I reminded myself of my belief that the Phantom didn’t want me dead. Problem was, I was also reminded of the fact that the last time I showed up at a meeting supposedly created by the Phantom, someone ended up dead on the Public Garden. I put that out of my mind, perhaps out of desperation, maybe ignorance, probably both.
And I began walking, slowly, buying time, but for what I wasn’t sure. Probably for Hank Sweeney to get himself in better position. I walked past the door to an office building on my right, then the darkened entrance to Locke-Ober on my left. Inexplicably, the thought occurred to me that thousands of patrons of that restaurant, given its two-century tenure, had left this material world, and I wondered if I was about to join them. My thoughts, my mood, my expectations were of little more than death.
Or were they? One more time, I reminded myself that the Phantom wanted me alive. Very, very much alive. I was his mouthpiece for a message he hadn’t yet gotten out, and I don’t think he was about to kill me out of spite. Maybe somebody else was, but not the Phantom.
I arrived at the passageway, every bit as long and narrow as I had envisioned, and even darker than I had imagined. There wasn’t a single light along the way, which was a metaphor for something in my life, but damned if I could conjure up what.
This was really stupid, I realized, arguably the stupidest thing I had ever done, not just putting myself in harm’s way but voluntarily walking, unarmed and barely protected, into the most vulnerable crevice in all of Boston.
And yet I took that first step. And then another. And another yet.
They were slow steps, cautious and methodical. Pretty soon, it was as dark behind me as it was ahead — so dark that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I heard a dull squeak, and felt a swoosh along the pant leg at my shin. A rat, though, was the least of my worries. The passage was so narrow that I kept brushing against one of the cement sides with my shoulders.
After each step, I paused, looking for something that I couldn’t see, trying to hear something that perhaps wasn’t there, feeling for something that didn’t exist. I didn’t know. I only knew what my gut told me to do. There are thousands of newspaper reporters in this great country of mine, good reporters and bad, curious and incurious, ambitious and lazy, and I was the one, the single one, who was a big enough jackass to be meeting a killer in a tiny, blackened, concrete-enclosed sliver of downtown Boston tonight.
I got what I estimated was about 40 percent of the way through the walkway when I thought I heard a noise emanating from the other end. It was a vague scraping, shuffling noise, and I stopped, held my breath to stifle my own sounds, and strained to figure out what it was.
Scrape, scrape.
“Who’s there?” I called out.
My voice ricocheted off the walls, magnifying along the way, then echoing mournfully toward the end.
Silence.
But only for a moment. Then the scraping resumed, and the scraping was accompanied by hard breathing. I had a terrible picture in my mind of one of the Phantom Fiend’s victims lying on the passageway floor, not quite dead but barely alive, searching for help that maybe I was there to give.
So, frantically, I shouted again. “Who’s there? Say something! Who’s there?”
A panting noise now, and more scratching. I surged forward, perhaps in vain, maybe in stupidity. With each step, I poked ahead with my foot and pushed at the air with my outstretched arms. I took maybe four steps this way, looking not dissimilar to the way Frankenstein looked when he lurched across wherever it was that he lurched.
And that’s when the collision occurred.
Whatever it was, it was low to the ground, where I pictured the injured woman to be. I hit it with my knee and my foot at the same time. It was solid and resilient, very much alive. As I pushed against it, I heard a guttural noise, and whatever it was pushed back against me, knocking me off balance, toppling me against the side wall, and then to the ground.
I thrashed on the pavement, making contact with whatever it was, pushing against it while it pushed back at me.
“Who is it?” I yelled, my voice reverberating off the two walls. Again I got no answer, but I didn’t think I would; part of the reason for yelling was so Hank Sweeney could hear me out on the street.
I rose into a crouching position and felt around my knees — carefully. But just as I made contact with my hands, whoever it was, whatever it was, lunged at me, driving into my waist and chest, trying to take me down onto the undoubtedly urine-stained floor of this ancient passageway yet again.
