The Strangler (3 page)

“So,” Amy cut in, “you still want that bet, Brendan?”

“That Byron won’t butt in? Sure. I just hate to take your money, girly-girl. How’s two bits, can you afford that? They pay you enough at that fish wrapper?”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t be paying it.”

Conroy grinned and raised his glass to Amy. “I like your style.”

Michael rolled his eyes.

Joe saw Michael’s eye-rolling and misinterpreted it. “It’s easy to make fun from the cheap seats, Mikey.”

“I didn’t say anything to you, Joe.”

“I’m a cop, too.”

“I wasn’t talking about you, Joe. Just let it alone.”

“Yeah, you were. You were talking about cops. I’m a cop.”

“Your dad was a cop, too,” Conroy threw in.

“Let’s leave him out of it,” Michael said.

“I was just saying—”

“Leave him out.”

“Sorry, Michael. I didn’t mean anything.”

“He didn’t mean anything,” Joe seconded.

From the police reports, Michael had formed an image of his father’s death: In an alley in East Boston, his heart pierced by a bullet, Joe Senior had shimmered down to the ground, hands pinned to his sides. That was the image Michael saw now, and it made him venomous.

“Brendan, you might have let that chair cool off before you sat down in it.”

“Michael!” Margaret’s tone was more astonished than angry.

Conroy was unruffled. “I see.” He simply had not understood and now everything was clear. “Maybe I should go.”

“So go,” Michael said.

Joe pounded the table with the butt of his fist.

Conroy dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come. Margaret, ladies, thank you for all this. Excuse me.”

“Brendan,” Margaret instructed, “you sit down. This is my house, you’re my guest. It’s enough of this.” Mother Daley could be magnificently huffy. Her late husband had called her Princess Margaret. The three boys, more accurately, called her Queen Margaret.

“No, Margaret. Maybe Michael’s right, it’s too soon.”

“Michael is
not
right.”

“Some other time. I don’t want to spoil this beautiful meal.”

“Brendan! You sit down. Michael is going to apologize.”

Ricky said, “What’s he got to apologize? He didn’t do anything.”

“Mind your own business, you.”

Brendan Conroy smiled gallantly. All the arguing was pointless. There was no swaying him from a grand gesture. “Some other time,” he repeated. He excused himself, got his coat, and left.

The seven Daleys listened as Conroy started his car and drove off.

A moment of silence.

“Michael,” Ricky said, “let me have those noodles.”

For as long as the Daley boys could remember, there had been a basket attached to the phone pole in front of the house. They had gone through a few of them. Winters killed the steel hoops and especially the flimsy backboards from Lechmere’s, and every few years Joe Senior would swap in a new set, adjusting it slightly up or down the pole to avoid the holes left by the big lag screws he used. The current model, which had lasted the longest, had a faded, undersized fan-shaped aluminum backboard. It was hung a few inches too high and seemed to rise even higher as you got closer to the curb, where the pavement dipped. The boys thought of this hoop and the pavement in front of it as their private court. Even now, with the Daley boys all long gone from the house, there were neighbors who did not park in front of the basket, out of old habit, as if it were a fire hydrant. Occasionally a new neighbor or visitor or other interloper, ignorant of the local etiquette, would leave his car under the hoop, and the boys took it as a sign of the decline of their city. Back in the day, no one would dream of parking there because, as a general rule, you did not fuck with the Daleys, particularly Joe, and in any case there was always a game going on there.

These games were a deadly serious business. A
Code Napoléon
of unspoken rules governed play. One must never take the feet out from under a player near the basket lest he land on his back on the curbstone, as Jimmy Reilly once did. The Daleys’ ball was never to be used in a game at which no Daley was present, even if the ball was sitting right there in the yard. All parked cars were inbounds. But the sidewalk was out-of-bounds, to discourage smaller players from running behind the basket and using the pole to rub off a defender, a strategy deemed so chickenshit that Joe forbid it outright. These were technicalities, though. The real secret knowledge of these games—their whole purpose—was the hierarchy of the boys involved. There were a dozen local boys who regularly played, mostly Irish, all linked through school or St. Margaret’s parish, and every one of them knew precisely where he ranked from number one to number twelve. There was no allowance for age or size. Nor did it matter who you were. Michael Daley never rose above the middle of the pack, even on his home court; Leo Madden, though his father was in and out of Deer Island and his mother weighed three bills, was a rebounding machine and therefore he was completely respected here. Prestige to the winners, shame to the losers. All of it real and perfectly quantifiable and precious as money in the lives of boys, and men.

