Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  The place was still empty, which was nice, because I could sprawl across the tile bench without the fear that one of the older members would toddle into the room, not see me through the steam, and park his flabby ass somewhere on top of me. Granted, it’s not a normal fear, but it’s there nonetheless.

  With the whoosh of steam blowing into the room, I thought again of Maggie Kane, and one more time thought it a shame that something that starts so good inevitably has to end so bad. Or maybe this wasn’t really that bad. Maybe we rushed toward matrimony because of how it all looked on paper, when in real life we didn’t really know. Maybe the fact that both parties put a halt to it in the final hours made it obvious that it wasn’t meant to be — no marriage, no harm, no foul.

  But here she was on the phone talking about being lonely and wanting to get together, and the only emotion that kept flowing over me was complete and total detachment, which may not be an emotion at all. If ever I should have missed Maggie Kane, it should have been now, when my professional world seemed to be falling in on me. And yet I barely felt a thing.

  Elizabeth Riggs.

  The steam kept blowing all around me, the temperature rising, and there she was, in my head, mostly because she never actually left it. She was beautiful that night in the waiting lounge of San Francisco International Airport — composed, elegant, sexy, relaxed — just as she was beautiful in Logan International Airport that day she left for California and I did nothing to stop her. She wanted me to yell out, to grab her shoulder, to block the door, to do something, anything, and instead I simply watched her leave, because I figured that’s what people do in life — they leave. And nobody, not even Maggie Kane, has yet to prove me wrong.

  The power of hindsight is sometimes a heady thing. It’s showed me these last couple of years that Elizabeth didn’t so much leave of her own volition as she was guided to the door by yours truly and encouraged in every implicit way to go. Maybe I never outright told her to get out, but my aloofness, born of my own past, manifested in my hesitance to allow anyone else to get too close, and proved impossible to take. God knows, Elizabeth Riggs tried. She really did.

  Outside the glass door, one of the locker-room attendants, either Mike or Angel, flung open a nearby supply closet, the sound jarring me out of my heat-and-exhaustion-induced reverie. I could hear him fiddling with some equipment. He knocked absently against the door, and he was off.

  Inside, the steam started surging full bore again out of a pipe on the floor, and the room was approaching the point of being unbearable, which was just the way I liked my steam rooms, if not my women. The thermometer on the wall read 117 degrees, and I told myself I’d gut it out until this round of steam stopped and then I’d go take a cool shower.

  Another minute passed, and the steam was still flowing with abandon. The thermometer read 119 degrees. I lifted myself up from a lying position and began counting to twenty, waiting for the steam to shut off. It didn’t.

  So I started thinking like Ernest Hemingway might write, though I can’t explain why. The room was hot. The man was sweaty. He wanted a cool shower. He would get a cold glass of beer. The beef he’d have for dinner would be charred and juicy.

  Another minute later, it was showing no signs of abating — the steam, not the Hemingway impersonation. The temperature had risen to a heady 121 degrees, and the room had grown so thick I was about to lose sight of the thermometer. I wasn’t a science or home economics major, but at 121 degrees, can’t you boil sheep’s milk?

  So I gave up. In fact, I got up, staggered toward the door, opened it, and proceeded to take the most delightfully reinvigorating cool shower that anyone could ever possibly imagine, the memory of which would hang with me for a lifetime.

  That was the plan anyway, but I ran into a problem, that problem being the door. It didn’t budge. So I pushed against it again. Again, it didn’t move. I shoved my shoulder into it. Still nothing.

  Meantime, the steam was roaring out of the small pipe as hard as ever, and that pipe happened to be near the door, which meant that my feet were about to be scalded off.

  I stepped back and gave myself a little bit of a running start, figuring that the door must have swelled in the heat and was stuck on the frame. I took two long, fast steps and hit it hard with the sole of my foot. I might as well have been pushing against the side of a Greyhound bus, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do such a thing. The door wasn’t going anywhere, and its sheer physical obstinateness knocked me to the hard, hot floor.

