Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  I said, “He was trying to tell me something before I left, but he couldn’t get the words out. Then his health worker showed up and kicked me out.”

  She nodded. I was beginning to hear the clock ticking toward my return flight, so I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m on a tight schedule, and the truth is, I’m really eager to see what it is that your old man has.”

  “Let’s go.”

  She led me from the kitchen down a short hall and out a metal door into an obsessively neat two-car garage, where the floor still looked like it was brand-new. There were no vehicles in the garage, giving it a cavernous feel. It was also un-air-conditioned, making it feel hotter than a day in hell, which perhaps this was and someone forgot to tell me.

  Deirdre said, “The day after my father died, I was really sad for all that had happened, not just his death, but what became of his life, and my mother’s life, and my life. I wanted to relive some of it, reach back to the better times and try to figure out what went wrong. I took a peek through his stuff myself. There’s some interesting stuff. Maybe it explains all this — his misery, the way he died. You know?”

  I didn’t know. Not yet, anyway. As she said this, she led me to the far rear corner of the garage, where an old footlocker — a chest, really — sat on the floor. The key was already in the hole. She turned it and opened the locker upward, revealing four old boxes in pretty good shape sitting side by side inside.

  She opened the top of the second one and pulled out a notebook from inside. She slowly flipped through it to a section in the back that she had tabbed with a Post-it note, and she began reading to herself, getting lost in the words and her own thoughts. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “My father always said he had another prime suspect in the stranglings, but he would never tell anyone who it was. Here it is, in black and white, in his own words.”

  With that, she handed me the notebook. As I received it, I could already feel my heart falling. I read through the notes, which were of the exact interview he had already described to me in his bedroom on the morning that he died, the one with Paul Vasco. The session was held in an anteroom in Bridgewater at the prison for the sexually dangerous. Bob Walters was alone with nothing more than his badge and his gun and his total indignation that the state attorney general and some of his cohorts in homicide had fingered the wrong guy. There was no reason for him to be there. Vasco could have offered him a confession, and the other higher-ups would have told him it was all a lie. He was there only because he couldn’t let it go.

  The notes showed that he asked the exact question he told me he’d asked in the exact way he described it: “Hey, Paul, DeSalvo’s gone. The case is off the books. But we had the wrong guy, didn’t we?”

  Beneath the question, he wrote, “PV remained silent. Didn’t say a word. But he smiled like the devil, making sure I understood exactly what he meant. And I did.” The word devil was underlined three times.

  And beneath that he wrote, “Paul Vasco is the Boston Strangler.”

  I looked up at Deirdre Hayes, who was looking intently at me as I read the notes. I said, “Do you mind if I take this with me?”

  She hesitated for a long moment, anxiously rubbing her hands together at her waist, looking more innocent than she probably should have in that particular outfit.

  Finally she said, “I’ve never dealt with reporters before. How do you handle payment?”

  Terrific. I fly across a continent and am met by a woman who wants to turn a profit on her old man’s death. Though hell, she probably had it coming to her, given the misery that the guy had caused.

  I said, “We don’t.” I said this softly, attempting a tone of understanding, perhaps even empathy. “I’m not allowed to pay for information. Newspapers like mine, reputable news organizations, won’t do it.”

  She looked surprised. “So these notebooks aren’t worth anything?”

  I said, “They’re worth a lot. This information might someday soon be invaluable to the hundreds and thousands of other people who have been affected by the Strangler case, people not all that much different than you. It may give them some sense of closure, some little bit of freedom from the past. But I’m not allowed to pay for it.”

  She stood there in the garage, this beautiful woman dressed like a harlot, exhausted from pushing drinks to obnoxious, leering guys on the overnight shift at a casino bar on the Las Vegas Strip. She probably thought this notebook was about to rescue her from massive credit-card debt, or maybe was an opportunity to buy a nice used car. Instead, some schmuck from the East Coast was explaining to her that once again, she was screwed, just like she’d always been.

  So I said, “I’d hate to think that you’d do this, but I feel like I should tell you anyway. A place like The National Enquirer might pay you good money for this.” I could picture the headline, “Good Cop Fingers Real Boston Strangler From the Grave.” The reason I mentioned it to her, aside from the fact that I felt legitimately bad, was that I already had the information from Walters himself.

  She looked at the immaculate floor for a long, agonizing moment, and then up at me, and said, “No, I’d rather you had it. My father might have been a bastard, but he meant well most of the time. You’ll do the right thing with it.”

  I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get a look at what else is in these boxes.”

  She nodded again. Then her brow suddenly furrowed and she said, “I always thought there was another box. For some reason, I always remembered seeing five of them. You know how you have that picture in your mind that just stays there? In this case, five boxes, stacked three and two.”

  She shrugged and said, “But I must be wrong. I looked all over, and this is all there is.”

  And with that, she walked into the kitchen.

  The first box contained a lot of physical paraphernalia, pieces of clothing and various trinkets from every one of the murder scenes that occurred within Boston proper, which was six of them. It was odd, holding a kerchief from one dead woman, a bracelet from another, an ashtray from someone else’s apartment — but no odder than handling the driver’s licenses of recently slain women.

