The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Who are we? What are we gonna look into it? That’s the police’s job.”

  “You think the cops are gonna investigate Conroy? He’s in Homicide.”

  Ricky smirked bitterly. “Wouldn’t be the first case he didn’t solve.”

  “It’s not our job, Mike.”

  “I didn’t choose it, Joe. I was just living my life, having an ordinary day, and then the phone rang and Dad was dead and suddenly we were all about dying. We’ve never been the same since. At eleven fifty-nine we were a regular family, at twelve-oh-one suddenly we were the family that had a murder. I didn’t choose this job, ‘son of a dead guy.’ I’d give it back if I could.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “Can I ask you something, Joe? If you found the guy that killed Dad, and there was no doubt about it, you knew he was guilty, and it looked like he was going to get away with it—”

  “If, if, if.”

  “That’s right, if, if, if—what would you do?”

  “That’s not what this is.”

  “I know. I’m just saying, what if? If you knew who did it?”

  “I don’t know. Kill him.”

  “Kill him,” Michael repeated evenly. “Kill him.”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “I agree.”

  Joe shook his head. “What are you talking about, ‘you agree’? You don’t even know anything yet, and already you’re ready to kill him? You ahn’t exactly the type, Michael. Tough guy.”

  “I meant, I agree it would be the right thing to do.”

  “I think he just called you a fag, Mike. What does that mean, he’s not the type?”

  “Means he’s a fag.”

  “Say it to his face.”

  “You’re a fag, Mike.”

  “Well, he said it to your face, Michael. Give him credit.”

  “Okay, I’m a fag.”

  “I knew it!” Ricky grinned. “Pickle sniffer.”

  But Michael was grim. “I think we have to think about it.”

  Joe: “Again with this. Would you shut the fuck up? No one’s killing anyone.”

  “We have to think about what we’re going to do if it’s true.”

  “It’s not true. Would you just get that? It’s not true.”

  “Joe, he didn’t say it was true. He said if.”

  “I know what he said, Rick. He keeps sayin’ it without sayin’ it.”

  “All I’m saying is we have to consider it. Because that’s where we’re headed.”

  “Mike, do you know this is already a felony? It’s called conspiracy to murder.”

  “We’re just having a philosophical discussion, Joe.”

  “Oh, is that what we’re doing?”

  “Come on, if they arrested everybody who ever talked about murder, or thought about it or read about it…”

  “Well, I’m not thinking about it. I’m out.”

  “All right. You’re out. How about you, Ricky?”

  “Is this a conspiracy or still just a philosophical discussion?”

  “Just talking.”

  “You hear that, Mr. Cop?”

  “Joe knows. We’re just talking. In the abstract. What do we do, Rick?”

  “We do nothing. If we have evidence, we pass it to the cops. Give them a chance. If they do nothing, we take it to the feds.”

  “And if the feds do nothing?”

  “If the federales do nothing, then…we think of something else.”

  “That’s all I’ve been doing is thinking, Ricky.”

  “I know it. Maybe you should shut it off awhile, Mikey. You’re making yourself crazy.”

  “I think maybe everyone else is crazy.”

  “All crazy people think that.”

  “I think if Conroy is the one and we don’t do anything about it…” Michael shook his head as he searched for the end of his sentence. “…then shame on us.”

  “Mikey, are you being serious?”

  He pondered before answering. “I don’t know, Rick. To be perfectly honest.”

  “Look, you know when the chips are down, we’re with you, right?”

  “Except Joe, of course.”

  “Joe’s with you too. When the chips are down.” Ricky gave Joe a hard look.

  Joe declined to offer any confirmation. Just sat there.

  “Well, that’s comforting. Guess it’s me and you, Ricky. The Two Musketeers. Doesn’t have the same ring, does it?”

  Joe said, “You got enough trouble already, Ricky.”

  “What’s that mean, Rick?”

  “Tell him. Go ahead. Tell him what it means.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. It means Joe’s got a big mouth.”

  “Tell him what it means, why don’t you?”

  “The point is, he’d be there for you. Isn’t that right, Joe?”

  “Yeah, whatever. Crazy fag running around like Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes.”

  “Mikey, though…you’re not gonna do anything crazy, right?”

  “I told you, everyone else is crazy. I’m the only sane one.”

