Strangled (21 page)

“Sounds like someone went out the emergency exit in the back,” he said.

I bolted. I descended the back staircase three at a time, my hand on the railing to balance me. I shot across the short first-floor landing and crashed against the bar that would open the fire exit, finding myself in the small rear parking lot of the club.

A Latino kitchen worker sat on a milk crate with his back against the brick building. “Did someone just come out of here?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Which way?” I said, trying to control my excitement.

He pointed out across Clarendon Street, heading toward the South End. I took off in a sprint. It was the early side of rush hour, and as such, the sidewalks were growing crowded with pedestrians on their way out of work, a fact that might have impeded my chase.

I say might have, because it didn’t. The workers were mostly attired in suits and ties, walking purposefully, but by no means urgently. Across the street, I spied a guy in a windbreaker running wildly on the sidewalk as he looked back over his shoulder. So I stormed across the street in pursuit. I mean, I’ve heard of chasing down a story, but this was taking it to ridiculous extremes. He was about forty paces ahead of me, the two of us weaving in and out of other pedestrians as we headed toward Columbus Avenue, when it happened: a cramp in my thigh so immense and intense that I immediately fell to the ground in restrained agony. Truth be told, I thought my leg would need to be amputated. What I really needed was more fluids.

From my vantage on the sidewalk, I saw my would-be killer slow down to a fast jog as he approached the next intersection. I saw a blue van pull to the curb, and the side doors seemed to pop open at just the right time. I saw my assailant jump inside the van. I saw said van melt away into the rest of this big city.

I was in desperate need of a break on this story. What I felt like I had was a broken leg.

A
guy walks into a bar with a weight on his shoulders.

All right, the guy was me. The bar was the always luxurious Max Stein’s in the wealthy suburban town of Lexington. The weight was of the whole world — or at least it felt like it at the moment.

Max Stein’s, though, represented something of a respite, a place to gather with legendary
Record
reporter Vinny Mongillo during what felt like an uneasy calm before a particularly nasty storm. Or maybe it was the eye of the hurricane. I’m trying to think of other suitable weather-related clichés, but none come immediately to mind, except maybe that it was raining trouble, so with sincere apologies, we’ll leave it there.

As I walked through the double doors, the appropriately named Richard Steer, the ever hospitable general manager who I’d known since what felt like the beginning of time, gave me a long, two-fisted handshake. “I’m betting this one’s driving you crazy,” he said. I only needed to nod for him to know that he was as on-point as usual.

Vinny was already at the bar, two glasses of red wine in front of him and one in his hand, which he happened to be holding nearly sideways, peering through the glass, saying to my favorite bartender, Nam, “It’s got terrific legs.”

Who knew wine had legs? Vinny and Nam, that’s who. And probably all the good waiters who were walking through the room carrying groaning plates of dry-aged sirloins and cottage fries and sautéed spinach. I was amazed that Vinny could keep his attention away from it, but he did.

“Hey, Mike Tyson,” he said as I sidled up to the bar. Nam gave me his characteristically cheery hello and my characteristic Sam Adams, icy cold from the back of the chest.

I poured my beer slowly into a glass and said, “Great legs.” But I was looking at a woman down at the far end of the bar.

Well, all right, that really didn’t happen, that last part, but Mickey Spillane would have been proud if it did.

“You doing any better?” Mongillo asked me, meeting me square in the eye.

“I was never doing bad,” I replied, not meaning to sound quite as clipped as I probably had. “I just don’t like being played by a murderer, that’s all.”

Vinny looked at me funny, eyeing my face and then my hands, almost analyzing me. He said, “Wait a minute. You look funny. Like a prune.”

“Long story,” I said. “One that I’d just as soon forget about.”

Vinny did. He took a long sip of wine, and I gulped my Sam. Nam came back over and asked Vinny about the “Russian Valley cab.”

“There’s a taxi here already?” I asked. They ignored me.

