Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  No, I was just about certain that, unlike that deadly debacle on the Boston Public Garden, this was the real thing.

  Silence. It was rare for Peter Martin to offer a flawed analysis like that, rarer still for him to be at a loss for words. Maybe this thing was taking a harder toll on him than I realized.

  So I said, trying to present at least the veneer of calm, “This presents us with a bunch of problems, most that we don’t know about yet, but some that we do. First and foremost is that I’m not going to be back in Boston in time for that six o’clock pickup.” The clock on the rental car dashboard read 2:06, which meant 5:06 p.m. in Boston. I don’t know if I could have gotten there on the space shuttle, not that I’d be willing to fly on that thing anyway.

  Martin said, “I’ve directed the security consultant to reply to the sender from your account, in your name, that you’re out of town until later tonight and you won’t be able to make the six o’clock rendezvous. He’s doing that as we speak.”

  Okay, this was reassuring now, to hear Martin talk again like a man in control of a situation, like he usually is. I heard a muffled sound, as if he put his palm over the phone, then he got back on the line and said, “Buck, our new security guy, wants to know what time you’re back on the ground.”

  I wondered if Buck would have put his life on the line for me like Edgar Sullivan did, and quickly decided he would not. Maybe it was irrational for me to dislike him, even disdain him, without yet knowing him, but I did. I mean, give me a break on the name: What the fuck is Buck?

  “Twelve-thirty. What’s the e-mail address the Phantom’s using?”

  More muffled sounds, then, “PFBoston@yahoo.com.”

  I asked, “Any chance the origin can be chased and linked to a computer somewhere?”

  Martin answered, “Highly unlikely, but Buck’s working on it.”

  I was about to ask for funeral arrangements for Edgar when Martin shot out, “Hold on, here, Buck says we have a response. I’m going to make this easier and put you on speakerphone, Jack.”

  He pressed a button, because suddenly I could hear a low humming sound, like when you place a shell against your ear at the beach. Martin said, “Jack, I’ve got Buck here. Buck, this is Jack on the phone.”

  What followed was the typically awkward start of a speakerphone call. Buck called out, “How are you, Jack? Nice to meet you.”

  I wanted to point out that we hadn’t actually met yet, and that it wasn’t bound to be all that nice when we did. Instead I said, “Good, Buck. Where are we with the Phantom?”

  Buck said, “He’s just come back and essentially said he wants to meet in Downtown Crossing at one this morning.”

  I gritted my teeth. By the way, the Nevada desert was giving way to development, which was leading to the airport, which meant that I was getting close to being wheels up and flying home. I said, “Buck, I don’t want to know what he essentially said. Tell me exactly what he said.”

  “Why don’t I just read it…”

  “Good idea, Buck.”

  “Sure. He wrote, ‘Dear Mr. Flynn, then please appear at the corner of Winter Street and Winter Place at one a.m. Come alone. Do not alert authorities. Do not send anyone in advance. If you violate these conditions, you will suffer even greater consequences, and so will many more women. I will contact you at the appropriate hour and location. PF.’ ”

  Buck added in a confiding tone, “I think the PF stands for Phantom Fiend.”

  “Thanks, Buck.” I added, “Peter, can I talk to you for a moment?”

  The line clicked and became clearer, and then Martin said into the phone, “I don’t like the feel of it.”

  He didn’t like the feel of it because he’s the one who put us — namely, me — into this situation by not standing up to Justine Steele’s bullshit.

  I said, “But you’re not going to do anything about it. You’re not going to the police. You’re not going to Justine. You’re not going to flag the mayor. Every time we include authority figures in our thinking, we get screwed, Peter. Let’s just do what we do best and report this story out.”

  I liked the simple sound of all that, apparently more than Peter did. He said, “You could get arrested for interfering with an investigation. And maybe so could I.”

  I replied, “Hey, jail’s probably a hell of a lot safer than where I’m at now.”

  He didn’t have a comeback to this one, least of all because he undoubtedly knew it was true. He said, “All right, against my better judgment, go. But I’m going to have Buck meet you at the airport when you arrive.”

  I said, “I don’t think Buck can find the airport, but go ahead and let him try.”

  And then I heard another little click. Peter Martin had just hung up the phone on my ear.

  Before I could even put the phone down, it chimed anew. I thought it was going to be Martin calling me back to apologize for the abrupt cessation of our conversation. Instead, it was the serious voice of a self-important young woman telling me — not asking me, but telling me — in her words, to “please hold the line for Commissioner Harrison.”

  “I don’t want to hold the line for Commissioner Harrison.” That was me, replying, but there was no one on the other end to hear, no one except some Muzak version of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Believe me, I know how you guys feel.

  A good two minutes passed, and by then I was pulling into the Avis return lot, some guy in a brown shirt walking briskly toward me with one of those handheld checkout devices as jet airplanes roared overhead. Still no sign of Harrison on the phone.

