The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Alright. I’ve got to be sure is all.”

  “Detective, I’m not asking you to shoot him, just talk to him. How sure do you got to be?”

  Joe walked onto the construction site with the happy sense of trespassing.

  The man looked up. Early twenties. A sleek, dense mat of hair opalescent with Brylcreem. Slit eyes. He was squat and thick-bodied. A white tank top showed off his inflated shoulders and arms. On his right biceps was a tattoo of a red devil wearing boxing gloves above the initials U.S.M.C. Seeing Joe, the kid put down his coffee so his hands would be empty.

  “I want to talk to you,” Joe said.

  “Yeah? Who the fuck are you?”

  Joe wavered, as if the kid’s words had blown him back. He tried to recalibrate his approach. Joe firmly believed in the streetfighter’s code: In a fighting situation, the only strategy is attack, attack, attack—stick out your chest and tell ’em “fuck you,” be ready to hit first, and stay on your feet at all costs. He knew the game. Now this kid was eyeing Joe, watching his reaction. His mouth puckered up in a defiant, kissy pout. The proper response would be a show of overwhelming force. Joe tried to stimulate the necessary resources to match this wop dago fire hydrant, this, this Golden Gloves Guido greaseball gangster punk fuck…ah, but it was no use. He was exhausted and unprepared. He did not have the energy. He took out his badge-wallet and showed the kid his shield. “Watch your language,” he instructed in a stern-fatherly way.

  The kid sensed his victory. “Sorry, Officer,” he said, still wearing that lippy little moue. “I didn’t know. You coulda been anybody.”

  They retreated to a corner of the dusty rubble-field, where the kid took care to strut his insubordination. Holding his coffee cup, he flexed his right arm so the little red devil quivered on his biceps. Joe had a similar tattoo, a boxing leprechaun, in the identical spot. The coincidence reinforced his sense of failure.

  “Where were you the night of January ten, around eleven, midnight?”

  “No fuckin’ idea. Where were you?”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “Sorry. I don’t remember. Why? What happened?”

  “There was a shop over near the Gahden that got broke into.”

  “You came out here to hassle me over some diddlyshit B-and-E?”

  “Language.”

  “Sorry. It’s just…pfft. You got nothing better to do?”

  “This is all I have to do, all day. You got a car?”

  “Why?”

  “Who’s got the black sedan?”

  “What black sedan?”

  “Four guys showed up with baseball bats in a big black sedan and broke the place up.”

  “What four guys? What the fu—What are you talking about? You have absolutely no idea, do you?”

  “I’ve got an idea. I’ve got a pretty good idea. I’ve got a witness who IDs you as one of the four apes that did it.”

  The kid stiffened at the word apes. “Who? That fuckin’ geezer you showed up here with? Half blind…”

  “That half-blind geezer picked you out of all the guys working on this site. Tell you what: I bet he’d pick you out of a lineup ten times out of ten. Put him in front of a jury and I’ll take my chances.”

  “So arrest me. Go ahead.”

  “Not today.”

  “No, not today. Didn’t think so. You got nothing and you know it.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul what?”

  “Marolla.”

  “Give me your license. Where do you live, Paul Marolla?”

  “Lynn.”

  “Figures.”

  Joe took down the guy’s name, address, and D.O.B., and handed his license back to him. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “We’ll talk again.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You want to come down the station and cool off awhile?”

  “For what?”

  “Suspicious person. Disorderly. I’ll think of something.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Joe shook his head. Somehow, unwittingly he had played the cool hand. He felt smart—at least he felt he looked smart. He had not said a wrong word, and rather than risk spoiling this little miracle of nonviolent interrogation, he decided to walk away, though he was not sure quite what he had, what good this man’s name would do.

  “Watch your language.”

  “Fuck. You.”

