Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  On Walters, I had an address, courtesy of Hank Sweeney, also retired from the Boston Police Department. I had a brief description that he could be ornery and impatient, but was also regarded as brilliant in his day. I think that actually describes me as well. I also knew that he was eighty-five years on this earth, not all of them particularly good to him.

  Once in my room at the Venetian, I gave myself a little tour of the various luxuries, from the motorized drapery opener in the sunken sitting area to the bathroom that was roughly the size of my condominium on the Boston waterfront. I ordered a twenty - seven - dollar - room - service hamburger. I could already hear Martin asking if I paid for the entire steer. I checked my voice mails and realized with another pang of depression that Maggie Kane had not yet bothered to call. In a fit of either whimsy or impatience, I dialed her cell phone number with no idea what I was going to say. Fortunately or unfortunately, it kicked directly into her voice mail. I listened to her recording for several long seconds and hung up.

  Nothing from the Phantom, either, by the way.

  I fired up my laptop and checked my e-mail. Again, nothing from Maggie and nothing from the Phantom. I flicked on the television, but all the March Madness NCAA basketball previews were over for the night. The most interesting thing on the tube was a hotel video of a dealer giving a lesson in baccarat, which I figured after about a minute of watching him would take me roughly six years and a million dollars to learn.

  I hit the Off switch on the TV’s remote and turned my attention back to the computer as I bided time waiting for my gold-plated burger. I absently flipped back through my laptop’s remote e-mail account and inexplicably clicked on a note that Maggie had sent me eight months earlier.

  In it, she was talking about an award she had just been given as the teacher of the year at her school, and what it meant, and why she believed in her heart that the reason she had just won it was because she was a better teacher and a better, happier person since she met me — that the pain in her life, the loss of a child, the breakup of a marriage, the death of her sister, had lessened since she met me. I read the note a second time, this time with a lump in my throat.

  I clicked on another e-mail from her about a month later. This one was a short, chatty, flirty little missive. I was on a work trip to New York, due home that night. She asked me to try to get on an earlier shuttle because she didn’t think she could wait another minute to have sex.

  I opened up another that said, simply, “I love you.” I clicked on one that she had sent a few minutes later that said, “I want you.” And a couple of minutes after that, she wrote, “Now.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, sitting in a dark hotel room that was illuminated by a low-hanging desk lamp and the bright neon of the strip shining through the picture window. It was a smile, yes, but a rueful one. Not for the first time, I thought how tough it is at the beginning of something good to remember that it’s probably going to end bad, such being one of the overriding lessons of my life.

  In those first, heady weeks and months of a relationship, it’s impossible to think that the whole thing will fall apart with a phone call made from the Atlanta airport on what’s supposed to be your wedding day. When you start a new job, it’s impossible to picture the day your company is sold and you’re summoned down to the human resources department and told you’ll be given two months’ severance, but they need all your stuff out of the building by the end of that day. When you watch a new puppy romping around the house, you can’t foresee the day you’re lying with him on the floor of a veterinary office while the doctor sticks a needle in his leg that will forever relieve him of his pain.

  But that’s the thing about beginnings — they inevitably, invariably, lead to endings. Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens couldn’t foresee their end coming with a ligature around their throats and some freak watching the life vanish from their panic-stricken eyes. That poor widower in the Public Garden, Joshua Carpenter, couldn’t have imagined that his end would come with a bullet to the head while he mourned the loss of his wife, whose ending itself he could never have foreseen. And I never in a million years imagined driving to the hospital with a pregnant wife that morning too many years before and returning home alone that night, completely alone, because Katherine and the daughter I never knew died in childbirth.

  I scrolled upward on my computer until I found the name of Elizabeth Riggs, the one I let get away, despite the fact that every sane cell inside of me screamed for me to hold on for the rest of my life. I clicked on the e-mail and it simply said, “The two of you were snoring in stereo.”

  That one line just about jumped off my computer screen and kicked me in the gut. I knew instantly what she meant, even if the note was sent some three years before. She had been complaining to me, tongue in cheek, about the lack of sleep from the night before, not because of any wild circus sex, but because I was on one side of her and Baker on the other, both of us with colds, snoring in her ears. I even remembered that night, stretched out long and comfortable in my bed with a woman and a dog I would always love, having no idea that everything — everything — comes to an end.

  And then it did, the day she walked down the jetway to board a flight for San Francisco. She told me she loved me, but she knew I couldn’t love her back, not the way she needed me to. And all I could do was stand there like an idiot and mutter good-bye. Very rarely, too rarely, endings come with warnings, but far more often they don’t.

  Someone rang the doorbell of the hotel room. I jumped up, startled, then heard a man’s voice call out, “Room service.” When I opened the door, he rolled in a cart and reached into a warmer. For a fleeting moment, I thought he might pull out a gun. Instead, he held out a plate with my hamburger. We exchanged pleasantries, I signed the check, and he left. I took a bite of the burger, which was good, though twenty-seven dollars’ worth of good, I doubted. Of course, at that moment, it could have been the best burger ever and I don’t think I would have tasted a thing. I dropped it back on the plate with a quiet thud and pushed the cart back toward the door.

