The Strangler

by William Landay

  Fish ignored him.

  The bartender ignored Joe, too. He busied himself with stocking a beer cooler from a case of Narragansett.

  “Hey, I’ll have one of those,” Joe said.

  The bartender opened a bottle from the case, not the cooler, and put it in front of Joe. He slid an envelope onto the bar beside it.

  The envelope disappeared into Joe’s black leather jacket. “Thanks, neighbor,” he said with a tip of his bottle, echoing a line from the Narragansett ads.

  The bartender did not acknowledge the little joke, but went right back to filling the beer cooler.

  Joe gave up on him. He tossed a dime on the bar as a tip, then moved over to the booth. “What’s going on, Fish?”

  No one knew why this man was called Fish. His real name was not Fish or anything like it, nor had he ever been involved with fishes or fishing, at least not that anyone knew of. But Fish he was, a small-time bookie who, after paying out the rent he owed to the North End mobsters and to the Chantilly and to the cops, barely had anything to show for his bookmaking efforts. It had been easier before Capobianco took over, before the dagos decided to consolidate all the bookmaking in the city. Then, you paid the cops and that was that. Now you paid everybody. You couldn’t live off the crumbs they left you. Not like the old days.

  Joe slid onto the bench opposite Fish. “Let me see the Army,” he said. This was Armstrong’s, a daily racing form that covered the East Coast tracks. “What looks good today, Fish, anything?”

  “I don’t get involved, Officer.”

  “Hey, what’s with the ‘officer’? I ain’t working, not till five.”

  “Before five, after five, I don’t get involved. Just make your own picks. I don’t give a shit.”

  Joe opened the paper and studied the handicapping information closely. He muttered as he read, “Feeling good today, Fish, fee-lin’ good.”

  Fish shared a glance with the bartender.

  “How about this one,” Joe said. “Sixth race at Suffolk, Lord Jim. I like that name. Can I get one down for three oh five? Time is it?”

  Fish took the Army with a little frown and found the listing. “Lord Jim,” he mumbled, “ten to one. Ten to one.”

  “No guts, no glory.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “I know I like him. What, you gonna talk me out of it now?”

  “How much?”

  “A fin. Make it interesting.”

  “To win, you mean?”

  “Yeah, to win. Of course to win. What do I look like?”

  “Let me see the cash.”

  Joe dug in his pocket but came up with just two crumpled singles. He felt the envelope, hesitated. The bartender was watching. Ah, what the fuck, right? It was Joe’s money, some of it anyway. He peeked inside the envelope. Nothing smaller than a ten.

  “That ain’t all for you,” the bartender said.

  “I’ll put it back.”

  “It’s not yours in the first place.”

  “I said I’ll put it back.”

  Fish shook his head. He produced a battered black notebook from his coat and he noted the bet, encoding Joe’s name in a cipher of his own invention. He folded the Armstrong’s and put it aside, went back to reading the Observer.

  The bartender returned to his work, avoiding Joe’s eyes. His movements were sulky, miffed.

  “I told you, I’m good for it.”

  “Yeah, alright, Joe, you’re good for it. Whatever you say.”

  “Good.”

  “I just don’t want to hear the envelope was light. Some sergeant comes down here—”

  “I’m good for it, I said.”

  In the sixth race at Suffolk Downs, Lord Jim finished sixth in a field of six.

  4

  Joanne Feeney’s apartment on Grove Street had a kitchen window overlooking the West End, or what was left of it. The old neighborhood had been leveled. Rubble, acres and acres of nothing. Only a few buildings had been spared, a couple of churches, Mass. General Hospital. Outside the window now, in the distance, a crane idly swung a wrecking ball into the remains of a tenement. With each tap of the ball, the building shed a few crumbs.

  Mrs. Feeney hadn’t had much to do—she was sixty-three—so she had formed a habit of watching the demolition day by day. From her window she studied the wasteland, overlaying it with her memories of the West End, the narrow streets where she’d grown up. When she was a girl, there had been a bicycle shop on Chambers Street where you could rent a bike for a nickel an hour, and Mrs. Feeney had ridden around and around those vanished streets: Chambers Street, Allen, Blossom.

