The Strangler

by William Landay

  “There’s someone else who’s more responsible than you.”

  Conroy had spent the night working the Joe Daley homicide. An all- night vigil was typical of the critical early hours of a homicide investigation; it was pursued with a special mission in this case, where the victim was a cop. Night-for-day meant nothing. Almost immediately they had searched for an organized-crime angle. The stink around Joe Daley and the brazenness of the hit pointed the way as clearly as fingerposts. They swarmed out to press witnesses and rats, and in the whisperings a single name swirled continually: Vincent “The Animal” Gargano.

  For Brendan Conroy the direction of the investigation was worrisome. If Gargano ever did start talking, who knew where it would lead? But the situation could be managed. In the end, there was no chance Gargano would talk; these North End guinea hardcases didn’t operate that way. That was all that mattered. Conroy was insulated. For now there was nothing to do but stay out front. Over the next few days and weeks in his dual roles as detective and grieving “step- father,” he would be a paragon.

  He got home around nine A.M., but only for a quick stopover. A hot shower and a good stropping toweling-off and a clean shirt, then he would head off to Margaret’s house to join the mourners. He stood in the tub shower, let the water pound him awake, thought of Margaret and of various graceful condolences he might dispense over the next few hours. His position with the Daleys, with Margaret in particular, could only be strengthened by his performance today. He would radiate his imperturbable strength and they would be grateful. How could they not be? It was no good, a manless woman, a manless family. He would lead them. But softly, softly. No need to overstep. Jesus, his back and knees ached. Getting old. His brain was the only goddamn part of him that wasn’t breaking down. Every other goddamn thing, knees and cock and shoulders and eyes and feet, the whole damn thing was starting to go.

  He turned the water ice cold—he believed it closed the pores and thus warded off sickness—and withstood the blasting freeze for a full thirty seconds, then turned it off. He yanked the shower curtain back with its metallic screech.

  He froze. Shocked, he worried he might piss; his bladder was suddenly engorged, quivering, another betrayal by his aging body.

  But he recovered himself to say, in a loving tone—because surely there was still a deal here, a way to talk his way out—“Well now, look at you. And where did you get that?”

  It was from the newspapers that Michael learned, later, what sort of gun he brought to Brendan Conroy’s home that morning. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 39 nine-millimeter with a blue-black finish and wooden grips. The newsmen were keen to identify the gun precisely, just as the newspapers had been full of Oswald’s 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano carbine. In the absence of meaningful information, minor data can be spun to create an illusion of knowledge. Sometimes it’s the best you can do.

  Michael did understand the gun’s logical significance, its value to the detectives who would puzzle over it. Here was the same weapon used to kill Joe Daley the night before. The magazine bore prints of Vincent Gargano’s thumb, index and middle fingers, protected from smudging inside the pistol grip. They would conclude—what else?—that Gargano had killed both Joe Daley and Brendan Conroy. They would not wonder for long over the motive, either: “Two Cops Slain for Anti-Mob Bravery,” the reporters would write. The story would be an easy sell. It is a cop’s job, after all, to stand in a criminal’s way.

  Better still, as Amy used to say, that headline would move paper. And who would ever step forward to complicate the official version? Not Gargano, certainly; Vinnie The Animal, it would be widely assumed, had gone underground. Not the cops; still bruised by the bookie- joint controversy and the gossip about mishandling the Strangler case, the Department would happily lay the blame on an olive- skinned baddie in order to close the cases. Michael understood all that. Every murder plays out first as a whodunit—people can’t stand not knowing—and only then as a tragedy. So Michael had been canny enough, even in the hysteria of hammering Vincent Gargano to death, to resolve the whodunit for them. He had retrieved the gun. He had found an extra loaded magazine in Gargano’s jacket. Using the dead man’s wormy fingers, he had rolled the fingerprints onto the magazine. Its smooth oiled finish would hold the prints nicely. When he was finished here at Conroy’s apartment, Michael intended to leave the gun for them to find.