  38

  They were like vampires, these Mob guys. They came out at night. Lunch was breakfast, supper was lunch, the workday ended anytime before sunrise. The big boss, Charlie Capobianco, would drive himself into the city from his sprawling oceanfront house in Swampscott after noontime. His workday began at the “clubhouse” on Thatcher Street. Around seven he might sweep into a favored restaurant with his retinue, like a feudal lord paying a call on a vassal. Then it was on to C.C.’s, a bar he owned in the Combat Zone where he kept an office. Sometime around two or three in the morning Capobianco would drive himself home. Hardly anyone knew when he left; hardly anyone was still around.

  BPD Station Number One was in the same North End neighborhood, a couple of blocks off Hanover Street, the main drag. It was not unusual for Joe to recognize these guys on the street, big shots like the Capobianco brothers or Vinnie Gargano, or schools of bottom-feeding plug-uglies that cruised the area. Some he knew by name, many more by face. Long before Joe had enlisted in—or been impressed into—the Capobianco organization, he had made it a point to ignore them. Most cops did the same. Leave the gangbuster crap to the movies. In real life, there was only danger for a cop in tangling with these guys. Better to keep a respectful distance. And now that he was lugging around his Big Secret, Joe avoided the North End altogether, lest a wave or a nod betray him.

  A shit-cloud had settled over Joe. Every day, bad luck all around. Every fucking day, more trouble. It was all around him, it was inside him, this fucking Trouble, like a virus, and now he would have to ride out the illness right to the end. He was so damn tired. He needed a good long sleep was what he needed. If he could just sleep, then—then—maybe he could think this thing through.

  After working a last-half, around one in the morning, Joe guided his big Olds Eighty-Eight to a stop behind a fancier black Cadillac on Mass. Ave., across the river in Cambridge. He turned off the ignition. Nearly a full minute passed. Inside the Cadillac the dim silhouette of Vinnie Gargano threw up his hands, and Joe figured he had better get going. He slipped into the passenger seat of Gargano’s Caddy.

  “What was that with the sitting? What, are you listening to the radio?”

  “No. I was making sure nobody was going to see.”

  “Who the fuck’s going to see?”

  “I don’t know. People.”

  “What people? I got things to do. I’m sitting here thinking, What’s with this guy? Is he waiting for me to come to him or what? This is some crazy fucking cop I found!”

  Joe shifted in his seat.

  But Gargano was in a lighthearted mood. “If I was that broad from Joe Tecce’s with the tits out to here and the hair out to here, you wouldn’t be able to get in the car fast enough. You’d’a jumped through the window, pshoo, with your pants around your ankles.”

  “I took care of that thing.”

  “Listen to you, ‘I took care of that thing.’”

  “I took care of that thing you asked me.”

  Gargano gave Joe a disappointed look. All business. This big, dumb mick was rejecting his friendship. Again. So be it.

  “I talked to the prosecutor at the BMC. He’s going to file a nol pros.”

  “Speak English.”

  “He’s going to shit-can the case.”

  “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “What else do you want to tell me?”

  “Nothing.” Joe puzzled over what Gargano might be fishing for. What the hell was Joe doing here with Vinnie The Animal Gar
gano? Why would Gargano take the time to oversee Joe’s case personally? There were bigger tabs to collect. There were also better ears to occupy Gargano the spymaster. As a fixer or an ear, Joe Daley was not worth the trouble.

  Gargano handed him an envelope. “A little walking-around money.”

  Joe checked inside. Two hundred. Two or three days’vig. Walking-around money was all it was. Then again, why would Gargano help Joe out of the hole he had dug? You’re a dummy, the little voice said. Taking the money would do nothing but seal Joe in further. He took it anyway. He needed it. Dummy.

  “I got something else for you. You know about that Copley job? Half million in diamonds.”

  “Read about it in the papers.”

  “I need those stones. They belong to a friend of mine.”

  “Diamonds? What do I know—? I don’t know from diamonds.”

  “I said they belong to a friend of mine.”

  “I don’t know about that kind of stuff.”

  “I thought you were a detective.”

  “Not that kind.”

  “The fuck’s the difference? You’re a detective—detect.”

  “It’s just, I can’t promise…I don’t know how, where to start.”

  “You don’t know where to start? Here, let me give you a fuckin’ clue. Start with your fuck-up of a brother.”

  “My brother?” Joe tried to deliver the line in a natural way.