  61

  Joe found him in one of the “social clubs” in the South End. This one was called the Top Hat, though you were more likely to see a flat-brim fedora here on one of the old Mustache Petes. It occupied the bottom two floors of a tenement. Here the old-timers mixed with the younger generation of kill-crazy grunts like Vinnie The Animal, and all the gangsters, young and old, mingled with the plain civilians, to drink and play poker or barbooth, with no trouble from the cops who were either bought and paid for or simply knew better. You could get a watered-down beer for a dime while you dropped a fifty at the tables, and out of that fifty bucks, one and a quarter—the magical two and a half percent—would be passed from hand to hand to hand to Charlie Capobianco’s counting room. When Joe walked into this place—the Top Hat was members-only but the thing had been arranged, as everything was always arranged, somewhere outside Joe’s hearing—he knew something had changed. Here, finally, was the step too far. He had the sense of the floor moving beneath his feet, as if he had stepped onto a boat as it left the shore, the black water opening up behind him. But Joe’s unease was a wordless, formless thing, and he barred it from the front of his mind where it might coalesce into an idea, a clear reason not to go ahead with it. This was the soldier’s way of completing a mission. Don’t think. Don’t question your orders. Just execute. Accomplish the objective. But the sub-thought persisted, even gained strength and shape: Don’t do this.

  Paul Marolla lurked at the periphery of a barbooth game with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, pimped out in a puce polyester shirt that showed off his bodybuilder’s physique. His hair was slicked and opalescent. The backs of the men watching the game were too tall for Marolla to see over, a fact he finessed by affecting a honed indifference. Here was a man content with a beer and a smoke and a view of taller men’s backsides.

  Joe moved through the crowd toward him. The people seemed to part for Joe, which added to the static in his head, the sense of stop-time. He did not know why they opened a path for him, whether they made him for a cop or a troublemaker or were just being prudent, giving a big man a wide berth. Maybe it was not happening at all, just Joe’s mind playing tricks.

  Marolla spotted him and his face churned as he placed Joe. It had been weeks since this hulking cop had questioned him at the construction site. The connection made, his face relaxed into a smirk.

  “I need to talk to you,” Joe said.

  “What about?”

  “Never mind what about. I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk. The fuck?”

  “Here?”

  “Why not?”

  “You want everyone to see you talking to me? Maybe I should flash my badge.”

  Marolla considered.

  “I’ll see you out front,” Joe said. “Alone.”

  “When I finish my drink.”

  Joe looked at the half-empty glass. It cross
ed his mind to snatch Marolla’s lit cigarette from his fingers and drop it into the drink. But Marolla was in for a hard night. What harm in granting a reprieve? Joe left him there, and with that little act of gallantry and knowingness he felt himself rise above the Top Hat and its greaseball clientele. He was an insider.

  Joe waited at the curb until, five minutes or so later, Marolla came out of the front door. Marolla glanced to his left, at a big-shouldered curly-haired dago leaning by the doorway, waiting for someone. This dago wore a wool sportcoat with natural shoulders and a thin tie. He had a horizontal lightning-bolt scar on the left side of his head which showed as a jagged part in his hair, though a little lower than a proper hair-part. The two exchanged nods, and Marolla turned toward Joe. He made it three steps.

  Behind him, in one motion the scarhead dago produced a baseball bat from the shadows which he swung with one hand, his right, the blow sprung with such whippy quickness that Joe was startled even though he knew it was coming. It struck the right side of Marolla’s head, above the ear; maybe Scarhead was trying to create a false hair-part like his own. Marolla’s eyes closed and he sprawled down to the sidewalk, and Scarhead stumbled over him, and Joe was left staring at the unmarked door of the Top Hat for a moment.

  Car doors opened behind him. Scuffling.

  There were seven other guys besides Joe and Scarhead, soldiers, most of them young and feral. They stood around the body—Marolla lay on the pavement with one arm and one leg crooked at right angles like a sleeping child—and it seemed inevitable that one of them would stomp on a finger or a cheekbone just for the hell of it.

  Vinnie Gargano jostled the body with the bottom of his shoe. No reaction. “Okay, let’s get going. Good job, cop. That’s some strong little fuck. No sense wrestling him out of there.” Gargano seemed proud to have deployed his new weapon so artfully. His reputation had not been built on clever tradecraft. He had proved it wrong.