  The apartment door was unlocked.

  In the living room was a cheap tin snack table on metal-tube legs. Water was dripping somewhere, pink, pink, pink.

  It was not too late to stop, of course. He could turn around and walk out and no one would be the wiser. But he had determined to do this thing, and the idea pulled him on. He took Gargano’s gun from his coat, and the gun seemed to lead him by the hand toward the bathroom, toward the sound of the water.

  The door was ajar and Michael glimpsed a hairless bone-white knee above the rim of the bathtub.

  He did not like to think of that knee—it was naked and animal—and so he focused on the gun in his own hand and what a supremely well-designed tool it was. The way it nestled in his palm. How naturally his fingers curled around the grip, how perfectly sized it was, smaller than a tennis racket handle, thicker than a knife handle. What a sensuous pleasure to raise and point it. It felt like a part of him, an extension of his hand. When he raised the gun and sighted along its barrel—

  when he tapped the door open with it—

  and he beheld Brendan Conroy—round and white and lightly haired, his head lumpy and small under wet hair, his legs incongruously skinny, the little pale-pink rosettes of his nipples, the spatters of orange freckles—an old fat man on his back in the bathtub—sprawled—the vulnerable fleshy clump of his genitals—

  it felt as if the gun barrel was an eleventh finger or, more exactly, as if it were his own index finger extended to absurd length, telescoped outward—

  and didn’t every child know—didn’t—

  He was distracted by Conroy, by that sly shit-eating grin, as if they were sharing a little joke, the two of them. Hey there, boyo, now what did you mean to do with that thing?

  Didn’t—

  didn’t every kid in the playground who had ever formed his hand into a gun and said pshoo!—

  Conroy, a pinkish blob in the background of the gun sight—

  didn’t every kid know that pointing your finger and pointing a gun were essentially the same gesture? But how godlike, to kill with nothing more than a pointed finger! Like a wizard pronouncing a curse, you had only to point and wish someone dead—you had only to decide it, and bang.

  “Bang,” Michael whispered aloud. He lowered the gun.

  Conroy was already dead. A single bullet hole in his chest, at the heart—where, Amy had once said, a lucky marksman could kill a man with one shot. Already dead.

  The tub spout dripped. Pink, pink.

  Michael stared. Would he have done it? Yes, he assured himself. Maybe. He thought he would have. Then: No, of course not.

  He came to the side of the tub.

  Dark wet blood was gelled over the hole in Conroy’s chest. No blood or damage on the walls of the shower stall; the slug must still be inside the body. Conroy had been standing naked in his tub when he took the bullet into himself, absorbed it in the thick mass of his torso. Another remarkable thing, that: The bullet had emerged from inside the gun only for a millisecond before burying itself again inside this man, leaping from one host to the next. Then Conroy had fallen, or sat, and died with this ambiguous expression on his face, not so much wounded as astonished. There was water beaded on his skin, and pink watery streaks of blood that marbled his belly in intricate thready patterns like veins.

  There was still work to do, of course. It was not enough that Conroy was dead; the murder had to be explained, the whodunit resolved, the story spelled out.

  So Michael pulled the shower curtain closed, feeling fastidious and cunning both, but not really deciding anything now, just following
through on a course he had already committed to—finishing. The curtain rod screeched.

  Carefully, so as not to disturb the fingerprints, he slipped the magazine out of the pistol grip, pried up the top bullet with his finger, and dropped it in his pocket. True, the slug already in Conroy’s body would not match the slugs fired from Gargano’s Smith & Wesson, but it would take a careful ballistics test to reveal that. It would require no special knowledge to count the slugs, though, and to realize that Conroy’s body held one more bullet than Gargano’s gun could have fired.

  Ready now, Michael chambered a round, wrapped his arm inside the shower curtain, and tensioned the trigger. But the trigger pull was tight and the gun did not fire.

  An inch or two from Michael’s nose, the shower curtain—an opaque sunflower-yellow vinyl stamped with a flower print—reflected the sound of his frustrated sigh.