I retaliated hard, quite literally fighting for my life. I grabbed he/she/it, forcing it off me, and then pinning it to the ground as I climbed on top of it, my face grazing one of the side walls. But still it wouldn’t give up, thrashing as it was. It felt solid. It felt muscular.
It felt, um, furry.
So I cupped my hands, ran them across the squirming figure, up and down in unison, until I felt an unmistakable shape I’ve felt thousands of times before: a dog’s head.
I felt its forehead. I felt its muzzle. I felt its floppy ears. I was relieved until the second I wasn’t, which was when it occurred to me that it could be a vicious pit bull or an aggressive rottweiler, sent into this enclosed space to tear me apart like the lions used to kill Roman peasants.
I grabbed whatever it was by the muzzle and held it closed with one hand, hearing a soft whimper in response. I patted around the animal’s neck with my other hand until I felt a collar, and I slipped my fingers inside. I struggled awkwardly to my feet, with both my hands otherwise involved in this creature, and began yanking him toward the direction from whence I came.
He or she was a willing prisoner, and reasonably polite, given the circumstances, passing along with me as I backed toward the entrance. My shoulders kept colliding with the walls, sending me staggering, but I never lost my grip on his nose or his neck.
And finally, I felt a little breeze on my neck and the sides of my face. The air became softer, less pungent, and a streetlight glowed from above. My eyes readjusted for a long moment, and I looked down at my hands to see a singularly frightened but particularly handsome black Labrador retriever staring at me with his enormous brown eyes. I let go of his muzzle, but not his collar.
Immediately, he hung his jaw open, gulping at air, panting hard. I knew how he felt. Then he voluntarily went into a sitting position in front of me, his eyes never leaving mine.
“What the hell were you doing in there?” I asked him.
He didn’t respond.
Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. He banged his tail hard on the pavement about half a dozen times, still staring at me staring at him.
For Hank Sweeney’s benefit, I said, “What’s a good dog like you doing in a dark alley like that?”
More tail thumping. I let go of his collar and he didn’t move away from me. Instead, he scratched at my leg with his left paw.
I crouched back down, this time in a show of peace. He licked me hard across my face, his grainy tongue seeming to pause on my cheek before it swept against my nose. I laughed, which was no small feat on this night, and memories, nice memories, wonderful memories, of my own golden retriever, Baker, dead a year now, washed through my head. So I pressed my face against his and rubbed the soft underside of his chin.
Which is when I felt it, an object jutting out of the bottom of his collar, much like a cask a Saint Bernard would carry. I maneuvered his collar around until the object was illuminated by the streetlamp. It was an envelope, business-size, folded over, fastened by a pin. I pulled it off delicately so as to not prick my new friend. Through the dark haze, I saw that the envelope bore the name Jack Flynn. I think I’ve heard of the guy. Tall. Handsome. Brave.
I was getting punchy, obviously, or maybe just relieved that I got out of that passageway alive. I pulled the dog by the collar down to the near end of Winter Place, out onto Winter Street, and toward Boston Common. I didn’t want to let go, because I didn’t want him to get hit by a car. He walk
ed agreeably, nearly appreciatively, beside me.
Out on the main intersection, where the passing traffic gave me the feeling of safety, I pulled him into a Bank of America storefront that contained an ATM. It was relatively clean, and bright, and enclosed, all good things at the moment. We were alone in there, so I let go of his collar. He sprawled out on the floor with a short groan, followed by a long sigh, as I opened the envelope. I tried to be careful in tearing the paper in case there was any forensic evidence involved.
Inside, I felt a heavy laminated card, and my heart immediately sank into my stomach: a driver’s license, another dead woman, killed on my watch, as I did too little to stop it. I held the license in my hand for what felt like a long minute without looking at it, frustration and helplessness seeping through every pore of my exhausted body. My prior relief devolved into contained fury. The dog sprawled on the floor with his eyes at half-mast. A car honked its horn out on Tremont Street. A group of teenagers laughed as they strode past on the sidewalk.