  I looked around the empty hotel room and thought about my empty apartment back home. Had I been the one to die in the Public Garden that day, I wondered how many people would have really, truly cared. Would Maggie have come back for the funeral? Elizabeth? Is that what it would take to be with them again, to finally be at peace in our relationships, for me to be dead?

  Wait a minute. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t how I thought. This wasn’t how I looked at life.

  I flicked off the desk lamp, leaving the room with just the glare of the red and blue neon outside. And with that, I climbed slowly into bed.

  14

  The day dawned with a chain saw ripping through the darkness and heading toward my handsome head. I bolted upright to see who or what was attacking me, and for that matter, where I had been taken hostage, when I realized I was in a hotel room, a pretty nice one, actually, and the urgent sound emanated from my cell phone, which was lying on the nightstand. I squinted at the alarm clock’s lighted red numbers and saw it was 3:15 a.m.

  “Peter, it’s the middle of the fucking night here,” I said, my voice still thick from a sleep that had barely begun.

  In response, I heard no response, just silence. I said, “Hello?”

  The caller cleared his throat, hesitated, and asked, “Is Jack Flynn there, please?” It was one of those deep voices that called attention to itself, like Ted Baxter’s on the old Mary Tyler Moore show, but with more of an edge.

  I replied, “He is.”

  Again, no response, not immediately, anyway. The caller cleared his throat again and said, “May I please speak to him?” He calls me at three-fifteen in the morning and he keeps using the word please, as if he’s being polite.

  I said, “You are.”

  “Great. Jack, if I may call you Jack, this is Walt Bedrock from the WBZ-TV morning show. Terrific story in today’s Record. Terrific read. We’re interested in getting you on the air so
you can tell people about it.”

  The name was familiar to me in the way that the names of dozens of lightweight television reporters and anchors are familiar to me, which is to say it was barely familiar at all. Put them all in a room together and you’d discover an immediate cure for even the worst TV addict.

  I asked, “Didn’t I already tell people about it — in the Record?”

  Again he hesitated. Sometimes you’re on someone’s wavelength, other times you couldn’t possibly be further away. Walt Bedrock and I, it was immediately apparent, were like fire and ice, though it was either too early in the morning or too late at night to tell who was which.

  “Possibly,” he said, “but —”

  I cut him off and asked, “Walt, if I may call you Walt, what’s your viewership over there on the WBZ-TV morning show?”

  Don’t ask me why I was this angry at this hour. Maybe because of the hour, though poor Walt Bedrock didn’t know I was trying to sleep 2,800 miles and three time zones away, and he never would. More likely it was my visceral disdain for reporters interviewing reporters, an increasingly common practice among the laziest denizens of my world.

  “We are watched in a hundred and ten thousand households a morning.” He said this proudly.

  I replied, “The Record prints five hundred and twenty thousand papers each day, with an average readership of 1.7 people per paper. Plus there’s however many hundreds of thousands of people who read the Record online, freeloaders that they are. Why don’t I just stick with my medium and you stick with yours?”

  He hesitated yet again, and then said, “Because this is TV.”

  Good answer. Perfect answer. Couldn’t have imagined a better one coming from a guy who undoubtedly sits in a studio for his entire three-hour workday, reads a script, and moves his hands and facial muscles exactly like the producers tell him to through an earpiece that’s never as well hidden as they think.

  I said, “Walt, I’m going to do you a favor. We’ve never met, but I’ve got the kind of face that was born to be in newspapers. Trust me, you put me on the air and you’ll shrink to sixty thousand viewers that day, most of whom would have the last name of Flynn. And it’s not a particularly desirable demographic for advertisers. Thank you anyway.”

  And I hung up. No sooner than I had sprawled out anew did the phone ring again.

  “Jack Flynn here,” I said.

  “Jack, you’re a superstar. You’re a real fucking superstar, but you probably know that already.”

  “I do. Who’s calling?”

  His voice, by the way, was inexplicably strong and nasally at the same time, like a football player addicted to Afrin.

  “It’s Brett. Brett Faldo. Senior producer from the Today show. Meredith and Matt asked me to call you. They absolutely love your story in today’s paper. They want to get you on the air ASAP, as in this morning. We’re not even going to make you go into the remote studio. We’ll send a crew over to your place to make this easy on everybody.”

  “Who are Meredith and Matt?”

  He laughed his nasally, jocular little laugh, incredulous, as if I had asked who Christ was. He said, “Just give me an address. You’re a hero, and you’re going to make this a great show.”

  I’m a hero. I’m a superstar. A killer emerges from a four-decade hibernation, or maybe a new killer comes along with a passion for history, decides to contact me with a couple of cryptic notes and the driver’s licenses of a pair of dead women, and that makes me, in the eyes of the broadcast-news media world, not merely a superstar but a hero as well.

  I should have anticipated this, and I guess to a certain extent I probably did. But there’s a difference between anticipating something and preparing for it. I had no set answer, which may have been just as well, because that brought me to my default answer whenever a television show asked me on as a guest, which was, in a word, no. What I had said to Walt Bedrock about having a face meant for newspapers wasn’t entirely untrue — though maybe a little bit so.

