The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Well, any information you can tell us, Mr. Wasserman.”

  “Eh, you won’t catch them. Personally”—he made an apologetic gesture, a flip of the hand that said Forgive me for saying so, but…—“I’m surprised you’re even here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You’re not from the West End, are you, Detective…?”

  “Daley. Joe.”

  “Detective Daley. You’re not from around here.”

  “I’m from Dorchester.”

  “You haven’t been a policeman around here for long, either.”

  “I’ve been a cop fifteen years.”

  “But not here.”

  Joe frowned. This was echt Boston: here did not refer to the region or even the city; here meant this neighborhood, these few blocks. To a West Ender, Dorchester might as well have been Greenland. “No,” Joe admitted, “not here.”

  “No. Because I would have seen you. Well, so let me be the one to fill you in, Detective. There haven’t been cops here for a long time. Garbagemen neither; they let the garbage pile up in the street. Why? Because they want to say the West End was a ghetto, it was ‘blighted.’ So what did they do? They stopped cleaning it up, they pulled out the cops, they didn’t fix the roads. That’s how they put the rabbit in the hat, see? They make a ghetto, then they say, ‘Look, a ghetto! Let’s tear it down.’ It’s business. I understand. I’m in business too. But let’s be honest in this here.”

  “I’m here now and I’m a cop.”

  “Yes. I suppose.” The old man sighed dismissively. You must be some boob of a cop to get sent here now.

  “Well, look, alls I can do is try. And I promise you I’ll try. But I can’t do anything if you won’t even talk to me.”

  “An honest man, heh? Alright, my friend, we’ll try. Here it is: Couple weeks ago, December two, I’m up in my apartment in bed. This is maybe eleven, midnight. I hear a car drive up. Everything’s quiet around here now, it’s empty at night, sounds carry. So, I hear a car.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Don’t know. I was looking down at it from the window, my bedroom window upstairs. I got an apartment above the store. It was a four-door, dark color, maybe blue, maybe black, that’s all I can see. Four guys get out, big guys with bats. I seen them come up the sidewalk and one of them takes his bat and he smashes my window.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Course I called the cops. What else am I gonna do? What difference does it make? The cops don’t come; I told you. So these guys, they smash my window and they climb right in the front of the store and they just go through it with their bats and they break it all up. They broke everything. I mean, I got insurance, but what am I gonna…? You know how long this place has been here? Thirty, forty years. My father had it. So I get dressed and I go running down to the shop. I figure, if it’s money they want, so what? I’ll give it to them, at least they won’t smash up the whole thing. Because there’s nothing here to steal. What are they gonna take, a corned beef? I go down and I tell them, ‘Just take the money, here it is, what else do you want?’ But they don’t want the money. They just want to smash everything. So that’s what they did. They smashed me, too—not with the bats, thank God. There was money right out on the floor; they smashed the cash drawer. They didn’t even take it. All they had to do was bend down and pick it up. But no. They couldn’t be bothered.”

  “Four guys?”

  “Four guys.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “All the same, I guess. Big shtarkers, maybe not as big as you, shorter. But big, strong guys. One guy, the guy in charge, he might have been Italian, that one: dark skin, thick hair, scar on his face like this.” He dragged a finger down his cheek. “Wolves.”

  “Wolves?”

  “That’s what they were. Wolves.”

  “They say anything?”

  “Yeah, ‘get out, get outta here.’ Jew this, Jew that, Jew bastard, kike, that kind of stuff. Eh. But that was the main thing, just ‘get out.’”

  “You knew what that meant, ‘get out’?”

  “Of course I knew. You think these guys just took it upon themselves to come out and smash up an old man’s little shop just for kicks? Think, my friend. Somebody paid ’em. Cheaper than a lawyer. Course they’ve got lawyers working on it, too.”

  “Who paid them, you think?”

