The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Finish it,” Gargano said.

  Joe was panting and sweaty.

  At his feet a man lay balled on the concrete floor. The man’s filthy raincoat trailed away behind him, like a sleeping child’s tossed-off blanket.

  “Come on, stand up.”

  “No.”

  “Get up, asshole!”

  “No!”

  Gargano intervened. He said in low voice, “Stand the fuck up, you piece of shit, or you’ll never get off that floor.”

  The guy’s name was Slots. He booked out of a bar called Chiambi’s, a bucket of blood near the corner of Bennington and Brooks in East Boston. He was a numbers guy but had also been a roughneck in his day and he was slow to accept the new order. For a while he had refused to pay any tribute at all to Charlie Capobianco, which had earned him an educational beating. Then his payments had slipped again and The Office had noticed because Capobianco always noticed when money went missing. The boss’s first impulse was to squash the guy out, but someone in The Office had intervened on behalf of Slots, some friend of a friend of Nicky Capobianco, another North End book named Gerry Angiulo—Joe could never keep it all straight, all the crazy dago names and shifting alliances. Alls he knew was that by some shadowy miracle Slots—whose nickname referred to the fact that he had lost an arm in the Pacific twenty years before and was said to resemble a right-armed slot machine—was not scheduled to check out on this night, although he might have wished otherwise by the end. A couple of Gargano’s men had driven Slots to a bar up on Blue Hill Avenue. The place was owned by Gargano. Its basement, mildewy and cluttered with beer cases, was the last thing a lot of guys ever saw.

  “Shoulda stuck him in a chair.” Gargano sighed ruefully. He turned to his guys. “Get him up.”

  Slots was yanked to his feet.

  “Go ahead, Joe, we don’t got all night,” Gargano said.

  Slots gave Joe a bleary smile, which Joe admired. The guy had balls. Already he looked pretty bad. His face was beef-red. His right eye had swelled nearly shut.

  Joe hefted his gloved fist, cocked it by his ear, and fired it at the corner of the man’s left eye, where the heavy bones of the skull thinned into the more delicate orbital bones of the eye. Through the steel on his knuckles he felt the side of the face give way, the skin, the bony substructure, the mush behind it all.

  Slots’s head snapped back and his knees gave way simultaneously. He arched down and backward like a dancer, already unconscious, hung there, then collapsed.

  “Alright, go clean yourself up, Joe.”

  Joe stared at the sprawled body. Blood was smeared on the floor and on the man’s clothes. Joe searched his head for a thought, a reaction, but there was nothing, not remorse or pity, not even a practical concern for his own situation (a clean shirt, a ride home). The nullity was not unpleasant. Just a white, open space to drift in.

  “There’s a sink right over there.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Don’t put your shirt back on. First take off that undershirt, leave it here.”

  “Alright.”

  “Hell of a fuckin’ shot you got there.” Gargano snorted to the other two, “D’you see that? Jesus Christ, that was fuckin’ beautiful, man. Fuckin’ A. Just fuckin’ beautiful.”

  Joe shuffled between the stacks of cardboard liquor cases. The sink was on the opposite side of the basement. He did not like to think about what might have been rinsed down the drain of that sink over the years. Not just beer, certainly. He heard his own panting, felt the weight of the gloves dangling from his arms. He paused to look back down the aisle between the boxes.

  Gargano took off his jacket and laid it aside. He wore a scarlet pimp shirt, slim black slacks, and mod ankle boots with a big finger-loop in the back. His gut bulked against the shirt fabric. Gargano looked down at the unconscious body and sighed again. A single red brick lay on the floor nearby, tossed away by someone, misplaced—the building was wood with a poured concrete foundation, not a brick in it except this one. Gargano picked the brick up, raised the right leg of the body, and slid the brick under the knee so that the joint was flexed a few inches off the concrete floor. He stood, raised his own leg up like a drum major, then stomped down on the man’s shin, just below the knee. The tibia dislocated with a snick. Gargano slipped the brick out, came around the body, and propped the other leg the same way. He stomped again, just once, like a good carpenter driving a nail with one slap of his hammer.

  50

  Ricky stepped through the window out onto the fire escape and he smiled. It was laughably easy—like some low-rent junkie step-over artist, the bums who made a living out of climbing fire escapes and literally stepping over the side to enter apartments through open windows or reaching in and grabbing whatever they could. Imagine, taking that sort of chance! If it weren’t so stupid, Ricky might have admired the courage of these idiots. He lowered the window behind him, checked up and down the alley, then smashed the single big pane with a jab of his foot. The shattering glass made a cymbal-crash. Gingerly he raised the window sash again. Was that the way they did it? He guessed so. It certainly looked messy enough. He descended the stairs like a debutante and rode the drop-ladder down to the sidewalk.

  A block away, at the corner of Hemenway and Westland Avenue, he called the police from a phone booth.

  “Station Sixteen.”

  “Yes, I’d like to report a burglary.”

  “What is your name, sir?”

  “I’d rather not get involved. I’m just a concerned citizen. The address is fifty Symphony Road, apartment seven.”

