The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Soon.”

  “No. I said when. You tell me exactly when you’re gonna get it. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, what?”

  No answer.

  “I’m guessing you don’t have the money.”

  “Not right now.”

  “Not right now.”

  “Not right now.”

  “So what are you giving me this bullshit about ‘soon’?”

  “I could get some of it.”

  “Some of it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t, I don’t exactly—”

  “How much? How fuckin’ much, Joe?”

  “I don’t know. Couple thousand.”

  “A couple thousand? Is that a joke? You think this is some kind of fuckin’ joke, you make fuckin’ jokes with me? Are you being funny? Tell him a couple thousand and that’s the end of it, like this is some joke. Is that it? You think this is a joke?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, it’s not a joke.”

  “Fuckin’ right it’s not a joke. You know, I heard you weren’t the sharpest fuckin’ guy.” He shook his head. “So what are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you gonna get this kind of money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ You don’t know much.” Gargano had gradually moved to the edge of his chair, leaning far forward with his hands on his knees, and now he slouched back. “I ain’t leavin’ here till I know where you’re gonna get this money.”

  No response.

  “How about your brother the thief?”

  “Let’s leave him out of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s my problem, I’ll fix it.”

  “He’s got money.”

  “Not this kind of money.”

  “You hear about that Copley job? He’s got plenty of money, that one.”

  Joe was not sure what Ricky was calling himself these days—a car dealer or a realtor or a club owner—but he knew it was not wise to reveal anything to a guy like Vinnie Gargano. Joe didn’t know what he didn’t know, sometimes he didn’t know what he did know, and so when it came to Ricky he made it a policy to know nothing at all. Saying too much could get Ricky killed. “My brother doesn’t have that kind of money and he isn’t a thief.”

  Gargano grinned. “Jesus, you really are dumber than a box of rocks.”

  Joe shrugged. He felt at once defeated and oddly relieved. Gargano’s appearance here felt like a culmination—as if Vinnie The Animal had come into that bus station bodying forth all the bad luck and all the defeats Joe had been enduring, and now at last it might all come to an end somehow. Probably badly, it was true, but any sort of end would be better than this slow slide. Gargano was right, after all: Joe had passed the point where he could hope to pay off the debt. From here the vig would bury him, fast. He had no way to stop the clock, and so time itself had become a burden, the passing of an hour was a reason to suffer. He wanted it to stop.

  “So how are you gonna get this money? You got a nice house. I seen it.”

  “It’s mortgaged.”

  “So sell something. What do you got to sell?”

  “Pfft. Nothing.”

  “You know what I usually say in this situation? I tell the guy, ‘Look, you owe ten grand, fifty grand, whatever it is. You only got one thing that’s worth fifty grand. I’ll buy it from you. You know what it is?’” He paused.

  “No,” Joe said. “What is it?”

  “It’s your head. I tell him, ‘Sell me your fuckin’ head for fifty grand and we’ll call it even. I’ll take it right now. You want, I’ll even cut it off for you.’ Then I show him the knife.” He reached inside his leather coat and produced a small knife.

  “What if the guy really doesn’t have fifty grand?”

  “They tend to find it.”

  Joe’s eyes closed.

  “Relax. Your fuckin’ head isn’t worth fifty cents. Let me tell you what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna come work for me.”

  “That won’t—I can’t do that.”

  “Please. I seen Nicky Capobianco’s police pad.” Nicky Capobianco was Charlie’s brother, fixer, and money man. “The morning after the prom is a little late to be calling yourself a virgin. You’ve been taking the money. Now you can earn it.”

  “Earn it how?”

  “Just help us out. If you hear anything we should know about, you tell us, that’s all. If there’s gonna be a raid, we need to know that. If there’s a bug somewhere, obviously we need to know that. You’re a cop, you hear things.”

  “I don’t hear much. You’re gonna be disappointed.”

  “There’s other things you can do. Errands. We got a lot of work. You’re a big guy; we’ll find jobs for you.”

  Joe bowed his head.

  “Relax. It’s not so bad. Alls I’m asking is just help out a little, pitch in. It’s the least you can do. I mean that.”

  33

  With a machinelike shuffle, Fish counted tens and twenties from a roll. At one hundred dollars, he would shift the pile to one side, moisten the pad of his thumb with his tongue, and riffle out another. His dexterity was surprising. Fish looked old and gristly. The skin on his hands was spotted parchment. His fingernails were overgrown to the point of dangerousness. But there was something magical in the way those hands spun out bills into ten neat piles, recombined them, and handed the stack to Joe Daley.

  “Thank you.”

  “Hope your new boss chokes on it. That’s between you and me.” Fish watched the money disappear into Joe’s pants pocket and made a sour little frown. “Make sure it gets where it’s going.”

  “How about I do my job, you do yours?”

  “I’m just sayin’. Remember whose money that is in your pocket.”

  “Pretty strange, huh? You putting money in my pocket for a change.”

  “I seen stranger.”

  “Well, it’s strange to me.”

  “You’ll get used to it. You’re a natural.”

  “Hey, what are you always breaking my balls? What’d I ever—?”

