The Strangler (23 page)

46

“The fuck is this, Rick?”

“Edith Piaf.”

“Edith Piaf. Fuckin’ Cambridge.”

“She’s French.”

“Well, I know she’s French. That’s not my point.”

“You know Edith Piaf?”

“No, dummy, I can hear. She’s singing French. I’ve been to France, remember? She’d be singin’ German if it wasn’t for me.”

“Good thing you went, then.”

“What kind of place puts Edith Piaf on the fuckin’ jukebox?”

“The customers must like it.”

“Exactly. That’s my point. What kind of people come to a place like this?”

“Me.”

“See, there you go.”

“You said pick a place you wouldn’t see anyone you know. Trust me, no one you know comes here.”

“Why would they?” Joe looked around the place, a scruffy basement bar called the Casablanca—the Casa B, everyone called it—on Brattle Street in Harvard Square. He snorted. What a scene. Couple of boho hippy poets needing a bath and a haircut. Skinny Harvard rich kids needing a wising-up before they went off and became stockbrokers. Dumpy Cambridge broads looking like washerwomen. “Jesus, Rick, I could see Michael hanging around a place like this. I figured you knew better.”

“Sorry to let you down.”

“What are you doing out here anyway? Who would want to live in Cambridge?”

“It’s better not to live where you work.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“I cross that river, I’m in Middlesex County. Different cops, different D.A.’s. Nobody knows me here, no hassles.”

Joe nodded. He scraped his beer bottle with a thumbnail, distracted.

“Relax, Joe. I just told you, you’re out of your jurisdiction.”

“I don’t give a shit. Do whatever you want. What, you think I’m gonna arrest you?” But Joe’s disdain seemed to have exhausted itself on Edith Piaf and the Cambridge hippy scene, and he fell quiet.

Ricky did not know exactly what to make of it. What was Joe up to? What was going on in that massive head of his? Ricky always went a little crazy with Joe. All that firstborn’s confidence and facile conservatism, the dense, bullying, confrontational manner, the reflexive, arrogant, empty-headed, aggressive xenophobia…Joe was Ricky’s negative image. If they had not been brothers, Ricky was sure, they would never have been friends. As it was, they needed Michael as a middleman. Alone, there was a relentless fractious undercurrent to their conversations, as if their thirty-year relationship had been a single ongoing argument. But, in the way of brothers, Ricky could not completely escape admiring Joe, who had, after all, willingly accepted the weight of their patrimony. Fatherhood, husbandhood, cophood—all the things Ricky did not want and doubted he could sustain, Joe took on his shoulders and dead-lifted every day. You had to see Joe the way Kat saw him, Ricky figured: firm, not stubborn; doggishly loyal, not just a company man. Still, Ricky was never sure how to reach Joe.

Chuck Berry came on the jukebox, “Sweet Little Rock ’n’ Roller.”

Joe dipped his head in a stiff, rheumatic way to the beat. Not exactly his style, but getting there.

“Well, come on, Joe,” Ricky said, “you sat through Edith Piaf. Whatever it was you had to say, you might as well get it off your chest.”

“I’m supposed to give you a message.”

“From who?”

“Gargano.”

Ricky felt a freeze. It began between his shoulder blades and washed up the back of his neck. He smothered it as best he could, permitting himself just the slightest rustle of his shoulders, as if he were resettling a jacket that had begun to slip off.

“It’s about that Copley thing. They think you’ve got the stones. They want the stones, is all. He says they just want the stones back and that’s all it is. That’ll be the end of it.”

“You believe that, Joe?”

“I don’t know, Rick. These guys…”

“Yeah.”

“If you’ve got the stones, just give them up. Don’t fool around with this. I don’t care how much they’re worth.”

“It’s not about that. If those guys think I did that job, I’m dead. Whether they get the stones or not.”

“Did you do it?”

“Joe, I can’t—You really want to know? You can’t tell them anything you don’t know. And they’re gonna ask you.”

“They won’t believe me anyways, whatever I say.”

“Still.”

Joe nodded.

“Gargano told me you got yourself in a hole, Joe.”

“When was that?”

“Few months ago. He came looking for me about this. He mentioned you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a bigger hole now.”

“How big?”

“Big.”

“I can get you the cash.”

“It’s a lot of cash, Rick.”

“I can get anything you need.”

Joe shook his head.

“Anything.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re not gonna let me out. I’m a witness now. If I go to the feds, I could have Gargano locked up by supper-time. They aren’t gonna let me just walk away from this.”

“Fuck, Joe, why didn’t you come to me? I’ve got money.”

“We never—I don’t know, Rick. It was like, I had it under control. That was the thing. I did. It’s not like I never got in a little hole before. That’s how the thing works: you go up, you go down, it’s all part of it. You can’t let it bother you. I kept figuring it’d turn around. Only this time I just kept going down and down and down. But I had it under control. It was like, it happened real slow and then real fast. Real fast.”