  “Farley Sonnenshein. The Redevelopment. The city. It’s all the same. This is valuable real estate all of a sudden. Too valuable for a schnook like me. See, I own the building, so they can’t move me out so easy. And I ain’t giving it away for fifty cents on the dollar like the rest of them. I fight ’em. I’m a pain in the ass. That’s what it comes down to, Detective. I’m what you call a pain in Farley Sonnenshein’s ass, and he wants it to go away. But guess what? I’m not going away.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “What am I gonna do? I’m gonna give him a pain in his ass like a hemorrhoid till the day he dies or he pays me what he owes me.”

  Joe walked through the empty West End toward Cambridge Street. He passed abandoned buildings for a block or two, then bare dirt blocks, then the streets themselves disappeared and there was only gritty hard mud. The air was warmer than usual, the second straight day of mild December weather. Demolition debris was everywhere, scraps of brick and steel and concrete. Wet slush. The melting made a soft trickling sound, audible beneath the city noise, like a faucet dripping in the next room.

  Wolves, the old man had called them. Wolves.

  Joe had seen wolves. In Germany there had been a camp—Ohrdruf—outside a town called Gotha, where Joe had stepped on something, a twig maybe. He had looked down to see a human finger, shriveled, half buried by the weight of Joe’s boot. He thought: They are wolves, all Germans, every last one of them. He would feel no mercy for them. He swore it.

  Then Joe had gone on to Berlin, where he was stationed for several months before shipping out. He remembered the thousands of notices fluttering like bird feathers everywhere in the city, on buildings and trees, covering the enormous cylindrical pillars on street corners: messages for people who had vanished. He remembered the pipes and radiators clinging like vines to the walls of bombed-out buildings. He remembered a summer night with his pals outside a club called the Rio Rita, all of them drunk. Walking, they came upon a group of Russians, the squat brown Mongolian types with dirty smock-like uniforms, standing over a woman, waiting their turn while one of them raped her. On the ground, the woman had turned her head and, between the Russians’ boots, she gazed out at the GI’s. Her face was impassive, a mask which shook with the rhythmic jarring of her rapist’s pumping hips. Joe took a step but his buddies held him back. Leave it alone, Joe, not our fight, fucking bastards, too late, happens every day in this fucking place… So they stood there. They let it happen. They were in the British sector, ducking the MP’s outside a club that had been declared off limits; they didn’t want trouble, not when they were so close to shipping out. Still, they could have stopped it. Maybe they figured there was a kind of justice in it—who were the wolves now and who the niggers? But Joe did not see it that way. He was still a cop’s son, and he figured Berlin was where you glimpsed the truth of things, of life unpoliced, and all he wanted was to get the hell out.

  Almost twenty years later, Joe could see that woman’s face as clear as day and still feel ashamed.

  “Hey, cop.”

  On a corner near Cambridge Street a half dozen kids loitered. A few city blocks still survived here, just north of the police station, the city reemerging, knitting itself back into existence after the void of the empty West End site.

  Joe had been feeling addled by the morning’s events, the smashed-up shop, the suggestion that cops had been complicit somehow in the West Enders’ betrayal, and the fog of memories from the war. But those punks, those two words—“Hey, cop”—belted him back into the here and now.

  “Who said that?” he demanded.

/>   The kids smirked. They wore jeans and short jackets. A couple smoked.

  “Who said it?”

  “I did,” one responded. He was the biggest of them. He had a swagger. “What, you can’t even say hello to a cop anymore?”

  “You the tough guy? Is that it?” Joe was bigger than any of these kids, but they seemed to feel there was safety in numbers. “All tough guys, huh?”

  No answer.

  “Who’s the toughest guy here?”

  After some wordless discussion, they nodded in unison toward the first kid.

  “You?” Joe pulled out his pistol. He leveled it directly at the tip of the kid’s nose. “Now I am.”

  The kid’s eyes bulged.

  “My name’s not ‘cop.’ From now on you call me Detective Daley or Lieutenant Daley or Sir, you got that?”

  Nod.

