The Boston Strangler (15 page)

Putting that aside, he had long been intrigued by telepathic experiments conducted by friends in the National Aeronautic and Space Administration laboratories at Cambridge. It was known that the human brain generates a measurable electrical current. These scientists proceeded on the theory that if the brain could send forth such impulses, it was conceivable that it could also pick them up. Could not such emanations be produced by thought? And might not sensitivity to them be more developed in some persons than in others? In NASA files, he had been told, was a documented case of a human sender and receiver—that is, two men telepathically attuned to each other—who had worked together during a critical period in the war. One had been smuggled into occupied France, the other sent to London. A number of times, at a fixed hour, they had attempted to communicate. One, seated in his apartment on the outskirts of Paris, concentrated on sending a specific message; the other, seated in a London flat, concentrated all his powers on receiving it. Several times the message had come through. The team was not always successful but their rate of success far exceeded the wide range of mathematical probability.

On Bottomly's own staff, Detective Tommy Davis, an expert on electronic matters, had once reported a fascinating experiment in infrared phenomena. At eleven o'clock one night he photographed a parking lot filled with automobiles. At 1
A.M.
when the owners had driven their cars away and the lot was empty, he took another photograph from the same vantage point, this time under infrared light. It showed the lot crowded with the automobiles that had been there two hours before! The images had remained—to be picked up by infrared rays. The two photographs were identical. The one taken under infrared was somewhat ghostly, but the negative was clear enough to discern the make of car and even the license numbers.

Who was to say what impressions—visual, psychic, the products of reality or men's thoughts—existed all about us, only waiting for an instrument sensitive enough to pick them up?

Now this man Hurkos …

A book entitled
The Door to the Future
, by Jess Stearn,
*
with a long chapter on Peter Hurkos, had been forwarded to Bottomly with other material on the Dutch mystic.

Bottomly glanced through its pages. Hurkos, he read, was known in occult circles as a psychometrist—that is, one who divines facts about an object or its owner by touching or being near the object. A man in his forties, he had originally been a house painter in Holland. In 1943 he fell thirty-five feet from a ladder, fractured his skull, and lay in a coma for three days. When he regained consciousness, he was in a hospital bed and a doctor was leaning over him. Hurkos' first words were, “Doctor, don't go! Something terrible will happen!”

The physician who, it turned out, had been planning to take a trip abroad, joked with Hurkos, then left the country—and was killed shortly after. During Hurkos' recuperation he began telling fellow patients and nurses about themselves; his fame grew after he left the hospital; he was called in to find one lost child, then another, then missing persons, stolen property—he had helped Scotland Yard find the stolen Stone of Scone, a national treasure—and finally, murderers. He was said to have solved one murder simply by pressing the victim's photograph against his forehead. Taken to the scene of a crime, Bottomly read, Hurkos often solved it, some speculated, because of his extreme sensitivity “to the auras, emanations, or odic life force clinging to that scene.”

Bottomly read on. In Miami, in October 1958, a cabdriver had been shot to death in a downtown street. A few hours later, a Navy commander had been fatally shot in his apartment not far away. Both had been killed by bullets from a .22 automatic. Hurkos had been sent for; he seated himself in the dead man's taxicab and at once described the murderer in detail to Detective Lieutenant Thomas Lipes, Chief of Miami's Homicide Squad.

Bottomly acted. He asked his Administrative Assistant, Bill Manning, to check at once with the police chiefs cited in the book, and especially with Lieutenant Lipes, known as a hardheaded, no-nonsense police official. When Manning reached him on the telephone, it was obvious that Lipes had been greatly impressed by Hurkos. “He helped us tremendously on two homicides,” Lipes told Manning. “I know you people are skeptical up in Boston about things like this, but believe me, this man has something you and I haven't got.”

Okay, thought Bottomly. We'll try him on condition that Commissioner McNamara and other police officials agree that Hurkos' work will not interfere with theirs. Bottomly himself was confident of that: all investigations would go on as before; this would simply be an added investigation. Brooke had promised the people of Boston that “everything humanly possible” would be done to find the Strangler. Even if Hurkos had no special powers, surely bringing into the search a new mind, an investigator accustomed to out-of-the-ordinary murder cases, a man who had worked with police throughout the world, should help. Even if Hurkos only succeeded in irritating Boston detectives so that they redoubled their efforts to prove him a fraud, the increased activity might be advantageous.

