The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Sounds like a real E-ticket ride.”

  “That wouldn’t be the clinical term, but…”

  “What about young women? When my brother found Nast in that alley, he was choking a college girl, twenty-one years old, very pretty. She sure did not look like his mother.”

  “Yes. Well, Arthur’s sexual…impulses are quite primitive and unrestrained. Now, to what extent that’s rolled up with these feelings about his mother, I don’t know. It’s probably a reach to say his hatred for one woman has poisoned his perceptions of all women. In our conversations I have always had the sense that Arthur just does not have any feelings at all toward women except as sexual playthings. He does not empathize with them, he does not even perceive them as human. This is why I found it troubling that there have been old and young Strangler victims but none in between. Women interest Arthur either because they are old enough to be his mother or young enough to be objects of sexual desire. Women who fill neither role are of no interest. He does not see them.”

  “But you say he was here when the two young women were strangled, in December of ’62?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So there’s at least two stranglers?”

  The psychiatrist shrugged. Not my job.

  “Have you ever confronted him directly about the murders?”

  “No. In clinical terms, that would be a very bad idea. He would never trust me again. But one day last year—and I did report this to the police—I found Arthur wandering in the hall in a doctors-only area of the hospital. He said, ‘Dr. Keating, I need to talk to you.’ I asked him what it was about. He said, ‘The stranglings.’ I took him to my office immediately. I was going to inject him with sodium pentothal and question him about the murders. But at just that moment I got an emergency call and I had to leave. I never got the chance to question Arthur directly. He never gave me another opportunity like that.”

  “Doctor, do you think Arthur Nast is the Strangler?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Look, all I can tell you is I have a terrible, terrible feeling.”

  17

  This broad was built like a brick shithouse. Packed into a blue dress pressurized across the bust and butt. Big vaulted Neapolitan nose, lacquered helmet of brown hair. Paula Something-or-other. Joe was partial to the brick-shithouse type, and when he had caught sight of this one progressing down Cambridge Street like a Zeppelin, he had thought she looked like Sophia Loren a little. He knew he could fuck her, he knew it the moment he saw her walking that stroppy walk. He brought her to Joe Tecce’s for dinner, and now, halfway through her veal piccata with a side of pappardelle, this broad Paula was still hungry and Joe was feeling the familiar anticipation of a rich dessert.

  When she excused herself to go to the “little girls’ room,” Joe sipped his wine and watched her ass, then he sipped his wine undistracted.

  A man sat down in Paula’s chair. “You know who I am?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah you do.”

  Joe topped off his wineglass then offered the bottle to the visitor. When a guy like Vincent Gargano shows up at your table, you make nice.

  Gargano was short and doughy, a dark-complected guinea, with the sort of kissy Cupid’s-bow mouth that belonged on an angel on a church ceiling. A street kid in a suit. He was not even gangstered up in the usual pinky ring and hockey-puck-sized watch. Maybe he was purposely guarding his reputation from any indication of softness. Or maybe he just didn’t know any better. But intentional or not, Gargano’s cheap suit and ringless fingers were like a friar’s robe: they suggested a sort of incorruptibility. Vinnie The Animal was not violent for the money; he was just violent.

  “You’re Detective Daley, am I right? You just come over to Station One.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s some good-looking lady, your wife.”

  Joe glanced toward the ladies’ room.

  “You’re a lucky guy.”

  “That’s not my wife.”

  “Even luckier. Hff, that’s some broad. Must be your sister.”

  “Something like that.”

  “She’s somebody’s sister. Not mine, lucky for you.” Gargano grinned. This was charm, a pale version of it. “Listen, I just come over to welcome you to the neighborhood, you know, let you know if there’s ever anything I can do for you, help you out or whatever, something I can do…you know.”

  Joe nodded but did not reply.

  “I’m offering you my friendship, see?”

  “I see.”

