The Strangler

by William Landay

  “The case won’t go down, Brendan.”

  “It’ll go down. They all do. Someone else’ll make it go down.”

  “It’s my case. I want to close it.”

  “Good for you. That’s admirable. Now forget it. Go chase hookers and stay out of trouble. Someday you’ll thank me. And let’s leave Sonnenshein alone. They’re the chosen people, Joe. Who are we to bother ’em? Lord knows, He didn’t choose us.” Conroy’s pale blue eyes fixed on Joe until the matter was settled. He then produced an envelope from an inside coat pocket, laid it on the side of the table, and went back to his game.

  “What’s that?”

  “Going-away present.”

  “From who?”

  “So many questions, Joe.”

  “It’s from Sonnenshein, isn’t it?”

  “It’s from a general fund.”

  “Well, I don’t want it.”

  “Oh, don’t get your shorts all in a bunch, Joe. Every cop gets a little something when he leaves this station, every cop who’s willing. It’s their way of saying thank you.”

  “I’ve been thanked enough.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Conroy returned his attention to the table. He frowned.

  Joe turned to go, but that envelope jerked his leash. He came to the table reluctantly, against his own will, and peeked inside it. He put the envelope down and turned for the door again.

  Conroy’s frown deepened. The cue ball was hemmed in. It had been a bad break. There was one shot, perhaps: the ten ball to a corner pocket. But the three ball obstructed the path just enough to spoil the shot. Conroy considered. He extended the cue and nudged the offending ball a half rotation aside.

  Joe left the room and closed the door behind him.

  Conroy clacked the ten ball home. He sighed, ahh.

  Joe opened the door again, marched to the table, grabbed the envelope, and left.

  55

  Boston State Hospital—formerly the Boston Lunatic Hospital—occupied a two-hundred-acre campus in Mattapan, most of which was a virgin wood. A wrought-iron fence enclosed the entire circumference of the property. The few scattered buildings were red brick, vaguely federalist, with shallow roofs and white moldings and trim. The bigger buildings looked like old industrial mills. The smaller ones might have been little schoolhouses or private homes.

  The administration building to which Ricky was directed was one of these, a three-story brick house with a white portico. The forest seemed to be closing around this structure. Trees overhung it, vines crawled over its surface, the grass out front was high and weedy.

  Like a lot of city boys, Ricky had no real feeling for nature. The work of men was done in cities, and what lay between cities was best hopped over in a plane or sped through on a highway. When circumstances compelled him to the beach or out into the woods, he was uneasy. And in town, where nature erupted out of the concrete, as in this forest in the middle of Mattapan, it was the forest that seemed artificial—a big green obstruction to be got around on the way to where you were going. A big green pain in the ass.

  But these woods were not so benign. There were no people around despite the warm weather. When Ricky had been a kid—the Daleys’ house in Savin Hill was just a few miles away—there had been more than three thousand patients here. Now a policy of “deinstitutionalization” had nearly emptied the hospital. Only a few hundred souls remained. The grounds were shabby and dilapidated, almost ghostly. Soon these buildings would be abandoned altogether, the forest would close around them, and that would be that.

  Why did all that bother Ricky? A few old buildings moldering in the woods, an old insane asylum being decommissioned—what was the big deal?

  But Ricky’s mood remained stubbornly shadowed. He was not so good at playacting anymore. He was no longer a ventriloquist’s dummy; he was too much himself. Amy would have gotten a kick out of that, of course. The thing she had most wished for—Ricky’s genuine presence, his new capacity to feel deeply, to ache—had come about only as a product of her dying. It was a joke she would have appreciated.

  Would it be profane of Ricky to enjoy what he was doing, tracking down Amy’s killer? He thought it was precisely what Amy would have wanted. She certainly appreciated the pleasures of sleuthing, of following the clues, feeling the knot relax and come undone in your hand. More important, Amy knew the consolation of hard work. She knew it was all essentially a distraction. The dailyness and busyness of work obscured the bleak realities—that life was short and pointless and precarious and so on and so on. Why think about it? Better to keep your head down, keep on working. Finding Amy’s killer was more productive than grieving. Maybe it was grieving.

