Strangled (33 page)

“Which train station?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I clenched my fist harder, causing him to flinch. They probably don’t teach this interview technique at Columbia University’s ever-famous journalism graduate school, but nor do they probably teach young reporters-to-be what they’re supposed to do when everyone around them keeps dying. Or maybe they do; I don’t really know. I barely got a bachelor’s degree.

I asked, “How the fuck do you not know?”

“I don’t know this city, man. I don’t. I’m from Detroit. I really don’t know.”

Mongillo and I remained silent for a moment, both our minds rushing to devise our next step. In the quiet, I glanced over at the wall that held the photographs of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May, and saw with a start that their pictures were no longer there. I scanned the floor quickly, and they weren’t there either. I don’t know why this was important to me, the fact these pictures were missing, but it was.

“You’re coming with us,” I said, grabbing him by the front of his dirty white T-shirt and lifting him up.

“I can’t, dude. I can’t.”

I hate the word
dude,
though that’s not entirely why I clenched my fist once again, gritted my teeth, and whispered to him, “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”

“I need a fix.”

Mongillo, intuitively and literally understanding where we were going with this, said, “We’ll get you one — right after.”

I asked, “What’s your name?”

“Marcus.”

“Marcus, we’re going to go for a little ride, and as soon as we’re done, we’ll set you up with whatever you need.”

He nodded, hopeful for the first time in this encounter. The three of us walked out of the room, down the dark, dingy hall, down the stairs, and out into the street. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; I didn’t particularly care.

The goal was to retrace their route. I’m not completely certain why this was so important to me, but it falls in the same category as conducting an interview in person rather than by phone. You always get more from facial expressions, from body language, from being in the same room. You always get more from just showing up.

In the car, Vinny got in the driver’s seat and I sat in the back beside Marcus, with my man Huck squishing over against the door. Before we pulled out, we discerned that Marcus and Vasco had walked to a subway stop. The subway stop was next to where the Celtics played, which meant North Station. They did not switch subway lines. They did not take the subway directly to the train station. They got off the subway and came aboveground at a busy intersection with a large park, then walked to the train station behind a tall glass skyscraper.

I said to Vinny, “Sounds like they took the Green Line to Arlington Street, and walked to Back Bay Station. But why the hell didn’t they just take the Orange Line from North Station right into Back Bay Station?”

Mongillo said, “Maybe Vasco doesn’t know the subway lines well.”

“He’s a genius.” I paused and said, “Drive over to Arlington Street.”

We did. Marcus said it looked familiar. I started feeling like I should work for Scotland Yard. He pointed in the direction they walked, which was toward the train station, and Vinny slowly followed the route.

Marcus, sleepy now rather than feisty, pointed casually out the window and said, “Paul went in there.”

It was a Kinko’s copy store, still open because it was always open.

“He stopped in there?” I asked, incredulous. “For long?”

“No. Five minutes.”

“Then where?”

Marcus said, “We went to the train station.”

I insisted on following the route. It was ten-thirty at night; the streets were virtually void of traffic, giving us the luxury of driving at our own slow pace.

Marcus said, “We took a left here.”

Vinny banged a sharp left, down the wrong way of a one-way street, but that’s all right. What wasn’t all right was that it suddenly didn’t make complete sense, this route, because it took them a block out of their way.

“Marcus, think hard. Where else did you stop?” I said.

“Nowhere. That was it.”

Vinny pulled up to the next intersection, driving the wrong way.

“Think, Marcus. Any little stop. Any short detour. Think.”

Marcus casually pointed out the window and said, “Right there, but just for a second.”

I whirled around in my seat. He was pointing at a U.S. post office, the Back Bay annex. Suddenly things started fitting together in my head like they never had before, pieces creating a whole, the whole being a picture of Paul Vasco mailing a letter to me because he was the Phantom Fiend, and probably the Boston Strangler.

“What happened?” I asked, nearly yelling. Huck sat up for the first time.

Marcus was staring out the back window at the post office. Vinny had pulled to the curb. “Paul handed me an envelope. The building was closed. There were three mailboxes on the sidewalk, and he told me to go put it in the middle mailbox. He said he’d give me twenty dollars if I did. He kept walking toward the train station.”

I asked, “Did you mail it?”

He nodded. “Then I had to run after him. I met him outside the station. He gave me the money, said he had to take another trip, and told me to get to work and not tell anyone what we had done.”

