Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  “You want to sleep out here?” I asked. “You can sleep anywhere you want. Me, I’m going to bed.”

  He continued to growl — a low gurgle, really. I walked over to him and crouched down, putting my face toward his. He kept looking around the apartment, looking into the open doors that led to the dark spaces of the other bedroom, the entry hall, the bathroom. I rubbed his head, only to feel how rigid his entire body had become. He looked at me mournfully, and I said, “Do you sense my dog? Is that what it is? Can you smell Baker?”

  Huck kept looking around, tense. I said, “Look, I’ve got to get some sleep. You can stand sentry all night, if you’d like, but that’s your choice.”

  He didn’t budge.

  I clicked off the living room light, sending the apartment into total darkness again. That’s when I heard the noise.

  It began softly, like a distant movement, maybe a rustle, cloth against cloth. It came from behind my bedroom door, leading me to assume I had left a window open and the drapes were blowing in the breeze.

  I was about to open the door when Huck let out a low, guttural woof — more a directive to me than a warning to anyone else. I pulled my hand off the knob and looked back at him as he stared intensely at the door. His actions, or maybe they were reactions, were now making me tense.

  Then another sound.

  This one was more like footsteps — definitely movement, someone or something walking on the carpeted floor of my bedroom. I thought immediately of Edgar Sullivan, shot dead in a CVS a little more than twenty-four hours ago, and how unspeakably sad that really was. I thought of Joshua Carpenter, gunned down in the Boston Public Garden while he mourned his late wife. And now whoever did that might well be in my apartment, lying in wait for me.

  I looked back at the dog and put a finger over my mouth, in the universal sign that requested he not bark. I’m not sure he understood, though maybe he did. Something creaked from behind the door, and then everything fell quiet.

  I thought of stepping outside and calling the police. The police, at least one of them, might have been the bad guys in all this, given what I suspected Mac Foley was up to. So I put that plan on hold. I thought of calling Hank, but didn’t want to leave Elizabeth Riggs unprotected. I thought of calling Vinny Mongillo, but he was stuck in jail. I thought of calling Peter Martin, but unless I planned to nag the intruder to death, that wouldn’t do any good.

  So I put my hand on the doorknob again. I was tired. I was frustrated. I was furious over having been unwittingly lured into the center of a lurid tale, alliteration intended. I was even angrier over the fact that people, innocent people, good people, had died. And in a more honest moment, I would probably confess that I felt more than a little guilty that I was still alive.

  So without further ado, I flung the door open, simultaneously yelling, “Don’t fucking move!”

  I’m not quite sure what I expected to find, though it probably involved a man in a black ski hat holding a semiautomatic weapon pointed at my face. Didn’t matter; I wanted to confront whoever it was that was trying to do whatever it was that they were doing. I wanted to see the face. I wanted to take a swing. Maybe, just maybe, I’d surprise him. Maybe I’d wrestle him to the ground, knock him out cold, summon authorities, and gain my biggest clue yet as to what the hell was going on.

  Well, I didn’t find that. Any of that.

  No, what I found was a five-foot-seven-inch woman with a short mop of blond hair, and big blue eyes that were at once sleepy and surprised, wearing one of my blue oxford cloth shirts and nothing else, balancing a glass of water in her hand while she climbed into my rumpled bed. Her name was Maggie Kane, and she said to me, very simply, “I won’t.”

  Huck, standing directly behind me, brave boy that he was, inched out in front, slowly at first, hesitantly — until Maggie called out, “Who’s this?” And then he went scampering over, relief all across his face, his tail slapping against the side of the bed.

  Me, I stayed in the doorway. Men might be dogs, but I didn’t want to act like one here. Plus I was too tired. And shocked.

  I hadn’t seen her since before we were supposed to become husband and wife, meaning before she fled the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to get away from me and us, and before I had sat in Caffe Vittoria in Boston’s North End and decided that she wasn’t the woman I was meant to be with for the rest of my life. That seemed, by the way, like five centuries ago.

