. They came more frequently after the murder; stress was a trigger. Michael had been getting migraines since he was a teenager, but they had been rare then, once a year or so. In his twenties, the attacks came more frequently, but still only three or four a year. It was Joe Senior’s death that made them a constant threat; now Amy’s death set off a rolling series of attacks that never quite receded. The recurring pattern seemed to intensify the experience. Raw exposed nerves did not have time to heal and toughen between bouts. The onset of an attack, with its visual aura and incipient head-pain, meant he had to drop what he was doing and rush home, resting his forehead on the steering wheel at red lights or stumbling down crowded sidewalks. When he rejoined the mourners a day or two later, he would find the world subtly changed. The bustle would have subsided detectably. The ashtrays were less full; there were fewer empty glasses and beer bottles about; Amy’s death had become remoter. Drained by the headache, Michael would slump in a living-room chair as strangers sat down opposite him and made expansive remarks about the inevitability of death and the importance of moving on. Over and over it was pointed out how unlucky the Daleys were—two family members murdered in the space of a year. Who would be next? A joke circulated: The Roman soldier who pierced Jesus’s side must have been named Daley; now they were cursed forever. With the men, Michael chunked his beer can against theirs and drank. The women tended to flop a hand onto his knee or his wrist as they spoke, which distracted him from whatever bromides they may have been passing along. Why did they bother? Probably they mistook his exhaustion—after a migraine attack he tended to look sallow and hollow-eyed—for prostrate grief.

  But Michael was not defeated so much as mortally distracted. He could not focus. The TV lured him. News shows, vapid comedies. He drank. He shuffled out for a pack of Larks only to forget half a block away what it was he had gone out for. The weeks after Amy’s murder took on the feel of a dream.

  One thing did hold Michael’s attention: Brendan Conroy, who held court in Margaret Daley’s house and draped his arm around her and pushed in her chair at the table. The more Conroy did, it seemed, the more he was beloved. Wasn’t Margaret lucky to have him? Wasn’t Brendan gracious to insert himself into the family this way? Wasn’t Joe Senior smiling down on them now, seeing his old friend and his old wife together? Michael seethed. He could not take his eyes off this pink, insinuating, coarse intruder. The small scale of the house only exaggerated Conroy’s bulk. Had Conroy murdered Joe Senior, as Amy thought? The suspicion possessed him. A spurious gravity attaches to the words of dead people, who cannot be cross-examined. Amy had known Conroy’s secret, it seemed, and maybe Conroy had killed her too—then slid into Margaret Daley’s bed with the residue of blood still on him. All wild blasphemies Michael did not dare utter. He might simply be going crazy. Certainly he would sound crazy.

  On Thursday afternoon, ten days after Amy Ryan’s murder, George Wamsley appeared at the Daleys’ home to pay his condolence call. Mic
hael escorted him around the room making introductions, then they retired to the back porch for a private chat. It was the only place they could be alone, a narrow space crowded with garbage cans.

  “So, Michael. What are your plans?”

  “Plans. What, um, what plans do you mean, George, specifically? I don’t think I have any.”

  “For work.”

  “Ah. That.”

  “Yes, that. You know there’ll always be a place for you in the office, as long as Alvan is the A.G. You could just go back to Eminent Domain, if you like. Or the Civil Division. You’re a natural litigator. It might be a good step, professionally. It’s really up to you. We’d like to accommodate you if we can.”

  “But not the Strangler Bureau.”

  “Not the Strangler Bureau. You’re conflicted out. I think you know that.”

  Michael searched Wamsley’s placid equine face for a hint of something more, some hidden motive. Michael was the obvious source of the leak behind Amy Ryan’s last story, which cast doubt on DeSalvo’s confession—a leak that compromised the case against DeSalvo, in the public’s mind at least. After that, it was unlikely Michael would be welcomed back to the Strangler Bureau, with or without a conflict of interest. He was not sure he wanted to work the Strangler case anyway. He could not tolerate the vision of Amy strung up on her bed, so he flicked it away, and flicked it away again. One reason Ricky had had an easier time of it, he thought, was that Ricky had not actually seen her. The fact made him jealous. Michael could never un-see what he’d seen. Still, he resented that the decision had been made for him, that he’d been talked about behind closed doors.

  “What about Brendan?”