The Strangler

by William Landay

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Margaret.”

  Tsk, she said, shrugging the subject away. “Well, thank you for lugging those groceries. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

  His eyes returned to her face then drifted downward so that, by the time he spoke, they seemed to have settled around her chest. “It’s nothing.” He flipped a lock of hair off his forehead. “Anything else I can do? Anything need fixing? Old houses like these, things fall apart. I’m pretty handy.”

  “No. Nothing needs fixing.”

  “Shall I take a look around, just to be sure?”

  “No. It’s alright.”

  “Well, then.” He came toward her, reached out, and placed his half-empty glass on the counter beside her, then moved back again. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “I’ll show you out.”

  “Alright.” He waved his arm, inviting her to lead him through the kitchen door.

  “No, no, please. After you.”

  She had stepped closer now, within arm’s length—the kitchen was small—and again he reached out toward her. “This is lovely.” He lifted the pendant of a necklace she wore, a gold crucifix with ornate scrollwork. She felt his hand at the open neck of her dress. The edges of his fingernails scratched across her skin, then the coarse crusted skin of his knuckles came to rest on her collarbone, dry and cool at the hollow of her throat. “Where did you get this?”

  She leaned back a little but decided that the boy was just being inappropriate, not threatening. It would be a relief to have him out of the house but, projecting herself a few seconds into the future, she did not want to remember his visit as frightening in any way. He had done nothing to alarm her, and so her apprehensiveness seemed to be just old-age anxiety. She shooed it out of her mind. She was not old. Not some vulnerable, helpless, brittle old woman. There was also, of course, the hint of a sexual offer in his touch, but she was too old for that, and he was rather effeminate, probably a homo. She could hear her three sons ridiculing her for even suggesting a much younger man had made a pass at her. So she consciously decided not to be put off by his gesture, but to ignore it. She lifted the pendant out of his hand and slipped away from him, through the kitchen door. “Never mind where I got it,” she said. “I don’t remember anyways.”

  “Too bad. I thought my mother might like one just like it.”

  “I don’t remember where I got it.”

  She reached the front door and held it open for him. She was relieved to have the open door beside her, the street noise, daylight. They were not quite so alone now.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret. Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You seem upset.”

  “I just have things to do.”

  “Alright, then.” He extended his hand, with the pink palm turned halfway up, for her to shake. “It was very nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you again somewhere. Around the neighborhood, maybe.”

  She regarded his hand a moment before shaking it once, curtly. Its warmth surprised her. “Maybe.”

  He made another of his amiable grins and went off down the stairs with that queer loping stride of his.

  She closed the door and, quietly, lest he hear, she slid the chain-lock into its groove.

  Margaret tended to see in her three sons very specific aspects of her husband, so that, like a triptych or a tailor’s three-sided mirror, together the boys formed a picture of their father. Joe’s temper and Ricky’s sneakiness—both qualities were inherited from her husband, though in him they had been just facets. Michael’s melancholy had been his father’s, too, though again Joe Senior had managed it better. Fully expressed in Michael, Margaret did not know quite how to respond to it. She had a tin ear for that sort of thing, and she knew it. But she could not help seeing how attractive Michael’s involution was. It was the Irishest thing about him, that melancholy, maybe the only genuinely Irish thing—though he was vindictive, too, which she also admired—and she felt that even when he made good—when he finally got married and moved to the suburbs and “passed” for a Harvard Yankee the way some coloreds passed as white—he would still have that Irish fatalism in him, that little bit of unsmiling Dorchester to stain him forever.

  It was to Michael that she confided her unease about that odd boy Kurt Lindstrom. She waited till evening to phone him, and she related the story in an offhand way—“…oh, the strangest thing, dear…”—which was her habit. Fortress Margaret did not betray her upset; even her husband’s sudden death had been endured without keening or self-pity. But in her indirect way, she signaled something was not right. Michael’s reaction surprised her. He ordered his mother to go next door immediately and call Joe to come get her. Michael was going to speak with Lindstrom himself, to set him straight. Maybe he would bring Ricky along, too. The decisions and the tone were so far out of character, Margaret did not know what to make of it. In their brief conversation, Michael never did inform her who on earth this Kurt Lindstrom was.

