The Strangler (18 page)

“Earn it how?”

“Just help us out. If you hear anything we should know about, you tell us, that’s all. If there’s gonna be a raid, we need to know that. If there’s a bug somewhere, obviously we need to know that. You’re a cop, you hear things.”

“I don’t hear much. You’re gonna be disappointed.”

“There’s other things you can do. Errands. We got a lot of work. You’re a big guy; we’ll find jobs for you.”

Joe bowed his head.

“Relax. It’s not so bad. Alls I’m asking is just help out a little, pitch in. It’s the least you can do. I mean that.”

33

With a machinelike shuffle, Fish counted tens and twenties from a roll. At one hundred dollars, he would shift the pile to one side, moisten the pad of his thumb with his tongue, and riffle out another. His dexterity was surprising. Fish looked old and gristly. The skin on his hands was spotted parchment. His fingernails were overgrown to the point of dangerousness. But there was something magical in the way those hands spun out bills into ten neat piles, recombined them, and handed the stack to Joe Daley.

“Thank you.”

“Hope your new boss chokes on it. That’s between you and me.” Fish watched the money disappear into Joe’s pants pocket and made a sour little frown. “Make sure it gets where it’s going.”

“How about I do my job, you do yours?”

“I’m just sayin’. Remember whose money that is in your pocket.”

“Pretty strange, huh? You putting money in my pocket for a change.”

“I seen stranger.”

“Well, it’s strange to me.”

“You’ll get used to it. You’re a natural.”

“Hey, what are you always breaking my balls? What’d I ever—?”

“You just took my hard-earned money. You want I should thank you?”

“Come on, Fish, this is just business. I don’t like it any more than you do.”

“You like it fine.”

“Oh, you know this.”

“I got eyes, I can see.”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

“I been doing this a long time,” Fish shrugged, “but…”
Whatever you say.

“Anyways, this isn’t about me. If it wasn’t me sitting here, it’d be somebody else.”

“But it
is
you sitting here. That’s the point.”

“That’s right, it’s me sitting here, so how about you just treat me like a professional and we’ll get this over with. Unbelievable. Like I don’t have enough on my mind without this shit from you. Jesus, as if I haven’t given
you
enough money all these years. That doesn’t count for nothing?”

“You think I keep all that? I don’t keep it. You people bet against each other—the losers pay the winners. That’s the way it works. I’m just the matchmaker. You want to know where your money went, go find somebody who won that day. I don’t have it. Alls I keep is the juice. It’s nothing, crumbs.”

“Charlie Capobianco does okay with crumbs.”

“Volume.”

“Well, anyways, you took a lot of crumbs off of me.”

“So now you get to take some back. Funny, huh, Detective?”

“I said, that’s enough with that, Fish. I didn’t tell you to go get in this business.”

“I was going to say the same thing to you.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have a whole lot of choice.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“There’s things you don’t know, Fish.”

“You’d be surprised. Hey, you are what you are, is all I’m saying. Your father must be spinning in his grave.”

“Watch your fuckin’ mouth.” Joe reached across the table and tamped his finger against Fish’s chest as if he were pushing a stubborn button there. “I’m not gonna tell you again. It’s enough with that. Am I going to have to hear this crap every week?”

“No. Guess I said my piece.”

34

Seagulls had nested on the roof of Station One. They came and went from the yellow-brick parapet, landed, squawked, fretted, flew off again. Three dun, speckled eggs lay unprotected in a nest of twigs. A fat furry chick bumbled around the edge of the roof, following the high yellow-brick wall. It was the same speckled gray-brown color as the eggs. The chick paused here and there to inspect bits of garbage collected in the stones that covered the rooftop, cigarette butts, beer cans, Christmas lights. When the chick reached an enormous pair of black shoes, it tried to hop up toward the laces.

“Beat it,” Joe Daley said.

He shifted his feet and the little bird waddled off. Joe returned his attention to the view from the parapet, rooftops bristling with antennae, Beacon Hill and the waste field of the West End at dusk. Below, cars emerged from the Sumner Tunnel and disappeared again into the city.

