The Strangler (35 page)

Above him, Michael Daley hoisted a sledgehammer a second time. Michael shouted in pain as his arms reached ten o’clock and his shoulder—smashed in the fall—dialed upward. The pain made him dizzy. But the long-handled sledgehammer seemed to know where it was going, as if its design compelled it along a predetermined arc, and so Michael lassoed it above his shoulder and brought it down on the man’s upper chest, just below the hollow of his neck.

The blow shook the man’s body. His arms and legs jumped.

Michael tugged the sledge but it stuck, or seemed to. The illusion held for a moment—it felt like the hammer was sunk in the man’s chest, like an ax head in a fat log—until Michael realized what had actually happened: His own shoulder had failed. He could not budge his right arm, let alone the weight of the sledgehammer. The impact with the ground minutes before had spread open the bones of the shoulder, and now he could feel the displacement in his own skeleton, the ball of the humerus dislodged, grinding the rim of the socket, the arm dangling light and unsprung. The pain, though, was not confined to the area of the jumbled bones. It was general, radiant, a cold electrical current that chilled his entire side. The last two fingers of his hand tingled, as did his neck. Silently he chanted his old migraine prayer:
I am not my body; I am in my body.
He would master the pain.

With great effort, the man rolled onto his elbows and scraped forward, apparently unaware of the gun he had dropped or the heavy sledgehammer sliding off his body. His breathing was clutched and whispery.

Michael limped around him, crouched, and demanded, “Where’s Conroy?”

The man belly-crawled a few feet toward the center of the pit. For a moment he did not move, then he raised up on all fours and pawed ahead. Stopped. He arched his back, opened his mouth wide, and released a gush of vomit with no more effort than a dog opening its mouth to drop a ball at its master’s feet.

Michael picked up the gun. Surely it had been emptied, but he did not know how to check. He gathered up the sledgehammer as well. (Should he leave the tool in the pit where he had found it? Mix it in among the others left here by the workmen? Or take it away to avoid leaving evidence?) With these implements, the gun in his right hand, sledgehammer in his left, he felt absurdly well armed and capable. He felt himself grow stronger under their influence.

The injured man was stock-still, on hands and knees. His breathing was shallow.

“Where’s Conroy?”

No response.

Michael raised the gun uncertainly. Where to place it? The man’s head was bowed, so Michael pressed the nose of the gun against the back of his scalp where it nestled in the dense black plush of his hair. “Who are you?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“I
don’t
know. Tell me.”

“Vi-Vincent Gargano.”

Michael paused. Until now he had known Gargano’s name and reputation but had never seen him. Vincent The Animal Gargano. Holy shit.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

No response.

“Where’s Conroy?”

Gargano lay in the mud, silent.

“Is he here?”

“No.”

Michael’s finger tensioned the trigger, but he paused. “Is Joe Daley really dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Who killed him?”

“I did, you d—” Gargano wet-coughed, then labored to suck in a shallow, congested breath. “Dumb fuck. I did the both of ’em.”

“The both of…who?”

“I clipped your old man, too. Last year. Now I did the other. Ha! Two Joe Daleys. I—” He did not finish, or could not.

Michael snapped the trigger back decisively. The gun hopped in his hand with a springy clack. Empty. He tossed it away.

“Can’t even f—can’t even fuckin’ count.”

“Is anyone here with you?”

No response.

Michael shook his head. He felt a lethal sense of detachment. He was indifferent to the man at his feet, to consequences, to his own former self. The killing mood. He tugged the sledgehammer up and guided it through its parabolic course again—he yelled again as the handle lifted his arms excruciatingly—and he brought it down squarely on the small of Gargano’s back, where the belt of his jacket had pulled up to expose a bulge of soft flab and a cirrus cloud of black body hair. The impact made a fleshy smack.

Gargano’s limbs held him up a moment, then he collapsed.

“Are you alone here?”

Gargano wheezed.

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah.”

Michael sat down carefully in the dirt. Just lowered himself down. The hammer moved off his lap, drawn away by the weight of its heavy head. He cradled his injured arm with his good one, holding it across his belly. In this position the pain was reduced almost to nothing, although the nerves still shivered with the memory of it. His mouth was particled with dirt and stones. A raw scrape burned down his cheek. On the right side of his scalp was a cool wet sensation, as if a flap had been opened and the interior of his head lay exposed to the air. It was not painful. Far from it, the breezy window in his head, if it was that, was rather pleasant.

