Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  A rather gruff gentleman answered the phone and tersely announced, “Homicide.”

  “Is Detective Foley in, please?”

  “No.”

  Silence. And some people wonder why reporters and cops generally have such a tough time getting along. If you strip everything else away, I think it’s because reporters, by their very nature, like to communicate, to put their thoughts into words and use those words to enlighten. Cops, at least the ones inevitably assigned to answer the phones, don’t like to talk — except, maybe, to one another.

  I said, “Could I leave a message for him?”

  “Sure.”

  I’d like to see this guy consoling the grieving relatives of a newly made victim. The odd thing is, he was probably pretty good at it, all his emotions spare but heartfelt.

  “Could you tell him that Jack Flynn called.”

  “Hold on.”

  He didn’t, though, bother putting me on hold. Instead I heard the receiver clank on what sounded like a metal desktop. Then I heard him yell, “Hey, Mac, the asshole is on line one.”

  I could vaguely hear a distant voice reply, “Which asshole?”

  “The big one.”

  The phone clicked and another voice came on and announced, “Foley here.”

  “Jack Flynn calling.”

  “Jack,” he said, his tone surprisingly upbeat, “you outdid yourself. I thought I’d seen a lot of bad, sleazy reporting in my fortysomething years on the job here, but in today’s fish wrap, you turned sleaziness into an art form.”

  I said, “Thank you. God knows we try.”

  Actually, that’s not really what I said, though I might have, if he had given me a chance, which he didn’t. As he spoke, the scrub of the Nevada desert washed by me on either side of my car as I barreled back down the same interstate highway destined for Bob Walters’s house to try to wring out that one last piece of information: Who had the bloody knife? I use the descriptive bloody not like a Brit might, but in the most literal way possible.

  Foley continued, “That was really a pile of shit, Jack. You were used by some fucking kook. You violated the privacy of two different families. You needlessly scared the crap out of an entire city. And you got in the way of a police investigation that is now stalled in its tracks because you and your fucking editors are desperately trying to sell newspapers on the misery of others.

  “Otherwise, great job, you asshole.”

  “So you liked it?”

  That I did say, though he didn’t respond. I think he was too busy disemboweling a bunny at his desk or something. I was also starting to rethink my theory that I was uniquely capable of maintaining great relationships with law enforcement types, mostly because I could relate to them so well. If this was an example of a great relationship, then Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had a terrific marriage.

  I said, “So you don’t think there’s a serial killer in town?”

  He responded, “I’m not saying a fucking word to you, except that by rushing that story into print, you just validated that lunatic talk-show host. And if there is a serial killer in town, you just made it one hell of a lot harder for us to catch him — and you can quote me on that, but you won’t, because you’re too chickenshit.”

  Don’t bet on that. His answer was interesting, though, the profanity aside, because it represented what former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee famously described during Watergate as a “non-denial denial.” Mac Foley wasn’t actually denying the existence of a serial killer. What he was saying is that by reporting on it, I was making his job tougher — which I hate to say, or maybe I don’t, wasn’t really my concern. Because by reporting on a serial killer, I was also prompting hundreds of thousands of women in the city to take precautions, maybe saving lives. I’m not saying police wanted him to kill again, but every murder provides them with fresh possibilities for clues, and unreported or underreported murders allow police the luxury of time to find out who committed them.

  I said, barely able to conceal my increasing disdain, “If you can hold yourself together for a moment, I wanted to share with you some new correspondence from the Phantom Fiend.”

  Silence. I can only imagine how much he hated the fact that his investigation was dependent on a reporter for information — an investigation that would now fall under intense scrutiny because of that same reporter. Actually, I can more than imagine, because here’s what he said: “Flynn, if you try playing any games with me, if you so much as hiccup before you get me every tiny little piece of information that comes your way from whoever this is that’s calling themselves the Phantom Fiend, I’ll have you grabbed off the street and thrown in front of a grand jury so fast that you won’t be able to change out of the panties that you fucking reporters probably wear. And that’s if I’m in a good mood. If I’m in a bad mood, you’ll end up spending some time at the county jail.”

  I rolled my eyes, even as I admired his ability to put his thoughts into words. This was why he wasn’t in charge of answering phones, I’m sure. I asked, “What’s your e-mail address?” He gave it to me. I told him I was sending him a video that had been mailed to the Record, that he could have the hard copy, and that our own investigation showed the address to be at 284 Commonwealth Avenue. We both hung up without saying good-bye.

  I came around the corner of Rodeo Road and blinked at what I saw: straight ahead, several blocks away, the pulse of red and blue police lights from squad cars idling in the otherwise empty street.

  I reflexively hit the gas, which I suppose isn’t something you should do with cops around. As I got closer, my fears compounded with every passing house. The police cruisers were parked in front of Bob Walters’s house, and they were parked alongside an ambulance, which, in turn, was idling next to a black van. This was not good.