  “‘Oh, my brother!’ Yeah, the thief. Something gets stolen, you start with the thief. Whattaya think?”

  “But—”

  “Just get the stones, Joe. Your brother didn’t do it, fine, I don’t give a shit. I really don’t. Just get the stones, that’s all I care.”

  “You want me to squeeze my own brother? I can’t do that.”

  “You can. You will.”

  “Give me something else. Anything else.”

  “They figured you’d say that.”

  “Well, they figured right. I’m not gonna do it.”

  “They also give me this.” He dug in his jacket pocket for a folded piece of paper and laid it on the dash in front of Joe.

  The paper listed Kat and Little Joe’s names, the family’s home address, and Little Joe’s school, all in neat Palmer Method handwriting.

  “Let me tell you something about how this thing works. Don’t ever tell me no. You got me? I don’t ever want to hear that word out of you. Just get those stones.”

  39

  Two policemen at the door. The taller one was Buczynski (he pronounced it buzz-IN-ski) from the Manhattan Burglary Squad. He was average height and thin, and he might have been handsome if only he were better dressed and took all those things—pens, scraps of paper—out of his shirt pocket, and learned not to wear short-sleeve shirts with neckties, and stood up straight, and learned to shave properly and not drench himself so in aftershave. Buczynski did look like a policeman, at least, which was more than you could say for his partner.

  This was a little pale-yellow lump of a man with another of those names, Gedaminski—the name rumbled on and on like a freight train behind that G—and no amount of cleaning up was going to salvage him. This man Gedaminski did not seem the police type. He was small, doughy, and rather anemic looking. What chance would he stand against a respectable criminal? One wanted to put him under a warming lamp like a jaundiced baby. He had come all the way from Boston, driven, he said, though one got the sense he would have walked if necessary. He did have a beady little attentiveness about him. Otherwise, nothing. A complete disappointment.

  Anyway, it seemed like great fun to talk to policemen. A lark. It would make a marvelous story. To meet them she had dressed simply, in a dove-gray sweater and pants, no jewelry except a watch and very plain stud earrings. She wanted to project that she was more than she seemed—she was the sort of girl who, under different circumstances, would have thrived as a burglary detective, perceptive and ready for action as she was. She did not like that they would make assumptions about her. They would presume. They would dismiss her with two words: Park Avenue. So she was inordinately hospitable. She put out coffee and muffins, the sort of food she imagined policemen enjoyed. She was eager to help.

  But really, what could she tell this Gedaminski that she hadn’t already told him on the phone? He had come an awfully long way just to confirm a very simple story.

  Gedaminski handed her a photo.

  “Yes!” she said. “That’s him.” She was surprised to remember the man so clearly. But he had been handsome. There had been a presence about him. She had thought, upon seeing this man, He is just like me somehow. “Tell me his name. Is that alright? Am I allowed to know his name?”

  “Richard Daley.”

  “Are you sure he’s the one? It seems like a mistake.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me the story again.”

  “Alright. Well, it’s just what I told you. Does your friend know the story already?”

  Buczynski had agreed to drive his counterpart from Boston as a courtesy. They had worked together before. Gedaminski had been to New York chasing this or that suspect, usually Daley. A real pro, a good thief, often worked out of town, the better to go unrecognized. Gedaminski had long suspected that Ricky Daley had paid a few visits to Manhattan to steal and not be bothered. Gedaminski knew, too, that Ricky worked with the same fences over and over, a trusted few, and none of them were in Boston. There was no better place to fence jewelry than New York. There it could be quickly broken up and moved. Often the only way to catch a good thief was to follow the swag. It was very easy to steal, but very hard to dispose of stolen things once you’d got them. Most thieves had to settle for twenty or thirty cents on the dollar from a fence. Good thieves did better; there was less risk in dealing with them. Burglary detectives spent much of their time trolling pawnshops and jewelers, tracking the swag. Gedaminski would have given his left nut to know where Ricky Daley fenced his stuff. He and Buczynski had canvassed the usual layoffs in New York several times, with no luck. Gedaminski got along fine with Al Buczynski, though Buczynski talked too much, and the Old Spice he wore gave the Bostonian a roaring headache and made him suspicious of the entire NYPD, since perfume on a man was a sort of subterfuge, and perfume on a cop smelled like corruption.