I slowly lifted the license to my eyes. I wasn’t in any rush to see the next victim, because it didn’t really do me — or her — any good to know. My only job here, courtesy of the Phantom, wasn’t to help or to stop or to investigate, but merely to convey. Another day, another license, another dead woman somewhere in Boston. How many more women would die before this story came to an end?
I flicked the license over and stared at it, but what I saw didn’t fully, immediately register. The face, it was familiar, the way her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her eyes were piercing, and she was giving this look as if she was about to call out my name, not in any sort of plea, but casually, like she had a million times before. Where do you want to eat. What movie do you want to see. Let’s go grab a drink after work.
I melted at her image, almost as if I hadn’t realized yet why I was seeing it.
And then I did, and I screamed, except nothing would come out. Finally, with blurred vision and with trembling hands, I read her name, just to be sure I hadn’t lost my mind, that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on my brain. But it was there in black and white, the newest victim of the Phantom Fiend.
Elizabeth Riggs.
32
Next thing I knew, the door of the ATM storefront blasted open, and I looked up to see Hank Sweeney, sweating and panting, lunging toward me. Much later, I’d ask him why he didn’t simply buzz the door open with his bank card rather than kick it down with his foot. And at that time, he’d explain to me that he didn’t carry a card because he didn’t trust what he called those “fancy-schmancy financial gimmicks,” adding, “I’m a cash-and-carry kind of guy.”
On his end of the two-way radio connection, he thought I was a man in distress. And I was, just not in the way he expected. I was hunched over the counter with the ATM deposit envelopes and the pens chained to the faux-wood top. I showed him the license in my hand and he said, “Oh God. That son of a fucking bitch.”
By the way, alarms were sounding, courtesy of Hank and the broken door. I have virtually no doubt that our images were clearly captured on the two surveillance cameras inside, and soon enough, our faces would be hanging on bulletin boards in post offices as far away as Nebraska and Wyoming.
He grabbed me by the arm and the two of us bolted out the door and across Tremont Street toward his parked car. When I put my fingers on the door handle, a synapse fired in my brain and I exclaimed, “Fuck!” I looked across the roof of the car at Hank and said, “I’ll be right back.” And I bolted across the street from whence I came, weaving amid the late-night traffic.
When I got to the ATM, the dog was still inside — sitting by the glass door, which was broken but shut, just staring out into the dark street. When he saw me approach, he stood up and began to pace, his tail furiously wagging. When I stepped inside, he was crying with joy.
I scooped him up in my arms, all seventy or so pounds of him, and scampered back across the street, carrying him all the way to Hank’s car, his head resting placidly on my shoulder, his wet muzzle pushing against my ear. When I pushed him into the backseat, Hank flatly said, “You’re going to put that beast in my nice clean car?” I gave him a look.
Hank asked, “How do we know he doesn’t bite?”
I looked back at the dog, who had already spread himself out across the seat, panting softly, staring straight ahead in contentment. I said, “Hank, he’s wondering the exact same thing about you. Shut up and drive.”
So he threw the car into drive — Hank, not the dog, though where we were heading, I neither knew nor particularly cared. I pulled my cell phone out, located Elizabeth Riggs’s cell phone number on my speed dial, and pressed Call.
It took an agonizing moment to connect, and finally I heard a ring. Then another. And another — five times in all. Her recorded voice came on the line and said, “You’ve reached Elizabeth. You don’t need me to explain what to do.” And then a beep. The futility of this exercise was starting to overtake me, yet I left a message anyway. You don’t have anything when you don’t have hope.
“Elizabeth, Jack. This is an emergency. Call me immediately. Immediately. Please.” And I hung up.
I located her home number on my speed dial and pressed Call. Same drill — another agonizing moment, then a ring, followed by several more, followed by her voice saying, “Sorry I’m not around. Let me know who it is, and we’ll talk soon.”