I let out a long breath. Vinny looked back at me and I looked at Vinny. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a pair of twenty dollar bills, handed them to Marcus, and said, “You’re a man of your word. Thanks for your help. Don’t tell anyone about us.”

“I won’t,” he said as he got out of the car, looking back nervously as he shut the door.

I snapped open my cell phone and dialed Peter Martin. “You’ve got to hold that Mac Foley story,” I said. “I think we’re wrong.”

Martin replied, “You think, or you’ve got something else you can write in its place?”

Good question, as usual.

“Give me an hour,” I said, having only some idea just what an hour it would be.

At
ten forty-five on a raw Sunday night in the middle of a dismal March, the Pigpen lounge in Chelsea was exactly how I expected it to be, which is to say peopled by some of life’s most exquisite losers — beer-bellied guys with tree-trunk necks wearing ill-fitting black blazers, desperate-looking women in caked-on makeup with skirts that revealed things that no normal man would want to see, coked-out servers who had neither showered nor shaved in days.

The place reeked of stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, and fresh urine, not necessarily in that order. That potpourri actually represented an improvement on the drugstore-quality colognes and perfumes worn by the patrons. If Charles Darwin had ever been able to stop by the Pigpen for a Scotch and a beer chaser, I think he’d have quickly remade his entire theory.

I marched through the front doors and yelled out, “Everyone freeze. Massachusetts Health Department. I’m here to enforce the state’s no-smoking laws.”

Actually, that’s not what I did or said. I didn’t have the luxury of time or humor. Rather, I barged inside, spied old friend Sammy Markowitz sitting in his usual rear booth, and made a beeline for him.

I almost got there, too, but for the two bodyguards who looked as if they had just escaped from the primate exhibit at the Franklin Park Zoo. They stood side by side, blocking my path, their bodies about the width of a football field, and one of them said, “Nobody goes back dere.”

“You must be mistaken,” I pointed out to them. “There are people back there now. So if you’ll excuse me.”

The guy who had spoken to me glanced over at the silent one, as if he was looking for some sort of explanation of what I had meant. He didn’t get one. Then a voice called out from behind them, “He’s good, gentlemen. He’s good.”

The men hesitated, then awkwardly parted in silence. To me, the voice said, “Jack Flynn in the Pigpen. To what do I owe this rarest of pleasures?”

That was Sammy Markowitz, bookmaking kingpin, Pigpen owner, and one of the oldest, most valuable sources of information in my legendary stable. We’d befriended each other years ago when I was reporting out a story on the scope and breadth of his enormously successful criminal enterprise. Desperate for me not to write, he leaked like a sieve about anyone and everyone all around him, from cops to mayors, providing me fodder for a series of stories that nearly — but didn’t quite — win a Pulitzer Prize. We’d remained in occasional touch ever since.

I hadn’t seen him in years, and Father Time had not necessarily been kind. Not exactly Tom Brady to begin with, Markowitz’s jowls now hung so low that they almost rested on the table. His eyes were so bloodshot that I think even his pupils had turned red. His teeth were the color of caramel, most likely from the Camels that were ever present in his mouth, like the one that hung on his bottom lip at that very moment.

He ran his syndicate from this corner booth, and he was sitting there alone with open green ledger books bathed in the soft light of an old-fashioned banker’s lamp, a highball glass of his trademark Great Western Champagne sitting within easy — and constant — reach.

“A favor,” I said, sitting down across from him. “I only come when I’m looking for favors, and I apologize for that. This one I need real bad.”

“Every time you come in here, you need it bad,” he replied, looking at me with that deadened stare.

“I am sorry —”

“I say that as a compliment, kid,” he interjected. “Believe me, you’re me, there are pains in the asses that are shuffling through here seven goddamned days a week looking for this and looking for that. It never ends. You show up, I know it’s important. Go ahead.”

So I did. Mongillo and I had checked the pickup times on the mailboxes, and saw that all Sunday mail was retrieved by four o’clock. That meant the envelope from Paul Vasco was most likely sitting inside the locked and darkened brick building. I needed to get into that post office, and I needed to get in there fast.