  “I heard about that thing with The Monkey and that TV show, this whole…mixup. I liked the way you stood up on that. Never said nothin’ about nothin’. You got a lot of fuckin’ balls, Detective Daley, you don’t mind my sayin’ so. That’s what I hear about you and that’s what I think: this man’s got balls like coconuts. Stand-up guy with two big fuckin’ coconuts.”

  Joe nodded in a not unfriendly way. He figured Vinnie Gargano’s head was filled with coconuts, but what could you say?

  “I remember your old man Joe Daley. You look a little like him, only bigger.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “Hey, can I ask you a favor?”

  Joe shrugged.

  “You don’t mind? I mean, I don’t wanna do anything…”

  Another shrug.

  “I got this cousin, he’s a good kid, not like me. A little”—he pointed to his temple and made a face: crazy—“know what I mean, Joe? You got kids, right? So you know. So this kid, my cousin, he piled up all these parking tickets, with the construction and everything, and cuz he don’t care, since we’re just talkin’ here. So he piles up all these parking tickets. End of the year, he goes down to the registry to renew his plates. Stands in a line around the block, the whole thing. And guess what? They turn him down. Just like that.” He washed his hands together and showed Joe his palms. “I mean, whattaya…? So I told him, ‘Hey, stugatz, just go pay the fuckin’ tickets like Joe Citizen and take care of it.’ But he don’t listen. He’s a fuckin’ kid, am I right? Just screws the plates back on the fuckin’ car and off he goes, like nothin’. So some cop over there in your station cites him for an unregistered motor vehicle. So now the kid can’t drive. And if he can’t drive, he can’t work. You see the problem?”

  Joe forked a piece of steak and showed it to Gargano. “You mind?”

  “Go right ahead. While it’s hot. Don’t mind me. So the thing is, is I want to take care of this thing for this kid, my cousin. We all made mistakes when we were kids, right? So I seen you come in tonight and I figured, hey, that’s Joe Daley’s kid, why not reach out to him, see if he can help me take care of this thing. I mean, it iddn’t like the kid robbed a bank. Am I right or am I right? I would be very grateful if you would do this thing for me. Very grateful. I would consider it a personal favor.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “I would consider it a personal favor.”

  “Can’t help you. Sorry.”

  “If it’s about the cost—”

  “It’s not about the cost.”

  Joe knew how it worked. He would do Gargano this small favor, then Gargano would slip him an envelope as a way of saying thank you, and that’s how it would start. They would have their hooks in him. Charlie Capobianco’s mob was famous for collecting cops. Their police pad was rumored to include the names of half the downtown cops, including captains and lieutenants in Homicide and Vice, even a special unit assigned to monitor organized crime. It was easy money, but the risk in getting tangled up with these North End guys was too high. Joe was determined to clean up his act. This bullshit with the bookies, and the money washing in and out—he’d had enough of the whole thing. As soon as he got back even, he was giving up the whole thing. Anyway, Capobianco hated cops almost as much as he hated Irishmen, and he harbored a special contempt for Irish cops. The last thing Joe needed was to crawl into bed with a guy like that.

  “No offense,” Joe offered.


  “No, no. No offense.” Gargano glanced around the restaurant. Joe Tecce’s did a good business even midweek, and the tables were piled in close. “Anyway, like I said, if there’s ever anything I can do for you.”

  “Alright.”

  “I hear you got a couple little tabs running, Detective.” Gargano stared. The mask of solicitousness slipped just a little. “You hit a little cold streak?”

  “Huh?”

  “I hear you like the puppies. They don’t like you so much though, lately.”

  “Something you can do about that?”

  Gargano shook his head. “Can’t help you there. No offense.”

  Joe’s eyes fell. He cut his steak with affected concentration.

  “Hey, that guy Rick Daley, that’s your brother, iddn’t he?”

  “What about him?”

  “Just askin’ is all. I need to have a word with him, too. He’s ducking me.”

  “Leave him out of it.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you, big brother. We got our own business to discuss, Rick and me.”

  Joe glared briefly, and foolishly, but then it is not always an asset to have balls like coconuts.