Bottomly strode into an outside room and tossed
The Door to the Future
on Bill Manning's desk. “Read up on this fellow Hurkos, and get hold of him,” he said. “I want to talk to him.”

Late Wednesday night, January 29, Detective Sergeant Leo Martin drove Bottomly to the Providence, Rhode Island, airport to pick up Peter Hurkos, arriving from California. Manning had traced him to the home of Glenn Ford, the actor, who, Hurkos said, planned to play him in a film based on his career as the world's best-known psychometric detective.

Bottomly had spoken to Hurkos, who had agreed to come to Boston on the condition that no publicity of any kind appear until he had completed his work and left town. Otherwise, he said, the crowds of curiosity seekers would constantly impede him.

Arranging this
sub rosa
visit to Boston had taken all of Bottomly's ingenuity. Though Police Commissioner McNamara doubted strongly—profanely would be a more accurate word—that Peter Hurkos could be of any help, he would not stand in the way. Bottomly had also managed to obtain a pledge of secrecy not only from local newspapers, radio, and television, but from
The New York Times
and the New York
Herald Tribune
, the Associated Press, United Press International,
Time
, and
Newsweek
, as well as from every correspondent of foreign newspapers and magazines. Save in time of war, so complete a blanketing of the world's communication media was unheard of: it had taken two days of meetings in Brooke's office to do it, but it had been done. And finally, lest Peter be recognized in Boston's busy Logan Airport, Bottomly had asked him to land at Providence, forty-four miles away.

The plane had arrived early: Hurkos had to be paged. In the corner of the terminal Bottomly and Sergeant Martin saw a giant of a man, some four inches taller than Bottomly—which meant at least six feet eight—wearing a huge cowboy hat, yellow cowboy boots and trousers, a wide leather belt, and a yellow-fringed leather shirt. The figure rose and bore down on them.

“I'm Jim Crane,” he announced. He looked at them from a pair of suspicious blue eyes. “You got any identification?”

Bottomly knew of Crane. This man was a West Coast speculator who had taken Peter's advice on a gold mine investment, and had been so delighted with the result that he had appointed himself Peter's bodyguard. In a deep side pocket Bottomly made out the bulge of a revolver.

After satisfying himself as to their credentials, Crane vanished in the direction of the balcony restaurant to return with a heavyset, heavy-jowled man about six feet tall, with curly black hair and darting black eyes—the celebrated Dutch mystic himself. He turned out to be a very engaging man, completely uninhibited, who spoke sharp, quick sentences, impatiently, in bad English, with a thick Dutch accent.

It was now nearly midnight. Bottomly wanted to keep Hurkos out of sight as much as possible, and rather than have him and his bodyguard stay in Boston, plans had been made for them to register under false names at the Battle Green Motel in Lexington, about fifteen miles from Boston. As they drove, Hurkos explained that he had discussed the Boston assignment with Glenn Ford, as well as with Doris Day, who was to play opposite Ford in the film, and with actress Katherine Grayson. He had helped Miss Grayson search for a fortune in jewels stolen from her Palmer House suite in Chicago some weeks before. The three Hollywood stars urged him, Hurkos said, to accept the Boston assignment: he owed it to his talent to help the people of Boston.

En route to Lexington, they stopped for coffee. Sitting in the roadside restaurant, Peter suddenly looked up from his cup at Sergeant Martin, seated opposite him. “Who is Katherine?” he demanded.

Martin, taken aback, said, “That's my mother's name—that's the only Katherine I know.”

“You tell her, take doctor's advice,” said Peter. He slapped his legs dramatically. “I am worried about her legs. Very bad varicose veins—she should do what family says.”

Leo stared at him, round-eyed. “That's just what we've been telling her!” he exclaimed. “But she won't go to the hospital. You're right, Peter, you're darn right.” He continued to stare at him.

Peter nodded. “One good thing, Leo. It is good she got those glasses two months ago. That left eye, very bad.”

