Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  Hank looked hard at the guy and said, “Wait a minute, I know you.” He still had that smooth voice, though his next motion didn’t seem quite so calm. He raised his fist and cracked it down on the guy’s nose, causing a veritable explosion of blood. The man was actually reduced to tears as Hank called out, “Let’s go.”

  Vinny Mongillo was already up and about, seemingly recovered from his close call. The three of us got to the back door in unison. Hank flicked the lights back off and we all filed outside. My cell phone said 11:27.

  On the loading dock, I asked, “Who was that?”

  Hank replied, “Goddamned police captain, one of the commissioner’s top yes-men. Maybe I should say henchmen. Seems like the commish has been going to extremes to block your story.”

  As I let that little shard of information sink in, Mongillo asked, “No luck with the letter?”

  I shook my head. Hank said, “We’ve got to give it up.” He pointed to a car turning from Clarendon Street into the alley and added, “The writing’s on the wall. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  The writing’s on the wall.

  This jarred something deep inside my head, or maybe it wasn’t that deep. Maybe it was something that had been precariously floating along the surface of my mind, something I couldn’t quite piece together.

  All truths are easier to understand once they are discovered.

  That was Paul Vasco, in his miserable little room on that miserable Friday that Edgar Sullivan died at the hands of a gunman in the Beacon Hill CVS, and I was just now starting to sense what Vasco meant.

  You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.

  That gem, courtesy of the famous H. Gordon Thomas, pretty much summarized what I had been trying to do right here. But it occurred to me that I had the wrong execution of the right idea. It was as if I had just heard a clap of thunder in my brain.

  I turned to Hank and all but yelled, “What’s the zip code of police headquarters?”

  The car was pulling down the alley now, into a space in front of the bay.

  Hank told me.

  “Hold this person off,” I called out as I slipped back under the garage door.

  I could hear Hank hissing, “Wait,” as I groped my way farther inside.

  Once in, I flicked on my penlight, got myself to the row of canvas baskets, and found the one marked with the zip code at police headquarters. There were about a hundred envelopes inside, and I furiously picked up a stack and sorted through them, throwing the ones that I didn’t need onto the floor. No luck.

  So I scooped out another stack. I couldn’t hear anyone at the door. I couldn’t hear anything at all but my own heavy breathing. And that breathing got a whole lot heavier when I came upon a plain white envelope with “Detective Mac Foley” typed in a familiar font. I tossed the rest of the mail back in the carrier and set out for the door.

  I slammed into a desk, stopped for a moment to get my bearings, and shone my light across the room to determine an easy flow to the door.

  Click.

  That sound, though, stopped me cold. It occurred right in front of me, in an open area of the room unencumbered by furniture or tall baskets. I shone my light onto the floor, and about ten feet away, in my path toward freedom and what I strongly suspected was a magnificent story that no one else would ever have, that middle-aged man with the bloody thigh was aiming a handgun directly at the bridge of my handsome nose.

  “Drop it,” I said. I had no authority to command this. Well, maybe moral authority, but not a whole lot else. I had no weapon. I had no easy hiding place. I didn’t even have the power of persuasion, because by the time I’d use it, I think I’d already be dead.

  The man, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, was trembling as he held the trigger up around his eyes and took aim at my face. I had watched Hank Sweeney grab the guy’s gun, but apparently, like the perpetrator in the CVS, he was hiding another. Actually, I shone my light on his face and realized he was the same attacker as in CVS, a thought that didn’t exactly thrill me because it meant he had no compunction about killing.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  I said this mostly to buy time, to play out my options, to give Hank or Mongillo or the postal inspector or the Easter Bunny time to walk inside this goddamned dank post office and shoot this nutcase in the back of the head. Problem was, I didn’t see any of the above — and didn’t hear them, either.

  The gunman, by the way, didn’t reply to my assertion. He just kept pointing, trying to get his bearings, shaking all the while.