I remembered that years before, the U.S. attorney had leaked word that Sammy Markowitz was about to be the subject of a multiple-count indictment on a battery of far-reaching charges that, if proven, could send him to prison for the rest of his life. The crux of the charges, as with the crux of many federal indictments, involved mail fraud. So when a key U.S. Postal Service inspector in the Boston office lost a laptop computer and a box of critical evidence, the entire case fell apart before the grand jury ever took a vote. Supposedly, that inspector now owned a lavish oceanfront spread on Nantucket, courtesy of Sammy Markowitz. I was hoping to hell he was in Boston now and willing to help out.

This is what I told Markowitz. He looked at me, forever flat, the butt drooping off his bottom lip, his eyes sagging into the bridge of his nose, and he said, “That’s all you need, a U.S. Postal Service inspector to allow you to commit a felony on government property on five minutes’ notice?”

He let that hang out there amid the swirl of fresh smoke, the acrid smell of old beer, and the tinny sounds of the jukebox that at that precise moment was playing Huey Lewis and the News. I didn’t say anything, because there was really nothing I could say.

“No problem,” he added, with just the hint of a smile at the edge of his lips. He leaned over and picked up the receiver on an office-style phone that rested on his table, placed a pair of reading glasses across his eyes, and carefully dialed a number.

“Barney, Sammy,” he said into the phone. “Oh, did I wake you…How’s the island been…? You’re using sunscreen, I hope, on that fair skin of yours…Your wife ever ask after me…? Listen, I’m in the market for a favor and I need it now…You’re going to have to go over to the Back Bay post office…I’m sending a guy over there, name of Jack. He’s like my son, but not as good-looking. He needs to go inside…Huh…? What…? Yeah, inside the post office. He’s looking for something. Do whatever you can to help him out…Call me sometime from Nantucket. I want to see if you really can hear the waves from your porch.”

And that was that. I rapped the scratched tabletop twice with the side of my hand as I got up to go.

“Wait a minute,” Markowitz called out after me.

I turned around and he said, “What the hell do I get out of the deal?”

Good question. I replied, “You got the opportunity to do something really good.”

He shook his head in mock indignation, pulled the cigarette off his lip, and said, “What the hell good is that? You owe me, kid. You owe me.”

He was right, I did. As the old saying goes, when you’re looking for a pig, you don’t search the cosmetics counter at Saks. Or something like that.

I slipped out the door, from fetid air to fresh, snapped open the passenger door to my idling car, the dog still asleep in the back, and told Mongillo, “Back to the post office.”

And we were off, one more stop amid a long day in an awful week in an increasingly uncertain life. One way or another, I suspected it would be our last.

When
my cell phone rang, I snapped it open so hard I almost snapped it apart. “Flynn here,” I said.

Mongillo was deftly steering my car over the Mystic-Tobin Bridge, the mostly darkened towers of Boston’s Financial District spread out in the near distance below. Huck was snoring in the backseat, oblivious, virtuously so, to all that was wrong in this world.

“Sweeney here.” Hank Sweeney, to be more precise. His voice, as always, was soft, velvety, and welcomed.

“How’s things?” I asked, my pulse slowing for the moment.

“Well, two goons, both newly hired employees of
The New York Times,
just picked up Elizabeth Riggs, escorted her to the airport, and are getting her out of this crazy town via a company-hired jet. So you should feel good about that.”

“I do.” At least I thought I did. I had to further process the fact that she was gone, though safe, before I could make that same declaration to myself.

“Which frees me up to spend a little more quality time with you,” Sweeney said. He paused, gave me that purring chuckle, and added, “Of course, anytime you and I spend together is quality time.”

“How about we begin anew in about five minutes, in front of the Back Bay post office. I need some help committing a felony — all toward a good cause.”

“Such a coincidence,” Hank replied. “I just happen to be feeling very felonious.” And like that, the line went dead.

Vinny Mongillo glided up to the front of the post office, a hulking brick building that sits on the corner of Stuart and Clarendon Streets in the shadows of the tallest building in Boston, the John Hancock Tower.

I said to him, “You don’t have to do this. You can watch the car, stay with the dog, and I’ll slip in there with Hank.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” he said. “By the end of this night, we’re going to know who killed my mother, one way or another, and I’m going to be front and center in bringing that information home.”

I wasn’t about to argue with that.

Hank was waiting outside, dressed in black, looking like little more than a silhouette. I told the dog to guard the car, though he didn’t so much as open an eye in acknowledgment. As Vinny and I joined Hank outside, my cell phone rang yet again.