Ricky massaged his eyes with the fingertips of one hand.

“Ricky, I’d just as soon Kat doesn’t know about this. We got enough trouble already, alright?”

“She’s gonna find out eventually, one way or the other.”

“Let’s make it ‘the other,’ okay?”

“Okay. How about Michael?”

“Let’s just keep it you and me for now.”

Ricky made a disapproving face but said nothing.

“What do you want me to tell them about the stones, Rick?”

“Tell them I don’t know anything about it.”

“It’s not gonna be the end of it.”

“I know.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“Don’t know yet. What are
you
gonna do?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“Is this all they’ve got you doing, squeezing poor guys like me?”

“No. I do some other stuff, too.”

“Kind of stuff?”

“I’d rather not talk about it. ‘If you don’t know anything,’ like you said.”

“Maybe we should go away somewhere for a while.”

“We could go to Ireland. Always wanted to go to Ireland.”

“That’s an idea. We’d fit right in.”

“You could go to France. Fag.”

“You know, what if I walk out of here and these guys shoot me? That’s gonna be the last thing you ever said to me, calling me a fag. You’re gonna feel like shit.”

“I’ll get over it. I’ll listen to a little Edith Pee-aff. That’ll make me feel better.”

“I’m serious, Joe. If I go somewhere, to France or whatever, you want to come? They won’t find you.”

“France?”

“It’s better since the Germans left. Trust me.”

“What happened to Ireland?”

“Alright, Ireland.”

“I can’t. I got a family.”

“Bring ’em.”

“What’ll we do there?”

“I told you, I’ve got cash. We won’t have to do anything. We’ll sit under a shamrock tree all day.”

“What about Little Joe?”

“They’ve got kids over there. He’ll make friends.”

“For how long?”

“Till it blows over.”

Joe frowned.

Ricky’s eyes fell.

It was never going to blow over. These guys were not going to forget, much less forgive. If the brothers left, it would be forever.

“Can’t do it, Ricky. This is where I live. Imagine me in Paris.”

“Think about it.”

“Yeah, okay, right. I’ll think about it.”

“Maybe one day you’ll wake up and I’ll be gone, y’know?”

“’Kay.” Joe studied the tabletop. He refused to lift his eyes.

“Not tomorrow, Joe. I’m not going anywhere tomorrow.”

“Good.”

47

At mid-morning, Michael stood in the doorway of the BPD Homicide office at Berkeley Street. He did not like coming here, where Joe Senior had worked and where his murder had been investigated, inconclusively. To Michael, this was still his father’s office. Two long rectangular rooms side by side, sergeants on one side, detectives on the other. In the detectives’ room, second from the end, was the desk that had been Joe Senior’s. It reminded Michael, yet again, of the awesome moment when his father had ribboned down to the ground and for the Daleys everything went to shit.

So he paused at the threshold and forced himself to see the place in perspective, to realize that it was just a room after all. Empty but for a single detective, Tom Hart, who studied a pile of papers. On the wall opposite, the row of windows faced the Hancock building, each at a slightly different angle, like frames in a film strip. The overhead lights were off, and the shadow of an ailanthus tree outside dappled the wall.

Tom Hart had not been a friend of Joe Senior’s the way Brendan Conroy had been. The two had never played handball at the Y or drunk after work or visited on Christmas. Hart had been a protégé. Once upon a time, Joe Senior had taught him how to work a homicide case, and forever after, Tom Hart’s view of the elder Daley was tinged with the sort of schoolboy admiration younger men often form for older ones. Balding as a forty-year-old when he first came to Homicide, now at fifty Hart was just plain bald. He brushed his remaining gray hairs straight back and out of the way, and meeting him, you saw his handsome, ram-jawed, granitic head as a single piece rather than an assemblage of parts, like a bust carved from a single block of stone. He was the ranking detective in the squad, number three in terms of seniority behind the commander and Conroy, but probably higher in the eyes of his peers who saw him as a “good cop” in every sense of the adjective.

Hart noticed Michael and greeted him warmly. He escorted Michael to a chair with one arm crooked in the air a foot or so above Michael’s shoulders, protectively, as if he were shepherding an invalid or an idiot to a wheelchair.

“Where is everybody?” Michael asked.

Hart’s eyes swept across the empty room. The office was lightly staffed: eight detectives and eight sergeants for an entire city, working staggered shifts, with cases assigned to whoever happened to be working when the call came in. It was not a job for deskmen. “Out working,” Hart said, “what do you think?”

“We alone here?”

“For the moment.”

“Well, maybe we could go somewhere? In private. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, no. Never better. I have some information. I’d rather not be attached to it.”

“So why’d you call me? You’ve got a houseful of cops over there. I thought Brendan Conroy was…well, whatever.”

