The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Is this about money?”

  “Is this about money?” Capobianco’s face tensed.

  “’Cause I can get the money up. I swear.”

  Capobianco came forward, suddenly and inexplicably pissed off. He stopped a few steps from Joe so that the disparity in their heights would not be so apparent, and he stood with his chest out and chin up like a gamecock. He spoke fast and loud: “Are you fuckin’ stupid? These Irish fuckin’ cops—what, do you got fuckin’ rocks in your head? Answer me, you got rocks in your head? Or potatuhs? Look at ’m: nine feet tall and nothing but potatuhs in his head. This is what we got, a whole police department full of these backward fuckin’ Paddys. How the fuck do you guys ever fuckin’ catch anyone? You walk around with your hand out and your head up your ass—what I want to know is, how the fuck do you ever catch anyone? Huh? Let me ask you something. How is it when the Italians already ruled the fuckin’ world, a thousand years ago or whatever, you fuckin’ Paddys were still running around in the woods like fuckin’ cavemen, digging in the dirt for something to eat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You fuckin’ stupid?”

  “No.”

  “No? No? I hear you’re a fuckin’ idiot. I hear you’re about the stupidest Paddy cocksucker on the police force. And that’s saying something.”

  It occurred to Joe that, all things being equal, he could break this greaseball guido midget in half with one hand. But all things were not equal.

  Capobianco wiped a curl of spittle at the corner of his mouth. “This is the last time you disrespect me.”

  “Charlie.” Nick smiled in a way calculated to soothe both men. He was older and cooler-headed than his brother. He wiggled his finger: Let’s get on with it.

  Charlie Capobianco said, “You been told to stay out of the West End?”

  Joe was thrown. He was prepared to talk about money. Capobianco would threaten him about his spiraling debt, demand he pay it off or else, and Joe in turn would offer whatever empty promises came to mind. It was an exchange he and Gargano had rehearsed many times already. It was supposed to be about money, not the West End.

  “You were told, stay out of there, let it alone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you get moved out of Station One and they tell you again: Stay out of the West End. And still I got to hear about this dumb fuckin’ Paddy cop running around over there. You take my money? Like the rest of the pig cops in Station One, you take my fuckin’ money?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So how come when I ask you for something you don’t do it?”

  “I don’t understand. You asked me for something?”

  “Jesus, you are a dumb fuck. I told you to stay out of the West End. You stupid fuck.”

  Joe’s thoughts snagged on the word stupid every time it was repeated. He had to force himself to hear the rest. He rotated his head so that one ear was aimed at Capobianco, to be sure he caught it all and could repeat the remainder of the sentence in his mind minus that word. What the hell was Capobianco ranting about?

  “What,” Joe said simply, “do you care about the West End?”

  “Never mind what I care. Your job isn’t to think. You’re not smart enough to think. Your job is to fuckin’ do what you’re told.” Charlie Capobianco wandered away from Joe, deeper into the small office. “Just do what you’re told or you’re gonna wind up like your thief brother.”

  “What’s this got do with my brother? This has got nothing to do with my brother.”

  “No. He’s got enough trouble.”

  “He didn’t do nothin’.”

  “No? Well, just the same, I wouldn’t stand too close to him. Be a shame to lose the both o’ yuz.”

  “You stay the fuck away from my brother.”

  “What?” Capobianco was livid again, the switch was thrown. “What did you say to me?”

  But Joe was too far gone. Fuck Capobianco. Fuck this whole thing. “I said, stay the fuck away from my brother.” He saw Capobianco’s expression coil again, and knew he had fucked up. But it was too late.

  Charlie Capobianco said to his brother, “Get this fuckin’ guy out of here. Get him out.” Then to Joe: “I’m through with you, cop. You understand me? Do you know who I am? You better learn your fuckin’ place. Learn your fuckin’ place. This is the last time you’ll disrespect me. You know what a contract is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t stand too close to your brother.”

  Joe absorbed the warning slowly.