“Big nose, very broad, and a little bit acidic,” Mongillo said to Nam.

“You just described my aunt Toni,” I said.

He ignored me again. So did Nam, who was pouring yet another glass of wine. He handed it to Mongillo with a look of concern and said, “Tell me if you think this is too buttery.”

Enough already, so I used the one trump card I hoped I still had with Mongillo and said, “You want to eat?”

He looked at me almost surprised, as if he had forgotten that’s why we were there, though I’m reasonably sure he hadn’t, and said, “Great idea.”

My first one in a long while, actually.

Nam sent a waiter with a tray to ferry Mongillo’s wines to the table, though I’m not sure wine can be made plural like that. I carried my own beer and drank it along the way.

Once we were settled into a booth, Mongillo met my gaze and simply said, “Paul Vasco was the Boston Strangler.”

I wasn’t sure whether to say “No shit,” or ask “How do you know?” So instead I told him, “Go on.”

“Because Dorothy Trevorski really did have a shard of glass shoved into her eye,” he said, his gaze staying on mine. “It was never reported by any newspaper at the time. It was never revealed by the cops. It was one of those bits of info they held back so they’d know whether they had a professional confessor on their hands or the real thing.”

I said, “Well, if that’s the case, then wouldn’t they have known that DeSalvo wasn’t the real thing?”

“Maybe,” Mongillo said. “Or maybe Vasco told DeSalvo about this detail in one of their many prison walks, and he parroted it to the interrogators.”

I said, “Or maybe DeSalvo told Vasco.”

Mongillo thought about that for a long moment. Either that or he was just looking for an excuse to take a drink of wine from the glass he had been swirling.

“I suppose,” he finally said. “But there’s something else, too. Seven of the murder scenes had sperm on the floor several feet from the bodies. Vasco just about admitted pleasuring himself over the corpses. I don’t know if that’s something two guys would have talked about in prison, you know?”

I thought about that myself, and used my thinking time to drain my beer. Before I even put it down, a waiter named Jack, God bless him, appeared with another.

We ordered. I got grilled swordfish with cottage fries. Mongillo basically got the right side of the menu — or at least it sounded that way. Then he asked for the wine list back. I could all but hear Peter Martin’s lines when he looked over the expense account: “Is there a deposit on this dinner that we’re going to get back?”

Once the waiter retreated to the kitchen to inform the chef that there appeared to be a patron at Table 23 in pursuit of the world’s beef-eating record, Mongillo leaned toward me and said, “The most important thing that happened during that session with Vasco, I don’t think you even saw.”

“The fact that you picked up his cigarette butt, which contains his DNA?”

He furrowed his brow and squinted at me. “You saw that?”

“I think Ray Charles would have seen that.” I paused and added, “I was going to do it myself, but you beat me to the punch. Good move.”

Vinny asked, “Do you think Vasco saw it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what that guy sees, besides torture and necrophilia.”

We both fell quiet for a moment, maybe thinking of the women he tortured and the corpses he violated. Or perhaps Vinny was merely regarding his wine. Either way, I said, “You have someone in the BPD crime lab who will run it?”

He nodded his head knowingly. Of course he did.

I said, “It’s too bad we can’t get some of DeSalvo’s DNA. Then we’d have all bases covered — the ability to prove and disprove.”

Mongillo shot me an odd look and said, “We may get lucky on that count. Stay tuned, and don’t ask.”

So I didn’t, which runs entirely antithetical to every cell of my being, but it was that look on his face that gave me pause.

In the gulf of silence, a veritable team of waiters arrived at our table en masse — one of them carrying the seafood platter Vinny had ordered to kick things off, another a plate of fried calamari, and still another a Caesar salad and the wine list. Fortunately, the table was sturdy enough to withstand all the added weight on Vinny’s side.

Vinny asked Jack (the waiter, not the handsome but momentarily frustrated scribe), “Do you have an unoaked Chardonnay muscular enough to withstand shellfish?”