“There’s all different kinds of cops, Tom. Brendan’s not the kind I need right now. You are.”

“What kind is that?”

“Kind I can trust. Tom, you knew my dad. I need someone who’ll handle things the way he would if he was here, for me and my brothers.”

A little riffle stirred Hart’s features. “Alright, come on.”

They shut themselves in the commander’s office at the end of the room. It was the same office where, months before, Michael himself had interrogated the giant, Arthur Nast, and linked him at the least to one of the Strangler murders. Behind the little mirror on the wall was a peephole, Michael recalled. The intimacy of a sub rosa meeting in here was, or might be, an illusion. But what could you do? You had to trust someone, and Tom Hart was as good as a priest. Better, actually: a priest with a size-thirteen boot and a nine-millimeter in his desk, both of which might come in handy if it turned out God was otherwise occupied at a prayerful moment.

“Alright, then. So what was so important?”

“It’s about the Strangler.”

“Not our case. You know that. Take it to Wamsley.”

“This is a case he doesn’t know what to do with: Amy Ryan. All Wamsley has is DeSalvo. And even DeSalvo can’t figure out a way to confess to it; he was in Bridgewater when it happened.”

“Well, it’s still the A.G.’s case until I hear different.”

“It’s an unsolved murder in the city of Boston, Tom. You want to leave it to that fruitcake so he can call in a psychic to solve it for him?”

The fruitcake in question, of course, was Wamsley, who had in fact hired a psychic to fly into Boston early in the Strangler investigation. It had fallen to Tom Hart to escort this man discreetly around the city, even bunk with him at a hotel in Lexington. The whole thing had made Wamsley a laughingstock among cops, who had more colorful names for George Wamsley than fruitcake.

“Alright, Michael. No harm in listening, I guess.”

“I have a friend with an interest in the case. Someone who’s completely trustworthy.”

“Who? I need a name.”

“This is in confidence. It’s someone close to me.”

“I still need the name. You can trust me, you know that.”

“My friend can open doors.”

“Ah. That one.”

“You remember Kurt Lindstrom? He was a suspect in some of the stranglings.”

“The symphony guy. Othello.”

“Right. Well, my friend has, by…um…arguably extralegal means, he got into Lindstrom’s apartment. He wants you to know what he found there. He says Lindstrom has bloodstained panties. At least it looked like blood. He says the panties are big, like a girdle, like the kind an old woman would wear. And there’s magazines, porno but not the regular stuff—women getting raped and killed.”

“So? The guy likes porn. So do I. So do you.”

“It’s not just that. My friend says there’s pictures there that look like they come straight from the Strangler murders: women tied, tortured, strangled with ropes tied off in a bow. Lindstrom lives on Symphony Road, right around the corner from Helena Jalelian, the first victim.”

“Jalakian.”

“Jalakian. She was a symphony fan, remember? She must have seen him at some point. She probably would have let him in. And the alley behind her apartment goes right down to Lindstrom’s building. He could have strangled her and got home without ever showing his face on the street.”

“And what do you—what does your friend—suggest we do?”

“Get a warrant, today. Put all this in an affidavit, get a warrant, and get in there.”

“Get a warrant for a murder DeSalvo’s already confessed to?”

“Confessed isn’t convicted. Come on, Tom, you see where this is headed. There isn’t going to be a trial. Wamsley doesn’t have a case. There’s no evidence against DeSalvo. The confession’s not admissible. Even if it were, it’s not enough to convict. The guy was in a mental hospital when he confessed. So Wamsley’ll let it drop, DeSalvo’ll rot in Walpole, and everybody goes home happy. Meanwhile Lindstrom is still out on the street. Are you going to leave him out there, when I’ve just told you he has Helena Jalakian’s bloody girdle in his sock drawer?”

“You don’t know either that it’s Helena’s or that it’s bloody.”

“How much proof do you need, Tom, before you
start
investigating?”

“Michael. No judge is going to open up those Strangler cases without Wamsley’s say-so. There hasn’t been a strangling in nearly six months, since Amy Ryan. I know DeSalvo was in custody when Amy was killed. Still, it’s been a long quiet period. Now, if you could link this guy to Amy somehow, we might have something. Otherwise, I’ll never get a warrant with just that tip; your ‘friend’ is a thief.”

“Who among us is without sin?”

“Not him, certainly.”

“Look, Tom, he asked me to give you the information. You do what you think is right with it. It’s up to you.”

“Tell you what: I’ll look into it, see if I can get the Strangler Bureau people to reconsider at least that Jalakian case. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Nobody wants to talk about this anymore. The Amy Ryan case, obviously that’s a different thing. But you haven’t made that link yet.”

“Alright. I’ll tell him. And you’ll keep my friend out of it, right, Tom?”

“I’ll keep him out of it. Tell him, from now on leave the police work to the police.”