She looked surprised without being particularly disappointed, though maybe I was reading too much into that. “Um, why not?” she asked.
Blunt now. She pulled her hair back with both arms in that way she always did, getting it out of her face, getting ready to have a serious talk.
I said, “You know. Life.”
“Or death?”
Clever, her referring to my wife’s death six years before, something that Elizabeth ended up believing would color me for the rest of my days, making it impossible to have a normal, healthy relationship with a normal, healthy woman.
I leaned forward now, my elbows on my knees, looking at her with a cocked head. I said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s life. You know, sometimes two people aren’t meant to get married, even if they first thought they were, and it’s not because the guy’s wife died.”
She nodded. “Point taken. What went wrong?” Not dropping it, and unapologetic in her pursuit of facts.
“I’m not really sure. I haven’t talked with her.”
She looked at me with a flash of incredulity and bemusement.
“So how did you tell her you didn’t want to get married?”
“I didn’t.”
She guffawed, which probably wasn’t the most endearing or empathetic reaction to this revelation. Then she said, “She called it off, not you?”
“Long story, though I guess not really. I was sitting down at Caffe Vittoria that morning trying to figure a way out of things. I mean, the woman is terrific — for somebody else. I swear, someone’s going to marry her someday soon and think they’ve hit the fucking lottery.
“We were going to do a little justice-of-the-peace deal and then head to Hawaii, you know, everything very low-key. So I finally get up the guts to call her, and when I do, she tells me she’s in the Atlanta airport. It’s five hours before we’re due to be married, maybe less. I say, ‘What are you doing down there?’
“And she comes back with, ‘I’m so sorry, Jack. I was just about to call you.’
“She literally fled town. I haven’t seen her since.”
Elizabeth looked at me incredulously. “You’re sure you didn’t pull a Jack on her without realizing it? You didn’t send her signals? You didn’t drive her away? You didn’t do that thing where you kind of cut her off from everything you’re doing and thinking because you’re afraid to let someone else in?”
Pull a Jack. “That’s real nice,” I said. “Thank you for your heartfelt sympathy in this most trying time.”
I said that last part with intentional, mocking formality. She laughed and absently dropped her hand on the outside of my leg like she always used to do and said, “I’m sorry, but come on. You know how you can be.”
“And I know how you are, which is not very nice.”
Past the awkwardness, everything very familiar again, comfortable.
She asked, “And you really haven’t talked to her since?”
I shook my head.
“What are you doing out here? Don’t tell me you went on your honeymoon on your own.”
I smiled and said, “No. Story.” I didn’t tell her what, and she had obviously been too busy with her friend in LA to have read the Record online.
She said, “At least you picked a honeymoon destination that we’d never been to. I would’ve killed you if you went to Turks.”
The Turks and Caicos Islands, amid a stretch of too much arguing, near the end of a bitter winter. We were having yet another senseless fight over something we wouldn’t be able to remember the next day when she glared at me and said, “You know what the problem is with us? We don’t spend enough time together.” I mean, I always knew she could be counterintuitive, but this was the biggest bit of counterintuition that I had ever heard.
That’s when she flipped open the morning Record, pointed to an airline ad, and said, “We’re going here.”
“Where.”
“Providenciales.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know. Um, says here, the Caribbean.”
“When.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
And sure enough, there we were at the airport the following morning, bags in hand, frequent-flier miles drained out of our accounts, with two round-trip tickets to the Turks and Caicos Islands and a reservation for three nights at a beachfront guesthouse named Jose’s Place. I had created a rule for myself about never staying at a place named for the owner, unless it was Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. But in this case, every decent resort on the island was booked. Jose’s, for every good reason, wasn’t.
After Jose himself proudly showed us to our room, with the torn shade covering the single window, the scraped tile floors, the refrigerator-size closet, the Third World bathroom, we looked at each other, wondering what the hell we were going to do.
Ends up, we decided pretty quickly: we had sex. We had it in the room, immediately and urgently, then later, constantly. We had it that evening on a blanket under a coconut tree on the pristine beach as insects the size of dairy cows chirped in the nearby brush. We had it in the handicapped restroom of a very swank resort before the dessert course of our dinner the following night. We had it in the middle of the afternoon under a blanket on a dock during a passing rainstorm.
Not that I’m proud of any of this. Well, okay, maybe I am a little.
We also talked. We talked about the past, mine and hers and ours. We talked about the present. And we talked about the future, always as a couple, the challenges we’d face, the marriage we would undoubtedly embrace, the babies that would someday pop into our lives. And then we had more sex.
She wore a flower in her hair. The tops of our feet got brown. We’d walk the beach and look at the silent, sullen couples sunning themselves on the expensive chairs at their luxury resorts, knowing that our little eighty-five-dollar-a-night prison cell of a guest room back at Jose’s was the most perfect thing we could ever have imagined.
“I wouldn’t have gone to Turks,” I told her, solemn now. “That’s off the list.”