A voice behind him: “Jesus, Joe. What, are you hiding up here?” Brendan Conroy negotiated the roof door, the raised threshold, the steel bar that propped the door open. He was awkward in the top-heavy way that big old men are. To Joe he looked like a moose crossing a stream, from stone to stone. “I’ve been all over this fucking place looking for you. Three flights of stairs,
pshh
. The hell are you doing up here?”

Joe removed a cigarette from his lips and showed it.

“Ah. Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant? What if they needed to find you?”

“I’m off.”

“Go home, then. You’ve got a family, young fella.”

“What’s on your mind, Brendan? You must have climbed those stairs for a reason.”

Conroy came over. He was not tall enough to look out over the parapet, so he scanned the rooftop. Three chimney stacks, an air shaft, those filthy goddamn birds screeching and flapping. The one finished feature was a cupola complete with Palladian windows, gold dome, and pineapple finial. Conroy was in full uniform, gold chevrons on his arm. “You know, I’ve never been up here.”

“Only place you can be alone around here.”

“Go home, Joe. It’s time to go home.”

“That’s what you come up here to tell me?”

“Your mother’s worried about you.”

“And she sent you.”

“If your dad was still around…Joe, you can’t blame the woman for worrying about her son. What’s wrong with you?”

“You don’t want to know, Bren. Trust me.”

“Come on. Can’t be that bad, boyo.”

“It is.”

“Maybe I can help.” Conroy waited but got no response. “You remember the time you got pinched for that thing in Dearborn Square, looking for trouble? ’Member? Who’d you call when you were too scared to tell your old man?”

“I was a kid. This one’s tougher to fix.”

“Maybe.”

“Trust me. Ol’ Uncle Brendan can’t fix this one.”

“Whatever it is, boyo, it’s just you and me here. You and me and the pigeons.”

“Those are seagulls.”

“Okay, seagulls, whatever.”

Joe smirked. No doubt Conroy meant well, but even if Joe had wanted to confide what he was feeling, he could not have named it. It was not fear. On the contrary he felt safer now than he had in a long time. He might even have been clever. By playing both sides of the fence, he had appeased the enemy without paying or promising anything. Nor had he actually done anything he felt ashamed of. The work was nothing. There were occasional mid-morning calls to transport a suitcase to the North End. And occasional rounds of hole-in-the-wall shops that did a small book—smoke shops, groceries, a shoe-repair joint—to collect the tax. Far from a villain, Joe felt like a functionary in an ancient and very large organization. He was just an errand boy, for now. And Fish had been the exception; the people Joe had called on thus far had not resisted or even resented paying. Capobianco’s tax was just ordinary overhead. It seemed to Joe that The Catastrophe had occurred without fanfare, so maybe—just maybe—it had not been a catastrophe at all. And yet, and yet…he could not shake this feeling. He did not feel comfortable around cops. He had a shameful secret. He was a spy among them. And stripped of his cophood, he did not feel quite like Joe Daley anymore. Maybe he never would.

“I took a wrong turn, Bren, that’s all.”

“What did you do?”

Joe hesitated. Well, what the hell. Might as well tell somebody. “I got in a hole. Betting.”

“Betting on what?”

“Numbers, sports, horses, name it.”

“And?”

“I have to—I kind of have to work it off. They’ve got me running errands. That’s it so far. I’m sure it’ll be more.”

“Who’s they?”

“Capobianco’s crew. It was Vincent Gargano came to me.”

“Ah. And how big a hole are we talking about?”

“Too big. More than I have.”

“I can get you the money.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be enough now. I don’t know that I can just walk away.”

Conroy nodded. “Who knows about this?”

“No one.”

“Not even Kat?”

“If Kat knew, my mother would know. If my mother knew…I kind of wanted to handle it my own way.”

“Of course, of course. Alright, keep it to yourself, then. Let me see what I can find out. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You’re not alone in this, boyo. You know that, don’t you?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Anyway, it sounds like you didn’t have much choice. Did you have a choice?”

“Yeah, a bullet in the hat.”

“Alright, then. So don’t grind yourself up over it. You do what you have to do, Joe, understand? Just don’t go too far. Run a few errands or whatever, just remember you’re still a cop. If you go too far, no one will know you.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll take care of it. You stay cool. You have a family, son. You have a son of your own. You have a responsibility to them. No one can say you did the wrong thing till they walk in your shoes.”

“Thanks, Bren. I’m glad my dad’s not around for this.”