  “You just took my hard-earned money. You want I should thank you?”

  “Come on, Fish, this is just business. I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  “You like it fine.”

  “Oh, you know this.”

  “I got eyes, I can see.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  “I been doing this a long time,” Fish shrugged, “but…” Whatever you say.

  “Anyways, this isn’t about me. If it wasn’t me sitting here, it’d be somebody else.”

  “But it is you sitting here. That’s the point.”

  “That’s right, it’s me sitting here, so how about you just treat me like a professional and we’ll get this over with. Unbelievable. Like I don’t have enough on my mind without this shit from you. Jesus, as if I haven’t given you enough money all these years. That doesn’t count for nothing?”

  “You think I keep all that? I don’t keep it. You people bet against each other—the losers pay the winners. That’s the way it works. I’m just the matchmaker. You want to know where your money went, go find somebody who won that day. I don’t have it. Alls I keep is the juice. It’s nothing, crumbs.”

  “Charlie Capobianco does okay with crumbs.”

  “Volume.”

  “Well, anyways, you took a lot of crumbs off of me.”

  “So now you get to take some back. Funny, huh, Detective?”

  “I said, that’s enough with that, Fish. I didn’t tell you to go get in this business.”

  “I was going to say the same thing to you.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have a whole lot of choice.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “There’s things you don’t know, Fish.”

  “You’d be surprised. Hey, you are what you are, is all I�
��m saying. Your father must be spinning in his grave.”

  “Watch your fuckin’ mouth.” Joe reached across the table and tamped his finger against Fish’s chest as if he were pushing a stubborn button there. “I’m not gonna tell you again. It’s enough with that. Am I going to have to hear this crap every week?”

  “No. Guess I said my piece.”

  34

  Seagulls had nested on the roof of Station One. They came and went from the yellow-brick parapet, landed, squawked, fretted, flew off again. Three dun, speckled eggs lay unprotected in a nest of twigs. A fat furry chick bumbled around the edge of the roof, following the high yellow-brick wall. It was the same speckled gray-brown color as the eggs. The chick paused here and there to inspect bits of garbage collected in the stones that covered the rooftop, cigarette butts, beer cans, Christmas lights. When the chick reached an enormous pair of black shoes, it tried to hop up toward the laces.

  “Beat it,” Joe Daley said.

  He shifted his feet and the little bird waddled off. Joe returned his attention to the view from the parapet, rooftops bristling with antennae, Beacon Hill and the waste field of the West End at dusk. Below, cars emerged from the Sumner Tunnel and disappeared again into the city.

  A voice behind him: “Jesus, Joe. What, are you hiding up here?” Brendan Conroy negotiated the roof door, the raised threshold, the steel bar that propped the door open. He was awkward in the top-heavy way that big old men are. To Joe he looked like a moose crossing a stream, from stone to stone. “I’ve been all over this fucking place looking for you. Three flights of stairs, pshh. The hell are you doing up here?”

  Joe removed a cigarette from his lips and showed it.

  “Ah. Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant? What if they needed to find you?”

  “I’m off.”

  “Go home, then. You’ve got a family, young fella.”

  “What’s on your mind, Brendan? You must have climbed those stairs for a reason.”

  Conroy came over. He was not tall enough to look out over the parapet, so he scanned the rooftop. Three chimney stacks, an air shaft, those filthy goddamn birds screeching and flapping. The one finished feature was a cupola complete with Palladian windows, gold dome, and pineapple finial. Conroy was in full uniform, gold chevrons on his arm. “You know, I’ve never been up here.”

  “Only place you can be alone around here.”

  “Go home, Joe. It’s time to go home.”

  “That’s what you come up here to tell me?”

  “Your mother’s worried about you.”

  “And she sent you.”

  “If your dad was still around…Joe, you can’t blame the woman for worrying about her son. What’s wrong with you?”

  “You don’t want to know, Bren. Trust me.”

  “Come on. Can’t be that bad, boyo.”

  “It is.”

  “Maybe I can help.” Conroy waited but got no response. “You remember the time you got pinched for that thing in Dearborn Square, looking for trouble? ’Member? Who’d you call when you were too scared to tell your old man?”

  “I was a kid. This one’s tougher to fix.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Trust me. Ol’ Uncle Brendan can’t fix this one.”

  “Whatever it is, boyo, it’s just you and me here. You and me and the pigeons.”

  “Those are seagulls.”

  “Okay, seagulls, whatever.”

  Joe smirked. No doubt Conroy meant well, but even if Joe had wanted to confide what he was feeling, he could not have named it. It was not fear. On the contrary he felt safer now than he had in a long time. He might even have been clever. By playing both sides of the fence, he had appeased the enemy without paying or promising anything. Nor had he actually done anything he felt ashamed of. The work was nothing. There were occasional mid-morning calls to transport a suitcase to the North End. And occasional rounds of hole-in-the-wall shops that did a small book—smoke shops, groceries, a shoe-repair joint—to collect the tax. Far from a villain, Joe felt like a functionary in an ancient and very large organization. He was just an errand boy, for now. And Fish had been the exception; the people Joe had called on thus far had not resisted or even resented paying. Capobianco’s tax was just ordinary overhead. It seemed to Joe that The Catastrophe had occurred without fanfare, so maybe—just maybe—it had not been a catastrophe at all. And yet, and yet…he could not shake this feeling. He did not feel comfortable around cops. He had a shameful secret. He was a spy among them. And stripped of his cophood, he did not feel quite like Joe Daley anymore. Maybe he never would.

