Strangled

by Brian McGrory

That was me, practicing. I don’t usually do that, but I was uncharacteristically nervous over this encounter, if they were home to have one. I needed to get this right.

  A couple of more sessions like that, and then I opened the door, pulled myself out of the rental car, and walked up to the house, carrying just a blank legal pad in my hands. The day, by the way, was nothing shy of brilliant, with a big sun floating in the shallow blue sky and temperatures that felt like the low seventies, cooled with just a whisper of a desert breeze. Beats the hell out of a Florida retirement, that’s for sure.

  I rang the doorbell but didn’t hear the chiming sound inside, so I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t get any sort of response. I stood for several long seconds waiting, then opened the screen door and knocked.

  Nothing.

  I knocked again. Still nothing. No dogs barking, cats meowing, home owners threatening me to get off their property. Just empty, dead air, sonorously punctuated by a few birds chirping from a distant tree.

  I knocked a final time, to the same lack of response, so I shut the screen door and walked back to my car. I didn’t like the feel of this, but couldn’t figure out why.

  I fidgeted with my cell phone, wondering if I should call Walters’s number to make sure he wasn’t home. He was probably running errands with his wife, or at a doctor’s appointment. My worst case, he was on that vacation I feared, maybe off visiting a grandchild back in Massachusetts. We could have passed each other at the airport here or in Boston, or maybe our planes roared by each other thirty-three thousand feet in the sky. If so, at least I got the frequent-flier miles out of the trip.

  Then something occurred to me: Maybe he was inside, dead. Maybe whoever had been trying to kill me killed him. It wasn’t necessarily a rational thought, but these weren’t necessarily rational times. People kept indiscriminately dying, or, as in my case, nearly dying, and there was no logical reason to think that pattern was about to stop or change.

  I started to punch out his phone number, urgently now, when a red van pulled up to the curb behind my car, stopping abruptly a few feet from my back bumper. For some reason, it made me think of how I had declined the insurance at the car rental counter, because I’m told that’s what you’re always supposed to do. Anyway, the driver’s-side door flung open and a twentysomething kid, a guy, in loose jeans and a T-shirt, trotted up to the front door holding a small brown paper bag. He opened the screen door and left the small bag in the gap between the doors. Two seconds later, he was gone.

  I sat in my idling car with the cell phone in my hand and my sunglasses off, wondering what to do next. I didn’t wonder for long. Maybe a minute later, the heavy storm door opened about halfway. I could see the face of an older woman through the screen. She looked around her yard quickly, picked up the bag, and shut the door tight. That was that.

  I jumped out of the car, walked briskly back to the front door, and knocked. Again, no answer. So I knocked louder. No answer. If I’d knocked any louder, I’d have ended up knocking the fucking door down, so I backed off, quite literally, and walked across the lawn and around to the rear of the house.

  I’ll be honest here: I wanted to look in the windows. If you look in the front windows and a neighbor happens to see you, you’re what’s known as a Peeping Tom. If you look in the back windows where no one sees you, you’re what’s known as an intrepid reporter. They don’t teach you these things at the Columbia School of Journalism, though they do at my alma mater, the School of Hard Knocks.

  The backyard, by the way, was as lush and well kept as the front, with a carefully edged garden tucked close to the foundation of the house, and a stone patio leading to the back door. I walked up to the door, which, unlike the front, had two big windows, and looked inside.

  I was looking into the kitchen, which seemed to be in need of some updating. My eyes were scanning along the cabinets and countertops and appliances when I saw a flash of movement. Sitting at a small table pushed up against a wall was a woman, undoubtedly the same one who came to the front door. She was sitting alone, sipping from a glass.

  On the table before her was a bottle that looked to be vodka, and not one of the fancy new labels from countries I’ve never been to, but some plain old call brand. Beside the bottle was the brown paper bag on its side. The delivery had been from a local liquor store. I gazed back at the counter and saw that a similar but empty bottle sat next to the sink.