  “Here comes your sister. Jee-zus Christ, would you look at the tits on that broad.” Gargano leered as she processed across the room. “Tits like that, they ought to strap her to the front of a ship, you know? Like one of those fuckin’ statues with the big tits they put on the front of a ship there?”

  Joe said nothing.

  Gargano turned to him and smirked at his own joke, at Joe’s abased silence. There could only be one alpha dog.

  When the girl arrived, Gargano jumped to his feet, pushed in her chair for her, and wished them both a good meal.

  “Friend of yours, Joe?”

  “No. Come on, baby, let’s get out of here.”

  “But I haven’t finished my dinner.”

  “You’ll finish it some other time.”

  18

  Boston Homicide. BPD Headquarters, second floor. Friday, December 27, 1963, 10:30 A.M.

  A dozen or so detectives clustered by the wall peering into a one-way mirror. The mirror looked into the Homicide commander’s office, a small space—a desk, a few chairs, a low bookcase—where important interviews usually took place, since there was no formal interview room. Unfortunately the glass was only big enough for two or three guys to look through comfortably (inside the office, the window was disguised as a discreet little framed mirror). So the detectives had arranged themselves just so, craning, like kids watching a ball game through a hole in the fence. At the front of the crowd was Brendan Conroy’s big slab of a face. Conroy was second in command at Boston Homicide. Michael Daley’s face was there too, peering down a narrow sight path through the crowd, through the glass, to the back quarter of Arthur Nast’s head. Next to Michael in the crowd was a Homicide detective named Tom Hart, who had been one of Joe Senior’s favorites. Tom Hart was bald and puff-bellied and decent. There was an unmistakable significance, Michael thought, in the way Hart had positioned himself next to Michael. The implication was that Joe Senior’s son could never really be an outsider here. Through the glass, inside the commander’s office, seated at the desk, was George Wamsley.

  They were all eager to know the same thing: Was it possible this bug-eyed bald-headed towering mental case might actually be the Strangler?

  Nast had managed to stay on the run for five days after the attack on the girl in the alley. He was discovered sleeping next to a furnace in the basement of an apartment building on Hemenway Street. The janitor who found Nast thought he might have been staying there awhile; he had made a bed out of oily rags and old blankets scrounged from the storage bins in the basement. He had also left an enormous turd on the floor. It reared up like a coiled cobra, which disturbed the janitor much more than the possibility that the Mad Strangler had nested in his building (“Who’s gonna pick that thing up? I’m not gonna pick that thing up…”). When the cops came down into the basement, Nast blurted, “I know what this is about” and “It’s about that girl.” He gathered up a few of his things from the floor, crammed them into his pockets, and submitted to the handcuffs. He was taken straight to BPD Homicide.

  Why George Wamsley decided to conduct the interrogation himself was a mystery to the assembled sergeants and detectives from Boston. As far as anyone knew, Wamsley had never interrogated a suspect in a homicide or, for that matter, a jaywalking. It was arrogance, pure and simple, that was the consensus. Typical Wamsley. Typical of the whole farcical Strangler Bureau, which was disdained within Boston PD as a political stunt designed to turn Alvan Byron from politician to hero and thus to governor. Once the halo was fitted to Byron’s nappy head, he would no doubt lose all interest in the city and its murders. Now, as Wamsley’s interview stretched into its second ineffectual hour, there was a sinking feeling in the room that Wamsley would cost them their only chance to question Arthur Nast. From here Nast would be booked, then taken to the Boston Municipal Court to be arraigned on two life felonies—assault with intent to rape on the girl in the alley and assault with intent to murder on Joe—whereupon he would be appointed a lawyer. That, no doubt, would be the end of the interrogations. With each futile question from Wamsley, the cops’ frustration grew.

  Brendan Conroy groaned, sniffed, shook his head, rolled his eyes heavenward. Lord, save us from amateurs.

  Wamsley: “The girl in the alley, where did you first see her?”

  Nast: “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Shrug.

  “Was she walking?”

  “I guess.”