“Let me tell you somethin’: Your dad was no saint, God rest his soul. Sometimes he did what he had to do, too.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like I’m not going to say. He’s passed away and he was a friend of mine and he loved you boys something awful. If there were things he did not want to tell you, then that was his decision and it’s not my place to do any different. No father tells his son everything, Joe. No father does and no father should. A son never really knows his father. There’s too many years in between. But I knew him. I knew him like a brother. Like a goddamn brother, your dad, and he was a good, clean, honest cop. He never did anything—anything—you boys should be the least bit ashamed of. So don’t misunderstand me. But just the same, he was a man, same as you, and he lived in the world, same as you, and that’s all I’m gonna say about it. I don’t want you coming up here on the roof mooning over ‘what would dear ol’ Da think?’ Because I’ll tell you: He’d understand and he’d back you up, same as I’m going to back you up. That’s what we do. We do what we do, and we don’t apologize. That’s how a family works.”

“Alright. Okay.” Joe wasn’t sure whether Conroy was referring to the Daley family or the police family. He suspected there was not much distinction, to Conroy at least. “What are you going to tell my mother?”

“What am I going to tell her? The truth: this young fella’s been working his fingers to the bone and he’s tired, and she and Kat and the rest of the ladies’ sewing circle should just leave yuz alone for a while, let us work it all out.”

35

Symphony Hall. Wednesday, three-thirty
P
.
M
., final closed rehearsal before the weekend’s performances.

Something was happening inside the music, something was stirring. The musicians seemed to sense it. During a rest they inhaled deeply, as if to fill their lungs with it. The orchestra had been augmented with freelancers to play the piece—Respighi’s
Pines of Rome
—and the stage was crowded with players and instruments, extra brass, an organist. Some of the horns were stationed in the balconies around the hall, where they stood at attention behind the gilded latticework railing. The conductor was a trim, bald man in a snug black cardigan, like a midshipman’s jacket. His upper body jerked with the movement of his arms. He barked curt German-accented instructions and expressive grunts:
Hup! Tick! Ta!

At the back of the hall, Ricky lurked in the shadow of a doorway. Up to this point, he had not liked the piece very much. The earlier movements had reminded him of the corny orchestral music in Disney movies, bright and brassy in some places, self-consciously solemn in others. Probably classical music just wasn’t for him. But around the three-minute mark of the fourth and final movement, he felt it too.

The music unclogged. Out of a stagnant, reedy pianissimo passage, the horns stepped forward and began to blast away. The unstable B-flat opened out onto a major key—“Hah!” the conductor exclaimed—and the brass pulled the entire orchestra into a cycling crescendo that lasted two thrilling minutes, with the horns in the balconies blaring back over the empty hall and the conductor calling for “More!”

At the rear of the stage, the organist tipped his head back, his mouth yawned open, and he played in a sort of ecstasy or sustained orgasm. This was Kurt Lindstrom.

After the rehearsal Lindstrom emerged from the stage door with a couple of older musicians. The threesome stood chatting a moment. One of the men said something at which Lindstrom laughed too loudly, then he left them. He walked away on St. Stephen Street, bouncing on the balls of his feet, chest thrust forward.

Across the street and half a block behind, Ricky walked too. He had tracked any number of suckers with an eye toward taking them off, and he was meticulous about this aspect of his job. He was confident—overconfident—in his ability to size people up. He figured that any semi-intelligent thief could acquire the few basic facts needed to pull off a burglary: the victim’s daily routine, the sort of locks on the door, the jewelry or other things to be taken. What set Ricky apart, he believed, was that his empathy was more acute than that. He thought he understood something about the people he ripped off. When circumstances allowed, he lingered in their rooms, inspected their bookshelves, LP’s, medicine cabinets, and refrigerators, to confirm his impressions. He had a thief’s haughty scorn for his victims, who must be less clever or careful or nimble than he was, otherwise they would not be such easy prey. At the same time, he disapproved of the low-rent burglars—the step-over men and window smashers, opportunists and drug addicts, most of them—who ignored the human aspect of the job. They did not bother to research their victims, let alone study the finer points, lock-picking and the rest of it. They did not prepare, and so they were forced into unnecessary risks. Fools. Between the rich fools Ricky victimized and the poor fools who occupied the bottom rungs of his own profession, it was hard to say whom Ricky disdained more.