  I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. I didn’t know if I should feel vindicated. I didn’t know if I should feel relieved. I didn’t know if I should feel anger, arousal, disdain, contempt, humiliation, or overwhelming joy.

  But the reality was, I didn’t feel any of that. I didn’t feel any of that because I didn’t feel anything at all. I stood there in that doorway, looking at a barely attired woman who ninety-nine out of a hundred guys would have been jumping and screaming for joy to have found lying in their bed, and what I felt was nothing.

  “How are you?”

  That was me, with one of the more unoriginal questions I’d ever asked. She didn’t take it that way. She looked up from the dog to me and replied, “How am I? I’m horrified. I’m depressed. I’m ashamed. I’m unspeakably sad. And I’m really, really sorry.”

  She kept her eyes on mine, studying me for a reaction, some hint of emotion that I’m sure she couldn’t find. She was sitting up on the bed now, her arms wrapped around her knees. The dog was sitting on the floor beside her, looking up with something that approached awe.

  For a passing, fleeting moment, I allowed myself some awe of my own over the situation. We were supposed to be in some five-star resort on the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii, getting pampered nonstop by a solicitous staff, having sex often and urgently, dining under the stars, looking forward to a life well lived, together.

  Instead, I had the smack and acrid taste of death all around every single thing I did, to the point that it felt like it would never be any different than what it was then. And this woman, this fundamentally happy, confident, well-balanced woman, was confessing shame, humiliation, and depression.

  I don’t know how else to put it: Life really sucks sometimes.

  But I was too tired to carry this out any further, to explore some of the not-so-subtle nuances of it all.

  She asked, “How are you?” as I knew she would.

  I yawned, long and hard, and replied, “I haven’t slept in two days. I’ve never been more exhausted in my life. I’ve got a story that’s killing everyone around me. I’ve more suspicions than proof. I’ve got little faith in anything that anyone does around me. I have no hope that anything is about to change for the better.”

  I paused and added, “Otherwise, I’m great.”

  She continued to stare at me. I snuck a glance, then looked down at the floor in silence, my arms folded across my chest. The Harvard Medical School’s psychology department could do a case study in our body language here.

  I quietly added, “None of this is your fault, by the way.”

  I snuck another glance and saw a tear rolling down her cheek. This was not what I wanted.

  So I said, “I’m desperate for some sleep. Is there any possible way I can get in my own bed and go to sleep for the night, and we’ll talk about this some other time?”

  She asked, “Do you want me to stay or leave?”

  Let’s not put too fine a point on it: I wanted her to leave. It was three-thirty in the morning. She skipped town on our wedding. She used her own keys to come unannounced into my apartment. I wanted to sprawl across my own bed for the next four hours unencumbered and unconcerned. But I didn’t have the energy for the scene that her departure would inevitably require.

  “Why don’t you stay,” I said.

  Ends up, those would be just about the last words we’d ever speak to each other. Maybe communication isn’t my strong suit, as Mongillo likes to remind me every time I write a story. When I got up the next day, Maggie was still asleep; when I got back to my apartment th
at night, she was long gone.

  I climbed into bed. Two minutes later, I was already drifting off toward an unsteady slumber when I felt two paws beside me, then some tension, lifting, struggling, and then two more paws. Huck stepped methodically over my back and set himself down in the shallow valley between us, wrapping a paw over my head and resting his snout about two millimeters away from my ear.

  At least something in this life was going right.

  36

  The sprawling lobby of Boston Police headquarters was oddly quiet when I walked through the double doors at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning for my meeting with Commissioner Hal Harrison — maybe due to the fact that Vinny Mongillo and his big mouth had been bailed out by the Record’s attorney about three hours before.