  That she followed his orders anyway, without question, and that Joe then did the same, seemed momentous to Margaret. Without discussion, the captaincy of the family was passing to diffident, moody Michael, who wanted it least and who, Margaret had always assumed, was the least fit for it. She remembered him at four years old when he had got sick with spinal meningitis. The doctor had set his chances at fifty-fifty. She could still picture Michael in his hospital bed, arching his back in agony like a small animal. He had survived, of course, which his father interpreted as a sign of the little boy’s strength. Margaret read it the other way: her middle son was fragile, weakened. The runt of the litter, bracketed by her two indestructible mastiffs. Now Michael was the one issuing orders to her.

  And Margaret herself? She was not old, not yet, but she was—what? Obsolescent. Irrelevant. Her sons did not come to her for advice anymore; they did not want her opinions. If Joe Senior had been alive…well, no sense in thinking that way. What if did not matter, only what is. So the time had come to start taking orders from her boys. Okay, then. Alright. So be it. But she meant to share this thought with Brendan sometime: It was murderous, ruthless, the way younger generations rose up to displace older ones.

  53

  Once he’d decided on the crime, he was no longer one of them.

  They crowded past on the sidewalk. Raucous college girls with pale necks and arms, laughing, stumbling arm in arm, celebrating the first summery evening of spring. An old couple shuffling toward Symphony Hall. Negroes traipsing back to the Mass. Ave. bridge, to the South End, completing their daily migration. They did not know that tonight was special, tonight there would be violence.

  Michael knew.

  In the pocket of his Baracuta jacket, clasped in his right fist, was a rock. At least it had looked like a rock when he’d first picked it up; on closer inspection it had turned out to be a chunk of concrete. It was heavy, roughly the shape of an egg, fractionally larger than his own fist. Pebbles were embedded in its stippled surface. This concrete egg fit his hand and had a pleasing heft like a well-made tool. And like a well-made tool it had an inviting quality: To hold it was to want to use it.

  Ricky sat nearby, on a stoop, smoking a butt. “Sit down, Mikey. Don’t make a fuss.”

  “Don’t feel like sitting down.”

  “You’re making a fuss.”

  “I’m not making a fuss. I just don’t feel like sitting down, alright?”

  “Alright. So stand. I’m just sayin’, you’re gonna call attention.”

  “I’m just standing here. What am I gonna call attention?”

  “Alright. I’m just sayin’.”

  That rock in Michael’s pocket felt like a mistake, and he seemed to see himself walking away, down Symphony Road toward St. Stephen Street, innocent, empty-handed.

  But he could see the appeal of it, too, of lashing out. Armed, ready for action, he no longer felt quite as powerless against the accumulating anxiety. The city and the country beset by enemies. DeSalvo behind
bars, but not the Strangler, not Amy’s killer certainly. And now the newspapers were speculating that Khrushchev had been behind the Kennedy assassination, still intent on establishing missiles in Cuba to menace us. Meanwhile, the city government had announced the demolition of yet another neighborhood, Barry’s Corner in Brighton, triggering a small revolt. Enemies without, conspiracies within. Hidden forces at work. Certainly the Daleys were acquainted with this mood, schooled as they were in the whole impacted Irish thing—a half millennium of impotent, irredentist, mythologized victimhood. At some point wasn’t it easier just to pick up a rock?

  At last, Lindstrom rounded the corner from Hemenway Street with that jangling loose-limbed walk.

  “That’s him,” Ricky said.

  Michael glanced up and down the block, and saw no pedestrians, which he took to be a sign that his project was blessed, inevitable. Fate would not grant him a nosy old woman or an alert cop, a prudent excuse to abandon his duty. He started across the street.

  “Kurt Lindstrom?”