  The second box was filled with newspaper clippings on every one of the eleven murders, all of them yellowed, some of them crumbling, each one more fascinating than the last. I love reading old papers, partly for the simplistically done ads for products that probably no longer exist, partly for the more formal writing tone that reporters used to take. I had to convince myself not to get lost in the stories or I’d end up spending the night in Vegas, which may or may not have been a bad idea. Edgar Sullivan would have probably advised me to stay.

  The third box was a collection of official-looking police reports, transcripts of interviews with witnesses and perhaps suspects, and minutes of various meetings convened by the state attorney general and a group of police and prosecutors dubbed the Boston Strangler Commission. I gave it a quick scan, but had neither the time nor the patience to give it a thorough review.

  Should this stuff have been walked out the police department doors — read: stolen — and be hidden away for years in some anonymous garage in the middle of a sun-baked housing development? Absolutely not. But was it a common occurrence for police to grab documents and other various trinkets from cases that were dear to their hearts? It happened every day, and Bob Walters appeared no different than anyone else.

  The last box contained many of Walters’s personal mementos and correspondence that he undoubtedly pulled from his desk when he walked out of the homicide bureau that final time, at the end a bitter man. There were plaques from various victims’ groups, awards from civic associations, framed letters of commendation from the commissioner. I was about to pack them all away, call it a day, and head for the airport, when a leather-bound scrapbook in a corner of the locker caught my eye, and I flipped it open.

  In it were various notes and letters. The first was from Hal Harrison, then a homicide detective, urging Bob Walters to
take some time off in the midst of the Boston Strangler case. Right after it was a hand-scrawled note from a detective by the name of Mac Foley — yes, I believed, the same Mac Foley — telling Walters he was absolutely right about DeSalvo and to keep pounding away on the issue. It didn’t elaborate.

  I flipped through page after page of what seemed to be meaningless material until I arrived at a handwritten note that gave me pause for reasons I can’t fully explain. Maybe it was the penmanship, which seemed vaguely, oddly familiar, or maybe it was something else. I honestly don’t know.

  Regardless, the letter, dated November 1976, began, “Dear Detective Walters, I agree with you completely that Albert DeSalvo did not kill my mother. Thank you for telling me what you know, and for being honest about what you don’t. My dying grandfather, though, needs to believe that my mother’s killer has been caught and killed. He’s been very sick with cancer, and as he tries to cope with his pain, it helps him to think that DeSalvo was the murderer. That’s why your package was so helpful to him. Thank you for sending it. Me and my family truly appreciate all that you have done. Sincerely yours.”

  I had to read the signature twice, and then a third time, to make sure my eyes or my brain weren’t playing tricks on me. It was jarring to see it there, like seeing an apparition, only this was the opposite: a living person so closely, unexpectedly associated with the dead.

  I read it yet again, following the curve of the many letters with my eyes, picturing how old he must have been when he wrote his name across the bottom. And then I said it out loud, just to hear it, to put it in the public realm.

  “Vincent Mongillo.”

  My colleague, my friend, a victim of the Boston Strangler, and he kept it secret all these years and, as important, all these crucial days. I reread the letter, which had to have been written when he was about fifteen years old.

  I recalled being surprised at his breadth and width of knowledge on the Strangler case, and I recalled asking him why he knew what he knew. That’s when he gave me the never - pickedin - the - neighborhood - baseball - games thing, that whole explanation of spending all that time sitting at home reading about old Boston crimes. Why hadn’t he wanted me to know?

  I looked over at the door to the house, which was ajar. I pulled the letter from the scrapbook and placed it in my coat pocket, separate from the pile of materials I was going to take back to Boston.

  Quickly, I reloaded the boxes back into the locker and pushed it back into the corner. I headed into the house and told Deirdre I needed to get back to the airport. She had changed from her tank top and miniskirt into a loosely fitting T-shirt and a pair of short shorts — and still looked great, albeit exhausted.

  She kissed me on the left cheek and hung on what felt like a moment longer than I had expected. I kissed her cheek in return and again told her how sorry I was about what had happened, and how appreciative I was about her help.

  On my way toward the front hall, I felt in my pocket for the small roll of hundred-dollar bills I had brought on the trip. I placed it next to a stack of unopened mail atop an entry table by the door.

  I could probably be fired for doing that, but no one would ever know, no one but me and Deirdre Hayes. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  I got in the rental car and pulled down Rodeo Road for what I expected would be the final time in my threatened life and had no complaint about this fact. As I turned the corner, my cell phone vibrated in my back pocket. If I thought for a moment that Mongillo’s name would be the biggest surprise of the day, I was about to be proven woefully, frighteningly wrong.

  30

  Trust.

  It’s an interesting concept when you really stop and think about it. In huge swaths of America, it’s the way of the day, ingrained into the culture, the default attitude toward the people and institutions that make up civic life. On the sprawling farms of the heartland, in the village centers where ice cream sodas are still served at lunch counters in the local Rexall, people trust one another. They firmly believe that their neighbors, their friends, their colleagues, their business associates won’t try to slip a curveball past them.