  I said, “I can help you with that wound. I can drive you to the hospital, drop you off at the emergency room, get you taken care of, and no one will ever know why you or I were here.”

  Again, nothing.

  I shone my light more directly on him, and noticed what his hesitance was in shooting me. He was slowly gathering his body, arduously lifting it upward against the pain of his own wound. He was obviously trying to position himself to be able to flee once the gunshot rocketed through the room and I lay dead on the floor. Sweat was pouring down his face as he tried to move, hampering his vision.

  “Get that fucking light down,” he said, his Boston accent thick, his voice craggy and tough.

  I pushed the light off to the side, and in the process saw the glint of a metal object on the desk that I had just slammed into. It was a letter opener, long and sharp, just sitting there for the taking.

  So here’s what happened next. I sized up the gunman’s position, and then mine. I flicked my flashlight off, leapt over the desk, grabbed the handle of the letter opener, and flung it directly into his temple, kung-fu style, killing him instantly.

  Well, all right, that’s what I was trying to do, anyway. Would have been good, even if I wasn’t.

  Here’s what actually happened. I flicked off my flashlight. The split second I did that, he began firing, the bullets passing so close to my face and shoulders that I could hear them scream past in the air.

  I dove for cover, paused for about ten seconds, picked a basket filled with mail up off the floor, and heaved it in his direction — one, then another after that, and still another. After the third one, the gunman groaned in agony. Suddenly the lights sprung to life in the room. Sweeney raced toward us with his weapon drawn. The perpetrator lay on the ground, still as a statue, his gun just out of reach of his hand. Sweeney approached frantically, kicked the gun farther away, lifted the guy’s head off the concrete, and announced, “He’s out cold. You must have hit him in the head with this basket.”

  Brings new meaning to the USPS motto of “We deliver for you.”

  “I’ve got to run, Hank.”

  “So do I,” he said.

  We bolted for the door. Outside, Mongillo was talking to a pair of postal workers like they were relatives. Actually, as we were leaving, one of them called out, “I promise, cousin, nothing but silence.”

  At my car, I flipped open the driver’s door and climbed in beside a sleeping dog named Huck, who had crawled into the passenger seat. I flicked on the dome light, calmed my nerves for a second, gently opened the envelope that I had risked my life to get, and held its contents in my sweating hands.

  I unfolded a single sheet of paper and bore down with my eyes to read it.

  “Back again,” it said. “Still more to follow.”

  On a separate line were the words “The Phantom Fiend.”

  It was written in that same typeface as the notes I had received at the Record. In my other hand I was holding something else, something that it literally hurt me to my core to feel: the driver’s license of a thirty-four-year-old woman named Jennifer Cooper who was listed at an address on Commonwealth Avenue.

  Jennifer Cooper, I said to myself, rest in peace.

  I snapped open my phone, saw it was 11:35, and hit the speed-dial button for Peter Martin. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Peter, you’ve got to kill the Fol
ey story,” I yelled. “You’ve got to kill it now. It’s wrong. I’ve got the facts right here in my hand. I can write another story identifying the Phantom Fiend.”

  “Who is it?” Martin asked.

  “Paul Vasco. He’s definitely the killer now, I’m betting he was the killer then. I’ve got it good enough to go with.”

  “You’re telling me that with all we have on Mac Foley, that he’s not guilty?”

  “Peter, he’s guilty,” I replied. “He’s guilty as hell. He’s just not guilty of murder.”

  Martin said, “I don’t know what the hell you mean, but I trust that you’ll make it clear in print. Now get in here and do your job.”

  Mongillo was still standing on the curb with Sweeney when I threw the car into drive. It was the first time in a week that I was about to write something that I really wanted to say.

