The Strangler

by William Landay

  Impulsively, Michael dropped his hand onto the back of Ricky’s. Their stacked hands looked strange, like mating animals. Some old taboo, or a battalion of them, made Michael want to pull his hand away, but he left it there.

  Ricky looked down at the two hands. A riffle of uncertainty crossed his face. But he left his hand there, too.

  part two

  27

  Michael opened his left eye—the good eye, free of the hydraulic pressure that swelled his right eyeball during a migraine. His eyelashes were crusted with mucus; he teased it away with his finger. The room was dark. He could make out the sloping surface of his pillow, the outline of the bedroom window. His head remained still. Behind him, his mother whispered rosaries. Her beads ticked softly as she worried them in her hand. Even then—with his brain pressing open the fissures of his skull, trying to blossom out of its thick bone case—he saw that it was funny. Margaret would treat his migraine with ancient cultic hocus-pocus. A half dozen norepinephrine tablets had not worked; maybe a dose of Jesus would do the trick. He had seen a cartoon in a magazine once: a witch doctor in a grass skirt dancing around a car with its hood raised. That was Margaret. The sound of her whispering infuriated him. Sibilant hisses, like mouse scratches. Why wouldn’t she be quiet?

  Michael thought he might vomit. He risked jostling his head to feel for the stainless-steel mixing bowl on the floor by his bed. His fingers found the bowl and he pulled it up onto the bed.

  His mother whispered, “Michael?”

  He let his eye close, let himself drift.

  The attacks usually began on the right side, a ghost behind the right eyeball, and as the pressure intensified and expanded, the pain became increasingly physical, sensual. It invaded the bony and spongy and meaty parts all packed tight in his head, and the loose weave of capillaries that netted the whole thing and kept it drenched. At times it seemed that the interior of his skull was illuminated. He could visualize the smooth bowl of his eye socket, and the mounting pressure in his arteries, and the poisonous fluid accumulating between his skull and scalp. At its worst—when he wondered if someone observing his scalp might actually see it stretch—at these moments he was conscious of the weight of his brain lolling on its stem, this pulpy wet mass that contained his consciousness. His mind beheld his brain. It was an electrochemical engine, impossibly complex, and when it broke the doctors were at a loss to fix it. They understood the mechanisms of migrainous pain well enough. Michael understood them, too; he had studied the literature and even with his layman’s knowledge he could follow the cascading failures—minute dilation of the arterioles feeding the brain, increased intracranial hydrostatic pressure, which in turn triggered the excruciating buildup of fluid in the subcutaneous tissue under the scalp, a drop in circulating serotonin, erratic electrical activity. The neurologists could explain how it all happened; what they could not explain was why. What triggered it? What was the First Cause? Somewhere in his brainstem was a flaw. The same sustained electrochemical reaction that produced Michael’s mind was flawed.

  In her shushy whisper, Margaret continued to page Dr. Jesus, who seemed not to hear the message, or was not inclined to answer it. But then, He had not interceded on Amy’s behalf or on Joe Senior’s either. How, after all that, could Margaret maintain her childish faith in the old Catholic fairy tales and trinkets? What made the Jesus myth any more credible than a thousand others that people had been chanting around campfires all over the world in Jesus’s day? What distinguished Jesus from, say, the army of abandoned jesuses on Easter Island—except that Jesus had had the good fortune to be taken up by Europeans? Ah, it did no good to cross-examine her. Margaret’s faith was its own answer. He took her religiousness as a sign—yet another sign—of her simplicity. A lifetime in the hermetic world of a housewife had left her dull.

  He pushed his head down into the pillow. Sometimes he could mash the heel of his hand into his right eyeball and feel relief, or press on his neck at the carotid artery, or squeeze his entire head with two hands. But the relief came at a price: When the compression was released, the gush of pent-up fluid was excruciating. So, by experimentation, he had found a compromise in which he lay on his right side and pressed his head down into the pillow with light, steady pressure that could be maintained for long periods. This was the position he returned to now, out of habit. He thought the attack was beginning to crumble. The peak had been reached and passed, almost undetectably. The sensation of pain took on a slightly different tone—stale, stanched, like turbid standing water. The current was reversing. He could begin to imagine himself in control of his body again. The very profusion of all these thoughts was itself a sign of recovery; pain annihilated thought, but Michael was thinking now. He was coming back to himself. The rebound stage would progress relatively quickly. Still, still. Another hour or two.