  I said, “Meredith and Matt, they’re on really early, right?”

  “Every day, yes.” Proud of this. Very proud.

  I said, “The problem is, I don’t get up that early.”

  He gave me that same laugh. I’m betting he used to give Tom Brokaw that same laugh regardless of how bad the jokes may have been. Brian Williams, that’s probably a different story; he’s supposed to be legitimately funny, though I bet Brett, his nose constantly twitching for the next story or office politics vibration, can’t tell the difference.

  “Like I said,” he said, his tone clicking ever so slightly from solicitous to demanding, “we’ll make this easy on everyone. Meredith and Matt really want this to happen. I’m not going to tell them it can’t. I’ll have a crew over to your place in thirty minutes. Just tell me where.”

  “I could, Brett. But the problem is, I’m not there. I’d love to help you, Meredith, and Matt out, but I’m working on a story for tomorrow’s Record. I’ve got my own job to do, Brett. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to run and do it now. Thanks for your kind offer.”

  I heard him whining into the phone as I hung up.

  Not ten seconds later, the phone chimed again.

  “Yeah, Flynn here.”

  “Jack, Regis Philbin here…”

  Seriously, it was Regis Philbin. I love the man, I really do, but now was not the time to profess it. I write a story destined to rock my native Boston right to its parochial core, and this is how it begins to unwind, with a bunch of TV people wanting to piggyback on what they don’t have. And I thought it was newspapers that were in trouble. Well, okay, maybe we are as well, but at least there’s some honor to it.

  As soon as I extricated myself — politely so — from that offer, I turned my phone off, rose from bed, and gazed out the window at the flashing neon up and down the Vegas strip — Paris to my left, New York–New York and the Bellagio across the street, the outdated Bally’s to my right. I wondered if my gamble would pay off today, not just for me but for women I didn’t yet know, women who were marked to die. Which is when it hit me. Most stories, truth be told, were little more than an exercise in this grand and illustrious business of reporting. If you get it, terrific, you make a splash, maybe cause some humiliation, perhaps even a resignation. Believe me, been there, done that, with mayors and governors and even a president. But this one, this one was different. People’s lives were on the line, people I didn’t know. A killer might have been playing games with these notes and driver’s licenses and all that, but it wasn’t a game at all. I was in the middle of it, but felt like a mere conduit, working on behalf of people I would probably never know.

  I did know this, though: I needed a good hand, I needed it fast, or more people, myself possibly included, were destined to die.

  15

  At about nine o’clock, I slowly drove down Rodeo Road, a street, I’m fairly certain, that was pronounced like the sporting event with the cowboys on the bucking broncos, and not the more affected shopping boulevard that runs through the heart of Beverly Hills. I once quite literally bumped into Angelina Jolie on that boulevard, but that’s not really the point here. I’d bet Mongillo’s lunch money that I wasn’t going to run into her today.

  Still, the houses surprised me for their size, which is to say they were large, as well as for their condition, which was well kept. These were nice homes painted in subtle, sophisticated colors with wide, irrigated lawns and freshly trimmed fauna. All very un–Las Vegas — although what did I expect, giant lighted flamingos in residential developments? Some of the houses had big bay windows, others had triple-car garages. It appeared very quiet, this neighborhood, meaning there weren’t kids running around the streets playing kick the can, but maybe that’s because kids don’t play that anymore.

  Anyway, 284 Rodeo Road was a gray center-entrance house with two levels and a brick driveway. More important, it was also where Bob Walters had come to live after retiring from the Boston Police Department, which g
ets back to the point about me being surprised. This didn’t look like the kind of street where old men on a public-service pension could afford to retire, but maybe he bought at just the right time, as it was being built, or maybe he had family money on one side or the other. People and money, I’ve learned in life, will always surprise you in ways good and bad.

  I glided past the house to get a sense of what I was dealing with, as well as to stall for a little more time, and a block or two down pulled a U-turn and circled back. The garage doors were closed, as was the center door. The windows were all pulled shut, some of them darkened by drawn shades or curtains. The sprinklers were not on, but then again, they weren’t on any other lawns, either. Maybe that whole thing about not watering the grass while the sun beats down on it is true. But how would I know? I live in a downtown condominium.

  All of this is to say that it didn’t look like there was anyone home, or if there was, it didn’t appear that they had jumped out of bed and happily embraced the new day, as I had nearly six hours earlier. I knew Walters’s phone number and could call, but why would I do that after flying all the way across the country to knock on his door? If he wasn’t home, I wouldn’t leave a note, because the element of surprise was an advantage I wasn’t ready to cede. No, I’d end up staking out his place for pretty much the entire day if I had to. The big problem would come if he and his wife were away on vacation, but they already lived in Vegas — where the hell would they go?

  I pulled up to the curb next to the neat sidewalk and parked. “Hello, Detective, Jack Flynn, it’s an honor to meet you. I’ve come a long way to ask you a few questions and am hoping you can be of help.”