So, when the three brothers drifted out to play after dinner under the streetlight, the women gathered at the windows to watch. They arranged themselves at the living-room windows, which looked across the porch and over a shallow yard to the street. Margaret and Kat stood together at one window, Amy at the other. The younger women wore similar expressions, sharp, bemused, scornful. Queen Margaret had the same sharp smirk, but there was bleary concern in her eyes. She could not completely share in the womanly skepticism of boys’ games, knowing that, however it turned out, one of her boys would lose. She felt Kat’s arm curled around her lower back; that helped a little.

“Margaret,” Kat said, “you should have had one more. Two against one, it’s not fair.”

“Fair to who?”

“True.” Kat considered the problem. “You know, Ricky should let them win, just once.”

Margaret emitted a skeptical sniff. Cigarette smoke piped out of her nostrils.

“Amy, why don’t you talk to him? Ricky’s got to let Joe win sometime.” Kat gave Amy a sidelong look. “Come on, Aim, you could find a way to convince him, couldn’t you?”

Amy raised two fingers, scissored her cigarette between them, and removed the cigarette with a flourish. “Ladies, let me assure you, I could lie down in my altogether on a bed of roses and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference. Ricky’d cut off his right arm before he’d let Joe win.”

“Well,” Kat sighed, “if Joe beats him then, it’ll be fair and square.”

“He’s got to win sometime, right? I mean, if they play enough times?”

Amy: “I just hope Joe doesn’t kill him, after that fiasco.”

Margaret: “If he’s going to kill anyone, it’ll be poor Michael. I don’t know what’s got into him. Michael’s crazy lately.”

“Don’t worry, Mum, Joe won’t kill him. Maybe just, you know, shake him around a little.”

“Well, that’s a comfort, dear.”

Outside, Michael was hopping up and down to stay warm.

“I don’t know what Michael’s got against poor Brendan, I really don’t.”

Amy: “I do.”

Kat: “Margaret, maybe you should enter a convent.”

“I’m not entering any convents.”

“Still got some wild oats to sow?”

Margaret turned to face the two younger women. “Now why should that be so funny?”

Kat made a face at Amy: eyebrows raised, impressed smile,
Wow!

Amy: “Nothing’s funny. So, Mum, is Brendan…?”

Kat covered her ears. “Oh, stop! Ick.”

“Brendan is—”

“Stop, stop, stop!”

“I didn’t know you girls were so squeamish.”

Amy said, “I’m not squeamish.”

Kat watched Joe as he stood waiting for a rebound, arms up. “Amy, you want to make this interesting?”

“Sure.”

“Six points okay?”

“Sure, whatever.”

“Margaret, how about you? Michael’s feeling feisty tonight. Care to put a little cash down on the middle son?”

“You want me to bet against my own sons?”

“Only one of them.”

Margaret shook her head.

“Go on, Mum,” Amy urged, “it’s just for fun.”

“We’ll never tell,” Kat added. “Promise.”

“No, thanks, dear.”

“Take Joe,” Kat pleaded. “The poor thing.”

Margaret considered it. “I’ll put a nickel on Ricky.”

“Oh!” Kat yelped. “You’re a horrible mother.”