  “Well,” the woman said, “it’s just like everybody says: Where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot? I was in Boston. The Harvard-Yale game was that weekend. We were supposed to stay the whole weekend but we didn’t. They wound up postponing the game, anyway. We were staying at the Copley, my husband and I. We sat in front of the TV all afternoon, it seemed like. We were with friends in the Back Bay. And I was drained and just, just exhausted, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear to watch the TV anymore—they were saying the same things over and over again, hour after hour, I couldn’t stand it. So I went back to the hotel, to the room, while my husband stayed to watch.

  “When I got back to my floor, I came off the elevator and I was walking down the corridor, getting my room key out and so forth, and there was this sound, not like a gunshot but like a firecracker or a pop, just crack. Well, I was spooked already from that whole day, so it frightened me and I kind of stopped there in the hall a moment. When I got to the door of my room, I was fumbling with the key. My hand was trembling. I was—well, I wasn’t crying exactly, but tears were coming out, you know?—and I was just anxious to get into my room and lie down. So while I’m trying to open my door, a few doors down the hall a door opens and out comes this man—this Richard Daley. He looked much nicer than he does in that picture. He was wearing a very nice suit and he had no luggage. I noticed he did not have a room key, he was not locking the door behind him. He just pulled the door shut.

  “He came walking down the hall toward the elevators. He saw me struggling with my door and as he went by me he said, ‘Are you okay?’ I told him my hand was shaking and I could not seem to get my door open. He said, ‘Here, let me help you. I’m good with locks.’ I gave him the key and he put it i
n my lock and opened my door for me. That was it. He said, ‘It’ll be okay,’ and he smiled and he turned to go.

  “He was really very nice. Very nice. You know, something in his face made me think, you know, just for a moment, maybe it really will be okay. I said to him—not that it mattered, but I just wanted him to stay there for another minute, I don’t know why; I liked him, and it was such a crazy day—I said to him, ‘Hey, you forgot to lock your door.’ So he stops and he kind of looks at the door, and he says, ‘It’s not my room. I just checked in and they gave me the wrong room. I asked for a suite. That room is a single.’ So I said something about ‘Well, it’s a horrible day and you can’t really blame the fellow at the front desk for making a mistake.’ And he smiles—not a happy smile, I mean just a reassuring kind of smile—and he says, ‘No. It’s just a mistake. I’ll go right down and straighten it out.’ And that was it. He went down the hall, and I went into my room, and I never thought anything of it. I never even heard about the robbery in that room. We checked out an hour later and came right home. We didn’t want to be away.”

  “You’re sure it’s him?”

  She picked up the picture and looked at it again. She was absolutely certain and yet she could not quite hold both facts in her head at once—this was the nice, handsome man she had met in the hotel corridor, and this man was a thief. That he would rob someone during the chaos of That Day, well, it was particularly profane and opportunistic, and it added to her confusion.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “Richard Daley. But he wasn’t, he didn’t seem…I just—”

  “You’re sure it’s him?”

  “Yes, it’s the same man but…he was just in the wrong room.”

  “Trust me, lady, he’s always in the wrong room.”

  40

  Ricky was in the wrong room.

  With the lights still off, he worked his hands into a pair of leather driving gloves. These were tan calfskin, very thin. He liked them because the thin leather permitted him to feel, they were not too hot to wear nor too bulky to fit in a coat pocket, and they were stylish. He took pride in the hidden aspects of his craft, just as a master cabinetmaker takes pride in perfect dovetails at the backs of drawers. This was what it meant to have an avocation, a calling. That his life’s work would take place entirely in the shadows, unwitnessed, was precisely the reason to do it perfectly. He was a member of a secret guild, and he felt a little thrill of professionalism when he worked his hands into those gloves, flexing and unflexing his fingers, packing the leather down into the crotches between his fingers. He was at work and happy.