“Flynn here.”

“I’m the guy who’s helping you.”

I couldn’t be so sure, especially since the car that at that precise moment was rolling slowly past on Stuart Street bore a striking resemblance to a vehicle parked two spaces behind us at the Pigpen. Thinking even more quickly than usual, I asked, “What did Markowitz tell you to wear plenty of in your last conversation?”

Silence, and then, “Sunscreen. What’s that have to do with breaking into the post office on my watch?”

“Nothing.” And everything, but I didn’t have time to explain. That same car idled about half a block down. I hit Hank on the arm and pointed, and Hank pulled a pair of what looked like opera glasses out of his coat pocket and peered down the street.

“The garage door is rolled up about three feet in the middle loading bay in the back alley. Use that as your entry point. I’m watching the building from a distance. When you’re done, flash the lights of your car once before you illuminate them for good. The overnight managers start coming in around eleven-thirty, so you have to be out in the next ten minutes. When you’re inside the building, keep all lights off at all times.”

And he hung up. I turned to Hank and asked if he brought flashlights.

“Does the pope carry a rosary?” he replied, then handed small lights to Mongillo and me. As I led them around back, Hank said, “What are we doing here? Are you missing your Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes form this year, or is there something larger at stake?”

Mongillo laughed. I didn’t. I told them both, “We’re looking for any envelope addressed to me. We’re probably going to find it in an incoming mail bin that’s yet to be sorted, but who really knows? It was dropped off in one of the front boxes earlier today. I’m just hoping it hasn’t been brought down to the main headquarters for sorting already.”

Neither of them said anything, though I suspect I knew what they were thinking: this was like looking for a hunk of manure from a specific horse on a sprawling farm field. Or something like that. The face of my cell phone read 11:15. I said, “And we’ve got ten minutes to get in and out of the building, no lights allowed.”

Mongillo asked, “Would it be any easier if we were all bound and gagged as well?”

I ignored that, but Hank laughed. Apparently this was anything-goes night on the humor front.

As advertised, the garage door on the middle bay was rolled up about three feet from the bottom, leaving a gap that I slid under easily enough, and Sweeney did with just a little more effort. Mongillo, that’s another story, one that involves some pushing and pulling and a rather uncomfortable moment when I thought we might have to abandon him directly under the door. Once inside, Hank rapped softly on a regular exit next to the garage and said, “Mong, use this on the way out.”

So we were in, the three of us. My cell phone said it was 11:17 p.m., giving us about eight minutes of search time before we had to get out, and another five minutes to alert Peter Martin as to what we’d found.

“Look anywhere and everywhere,” I said, “for anything addressed to me.”

The place was as dark as the Black Forest on a moonless night, though I confess the closest I’ve been to Germany is a slice of German chocolate cake that I had at an absurdly overpriced New American restaurant about six months before.

Suffice it to say, the place was dark — extremely dark, can’t - see - your - hand - in - front - of - your - face dark. It was also moldy and more than a little musty, and it made me understand for the first time why UPS drivers are always so cheerful: because they don’t have to work for the post office.

The three of us fanned out across the first floor of the building — at least I think we did, but I couldn’t see them very well. A moment later, I did see a couple of slices of penetrating light from their flashlights, and I illuminated mine as well.

The place was lined with various canvas pushcarts. Little warrens were separated from one another by mesh netting. There were stacks of envelopes and piles of boxes stuffed in every possible crevice. It made it seem all the more extraordinary that a letter could be delivered to the most remote outposts in America in just a few days.

I quite literally stumbled across a row of those aforementioned pushcarts, each of them identified by zip code. I shone my light on the various labels until I found my code on the waterfront, and I reached into the deep basket and pulled out a fistful of envelopes.

I quickly shuffled through them with one hand, shining the light on them with the other, dropping each envelope back into the cart after I had scanned it. I got to the end without finding anything with my name.

So I went to the cart that bore the
Record
’s zip code, only I found hundreds more letters. I called out in a loud whisper, “Guys, over here, I could use some help,” and I flicked my light around the room. In a moment they were both by my side, and the three of us divvied up the contents of the basket. I was fairly sure we’d find it there.

We didn’t.

I checked the face of my phone — 11:21. Sweeney said, “Follow me, I found a bunch of white boxes with postmarked mail. I’ll bet it’s in there.”

