The Strangler

by William Landay

  The Impala had a long, low trunk. With the lid raised, it looked spacious enough.

  Marolla was trying to jerk himself up onto the side wall of the trunk so he could face them from a semi-sitting position.

  “Gimme that string,” Gargano said.

  “No! Vince! Don’t! It’s a mistake. Listen to me, just one second—”

  “‘Ooh-ooh, it’s a mistake!’ Tell me how it’s a fuckin’ mistake? Huh? Tell me. Tell me how it’s a fuckin’ mistake, you fuck. Go on, I’m listenin’.”

  “It just is. I didn’t do it, Vin, I swear. You gotta believe me. I know everybody says that, but I’m telling you the truth. Please.”

  “You must think I’m fuckin’ stupid. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No. Vin, no. I don’t think that.”

  “Do I look stupid to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you talking to me like I’m fuckin’ stupid, telling me it’s a mistake? How can it be a mistake?” Gargano was handed the ball of twine and he began to unwind it. As he worked, he explained himself, like a father explaining the punishment he was about to dish out. “They know how much you got. You think they don’t know these things, they don’t count it first? Money can just disappear and nobody’s gonna notice? Your job was to take that money and deliver it. And you were short. Not once, not twice, over and over. They were watching you, you dumb shit. They always watch the fuckin’ money. Don’t you know that? The fuck did you think, nobody was gonna care? You could just help yourself, like that money was yours? Is that what you thought?”

  “I can pay it back.”

  “I thought you didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t. But I mean, if it’s missing then it must be my mistake. My mistake, see? My mistake. I’ll pay it back. Plus the juice, whatever you say it is.”

  “Just stop talkin’, a’right? Fuckin’ embarrass yourself. Shit your pants.” To no one he said, “Let’s do this already.”

  “No! Stop!”

  Marolla scanned the faces and, desperate, he locked on Joe: “Hey, cop, help me out.”

  Joe shook his head.

  “Cop. C’mon, help me out. You’re a cop. You gotta. Help me out.”

  Joe felt the eyes of the group shift toward him. He shook his head again. “Nothin’ I can do, pal.”

  Lying on his side Marolla managed to lift his shoulders a few inches off the floor of the trunk. “I can te—I can tell you what you want to know. Those questions.”

  “I don’t have any questions.”

  “You do you do you do. We talked, remember? We did, we talked.” Marolla’s voice was skittery-frantic-breathless. But he was still negotiating, still talking. He seemed to think if he could just keep someone engaged, he could buy himself a little more time. A little more time. “We talked once, we talked. The West End, remember? The grocery store, that whole thing? You wanna know what happened? You wanna know? Huh? You wanna know? I can tell you. I can tell you. I’ll tell you the whole thing, the whole thing, I’ll give it to you, the whole thing. Forget that guy, the grocery, that’s just one building. That’s nothing. I can give you the whole thing.”

  Gargano said, “Shut the fuck up.”

  “These guys—”

  “I said shut the fuck up.”

  “These—”

  “Jesus!” Gargano collared Marolla’s neck with two hands and hammered the man’s head against the lip of the trunk three times. A frenzy, then over.

  “Hey, cop.” A spreading, woozy smile. “Hey, cop, I know who killed your old man. I know who you are. I can tell you.” Marolla knew he was doomed. He seemed finally to accept it. It gave him false courage. “Wanna know who killed your old man? That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?”

  Gargano gave the man’s head a final crack against the car, like a fisherman gaffing a stubborn flapping fish, and Marolla slithered down inside the trunk. His face lolled on the floor.

  Gargano leaned over to add his own ropework, but the body was too far away. “Get over here,” he growled. He dragged the body closer, then began to wind the twine around Marolla’s neck.

  Marolla bucked. He tossed his head back and forth to avoid the string. “No! Don’t don’t don’t! Please. Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t!”