  The silver-haired desk sergeant looked at me in silence. I said, “Jack Flynn of the Record here to see the commissioner.” He made a little clucking sound that seemed to emanate from the roof of his mouth, snapped up the phone, and in a moment a young cadet with neither a gun nor an attitude arrived to escort me upstairs.

  The commissioner’s suite was empty, and I wondered if even the commissioner himself was in. The cadet asked me to sit in a little waiting lounge that looked to be designed by someone’s grandmother — a grandmother, though, who had an affinity for antique, wall-mounted guns. I didn’t sit, mostly because I was pretty tired of doing as told; standing was my little rebellion. Sometimes you draw your own line in life, even when no one else notices, and this happened to be mine.

  The cadet disappeared, returned in a moment, and said, “The commissioner is ready to see you.” No power games here, which was good.

  For whatever it’s worth, and maybe that’s nothing, I’ll note that I was feeling about as unsettled as I ever had before. Edgar was still dead, and that wasn’t going to change. Elizabeth Riggs was still threatened, and that wasn’t going to change, either, at least not until this serial murderer was captured. The good news there was that she still had the estimable Hank Sweeney at her side. The bad news was that in the meantime, other women might still die.

  All the while, something was clattering around in the hollow spaces of my mind, little shards of information that I needed to piece into actual enlightenment — things people said, stuff they did that didn’t add up, or maybe they did and that was the problem, that I couldn’t do the math. Sometimes it felt like the shards were coming together, creating a whole, and then they’d suddenly blow apart, leaving me grasping at air, figuratively, if not literally as well.

  “Nice of you to come in on your day off, Jack.”

  That was Commissioner Hal Harrison, standing behind that big oak desk of his, wearing a beige V-neck sweater and a pair of carefully pressed blue pants, the crease so tight you could cut a steak with it, and not some soft tenderloin but a thick sirloin or a well-marbled rib eye.

  He leaned over his desk and extended his hand, and as we shook, I almost laughed at the notion of a day off, like I was going to kick back at home with a bag of Fritos and a six-pack of Sam Adams and watch March Madness on TV, not a worry in this delightful little world that we all share. Of course, that made me think again of the Hawaiian resort that was charging me for not being there, which made me think of the prior night with Maggie Kane, which made me happy not to be at that resort. Suddenly, work seemed good. See, life’s really simple, even when it doesn’t necessarily feel that way.

  “Nice of you to have me,” I said, the two of us maintaining the veneer of politeness.

  The commissioner leaned to the side of his high-backed leather chair. I took a seat across the desk from him. He said, “Jack, you’re a young pup. You weren’t here back in the early sixties when this Strangler stuff was exploding around this town. You don’t have a feel for what it did to Boston, to the people, to the cops like me and the prosecutors I worked with trying to get a handle on it.”

  He paused and looked at me, hard. I held firm to his gaze.

  “I was here,” he said. “I was in the middle of it. I was one of the lead detectives on the biggest, most comprehensive, most demanding investigations this department has ever undertaken.”

  God how politicians love the word I, and that’s what Hal Harrison had become — a politician. You could see it all over his face. You could hear it wrapped around his every word. He wasn’t so much concerned about the victims who had already been killed or those who were about to be. No, he was concerned about his own future, meaning whether this murder spree was going to get in the way of his becoming mayor.

  Clank, clank, clank. There were those shards of information, bumping against intuition, almost coming together, painfully close but not quite. And then it all fell apart again, like when you can’t remember someone’s name even when it’s right there on the tip of your tongue.

  “Let me tell you, Jack, it wasn’t a good time for this city. Jack Kennedy was assassinated right in the middle of it all. The Vietnam War was brewing. The country was going through huge changes. And we had some bastard, some absolute bastard, strangling women to death right in our midst.”

  I didn’t know where he was going with any of this, so I simply sat in silence and went along for the unusual ride. I could hear church bells peal in the distance. I momentarily imagined older women in their Sunday best marching tentatively into Mass and praying for the safety of their daughters amid this murder spree. My eyes drifted toward the big windows, which revealed a gray, dank morning outside, moist, but still without any rain.

