Strangled (18 page)

Mongillo guffawed. Or maybe he was choking on his mortadella. Either way, he said, “How could you tell if Boston PD becomes unhelpful?”

A good question, or rather a point. Martin nodded; Justine said and did nothing. Martin broke a brief but strained silence and said, “Jack, give us your take.”

So I did. I gave him exactly what he expected to get.

“I’ll be honest with you,” I began. “First, I understand that we had to turn that letter over to the cops; I just wish I had been consulted on it. Second, I didn’t realize we were consulting with the acting mayor on editorial policy and decisions. From here on in, should I plan to run all my stories past Mayor Laird to make sure they meet with her approval?”

Steele frowned. Martin was about to interject, but I continued before he got the chance.

“Third, as the Phantom Fiend points out, that blood he’s talking about will be on my hands, so I’ll be up front by saying I’m in favor of getting this thing into print as soon as possible, tomorrow being barely soon enough. Maybe we ought to even consider putting it out on the website today, though he didn’t ask us to do that, so that could screw things up.

“And fourth, there’s already blood all over the floor — Bob Walters’s blood, Kimberly May’s blood, Jill Dawson’s blood, Lauren Hutchens’s blood, Joshua Carpenter’s blood. This thing broke on a Monday. It’s Friday now. Boston PD has had a week on this, with a stream of clues provided by us. You really think another twentyfour or forty-eight hours is going to change the scope and direction of their investigation? Or do you think they’re just worried about the additional pressure?”

I paused and looked from Peter Martin to Justine Steele, then added, “And let’s assume for a moment that it’s the latter. Is it really our job to take pressure off the cops, or is it our job to put pressure on them?”

There was a moment of silence. Well, not entirely silence. Mongillo chomped on the last few potato chips, then noisily balled up the sandwich wrapper and let it sit on the table.

Finally, Steele asked, “Who’s Bob Walters?”

I explained his former position, then I shared the details of my Las Vegas trip — his drunken wife, his theories on the Strangler, and then Bob Walters being carried out of his house in a black body bag that shone brightly in the desert sun.

I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year.

Why on that one day would he have ever thought to have tried? The likely answer: he didn’t.

Mongillo, fully nourished now, piped up. “I’m with Jack on this. Since when do we hold shit back? Since when do we climb in the sack with the cops, rather than serve as a check on them, and without even a promise of exclusive information if this thing pans out? Since when do we not warn the damned public about what we know, when we know it?”

He paused, seemingly getting more wound up, then added, “This shit is life and death. This isn’t some journalism exercise about confirming a source. This is about letting women know they’re in dire danger out there.”

I added, “Hal Harrison doesn’t want people to think there’s danger because he’s running for mayor. Mara Laird doesn’t want people to think there’s danger because she is the mayor. We don’t get this letter into print, we’re not doing our jobs.”

Again, silence, until Martin asked, “You don’t think that by printing this letter, verbatim, that we’re turning over editorial control of the newspaper to a serial killer?”

A good point. But let’s face it, like it or not, what the Phantom Fiend had to say — that the Boston Strangler lives, that they had it wrong before, that they’re getting it wrong again — was news, blockbuster news, actually. And this was the same sort of journalistic issue that the editors of
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
wrestled with in 1995 before finally deciding to publish the Unabomber’s manifesto, as he had requested. The publication led to his arrest.

I said all this, and Justine and Martin simply nodded in response, though Justine also noted that with the Unabomber case, federal officials were pushing the newspapers to publish because they had a paucity of other clues. In this case, Boston PD claimed to have other clues that needed to be pursued, and didn’t want the published letter to get in its way.

This was getting frustrating. Martin was being deferential to his boss. And his boss, Steele, was being entirely too corporate, far more cautious than she typically was, or at least used to be when she was editor. Maybe it was the lawsuits that newspapers were losing around the country. Maybe it was the diving stock price. Maybe it was her friendship with Mara Lairdo. Maybe it was the barrage of accusations that the news media was growing irresponsible and increasingly cavalier about the truth. Hell, maybe she was losing her backbone. I glanced over at Mongillo and saw that he was gripping his balled-up sandwich wrapper so tight that the veins were popping through his wrist.

Martin said to both of us, “You’ve been very helpful.”

Gee, thanks, Peter. With that, we got up and left. When we got out of earshot, Mongillo said, “I’ve got a suspected serial strangler we need to go see.”

Hey, why not? We already seemed to be getting the life choked out of us.

At
first — and I should probably be embarrassed to admit this — I almost didn’t recognize her voice.