  In Michael’s head was a film: His father, Joe Senior, not idealized but as he’d been in life, fifty-eight years old, thin and sinewy like Ricky, with a pair of reading glasses in his shirt pocket, in the same black windbreaker he always wore on the job. He was running. Fast. He could surprise you with his athleticism, even at fifty-eight. It was easy to forget Joe Senior had not always been old. The brothers always thought of their dad as an old man, decrepit from the booze and the long hours. When he ran, it was like a revelation—this, this, was the real Joe Senior, the young man inside the old one. The scene was a road, not a proper road but an access road along the water, bounded by redbrick buildings on the left and a molded-concrete seawall on the right. Ahead of Joe Senior a kid was scampering away. Probably just a reflex. See a cop—run. There were swarms of tough kids like this one scurrying around the East Boston wharfs. Wharf rats.

  (In his confession at Bridgewater, as Michael listened, Albert DeSalvo had claimed he’d hung around the East Boston waterfront for a while as a kid. The waterfront had been his only escape from an abusive father, he had said. The wharfs had toughened him up. This was where DeSalvo learned he could take care of himself, that he had good fists. He did not hate cops—DeSalvo had hastened to point this out, always ingratiating—but the other wharf rats did. One of the beat cops here liked to blow the homeless boys who lived at the wharfs. He liked it when the boys ejaculated on his blue brass-buttoned tunic. The rats all hated that cop, but DeSalvo did not hate him, or any other cop. It was just a story, DeSalvo had said, a memory.

  But Michael was conflating memories. When Joe Senior sprinted down that alley in 1962, no one had heard of Albert DeSalvo, or the Strangler, or Lee Harvey Oswald or any of the rest of it. This was Before. Michael depressed his head into the pillow again, tried to refocus. He had to slow his brain down to keep the movie running, to let the reel play out.)

  The kid skittered around a corner with a neat pivot. He disappeared. He was there and then he was not. Black sneakers, blue jeans, white T-shirt, blue jacket—Joe Senior made his mental notes as he ran, he started writing his report. His feet tick-tick-ticked light on the gritty ground. Behind him were the heavier chunking footfalls of Brendan Conroy, his partner. Conroy chuffed loudly, struggled to keep up. “That’s the kid!” Conroy shouted. “That’s the kid!” Conroy and Daley had a tip on a homicide. They wanted to talk to this kid. When the kid vanished around that corner, Joe Senior seemed to accelerate. Something in him opened up and he found himself rushing ahead faster than he’d thought possible, lifted, flying. (Michael saw from his dad’s point of view now, through the old man’s eyes, heard the old man’s breath in his own ears. He heard his dad say through Michael’s own mouth, “Hold it! Police!”) Joe Senior fixed on that corner, an alley between two buildings. He had to slow down to come around the corner. A good cop does not rush around a corner. But it was a kid. He was thirteen or fourteen years old, he was not a suspect, just a witness, a “person of interest.” Joe Senior came around the corner a little off balance, turning left as his upper body pulled him right, momentum like an invisible string tugging his torso; he leaned right, put out his left hand to s
teady himself on the brick wall of the building. And here was the kid—

  a moment’s confusion—

  no—

  here was the kid with a snub-nose four-shot derringer, a punky toy thing—

  wavering in the kid’s hand—

  and in the last moment the temptation was to stare at the gun but Dad looked up at the kid, caught his eye—

  Joe Senior was going to say No!—

  the tip of his tongue flattened against the roof of his mouth to sound the N.

