The Strangler

by William Landay

  Except this trial did not feel like a wrapping-up. DeSalvo was not even being tried for the stranglings. His entire marathon confession to thirteen killings could not be used against him; it had been given under a grant of immunity. And there was not a scrap of evidence linking DeSalvo to any of the stranglings. In fact, whether Albert DeSalvo was actually the Strangler was still a matter of debate among cops and prosecutors. The problem was DeSalvo himself. He kept insisting he was.

  So DeSalvo was on trial for the so-called Green Man attacks, four cases in which an intruder had broken into women’s apartments and assaulted them. (The cases were named for a “Green Man” because, for weeks before the Boston attacks, the police teletype had been reporting a vaguely similar series of incidents in Connecticut in which the suspect had worn a green shirt and pants, presumably some sort of work uniform.) But the Green Man attacks were not stranglings. They were not even murders. In one case, there had been a garden-variety rape—the attacker had forced a woman to fellate him—but the rest were aborted, inconclusive attacks in which the Green Man had tied women up and groped them, only to abandon the attack in remorse or skittishness. (“Don’t tell my mother,” he told his last victim as he ran off.) The charges were a lumpy mess of lawyerspeak: B-and-E with intent to commit a felony, unnatural and lascivious acts, ABDW. This was not the operatic, macabre horror of the Strangler murders. It was the sort of low-rent trial that usually goes unreported, the kind that assistant D.A.’s bide their time with while waiting for Something Big.

  So why was Albert DeSalvo copping to the stranglings in an unrelated, small-time case? According to Leland Bloom, the reason was simple: DeSalvo actually was the Boston Strangler and therefore must be insane; so by proving he was the Strangler, DeSalvo would prove himself not guilty by reason of insanity in the Green Man cases or, by extension, in any criminal case. Besides, Bloom calculated, his client was looking at life in prison anyway for the Green Man cases, so what was there to lose? It was such a daffy legal strategy, no one would have taken it seriously but for one fact: this was Lee Bloom, the Perry Mason of Boston, the Learjet lawyer who had won acquittals in places more glamorous than his run-down hometown. He was the swashbuckling native son who was too big for Boston but had stayed here anyway. So nobody mentioned the fact that there was no way in hell the Green Man was going to do life without parole on these chickenshit charges. Twenty, twenty-five years max, parole in ten—even that would be a stretch. More important, if DeSalvo actually succeeded in convincing a jury he was the Boston Strangler, they were never going to acquit him whether he was insane or not. What juror would want to go home to explain to his wife or daughter that he had released the Strangler on a technicality? It was legal hara-kiri. Of course there were lots of theories to explain DeSalvo’s ardor to confess to the stranglings. He wanted money, it was said, both the reward offered by the governor and the profits from book and movie deals. He was a pathological liar; he had confessed not just to the thirteen known stranglings but to a couple more besides, and according to Bloom the orgy of self-incrimination had not stopped there—DeSalvo claimed to have committed two thousand rapes and attacks over a period of eight or nine years. To the cops and lawyers and shrinks who knew DeSalvo it was even simpler: Albert DeSalvo wanted to be someone. He wanted to be famous.

  But these were inconvenient facts. Alvan Byron had his eye on the governor’s office, and Leland Bloom would forever be the lawyer who represented the Boston Strangler. And the city could sleep at night, finally. It did not matter that the end would be inconclusive. That, too, suited the city’s mood. Jack Ruby had already ensured an inconclusive end to the JFK murder; here was the local analogue, the smaller, cruder bookend to the national drama. It was as if the men and women of Boston had had enough. They were glad to have the Strangler ordeal behind them. They agreed on a resolution. They wrote their own ending. It was even tacitly assumed that Bloom, by allowing his client to admit to the stranglings, was doing a civic service. He was manipulating the process to the right outcome. Besides, even the Perry Mason of Boston could not exonerate a man who would not stop confessing. DeSalvo was the Strangler—so be it.