  As I pulled up, I saw that there was no yellow police tape, meaning the authorities weren’t treating this as a crime scene, meaning, hopefully, that maybe this was merely a matter of the sickly Bob Walters suddenly needing some medical attention and now everything inside was just fine. Couple of aspirin, maybe a catheter, and the guys in rubber gloves are on their way out the door. Or better yet, and I should probably be embarrassed for even thinking this, but maybe it was his wife in physical distress. Slouched on the kitchen table amid a puddle of vodka and glass fragments, she was hardly the picture of long-term health.

  But as I left the air-conditioning of my car for the growing heat of a late desert morning, I saw with a start that the black van had the words, in sterile type, COUNTY CORONER on the side. Still, I thought, maybe Mrs. Walters had killed herself or died of a heart attack or sudden liver failure.

  There were a couple of uniformed Las Vegas cops chatting with each other on the front lawn. A team of paramedics came walking out of the front door of the house empty-handed. Well, not entirely empty-handed. They each carried what looked to be a briefcase in their hands.

  By now, sweat was dripping down my forehead and across my cheeks, and not from the heat, either. I didn’t want to look panicked, but didn’t know how to stay cool. I noticed that a few neighbors were looking on from their respective yards. I saw through the glare of the front outer door that uniformed men were crouched over, tending to something inside the front hallway. A man in a suit with a stethoscope around his neck came walking silently out the front door, got in an unmarked Ford Expedition, and drove away.

  I left my notebook behind in the car. I wiped the sweat off my face with my sleeve and walked across the lawn toward the cops, who kept talking to each other. As I got near I announced, “I’m a friend of the Walterses. Can I ask what’s going on here?” Easy does it, no panic, just projecting true, heartfelt concern.

  Both cops, young guys, turned to me with casual, even friendly looks on their faces.

  “What’s your name?” one of them asked, not accusatorily, but so he could have a point of reference as he gave me what was undoubtedly bad news.

  I told him. Before he could say any
thing else, the front door opened again, and a man in a white lab coat backed out of it carrying the front end of a stretcher, another man in a white coat picking up the rear. They carefully descended the two front steps, pulled on a bar at the same time beneath the stretcher, and a set of poles and wheels protruded out. They dropped the stretcher with a bounce and rolled it toward the awaiting van.

  On the stretcher was a long form wrapped in a black body bag, zipped from what I assumed was head to foot, shining in the midday sun. I watched in silence, as did the two cops, watched as they slid the bag into the back doors of the van and shut them with an aching thud. Still, some part of me thought that without Mrs. Walters around, maybe it was her in the bag. After all, if it was her husband, wouldn’t she be witnessing this scene, even if only with fake tears?

  My hopes were raised further when the two paramedics went walking back into the house carrying a portable stretcher. At the same time, one of the cops put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Sir, how do you know the Walterses?”

  I said, “He’s a retired cop, Boston PD. I’m visiting from Boston.” There wasn’t a lie in either sentence.

  The same cop put his hand on my shoulder and said, “There was an accident this morning —”

  Before he could finish, the front door opened one more time. This time, a paramedic backed out lugging a stretcher, which seemed to take forever getting through the door. They came slowly down the steps. I strained my eyes. There on the stretcher was Mrs. Bob Walters, her eyes open and blinking, her lips moving, nothing more than incoherent blather coming from her mouth. I hung my head in sadness — for Bob Walters, for the victims he couldn’t help in Boston, and yeah, a little bit for this reporter who didn’t get the full benefit of his knowledge.

  The young cop was still talking. “He was very frail, as I’m sure you know. He fell down the stairs sometime this morning. The mailman saw him through the front door on his daily delivery and called 911. By the time we got here, he was dead.”

  Fell down the front stairs.

  I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year. That’s what Walters had said to me less than two hours before. He didn’t suddenly get out of bed and try his luck hobbling around the house. He wasn’t anywhere near the stairs under his own power. He didn’t fall by accident.

  And I also knew something else: his wife had been too drunk to get herself upstairs, drag him out of bed, and push him. She probably wanted to do just that. She probably spent entire days dreaming of this scenario. But it didn’t happen like that, not here, not this morning.

  Of course, I couldn’t tell the cops any of this. If I had, they probably would have thought I was some sort of kook — the word that Mac Foley had used to describe the Phantom Fiend. And if they didn’t, they would have wanted me to go downtown to answer questions, and as anyone who knows anything about Vegas knows to their core, you never want to go downtown. Especially me, especially now, when I needed to get back east to deal with the new case of Kimberly May.

  So I solemnly nodded to the young cops and told them thanks. I got back in the car and carefully navigated around the emergency vehicles and the coroner’s van, which was also pulling out. I thought of Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens and Kimberly May, and wondered what their lives were like before they didn’t have them anymore. I thought of that poor man, Joshua Carpenter, mourning his wife in the Public Garden, wrong time, wrong place, and now he too was dead. And Bob Walters, just an old retiree with a lot of regrets and a reservoir of knowledge that he had been waiting forty years to share. I got almost all of it, but not enough.

  I drove off toward the airport. Success and failure seemed inextricably intertwined, as if good and bad were forever linked. I wondered if most of life was like that, and feared that maybe it was. I had to get back to Boston to figure out how to separate the two.