  Shopkeepers allow customers to run monthly accounts, rightfully expecting that they’ll always make good. Business deals are sealed on the power of a handshake. Families leave their doors unlocked at night. Little kids ride their bikes alone to the local park.

  Of course, there are other huge areas of the country where trust is little more than a relic from a simpler, curious past. Here, people have double locks and police bars. They buy guns not to hunt but to protect. They hire $350-an-hour lawyers to comb through almost every single document that dictates their distrustful lives. Even Ronald Reagan’s famous “Trust but verify” philosophy seems antiquated, because to these people, there shouldn’t be any trust at all.

  I’d like to think that my instincts belong with the former group, but my circumstances have thrust me toward the latter. I’d like to think that at my core, in my heart, I’m a trusting person, wanting to believe the words and respect the actions of those around me. But in my more self-aware moments, I know this not to be true. I didn’t get into this bizarre profession of words and news to write day after day that government is basically good, that businesses will always do what’s right, that people, left to their own devices, will always take proper care of one another.

  No, in my advancing age, I’m as distrustful at anyone else — which is not to be confused with being untrustworthy. But who knows, maybe I’ve become that as well.

  But never do I remember being more distrustful in my entire wary life than I was at that exact moment, driving through the Nevada desert in the direction of McCarran International Airport and a US Airways Boeing 757 that would return me to a place I may not have been ready to go.

  I didn’t trust the Boston Police and other various government officials who said that Albert DeSalvo, long ago dead, was the Boston Strangler, responsible for the deaths of eleven women more than forty years ago who were identified as part of the Strangler spree, in addition to two other murders that he confessed to as well. I didn’t trust the same police who were telling me that this recent string of deaths was the result of a fame-seeking copycat killer.

  I didn’t trust the sitting senior senator from Massachusetts, who built his career on his success in “solving” the Strangler case so long ago. I didn’t trust the current police commissioner for the same reason.

  I didn’t trust the people I usually trust, and that may have hurt the most. I didn’t trust women, mostly in the form of Maggie Kane, who walked out on a marriage before it ever began. Of course, I was about to do the same, but that somehow seems beside the point.

  I didn’t trust Peter Martin and publisher Justine Steele to do the right thing — not after they were browbeaten by city officials into not running the Phantom Fiend’s written assertion that the new strangler was the same as the old strangler.

  I didn’t trust Vinny Mongillo. I didn’t think I’d ever say those words, except maybe in regard to leaving him alone with some really expensive food. But why on God’s good earth had he not told me that his mother was a strangling victim all those years ago?

  And I wasn’t so sure I trusted myself anymore. The great Edgar Sullivan was dead because of me. So was some guy on the Public Garden who I never even knew. And here I was, ambling along, herking and jerking my way through a story that had no clear end. Was the Boston Strangler ultimately planning on confessing to me? Did he intend to kill another ten women, bringing his total this time around to what it had been before? How was this thing going to be resolved, and what role could I play in hastening a resolution?

  And I certainly didn’t trust that anything good was about to happen, not as I listened on my cell phone to the aforementioned Peter Martin explain to me that the Phantom Fiend had reached out to me again in his most foreboding note yet, this one in the form of an e-mail to my Boston Record account. In the hours after Edgar’s death, Martin was wise en
ough to hire a security consultant, which had people monitoring my e-mail account, my U.S. mail, my house, and the newsroom. Thank God I didn’t live a life of secret fetishes, constantly communicating online with big-breasted blond amputees, because I would suddenly have a lot of explaining to do.

  That consultant, in turn, read the e-mail and forwarded it on to Martin, who, in turn, read it to me, and it went exactly like this: “Mr. Flynn, you didn’t honor the one, simple request I made of you, to publish my words in the way I asked you to. I thought you were better than this. For that, there will be swift and severe consequences. People will suffer for your gutlessness. You will suffer with them. You may personally pick up a package at six o’clock tonight at the corner of Winter Street and Winter Place. The Phantom Fiend.”

  I swallowed hard as I listened to every dreadful word. The Phantom didn’t seem to be a killer prone to hyperbole — i.e., see the word killer. Once he’s willing to kill beautiful young women, there’s not a whole lot that’s really worth exaggerating about. And now he was informing me that I, along with some nameless people, presumably other young women, would suffer from my gutlessness. I was half tempted to buy an advertisement in my cowardly little paper to let him know that I desperately wanted to run his words exactly in the way he had written them. Gutless my ass.

  I said to Martin, “This doesn’t bode well on pretty much any level.” It was really all I had to say. There was no “I told you so” necessary. It wouldn’t get me anywhere different than I already was, and I knew that immediately.

  Martin was so upset that his voice was on the brink of quavering when he said, “Maybe it’s not really him. Maybe this is the other side of the equation, the side that wants to see you dead.”

  I replied, “That doesn’t add up.” I didn’t really intend to keep this mathematical metaphor going, but I did nonetheless. “I don’t think the other side would know that we didn’t print something from the Phantom that we were asked to print. That is, unless you and Justine spread the word around a little too far.”