  “And stay the fuck out of the West End. This is your last warning. You cost me enough money already. And to answer your other question: it’s always about money. Dumb fuck, what’d you think it was about?”

  Joe tended to sleep in short snatches of two or three hours. When he had worked nights, years before, his body had become accustomed to the inside-out schedule: first halfs alternating with second halfs—a six-to-midnight shift one night, midnight to eight A.M. the next—six nights a week, or three cycles. “Short days” and “long days,” cops called them. Sleep no longer correlated to night. You slept when you could for as long as you could, but always too little. Joe’s work schedule had improved after he made detective, but by then he seemed to have lost the ability to sleep deeply. At best, he drifted just beneath the surface of waking. As a result, he thought, he tended not to dream, at least he did not remember his dreams. Dreaming occurred during deep sleep; Joe could not submerge that far.

  But tonight he did dream. He dreamed he was climbing into the back seat of a car. A coupe of some kind with a tomato-red interior. He thought it might be the new Bel Air by the way the roofline curved downward to enwrap the back-seat passengers. Someone was holding the driver’s seat forward for him; he could not see who. Joe did not want to be in this car. He could not straighten his neck, the roof was too low. He tried to tip his head but his hair rubbed against the headliner, so he slouched down on the bench seat, only to see the roof drop down even farther. He panicked. He knew that if he stayed in the car, coffined in the back seat, he would die there. He struggled to climb out.

  And then he was awake, in his body in his bed in his room, with the window open. No longer afraid. The bedroom was cool. A bluish light from the street illuminated everything, as it always did. “Jesus,” he whispered. He reached behind him and his hand found Kat’s substantial rump.

  She had been a nurse when he met her, a big square-jawed girl with a sense of command about her. That was what had first attracted him, not her looks but that air of mastery. She was the kind of girl who got things done, who managed. Joe had always known he was just a knockaround guy, but when he was with her he had felt a little of her competence and gravity. He figured maybe he could manage, too. Not anymore, of course. As Joe had dashed himself against the rocks, his wife’s sensibility had only made him feel the more out of control. But once…once.

  He rolled onto his back, ran his hand down the slope of her hip. Her nightgown was cool. She did not stir.

  He thought of Capobianco’s words, This is the last time you’ll disrespect me, and wondered whether they were meant as an order (Don’t disrespect me again) or a threat (You won’t get another chance to disrespect me). It was ridiculous, even funny, that he might die without ever realizing he had been warned—like a cow he would be herded into the slaughterhouse, unknowing right to the end. It seemed significant that Capobianco had chosen such ambiguous words. He had left room for interpretation. Also, it did not make sense that Capobianco would arrange a personal audience just to inform Joe he would be killed. Clearly his intention was to bar Joe from the West End, just as Capobianco had said. Yes, Joe had fucked up by back-talking, but volatile guys like Capobianco forgot such things as soon as they calmed down, or were swept up by the next outrage. Yes, Capobianco would get around to killing Joe someday, when he had extracted all the cash and advantage he could extract. But not soon. For now, the one in immediate peril was Ricky. Do you know what
a contract is?

  Through the open window Joe heard the sounds of the city. Kat stirred under his hand. He waited to see if she would roll away to go on sleeping or roll toward him for warmth. She came to him, lifted her head and laid it on his chest. He squeezed her back, her arm, her tit in an experimental way, reminding himself. She was not what she had used to be. Her strong body was now padded with a quilty layer of fat. But she was still herself, and he was reminded that her bigness had been part of the attraction in the first place. She was built, if not to the scale of his own body, then at least to grander specifications than the perfumed broads he usually chased around, who tottered around on spindly heels to raise themselves up. He felt himself begin to get hard, and it occurred to him that all his “cheating” had actually enhanced his appreciation for Kat, and he congratulated himself on his open-mindedness with regard to women. Sampling other women only made him appreciate his wife all the more. What could be more destructive to a marriage than monogamy? You simply had to handle the issue with discretion, as Joe always had. What Kat didn’t know would never hurt her.