“Hey, Jack,” she said. That was followed by a long pause. “I’m back in Boston,” she continued. I was still somewhat confused at this point, sitting at my desk, listening to my messages before Vinny Mongillo and I headed out into this great city in a bold attempt to change its fate.

“I’m a little bit ashamed,” she said.

That’s when it struck: it was the elusive Maggie Kane — my fiancée, or again, maybe that’s ex-fiancée, or perhaps it’s simpler to just describe her as my would-be wife, the woman I had been planning to marry a week before, until the morning I wasn’t. We were supposed to be splashing around in the Hawaiian surf right about now, sharing frozen strawberry daiquiris at a swim-up bar, relentlessly having sex in our overpriced room as a sea breeze drifted through the open French doors.

Her voice started to waver at this point. “I feel awful,” she said. “I feel stupid. I feel so bad about what I’ve done. And Jack, I’m really lonely.”

I squinted in confusion, through the haze of the Kimberly Mays and Jill Dawsons and Lauren Hutchenses that had so recently left this world, wondering what it was that Maggie had done. Okay, yes, she ran out on our wedding day, fled not only our relationship but the state, climbing aboard a jet that landed in Atlanta, leaving me figuratively and literally behind. Of course, I’d never gotten the chance to tell her that I fled as well; I just didn’t make as big a physical spectacle of it as she did. I’d like to think I’m a reasonably subtle guy, was probably never more so than when I called off my wedding without actually telling anyone — the bride-to-be included.

“Is there any chance we can talk?” she asked. She was doing this thing that she always used to do, which was basically carrying on an entire conversation on my voice mail, asking questions that I wasn’t on the line to answer, giving answers to questions that I wasn’t on the line to ask. Like so much else in a relationship, when she first used to do this shortly after we met, I thought it was enormously adorable and often sexy. Now I just found it annoying, even if it was slightly comforting to hear the familiar sound of her voice.

“Jack, I know how furious you probably are. You completely have the right. I panicked. I did a shitty thing. I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life, for what I just did to the rest of my life, and more important, for what I did to you.

“But Jack, can you please, please let me talk to you for a little while, face-to-face.” She began crying here — sobbing, actually. She fell quiet for a moment, apparently trying to compose herself. I heard her sniffle, and could all but see her wipe the back of her right hand across both her cheeks the way she used to do at the end of our occasional arguments. “Jack, please call me back.”

Another long pause, another sniffle, then, softly, “I’m so, so sorry for all this.”

And click.

“Maggie, it’s okay, I wasn’t planning on going through with it either.” That was me, talking into the dead air on the phone where Maggie Kane’s voice had just been. I wondered if I would ever tell her that. I wondered if we’d ever even get together. I supposed I should have wondered where and when and how it all went so wrong, but I didn’t, and can’t completely explain why not, not even to myself. So instead I pressed 3 and heard a woman’s voice say, “Message erased, next new message.”

The rather clipped voice of a middle-aged man came on, carrying something of a Western twang.

“This is Sergeant Wit Jackson of the Las Vegas Police Department public relations division, returning a call to Jack Flynn.” He left his number, told me to have a good day, though it didn’t sound like he particularly cared if I did, and hung up the phone.

I listened to a couple more messages from guys with names like Gray and Stone from television magazine and tabloid shows, and that was that.

I clicked off that line and onto another, the fresh dial tone filling my ear. Meantime, Vinny was standing at his desk, staring at me, making a twirling motion with his right index finger, his way of telling me that it was time to go. Subtle he was not.

I had time to return one call. Maggie Kane or Wit Jackson. Wit Jackson or Maggie Kane?

I called Wit Jackson. Don’t ask me why, though if anyone had, I’d probably have answered that I didn’t have the time I’d need to have the conversation with Maggie that I’d want to have. Or maybe I just liked the name Wit because it reminded me of myself. Good answers. But what’s the real answer? I don’t know the real answer.

Wit picked up the phone halfway through the second ring and we exchanged greetings. He asked, “What’s a reporter from a hotshot Eastern newspaper want to know about our sandy little city?”

Sandy. Desert. Las Vegas. Get it? Wit was really living up to his name.

I laughed out of politesse, then turned my questioning toward Bob Walters’s death, saying that I was trying to determine a cause of death and whether an investigation was under way. I could hear Wit typing into a computer, and then silence as he was undoubtedly reading something on the screen.

He said, “Cause of death determined to be head trauma from a fall down a flight of stairs at his house.”

“Suspicious death?” I asked.

“Apparently not,” he replied, then added, “Sometimes an accident is just an accident.”

And sometimes not. But I didn’t say that.