  As I watched, she unscrewed the bottle and refilled her lowball glass, taking a long swig as she stared straight ahead at the pale green wall. I noticed on the wall some sort of embroidered poem that involved the words home and love, a piece of household kitsch, but was too far away to read anything more.

  I stood in the back doorway, the warm desert sun on my neck, playing the unintentional role of the voyeur in what I immediately understood was this woman’s sad and painful life. If anyone saw me, I was as good as arrested, though maybe the Las Vegas jail might be the safest place I could be. I watched as she finished off her drink and tilted the bottle into her glass yet again, spilling a few drops of vodka on the wooden top of her table. She drank again as she stared at things I would never be able to see.

  I knocked. It was a soft knock at first, three times against the window in the door. I didn’t want to startle her, and I didn’t. She slowly turned her head in my direction. When her gaze set upon the door, she squinted as if she couldn’t understand what she saw. She didn’t move, though.

  So I knocked again, a little harder this time. She slowly pulled herself to her feet and walked unsteadily across the tiled kitchen floor. She was wearing that kind of floral housedress that old ladies tend to wear, formless and unstylish. My guess was that she hadn’t been planning on seeing anyone that day.

  When she got to the door, our eyes met through the glass. Hers were bloodshot, exhausted, and slightly confused — yet still oddly serene. She looked at me for a long, awkward, silent moment, and then simply opened the door.

  “I thought I left my MasterCard number with the clerk,” she said. Her words were soft yet lurching, the end of one running into the beginning of another.

  “I’m not with the liquor store, Mrs. Walters.”

  Unfazed, she said, “Come in.” She walked unsteadily back to the kitchen table, took her seat, and asked, “Then who are you?”

  I was still standing awkwardly in the doorway. I asked, “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  She motioned to the chair. I sat and gave her my whole Jack-Flynn-from-the-Boston-Record thing. She remained entirely unimpressed, with my presence, with my position, with the distance I had traveled to be here.

  “What is it you want?” she asked.

  Her words came out lazy and a little bit warped. She took a sip out of her glass, the bottle still tall before her, doing nothing to hide the fact she was drinking vodka, straight up, at nine-thirty in the morning.

  “I was hoping to talk with your husband,” I said.

  This finally got a rise out of her.

  “My husband,” she said dramatically, slurring even more the louder she spoke. She squinted at me and added, “You want to speak to my husband?”

  Sometimes, in journalism, you have to play along, so I nodded and said without an ounce of disrespect, “Yes, Mrs. Walters, I was hoping to have a word with your husband.”

  She took a long gulp of vodka and refilled her glass, never offering me any, not that I would have accepted. She was looking down at the table for so long that I was starting to think I had lost her. Then she cast a glance at me and said, “About what?”

  “The Boston Strangler.”

  I mean, why lie? Why wander down all sorts of hazy dead-end avenues with a woman too drunk to guide me on a clear path to the place I needed to go? At least the truth would set me forth in the right direction.

  Well, maybe not. She coughed loud and hard, reflexively grabbing at her chest in that melodramatic way some people have of showing their distress. When she collected herself, she walked ov
er to the kitchen sink and poured water from the tap into a glass. When she got back to the table, she put the glass down, untouched, and took another sip of booze.

  Finally, she said, “You want to speak to my husband about the Boston Strangler?”

  Her face was contorting as she spoke, her words slurring more now than the few minutes before when I arrived. This was not going as planned, but should be just a small obstacle, provided I didn’t lose patience.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That’s why I came out here from Boston.”

  “What about the Strangler?” she asked. Her words were so wobbly, they almost fell out of her slanted mouth and smashed on the floor.

  I fidgeted now, growing uneasy, thinking for the first time that Mrs. Walters might prove to be a bigger obstacle than I had anticipated. I said, “Lots of things, ma’am. I’d rather just ask your husband.”