  Now the window was open. Cold air blew in.

  Classical music played on the hi-fi set. Her son had bought the hi-fi for her; she could barely work the thing. But now it was playing Sibelius, the Fifth Symphony. The record ticked and crackled, but oh, the music! It swayed in a three-note theme, over and over, over and over—the long, gathering crescendo.

  A long smear of blood.

  A red handprint.

  Mrs. Feeney lay on the floor. Her robe ripped open, legs wrenched apart, ankles pinned in the slats of two dining-room chairs to hold them spread, a pillow tucked under her rear end to prop it so that her pudendum was aimed at the front door. A pillowcase and stockings were wrapped around her neck, tied off with a big bow. Bluish bruises and the pink lividity of pooling blood mottled her skin around the garrote. Her mouth was still moist. In her eyes were tiny red spiders, capillaries that had burst.

  The Sibelius symphony reached its climax. Five identical chords—irregularly spaced, like a dying heartbeat—each chord separated by a long, breathless pause. In an unstable B flat, the music pulsed twice—three—four—five times—then fell, exhausted, into its natural key of E flat—and it was over. The needle caught in the gutter and scratched there.

  A fly, a lethargic November fly, flicked onto the dead woman’s cheek. It tasted the corner of her mouth and scrubbed its forelegs together.

  5

  Michael, on the front porch. He paced. He hunched inside his winter coat, dragged on a cigarette, picked at the spongy floorboards with his toe. The planks were rotting, flaking apart. What a fucking dump. Whole place was falling apart. It was amazing how quickly a house began to disintegrate, how opportunistic the rot and damp were. One good stomp and he could crack any of these boards.

  The screen door creaked and Ricky’s head extended horizontally out of the door frame. “Supper.”

  “Be in in a minute.”

  Ricky’s head retracted into the house, the screen door slammed, then the door snicked shut behind it.

  But a few seconds later Ricky’s head was out again. “She says now.”

  “Tell her in a minute.”

  “I told her. She says ‘in a minute’ isn’t ‘now.’”

  “I know ‘in a minute’ isn’t ‘now.’ That’s why I said ‘in a minute, ’because that’s when I’m coming in: in a minute. Jesus.”

  Ricky came out onto the porch, shut the door behind him. “The fuck are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”

  Michael held up the cigarette.

  “So come inside and smoke it. It’s freezing.”

  “You seen this?” Michael nudged a long splinter in one of the floorboards with the toe of his penny loafer. He worked it back and forth until it flaked off. “Look at this.”

  “I know. It’s a fuckin’ mess. We’ll fix it in the spring maybe. Come on, let’s go. It’s cold, I’m hungry.”

  Michael scowled.

  “What’s a matter, Mikey? You got a headache?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t have a problem.”

  “You’ve got a puss on.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You do. I’m looking right at it. Puss.”

  “I don’t have a puss.”

  “You do. I’ll be in in a minute.”

  “Fuck you, Rick.”<
br />
  “Fuck you, Rick.”

  Ricky smirked. The same charmed, blithe, princely grin he’d been deploying since the day he was born, four years after Michael. Ricky had smirked before he even had teeth, as if he knew, even as an infant, that he was no ordinary child.

  The gloom Michael was feeling lifted a little, enough that he could shake his head and say “fuck you” again, warmer this time, fuck you meaning stick around.

  “Let me bum one of those, Mikey.”

  Michael dug the pack of Larks from his pocket, and Ricky lit up using the end of Michael’s cigarette.

  “Jesus, would you look at this,” Michael said.

  The brothers peered through the window into the dining room, where an enormous red-faced man was taking his place at the head of the table. Brendan Conroy settled back in his chair, made various adjustments to his fork and knife, then shared an inaudible uproarious laugh with Joe Daley, who sat at his left hand.

  “Honestly,” Michael said, “I think I’m going to hang myself.”

  “Don’t like your new daddy?”

  “What ever happened to waiting a decent interval?”

  “Dad’s dead a year. How long do you want him to wait?”