Through the window they could hear the brothers ragging each other as the game got going. Joe and Michael were a team, as usual, and at the start they exploited their two-to-one advantage by spreading out, forcing Ricky to cover one or the other, then passing to the free man for easy shots. Michael was a careful player, a lurker. He liked to slide into open spaces for unmolested set shots. At times he moved out of the lighted area altogether, and the women had to squint to find him in the darkness. Joe’s game was all muscle. He moved like a bear chasing a butterfly, but his size ensured he would always have the best position under the basket. Together they made a decent inside-outside combination. As their lead climbed, 2–0, 3–0, 4–0, Joe’s taunting got louder and louder. Amy was right: Joe was pissed about the way Brendan Conroy had been treated, and, though Michael had been Conroy’s main tormenter, Joe directed his anger at Ricky. There was a tacit understanding that Michael was somehow disengaged from the grander struggle between Joe and Ricky. So if Joe was angry, it seemed perfectly natural for him to target Ricky, not Michael. The insults from Joe were all variations on a theme: “Come on, Mary…Does your husband play?…What, are you afraid of a little contact?…Pussy…”

And then, in an instant, the game changed. Michael put up one of his little jumpers, the kind he knocked down over and over, but this time the shot was flat. It caught the back rim and rebounded high, out into the street, away from the hoop where Joe was hanging. Ricky snagged it in the air.

“Shit!” Kat hissed.

A little smiled wriggled across Amy’s lips.

What happened next happened very quickly. Ricky bounced the ball once with his left hand, once with his right. Michael swiped at it, and Ricky avoided him by threading the ball between his own legs, from back to front, which left Michael behind him and out of the play. Joe took a step toward him, like a palace guard blocking a gate. Ricky paused for an instant to eye him up. He slow-dribbled the ball low and to his right, extending it a few inches toward Joe, who finally took the bait, leaning then stepping toward the ball, a reluctant irresistible stuttery step. But it was enough. Ricky crossed the ball over to his left hand, and he was behind Joe. He laid the ball in: 6–1.

Kat groaned, “
Mmm.
It’s not fair. The way Ricky shows off!”

“He’s not showing off.”

“Oh, Amy!”

“Alright,” Amy allowed, “maybe a little.”

But Amy could not take her eyes off him. Because he was showing off
for her
. And because he was beautiful. His game was jazzy and gliding and fast, she thought, but more than anything it was beautiful. The way he moved. The way the ball moved with him, the way it yo-yoed back to his hand. The way he spun, his body in flight. Amy had not known Ricky when he was a high-school hero—when he was Tricky Ricky Daley, point guard and captain at Boston English, All-Scholastic, All-Everything; when he’d been offered a scholarship to Holy Cross, alma mater of the great Cousy himself—and she was glad for that. She did not want to think of Ricky as one of those arrested men who were such stars in high school or college that everything after was tinged with anticlimax and nostalgia. She did not want to define him by what he
had been
. And she particularly did not want to define him as a jock because he wasn’t, not anymore. Anyway, Ricky never talked about it. For a long time after they’d met, Amy had had no idea the man she was dating had a glorious past, until she’d finally met his family and Margaret had shown her a book of clippings. In fact, for Amy the defining moment of Ricky’s basketball career was the way it had ended, the way he’d thrown it all away in a romantic, stupid gesture. He’d got himself pinched with a car-trunkful of Mighty Mac parkas that had “fallen off a truck,” as the saying went. That was the end of Holy Cross and basketball and Tricky Ricky Daley, and good riddance. It was all so clumsy—so un-Ricky-like—it seemed like a setup. Amy saw something heroic in the whole episode. Ricky had been true to some obscure, prickly, self-destructive impulse that no one, not Amy, probably not Ricky himself, could quite understand. He just had not felt like being Tricky Ricky anymore, so he had stopped. And yet Amy could not deny that she loved him more—at least she loved him differently, saw him differently—when she watched him play. She thought she understood in some intuitive, inarticulable way what made Ricky do the things he did. It was something about doing the opposite of what everyone else wanted him to do. My Lord, how could she not love such a beautiful, wasteful man?

Ricky spun and tricky-dribbled and flew by his brothers. His hair flopped over his forehead, grew damp and drippy. He did not say much; his virtuosity was not news to anyone.