  “Alright, we’ll send someone right over.”

  “Okay, and listen, can you do me a favor? I think you better call Tom Hart in Homicide and tell him Kurt Lindstrom’s apartment just got broken into and there’ll be cops inside there.”

  “Excuse me?”

  An hour later, the Daley brothers waited together on Symphony Road, across the street from number fifty. In the dim New England light—like a bulb burning out—the three of them appeared to smolder in hues of dull gray. Michael stood front and center, arms folded, watching patiently. Joe hulked behind, at Michael’s shoulder. Some part of Joe was always in motion: a hand explored a pocket, his head cricked this way or that, his foot pawed the sidewalk. Ricky had retreated to a stoop to smoke a butt. He alone seemed to realize the process would take a while.

  A black-and-white cruiser and an unmarked car were double-parked in front of number fifty.

  At length, Tom Hart came out of the building. He wore a crumpled fedora on his bald head. He made his way around the unmarked car to the driver’s door, which brought him within a dozen feet of the brothers. He caught Michael’s eye and shook his head with a little frown. Nothing. They had found nothing.

  51

  At McGrail’s, in a corner booth, his back against the wall and one foot up on the bench, Ricky smoked a butt and watched the door. Between drags his hand, with the cigarette angled outward like a dislocated sixth finger, sought out the ashtray and rotated it on the table. Ricky liked bars in mid-afternoon, when they were empty or nearly so. The bready smell of stale beer. The damp stink of twice-breathed air. It was three o’clock. Shafts of weak sunlight angled from high transom windows, flecked with dust motes that densified and textured the light, and created the illusion that the shafts were things you could touch. The light reminded him of empty churches. It had the captured quality of church light, of daylight diffused through stained glass, a perpetual late-afternoon of empty pews and cool stone walls.

  Stan Gedaminski came in and stood by the door, turning a scally cap in his hands, sniffing the air. Apparently he did not like what he saw. The bartender was missing. Three barflies slumped on nonadjacent stools. One of these men, sensing a policeman in the environment, sloped off hastily to the bathroom.

  Ricky waved with his cigarette hand, and Gedaminski slid onto the bench opposite him.

  “You want something to drink, Stan?”


  “I’m working.”

  Ricky shrugged.

  “Jesus, Rick. What are you doin’ here, a grown man, on a weekday? It’s the middle of the afternoon, for Christ’s sake. Like a bum.”

  “When should I come?”

  “After work.”

  “I got the day off.”

  “Then go do something useful. It’s not right.”

  Ricky doodled with his cigarette ash in the ashtray, shaping it into a cone. He smiled wryly. Something about Stan Gedaminski he liked. “What’s on your mind, Stan, besides my bad habits?”

  “I thought you might want to make a statement about that Copley thing. The diamonds.”

  “I told you, I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’.”

  “You may want to think about that. I got a witness from the hotel, a lady in the room across the hall. She puts you coming out of that room around the time of the robbery.”

  “She’s got it wrong. Whoever she is.”

  “She says you helped unlock her door for her. Remembers you clear as day.”

  Ricky made a face: So what do you want me to do?

  “I could arrest you now. I’ve got P.C.”

  “So do it.”

  “Just, if I was you, I wouldn’t leave home without my toothbrush from now on, just in case. Now’s I got a witness, I figured you’d be smart enough to tell me what the hell you were doing in that hotel if you weren’t there to steal.”

  “Is that what you figured? Or did you figure you still don’t have enough?”

  No response.

  “Something you should know, Stan: I’ve got an alibi. I was right here. Bartender’ll vouch for me. Anyway, you don’t have the stones. The grand jury’s gonna want to know: If I took all those diamonds, where are they? Where’s the evidence—where’s the money, where’re the stones? I don’t have it, Stan. You know why? Because I didn’t do it.”

  “We’re still running down the fences.”

  “Can I tell you something, Stan, off the record?”

  “Depends what it is. I’ll decide what’s off the record.”

  “There’s a rumor going around, those stones belonged to Charlie Capobianco. The jeweler was a protected guy. Now Capobianco’s got his stalkers out looking for who did it.”

  “I heard that.”

  “All I’m sayin’ is, if you’re gonna charge somebody, Stan, just make sure you get the right guy. And don’t run around saying you think this guy or that guy did the job, alright? ’Cause there’s not gonna be a trial. Whoever you charge, he’ll go into Charles Street and he won’t come out, and you know it.” Charles Street Jail was where defendants were held pretrial. “Vinnie Gargano’ll reach him there same as on the street. He’s got more guys in that place than you do.”

  Gedaminski nodded.

  “If you want to arrest me, fine. You got a job to do. There’s no hard feelings. But if you can’t make the case, Stan—Stan—if you can’t make the case, you keep my name out of it. Don’t just nod, Stan, say it. Tell me I have your word. This is serious. This is my life we’re talking about here. Tell me I have your word.”

  “Alright. You have my word.”

  “Okay. That’s good enough for me.”