  At the administration building, a nurse escorted Ricky to the office of Dr. Mark Keating. The title Chief of Psychiatry was stenciled on the frosted glass in the office door.

  Inside, the doctor hunched over his desk. His elbows rested on the desktop. The fingers of his right hand picked at his scalp. Dr. Keating hoisted up his head, as if its weight was becoming too much for his neck. “Mr. Daley?” he said, puzzled.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re not the one I spoke to.”

  “That was my brother Michael. He gave me your name. It’s about your patient, Arthur Nast.”

  “Former patient.” The doctor gestured toward the chair in front of his desk. “I think I told your brother when we spoke: I’m bound by confidentiality. There’s not much I can tell you.”

  Ricky sat. “I just have one question.”

  The doctor grunted, skeptical. He plowed his fingers into his hair and left them there, with hair kinking out between them. To Ricky, he resembled an old baboon, with his shoulders hunched and his baggy face and electrified hair.

  Ricky had a copy of the morning’s Traveler, quarter-folded. He laid the newspaper on the desk. On page one, below the fold, a headline read,

  FORMER STRANGLER SUSPECT FOUND DEAD

  A small photo showed Arthur Nast, gaunt, bug-eyed. The photo was misleading. It did not suggest Nast’s inhuman qualities, his gigantic size and strength, his Martian, distorted features. He looked merely like a thug.

  The doctor glanced at the story and sighed.

  “This didn’t happen, did it?” Ricky picked up the paper and read aloud, “‘Arthur Nast, once a leading suspect in the Boston Strangler murders, was found dead early last evening in his locked cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, a secure mental facility. Nast apparently swallowed a fatal dose of an antidepressant medication which he was supposed to take regularly but which he hoarded instead, apparently for the purpose of suicide.’ Now, that didn’t happen, did it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Very much.”

  “To who? Nobody cared about him when he was alive.”

  “Nobody cares about him now, including me. It matters because the truth matters. So, do you believe Arthur Nast killed himself?”

  “I think you’d better tell me who you are.”

  “My friend was Amy Ryan, the last girl who got strangled.”

  “Ah. And you think Arthur did it?”

  “No. Arthur was in Bridgewater when it happened.”

  “Why the interest, then? Why not let Arthur have some peace in death, finally?”

  “Because I want my peace now.”

  “I see. You’re not a policeman, are you?”

  Ricky shook his head.

  “No, you don’t sound like one. Well, look, there’s not a lot I can tell you. I wasn’t there. I haven’t seen Arthur in several months.”

  “You knew him as well as anyone.”

  “Alright, then, to be frank, no, I rather doubt that Arthur killed himself. Certainly he did not have the intelligence or the technical knowledge to do it that way—to form the plan, to determine what a fatal dose would be, to hide the pills until he’d accumulated enough. That’s all well beyond Arthur’s capacity. I doubt Arthur would ever have considered suicide in the first place. I don’t t
hink it was in his makeup. He never voiced any inclination toward suicide. He was never depressed, to my knowledge. Of course I can’t rule it out, but it strikes me as very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I can’t imagine who would want to kill Arthur, either.”

  “I can.”

  “Arthur had no enemies in Bridgewater.”

  “He did. He just didn’t know it. Someone did not want him to confess to any of the Strangler murders. Someone didn’t want to see DeSalvo cleared. If Arthur Nast talked, if he laid claim to the murders and described them convincingly—even more convincingly than DeSalvo, which would not be hard to do—then the whole thing would start to fall apart, wouldn’t it? How could people go on thinking DeSalvo was the Strangler if another, better suspect started confessing to the same crimes?”

  “Who are you accusing, then? The docs? The guards? The prisoners?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who put those pills in Nast’s hand, but I know why they did it: They’re covering up.”