Somehow, Jack the waiter understood. As Mongillo dressed an oyster, I said, “Can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“How is it that you know so much about DeSalvo, Vasco, and the Boston stranglings? You weren’t even old enough to talk then.”

A pretty good thought, by the way: Mongillo unable to speak.

He sucked down the oyster. Jack the waiter arrived with the wine and the two of them went into their whole overdone uncorking and tasting routine. Finally, that over, Mongillo said to me, “When I was eight, nine, ten, even older, all the kids in the neighborhood, my own brothers, used to go down to the park at the end of the street and play baseball. They’d play for hours, until it got so dark that you couldn’t see the ball, and then they’d come to our house or one of the others and eat Popsicles and talk about how they just played.”

He sipped his wine appreciatively.

“I’d go down to the park and they’d make fun of me. ‘Fat Vinny.’ ‘Tubby.’ ‘Lard ass.’ And a whole lot worse. They wouldn’t let me play. So after a while, why bother trying. The kids were all out playing baseball or kick the can or whatever else, I was inside reading everything I could get my hands on about old Boston crimes. Ask me anything about the Brinks robbery or Sacco and Vanzetti. The Boston Strangler, it’s like I needed to know as much as I could about that one.”

By now, Mongillo’s plates had been cleared without him ever so much as offering me a leaf of romaine lettuce. The entrées arrived and it looked like he had ordered his food by the pound.

I told him about the steam-room incident of a couple of hours before. He immediately snapped up his cell phone and relayed the information to Edgar Sullivan.

When he hung up he said, “You should drink a lot more beer to rehydrate.”

It was touching, this concern, but I said, “It doesn’t work that way.” He didn’t seem to hear.

Idle conversation now. I told him about Maggie Kane and me not calling her back.

“That thing was never meant to be,” he said.

I told him about running into Elizabeth Riggs in the San Francisco Airport.

“Now, there’s a woman who loved you more than anyone you’ll ever meet.”

I paused mid-chew and stared at him. He looked at me defensively, shrugged, and said, “What do you want me to say? She did.”

I asked, “How do you know that?”

“Fair Hair, how do I know anything? Intuition. My own personal radar. She didn’t make it too tough, either, the way she looked at you, the way she talked to you, about you. A good woman. And good-looking, to say the least. That weird to see her?”

Suddenly, my swordfish didn’t have a whole lot of taste and the cottage fries seemed limp, though maybe that was just me.

I mumbled, “Yeah, it was pretty strange.”

Vinny chewed on his steak, took a sip from a glass of ruby-red wine that Jack had brought over, and said, “Yeah, I bet it was bizarre, huh? She still look great? Those big eyes? That flat stomach? God, that hair that frames both sides of her face?”

“All right, never mind. Forget I brought her up.” I pushed my dinner plate a couple of inches away from me, almost reflexively.

Mongillo said, “Oh-oh. Someone’s got a little case of the regrets. Or maybe they’ve come down with love sickness.”

I wanted to tell him she was pregnant. I wanted to tell someone, anyone. But then I didn’t want to have the inane conversation that would inevitably follow, so I said sharply, “Drop it, Vin, okay? Not the time.”

For a moment, he actually looked hurt. That moment passed quickly when Jack returned with dessert menus. He said, offhandedly, “Well, go get her all over again, and this time don’t be such a fuckup.”

Ah, if life really was that easy: me being able to get her all over again, me not being such a fuckup.

I
left Mongillo and Nam at the bar mulling various dessert wines — Moscatos and Brachettos and other types I pretended to know even though I didn’t have a clue. And I headed out the door in hopes of finally putting this long, absurd, and occasionally dangerous day behind me.

My car was already parked right out front, so I fidgeted in my pocket for a ten-dollar bill and asked the valet for the keys.

“I don’t have them,” the kid said.

Great.

“Who does?” I mean, it’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask a professional valet about the keys to my own car.