  In one shockingly smooth motion, she picked up her lowball glass and flung it across the kitchen. I whirled around to see it explode against her wooden cabinets, the force sending a spray of booze and shards in all directions.

  She screamed, “Damn my husband. Damn the Boston Strangler. And damn you for asking about them.”

  All right, so this wasn’t precisely the reaction I had expected to get. I had expected to be greeted at the door by a diminutive elderly woman who would show me into a television room where her husband, a retired Boston Police detective, would pull out his scrapbooks and relive the case with me as his wife readied us some raisin scones in the kitchen.

  I wanted to get the hell out of this house, and, for that matter, get the hell out of Vegas, but I sure as hell wasn’t in a position to do that now. I said, “Mrs. Walters, I’m sorry for upsetting you. But what is it? What about the Strangler upsets you so much? That was forty years ago.”

  As I was asking this, it occurred to me there might be an obvious answer: He killed people. He violated the civility and livability of a city. He defeated her husband. Maybe she meant all that, but here’s what she said: “He ruined my life.” And after she said it, she looked down at the top of her wooden table and began to sob — one of those tearful, shoulder-shaking sobs that can’t be comforted.

  A moment later, she looked back up at me with glistening eyes and said, “He ruined my whole damned life. He took my husband from me. He took my marriage from me. He left me with nothing to look forward to but my next glass of booze.”

  “How, ma’am?”

  She raged, “Fuck you. Fuck you for coming into my life and questioning what I have to say.” Then she sobbed again.

  I asked, “Ma’am, is your husband here?”

  “Fuck him, too. Go tell him you want to talk about his Boston Strangler. Go tell him that. And tell him that they ruined my life, both of them.”

  “Where, ma’am? Where can I find him?”

  When she looked at me, there was fury in her eyes. I feared that she might throw her water glass, or even the half-filled bottle of vodka.

  “He’s upstairs. Go tell him that they ruined my fucking life.” Then, screaming, “Now. Tell him now.”

  I got up and walked from the kitchen, legal pad still in hand, my shoes crunching over broken glass, looking for the staircase, hoping though not hopeful that I wouldn’t get a glass in the back of the head.

  Behind me, Mrs. Bob Walters began crying again, crying hysterically, her head down on the table, her back quaking in uncontrollable spasms over a series of murders committed forty years before. Sometimes the past never lets up. That’s a fact I know all too well. But I suddenly realized, with no small amount of hope, that there was something else at play here, something that might explain what had been going on in Boston the past week, something that might help me bring it to an end.

  16

  Bob Walters was propped up in a hospital bed watching a game show on a big, clunky television that was on the other side of the small room from the door. The shades were drawn tight. The nightstands on both sides of the bed were covered by used glasses and dirty dishes. A portable oxygen machine stood on the floor on the near side of the bed, its mask lying haphazardly on the rumpled blankets. The place reeked of disinfectants and the faint odor of illness, which the chemicals failed to cover up.

  I stood in the doorway, undetected, instantly depressed over this little world I was about to enter, not to mention amazed that The Price Is Right was still on the air. Come on down, or in this case, come on in. No one had invited me, though, so I cleared my throat loud enough for Bob Walters, the former lieutenant detective with the Boston Police Department, to realize I was there.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” he said, his words, though not loud, were as sharp as the broken glass that was strewn across the kitchen floor downstairs. He said this without ever moving his gaze from the television set. “This place is a fucking mess and you’re sitting down there getting smashed, you drunken bitch.”

  Okay, so not everyone can be Ozzie and Harriet, but the Walters might have been carrying this to an antithetical extreme.

  I cleared my throat again. Walters said, his voice no louder and every bit as sharp, “Get some of this crap out of here before you’re too drunk to get up and down the stairs.”

  I said, “Lieutenant Walters?”