Leo's mouth was open. “How'd you know that?” he managed to ask.

Bottomly thought, So this is how a seer operates. O.K. Let's say he worked up information about the men on my staff. But Leo's mother? And why Leo? How did he know Leo would come with me tonight?

Peter was away and running now. “Very religious woman, your mother, Leo. Mass every morning, Novenas every Wednesday—” Leo nodded wordlessly. Peter paused for a loud sip of coffee. Unexpectedly he bent over and jabbed his thumb into his own back. “Your wife,” he said. “Bad back. Here. Hurts all the time. Right?”

Leo could only nod, look at Bottomly, then at Peter again.

“Know how she got it?” Peter asked conversationally. He obviously enjoyed the effect he created. Leo shook his head. “She's had it ever since I know her,” he said. Peter said, “She little girl, five and a half, she fall down stairs on bottom of spine. Not break, but always hurt.” He finished his coffee, and smiled affably. “I am ready now.”

Bottomly helped the two men check into the motel. “Tomorrow one of my men will call on you,” he told Hurkos. “He'll be my liaison with you, be with you all the time you're here, give you whatever you want, take you anywhere you want to go.” Bottomly had decided that if he wanted to judge Peter Hurkos objectively, it would be better not to work closely with him, but receive reports from others. “His name is Julian Soshnick. I'll tell you what he looks like so you'll recognize him—”

“No, no,” said Peter impatiently. “Not necessary. I tell you.” He described a dark-eyed, restless man of medium height, about thirty, who walked with his toes pointed out so that the back of his heels were worn down on the outside, “and never wears hat because it mix up his hair.”

It was Bottomly's turn to stare. This was Assistant Attorney General Julian Soshnick to a T—even to the private little vanity about his hair. Why should Peter Hurkos know—how
could
he know—Soshnick? Even if one granted the improbable—that Peter, never before in Boston, had somehow familiarized himself with every member of his staff, as well as with the character, appearance, and ailments of their mothers, wives, and the rest—why should he know this man? For Julian was not a member of Bottomly's investigative team. He had not been working on the stranglings. He was one of the forty-four attorneys in Eminent Domain, he had come into the picture at the very last moment because he was capable, resourceful, and could be counted upon to cope with the unexpected. He lived in Lexington, and it had been he who arranged for Peter and Crane to stay incognito at the motel, which was owned by a friend of his.

But Bottomly had not decided to enlist Soshnick's help until a few hours earlier, at which time Peter Hurkos was already on the plane en route from California!

A Hollywood director might have been hard put to set up a more intriguing scene than the one that occurred the next afternoon in the large suite occupied by Peter Hurkos and his bodyguard, Jim Crane.

Hurkos sat on a chair, facing the bed, on which Julian Soshnick had arranged a dozen or more sets of photographs, face down. Next to him, hovering over a tape recorder, sat Detective Tommy Davis; next to him, attending another tape recorder—“for our own records”—sat Jim Crane; his revolver, a .44 Magnum, was prominently on hand on an adjacent end table. George Indignaro, police stenographer, sat at a desk nearby to make the official transcription.

Soshnick had driven up a few minutes before. He had brought, in the locked trunk of his car, two large boxes. One contained the nylon stockings, scarves, blouses—the “decorations”—used by the Strangler on his victims. The other held nearly three hundred eight-by-ten police photographs of the strangling scenes, in sets of from fifteen to twenty-five in each case. Peter had asked for both—objects he would use in his psychometry. The photographs, each set placed in an identical plain manila envelope, were handed to Soshnick that morning by Bill Manning who had himself taken them from the locked files in the Attorney General's office five minutes earlier. Soshnick removed them from the envelopes without looking at them and then carefully placed them in stacks, face down, on the bed.

“O.K., Peter,” he said. “It's all yours.”

Peter bent over the bed. On a coffee table to his left, he had a glass of Scotch on ice, which he had requested: throughout the afternoon he sipped at it from time to time. Now he moved his right hand, palm down, in quick circles about two inches above the photographs. Suddenly his hand slammed down on one stack. “This phony baloney!” he cried. “This not belong!”