“He does,” he said, and as he said it, he pointed to someone or something behind me. I turned suspiciously around and found myself face-to-face with none other than Edgar Sullivan.

“Hello, Edgar,” I said. “You’re my designated driver?”

“I’m your guardian angel,” he replied.

He was sitting on a bench tucked amid some shrubbery and surrounded by two ornate buckets that were nothing more than glorified ashtrays. Massachusetts forbids smoking in all public places, and this bench was obviously put here as a little haven for the nicotine addicted. It’s one bad habit I never took up, though perhaps I still had time.

Edgar stood up slowly, the way old men always seem to do, his knee audibly cracking as he breathed a tiny sigh. He smoothed out his pants and walked stiffly toward me, thrusting out his right hand and saying, “I heard you almost melted to death today. I’m you, I’d be really steamed.”

“Didn’t I see you on Comedy Central last week?”

He smiled, not quite embarrassedly, but almost. “You sound like my second wife,” he said.

“Was that the really young one?” I asked.

“No, she was twenty-eight,” he replied.

I left the obvious question unstated.

A few stragglers were leaving the restaurant and handing their stubs to the valets. Others waited patiently and impatiently in the cool night air for their various BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes to be wheeled around. Edgar jingled my keys and said, “Come on, I’ll get you home safely.”

Truer words had never been spoken, but in retrospect, the cost was almost too much to bear.

We were floating down the wonderful riverside highway known as Storrow Drive, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. Ends up, I was learning, the young wife, the third one, was twenty-three years old. The first one was thirty. The fourth was an age-appropriate fifty-four.

“The next meaningful relationship I have is going to be completely platonic — with a dog,” Edgar said. He shook his head and added, “Sounds good when I say it, but don’t bet on it. I can’t help myself. I love wedding days. The celebrations, the well-wishers, the high expectations. It’s the marriages that don’t turn out so well.”

The Charles River was on our left, with Cambridge beyond it. The Back Bay of Boston — a neighborhood, not a body of water — was on our right. We were rolling toward the waterfront when I checked the clock on the car and said to Edgar, “Do you mind pulling off on Beacon Hill for a minute? I want to grab tomorrow’s paper.”

And he did. I wanted to see what the Phantom Fiend would see when he opened the
Boston Record
in a few hours — or more to the point, what he wouldn’t see, which was his miniature manifesto, if a manifesto can be done in miniature, which I don’t think it can. I wanted to know what he’d be reading instead of his own words, to get some empathic sense of what might set him off, and how.

I requested Beacon Hill because for whatever reason, the
Record
delivers the third batch of papers fresh off the press to a twenty-four-hour drugstore on the back slope of Beacon Hill. The first batch, by the way, goes directly into the newsroom, and keeping with tradition, the second batch always gets hand-delivered to the newsroom of the
Boston Traveler,
our main competition. They, in turn, send a stack from their early run over to us.

Edgar pulled off onto Cambridge Street, which isn’t in Cambridge, but go figure. I don’t know if Cambridge has a Boston Street, but I kind of doubt it. He glided up in front of the all-night CVS, stuck the car in a no-parking zone, and turned off the ignition.

“I’m going to run in,” I said.

He opened the driver’s door and said, “Not without me you’re not.”

The navy blue
Record
delivery truck was just pulling away as we stepped through the front door of the CVS. I can’t vow that this was the most upbeat place in the world at five after midnight. An Arab-looking clerk stood behind the counter reading that month’s
Cosmopolitan
— the one with the “Seven Sexual Secrets That Men Want to Tell” on the cover. And yes, he was a man, undoubtedly with secrets of his own. There was an elderly woman with a kerchief in her hair checking the use-by dates on every six-pack of Pepsi at a display near the front of the store. Otherwise, the place looked barren.

The
Record
s were still in a stack near the door, bound by plastic wire. As I leaned down and pulled the plastic apart, Edgar said, “You know what I want? A Hershey’s bar with almonds.”