  “I took a wrong turn, Bren, that’s all.”

  “What did you do?”

  Joe hesitated. Well, what the hell. Might as well tell somebody. “I got in a hole. Betting.”

  “Betting on what?”

  “Numbers, sports, horses, name it.”

  “And?”

  “I have to—I kind of have to work it off. They’ve got me running errands. That’s it so far. I’m sure it’ll be more.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Capobianco’s crew. It was Vincent Gargano came to me.”

  “Ah. And how big a hole are we talking about?”

  “Too big. More than I have.”

  “I can get you the money.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be enough now. I don’t know that I can just walk away.”

  Conroy nodded. “Who knows about this?”

  “No one.”

  “Not even Kat?”

  “If Kat knew, my mother would know. If my mother knew…I kind of wanted to handle it my own way.”

  “Of course, of course. Alright, keep it to yourself, then. Let me see what I can find out. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “You’re not alone in this, boyo. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Anyway, it sounds like you didn’t have much choice. Did you have a choice?”

  “Yeah, a bullet in the hat.”

  “Alright, then. So don’t grind yourself up over it. You do what you have to do, Joe, understand? Just don’t go too far. Run a few errands or whatever, just remember you’re still a cop. If you go too far, no one will know you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll take care of it. You stay cool. You have a family, son. You have a son of your own. You have a responsibility to them. No one can say you did the wrong thing till they walk in your shoes.”

  “Thanks, Bren. I’m glad my dad’s not around for this.”

  “Let me tell you somethin’: Your dad was no saint, God rest his soul. Sometimes he did what he had to do, too.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Like I’m not going to say. He’s passed away and he was a friend of mine and he loved you boys something awful. If there were things he did not want to tell you, then that was his decision and it’s not my place to do any different. No father tells his son everything, Joe. No father does and no father should. A son never really knows his father. There’s too many years in between. But I knew him. I knew him like a brother. Like a goddamn brother, your dad, and he was a good, clean, honest cop. He never did anything—anything—you boys should be the least bit ashamed of. So don’t misunderstand me. But just the same, he was a man, same as you, and he lived in the world, same as you, and that’s all I’m gonna say about it. I don’t want you coming up here on the roof mooning over ‘what would dear ol’ Da think?’ Because I’ll tell you: He’d understand and he’d back you up, same as I’m going to back you up. That’s what we do. We do what we do, and we don’t apologize. That’s how a family works.”

  “Alright. Okay.” Joe wasn’t sure whether Conroy was referring to the Daley family or the police family. He suspected there was not much distinction, to Conroy at least. “What are you going to tell my mother?”

  “What am I going to tell her? The truth: this young fella’s been working his fingers to the bone
and he’s tired, and she and Kat and the rest of the ladies’ sewing circle should just leave yuz alone for a while, let us work it all out.”

  35

  Symphony Hall. Wednesday, three-thirty P.M., final closed rehearsal before the weekend’s performances.

  Something was happening inside the music, something was stirring. The musicians seemed to sense it. During a rest they inhaled deeply, as if to fill their lungs with it. The orchestra had been augmented with freelancers to play the piece—Respighi’s Pines of Rome—and the stage was crowded with players and instruments, extra brass, an organist. Some of the horns were stationed in the balconies around the hall, where they stood at attention behind the gilded latticework railing. The conductor was a trim, bald man in a snug black cardigan, like a midshipman’s jacket. His upper body jerked with the movement of his arms. He barked curt German-accented instructions and expressive grunts: Hup! Tick! Ta!

  At the back of the hall, Ricky lurked in the shadow of a doorway. Up to this point, he had not liked the piece very much. The earlier movements had reminded him of the corny orchestral music in Disney movies, bright and brassy in some places, self-consciously solemn in others. Probably classical music just wasn’t for him. But around the three-minute mark of the fourth and final movement, he felt it too.

  The music unclogged. Out of a stagnant, reedy pianissimo passage, the horns stepped forward and began to blast away. The unstable B-flat opened out onto a major key—“Hah!” the conductor exclaimed—and the brass pulled the entire orchestra into a cycling crescendo that lasted two thrilling minutes, with the horns in the balconies blaring back over the empty hall and the conductor calling for “More!”

  At the rear of the stage, the organist tipped his head back, his mouth yawned open, and he played in a sort of ecstasy or sustained orgasm. This was Kurt Lindstrom.

  After the rehearsal Lindstrom emerged from the stage door with a couple of older musicians. The threesome stood chatting a moment. One of the men said something at which Lindstrom laughed too loudly, then he left them. He walked away on St. Stephen Street, bouncing on the balls of his feet, chest thrust forward.