  “May I ask you a question, Mr. Daley?” A skeptical, honeyed tone came into the doctor’s voice. It became the voice of a therapist. The shrink apparently thought Ricky himself was a little crazy, a little grief-sick, delusional, conspiracy-minded. “If you prove all this, a cover-up, if you do find the ‘real Strangler’ who killed your friend Miss…”

  “Ryan.”

  “Miss Ryan—what then?”

  “Then I’ll see that justice is done.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll see him go to prison. He’ll know he didn’t get away with it.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You said what you want is peace. Will you have it? What then?”

  Ricky blinked. His mouth drooped open as if he were about to respond. But his mind, the thought-stream so hard to silence earlier, had gone utterly quiet. What then?

  56

  Sunday Mass at St. Margaret’s.

  Frozen in time, Michael thought.

  Same harp parish. Father Farrell still at the altar. White-haired heads in the pews, all those Sullys and Murphs and Flynns and Flahertys—except that the white heads now belonged to the parents, not the grandparents, of Michael’s generation. Here were the same kids he and Ricky and Joe had grown up with, all looking a little flabbier than their fathers had at this age. Same brick cathedral named for a Scottish queen, Saint Margaret. It was Margaret’s husband, Malcolm III, who murdered Macbeth, and Michael always figured they should have called this place St. Malcolm’s—but they didn’t make saints out of guys like that.

  Anyway, this parish already had a Margaret: Daley. In her customary seat, front and center.

  And beside her, Brendan Conroy, in the aisle seat, where every time he lowered his bulk down onto the kneeler, his own fat knees squashed out the narrow ruts dug there Sunday after Sunday by Joe Daley, Sr.

  And beside them was Joe, drenched in worry. Kat, wearing a matching blue coat and hat. And Little Joe, in a clip-on tie.

  No Ricky. Ricky did not bother. Did not care what his mother said. Ricky was blithely agnostic about the Lord, and he was not about to fall for Margaret’s tail-chasing argument that doubting is a necessary part of faith. God or the God-shaped hole simply held no interest. What difference did it make? How would you live your life any differently, God or no God? Forget it, pal. Not a useful way to spend your time. Sunday mornings Ricky slept in.

  So the last seat in the Daleys’ row was taken by Michael. Michael who did not believe in God or Church, and who had not been to Mass in years. And yet, he figured, if he could just swallow the placebo—if he could trick his brain into giving his heart a rest—maybe there would be some relief here. Praying to a nonexistent God would be every bit as effective, in psychological terms, as praying to a real one, the whole thing being an exercise in talk therapy and blissful submission. And he could not deny that the placebo worked for billions of people. Why not for Michael, then? Wasn’t it at the darkest moments that grace was supposed to descend? To wish for the thing, to crave it, was to make it so. But to Michael, the Mass—every aspect of it, the tortured Christ above the altar, the dull expressions of the parishioners’ faces, the familiar musty smell of the church—seemed puny and desperate and exhausted. He had been a fool to come back here. As the Mass progressed, Michael’s disappointment quickened into anger, which he flung out at the entire parish for their collusion, for taking Conroy in. They saw Conroy walk in with Margaret on Sunday morning, they saw him cup his hand under her stout elbow as she shuffled out into the aisle for Communion, saw the two of them march around here with imperious nonchalance. Nothing went unnoticed here—over the years Michael had heard his mother condemn virtually everyone in this parish for one indiscretion or another—and yet no one raised an eyebrow. They pretended not to notice. Had they forgotten Joe Senior already?

  At Communion, Michael followed the rest of them out of the pew to line up two abreast. It did not even cross his mind not to take Communion. People would gossip, his mother would grind him for embarrassing her.

  The man beside Michael in line whispered, “Hey.”

  Michael turned to see Kurt Lindstrom. His face was mottled with blue and yellow bruises, and one eye bulged, but he was still smirky and undaunted, like a rich cousin.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here, Michael. Should you be in this line?”

  “Shh.”

  “Have you confessed?”

  Michael did not respond.

  “Have you confessed?” Lindstrom whispered. “For what you did to me?”

  The line inched forward one step.

  “It’s alright, Michael. I forgive you.”