  And now beside Michael’s bed, his mother was repeating and repeating those whispery rosaries imploring Jesus Christ and Saint fucking Anthony and God Himself to come down and heal the mis-calibration in Michael’s central nervous system, “grant him rest and relief”—this from the same Jesus who had not bestirred Himself to intervene on Amy Ryan’s behalf as her blood soaked the bedsheets, nor to stop the bullet from a child’s gun that drilled Joe Senior’s chest—for that matter the same Jesus who coded the flaw into Michael’s brainstem in the first place. Stupid woman. Stupid fucking woman.

  “Get out!”

  He spoke the words into his pillow and felt the muffled humidity of his own breath.

  Margaret was silent.

  He snapped his head around recklessly and the fluid swirled in his skull and phosphenes floated across his vision and he was dizzy and furious. He saw her face, wide-eyed, shocked, and knew how he must have looked to her. He did not care. His voice was low and raw. “Get! Out!”

  28

  The ball swung back and forth, back and forth, gathering its lazy momentum.

  A small crowd stood on the sidewalk behind BPD sawhorses, heads tipped upward, slack-faced with fascination. A woman said, “Here it comes.” The shopkeeper Moe Wasserman was in the crowd, at the front, watching his building come down. Joe Daley, too.

  The ball entered the building easily, through the brick curtain, and nestled in a second-floor bedroom. Plaster dust filled the room and drifted out of the front of the building like smoke. The room was not quite empty of furniture. A bed remained, its mattress stripped, and a small bureau. There were other holes in the building, other three-walled rooms exposed to view. The crane operator tugged the ball, which snagged the bed as it dragged across the room.

  The building came down. Thirty-five minutes. The cloud of plaster dust took longer to dissipate. It left ashy powder on the windshields of parked cars.

  After, the crowd looked past the rubble pile, across the newly opened air space to St. Joseph’s Church a quarter mile away. The church sat like a fortress on the bare plain of the old West End site. Joe tried to remember exactly what Moe Wasserman’s building had looked like, but already it was hard to summon up a complete picture. There had been a pattern along the roofline, like steps. Hadn’t there?

  A few hours later—it was after sunset, beyond that it was hard to know; could have been six o’clock, could have been ten—Joe was at the Pompeii, a favorite joint near Haymarket Square. The owner had a special relationship with the Department, and the Pompeii stayed open till all hours. That was a handy thing. There were nights he didn’t feel like going home after working last half, with his engine still revving and the house all dark and quiet, the kid asleep, wife asleep.

  Joe lived on the hill in Brighton, in a little split-level ranch on a woodsy new street behind St. Sebastian’s. The fancy house never suited him. This was not his neighborhood. He did not belong out here, pretending to live in the suburbs. When he thought of the house, he tended to picture Kat and Little Joe there, without him. Sometimes when company came, Joe felt like one of the guests. And at night—Christ. The street went black and the only noises were the bugs cricking and shrilling in the woods and the squawks of the city in the far distance.

  So, late at night Joe took it someplace else to work it off a little. That wasn’t always easy. Some nights he never did run out of gas. The energy just seemed to feed on itself and Joe felt a tireless capacity for working, drinking, laughing, fucking, whatever came along. He could go all night. Tonight would not be one of those nights, though. An uncharacteristic weariness had settled over him since Amy’s death. It felt like rot. His strong body was being pulped from the inside, like some massive blighted tree. Maybe this was what it felt like to get old. Your body rotted away with you in it. Age was a disease, a fatal one. The sight of that building under the wrecking ball seemed to fit the same pattern, though Joe could not quite articulate how.

  Across the bar were rows of bottles like soldiers in formation, and behind them a mirrored wall in which Joe saw his own blockish face. At least his appearance gave nothing away, he thought. He still looked like the old Joe.

  Also reflected in the mirror was the woman beside him at the bar, a big blowsy redhead with a lot of miles on the odometer but not a bad-looking broad once you looked past the wear and tear. The Pompeii-themed interior of the restaurant heightened the red in her hair. It was a brazenly false color for a gal her age, but rather than being put off by it, Joe understood. He saw the sassy natural redhead she’d once been and wanted to be still. With her right hand the woman held a cigarette wedged between her index and middle fingers while she made minute adjustments to the neck of her dress with the remaining three fingers.