  He pivoted his head on the pillow so that he was facing me. His eyes were the first thing I noticed. It was almost impossible not to. They were big and yellow and sunken deep into his bony face, vacant eyes that had seen so much of life but now rarely saw anything outside of the four dreary walls of this godforsaken little room. They were the eyes of a man resigned to misery.

  The next thing was the stubble, coarse and gray, all along his jawline and neck, most pronounced on his upper lip and chin. He hadn’t shaved — or been shaved — in at least a week, probably longer. Then his hair, all silvery black, mussed in the back, greasy and matted down on his forehead in the front.

  And finally his skin, sallow and veiny, more of it than he needed in his current state — the skin of a dead man, really.

  He said to me, “Who the hell are you?” His voice was old, tired, raspy, and world-weary, like warm water flowing through sand.

  “Sir, I’m Jack Flynn, a reporter for the Boston Record. I’ve flown out here to ask you a few things about the Boston Strangler case. I’m wondering if you have the time to help me out.”

  Of course he had the time, I mean, unless he couldn’t bring himself to miss a single glorious episode of Let’s Make a Deal, which was probably on next. The more important question was whether he had the inclination. It’s probably worth mentioning again that a lot of cops, active or retired, are particularly leery of newspaper reporters. Actually, forget leery. They hate reporters. We do the same basic thing, which is try to pull layers of lies away from essential truths, but we go about it in remarkably different ways. The cops do it mostly in the privacy of interrogation rooms or at crime scenes, or in the heat of violent moments when no one is watching but the suspects and God. Reporters, we’re more public, tending toward documents and interviews that will be splashed on the pages of our newspaper.

  The biggest schism comes from the fact that reporters tend to get particularly gleeful over policing cops, catching them in penny-ante shenanigans — the vice cop looking the other way on a prostitute because he’s getting free oral sex in the back of his cruiser; the street-crime officer who grabs a couple of thousand dollars in tainted cash when he raids the house of a heroin dealer. On the flip side, cops don’t police reporters; the best weapon they have against us is mere silence, which can be a dangerous weapon for all.

  “The Boston Strangler? You want to ask me about the Boston Strangler? A reporter for the Boston Record came all the way out to my castle here to ask me about the Boston Strangler?”

  His words were as slurred as his wife’s had been, but I had a feeling that it was caused by either pain or a medication to treat it.

  I decided not to mince words or motives. I mean, it looked like any word this guy
uttered could be his last. Given that the original stranglings occurred forty-two years ago, I probably should have been prepared for the fact that the people who possessed the most intimate knowledge of them were going to be pretty damned old by now, possibly even infirm, but I wasn’t. Not prepared enough, anyway.

  So I said, “Sir, if I can talk honestly with you, I think the Boston Strangler might be killing again.”

  This declaration didn’t seem to faze him one tiny bit. He continued to look at me through those distant eyes, his mouth slightly agape, as an announcer on a television commercial was prattling on about the cooling relief of Preparation H. He just kept looking, saying nothing, not at first, anyway.

  When he ultimately did speak, he said, “What the hell took him so long? They must have kept him in prison for a long, long time.”

  I said, “But Lieutenant, I thought the Boston Strangler was murdered in prison. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death more than thirty years ago.”

  “That’s right, kid. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison. The Boston Strangler wasn’t.”

  By now, I had walked into the room and approached the side of his unkempt bed. This far in, the room was even more of a pit, with crumpled old issues of TV Guide and Reader’s Digest strewn about the floor around the bed, old food wrappers on top of the discarded magazines, and stains on the sheets. Outside, it was gorgeous and vibrant, spring in the desert. Inside, the shades filtered out any sense of the world, casting the walls and furniture in a colorless haze.

  I nodded. “That’s what I’ve heard. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to hear that more and more.”

  He laughed a shallow laugh and turned his head back to the television to see a commercial for a soap opera that was going to be on later that day. Then he focused again on me.

  “Stranglings?” he asked.

  “Two young women so far.”

  “The cops making the link from the old serial killer to the new one?”

  “Absolutely not.”