  Four men, one at each corner, lifted Marolla by his hands and feet and spilled him into the trunk of Gargano’s Caddy. The trunk was big and empty and perfectly clean. Marolla’s body curled up inside it like a cat. A ball of twine was unwrapped, new from the hardware store, still banded in cellophane, and Scarhead hogtied the body. While an assistant pinned Marolla’s arms together at the small of the back, Scarhead wound the string around the wrists several times then cinched the loop tight with a belt of string between the wrists. He tied Marolla’s ankles the same way, then connected the wrists and ankles with a long tie-line. This step caused a momentary frustration. Pinioning Marolla’s wrists together had locked his body in its fetal curl, so that when Scarhead pulled the wrists and ankles together the body squatted in a ball rather than arching backward. Annoyed, Scarhead had to loosen the drawstring, roll the body onto its stomach, then flex it backward into the proper archer’s-bow position. Someone urged Scarhead to hurry. He responded in a pissy voice, “Fuckin’ thing won’t bend. Muscleman.” He checked his ropework carefully, pulled the long tie-line to test it, and gave a satisfied grunt.

  The trunk was slammed shut and the men got into two cars. Joe was in the back of the lead car, Gargano’s Cadillac.

  But they did not head for any of the usual destinations. Not west to Blue Hill Avenue where Gargano had his bar. Not south to the deeper recesses of the South End or the waterfront. They went right past the North End, too. North, over the bridge, and Joe knew—it was over for Paul Marolla. He was already dead. There was no reason to take him out of town just to put a beating on him. You took a guy out of town to dump him, ideally inside the borders of a rival mob. True, with the so-called Irish Gang Wars still raging, murder was becoming a more brazen and haphazard business, often done on the spur of the moment wherever the victim happened to be. A Charlestown mug named Connie Hughes bought it right on this bridge, victim number thirty—a Winter Hill crew in two cars trailed Hughes up onto the bridge, through the tollbooth, then dawdled up alongside his Chevy and unloaded sixty rounds from M1 carbines into it. Still, it was not the right way to do things. So Joe was aware that the point of this trip was to throw off the cops. That he was here, that none of the others cared to hide any of this from him, was a final defeat.

  In the car, no one spoke.

  Joe listened for sounds from the trunk. Marolla lay just a couple of feet away, behind Joe’s back. But Joe heard nothing. Just the engine hum and the road rattle. Was Marolla still unconscious? Or awake, thinking, ransacking his thoughts for a way out? Marolla had to know, even in the dark of the trunk, that the ride was taking too long. By now he must have realized the fix he was in. How did it feel back there, in the blackness and cold, suffocating, muscles aching from the rope and the tortured posture? Joe forced his attention outward, out the window at the city lights, the outer boroughs where city blocks gave way to strips of businesses set back behind aprons of parking lot.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  “Revere,” Gargano answered.

  Revere. Made sense. No one would look for the hand of Carlo Capobianco in a murder there. Even Capobianco could not crack Revere, the perfect Mobtown. Bostonians tended to talk about Revere as “Dodge City”: violent, anarchic, isolated, irredeemably rotten. But the comparison was not entirely fair to Dodge City, which at least had a law-and-order sheriff. Revere had no such advantage. In fact, when the old bookie who ran the Revere rackets died in 1963, it was the deputy chief of police, Phil Gallo, who took over as Mob underboss. The two great powers in the city, the government and the Mob, finally merged in the person of Deputy Chief Gallo. It was not as shocking as all that. Revere had been a mobocracy long before Gallo’s coronation made it official. The old joke was that even the dogcatchers in Revere were on the sleeve. Jewish bookies and Italian strong-arms had flourished there for half a century. But Charlie Capobianco had perceived an opportunity in the leadership change, a hint of weakness. He had moved on the city’s bookmaking rackets, and Gallo had hit back. One morning Gallo went so far as to shoot up Capobianco’s Cadillac while it was parked on Huntington Avenue outside his girlfriend’s place. It soon became apparent that Charlie Capobianco’s offensive was doomed. Gallo had a direct line to the superboss in Providence, Raymond Patriarca, and Patriarca was not going to let Capobianco take the city. Revere would survive as an independent principality within Capobianco’s empire, and Revere’s gangsters would remain stubbornly ungovernable, like Basques. It must have pissed off Capobianco to no end. Maybe dumping poor dumb Paul Marolla’s body in Gallo’s backyard would give the new boss a pain in the ass, at least. Certainly it would point the cops away from the North End.