  Joe turned to his left to peek at her directly, and they exchanged faint, well-meaning smiles, signals of good intentions. Up close, she was even more ruddy and windblown than she had looked in the mirror. Too old for Joe, but there was something there. He liked the way she plumped on her stool like a hen brooding an egg underneath her.

  “Hey,” the woman offered.

  “Hey,” Joe said, and he faced forward and for the first time in weeks he felt happy. Diffuse, childish joy.

  Jesus Lord, did Joe Daley love women! Not just fucking them, though fucking was certainly part of it. He enjoyed their company, he was happy in their presence. Their tricks, the smells and makeup and clothes. The power of their clothed bodies! The happy squeeze of cleavage, the rise of the hips under their dresses, the suggestion of nudity up an open skirt. He exulted in it. Joe was dumbfounded when people, especially men—baby brother Michael could be particularly preachy here—suggested there was anything low-down or girl-hating about Joe’s womanizing. Joe couldn’t imagine anyone loving women more or better than he did. How on earth could anyone take seriously the pretense of monogamy in marriage? Joe lumped it in with all the other crazy old relics of Catholicism, like Church Latin and celibate priests and Swiss Guards. What did Joe’s appreciation of other broads have to do with his sincere love for Kat? It just didn’t figure. One had nothing to do with the other. Maybe a smarter guy could understand it. Then again, if some smart-ass ever did figure it out, Joe hoped he would keep it to himself. He did not want any part of a world without women.

  Joe raised his empty glass and shook the ice cubes. The bartender ignored him. Joe called him by name, but the bartender pretended not to hear as he hefted a rack of dirty glasses back into the kitchen.

  “Wax in his ears.” The redhead shrugged.

  “I guess so.”

  When the bartender returned, Joe asked loudly for another bourbon rocks.

  “Tab’s getting pretty high, Joe.”

  “I haven’t been here that long.”

  “Not just tonight.”

  “Just give me a drink. You’re a bartender not a, a…accountant. Whattaya? What are you shaking your head? Just give me a drink.”

  “If it was up to me…It’s not coming from me, Joe.”

  Joe gave him a vexed look, a first stirring of trouble.

  “Hey, Joe, if it was up to me. I mean, what do I give a shit?”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Just throw in a few bucks, Joe. Make it look good.”

  “I don’t have any cash, the banks are closed. What do you want me to do?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Can’t do it.”

  “Can’t do it? The fuck is that, ‘can’t do it’? How long’ve I been
coming here?”

  “Long time.”

  “Long time is right. Is this how you treat a customer?”

  “No offense, Joe, but if you were a regular customer, I’d have cut you off a long time ago. You’re going to drink us out of business.”

  “You don’t think I’m good for it?”

  The bartender cleared away Joe’s glass and slung the ice into a dump sink. Joe took the act as a provocation and he started to stand, and things might have got worse had the redhead not piped up with “I’ll buy him a drink.”

  The bartender, though he was probably relieved to avoid a confrontation with Joe, gave her a look. “He’s a cop, you know.”

  “So? I got nothing against cops.”

  After he had his drink, Joe lifted the glass toward her. “Thanks.”

  She said, “Never a cop when you need one.”

  “You need one?”

  “Sure.”

  A few hours later Joe lay in this woman’s bed. The pillow under his nose stank of her perfume. She was beside him, under a thin blanket, the cool skin of her bottom against his. She snored, fluttery tubercular snores.

  The room was dimly lit with reflected street light.

  Joe stared at the wallpaper by the bed, a faded flower print. The paper was peeling at the seams. There must have been a room just like this one in Moe Wasserman’s demolished building. Maybe it had flowery wallpaper, too. Probably there’d been lots and lots of rooms like this in the West End. People had lived in those rooms, those boxes, stood in them, slept in them, got born and died in them. Now they were all gone. The rooms didn’t exist anymore except as boxes in the air. Pieces of sky. This room where Joe was lying—it had been a box in the air, too, thirty feet aboveground, until someone had come along and wrapped it in these four walls and floor and ceiling. He was lying in a bed thirty feet off the ground, in a box in the air. A city is a pile of such boxes.