  Ricky did not buy it. He retreated to the back of the courtroom more convinced than ever that Albert DeSalvo was no more the Strangler than Oswald was a lone crank with a rifle. It was an old story that always worked: History caroms off the unpredictable acts of misfits like DeSalvo and Oswald. We liked to believe it because it was simple, it made the mysterious and incomprehensible seem suddenly very small and manageable. All that worry and all along it had only been an isolated crackpot. Ricky knew better. The night Amy was murdered, after all, Albert DeSalvo had been locked up tight at Bridgewater. What if Michael had been right? What if there was not one strangler but several, not one monster but monsters all around? And what if the city was right, too—that there are some facts just too frightening to live with? You could not worry about stranglers forever.

  To no one’s surprise, the jury did not stay out long. Three hours and forty-five minutes. They came back at five-fifteen, a home-for-dinner verdict. Guilty on all counts. The judge immediately sentenced DeSalvo to life in prison for the simple reason, he explained from the bench, that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, de facto if not de jure. The next morning’s Observer screamed “DESALVO IS THE STRANGLER,” and so it was true, DeSalvo became the Strangler, and the next morning it seemed truer, and the next and the next until no one remembered to question it anymore.

  45

  The door was heavy steel, ugly, painted black. Graffiti was etched top to bottom in the black like a scratchboard, using whatever stylus came to hand, a key, bottle cap, knife, whatever you had in your pocket or could pick up off the sidewalk. Whose marks were they? There were a lot of tenants with “behavior problems” living here at the Cathedral Project, people who were hard to place in housing projects but had to be put somewhere; it was part of the Housing Authority’s mandate. And of course there were plenty of “behavior problems” in the neighborhood, too, slouching loiterers with slidy eyes on every street corner; maybe it had been them scrabbling against the door after dark, when the project was locked. Most of the marks were just strikes lashed in the paint.

  Michael pushed against the door, then rattled it, and finally had to shoulder the thing to get it squealing open. How, he wondered, did the old folks who lived here ever get the door open?

  Inside he was confronted with a long bank of battered mailboxes. The Cathedral Project, a yellow-brick monolith between Harrison Avenue and Washington Street near Franklin Square, housed some two thousand low-income tenants. Michael scanned the mailboxes looking for the name and apartment number. Outside, trains clattered by on the elevated line, which straddled Washington Street on paired legs like an enormous centipede, and the mailboxes shivered. He found one with a handwritten card taped to it with foreign-looking numbers. Presumably this was how Europeans wrote their numerals, with a horizontal strike across the middle of the 7 and fishhook tail on the 9. He wandered into the wrong wing of the project looking for number seventy-nine. It took him ten minutes to find the right apartment.

  A woman answered through the closed apartment door, “Who is it?”

  “Mrs. Cavalcante, it’s Michael Daley. I don’t know if you remember me.”

  “You from the Renewal?”

  “No. I was the lawyer in your trial, when they took your apartment in the West End. I’m a lawyer. You remember?”

  “From the Renewal?”

  “No, Mrs. Cavalcante. I’m with the Attorney General’s office. I just have a few questions. It’s not—you’re not in any trouble. Just questions.”

  Michael could barely remember the old woman. She and her husband were both short and slight, he recalled, and during the brief hearing they had spoken mainly to each other.

  “I don’t want no questions.”

  “It’s about what you said that day, Mrs. Cavalcante. In court. What you said. You said something about gangsters had come to
your apartment. Dinquenti, cinquenti, something. I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian—I don’t remember the word.”

  A chain rattled, then two locks, and the door opened a crack. An eye peered out, with a dull yellow sclera but alert, flicking up and down, nervous. “Delinquenti.”

  “Delinquenti, yes. Si.”

  “I remember you.” She opened the door now and glared. “I remember you.” Propping herself with a cane, she gimped back into the apartment on one dead leg, which she urged forward with a roll of her right hip. “I remember you.”