  43

  The turquoise waves rhythmically rolled against the soft shore — breaking, foaming, retreating — as I stretched out in a comfortable chaise lounge on the khaki-colored sand, drifting in and out of the most deeply satisfying slumber of my entire sheltered life. Tropical birds chirped in the distance. The gentle sun caressed the pale features of my tired face. I swear I could hear dolphins splashing offshore.

  “Are you going up to the beach bar?”

  That was the voice of Vinny Mongillo, who happened, not by coincidence, to be lying on the chaise beside mine.

  I opened one eye, then the other.

  “What’d I do that made you think I was going up to the bar?”

  Vinny said, “Well, it’s hot out here. If you were hot, I thought you might be thirsty. If you were thirsty, you might be going for a drink.”

  I said, “I was sleeping.”

  Vinny said, “I’m just saying.”

  I closed my eyes again.

  “So you’re not?”

  Okay, I guess this is what I get for bringing my friend and colleague on vacation to a five-star beach resort halfway around the world from where we began. It ended up that the hotel wouldn’t give me a refund on my honeymoon; the manager, who I’m betting was still on his first wife, said I had canceled too close to our arrival date. He offered me a credit instead, so here I was, accepting it — Vinny, as usual, along for the free ride. I mean, you can’t bring another girl along on your canceled honeymoon, right? Answer below.

  Seventy-eight, by the way. That was the temperature of the water I’d been wondering about just before the shots rang out in the Back Bay annex of the U.S. Postal Service on that night four weeks earlier when the Record broke what may be the most closely followed story that Boston has ever known. More on that in a moment.

  My reverie broken, I said to Vinny, “How long do you want to live?”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No, it’s a serious question.” And I meant it.

  “Just one more day than I need.”

  Interesting answer, though all his answers are usually pretty interesting. I sat up and looked over at him sprawled topless in his chair, clad in a pair of flowered surfer shorts, slathered in baby oil, his skin as dark as the inside of that post office ever was, his hand wrapped around a cell phone that I’m not even sure worked this far away from home.

  “Need to do what?” I asked.

  He looked at me. Even his cocoa-colored eyes seemed to have darkened in the sun.

  “You know — whatever. Win a Pulitzer. Start a family. Achieve some sense of inner peace.”

  I was about to say something, though what, I’m not really sure, when he cut in, “That’s the problem with you, Jack. You almost had what you always wanted, and then it got taken away. Now you’re too hesitant to do something that’s not planned down to the most minute details. You’re too protective — of yourself. Maybe it’s just that you’re afraid.”

  For this I got woken from a quiet reverie involving marine mammals and cockapoos. Or maybe that’s cockatoos.

  “Treat life like a story,” he said. “Let it unfold. Kick your feet up and go along for the ride. Manipulate it where you can, enjoy the parts that you can’t.”

  A nice thought, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.

  I slammed the Paul Vasco story out of the park that night. As I sped back to the Record, I dispatched Mongillo and Hank Sweeney to Jennifer Cooper’s apartment and they found exactly what I expected, which was her body, dead about a day.

  I jumped on the phone and called the Boston Police Department’s holding cell and had them put Detective Mac Foley on the line. I told him what I had, which was an intercepted letter from Paul Vasco to him. I told him what we found, which was a dead woman highlighted in the mailing. And then I told him what I believed, which was that Paul Vasco was sending him the driver’s licenses and other clues leading him to recently strangled women, just as the Boston Strangler had done with Bob Walters some forty years before.

  And just like four decades previous, higher-ups in the department wanted to keep the correspondence under wraps. So Foley in turn forwarded them on to me, knowing they would generate enormous publicity and immense public pressure around the case, just at the time that the buffoonish commissioner was running for mayor.

  In what may well be the most extraordinary on-the-record interview of my career, Mac Foley admitted to all this and more. He said he was so frustrated with the lack of publicity that he devised that mini-manifesto, and that when the Record didn’t immediately publish it, he stole Elizabeth Riggs’s driver’s license and sent me the note that essentially said “Or else.” He never intended to kill her. That’s what he said, anyway. I guess I believe him, but maybe not.