  “Longer.” Michael considered. “A lot longer.”

  Ricky turned away. He took a deep, contented pull on his cigarette and gazed out at the street, at the unbroken line of little houses, all looking drab in the winter twilight. December in Savin Hill. Cars were parked nose-to-tail up and down the street. Soon there would be fights over who owned those spots; around here, shoveling a parking spot was tantamount to buying it for the season. Christmas lights were beginning to appear. Across the street the Daughertys had already put up their five ludicrous plastic reindeer, which were lit from the inside. There had used to be six. Joe had broken one in high school when he came home drunk one night and tried to ride it. The next day Joe Senior had made Joe march across the street and apologize for riding Mr. Daugherty’s reindeer. What he ought to have apologized for was riding Mr. Daugherty’s daughters, which Joe did with the same gleeful droit du seigneur he exercised over all the neighborhood girls. Even Eileen Daugherty, the youngest of the three, took her turn—in Joe’s car, if Ricky was remembering right. That last coupling precipitated a brawl between Joe and Michael, because Michael had loved Eileen ever since kindergarten. He’d imagined that Eileen had somehow defied her genes and was not like that, until Joe set Michael straight, explaining that his conquest of the Daugherty sisters was really a sort of territorial obligation, like Manifest Destiny, and he’d needed Eileen to complete the hat trick, and anyway she had been a screamer. All of which had led Michael to throw himself at Joe, despite Joe’s size, because he couldn’t stop loving Eileen Daugherty even after she had offered herself up to Joe for the ritual goring. Maybe Michael loved her even now, deep down, the memory of her at least. He was that kind of kid. What ever happened to Eileen? Ricky turned back to his brother, “Hey, what ever happened to—?”

  But Michael was still engrossed in what was behind the window, a fresher outrage. “Would you look at this? Look at Joe! What the hell does he think he’s doing?”

  Inside, Joe Daley and Brendan Conroy were holding up their glasses of pale beer, laughing.

  “Look at him, with his head up Conroy’s ass. He’s like a tapeworm.”

  “Conroy could use a tapeworm.”

  “Really, Rick, the whole thing, it’s just—Doesn’t this bother you?”

  “Not really. Hey, what ever happened to Eileen from across the street? You ever hear about her?”

  “No.” Michael did not glance away from the window.

  Joe’s wife, Kat, came out onto the porch. “Are you guys coming in or you want your supper out here?”

  “Michael’s mad.”

  “I’m not mad—”

  “He thinks Mum’s going to lose her virginity—”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “—to Brendan.”

  Kat thought it over. “Well,” she concluded, “she’ll probably wait till after dinner anyways.”

  “There, see?” Ricky smiled. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Come on. In.” Kat herded them inside with a dish towel, and in they went. There was something about Kat—Kathleen—that suggested she wasn’t taking any shit. She was just Joe’s type, big and hippy and good-looking and stolid, and the Daley boys as a rule did not fuck with her.

  Michael went in first, wearing a sour-mouthed pucker. Ricky gave him a playful biff on the back of the head, and Kat rubbed his shoulder, both gestures intended to cheer him up.

  The house smelled of garlic, and the girls were bustling from the kitchen to the table with a few last things.

  Amy sped past: “Hey, Michael. Thought we’d lost you.”

  Little Joe passed without a word. Joe’s son, Little Joe, was thirteen and had taken over the title “Little Joe” from his father, who had been Little Joe to his own father’s Big Joe. The Daleys did not believe in Juniors and III’s and IV’s; too Yankee. So each succeeding Joe got a new middle name. The current Little Joe was Joseph Patrick. At the moment he was sulking, Michael had no idea about what.