  “And you thought she was attractive.”

  “Probably.”

  “Did you know her? Before that night, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “Well, how did you approach her, what did you say?”

  “I didn’t say nothing, I just…”

  “You just what?”

  “I don’t know, I just—We were kissing.”

  “And you wanted to have…sexual relations with her?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did she want to kiss you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not the way she tells it.”

  Shrug. No answer. Nast bowed his head, waiting for the next question. He was no genius, but he had the sensible instinct to ball up like a sow bug until the danger passed.

  “Did she like it when you put your hands on her neck?”

  “I guess so. Ask her.”

  “I did. She said she was screaming.”

  “Was she?”

  “Was she? A policeman heard her three blocks away!”

  Shrug.

  Wamsley massaged the back of his neck. “Arthur, have you heard of the Strangler?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  Wamsley said, a little helplessly, “Well, I find that hard to believe, Arthur.”

  Standing among the Homicide detectives, Michael felt his sympathies streaming toward them. Lord, save us from amateurs. But the sight of Brendan Conroy’s massive Easter Island head, his back puffing with contemptuous sighs, jerked Michael back to Wamsley’s side. What was Conroy up to? What possible advantage could there be in undermining Wamsley now? Michael tried to force his attention back to the interview, but he could not pull his eyes away from the silver back of Conroy’s head, the plush of thick hair sheared close to the scalp, and he felt himself start to seethe. It was as if a key had been turned and a little engine inside him began to grumble. Michael had not always disliked Brendan Conroy. When Conroy and Joe Senior had been partners for years, Michael had regarded him as a sort of laughing rogue uncle, the guy you could count on to spill his drink on the tablecloth or tell a dirty joke to Aunt Theresa the nun. But now it was a struggle to control his distaste. True to his self-critical nature, Michael found a way to extract guilt and self-reproach from the situation; he rebuked himself for his lack
of self-possession. But the thing was loose in him now, and working with Conroy only fed it.

  So when Conroy snorted one time too many at the lack of progress, Michael snapped, “Give him a fucking chance.”

  The profanity gave away a little too much. The others turned to look.

  “Just give him a chance,” Michael repeated, more meekly.

  Wamsley’s mistake was in presuming that interrogation was a sort of debate, in which facts and logic count. Wamsley was clever and intelligent and correct, Nast was none of these; therefore, Wamsley must win. The A.G. was not prepared for a suspect who simply turtled, refusing to hear logic or acknowledge obvious facts, refusing to respond in any meaningful way. Unfortunately everyone on the opposite side of that mirror knew what Wamsley did not: a real-world interrogation was not a short, intense grilling that climaxed in a tearful confession to the crime; more often it was a very long conversation during which a wary, exhausted suspect let slip a single tiny clue. It was about noticing the seemingly insignificant detail—the fact a suspect should not have known, or the one he got wrong in some small, telling way, or the inconsistency between one statement and another. It was about the needle in the haystack. The best interrogator did not expect to walk out with a full confession. Murder confessions—common as pennies in movies and TV shows—never happened in real life. So the good interrogator just wanted the suspect to “give him something.” By those standards, Wamsley’s Q&A was painful to watch.

  Wamsley hung in with Nast for another half hour or so. When he emerged, he had extracted some superfluous, arguably incriminating statements about the attack on the girl and on Joe—a bulletproof case already, with two unimpeachable victim-witnesses—but nothing on the Strangler murders. He was sheepish in front of the assembled cops, but buoyed to see Michael there.

  “Well.” Wamsley sighed toward Michael. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “George, come here, we need to talk.”

  Michael huddled with his boss at the opposite end of the long room, in which eight desks were arranged for the eight Homicide sergeants. Beside the two lawyers, a grinning cardboard Santa Claus was taped to the wall. On a chalkboard, the city’s homicide victims were listed according to date of death. The list still included all the Strangler victims killed within city limits. Strangler Bureau or no Strangler Bureau, Boston Homicide was not ready to cede those cases just yet.