  Foley was being hailed as a hero throughout BPD, a whistle-blower of the highest order. Soon enough, though, he’d be an indicted one. Word is that the Suffolk County District Attorney is looking at charges of evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and interfering with an investigation. With a good lawyer, my bet is that he can keep himself out of jail.

  The entire journalism world was chasing us the next day, and just when they thought they’d caught up, we came out the day after that with the results of DNA testing from Mongillo’s long-hidden knife. The irrefutable findings: Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler. More bedlam, like it couldn’t get any worse, until the morning after that when we carried the story, based on the cigarette butt that we had pulled from that dismal little room, that Paul Vasco’s DNA was tied to at least five of the murders from the early 1960s.

  Hal Harrison ended his mayoral campaign that very day, not with a bang but with a press release. He needed to spend more time with his family, he said. I didn’t quite get that, since he was divorced and his kids were off in college. What was he going to do, attend keg parties with them? I never had the heart to ask.

  Of course, Mongillo, Sweeney, and I committed at least one felony, and probably multiple felonies, that crucial night we came up with Vasco’s letter. Fortunately, it hadn’t been postmarked yet, and no one ever pressed us on the interception. The Traveler carried a story a couple of days after the fact reporting that Captain Carl Gowan, one of Commissioner Hal Harrison’s top aides, was wounded in a mysterious attack just outside the Back Bay post office, and had crawled inside seeking help. The case remained under investigation. We’re all holding our collective breath for the results.

  As Hank Sweeney told me in no uncertain terms, it was Commissioner Hal Harrison who wanted me dead throughout the story. Soon as I get back east, I’m going to pursue that theory, not for myself, but in the memory of Edgar Sullivan, the man who single-handedly kept me alive.

  Don’t bother hanging around the courthouse waiting for Paul Vasco’s murder trial to begin. The guy’s long gone, I suspect never to be found again. Believe me when I say that Boston doesn’t do fugitives particularly well.

  What else?

  Maggie Kane. Never heard from her again, nor has she heard from me. I was half tempted to call her from our room and describe the view that she opted never to see, but decide
d it would have been more rude than funny, and really not that funny at all. I have to draw the line somewhere, odd as that might seem. And the truth is, I’m a little embarrassed about the whole thing — embarrassed for me, embarrassed for her, embarrassed for us, embarrassed that we believed something was there that never really was, and embarrassed that we walked away from it in the manner we did. That’s life, even if it shouldn’t be.

  Huck? Great dog, and no one’s ever taking him away. He was staying at Peter Martin’s house for the duration of my Hawaiian vacation. Their first day together, Martin called me no fewer than twenty times asking questions about “this surly beast.” The second day he called another twenty times to say the dog was growing on him. I got a call on the third day asking for advice on getting one of his own. People surprise you all the time, even when they don’t.

  Which brings me to Elizabeth Riggs. She gave a ring two weeks after she fled Boston to congratulate me on the story and to let me know that she was moving from San Francisco to Chicago. She joked, though maybe she didn’t, that it was her way of meeting me halfway. I explained that if I went and did the same thing, that would leave me in Pittsburgh — a perfectly nice city, but was that really where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives? She didn’t really laugh, and I can’t say I blame her.

  “So you’re really not going to the bar?”

  Mongillo again. He gets something in his mind, especially involving food or drink, and he’s incapable of letting it go.

  “Mother of Christ,” I said, slowly rising to my feet. “Just to shut you the hell up, I’m on my way. What do you want?”

  “Surprise me,” he replied.

  I’d make certain of it.

  The open-air bar had a thatched roof, a particularly facile server, and at this precise moment, a rather stunning brunette in a backless yellow sundress, sitting on a corner stool and sipping a frozen strawberry margarita that she held in her tanned and manicured hands.

  “Hello, Jack,” she said, looking up at me over her drink.