  One of the mooks stepped forward to hold him still. Gargano pulled the string taut around the neck, then ran several long loops connecting the neck-rope to the ankles. He jacked Marolla’s feet up a little to create slack, and shortened this segment until the weight of the feet and legs tensioned the string. Then he released Marolla’s feet, and their weight pulled back on the noose.

  Immediately Marolla began to choke. His head jerked from side to side. He gasped. After a moment he figured out that his arms had been tied to his feet by Scarhead, and by pulling this segment of the harness he could lift his own feet upward and relieve the pressure on his neck, and he inhaled deeply several times.

  “Please. Don’t do this. Please. Please. I’ll get the money. I’ll get it. I’ll get it. Please, Vin. Please. Please.”

  Gargano took out a knife. Joe thought he might slice off an ear or finger as a trophy. Instead, Gargano sawed through the safety line that linked Marolla’s hands and ankles.

  Unsupported, the legs tugged the rope down and Marolla began to strangle again. He curved his back and legs as far back as possible to create some slack. But he would not be able to hold this position, bent backward to the limit of his spine’s flexion, neck and ankles joined by strings like an archer’s bow. He would tire, his legs would straighten, and he would be strangled.

  Gargano said, “Hey, cop, come here.”

  Joe stood by the open trunk.

  Marolla’s body quivered.

  Gargano said to the man in the trunk, “Hey, you got anything to say to the cop now? No? Didn’t think so.” He hawked, rolled his jaw as he organized the mucus in his mouth, then spat it on Marolla’s face.

  Joe stared at the spit. It was beneath the sideburn, at the hinge of the jawbone. A gob of phlegm, vaguely peanut-shaped, in a puddle of spittle. It repeated the shape of the adjacent earhole. It was a fetus. It metastasized into something more articulated and spiny, maybe a seahorse, the tail of which seeped into Marolla’s eye and, unable to wipe or shake it out, he squinched the eye shut, then a blanket was thrown over him and the whole image was gone, lost beneath the folds of the blanket that shifted with the man’s infinitesimal movements. The blanket was to muffle the sound.

  Gargano slammed the trunk shut, and the Impala bobbed down and up.

  As Joe stared, the car seemed to jiggle, though maybe it was his eyes playing tricks again.

  part three

  Lock picking takes place in a tiny space, the keyway. If it were magnified, the keyway would resemble a narrow corridor with a smooth steel floor and saw-toothed ceiling. Set into that ceiling are four pins (or more, depending on the lock), each of which travels up and down inside a cylinder. When each pin is raised to its proper height, the lock opens. The jagged edge of a key lifts all the pins at once to their assigned heights. The lock picker’s task, simply put, is to raise those pins one by one.

  It was a matter of feel, of course. When a pin reached its release point and set properly, Ricky could sense—through the pick in his fingertips, through his ears, his eyes, through no specific sense at all—a little give in the lock, an infinitesimal release like a sigh. But for Ricky lock picking was first and foremost an act of imagination. A good pick like Ricky could visualize the interior of that keyway. He could blow it up to the size of a cathedral and wander inside it and look up at the round bottoms of those pins hanging from the ceiling. He thought that if he were ever locked up in a prison cell, he would spend his days with his eyes shut imagining the insides of locks, impossibly complex locks with baroque devices designed to defeat him, mechanical marvels as yet undreamt by lock makers, and he would pick them for the sheer insolence of it. He would open them pin by pin just as, in dreams, other
prisoners would open women’s blouses button by button.

  And pin by pin was the proper way to pick a lock, Ricky believed, the only way. There were quicker, dirtier ways, of course, and in practice the need for speed sometimes required a shortcut or two. The most common technique was “scrubbing,” which meant scratching the pick quickly over the pinheads, knocking the pins upward. While scrubbing back and forth with the pick, the lock picker would apply enough torque to the cylinder that the pins would be trapped in their “unlock” positions before they rebounded and zinged back down. But scrubbing had a critical drawback: it scratched the pins and the keyway, and it sprayed metal dust inside the lock—which is to say, it left evidence that the lock had been picked. That sort of sloppiness was anathema to Ricky. A good pick left no trace. And of course, every burglar knew that the best way to open a lock was not to pick it at all but to get the key somehow. Alas, stealing or conning a key to duplicate it—or “smoke” it, in the argot of thieves—was risky as well. It generally required the thief to “show face,” a cardinal sin.