The rich ones, probably. As a student of the behavior of rich people—who, after all, had what Ricky wanted—he was stupefied by the mediocrity of the city’s upper classes. To anyone who preached the old fairy tale of America as a meritocracy, Ricky might have invited them to view the wealthy as a burglar would. Was there a more foolish, careless class than these rich old Yankees? They left their inherited jewelry lying around in dresser drawers and strolled out of the house with their doors unlocked, or badly locked—then they stiffed the waitress at lunch on a nickel or dime tip. If this was the ruling class, then it was about time the Kennedys of the world took over. A government run by thieves would, as the saying went, make the trains run on time.

Now here went Kurt Lindstrom loping down St. Stephen Street like some cartoon aristocrat. Something in the young man’s springy walk—like some flightless, fast-running bird—and the stubborn lick of blond hair on his forehead, and the FDR tilt to his chin, signified to Ricky a Yankee jackass of a certain type: foppish, effeminate. It was impossible to accept that this man might have murdered Amy. A musician and out-of-work actor whose only dramatic performances were the Shakespearian speeches he delivered on the sidewalks of Harvard Square, his old college haunt. Amy could have broken this guy in half. But brother Michael believed it, and the cops believed it, so Ricky had set out to prove it.

Lindstrom turned right on Symphony Road and entered number 50, two blocks down. The building was a four-story walk-up. Most of the buildings on the street were of the same type: simple redbrick bowfronts, unadorned except for rough-hewn granite pediments above the doors and windows. This was mostly a student area, and the street had a scruffy look. The bricks needed pointing, the little front yards needed weeding. But there was a genteel Victorian appearance, too, in the uniformity of the buildings, the low scale, the repeating curves of the street wall formed by those bow windows.

Ricky stood across the street and watched the light come on in Lindstrom’s apartment window. After a few minutes he climbed the stoop and noted the apartment number on the entry buzzer.

But he did not immediately leave. He went behind the building, inspected the rear entrance, the garbage cans, noted the cars parked there.

An alley, which was wide enough for a truck to pass through, ran down the center of the block, behind the rows of apartment buildings. About a block down this alley, on the opposite side, was the back of 77 Gainsborough Street, a redbrick bowfront very much like the one Lindstrom lived in. Helena Jalakian—the very first Strangler victim—had lived in a small apartment at 77 Gainsborough Street. She had been murdered there on June 14, 1962, the start of that terrifying summer.

Helena was fifty-six, a seamstress, first-generation Armenian immigrant, and classical music buff. She had taken the apartment in part because it was such an easy walk to Symphony Hall. She had attended the BSO open rehearsals and stood in line for rush tickets. She liked Brahms, disliked Mahler, disliked the new little German conductor who was not warm enough for her taste. She luxuriated in Symphony Hall; the opulence of it would once have seemed unimaginable to her. Had Helena met the young musician who lived nearby, who walked home along the same streets? Had she seen him on stage? Had they chatted by the stage door one day? Would she have opened the door for him willingly, eagerly? Would she have turned away from him to go change out of her housecoat, maybe then to offer him tea and cookies? Helena Jalakian had been clubbed on the back of the head, raped vaginally, apparently with an object (no semen was found; the object was never identified or recovered), beaten, and strangled with the cord of her housecoat, which was tied off in a bow—the first occurrence of that signature knot.

Returning to his own apartment, Ricky found the door smashed, the doorknob dislodged. He eased the door half open with one fingertip, but it caught on something and he had to shove harder.

Inside, the destruction was so complete that the apartment barely resembled the one Ricky had left a few hours before. Drawers were dumped on the floor. The sofa had been stripped down to the frame. The cushions had been sliced open, the cotton batting pulled out and tossed on the floor. The bookcase that had held the hi-fi and the records lay splintered on the floor. Most of the discs were shattered. Ricky would miss them most of all. He had built his LP collection over the course of several years, and sorted it with loving care, alphabetically within jazz genres. What a waste. Leave it to Gargano and his goons—for no burglar would risk making the sort of racket these guys must have made, and no cop would work this hard. They had smashed up a magnificent collection, and for no good reason. Ricky had already told him he did not have the missing stones.