  “Answer me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know that guy Moe Wasserman with the deli over near the Garden?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a friend of mine. Somebody broke up his store. I want to know who.”

  The kid’s eyes were slightly crossed from staring at the tip of the gun. “I, I don’t know.”

  “Find out.”

  “Okay.”

  Joe put the gun away. “Give me your wallet.”

  The kid pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and handed it over. The wallet was warm and ass-shaped. Joe felt queer holding it. But he found the kid’s license and confirmed the name, just in case.

  “What’s my name?”

  “Daley.”

  There was an audible whish from the kid’s lungs, and he doubled over onto Joe’s fist, and Joe looked down at him with something like relief at having thrown a punch, finally. Joe kept him from falling, held him up with a fist still clutched under the kid’s belly. He could feel the lungs spasm. “Breathe,” Joe counseled, “breathe.” He held his right arm locked at a ninety-degree angle while the boy hung over his fist like a magician’s cloth, to be whipped away revealing a bouquet or a rabbit.

  “What’s my name?”

  “Detective Daley.”

  This was how you dealt with wolves.

  16

  Boston State Hospital, Mattapan.

  Seated at his desk, the psychiatrist pondered a photograph. His index finger went to his upper lip and swept back and forth, back and forth, over a brushy mustache. “No,” he decided. He set the photo aside and picked up the next one, another head-and-shoulders photo of an old woman.

  His name was Dr. Mark Keating. He was chief of psychiatry at this public mental hospital, which was set in a sprawling woodsy campus in Boston. He had an air of slovenly cultivation: a froth of gray curls that still bore the impression of a hat, snaggled teeth, spectacles rotated a few degrees off horizontal. Michael equated that sort of Einsteinish sloppiness with purity of intellect, or of purpose, or courage or simple eccentricity, or all of these, because Michael knew full well that his own sensible, conformist appearance—the bag suit from Brooks, the brogans which he polished regularly with an old pair of underpants—signaled the opposite. The psychiatrist seemed to take Michael’s visit in stride. He had been treating Arthur Nast and talking to policemen about Arthur Nast for nearly ten years, on and off.

  “This was the one, I think.”

  The doctor handed the photo across the desk to Michael.

  “Helena Jalakian,” Michael said. “She was fifty-six.”

  “She looks older.”

  “She lost her parents in the Armenian genocide. She was just a child, of course.” Michael frowned. “She lived on Gainsborough Street in the Fenway, so she could walk to Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall. Classical music buff.”

  “This was the picture.”

  “I don’t understand. She was the first victim. But you said you called the police on August”—Michael checked his notes—“twenty-third, in ’62. There were already seven women dead by then.”

  “This picture was in the newspaper. Or a picture just like it, I don’t know. But it was this woman. Until then I wasn’t sure.” He riffled through a bristling file folder, his head shaking. He came to a form with a photo paper-clipped at the corner. He tugged the picture free and laid it beside the first. “You see? This is Arthur Nast’s mother.”

  Michael compared the two. The similarity was striking.

  “And look,” the doctor said. He arranged three more pictures from Michael’s collection around the tiny shot of Nast’s mother so they formed a cross.

  Michael recited, “Ina Lanzmann, Mary Duffy, Jane Tibodeau. Look at that. Amazing.”

  “They are all, at least they appear to be, between fifty-five and seventy. Arthur’s mother was fifty-eight when she died.”

  “So why did you wait so long to call the cops?”

  “All I had was the resemblance of the pictures. I needed more. You understand, I’m bound by patient confidentiality. Generally, anything Arthur tells me, I’m forbidden to repeat. I could not come forward until I was convinced Arthur might really be murdering these women. Even then, many of my colleagues would not agree with my telling you these things. If it ever comes out that I revealed all this to you…”

  His finger agitated the bristle-ends of his mustache again.