  So Ricky became expert at pin-by-pin picking. He crafted his own picks, which were roughly L-shaped, a design lock pickers called a “rake.” The long arm of the L, the handle, was five or six inches long. It was tuned to be flexy enough to provide feedback to the fingertips yet stiff enough to push hard on a pin. The proper stiffness was a matter of endless experimentation. The short arm of the L was dished at the tip so it would seat properly on each pinhead. On big jobs—and at this point big jobs were all that interested him—he researched the locks he would encounter ahead of time, and he made picks customized to those models. The net result of all this effort was that Ricky worked very fast and very clean. To stand behind him while he picked a lock was to watch a man open a door with a slightly sticky key.

  Which is why, when Ricky unlocked the door to Carlo Capobianco’s headquarters on Thatcher Street in the North End, the event looked entirely unremarkable. A man walked up to the door, jiggled a key in the lock (or seemed to), and let himself in.

  Ricky himself was surprised by the ease of it. The door had a single lock, a simple Yale deadbolt with a beveled keyhole. You could find it at any hardware store. Ricky could disassemble and reassemble that lock in the dark, as a soldier could disassemble and reassemble his machine gun.

  But of course it was not the lock that Charlie Capobianco relied on for security. It was the North End itself. Boston’s Little Italy. Insular, watchful, all eyes and ears. Not so much a neighborhood as a village within the city. Capobianco had grown up here on Thatcher Street. The road was barely two cars wide curb to curb, walled in by redbrick tenements. Residents easily carried on conversations from open windows on opposite sides of the street. Capobianco knew that a non–North Ender skulking around or breaking into buildings around here would be noticed. He knew it would get back to him. Then, too, maybe he did not need a lock on the door at all, because who would be foolish enough to break into Charlie Capobianco’s office?

  Ricky slid those four tiny pins up and felt the cylinder turn. He eased inside and locked the door behind him. It was three A.M. He had clocked the job for a couple of weeks and determined that this was the ideal time, the quiet Sunday-to-Monday overnight, after the Capobiancos’ nocturnal business had been done and before the city began to stir, which happened around five in this blue-collar neighborhood. The office was on the ground floor. Charlie Capobianco’s mother and one of his brothers were asleep in apartments upstairs.

  Ricky stood stock-still, listening, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Which was not quite darkness but a dim stony blue-gray light, fed by the ambient street light, and as Ricky’s eyes adjusted a long room was exposed. Thirty feet deep. A round Formica dining table with four cheapo vinyl chairs around it. A couch and two upholstered chairs, which might have been secondhand. A small desk in the far corner. A kitchenette. No carpet. Everything crummy and used. No evidence of the Capobiancos’ power. None of the equipment you would expect to find in the executive office of a big business—no filing cabinets, no adding machines, just a single telephone—though the Capobianco gambling business was already grossing several million a year, virtually all of it in cash, a torrent of cash that had to be invested or put back out on the street.

  Ricky traversed the room slowly. With each step the floor creaked—the ancient floorboards seemed to bend as they accepted his weight—and each noise forced Ricky to freeze again until he was sure no one had heard. His nose wrinkled; the room reeked of garlic.

  In the desk he found a few papers, but just a few, and his heart sank. There was a broad clothbound ledger book, rectangular and flat. The binding was held together by two little wing nuts on bolts.

  Ricky brought the ledger into the kitchenette. Around a corner was a small sink, the only interior space in the office, shielded from the windows, and here he risked turning on a tiny flashlight, the size of a finger.