  Harrison continued. “We worked like dogs. I worked. A guy by the name of Lieutenant Bob Walters, a good man, my immediate superior, worked. Stu Callaghan worked up in the attorney general’s office. We worked ourselves to the bone, morning, noon, and night. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many leads we pursued, how many tips we chased, how many doors we broke down, how many suspects we interrogated, always grabbing at nothing more than straws and air.”

  He paused, collecting himself, surprised, I sensed, at his own eloquence. Maybe he truly was speaking from the heart. Maybe his words flowed out unrehearsed. I usually know these things, but for the moment I couldn’t tell.

  “And then we caught ourselves a good old-fashioned break. Jack, we got a confession. Albert DeSalvo knew those murder scenes cold…”

  He began explaining just how well DeSalvo knew them, sharing details with me about the intricacies of the various scenes. Meantime, my brain cut out — not over something he said, but something he didn’t. He did not include Detective Mac Foley on his honor roll of those who worked the case hard way back when, and given my suspicions now, this became more than interesting.

  I finally cut back in and said, “Mac Foley.” Hey, why not? When was the commissioner going to make himself available to me again? He stopped talking mid-sentence and stared at me, undoubtedly surprised by the interruption as well as the name. I added, “He was your colleague on the investigation. He’s on this investigation now. He’s one of the most successful detectives in BPD homicide. How come you didn’t mention his name?”

  Harrison regarded me long and hard. He ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and leaned back in his chair, his fist under his chin. He suddenly leaned forward, thrusting his elbows on his desk, and asked, “Can we talk off the record?”

  This wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do, but I nodded, too curious about what he might want to say to ruin the deal.

  “Mac’s a good man. He is,” Harrison said, talking lower, his off-the-record tone, I figured. “But I worry about the quality of his work as a detective.” His eyes locked on mine, as if willing me toward complicity. I showed no emotion.

  “He was way off the reservation back then, to the point where I was worried about him — his psychological state, if you know what I mean. These days, he’s heading to retirement, kind of phoning it in. Soon as he’s gone, I think this investigation will move a lot swifter.”

  I asked, “Why don’t you simply remove him?”

  He smiled at me, lea
ning back again. “Politics, my friend. Politics. City hall. Departmental. News media. You name it. You have to balance a lot of concerns in this chair.”

  This was interesting to me, every word, especially those about Mac Foley’s psychological state. Could my wildest suspicions be right? Could he have snapped? On his way out the door, could he be killing women, reliving the toughest investigation of his career? Had he completely lost it?

  Or here’s another thought: Was he the Strangler way back then, kind of a police version of the firebug arsonists once so common across the country — firefighters who actually lit the infernos that they were called to put out? But if he was the Strangler back then, why would he have been ticked off over DeSalvo’s confession? Could he have felt that someone else was taking credit for his work?

  I was pondering these questions when my back pocket vibrated. I casually pulled my phone out and saw it was Martin calling in, and I put it back. Ten seconds later, he called again, and again ten seconds after that. The guy might have had the journalistic brains of Bob Woodward, but at the moment I wanted to wring his neck.

  “What’s your relationship like with Foley?” I asked.

  “Nonexistent. Lord knows I’ve tried. We started together. We’re leaving together, but he’s refused to be even civil to me in the forty years since Albert DeSalvo confessed — like I was somehow responsible for his cockamamie theories not panning out on the Strangler case.”

  My phone vibrated yet again. I cussed Martin under my breath, pulled it out, glanced at it, and saw it was a 702 area code — a call from Las Vegas.

  As I put the phone back, I felt Vinny Mongillo’s thank-you note to Bob Walters folded up in my back pocket. So I pulled it out and said, “While we’re off the record, you’ve got to see this. These charges you’ve filed against Vinny Mongillo are bullshit, and this proves it.”