  Lindstrom’s face grew puzzled. “Yeah?”

  Michael drew the rock out of his pocket. He meant to raise it above his shoulder, to smash it down on the crown of Lindstrom’s head. But he did not. He thought of Lindstrom in Margaret’s kitchen. He thought of Amy Ryan. His right arm felt paralyzed.

  Lindstrom eyed the rock. He took a cautious half-step into the alley, away from Michael. “Yeah?” he repeated.

  Michael stepped toward him, but already he knew he would not attack. Already he was asking himself, How far did he intend to take this? If he started, where would he stop? He stood there.

  “You stay away from Margaret Daley,” Michael said.

  “Margaret? You mean the lovely woman with the groceries?”

  “Just stay away.” Michael let go of the rock. It clattered on the pavement.

  “Is it a crime to help a woman with her groceries?”

  There was a sound. Michael turned to see Ricky coming to join them. Ricky’s face registered nothing. Michael was about to tell him it was all over, that he’d said his piece, there was no need for anything more, but Ricky did not stop to listen, did not acknowledge his brother at all.

  Ricky picked up the rock at Michael’s feet, and in three quick stabbing gestures he smashed the butt end of the rock down on Lindstrom’s head. There were two hollow-sounding knocks, the rock striking the helmet of bone under a thin layer of hair and tissue. The third blow made no sound.

  With each strike, Lindstrom crumbled a little further until he was kneeling on the pavement, hands pressed to the sides of his head. His blond hair was speckled with red. On his knees, forehead nearly touching the ground, Lindstrom’s shirt went snug against his back, revealing a thin torso scooped along the sides like a woman’s. The spine rose up in the center, a ridge of peaked bones.

  Ricky smashed that ridge, and Lindstrom cried out.

  “Michael,” Ricky ordered, “stay here. Don’t let anyone come back here.”

  Ricky dragged Lindstrom down the alley, behind the building.

  The next minute lasted a year. Michael heard the sounds of his brother beating Lindstrom. The rock made a wet slap as it struck. Lindstrom barked out for help twice. Ricky grunted with effort.

  When Michael finally went back there, he found Ricky splashed with blood. His right hand, which held the rock, was literally red. It looked painted. A spatter-line of blood droplets was stitched across his face.

  Lindstrom lay on his side, covering his head. Tentatively he lowered his arms and his head lolled back.

  Ricky stood over him. He seemed to target the broad bone of Lindstrom’s exposed forehead. He flipped the rock in his hand so that the narrower tip was exposed at the bottom of his fist—a more concentrated blow to punch a hammer-hole in that shell, to shatter it.

  “Ricky,” Michael said. “Stop.”

  54

  Station One.

  Joe pushed into the lobby from the wagon house, into a whirl of coming and going, cops drifting in like a rising tide for the shift change. He meant to get up the stairs to his locker, grab his things, get his car, which was double-parked, run out to the house for supper with Kat and Little Joe, then bolt back into town for a detail at Hayes-Bickford’s which he needed because they paid cash on the spot, no waiting, and he needed to turn that cash around to make his nut with Gargano, who cut him no slack for all the work he was doing, all the risks he was taking. Joe always rushed through the stationhouse now. He could not bear to linger. Discreet as he had been about moonlighting as a strong-arm, among cops a taint had attached to him. No one ever said anything. He could not even be sure it was really there. But he seemed to hear disdain in their voices. He thought they swerved to avoid him in the hallway, as if he stank. They fell silent when he entered the locker room. It was not simply that he was crooked, even outstandingly so. No one knew the true extent of it, Joe was sure, and anyway the rule among cops was “see no evil, speak no evil.” The cops who were not on the sleeve, roughly half the force, even if they did begrudge the others their little envelopes of cash, kept their mouths resolutely shut. No, in Joe’s case the real problem was that he had managed the whole business so badly. He’d been a fool. He was marked for a bad end, and no one wanted to be standing nearby when it arrived.