He closed his eyes and imagined those footsteps again,
shick-shick-shick-shick-shick,
whisking along the pavement. He dreamed Joe Senior sprinting down that alley as Conroy dropped back, with a grimace of Judas’s remorse on his face. Joe Senior coming around that corner, scuffing to a stop, confronted by a gun, the four-shot derringer, panning up to the face of—this man, Vincent Gargano.

Michael struggled to his feet, shielding his injured arm. With his good hand, he pat-frisked Gargano’s body.

Nearby a hole had been freshly dug, a deep tube drilled straight down in the earth to receive the next pile. The piles were arranged in a grid; the next would be planted here. A crane and an enormous pile driver loomed above it. Michael stood over the hole and looked down. He could see ten feet or so, after that it fell away into darkness. Michael knew about these piles. Everyone who worked downtown did. When the piles were being driven, windows shook in offices a half mile away and people kept their windows closed to muffle the raucous clanging. Gargano had intended to dump Michael’s body in this hole. Tomorrow morning, according to the plan, with each smash of the pile driver, Michael would be rammed down and down.

For now, the scene was quiet, so quiet that Michael could hear the wind fluting softly past the piles. He dropped a pebble into the hole to gauge its depth. He didn’t hear it land.

Gargano gasped. He said something which Michael could not hear until Michael stood right over him: “I c-can’t breathe.”

“Why,” Michael said, “did you do this? Why me?”

“I c-can’t breathe.”

“Why me?”

“Orders.”

“From who?”

“Capobianco.”

“Capobianco? But why me? Why
me
?”

“Conroy said—”

Gargano’s corpulent body shuddered. When it stopped, he said in a breathy rasp, “Conroy come to Capobianco…he said you knew…said you knew about the cop, your old man. Said you accused him right to his face. You even told him you thought Capobianco ordered it. That’s not something you say out loud.”

“So Capobianco ordered the hit on my old man? Why? What did he ever do?”

“Look around you, you d—dumb fuck.”

“I don’t understand.”

Gargano sniffed. He turned his head slowly. “You’re standing in money. These people are making fucking millions. Fortunes.
Fortunes.
”

“What’s that got to do with Capobianco?”

“It’s his money.”

And finally, by degrees, Michael saw it. He saw it. Gangsters not just working construction but doing the strong-arm work to clear the neighborhood for demolition, roughing up the holdouts, rolling up the lame and the halt and the stubborn—work that could take months, even years if it was left to the government.
Delinquenti,
Mrs. Cavalcante had called them.
They say, “You gotta go, Mrs. C, you gotta go. It’s not safe for you here no more.”
Capobianco had deployed his troops to evacuate the West End. That some of the soldiers happened also to be policemen was an incidental fact. Cops had acted like gangsters because they
were
gangsters—they were on Capobianco’s pad, paid to protect his interests. It all made sense only if Capobianco had an investment in the West End, because Charlie Capobianco didn’t do anything, didn’t even cross the street, except for money. He worshiped money as only a truly poor kid would. He wanted this project built, by any means necessary, and for reasons that had nothing to do with some fatuous fantasy of a New Boston. Charlie Capobianco did not give a Chinaman’s fart about Boston, new or old.

“How much does Capobianco have invested in all this?” Michael asked.

But Gargano was weakening. He lay flat on his stomach and his torso moiled about in the mud. His jaw chewed the air a moment until words came out: “I—I can’t breathe. I need a hospital.”

“You’re not going to any hospital.”

Gargano looked up at him with an expression of spite which softened, second by second, into spiteful submission.

“How big a piece of this did Capobianco take?”

“The fuck should I know?”

“What did it have to do with my father?”

“Conroy said—Conroy said he was gonna blow it up.”

“Blow it up how? My father wasn’t the type. He never squawked about cops on the sleeve before.”