  Margaret Daley, the materfamilias, tweaked Michael about a “disappearing act,” which tipped his mood downward again. Over the years Michael had evolved an exquisite sensitivity to his mother’s voice, so that he could detect the slightest reprimand or disapproval. Margaret was well aware of this sensitivity—Michael was her most finely calibrated son, the quickest to take offense and the slowest to forgive—but Margaret simply did not know how to speak without setting him off, without triggering one of those little sensors, and so she could not help but resent him for being thin-skinned and fragile, though in this respect he reminded her of Joe Senior, another man she’d never quite known, even after sleeping in the same bed with him for thirty-some-odd years. She saw Michael’s face fall when she mentioned his disappearing act. She regretted the comment for a moment, then decided not to regret it. Let him regret it. He was the one who should regret it. Margaret would regret only that Michael might spoil their Sunday dinner with his sulking.

  Michael stood behind a seat in the middle of the table, feeling awkward, a guest in the house where he had grown up.

  “Sit down.” Conroy grinned. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Yeah, sit down, Michael. What is this?”

  Michael looked at Joe, who continued to regard him with a quizzical, supercilious expression that said What is this? Joe was imitating Conroy; that was the insufferable part. Well, Michael sighed, dinner would only last an hour or two. The sooner it started, the sooner it would end. He could already see himself at home looking back on it.

  Michael took his place and the others filled in around him. Margaret at the head, opposite Conroy, in the same chair she’d occupied forever. Ricky at the corner opposite Joe, as far from Joe as he could get, to minimize the fighting. Kat positioned herself next to Joe, where she could keep a stern eye on him. Michael liked Kat and liked Joe for liking her. God bless her, Kat would take a bullet for Joe or put one in him, as the occasion required.

  But opposite Michael was his favorite, Amy Ryan, whose cool redheaded presence was the best part of these Sunday dinners. Amy was Ricky’s girlfriend, and Michael harbored an illicit, quasi-romantic affection for her. Amy was wry, Amy was brave, Amy was funny, Amy was lovely, Amy was hip, Amy was profane, Amy was smart—her merits jostled for attention and it would have been impossible for Michael to name the one or two he liked best. Tonight she was wearing a white oxford shirt that may or may not have been Ricky’s, which struck Michael as a poignant gesture. She wore Ricky’s shirt as other girls had worn his varsity jacket once. There was a little of the bachelor’s yearning in Michael’s feelings for Amy. She made him question his instinct for solitude.

  The group was still unfolding their napkins when Amy mentioned, “So, Brendan, I hear Alvan Byron is going to take over the Strangler case.” She spent a fe
w seconds surveying the dishes on the table in a nonchalant way—noodles and gravy and garlic bread—as if the answer would not make a bit of difference to her.

  But Amy Ryan was a reporter, one of only two women on the staff of the Observer, and Brendan Conroy wasn’t falling for any of her career-girl tricks. “Are we on the record or off?”

  “Oh, Brendan, come on. Listen to you. We’re just talking. Alright, you tell me, on or off?”

  “Off.”

  “Okay, off. Remember that, Margaret,” Amy said, “we’re off the record.”

  “Who could forget it?” the older woman drawled.

  Conroy folded his arms. “Alright, then, here it is. Alvan Byron will not take over the Strangler case for the simple reason that he could not solve the Strangler case. He hasn’t got the people or the resources or the know-how.”

  “He’s got Michael,” Ricky said.

  “And we’ve got Joe.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ricky-y-y,” his mother growled.

  Michael forked a tangle of spaghetti onto his plate and, head down, he mixed red sauce into it with extraordinary care.

  Conroy turned back to Amy. “Let me tell you something, girly-girl, before you go dancing off and write some story about the great Alvan Byron. Your Mr. Byron is not a cop, has never been, will never be a cop. What Alvan Byron knows about police work would fit on the head of a pin, with room for a few dancing angels.”

  Ricky: “The great Conroy has spoken.”

  Amy: “He is the Attorney General, Brendan. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “No. See, you don’t understand. Byron’s the Attorney General—that’s just the problem. You don’t go to a dentist for a broken leg, and you don’t send a lawyer to do a cop’s work. I look at the Attorney General’s office and do you know what I see? A law firm. Yankees and goo-goos and Hebrews, and the one lonely Irishman named Daley, and the whole place run by a colored fellow.” He smiled at his witticism. “Whole outfit is upside down.”

  “And you,” Michael said, “have got thirteen dead women.”