  The lieutenant on the desk was a hump named Walsh. Big-bodied, dough-faced loudmouth hump with gray hair spit-combed back over his scalp, and a pencil-line smirk. Kind of guy who always had something to say. Walsh called to Joe, “Hey, Detective”—a message in the formality, a jab—“Conroy wants to see you. He’s in the pool room.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “To give you a medal. The hell do I know?”

  “Well, what did he—? Never mind.”

  Joe cast a yearning look toward the stairs. This was the contingency he could not afford, the surprise that disrupted the whole schedule. Already he began to imagine the complications rippling through the rest of the night: the chilly phone call to Kat to say he would have to skip dinner again, the empty promises he would utter about making it up sometime, and his own sour mood as he loafed around Hayes-Bick’s all night. Fuck, he thought. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  There was a pool table in a room on the first floor of Station One. No one was sure why it was there, who had put it there, or how long it had been there. Certainly no one played much pool. There seemed to be a lot of miles on it, though. The baize had gone milk-white and bald in places, particularly where the balls were racked and where the cue ball was spotted.

  Joe found Brendan Conroy alone in this room, contentedly maneuvering his way through a solitary game. Conroy’s bulk tended to shrink the table by comparison. In his hands the cue seemed foreshortened, child-sized. But his game was surprisingly delicate and artful. As Joe entered, Conroy neatly pocketed a ball in the corner and drew the cue ball back toward the center of the table with biting backspin.

  “You a pool shark, Brendan?”

  “How much you got in your pocket?”

  “Nothin’. Some gum maybe.”

  “Guess you won’t find out, then.”

  Conroy surveyed the table. He leaned over the end—stiffly, impeded by his belly—and tapped a deft little touch shot in which the cue ball dawdled from the center of the table to the rail, shouldering the seven ball into the side pocket as it passed. He came around to the side of the table to smack the next ball home along the rail with a happy clack.

  “You come here to play pool? ’Cause I got to go. Kat’s waiting. She’ll have my balls in a vise.”

  “Let her wait. It’ll be good for her.”

  “Jesus, Bren, you don’t know. I got enough trouble.”

  “That’s why I’m here. To ease your trouble. You’re moving.”

  “Yeah? Where now?”

  “Vice and Narcotics.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  Conroy lowered his eyes to the level of the table, seeking a clear path for the cue ball. “I shit…you…not
.”

  “You want me to chase hookers around all day?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it.” Conroy boxed the cue ball into a muddle at the far end of the table where it bumbled around without purpose. “Now look what you made me do.”

  “Brendan, if it’s all the same to you, I’d just assume stay where I am. I’ve got some things workin’ here.”

  “It’s not all the same to me. I extended myself on your behalf, boyo.”

  “I know. It’s just—”

  “I extended myself and now I expect you to say thank you and listen to sense. You may not think much of Vice and Narcotics, but it’s a step up. More money. No victims, no pressure. You want to make captain someday? You’ve got to learn every aspect of the business. Learn your trade. A good detective can go anywhere, Homicide, Burglary, Vice and Narcotics, doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m no detective, Bren. We both know that.”

  “You’re a good police, Joe.”

  Joe did not answer.

  “You’re a good police, and Vice and Narcotics is where you’re needed at the moment. And it will serve your purpose as well. Two birds with one stone. Take you away from the North End for a while. Get you over to Berkeley Street; time you started meeting some people who matter, and stop pissing people off.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “This is a small town, boyo.”

  “And?”

  “Little birdie tells me you paid a visit to Farley Sonnenshein.”

  Joe said nothing.

  “Now, why would you go and bother a man like that?”

  “I was working a case.”

  “A B-and-E.”

  “It’s not just a B-and-E.”

  “No? What is it, then? A few broken windows. They didn’t even take anything. What’ve you got? Trespassing, malicious destruction—misdemeanors. And for that you barge in on a man like Sonnenshein? Foolish.”

  “B-and-E in the nighttime isn’t a misdemeanor.”

  “Don’t smart-mouth me, boyo. I don’t need a law lesson from you.”