  Under the flashlight the book was dented and frayed. The cloth cover had faded to a pale green that matched the ledger sheets inside. Long ranks of digits, apparently unlabeled, though Ricky presumed the labels were encoded. Maybe the labels were just numeric as well, as if the accountant who had assembled these ledgers could comprehend only mathematical language—the instinctive language of the Capobiancos. Ricky’s eyes skimmed the arrays of digits. He understood only that this was the wash of money through the system, streaming in from card and crap and barbooth games in the backs of taverns, from bets taken by bookies, and recirculated to the street to be sharked or to cover overhead. Page after page, the digits metering the flow. He came to a page where letters did appear, foreign bodies, like stones in a stream. Names. Names. And one he recognized. His eyes widened.

  “What’s Capobianco pay you for?”

  “Capobianco? Who Capobianco?”

  “I just want to know: What does a mobster get for his money?”

  “If I were you, boyo, I’d watch my mouth.”

  “It’s a simple question, Brendan.”

  “Simple question? You should be embarrassed for even asking me such a thing. All three o’ yuz, you should be embarrassed. That’s all I’m gonna say.” Conroy’s right hand wrung the skin of his cheek. He looked from Michael to Ricky to Joe, his favorite. “You in on this, Joe?”

  “It’s like Michael said, Bren: simple question.”

  “I didn’t ask what Michael said. I can handle Michael. I’m asking you. Does he talk for you now?”

  “Yeah. He does.” Joe’s lips went on moving, as if he had intended to say more but no sound came. The ghost words would have been an apology.

  “Big happy family, you three.”

  Michael said, “Not so happy.”

  “No. I suppose not. You want to tell me what this is about, Michael? You’ve got all the answers. What’s on your mind, Harvard boy?”

  “You’re on Capobianco’s pad.”

  “Says who?”

  “Capobianco.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Look, Brendan, why don’t we skip this part, alright? You’re offended, okay, I got that. What we want to know is what he pays you for. What do you do for him?”

  “You know, I don’t get you, Michael. I always treated you like a son. Go ahead, make faces. But I was like a father for you, and you know it.”

  “Two fathers, then. Lucky me.”

  “Lucky you is right, boyo.”

  “Two is one too many. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.”

  Ricky smirked.

  “Well,” Michael said, “good thing we had a spare, eh, Brendan? Where would we be now? Fatherless. Orphans. And who would adopt us? Especially Joe.”

  Conroy squinted, bewildered. He wore plain clothes, a coat and tie that did not sit properly on his cambered chest, and the whole of his torso heaved one time—inhale, exhale. Then—too suddenly for Michael to react—too quick even to register the snap in the old man’s mood—Conroy bolted forward—“You fuckin’ little shit”—at almost the same inst
ant Joe charged toward Conroy to intercept him—

  Michael had a flashing image of two long freight trains on transverse tracks, night trains barreling toward the intersection—

  Conroy hit Michael, gathered two fistfuls of his coat, drove him back—

  at the same moment Joe’s shoulder punched into Conroy’s side—

  air chuffed out of Conroy’s mouth, next to Michael’s ear—

  and then Michael was on the floor, the small of his back against the baseboard.

  He heard Joe’s voice, low and lethal: “Try that again, Brendan, and I’ll fuckin’ kill you.” Michael blinked up to see Joe kneeling over Conroy with his rock-fist cocked. “I mean it. I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”

  “Joe!”

  “Joe!”

  Joe’s head inclined toward his brothers’ voices, but he did not release Conroy and he did not unclench his fist.

  “Joe,” Conroy soothed, “what are you talking about, kill who? Who do you think you’re talking to? Let me go, boyo, come on. This is ridiculous. Let me up, son.”

  Joe remained frozen, his left arm locked on Conroy’s shirtfront, right arm cranked back. For a long moment it seemed that he would launch that fist straight down into Conroy’s face and straight through it to the floor. But Joe’s expression faltered and became poignant, and his fist relaxed perceptibly.