  “You know, I got a call a few days ago about a B-and-E on Symphony Road.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Some guy picked the lock, walked in the front door, then for some reason he broke the back window from the outside. Just like the Copley job. Nice, clean job on the lock, too. Good burglar.”

  “Pfft, people. Can’t be too careful these days.”

  “Funny, those two jobs looking so much alike, isn’t it? Guy like you wouldn’t fall into a pattern like that, though, would ya? Too smart. The great Rick Daley.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stan. I don’t know why any burglar’d be working in that neighborhood anyway. Nothing worth taking. Sounds like an amateur. Some junkie.”

  Gedaminski snorted. “Hey, what do I give a shit? ’Tween you and me, if that Lindstrom character had something to do with your girlfriend there, then fuck ’m. You three can do whatever the hell you want. This Copley thing, though, I’m not gonna stop. I’m gonna check every fence, every jeweler, I’m gonna dig up your front yard if I have to. If I find those stones, even one of ’em—if I find those stones, there’ll be no free pass on that one, Capobianco or no Capobianco. I like you, Rick. But I don’t like you that much.”

  52

  “Can I help you with those?”

  Margaret Daley hefted a brown paper bag from the trunk of her car, a corner of the bag bunched in her fist. But at the sound of the voice she relaxed the bag back down onto the floor of the trunk and turned. The young man on the sidewalk had an amiable appearance, a full-moon face, his cheeks pinked by the cool spring air, a tousle of dirty-blond hair. She guessed he was thirty, maybe a little older. He wore a white oxford shirt and khakis, all very wrinkled—the Brooks Brothers uniform of Michael’s Harvard pals. Is that what he was, a Harvard rich boy? There was a boyish quality to him certainly. Probably one of those men who retain a childish aspect right into old age, a boy in a man’s body. Or maybe, unconsciously, she was just lumping him in with Joe, Michael, and Ricky, who were roughly this young man’s age and whom she could not help regarding as eternal children, and so she saw the kid in him. There was something familiar about the boy on the sidewalk, but she could not place it. Maybe she had met and forgotten him. A friend of Michael’s maybe. She tended to forget. For all these reasons, and out of a reflexive old habit too, she called him dear. She said, “No, dear. I can manage.”

  “You sure? They look heavy.”

  “They are heavy.”

  “Then let me help you! Don’t be silly!” He loped forward and, by hugging the grocery bags against his chest, managed to lift them all at once. “Where to?” he asked.

  “I—Are you sure you can carry all that?”

  “Of course. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.’”

  Margaret searched his face. “You’re not from around here. I’d know you.”

  “No. But I’m happy to help.”

  “Well,” Margaret said, relenting, warming, “aren’t you the gentleman.” She pulled her keys out of her pocketbook and led the young man up the front stairs.

  “I like the basketball net out front,” he said in his affable way. His eyes were on her ankles.

  “Yes. My children.”

  “I’m something of a basketball aficionado myself.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not a very good player, I’m afraid. More of a fan. But I do love it. That’s the thing, don’t you think? To love whatever you do.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The people who excel in life, who really leave their mark, that’s what they have that ordinary people don’t: enthusiasm.”

  “I guess. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “It’s Kurt.”

  “Kurt what?”

  “Lindstrom.”

  “What kind of name is that, dear? German?”

  “Swedish.”

  “I never met anyone Swedish.”

  “Well, my great-grandfather was Swedish, but I’m not. I’m a mutt.” He smiled.

  “We’re all mutts. Lord only knows where half the people around here come from.”

  “Lord only knows.”

  She unlocked the door and swung it open. Not long before, she would not have let a stranger into her house. But now DeSalvo was behind bars. Life had begun to return to normal. She said, “Kitchen’s straight through there, in the back.”

  The young man beetled through the living room under the load of grocery bags, eyes flicking left and right, at the living-room sofa, the fireplace, the television, the stairs. In the kitchen he put the bags on the counter and took a moment to scan that room as well.

  Margaret, at the kitchen door, said, “Thank you. A true gentleman.”

  “May I have a glass of water, please?”
>
  “Sure.”

  She indicated with a gesture that he was blocking the cabinet where the drinking glasses were kept, and he stepped aside. She got a glass down for him and filled it from the tap. She felt, or thought she felt, his eyes on her. Her left hand moved to the side of her neck and covered it, a gesture she disguised by pretending to straighten the hair behind her ear. She handed him the glass then moved to the counter opposite, to create a space between them.

  “This is a lovely old house,” he said.

  “Nothing fancy.”

  “Doesn’t have to be fancy to be lovely. How old is it?”

  “I don’t know, really.”

  “I never got your name.”

  “Margaret Daley.”

  “Margaret. Lovely. Like the princess.” He sipped. His eyes darted around the room, ticking off the toaster, a heavy cutting board on the counter, a cut-glass vase in the window above the sink. He went to a picture on the wall. “Is this your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Three sons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very handsome. And this is your husband?”

  “Yes. That’s Joe.”

  “And where is he?”

  “He’s passed away.”