  I scrambled up. Steam everywhere. I took a different approach now, trying to jigger the door around, maybe loosen it from whatever had it stuck. But again, it wouldn’t move.

  The gushing sound was all-consuming. The heat was raging. The thought struck me that I could die in the steam room of my private club, and I wondered how that would look in my obituary. How long before my fellow club members began using the room again? A day? Probably more like an hour. The coroner wouldn’t even be halfway down the street. How odd it would be to have my boiling body shoved in the back of a refrigerated van.

  I yelled. I had no choice. “Help!” I called out. Granted, it wasn’t particularly original, but my brains were melting down into my neck.

  Nothing but the gush of steam in response. I hollered, “Please open the steam room door! Help! The door is stuck. Help!”

  I fully understood that one of my fellow members was going to casually happen along, open the door, and subject me to club-wide ridicule for the next five years. I was willing to accept that fate at this point.

  But again, nothing. I slammed my fist against the door and tried to shake it open, to no avail. Any moment now, the after-work crowd should be arriving. They’d get dressed at their lockers and maybe hear my cries for help. Any moment now, Mike or Angel, the attendants, should come back to the supply closet and see that I was stuck. Problem was, any moment now I could be dead of heat stroke, if you can die of such a thing, though I wasn’t sure. It certainly felt like it.

  I yelled again, then retreated from the scorching pipe to the bench on the other side of the small room. It felt as if half my body had already sweated out of my pores and dripped down to the floor. It felt as if I’d never be cool again.

  “Help!”

  Nothing.

  My mind began to drift in a way that probably wasn’t too good. I was pushing a blond-haired, pigtailed six-year-old girl who was sitting on a swing set wearing a little denim skirt and a Red Sox T-shirt with Bill Mueller’s last name spelled out across the back. I mean, no one wears a Billy Mueller T-shirt, but this girl always needed to be different, so she did.

  She was laughing, calling me dad, telling me to push her higher into the clear blue horizon of a gorgeous weekend afternoon. We were at a neighborhood park. My Audi was within eyeshot, which was interesting, because I’ve never driven an Audi. We were meeting my wife, the girl’s mother, for dinner at a local clam shack in a little while, but we stopped at the field to play along the way. And the girl kept laughing, and I felt this emotion in my chest, tranquility, or maybe it was security, or some combination of the above. Regardless, it was a feeling I hadn’t had in years.

  The girl got off the swing set, gripped my hand, and out of nowhere asked, “Daddy, why do people have to die?”

  “It’s a natural part of life,” I replied. “It’s what happens after you’ve done everything you wanted to do in life.”

  She looked up at me as she walked along, her big blue eyes boring into mine, and she asked, “But what happens if you didn’t get the chance to do everything you wanted to do?”

  I thought about that for a moment as we arrived at my car and I buckled her into the backseat with a kiss on her temple. I said, “It’s why you should live your life as hard and as well as you can, every single day. Everybody has to die sometime. It’s completely natural. But you want to make sure you did everything you wanted to do first.”

  At that moment, I felt someone’s hand on the back of my neck. A voic
e called out, “It’s Jack Flynn. He’s unconscious. Hold the door. We’ve got to get him out of here.”

  I was boiling hot and limp as a leaf of lettuce at a Texas barbecue. I mumbled something that no one heard. I suddenly felt myself being moved in someone’s arms, carried, then another voice called out, “I’m a doctor. Get him under some cool water.”

  And then I felt the chilling spray of a shower. As I gained my bearings, I saw three guys looming over me, and one guy in a suit kneeling down in the shower beside me, taking my pulse, getting soaked in the process.

  “I’m Bill Dennis. I’m an MD,” he said. “You’re going to be fine. You just had a little scare in there.”

  I half recognized him around the gym as another member, but never knew him well enough to say anything beyond a hello. I mumbled, “I thought you were a plumber.”

  “That’s my wealthier brother, Bob,” he said.

  I was regaining more and more of my faculties, enough, anyway, to realize that the tranquil feeling in my chest was a figment of my imagination, or the stuff of a very good dream.