  “Did you hurt your leg, Mrs. Cavalcante?”

  “My hip. I broke my hip.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Pssh, she said.

  “Should you be walking on it?”

  “What else should I do?”

  “Rest.”

  “I already rest. Three weeks I’m in the hospital with all old, sick…”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said again.

  Pssh, she said again.

  “Is your husband home?”

  “No. He’ll be back. What do you want from us now?”

  Michael closed the door behind him. “Look, I know how you must feel, Mrs. Cavalcante. I know how it must have looked to you. But there was another side. I had a job to do.”

  “What do you want from us?”

  “Mrs. Cavalcante…”

  She stared. The old couple had both been small but, Michael recalled, there had been an erect, peasant sturdiness about them. Two tough little brown nuts from some Umbrian hillside. No longer. Whether it was the injury to her hip or the effort of moving, only a few months later Mrs. Cavalcante looked withered, humpbacked.

  “I wanted to ask you—I got to thinking about what you said that day, about men coming to your apartment?”

  “Do you know what they did, the Renewal? When I was in the hospital with this hip, and the doctors were telling me I would never walk again, I should just stay in bed, do you know what they did? They sent in the movers and they took away my things. Pictures my dead son, dead from twenty years, they take away and they throw them in the trash like nothing. They wait until my husband comes to visit me in the hospital and they do this, they sneak. This is the kind of people. All my dishes, my blankets, my clothes, everything gone. Just like that they come, they take it all. I come home and my apartment is empty. My home twenty years.” She stood waiting for an answer from Michael, a confession of remorse. She had checkmated him and an apology was her due.

  Michael regarded her—she looked like a comma, standing there with her hump, a curlicue of hard gristle left over from what must once have been a fuller, softer woman—and he knew he could not say what both of them surely realized: that it did not matter, nobody cared. The Cavalcantes had been in the way, and so they had been swept aside and it was done now. There was no point in analyzing the right and wrong of it. Right and wrong had nothing to do with it. It was quaint even to think in terms of the old virtues. You would think she would have learned by now.

  “So then I come home,” the woman continued, reciting a familiar litany, “and one day while we’re asleep they boarded up the building! With us inside! We had to shout out the window till somebody heard and the cops come get us out. We could’ve been killed in there, they could have knocked down the whole thing and buried us.

  “Then they send us up to Lenox Street, this tiny little apartment where you can’t even turn around. And you can’t go out at night. It’s all colored, drinkin’ and hollerin’ all night and day. Knives—they’d soon as slit your throat. We didn’t even open the door. They had guys there would knock on your door and push their way right in if you opened it. We didn’t like to get killed, so we just sat inside like two crazy people not answering the bell. The social worker had to put her card under the door before we’d even open it. Finally we made a stink about my hip and I can’t walk up the stairs, till finally they give us this place. Only forty-seven bucks a month, and that’s with the light and gas included.”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “Not like what we had, though.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “We’re all alone here. Never see the old crowd anymore. They’re all out in Medford, South Boston, different projects all over. Most of them went to Medford.” She pronounced it MED-fid. “Unless they had family somewheres would take them in, they all went to Medford, flew away like birds.” She waved her hand. “What am I gonna go to Medford?”

  “Mrs. Cavalcante, about that day in court. What did you mean when you said the delinquenti had been bothering you back in the West End?”

  “Eh, these guys, they come around and say, ‘You have to go, everybody has to move out. If you don’t move, we’ll throw you out.’”

  “Who were they?”

  “Big guys.”

  “Did you know any of them?”

  “No. I seen ’em around, some of ’em, but I didn’t know them.”

  “You saw them around in the West End?”