  Joe didn’t give a shit about tectonic shifts in the Mob landscape. Bunch of mooks killing each other. None would be missed. What bothered him was the thought he could not stave off: victim number thirty-one, the next to go, lay in the trunk two feet from where Joe sat. Joe could imagine himself coffined back there. He could feel it. The metal frame of the trunk, the whoosh of the road a foot below his ear. Empathy, of course, was an unhelpful instinct in this situation. Marolla was already dead in all but the biological sense. No sense investing your emotions in a corpse. Joe would picture him only in wide frame. No humanizing close-ups; those were reserved for the living, who were worthy of sympathy. But even the long view—from high above, two cars progressing down a two-lane highway, visible only as dim cones of light thrown by their headlights in the dark, and as we zoom in, a cutaway view into the sealed trunk, this insignificant curled little animal—the long view was worse. Joe felt a panic of claustrophobia. He shook it away, forced himself to relax.

  This was the way they would come for Joe, too, someday. They would not come heavy, they would not send a soldier. They would use someone he trusted, an old friend, someone he felt safe with. Joe’s murderer would come wearing a smile, bearing a shiny gift—an offer, an invitation—he might even be a cop. No frontal assault, no spray of machine-gun fire, no “you dirty rat.” The blow would come from behind, a sucker punch, the Beantown special. Joe
would never see it coming.

  In Revere they came to a motel called The Hideaway. Cinder-block construction, neon sign out front. A high picket fence bordered the parking lot. It blocked the view of the industrial plants on either side, though both were marked in three-foot lettering visible above the fence, REVERE MARINE ENGINE CO. on one side, INDUSTRIAL HEAT TREATING on the other.

  Gargano nosed the Caddy into a parking space next to a white ’63 Impala. The second car parked on the opposite side of the Impala.

  The men got out, stiff-limbed, stretching, shaking off the ride. They gathered around Gargano’s trunk.

  Inside, Marolla was awake. He pulled in a deep oxygen-rich breath, blinked up at them—and launched into his defense. “Vince. I didn’t do anything. I swear. I don’t know what they told you but I swear to God, Vince, IsweartoGodonmymother’sgrave, whatever they told you I did I didn’t do it.”

  Gargano said, “You don’t even know what the fuck you did, but you didn’t do it?”

  The men laughed.

  Marolla did not laugh. “Sorry, Vince. Sorry. Tell me. I can explain.”

  “You skimmed.”

  “No!”

  “You skimmed.”

  “No! I did not! I swear! You gotta listen. It’s a mistake. I’m tellin’ you.”

  “No mistake.” Gargano said to no one in particular, “Get him into the other car.”

  The trunk of the Impala was opened with a key. With a grunt, a couple of guys lifted Marolla and heaved him into the trunk of the Impala. The car kneeled under the weight. “Sleep tight,” one of them said.

  Joe stood among them. He was not sure how to handle himself, whether to assert his loyalty to the group with some sort of wiseacre remark or just keep quiet and let them speculate that he might, in the end, be a real cop. The fact was, Joe had no intention of being a real cop. He knew the rules. You talk, you die. Maybe you die after you talk to the D.A., maybe you die after you talk to the grand jury. But cop or no cop, you talk, you die. Everyone could be reached. Besides, how would he explain his own role in tricking Marolla out of the Top Hat? He was already an accessory. Who would believe, or care, that Joe had thought Marolla was only going to be roughed up and released? Anyway, it was already too late. Seven of them, one of him. Joe had no choice. No choice but to let it happen. Soon it would be over anyway. Marolla would get the traditional two in the hat and the trunk would be closed and they could go home. Joe lowered his eyes. Out of habit he noted the license number of the car, for the report he would never write: Rhode Island plates, PM 387. No doubt the plates and the car had been stolen separately. Probably the Impala had been left here a few days before so its arrival would not attract attention the morning after the murder. Rhode Island, PM 387—Joe wished he could write it down in his notebook. That was proper procedure. He did not trust his memory. Did not trust his own mind. He had seen death before. He’d killed guys before, Germans. He could do this.