  “You awake?” he whispered.

  “No.”

  “I am.”

  She felt him. “Jesus, Joe, you’ve got to be kidding. Now? All this time…”

  “Lie back,” he said.

  Under his hands she lay half sleeping, and even when she lifted her nightgown over her head he thought she might be sleeping. Her arms were clumsy. Maybe to Kat this was a dream.

  It was when he was inside her, surrounded by her body’s warmth, that Joe saw this house without him in it. Kat, Little Joe—dying would mean saying goodbye to them, and they would go on living. Would Kat marry someone else? Where would she live? Would she be happy? And Little Joe. He was nearly fourteen now. What would he remember of his old man ten years on, or twenty? Would he think of his dad every day or not at all? Would thinking of Joe make them happy or sad? Who would they go to when they were in trouble? Margaret, Michael? Joe’s dying would be one last thing he would steal from them.

  He faltered, felt himself soften.

  “You okay, Joe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  Kat held his face in her two hands and studied him. “What is it, Joe?”

  “Just tired.”

  “Now you’re tired?”

  He grinned, expelling air from his nostrils.

  “Wakes me up in the middle of the night and then he says he’s tired.”

  Joe decided to purge his mind of everything that was outside the four corners of the bed. They were two bodies, one partially inside the other, and there was no need to hump the whole thing up with any more significance than that. There was no need to think at all. Animals died by the millions every day. It meant nothing. Why think about it?

  A warm night in June.

  There were a half dozen women at the corner of Washington and LaGrange. They reposed against the facade of the adjacent building, or smoked, or drifted to the curb and slugged one hip out toward the street, waiting for a car to ease alongside or a pedestrian to make eye contact.

  To Joe, some of them weren’t bad-looking broads, and he wondered what grim secret biography could explain this or that one’s becoming a streetwalker. Certainly there were a couple he would consider giving a poke, under different circumstances. Joe was seated in his car farther down Washington Street, a half block from them. He dragged on a cigarette; it tasted like nothing, as if they had stuffed it with straw instead of tobacco. He had no interest in leaving the car to disperse the hookers, let alone arrest them. Didn’t give a shit. Hookers. Waste of time, the whole thing, Vice. Even the name—Vice. What a fuckin’ joke.

  One girl, with a very pale and painted face, came to the corner to glare at Joe and flick her cigarette butt in his direction, then she returned to the wall and resumed the group’s attitude of boredom and insolence.

  Joe let his head tip forward. Maybe he would sleep. Five, ten minutes of shuteye was all he needed, and no sooner had he decided to nap than his mind switched itself off. That was how it had been lately: He was always on the verge of sleeping, he could give in to it at any moment. He snapped awake once, but he was too heavy-headed to resist it and he closed his eyes again. The air was cool, the windows open. It was nearly nine but not quite dark in the car; he had parked by a streetlight, some of which light illuminated his eyelids. No matter. He could still doze awhile.

  He heard street sounds. Snippets of conversation came in clearly, then dopplered away. Cars grumbled past, each one creating a whisk of warm wind in the open window as it went by. Somewhere a man laughed loudly, “That’s right! You gut me! You gut me!” Joe relaxed but did not sleep.

  At some point the ambient noise became muffled, blocked. There was an adjustment in the atmosphere, a drop in pressure.

  He opened his eyes.

  The street scene in his windshield was essentially unchanged. But no pedestrians were nearby. The hookers had drifted around the corner up LaGrange, toward Good Time Charlie’s, out of view.

  There was a car parked beside Joe’s. He was aware of it before he actually turned to see it, a long black-hooded car.

  A voice: “Hey, cop.”

  Joe looked to his right across the passenger seat to see Vinnie Gargano double-parked beside him, so close, the car doors nearly touching, just a few inches between the windowsills. At the same time Gargano seemed far away, in a separate space, tanked inside his own car. Gun.