  Dr. Dennis asked, “Did you black out in there?”

  I said, “The door was stuck.”

  Another member, standing off to the side in a sweat suit, said, “I found a mop wedged against the door, so it couldn’t be opened from inside. When I looked in, I found you there.”

  I said, “I think Mike or Angel might have dropped it there by mistake.”

  Mike, who was in the background, said, “I’ve been on break for the last half hour. Angel’s not in yet. None of us put that mop there.”

  I asked, “Why didn’t the steam valve shut off?” The thing is supposed to go off automatically when the temperature in the room goes above 116 degrees.

  Mike walked over to the wall where the On/Off button is for the bath. He called out, “This is weird. It looks like there’s a glob of glue or something holding the button in.”

  I stood up and leaned against the tile wall. I knew then precisely what had happened, but it wouldn’t do any good for anyone else to know — not that they’d believe it, anyway. Sure, Jack, someone tried roasting you to death, like you’re a fucking hot dog, a Fenway frank. Good one.

  Dennis said, “Listen, you’ll be back to normal by morning. Take some aspirin. Prepare yourself for a headache. Get to bed early. And most important, drink lots of fluids tonight to rehydrate.”

  “Does beer count?”

  “Ah, no.”

  Dennis walked away, as did everyone else, leaving me in the privacy of a cooling shower.

  “Yes, little girl,” I whispered, mostly to myself, “it’s pretty bad when you die before you’re ready to go.”

  I had just gotten my clothes on and downed a second two-liter bottle of water when a faint buzzing sound made its way up the back staircase and into the locker room. When I first heard it, I didn’t think I heard anything at all; I told myself it was in my head. But then I saw Mike, the attendant, grab for the phone, and I yelled over to him, “What’s that?”

  “Sounds like someone went out the emergency exit in the back,” he said.

  I bolted. I descended the back staircase three at a time, my hand on the railing to balance me. I shot across the short first-floor landing and crashed against the bar that would open the fire exit, finding myself in the small rear parking lot of the club.

  A Latino kitchen worker sat on a milk crate with his back against the brick building. “Did someone just come out of here?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Which way?” I said, trying to control my excitement.

  He pointed out across Clarendon Street, heading toward the South End. I took off in a sprint. It was the early side of rush hour, and as such, the sidewalks were growing crowded with pedestrians on their way out of work, a fact that might have impeded my chase.

  I say might have, because it didn’t. The workers were mostly attired in suits and ties, walking purposefully, but by no means urgently. Across the street, I spied a guy in a windbreaker running wildly on the sidewalk as he looked back over his shoulder. So I stormed across the street in pursuit. I mean, I’ve heard of chasing down a story, but this was taking it to ridiculous extremes. He was about forty paces ahead of me, the two of us weaving in and out of other pedestrians as we headed toward Columbus Avenue, when it happened: a cramp in my thigh so immense and intense that I immediately fell to the ground in restrained agony. Truth be told, I thought my leg would need to be amputated. What I really needed was more fluids.

  From my vantage on the sidewalk, I saw my would-be killer slow down to a fast jog as he approached the next intersection. I saw a blue van pull to the curb, and the side doors seemed to pop open at just the right time. I saw my assailant jump inside the van. I saw said van melt away into the rest of this big city.

  I was in desperate need of a break on this story. What I felt like I had was a broken leg.

  27

  A guy walks into a bar with a weight on his shoulders.

  All right, the guy was me. The bar was the always luxurious Max Stein’s in the wealthy suburban town of Lexington. The weight was of the whole world — or at least it felt like it at the moment.

  Max Stein’s, though, represented something of a respite, a place to gather with legendary Record reporter Vinny Mongillo during what felt like an uneasy calm before a particularly nasty storm. Or maybe it was the eye of the hurricane. I’m trying to think of other suitable weather-related clichés, but none come immediately to mind, except maybe that it was raining trouble, so with sincere apologies, we’ll leave it there.