I asked, “Anything else of note from the death scene?”

For the first time, Wit sounded somewhat suspicious. He asked, “What’s your interest in some old retiree living out his years in the sun?”

“Former member of the Boston Police Department — a homicide detective, and a damned good one,” I said. “I’m just making sure he’s well tended to in death.”

Wit seemed to appreciate that, as I suspected he would. He said, “Well, it looks like there was a pair of eyeglasses, broken, found near the body of the deceased at the bottom of the stairs.” He fell quiet again, probably reading from the screen. I heard him press a button a couple of times, like he was scrolling down. Then he said, matter-of-factly, “And there was a single key on a small key ring retrieved from the bottom step. The assumption is that he was carrying it downstairs.”

A key. His eyeglasses. An accident really may have been an accident. Bob Walters might have forced himself out of bed after I left, struggling down the stairs to get something that was locked away before I returned. And he fell. But what was it?

I asked, “Sergeant, off the record, can you share next of kin?”

“Well,” Wit responded, “it’ll be in tomorrow’s obituary anyway. He leaves a wife, Patricia. And I’ve got here a Deirdre Walters Hayes, a daughter who lives in the area.”

“Number?”

And he gave it to me — Deirdre’s telephone number. Boston PD should be so kind. I hung up with sincere thanks.

When I looked up, Vinny Mongillo was standing over me, a king-size box of Junior Mints in one of his oversize hands, a small reporter’s notebook in the other. The box of candy, I noted for no particular reason, was larger than the pad.

“Let’s go,” he said. “And bring your A-game. This is no time for us to choke.”

Choke. Strangler. Get it? Neither did I.

It
was to the point where minutes, even seconds, felt like they mattered, not only to the women who would become victims to the Phantom Fiend but to the people whose help I was seeking. Everyone kept dying, naturally and unnaturally.

Which would explain why I was speeding through the city of Boston, taking a left on red, among other automotive transgressions. And it would furthermore explain why a Boston Police cruiser came racing up behind me, its overhead lights whipping blue and white, its headlights pulsating on and off. I had no idea that Boston cops bothered pulling anyone over for speeding anymore.

“Who the hell knew that Boston cops pulled anyone over for speeding?”

That was Vinny, taking a quick break from gabbing away in the passenger seat on his cell phone. Great minds, it seems, really do think alike — or at least one great one and a slightly above-average one. No need, I hope, for me to distinguish whose is whose.

An old Irish gray-haired cop walked up to the driver’s window of my car after I pulled to the side of Cambridge Street near Government Center in downtown Boston.

“Quite the hurry, aren’t you?” he asked.

This was a good thing. It was a good thing because when a cop engages you in any way during a traffic stop, it gives you the opportunity to squirm your way out of the citation. It’s the cops, almost always younger cops, who act robotic and make no conversation as they issue you a ticket, who are a lost cause.

“Just trying to save the city, until you got in my way,” I said.

Actually, I didn’t. What I said was, “Too much of one, sir. I shouldn’t have been going as fast as I was.”

He nodded. I handed him my license and registration without him having to ask — another gesture that I think they like. Vinny continued to chirp on the phone, talking at that point about the prior night’s Celtics game.

“Any special reason?”

With that, I was reasonably certain I was off the hook.

“There is, sir, but it doesn’t change the fact that I was speeding, so I won’t bore you with it.”

I mean, shit, someone should write this stuff down and put it in a manual for how to avoid traffic fines, or, for that matter, maybe any other prosecution.

“No, go ahead. I want to hear.”

Vinny was yelling that Paul Pierce doesn’t play any defense. I noticed half of humanity slowing down on their way by to get a glimpse of the poor bastard who had been yanked to the side of the road. The officer’s radio cackled like a dying chicken, though I’m not sure what a chicken actually sounds like when it’s about to take leave, so that may be inaccurate.

I sighed, not at the cop but at life, and said, “Sir, I’m a reporter for the
Record
. I’m writing about the serial murderer. I’m on my way to an important interview and didn’t want to be late. That’s the reason why I was speeding, but I by no means offer it as an excuse.”

I was lighting it up here, and Vinny wasn’t giving me a second thought, let alone a first one. At least the cop was. He looked intently at my driver’s license, hunched down toward the window, and said, “You’re the guy who’s been getting the letters from the killer?” He said this softly, casually, his voice a little hoarse. When you’re a cop, even a street cop, maybe especially a street cop, you’ve seen a lot of the world, some of the good, but more of the bad. You know how easily people slip into the abyss, breaking through the flimsy little barriers that separate normalcy from desperation. And you begin, in some odd way, to understand, and understanding more often than not leads to empathy.