  “Look, I’ve had my suspicions about Arthur for a long time. Arthur is not confined here. We do not have the resources to monitor his movements, and he has ground privileges, which means he can leave the campus almost any time he wants. So he has a history of wandering off. And of course he tends to get in trouble on these rambles. Arthur is rather odd looking and quite a large man; people tend to be alarmed when they find him rustling around in their backyards. He’s been arrested several times for breaking and entering, trespassing, that sort of thing. Usually he’s just broken into the basement of a building to sleep there or to take some little thing that’s caught his eye, a bicycle or whatever. But sometimes he does more sinister things.

  “After I saw the woman’s photo, to satisfy my curiosity—to allay my fears, really—I checked the dates of Arthur’s absences from the hospital against the dates of the first seven Strangler murders, in that summer of ’62. The dates lined up perfectly.”

  “What about the other stranglings?”

  “That’s just it. If you remember, the first seven murders were all older women, all in a three-month period from June through August 1962. Those are the warm months, when Arthur tends to wander. Then there were no murders for a while, until the winter, December, I think, and those next two victims were young girls in their twenties. I checked: Arthur was here on those dates. Which made perfect sense to me because Arthur’s anger is not simply directed at all women. It is directed at one woman in particular: his mother.”

  “So Nast could not have done them all?”

  “I know for a fact he didn’t. It’s the murders involving these old women that concern me. You see, Arthur despised his mother. He first came here in 1956. He’d already been in other institutions—Bridgewater, Tewksbury, the Shattuck. But I first met him in ’56. He’d tried to kill his mother. Threw her down a flight of stairs. The judge pink-slipped him to us for the thirty-day competency evaluation. In the end it did not matter. The mother refused to testify; the case never went forward. But Arthur seemed to form some connection with me in those thirty days, and when the family ultimately decided he should be committed, in ’59, he came back here. I’ve been treating him ever since.”

  “And?”

  “Over the years he continued to abuse his mother. Punched her, kicked her, eventually he threw her down that flight of stairs. He would be arrested but the charges were never pursued. It’s an awful thing to ask a mother to testify against her own son.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I can’t prove it, of course, but it seems fairly obvious to me that he killed her, finally. This was in 1961. She was in the hospital, immobilized in bed, hooked up to an I.V. And then Arthur paid her a visit. Soon after h
e left, the old woman was found nearly dead on the floor beside her bed. The I.V. had been ripped out of her arm. The bed railing was still raised, so she could not have rolled off the bed. There were bruises on her neck. Arthur had choked her, obviously, ripped out the I.V., and tossed her on the floor. The mother died before she could ever tell what happened. The cause of death was heart attack induced by asphyxiation. So again, he was never prosecuted.”

  “Why did he hate her so much?”

  “I don’t know, not with any certainty. Look, I can’t tell you everything Arthur has said about her; I do still have some obligation to maintain confidentiality. But I’m not sure it matters anyway. Arthur reports all sorts of abuse when he was a child, some pretty monstrous things, all of which may be gospel truth or, equally likely, all of it could be delusional. It was real enough to Arthur, that’s the important thing. And of course the mother-hatred and the delusions feed on each other until Arthur can no longer see his mother as anything but a complete monster, one who persecutes him even from the grave. I will tell you that Arthur reports he still hears her voice. She berates him, accuses him, doubts him. On and on. So there was motive, if you can call it that.”

  “What’s actually wrong with him?”

  “A precise diagnosis in a case like Arthur’s is very difficult. He’s deeply disturbed. Likely schizophrenic. That’s how he exhibits, anyway: delusional, with some pretty bizarre illusions; fractured speech and thought; occasional hallucinations; obsessive about certain things, his mother, women, sex. One problem in treating Arthur is that his intelligence is very limited, as is his ability to articulate his thoughts. At times he seems childish, almost autistic. So as a clinician you have this knot of problems: the storm of emotion whipping around inside him, the constellation of behaviors that may or may not signal schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder, and all of it viewed through the fuzzy window of the man’s limited intelligence and ability to communicate. And of course what makes this all so dangerous is that Arthur’s mind is housed in this enormous, powerful body.”