  He plunged his finger down hard, once. The thunder echoed in the small bathroom, amplified by the tiles, and an after-explosion in his ears, trailed by a ringing sound. The spasm of the gun’s recoil sent a wave of pain through his injured right shoulder. The bullet casing carelessly tossed away. The homey, smoky-fireplace smell of the burned powder.

  He had the feel of it now, he thought, and he pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled the trigger, and this time he counted, as Gargano had instructed. Seven rounds. One fewer than the magazine in a Smith & Wesson Model 39 could hold.

  Michael slipped into church and glanced about, as if he meant to steal the candlesticks.

  The pews were nearly empty. Two old men sat far apart from one another, barely moving. Michael recognized them both as parishioners at St. Margaret’s. He’d seen these old-timers here a thousand times, back when Michael was a kid and going to Mass regularly, but now he could not for the life of him remember their names. They seemed to be waiting, these old men, though for what Michael did not know. It was mid-morning. No Mass was scheduled.

  He slunk down the center aisle, clearing his throat softly, self- conscious about the rustle of his clothes and the shushing of his shoes.

  Seated in the front row, characteristically, was Michael’s mother. From the back, her shape and posture struck Michael as very old- looking. Her spine and shoulders were beginning to warp. Even so, she was still very much the iron lady, the morning after her son was murdered. She gave Michael a brief glance, then turned her attention back to the altar. There was no trace of tears on her face.

  “You okay, Mum?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat down.

  Margaret’s black pocketbook stood between them on the bench. A big black faux-patent-leather thing with a stiff strap for a handle. Michael eyed the handbag, then he picked it up and opened the clasp.

  Margaret gave him another sidelong look but did not protest. Her expression suggested to Michael that she was not defeated, she was not giving in to him; she simply did not care what he found in the purse or what he thought. Go on, then, she seemed to be saying, see for yourself.

  He opened the purse and looked down into it. Joe Senior’s service pistol was nestled inside, among the clutter of balled-up tissues, the compact and lipstick, the wallet and keys. The gun lay on its back. Michael was transfixed a moment, before he realized the risk and clicked the pocketbook shut. The clasp, with its overlapping gold beads, reminded him of a schoolgirl’s crossed knees. He put the pocketbook back down on the bench.

  Beside him, Margaret had willed herself—her face, her posture—into a resolutely ordinary pose. She had nothing to say about Conroy’s multiple betrayals, of her husband and her sons and of Amy, and she made no excuses for the pistol in her pocketbook—down one bullet, surely, and mustn’t Brendan Conroy have been dazzled by the sight of her taking aim square at his breastbone. She picked up the purse and threaded her forearm through the strap.

  “Come on, Ma, we got to go. There’ll be people at the house.”

  “All night and day there’ll be people over to the house, talking us half to death, eating us out of house and home. We’ll all be fit for the loony bin before it’s over.”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  He stood and offered his elbow, which she took, and as they processed down the aisle she nodded at the two old parishioners who, she informed Michael in a stage whisper, were a drunk and a philanderer respectively, though the one still drank like a demon while the other’s philandering days were long behind him. The two of them together, she said, didn’t have enough sense to tie their own shoelaces. But the Lord is in no hurry to come collect His fools. Only the good ones like Joe He comes for. Only the good ones. “Only my Joe,” she whimpered, and Michael felt her weight on his arm and he stiffened his elbow to support her.

  1963 and the first half of ’64 had been murderous years. Michael’s father, his brother, Amy, even Brendan Conroy—all dead. But they had not quite left. Michael had the feeling that any of them might wander into the room at any moment. They left their things around, too: Joe Senior’s coat still hung in the hall closet, Amy’s handwriting lingered in a notepad. When the newspapers were filled with the Gulf of Tonkin question, Michael wanted to hear Amy boil it all down with her cheerful cynicism. It came back to him that of course Amy was dead; the memory still carried a faint sting of surprise.