I nodded and said simply, “I am.” I didn’t know the reaction I was about to get. Maybe it wouldn’t be a reaction at all but a ticket, which I suppose was a reaction as well.

He handed me my license and registration and said, “Keep at it, young man. Tell the truth. Because in this matter, too many people aren’t.” And just like that, he walked back to his cruiser, leaving me to go on my way.

Even Vinny looked at me with the phone still pasted to his fat ear and said, “Wow.”

The neighborhood of Charlestown is, among other things, home of the Bunker Hill Monument, the occasionally contentious host of the nouveau Olives restaurant, and creator of the infamous code of silence that let so many murders go unsolved in the 1980s. But it is arguably best known for producing more bank robbers per capita than any other neighborhood in the country. It’s as if “Safe-cracking” and “Demand Notes” are curriculum requirements at Charlestown High.

I bring this up only to point out that the halfway house that Vinny and I had just pulled up to was something of a rite of passage for what seemed like half of Charlestown’s native male population. These men are known as townies, though they don’t live in “the Town.” No, “the Town” is South Boston, also known as Southie. But natives there are called, well, residents, I guess. Yet another little point of confusion about my little hamlet of Boston.

But more to the point, I pulled the car to the curb across the street from the state-operated halfway house where Paul Vasco was supposed to be in temporary residence. It was a big, gray, nondescript wood-shingled house, four stories high, butting right up against the sidewalk, sitting on the side of Charlestown that had not yet been transformed by wealthy young professionals who, depending on your point of view, either cleaned up and added value to city neighborhoods, or sucked the spirit and history right out of them.

On this particular house, the paint was chipping. Old coffee cups, candy wrappers, beer cans, and corroded newspapers had gathered in the wells around the basement windows. Hinges that were supposed to hold shutters held nothing at all but rust. The mismatched front door looked like it was made of untreated plywood. I suspect it had been kicked in a few times.

“Remind me never to cheat on my expense account ever again,” Vinny said, gazing upward at the structure from the passenger seat of the car.

He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a rumpled sheet of paper, and unfolded it.

“Paul Vasco,” he said, his voice now taking on an official tone. “Age: sixty-two. Occupation: former handyman. More recently, convict. Most recently, ex-convict. Residence: 652 Bulham Avenue, also known as the Bunker Hill prerelease facility. Criminal record includes convictions on rape and first-degree murder. Notable characteristics: known to have an IQ that exceeds the level of genius.”

I said, “Well, the two of us will have something in common.”

“You’re a handyman, too?”

As he said this, Vinny shoved the paper back into his coat pocket. He added, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, he may be killing all over again. It’s on Jack and Vinny, Vinny and Jack, to stop him.”

Obviously, some of this stuff I had heard already. The handyman part I hadn’t. So he’s adept with his hands as well as his mind. I asked, “Our strategy?”

“First we have to get to him. My sources at the Department of Correction tell me it’s pretty easy access — hit or miss whether there’ll be an unarmed security guard around the house. They suggested that he was assigned to a room on the second floor, facing the rear, number twenty-seven, but couldn’t guarantee me that he hadn’t switched with someone, which they say is reasonably common.”

“Carlton Fisk,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Twenty-seven. That was Carlton Fisk’s number. He hit the most famous home run in Red Sox history” — to win the sixth game of the 1975 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds — “which maybe is a sign that we’re about to hit a home run.”

It should have been obvious to him. You’re in Boston, these numbers mean everything — 33 is Larry Bird, 86 is the year the Red Sox lost the World Series to the New York Mets, 4 is Bobby Orr, 9 is Ted Williams, 12 Tom Brady, 16 the number of Boston Celtic championships — a figure, by the way, that seems to be stuck in time. I could go on, but I won’t.

Vinny looked at me funny. “Right,” he said. Then, “He has supposedly been assigned to a job with the state highway department, picking up trash on median strips and the like, but it doesn’t start until tomorrow. He’s wearing an electronic bracelet that requires him to be home when he’s not either at work or commuting to and from work. My guy over at DoC said he was home this morning.”

I can’t say it enough, you’ve got to love Vinny Mongillo. If I ever become a good reporter, I want to be just like him.

I said, “Well, let’s go see if we can make hay of a diabolical murderer.”

“It’s about time.”