  As I walked through the double doors, the appropriately named Richard Steer, the ever hospitable general manager who I’d known since what felt like the beginning of time, gave me a long, two-fisted handshake. “I’m betting this one’s driving you crazy,” he said. I only needed to nod for him to know that he was as on-point as usual.

  Vinny was already at the bar, two glasses of red wine in front of him and one in his hand, which he happened to be holding nearly sideways, peering through the glass, saying to my favorite bartender, Nam, “It’s got terrific legs.”

  Who knew wine had legs? Vinny and Nam, that’s who. And probably all the good waiters who were walking through the room carrying groaning plates of dry-aged sirloins and cottage fries and sautéed spinach. I was amazed that Vinny could keep his attention away from it, but he did.

  “Hey, Mike Tyson,” he said as I sidled up to the bar. Nam gave me his characteristically cheery hello and my characteristic Sam Adams, icy cold from the back of the chest.

  I poured my beer slowly into a glass and said, “Great legs.” But I was looking at a woman down at the far end of the bar.

  Well, all right, that really didn’t happen, that last part, but Mickey Spillane would have been proud if it did.

  “You doing any better?” Mongillo asked me, meeting me square in the eye.

  “I was never doing bad,” I replied, not meaning to sound quite as clipped as I probably had. “I just don’t like being played by a murderer, that’s all.”

  Vinny looked at me funny, eyeing my face and then my hands, almost analyzing me. He said, “Wait a minute. You look funny. Like a prune.”

  “Long story,” I said. “One that I’d just as soon forget about.”

  Vinny did. He took a long sip of wine, and I gulped my Sam. Nam came back over and asked Vinny about the “Russian Valley cab.”

  “There’s a taxi here already?” I asked. They ignored me.

  “Big nose, very broad, and a little bit acidic,” Mongillo said to Nam.

  “You just described my aunt Toni,” I said.

  He ignored me again. So did Nam, who was pouring yet another glass of wine. He handed it to Mongillo with a look of concern and said, “Tell me if you think this is too buttery.”

  Enough already, so I used the one trump card I hoped I still had with Mongillo and said, “You want to eat?”

  He looked at me almost surprised, as if h
e had forgotten that’s why we were there, though I’m reasonably sure he hadn’t, and said, “Great idea.”

  My first one in a long while, actually.

  Nam sent a waiter with a tray to ferry Mongillo’s wines to the table, though I’m not sure wine can be made plural like that. I carried my own beer and drank it along the way.

  Once we were settled into a booth, Mongillo met my gaze and simply said, “Paul Vasco was the Boston Strangler.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to say “No shit,” or ask “How do you know?” So instead I told him, “Go on.”

  “Because Dorothy Trevorski really did have a shard of glass shoved into her eye,” he said, his gaze staying on mine. “It was never reported by any newspaper at the time. It was never revealed by the cops. It was one of those bits of info they held back so they’d know whether they had a professional confessor on their hands or the real thing.”

  I said, “Well, if that’s the case, then wouldn’t they have known that DeSalvo wasn’t the real thing?”

  “Maybe,” Mongillo said. “Or maybe Vasco told DeSalvo about this detail in one of their many prison walks, and he parroted it to the interrogators.”

  I said, “Or maybe DeSalvo told Vasco.”

  Mongillo thought about that for a long moment. Either that or he was just looking for an excuse to take a drink of wine from the glass he had been swirling.

  “I suppose,” he finally said. “But there’s something else, too. Seven of the murder scenes had sperm on the floor several feet from the bodies. Vasco just about admitted pleasuring himself over the corpses. I don’t know if that’s something two guys would have talked about in prison, you know?”

  I thought about that myself, and used my thinking time to drain my beer. Before I even put it down, a waiter named Jack, God bless him, appeared with another.

  We ordered. I got grilled swordfish with cottage fries. Mongillo basically got the right side of the menu — or at least it sounded that way. Then he asked for the wine list back. I could all but hear Peter Martin’s lines when he looked over the expense account: “Is there a deposit on this dinner that we’re going to get back?”