“Elizabeth, Jack. Sorry for the hour, but this is really, really important. Call me ASAP on my cell.”
I stared at my cell, willing it to ring. In the meantime, I punched out 411 and asked an operator to connect me to San Francisco Police. I thought of that night at the San Francisco Airport, her sidling up to me, the casual banter, the look she gave me after I kissed her on the cheek, her bombshell announcement that she was pregnant.
And then it struck me like a lightning bolt that someone had followed me out to Las Vegas, and had seen me in the waiting lounge with Elizabeth. He undoubtedly assumed we were lovers, and that’s why he targeted her now.
“Hold the line, please, for the San Francisco Police Department.” That was the woman from directory assistance, patching me through.
Another woman answered the phone and informed me that this call was being recorded. I told her that someone in her city might be in trouble. She asked, skeptically, what I meant. Good question. I told her I had received an ominous threat. She asked the address. I gave it to her. Then I gave her my number.
That call ended, I looked at Hank and said, “Where are we headed?”
“The newsroom. It’s where you do your best thinking.” And then he added, “You need to call Boston PD.”
I did. He was right. But something was holding me back, that something known as distrust. Still, his first simple answer — “the newsroom” — jarred something in my head, and I pulled my phone open again, dialed 411, and asked for the number for The New York Times.
After an infuriating five-minute session with the newspaper’s automatic telephone system, a real live human being finally picked up a phone, announcing in a bored voice, “National Desk.” It was now 1:45 a.m. I suspected they were just past deadline for their final edition.
I said, “This is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for the Boston Record. Is the national editor on duty around?”
“You’re talking to him.” No name, no nothing. His voice remained every bit as bored and almost painstakingly unimpressed by the announcement of my identity. I mean, I assumed everyone at The Times knew who I was, dating back to that botched presidential assassination deal a few years back when I kicked the shit out of them for a month straight on the biggest story in the world. And here I was at the heart of another story that was increasingly national in scope.
I said, “Sir, this is something of a life-and-death emergency. I’m the Record’s reporter on the Phantom Fiend/Boston Strangler story. I desperately need to contact your San Francisco reporter, Elizabeth Riggs, but she’s not answering her home or cell phone number. D
o you know if she’s on the road? Have you talked to her recently?”
“Tell me your name again.”
Good Christ. Your name would have to be Bartleby Hornsby III to have any impact on these clowns, and then the most he’d probably ask is if I had a brother who went to Deerfield or Exeter.
“Jack Flynn,” I said, gritting my teeth.
Hank was steering through the Theater District now, such as it is in Boston, heading toward the highway for the short jaunt to the Record.
“And why do you need her?” Bored as ever, the words coming out of his mouth like marshmallows.
I said, “She may be in grave danger. Look, I’m a Record reporter. I’m covering this story. If it helps at all, The Times has twice offered me a job.”
Working in the company cafeteria.
I fell silent. I could hear him pecking around a keyboard, presumably with his fingers. And then he said, sleepily, “Our file shows she’s in Boston on assignment.”
My heart fell even further, if that’s possible, and I didn’t think it was. One more bit of bad news and the thing would be beating in the soles of my feet — or not beating at all.
I said, “When did she get here and where is she staying?”
More silence, though I could again hear the pecking in the near background.
He cleared his throat. “Tell me your name again,” he said.
I did. Then he said, “The Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel. I have her down in Room 533. She was supposed to have arrived yesterday.”
I hung up without saying good-bye, and all but screamed at Hank to point the car toward Copley Square, which he did.
On the way crosstown, on the virtually empty streets, I punched out 411 again and asked for the hotel number. It rang through and a man in an unfamiliar accent — probably best known as hotelier — answered the phone. When I asked for Elizabeth Riggs’s room, he hesitated for what felt like forever, asked me to spell it, put me on hold, and then got back on the line.
“I’ll put you right through, sir,” he said. And he did.
Strangled Page 27