I replied, “You know what I want? I want to catch the Boston Strangler, I want to save any number of women from their miserable deaths, and then I want to win the Pulitzer Prize.”

Actually, that’s not what I said. What I said was, “Shit, you know what else I need? Some aspirin.”

A more inane conversation had never taken place among two people not married to each other.

Edgar lumbered up to the candy counter in search of his chosen bar. I grabbed a paper and scanned the front page on the very off chance that Justine Steele had changed her mind or that Peter Martin had grown a set of brass balls. Neither appeared to have happened. So I wandered the aisle where the sign said
FIRST AID AND PAINKILLERS
for something to quell the headache that their inaction, among other things, had caused.

That’s where I was when the killer came into the store, in Aisle 2b, looking for a goddamned bottle of extra-strength Excedrin.

I didn’t hear the door open. I didn’t see what the security camera would later show, which is that once inside the store, he pulled a ski mask over his head. I didn’t see him pull the gun out from the shin-length black trench coat he was wearing. I didn’t see it because I was shopping for a bottle of Excedrin. If so much of being a great reporter is just making sure you’re at the right place at the right time, then I failed miserably here. Or maybe I didn’t, because I’m at least alive to tell about it; it’s all a matter of perspective.

The first inkling of trouble I got was the loud voice calling out, “Don’t do nothin’ stupid.”

I looked up from the aforementioned Aisle 2b and saw the similarly aforementioned man in the black trench coat waving what looked like a semiautomatic pistol. He was talking to the counter clerk. Edgar was standing near a magazine rack off to the side, watching the situation unfold and remaining very calm.

If it was a robbery, I was perfectly willing to let it happen, and I suspect Edgar Sullivan was as well. Let the guy get his $280 or whatever from the till, make off into the night, and buy another week’s worth of heroin to make his miserable life remotely bearable.

But oddly enough, rather than tell the clerk to give him all his cash, he scanned the store, his gaze seeming to pass over Edgar and the older woman in the kerchief, and settling on me, still standing, appropriately enough, in the painkiller section.

“Everyone up here,” he barked. “I need people up here — now.”

His voice was shallower than a robber’s should probably be, and his build was slighter than he probably would have preferred — though his gun was undoubtedly every bit as powerful as the next one.

I didn’t move, or at least not quickly enough. He hollered, “Get up here, now.”

I began moving slowly up the aisle toward the front of the store, sans the Excedrin I came in for. I figured my headache was the least of my problems right now.

As I walked up, I noticed Edgar drifting farther off to the side, away from the cash registers. I saw out of the corner of my eyes the older woman slipping toward the door, and then out. The assailant heard the door open, whirled around, saw her leave, and did nothing but say “Shit” just barely loud enough for anyone to hear.

“Faster!”

I was staring into the distant barrel of the pistol. I don’t think the president of Smith & Wesson had seen as many guns as I had in the last few days. I picked up the pace a bit, but I wasn’t exactly setting a land-speed record. Time, I figured, bought opportunity. I just wasn’t clear what that opportunity was yet, though I had reasonable hopes that Edgar Sullivan might figure it out.

I’d be remiss in not noting that as I walked to the front, my mind flashed over the Starbucks massacre of 1997 in Washington, D.C.— three employees executed in an apparent robbery — and the Blackfriars Pub massacre of 1978 in Boston — five people executed for unknown reasons. Is this what we were destined for tonight?

I kept walking, Edgar kept drifting farther away, the clerk kept standing near the register, being no apparent help whatsoever. When I got to the front, maybe ten feet from the masked assailant, he said, “Get on the floor, facedown.”

This didn’t bode well. I thought about charging him, ramming his midsection, maybe giving him a kung-fu kick to the family jewels. I thought about grabbing one of the oversize bottles of Tide on a shelf within arm’s length and flinging it at his face. Instead, very slowly, still buying time, I descended to my knees, and even more slowly spread out on the grime of the cheap commercial carpet at the front of the Beacon Hill CVS.