She squeezed my thigh. “Good,” she said. “Same here.”
We fell silent for a minute. Finally, I looked her square in the eyes and asked, “What went wrong?”
When she looked back at me, her eyes were glistening like the top of a pond after a hard rain, like they might spill over in even the slightest breeze.
She swallowed and said, “Life went wrong, Jack. Life. We didn’t share enough of it. You spent too much time looking at the past — understandably so. I spent too much time worried about the future — maybe just as understandably. And the moment kind of passed us by. Before you knew it, you and I weren’t really you and I.”
I saw a tear fall from her left eye to her cheekbone, then begin the long descent toward her neck. My reflexes wanted me to reach out for her. My brain kept everything still and in its proper place. Brains can be stupid sometimes, especially mine.
She added, “The thing with you, Jack, the thing with you, is that the dead people in your life keep on dying.”
She paused after this declaration, causing me to replay it in my mind. The dead people keep on dying. She always did have a pretty amazing way with words, as well as piercing insight. The problem now, though, was that even people who had never been in my life kept on dying.
“It’s completely understandable,” she added, “but the fact that it’s understandable doesn’t make it any easier on the living people in your life.”
I said, “You’re over us?” I don’t know where I got the guts to ask that question, but I did.
She replied, “Some days, yes. Other days, not really. You?”
I bit my lip and replied, “That about sums it up here as well.”
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too.”
A woman’s voice over the PA system announced a preboarding for the flight to Boston, which brought me back to that awful day at Logan Airport when she first left for her new life in San Fran
cisco. I should have stopped her. I could have stopped her. And I didn’t.
She flashed me an odd look, the two of us sitting there amid the soft commotion of passengers all around us rising to their feet and grabbing their purses and computer cases and carry-ons. She said, “I had planned to tell you this if you ever got around to calling me to let me know you were getting married —”
“I didn’t get married,” I said, cutting her off.
She smiled wanly and continued, “But I might as well tell you here.” She paused and gave me a long, familiar look of mild trepidation mixed with excitement, and then said, “I’m pregnant.”
Did someone just set a bomb off? What was that intense white flash? Was I asleep? Would I at some point awake? Any reason I should be this inwardly distraught over a two-word sentence uttered by a woman I hadn’t been involved with in the biblical sense in at least a year?
I said, slowly, calmly, forcing a smile, “I thought you had a glow to you.” I don’t know if she did or didn’t, but it was a pretty good line for its magnanimity and the fact it bought me a little bit of much-needed recovery time.
She smiled in return and said, “I’m not really showing yet, not unless, well, not unless you look really hard. I’ve been a little bit sick, but not too bad. I’m pretty nervous. And I’m really goddamned excited.”
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and smiled more broadly — unrestrained happiness all over her face.
I squeezed her hand and said, “I’m really thrilled for you.” Was I? I didn’t know.
Passengers were filing past us, lining up for the boarding call, riffling through their coats for tickets and IDs, completely unaware of the minidrama unfolding in their midst. Or at least I think they were unaware.
I flashed to a scene a few years before, a summer’s evening at a traveling carnival in a small town in Maine. Her hair was wavy from the sun and her tan skin untouched by makeup. She had just nervously told me she thought she was pregnant, and I scooped her up in my arms and paraded her around the grass parking lot, thinking we were going to be parents together, that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, that I was going to have what was taken away from me before, or at least some sort of approximation of it.
Instead, the tests came back negative, the relationship eventually soured, and, well, here we were. Imagine if I could have looked into the future that night in Maine, and this scene at the San Francisco Airport is what I saw?
Of course, I hid all these feelings and recollections, or at least I hid them as best as I could. I said, “I’m really thrilled for you. And in all seriousness, you look spectacular.”
She beamed.
Left unasked, unanswered, and entirely unstated was the issue of paternity, which, for every logical and illogical reason, I was dying to know, though damned if I was going to bring it up. I did a double-check on her left ring finger and saw nothing but skin. I pictured a tall guy, dark hair, probably an investment banker, maybe a venture capitalist, every bit as thrilled as I was that night in Maine when we had that false alarm. That expanse I was suddenly feeling in my chest was what’s known as emptiness.
She said, “It’s all pretty overwhelming, you know?”
Well, yeah, I did know until I didn’t, which happened in a hospital when Katherine and our daughter died during childbirth. I guess this is exactly what Elizabeth means when she says the dead keep on dying in my life.
The line all around us had receded to a few stragglers, and the hum of activity had lessened to a vague sense of quiet. The gate agent announced over the PA system, “Final call for Flight 423 to Boston. This will be the final boarding call. All ticketed and confirmed passengers, please get on board now.”
A deadline, so I asked, “Are you planning a wedding at the same time?”
Tactful, even if it wasn’t.
Without missing a beat, she replied, “That’s what’s so overwhelming about it. I’m doing it on my own. I’m using a friend’s sperm. He signed away all rights; I freed him of all obligations.”