  Yet life went on. The summer and fall of 1964 were strangely normal. In Michael’s presence, people pretended nothing had happened. They were determinedly cheery and superficial, until the merest mention of tragedy, any tragedy, started them stammering. The possibility that Michael might launch into a discussion of his losses terrified them. They would rather whistle past the graveyard—better yet, they would rather not acknowledge the graveyard at all. They wanted to go on pretending that murder could never touch them. The truth was, Michael felt hardly anything at all. He was as hard, or at least as numb, as a stone.

  Michael felt no remorse for the blood on his own hands. The only question was: Could a man go from ordinary citizen to killer and back again? He assured himself that he could. Soldiers did it all the time. And if Michael were ever called upon to pass from citizen back to killer again? Well, he thought, soldiers did that, too, and so, if need be, could he.

  So went 1964, or most of it.

  On Christmas Eve, that desultory semi-holiday, Michael closed up his office in the middle of the afternoon. He had spent the day working, with no particular pleasure or urgency, on an eminent domain action: a few parcels around Scollay Square, which was already being razed to make way for a new “government center.” It was good, dull work. Michael made his way through the gloomy, nearly empty corridors of the State House.

  At the Strangler Bureau, Tom Hart and a couple of the BPD Homicide detectives were lugging cardboard boxes out to the street.

  “They’re shutting it down,” Hart said.

  “Shutting down the Strangler Bureau? They haven’t even charged the guy, never mind tried him.”

  “They’re not going to charge him. There isn’t going to be a trial.” Hart grabbed a box labeled Feeney, J., 11/22/63, and he hoisted it into Michael’s arms. “Here, make yourself useful.”

  Hart took a box of his own and together they made their way out to the street.

  “So,” Michael said, “the Boston Strangler is going to walk.”

  “DeSalvo’s not going to walk. He’s doing life, on those rapes. He’ll be parole-eligible in ten years, but let’s face it: No parole board is ever going to release a guy who the whole world thinks is the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo is going to do life.”

  “But if DeSalvo’s the wrong guy…?”

  “If DeSalvo’s the wrong guy…I’d rather not think about it.”

  “So what happens to the cases?”

  “Nothing. They sit. Technically, if the A.G. does not want to pursue the case, it comes back to us. But realistically it would be impossible to convict anybody on these murders now. Where are you going to find a jury that doesn’t already ‘know’ DeSalvo is the Strangler? No prosecutor is going to touch it. The Strang
ler cases are closed.”

  “So they wait till Christmas Eve to announce that the case against DeSalvo is going to be dropped. And hope no one notices.”

  “The stranglings have stopped. If DeSalvo is the wrong guy, then the real Strangler has probably moved on. Or he’s in custody. No sense telling everyone the Strangler got away. It’d just start a panic.”

  “Come on, Tom, listen to you. It’s politics.”

  “No, it’s government.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  The detective thought it over. “There is none.”

  They came out into the cold. Gray, sunless New England winter. Sunset coming earlier and earlier, daylight already beginning to dim in mid-afternoon.

  “So what happens now, Tom?”

  “Byron runs for governor or senator or whatever. DeSalvo sells his story to the movies. The rest of us just go about our business.”

  “It’ll never work. They can’t keep it quiet forever.”

  “The only one who could blow it up is DeSalvo. But he’d have to recant the confession, and he’s not going to do that. He’d rather be the Boston Strangler than be nobody at all.”

  “A few years in Walpole will cure him of that.”

  “Maybe.” Hart slid his box into the back seat of an unmarked cruiser, then relieved Michael of his box. “Merry Christmas, Mike.”

  “Merry Christmas, Tom. Let’s hope the guy coming down the chimney tonight is Santa.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry. Whoever the Strangler is, he’s probably skipped town. He hasn’t made many mistakes. I bet he’s someplace far away, someplace no one is looking for him.”

  “There’s no way this stays quiet. No way in the world.”

  “Michael,” Hart said, “this isn’t the world. This is Boston.”