I thought it extremely curious that of the four people in the store at the time of his arrival, I was the one to be singled out. But I didn’t think I was in much of a position — meaning facedown on the floor with a gun pointed at the back of my head by a masked assailant — to question why.

I saw him take a few steps toward me, saw his black trench coat swish against his jeans, until I could smell the leather of his dirty tennis sneakers. I heard his gun cock. And I heard a voice — Edgar Sullivan’s voice — shout out, “Drop it. Police officer. I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”

I don’t know if you can feel a gun’s aim leave you, but I’m pretty sure I did. I shifted my face to the other side and saw Edgar, pointing a pistol of his own at the guy who had been pointing a pistol at me.

Edgar repeated, “I said drop it. I’ll shoot you in the balls right now.”

There was a long moment of agonizing silence, during which I poised my body, and without warning shot upward, slamming the masked man in the bottom of the chin with the full force of both my forearms. It was probably stupid, but the alternative, which was nothing, seemed even more so.

He reeled back and toppled over from the shock and the force. The gun dropped aimlessly onto the carpet several feet from his grasp. Edgar pounced on it as if he was twenty-five years old, scooped it up, and put it into the outer pocket of his blue blazer. I jumped on top of our attacker and delivered one ferocious roundhouse punch to the vicinity of his nose, feeling flesh and bone crack on impact. I hoped it was his flesh and bone, not mine.

He groaned and I furiously yanked the mask from his head, revealing a panicked-looking fortysomething guy with a bad haircut and blood gushing from his oversize nose, across his upper lip, and down his chin.

Edgar yelled, “Step back, Jack.” So I did.

Edgar turned to the cashier and shouted, “Call the damned police.”

The clerk, who looked like he had gone into complete shock, turned around and began fumbling with a phone on the back wall.

And that’s when it happened. Edgar Sullivan’s arm was slack at his side, the gun in his hand pointing downward at the floor. The clerk was finally summoning the police. The assailant was still writhing in pain on the ground. I was collecting my breath and my wits. All of us just standing or lying there, playing our respective roles.

In a flash, the bloody intruder reached into his coat, yanked out a second pistol, and fired it. He fired it at Edgar Sullivan, once, twice, three times. The thing is, I remember hearing four shots, and quickly realized why: somewhere in the mix, Edgar returned fire.

His shot hit the perpetrator on the wrist of his shooting hand, causing him to drop the gun in screaming agony. The perp’s blood gushed out of him with such force that it splattered on my cheek.

I looked over at Edgar, who was lying on his side, bleeding from his face, his stomach, and his leg, and raced toward him. As I did, the shooter bolted for the door, screaming all the way out onto the street, his gun still on the floor inside.

“Edgar, we’re getting help,” I cried out. “Help is on the way.”

His eyes were glazed over, fading from life to death. I turned toward the clerk and yelled, louder than I intended, “Did you get hold of the cops?”

He looked at me, panicked, but said nothing.

“Call them again and tell them a man’s been shot!”

He picked up the receiver again and dialed 911.

I got on the floor and cradled Edgar’s bloody head in my lap. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it against the wound near his temple, hoping to stem the flow of blood.

“Help is on the way, pal. Just stay with us, okay? Edgar, just stay with us.”

I tried to sound reassuring, but I probably sounded anything but. My thoughts drifted back to the time
Record
colleague Steve Havlicek was wounded in a bomb attack on my car, and I sat with him on a Georgetown street waiting too long for an ambulance to arrive. He died a few hours later.

In the distance, I could hear the faint sound of a siren, and announced to Edgar, “Here they are, pal. They’re on the way. They’ll be here in a second.”

No response.

The siren got louder, closer, too slowly.

“Just stay awake for me, Edgar. Don’t go anywhere on me. I want to be toasting you at your next wedding.”

Still no response. His eyes were closed now. I placed a finger under his nostrils and barely felt a breath.