  “Some, I said. Most we didn’t know.” She moved to a chair with that oscillating step-lurch and sat down slowly. Michael made tentative gestures to indicate a willingness to help, but she ignored him. She said, “They come at night, they bang on the door, say they got a message for us: ‘What do you think you’re doing? How come you don’t move out like the rest?’ They think we’re gonna get scared and just go. Where were we gonna go? Huh? Sometimes there’d even be cops come around, knock-knock-knock, ‘Hey, Mrs. C, hey, you should move out someplace else. Hey, it’s not safe for you here no more, all these empty buildings, this construction.’”

  “What cops?”

  “Cops, I don’t know.”

  “Were they in uniform? How do you know they were cops?”

  “Because I know! Some was uniform, some wasn’t uniform. They were cops.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “Only some. The ones we had in the neighborhood.”

  “Maybe they were just looking out for you, like they said.”

  “Like you were looking out for me when you threw me out on the street? I guess I should be lucky—everybody’s so busy looking out for me, like a princess.”

  “The others, the bad guys, did they threaten you?”

  “Yeah, they said, ‘You gotta go, you gotta go.’ It was all the same: ‘It’s not safe for you here no more.’”

  “Did they do anything to frighten you?”

  “Sometimes they called on the phone. ‘If you don’t get out, we’re gonna shoot you, hey, we’re gonna burn down your building.’ One of them told my husband he should watch out, he could fall down the stairs in the building and nobody’d ever find him.”

  “In court that day, you called them gangsters. Did you mean real gangsters?”

  “I said delinquenti—criminals. I don’t know from gangsters. What, you don’t think a cop can be a bad guy? You should see. How come you’re so concerned all of a sudden?”

  “Because somebody got hurt.”

  “Somebody who?”

  My father, Michael thought but did not say. When he had been a kid, the Daleys received threatening phone calls too, usually at dinnertime, from cons Joe Senior had put away. The calls would come from Walpole or Deer Island. Michael or one of his brothers would answer the phone to a grinding voice, I’m gonna burn down your fuckin’ house, I’m gonna fuck your wife, I’m gonna cut up your kids, I’m gonna shoot you in the fuckin’ head. The calls continued all the years Joe Senior was in various detective bureaus and Homicide. Michael hung up the phone as soon as he heard the first bad words, just as he had been told to do, but he could not un-hear them. How had his father, a gentle man who submitted himself to be pig-piled and horse-ridden and smart-alecked by his sons, mastered these killers? “Don’t you worry, Mike,” his dad used to say. “Big man hiding behind a phone.” But his dad did worry, and Michael worried too. One of these men might escape his cage and come find Michael and mutilate him. Would Michael sacrifice one of h
is brothers to save himself? It would be best, he understood, if the animal ate Joe and let Ricky and Michael run away. But in a pinch it was clear Michael would have to let himself be devoured to save Ricky, who must be saved. Would he have the courage to surrender to it? What would it feel like when adult hands engaged Michael’s body and cracked it, or a knife unzipped his skin, or a spinning bullet drilled into him? When he was five or six, Michael had been shocked when his dad took him fishing at Jamaica Pond and blithely yanked the hooks from the sunfish they caught, tearing ragged holes in their jaws, cheeks, and eye sockets as the fish arched their bodies in agony. Michael had told him to stop. His dad had tried to appease him, first by saying that the fish could not feel pain because their brains were too small, then that the wounds would heal after they were flipped back into the water. Neither was plausible, and Michael decided not to fish anymore, ever. “What a pussy,” Joe had said, and no one argued the point. After that, Dad had taken Joe and Ricky fishing in Jamaica Pond, and none of them seemed troubled by the suffering of the fishes. So maybe it just did not matter.

  “A cop got hurt, Mrs. Cavalcante.”

  “Pssh. A cop gets hurt and everyone comes running.”

  “This one was a good guy. Not a delinquenti.”

  46

  “The fuck is this, Rick?”

  “Edith Piaf.”

  “Edith Piaf. Fuckin’ Cambridge.”

  “She’s French.”

  “Well, I know she’s French. That’s not my point.”