  N—

  Gargano hesitated, perplexed, as if he did not understand what his eyes had just told him: big Joe Daley’s expression had not changed, but a neat dark circle had winked open on his forehead. It appeared so suddenly and—the bullet’s flight being unobservable—inexplicably that for a moment it seemed like a magic trick. The hole seemed to have come from inside him. Daley’s body slumped back, and the hole filled with blood which ran out thick and gleaming as poured paint. Gargano recovered himself, remembered he had work to do—his jobs had become increasingly sloppy and frenzied, the trigger-hysteria getting the better of him—and he emptied his clip into Daley’s body and sped off.

  Long day. Michael leaned back, eyes shut, one toe poised on the ledge of an open drawer. The chair reclined with little metallic ticks, his weight transferred from his buttocks to the wings of his back, verte-brae popped into line with agreeable thumps, and when he had found the right balance he removed his foot from the desk and lay there like John Glenn in the Friendship 7, aimed upward into space, and he decided it was the first moment of the day that he had actually enjoyed. This chair might just have been the one good thing about working for the A.G. Maybe he would take it with him when he left. Or maybe he would never leave; he could just hang on here in a dingy state office, a lifer, the type that knew the precise date when his pension would vest.

  Outside, something changed.

  There was a modulation in the white noise of the city. A shrill siren whined, and another. A car drag-raced, making a perilous clatter in a city of close streets. Michael went to the window. Night had fallen. He saw nothing, of course, nothing but the yellow-brick rear of the State House, the ranks of office windows. But he knew by the change in pitch that something was wrong, some disaster, maybe close by, reflected off the maze-walls of the city. The air thrummed with it.

  Heavy steps in the hall, the jingling of keys and equipment, and Conroy was in the doorway, grim and massive. “Bad news, Michael. We got to go. It’s Joe.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, we got to go. It’s bad.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s—Look, there’s no other way to say it. I’m sorry—Joe’s dead.”

  “What!”

  “He got shot. That’s all they know. I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Michael, right now, we got to go.”

  And this was how suddenly it happened. This was how Joe died, for Michael, with th
ose two electric words: He’s dead.

  Then Michael was following Conroy down the hallways. Blood rushed in his ears. Objects seemed to swim—office doors with pebbled-glass windows; a janitor with a mop bucket on wheels; smudgy photos of stern, bushy-bearded politicians from the last century.

  Out into the street, where Conroy had an unmarked cruiser waiting. For some reason Michael went to get in the back seat, as if the black Ford was a taxi, and Conroy had to tell him to sit in front. “Come on, Mike, you gotta keep your shit together, Mike. Your mother needs you here.” Michael did as he was told, he sat in the front seat, and even now he detested Brendan Conroy—the worldly paternal tone with its hint that Michael would play novice to Conroy’s mentor; the repetition of his name, Mike, Mike, Mike, as if he had learned the habit in a Dale Carnegie course. Call me Michael, you prick. But he was too bewildered to maintain his contempt.

  Conroy rushed the car down the back slope of Beacon Hill and shot across Bowdoin Square.

  Michael thought: He should have turned right, to make his way west to Boston City Hospital. Joe must have been taken to Mass. General instead. Maybe when a cop got shot even the remorseless Yankees there would find it in their hearts to let an Irishman in the back door. But again, Michael’s cynicism evaporated almost immediately. He could not hold a thought in his head. His mind continually emptied itself.

  The siren made its clarinet wail, and a blue flasher strobed on the dashboard.

  “They found him on Washington Street,” Conroy was half-shouting, “right in his car, right there on the street. Can you believe that? I mean, can you believe the balls on these guys? The unmitigated balls on these guys.” He clenched the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock, arms stiff.

  Once they crossed Cambridge Street, the view through the windshield went black, like looking out over water at night. Then the buildings beside them disappeared and they sailed off the map, off the street grid, into the empty space of the old West End site. The road faltered. Conroy killed the siren and the blinking blue lights. They bounced over the rocky surface.