It’s always something with this woman, always another surprise around every terrific curve. My mood lightened, though I tried to hide it. I asked, “Why?”
The gate agent approached us and asked, “Are you guys on this flight?” You guys — everyone assuming we were a couple. I looked around the waiting lounge and saw only one man in the distance reading a newspaper.
I said, “I am. Do I have ten seconds?”
“How about five.”
Elizabeth said, “Because I was writing about other people’s lives and not living my own. Because time was passing me by. Because it’s something I’ve always wanted, and I don’t have the luxury anymore to sit back and wait.”
I looked at her and she looked at me and the gate agent looked at both of us.
“Congratulations,” I said. “I’m really thrilled for you, and don’t take this the wrong way, but proud of you as well, even if I no longer have the right.”
I kissed her on the cheek, turned around, and walked toward the jetway.
Me and Elizabeth Riggs — we were always parting ways.
20
There was very little rhyme and virtually no reason to the killings to which Albert DeSalvo confessed some forty years before. The victims were all women, they were all single, and they were all strangled. The similarities stopped there.
Sometimes the killer strangled two women in a single week. Other times, he went a month or more without killing anyone. Usually he killed within the borders of Boston, but he also traveled as far as Lowell and Lawrence to commit murder.
His first half-dozen women were into their middle or later years, some of them pretty divorcées, others spinsters. Later, his victims grew younger in age. One black woman was killed, though it was never clear whether she was part of the spree.
Sometimes the killer left big looping bows around their necks, usually tied from the victim’s own hosiery. Other times he didn’t. Occasionally he left them in ghoulish positions — sitting in a chair facing the door, for example, or propped up in bed just so, once in a bathtub. Other times they were left haphazardly where they died.
He left semen on various victims’ crotches, mouths, and chests. Some were vaginally raped, others not. One woman seemed to have been the subject of the killer’s necrophilic fantasies. Other women showed no sign of sexual assault.
He left a note — a card, actually — propped up against the foot of his final victim, but he hadn’t left anything like that with any of the victims before. He never had any contact with the news media, never reached out to the police, never intentionally left clues at any of the scenes.
When Albert DeSalvo confessed from the dank environs of the Bridgewater Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons, he poured out his soul, providing intimate details of each and every crime scene, as if he had so reveled in every murder that the sights, sounds, and smells would never leave his mind. Either that or, as Bob Walters seemed to believe, he committed someone else’s impressions to memory.
This is what I learned from my reading on the evening flight from San Francisco to Boston, which was also spent knocking back a couple of Sam Adams with a stewardess — ah yes, flight attendant — who invited me to join her for a drink at her, ahem, hotel bar. That wouldn’t happen, despite my best intentions, for a reason that can be summed up in two words: Edgar Sullivan.
You see, Edgar was there to greet me at the gate at Logan International Airport, along with a member of the Massport security team. It was nearing midnight. I think Edgar was up about five hours past his bedtime, though he didn’t seem to mind. He never seems to mind anything. The two guys silently hustled me down an escalator, past baggage claim, and through a set of double doors that I never knew existed. I thought they were leading me into some vault where frequent-flier miles are kept, but no, we were on the ground floor of a concrete garage.
Edgar had an SUV waiting, the kind of vehicle that celebrities are always getting into the mo
ment they leave the courthouse where they face various securities or molestation charges. We climbed into the back. The driver I didn’t recognize. Edgar simply said, “Over to the Record,” and we were gone. To me he said, “Welcome home. Peter and I agreed that this was the best way to assure that you would get safely back into town without being followed. Toby here” — the driver, a balding and rather burly man, turned around briefly and waved — “is a former linebacker for the Chicago Bears. He’ll accompany you wherever you need to go for the time being.”
Truth is, I didn’t mind. Every once in a while, I still shivered from that night earlier in the week spent flailing in the cold, murky waters of the Charles. And I don’t think I’ll ever get the sound of the gunshot out of my head that killed that innocent guy in the Public Garden two days before, then the woman screaming that he was dying, her voice rising in the early spring air before fading into the wind.
By the time I walked into the Record, it was nearing midnight. Didn’t matter. Peter Martin arrived at my desk about a minute after I did, though rather than being a bundle of jangled nerves, he was in that zone of calm that he gets into when the world around him gets particularly frenzied.
“Welcome back,” he said. He said this in the same mechanically calm tone that one of the Stepford Wives might use to welcome her husband home from work.
“Thank you. Are you okay?”
“Fine, yes. Just fine. We need to go over some things.”
He pulled up a chair next to my desk.
He said, “Okay, the cops went to Commonwealth Avenue. Kimberly May indeed lived there. Second floor.”
Already, I’m thinking to myself, life in the past tense. This wasn’t going to be good, not for Kimberly May, not for the women who would inevitably cross my desk after her.
He continued, “No answer at the door, so they knocked it down. Mongillo was downstairs and could hear the whole thing. They found Kimberly exactly as she was shown on the video sent to you, dead for what they think was at least a full day, maybe two.”
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