  A step. Another step. “Michael, who’s that with your mother?”

  The line stopped.

  Lindstrom, imitating the others, stood with his hands clasped at his belly. “She looks lovely today. Saint Margaret. Did they name the church after her?”

  “Shut up,” Michael whispered.

  “Such a lovely woman.”

  “Shut up.”

  When they reached the front, Michael knelt on the red-carpeted stair. Lindstrom knelt beside him.

  The priest worked his way efficiently across the row of communicants. When he reached Lindstrom, the priest hesitated, distracted by the bruises. Lindstrom opened his mouth and extended his tongue too far. Again there was a pause. The priest seemed unsure whether he was being mocked. He laid the wafer on that too-long tongue, and Lindstrom retracted it slowly.

  The priest hesitated at Michael, too, and gave a bent little smile. Long time since he’d seen Michael Daley at Mass. He placed the wafer on Michael’s tongue, then moved on to Little Joe.

  Michael circled around to the outer aisle to return to his seat. Turning, craning his neck, he could not see Lindstrom anywhere.

  57

  Vinnie Gargano had an idea: “You wanna know what you do? You do like the Romans used to. Get yourself a cross, a few hundred crosses, whatever, you set ’em up where everyone can see, up nice and high, like on the Common or someplace, and you fuckin’ nail these fucks up and leave ’em there a couple of weeks. Let the birds eat ’em. That’s the Roman way, see, that’s the Italian way. None of this take the guy in some little closet in Walpole and fry him up where no one can see. The whole point is people gotta see. They gotta see! I mean, that’s the whole fuckin’ point, am I right? Now I guess they ahn’t even gonna do that anymore. They’re just gonna stick ’em in a cell and leave ’em there. The fuck good does that do?”

  He scanned the table for an answer. Gargano’s features were scumbled in the dim light. His eyes in particular had a hooded, drowsy menace.

  But the three mooks at the table were mushing crab Rangoon and sub gum chow mein in their mouths and could not do much more than nod and make humming sounds to signal their agreement. But agree they did. They always agreed with Vinnie The Animal, even in his drunken expansive moods.

  Gargano loved going out for chink, and this w
as his favorite after-hours stomp in Chinatown, Bob Lee’s Lantern House. They took care of a guy here. Gave him an upstairs room. Gave him mai tais and Blue Whatevers with the little pussy maraschino cherry wrapped in an orange slice and speared with a little plastic sword—drinks that, despite appearances, could knock Sonny Liston on his ass. Plenty of cooze at the bar. No bosses; the bosses stuck to the tomato-sauce joints in the North End or the basement office at C.C.’s Lounge over to Tremont Street. And the cops did not even know Chinatown was part of the city. The only cop Vinnie The Animal was likely to see in Bob Lee’s Lantern House was the one he brought with him.

  “What about you, cop? What do you say? What good does it do?”

  “Whaddaya askin’ me? Fuck do I know?”

  “I just figured you’re a cop, you see this shit every day.”

  Joe shrugged. He did not like Vinnie The Animal. He was not charmed or frightened by him. He was too tired and too drunk to feel anything. “I don’t see nothing, Vin.”

  “The fuck you do. You pop some fuckin’ guy, he’s out the next day. Or maybe he does a little time and he’s out in a month or whatever. You know what I’m sayin’. Doesn’t make any sense, keep arresting the same guys. It’s got to bother you, don’t it?”

  “Not really.”

  “It should.”

  “It’s the system.”

  “It’s a shitty system, then.”

  “I’m over it.”

  “That’s the problem. That’s why you cops never get anywhere. Put me in charge for a day.”

  “And what? You’d crucify everyone? That’s your big idea? Round up all the jaywalkers and the hookers and crucify ’em? That’s a great plan, Vin.”

  “Not hookers. Who said anything about hookers? That iddn’t even really a crime. I’m talking about murderers here. I’m talkin’ about the way you need to do things if you really want to get the thing done. You think they had a lot of murders in Rome?”

  “Sure.”