  19

  I was in San Francisco International Airport when I saw her. Specifically, I was sprawled across a chair in one of those generic lounges with the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the departing and arriving planes, waiting for my connecting flight to Boston, because the only nonstop out of Vegas with any available seats was the red-eye, and civil people, it must be said, don’t fly on red-eyes. My shirt was untucked. My hair was mussed up. I had circles of worry and exhaustion under my sky-blue eyes. I had my cell phone plastered to my ear, listening to Vinny Mongillo explain that he had once again proven himself to be the world’s most tenacious and talented reporter by producing, in a mere three hours, Paul Vasco’s entire criminal record, his incarceration history, and, most notably, his most recent release date, which, not by coincidence, happened to be six months before. He also had Vasco’s current home address, a nugget of information he said would cost me dinner at a major Boston restaurant or, better yet, a private club, for him and the state bureaucrat who provided it. I couldn’t even imagine how much fun that would be.

  When I was done with the requisite congratulations, promises, and thank-yous, Mongillo said, “Now let me tell you about Kimberly May.”

  And that’s when I saw her, sauntering down the airy walkway amid a cluster of humanity that had apparently disembarked from the same plane and were heading for the exits and for wherever else after that — great hotels, bad motels, overseas flights, the warmth of home, the stone-cold reality of a failing marriage. Wherever. I noticed first the achingly familiar walk, the swivel of the hips, the fit of her jeans, the way her long brown hair swished back and forth. Then I saw the unmistakably beautiful shape of her face, the deep-set eyes, and the perfectly proportioned nose. All those people walking by, maybe a hundred a minute at least, and my eyes naturally fell on her. I swear to God, you could see the person you truly loved in a pitch-black room.

  And not that I’d make too big a deal of this, but there must have been eighty people sitting in the waiting area for the flight to Boston, and out of all of us, her look naturally came to rest on me. So she came walking over, calm and casual, unflustered, as if I’d been her destination all along, like something prearranged, not in the slightest bit surprised to see me. She had an overnight bag slung over her shoulder and a computer satchel in her hand. She placed them both on the floor, sat down in the empty seat beside mine, and said in that somewhat husky voice, “Come here often?” And then she smiled that crinkle-eyed smile that I don’t think has ever fully left my thoughts, or, in my more honest moments, my hopes.

  It was Elizabeth Riggs, a woman I once thought I’d marry and probably should have married, but never did, mostly because, I’ve come to convince myself, she came into my life at exactly the wrong time.

  She knew her line was weak, and so did I, but I let her off the hook with the following pale little offering of my own: “Only when I’m flying.”

  I remained slung across my chair, my neck supported by the top of the backrest. She reached out and touched the side of my face with her hand — no hesitation, no qualms, no forced display of formality. It’s just what came to mind or body, so it’s what she did.

  Her touch, by the way, was warm and soft, casual yet luxurious, like a cashmere blanket flung across an aging couch. I wanted to wrap myself in it, to take shelter from the cruel world in it. Instead, I took her hand in mine, kissed it once, and placed it back against my cheek. Given how attractive she was, anyone who was watching, and there were probably more than a few people who were, would have assumed that we had been lovers for a long, long time. And in some odd way, they were right.

  “So I get to the building about ten seconds ahead of the first screaming patrol car…”

  That was Vinny again, his voice still coming into the forgotten phone that remained absently against my ear. I said, “That’s terrific. Call you back in a little while.”

  I flipped the phone shut and said, “That was Vinny.”

  She nodded, her gaze hanging on mine in a spell of silence. She said, “You look good.”

  I didn’t.

  “So do you,” I said.

  She did.<
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  Her hands were now resting on her thighs. I asked, “Where are you coming from?”

  “LA. I was down there visiting a friend for a couple of days.”

  A friend. There used to be a day not so long before that I knew every one of her friends and she knew every one of mine. Times, quite obviously, change, and a friend in this case could mean absolutely anything.

  She asked, “Are you heading back to Boston?”

  I nodded. We looked at each other again, undoubtedly both racking our overwhelmed brains for more banal questions.

  They write songs about these kinds of encounters, particularly bad songs, actually. Wasn’t there an especially awful one about a pair of former lovers who ran into each other on Christmas Eve in a grocery store, or some similarly regrettable time and place, shuffling their feet in the frozen foods aisle as they tried to stem the flood of memories?

  She finally moved beyond the realm of verbalized politesse and said, “I heard you were getting married. I’ve been meaning to call and congratulate you. But you know, you violated our agreement. We’re supposed to inform each other of moves, deaths, marriages, and births.”

  I didn’t remember any such agreement, though I kind of liked the sentiment. I smiled a weary smile and thought about the number of times we’d sat on the couch together, or lain in bed, or faced each other on bar stools, sitting close, one of us telling of a recent failure, the other there to do the propping up, always successful until the day it wasn’t, and then the relationship wasn’t a relationship anymore.

  I said, “But you didn’t read the follow-up story of me not getting married?” I shook my head self-consciously, expressing, or at least trying to, the full depths of my idiocy in male-female relationships.