Mongillo and I followed Sweeney across the cluttered floor, stumbling more than a couple of times but ultimately arriving safely. I should have taken Hank’s bet, though, because after we divvied up about six hundred envelopes and shuffled through them, we didn’t even find so much as a phone bill bearing my name.

Now it was 11:23, time to give up. Mac Foley would be toast in the morning
Record,
in a story under my byline. I briefly tried to convince myself that he deserved it, but both my conscience and my gut told me otherwise.

My hands, by the way, were starting to cramp, probably from lack of food, lack of water, lack of sleep, lack of sex, lack of joy, lack of humanity, lack of virtually anything that normal people have plenty of in their refined and enjoyable lives.

That’s what I was feeling — self-pity — when the first gunshot rang out, the report slamming off the concrete floors and walls and ringing in my ears. I’ll repeat that: a gunshot. A real live honest-to-goodness gunshot, right there in the Back Bay U.S. Postal Service Annex in the dark of a crucial night. When I thought about it for any more than a fraction of a second, it started to make perfect sense, because that’s just plain and simple what happens in the increasingly absurd life of intrepid reporter Jack Flynn.

It’s what I heard after the gunshot that really frightened me. A crash, very near me, as if someone crumpled to the floor not from the sound of the shot but from the impact. I dove for cover, then crawled furiously toward the sounds of despair, which now also included a voice muttering, “Fuck. He got me.” It was, for the record, Vinny Mongillo’s voice.

I extinguished my light so I wouldn’t be a sitting duck, or in this case, reporter. I crawled headfirst into a metal desk, then a tall trash can, grabbing the former before it tipped to the floor. In about twenty seconds, I felt the form of Mongillo lying on his back between a desk chair and a canvas bin.

“Vinny, it’s Jack,” I whispered.

“The fuckers got me,” he said. His voice was more angry than panicked, especially when he added, “Right in my stomach.”

I flicked on the light and circled both my palms around it as I shone the bulb onto Mongillo’s vast abdominal area, which was not unlike trying to hit the continent of Asia with a dart. I didn’t see any bullet hole in his plaid shirt. I didn’t even see any blood. I whispered, “Show me where it hurts,” and he took his big, beefy hand and drew little circles in the air above the right side of his lower stomach.

I shone the light and saw the truth: he was grazed with a bullet that might have cost him an old shirt and a little bit of skin, but it hadn’t penetrated any flesh, or for that matter caused any lasting damage, at least not of the physical kind.

I whispered, “Vin, I think the bullet skimmed your gut. You’ve got nothing worse than a scrape.”

He replied, “Oh, God, man, anywhere but my stomach. Don’t take away the one true pleasure I still have.”

I don’t think he was talking about sex.

I shut my light off and told Vin to stay down and keep his light off as well. I set off across the room in search of that which I didn’t yet know. I stole another glance at my cell phone: 11:25 p.m. We were about to be late.

Hank Sweeney, it’s important to note, had virtually disappeared. Last I saw of his light was a full minute earlier, before the shot was fired, when he was futilely searching the last envelopes in the postmarked bin. As I crawled along the gritty floor, my heart was heavy with failure. All my soaring optimism coming in was seeping out. I was pretty resigned that my new goal wasn’t finding the letter, which would have been the proof I needed for a story I hadn’t written. Rather, it was simply the three of us getting out of there alive.

And then came the crash. It was surprisingly close to me, a few yards ahead, a fierce, sharp collision, as if something had just been flung across the room. Immediately afterward, a gun discharged. It was so close that I could see the flash of light from the muzzle. I could smell the explosion. Then silence. I was flat on the floor, holding my breath to mute any sounds.

About twenty seconds later, I heard commotion about ten yards away, a strange voice yelling some indecipherable words, and then another gunshot, followed by a scream of agony. Out of the mayhem, Hank’s voice cut through the darkness. “Hit the lights,” he yelled.

I bolted for the door, the narrow band of my flashlight illuminating the way. I stumbled across one cluster of boxes, and then another. When I got to the wall, I felt frantically around for a switch, found several, and flicked them all upward. Immediately, the room was bathed in harsh light, revealing Hank Sweeney kneeling atop a middle-aged man sprawled haphazardly on the ground, his head pushed against some empty boxes, his left thigh oozing blood.

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.