Interested parties, by the way, might notice that we had no interview strategy, Vinny and I — or maybe that’s Vinny and me. There was no discussion of the good cop and the bad cop. We didn’t review possible questions and the most probing follow-ups. We didn’t set a sequence. We didn’t plot out our tone. No, Vinny and I are from what would best be described as the wing-it school of American journalism, raised with the belief that reporters have to adapt to the situation, and not try to dictate it in any sort of preordained or formulaic way. Nothing drives me crazier than watching a blow-dried television interviewer sit and read a bunch of questions off a pad of paper that one of his or her producers had already sketched out. No conversation, no flow, just one preordained question following the next.

The aforementioned front door was unlocked, which was our first bit of good fortune on this mission, though maybe it wouldn’t prove to be so fortunate. It opened into a dark, bland hallway characterized by a threadbare carpet and peeling floral wallpaper illuminated by a single bare low-wattage lightbulb. The Department of Correction might seriously think about hiring a new interior designer for their interim housing. I’m a criminal spending more than an hour in a shithole like this and I’m doing everything in my power to get myself back into prison, including committing new crimes. At least the jailhouse color scheme — gray — is pretty uniform.

We were both silent and tiptoeing, though I’m not entirely sure why, and Vinny tiptoeing is like anyone else walking — with a sack of cement on their shoulders. Vinny motioned upward and we both began ascending the steep, creaky wooden staircase, which sounded very much like it might collapse before we got to where we were hoping to go.

The second-floor landing was neither better nor brighter. Think of a men’s room in a highway rest area, only this place smelled worse — a roundish, biting, aggressive odor that seemed to reach right into your nostrils and hit the back of your eyes. If hopelessness had a smell, this was it.

The hallway was longer than I thought it would be. If there had ever been carpet laid down, it wasn’t there now. Instead, the floors appeared to be made of scratched and grooved particle-board, stained in various shapes and sizes and colors. The dingy walls hadn’t been painted since the Republicans and Democrats in Washington all got along. I could hear the tinny sound of cheap televisions and radios, and was picking up the fumes of cigarettes. All in all, not a pleasant place.

“This feels like my old college frat house,” Vinny whispered to me.

“I had no idea you went to college,” I whispered back.

He ignored that and motioned for me to follow him toward the rear of the house. We passed several dark, old-fashioned doors, some with numbers on them, others not. The floors creaked, the air reeked, and it kept getting darker the farther back we walked.

Mongillo stopped in front of the last door on the right. It had the metal number 7 on it, and you could see the outlines of where the 2 used to be but wasn’t anymore.

I put my fist next to the door, waited for Mongillo to nod, and I knocked, twice softly, then three times firmly. We both stood and listened intently in the dark.

Nothing.

Well, at least nothing from behind this particular door. Down the hall, we heard a bolt get pushed into a lock. We heard a television set get turned down. We heard someone urgently dragging an unknown object across an unseen floor. And then we heard nothing at all.

I looked at Mongillo. He nodded back at me. I knocked, even louder this time, four firm raps with the side of my right fist.

Another lock turned down the hallway. Someone somewhere fell into a coughing, wheezing, hacking fit. A fly buzzed between our two heads.

But again, nothing from this unseen room.

I said, loud enough to be heard inside, “Mr. Vasco. Are you there? Mr. Vasco?”

The sound of my voice bounced off the bare hallway walls and melted into the hazy darkness. If Mr. Paul Vasco was indeed inside, as he was supposed to be, then he was either an incredibly sound sleeper, or he had no designs on entertaining visitors right about now.

I put my hand on the knob and began to turn it slowly. Mongillo squinted at me like I was some sort of maniacal nut, but did nothing to stop me. The knob, to my surprise, kept turning, turning, sliding all the way to the right. Just as it got to the end and I was about to slowly push it open, a latch opened across the hall and the door matter-of-factly swung open.

Vinny and I whirled around simultaneously. I half expected to be shot right between the eyes, gunned down in my own cold blood in a dingy halfway house on the fringes of Charlestown while I was in hot pursuit of the most befuddling story of my otherwise stellar career.

There was no gunfire, though, not even the flick of a knife. Instead, a voice from inside the darkened room called out, “You looking for me?”

It was a voice that was at once gravelly yet pointed, weary yet strong — the voice of someone who was energized by his newfound freedom, yet at some deeper level not quite sure, after all these years in prison, how to handle it all.

I asked, “Are you Paul Vasco?”

Still the person didn’t appear. Vinny and I were staring at the darkened, open doorway the way Dorothy looked at the stage that supposedly held Oz.

“Who the fuck are you?”

That was the voice, not Dorothy.

I replied, “Sir, may we talk to you in private?”

That inquiry was followed by a spate of silence, which was followed by the sounds of footsteps and the movement of a shadow; suddenly a silhouette appeared in the doorway.