“He wanted out. Said he didn’t work for Capobianco, didn’t want the money. They asked him to do some things; he said no. Didn’t want to go any further. All of a sudden he don’t want to go any further?
Shh!
After all those years he took Mr. Capobianco’s money? Now he’s gonna blow it all up, this
chiacchierone
? Nobody was gonna let that happen. If Daley had went and ratted about cops on the pad in the West End, or Mr. Capobianco having his fingers in the West End, he would have took down this whole thing. What politician is gonna stand up for a buildin’ owned by Charlie Capobianco? And everybody wants these buildin’s to go up. Everybody. The city, the feds, the developers. Too much money to stop it. Too much fuckin’ money. Your old man was like you: wasn’t smart enough to keep his fuckin’ mouth shut.”

“And Amy?”

“What Amy?”

“Amy Ryan. The reporter.”

“Oh. Whatever. She was gonna write it. Loved crooked-cop stories, this fuckin’ bitch, that’s what Conroy says. Course Conroy didn’t give a shit about nothing except himself anyways; he just didn’t want her writing
his
name in the papers. That piece of shit wouldn’t last a week in Concord without his badge. So he comes back and says we got to clip her, too. Otherwise she’s gonna spill the whole thing in the newspapers, and, y’know, prob’ly the whole project gets stopped. So we did. We hit her too. No choice.”

“Who…killed her? All the things they did to her?”

“That was Conroy’s idea. Dress it up like the Strangler, he said. He gave us all the details, all this shit we were supposed to do, tie a bow around her neck, whatever. He knew the newspapers’d go crazy for it.”

“And the broom handle? Conroy did not give you that; the Strangler never did it. Whose idea was that?”

“Mine.”

Michael nodded, accepting this boast. The sadistic indifference of it.

He hefted the sledgehammer again, patiently. The hammerhead was cast iron, barrel-shaped. Its weight pulled Michael’s arms into a rigid V. Together with the dangling hammer they formed a Y, and the Y rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A nerveless energy began to build, fed by the rocking and the vision of Amy crucified on her bed.

“And Joe, my brother? What’d he do? He told me he was helping you. Why kill him? He was already on your side, you already had him.”

“You can’t have a cop know that much about your business, see it from the inside. Longer it goes, the bigger the risk. Whole thing was crazy. Someday he’d have burned us. End of the day, a cop is a cop. He woulda woke up, someday. He walked away with too much of Mr. Capobianco’s money anyways. He was lucky he stuck around as long as he did. Dumb shit.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I even know Joe’s really dead?”

“Bullet in the forehead,” Gargano said. “Check it out, you’ll see. Third eye—keep the other two shut.”

“And the gun?”

“You just threw it over there somewhere.”

Michael surveyed the massive pit. The chilly gloom. The forest of piles rising overhead. This place was not part of the city, he felt. It was not part of the earth.

Gargano tortoised forward on his elbows a few inches before laying his head back down, exhausted. “My throat. I think you…”

“Why in the hell,” Michael said, “would Capobianco put his money in this? Since when is he in construction? What does he know about it?”

“Nothing,” Gargano said. “But he runs a cash business, and he can only put so much on the street. He’s got to put it somewhere. He needed a legit investment, a big one. You know how much cash he pulls in? More than you can imagine. Your dad was a cop?
Pff,
believe me, you can’t imagine.”

“Try me.”

“It’s so much fuckin’ money, the state’s gonna start up its own lottery. You believe that? All these years the government tries to get Capobianco, then they turn right around and go into the numbers business. That’s how much money is in it.”

“And Sonnenshein, how much does he know?”

“Sonnenshein doesn’t know shit. The money’s invested without Capobianco’s name on it, through a trust or whatever. Capobianco always owns things through trusts so the feds can’t take it.”

“So why’s Capobianco interfering? He’s already invested. Why not just watch the project go forward?”

“With that much money riding on it? You don’t know Mr. Capobianco. He don’t take those kind of chances. He’s gonna protect his investment. These buildin’s are goin’ up.” Gargano faltered. He coughed, then spat in an intricate way. “Mr. Capobianco don’t bet. That’s the secret. The book never loses, only the suckers.”

Another fit of racking coughs tossed Gargano’s body. When it was done he lowered a thread of drool from his mouth until it adhered to the ground, like a spider launching a filament out of itself.