  It’s an unvarnished power trip, this whole “hold the line for” stuff, a blunt declaration that my time is more important than yours, and you should be thrilled to wait while I finish up whatever else I may have been doing to get on the line and grace you with a few moments of my busy day. Another two minutes passed. “Satisfaction” morphed into “Rhinestone Cowboy,” a song I’ve always liked, and that played to the end. By that point, I was curious as to just how long Boston Police Commissioner Hal Harrison was going to leave me waiting on the phone for a call I had neither made nor necessarily wanted to have. But I wasn’t quite curious enough, so I hung up.

  Ten minutes later, as I was walking through the airport terminal, my cell phone rang. This time when I picked it up, it was Harrison acting as if that whole prior incident had never occurred. Or maybe he just didn’t know about it.

  “Jack? Hal Harrison here.” He said this in an abnormally loud voice, as if he were giving a speech at the morning roll call.

  “Hello, Commissioner,” I said.

  “Jack, it’s been too long since you and I got together and chatted about things. And that conversation the other day didn’t exactly go the way I had hoped or planned. You know what I mean?”

  I didn’t, but I didn’t say that.

  Instead I said, “What do you have in mind, Commissioner?”

  “Well, nice of you to ask. You’re under a lot of pressure at the Record with these murders. I think I’m in a position now to share a little perspective on this whole thing with you, seeing as I was one of the lead detectives back in the sixties on the successful Strangler investigation. Mind you, I’m not looking for any publicity on this thing. God knows, we’re getting too much of that as it is. I just think I might be in a position to give you a little help.”

  “When do you have in mind, Commissioner?”

  “Any chance you might find your way to my office tomorrow morning, say, ten a.m.? I’ll have coffee for us. I think I can make it worth your while.”

  “Count me in,” I said. And with that, I secured another first class upgrade and boarded the plane bound for Boston. If there were air-traffic controllers who had any idea of the metaphorical storm I was about to fly into, they never would have let the flight leave the ground.

  31

  As predicted, Buck wasn’t awaiting my arrival at Logan International Airport when my flight landed at twelve-thirty.
Or if he was, he was pretty effectively undercover.

  Didn’t matter. My man Hank Sweeney, attired in a blue blazer and a freshly pressed pair of khaki pants, stood at the airport end of the jetway, casually sipping on a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, as I got off the plane.

  “You strike it rich out there?” he asked, his voice the damnedest combination of silkiness and raspiness that I’d ever heard.

  “So to speak,” I replied, and the two of us immediately began walking with the flow toward the baggage claim and the parking lot.

  I hadn’t seen Hank since that Tuesday dinner we had at Locke-Ober, four days before, when he tipped me off as to the importance of the knife and the potential help of his former colleague Bob Walters. I was no closer to finding the knife, and Detective Walters was dead. All in all, things still weren’t going as hoped or as planned.

  He expressed condolences about Edgar’s death. I thanked him, and we walked for a stretch in silence.

  Finally, I said, “Your advice on Bob Walters was good. The big problem is, he died the day I spoke to him.”

  Hank nodded as if he knew this already, but didn’t say whether he did or he didn’t.

  So I said, “And obviously Edgar was killed last night in a supposed robbery that I don’t think was a robbery at all. I remind you of this because I’m going to head into this men’s room here. While I’m in there, you might be smart to just keep walking down this corridor, get in your car, head home, and watch Wedding Crashers on pay-per-view. People around me have a way of dying lately, and I really don’t want that to happen to you, Hank.”

  Cutting through my minidrama, Hank asked, “Then why’d you call me?”

  It’s true, I had. I’d called him just before I got on the plane in Vegas, explaining some of my predicament, laying out the dangers, and asking for his help. I needed an able-bodied, street-smart guardian angel — to use Edgar’s term — over the next day or so, and so what if he happened to be about seventy years old.

  “I might have been too rash. I’ve been thinking more about it on the airplane. I don’t want to see more people dead because of me. I really don’t.”

  “Go use the men’s room.”

  I did, looking around suspiciously at the other men in there, not alone because of how few of them took the time to wash their hands on their way out the door. I was starting to wonder who was following me, monitoring my moves, waiting constantly for the opportunity to strike.

  When I got back outside, Hank was still standing there, virtually in the same place and position as he was when I went inside. “There,” he said, “now that we’ve got that little episode out of your system, maybe we can go find ourselves a strangler.”

  And we were off.

  Hank had a black Ford four-door idling at the curb with a state police trooper watching guard. Normally these troopers are hassling harried travelers to get their cars out of the no-parking zones, not necessarily in the nicest or politest way. This trooper said to Hank, “That was fast.”

  “Life is fast,” Hank replied, opening the driver’s-side door. “Look at me. I feel like I’ve just begun, but I probably only have one bullet left in my gun — and I was never that good a shot to begin with.”

  The trooper nodded and laughed. He looked over at me and said, “Good luck with the story.”

  I thanked him, and Hank called out, “Trust me, Teddy, the whole damned thing just flies by.”

  On the ride into the city, we went over a quick plan, which was barely a plan at all — basically what Hank described as a “lurk and listen strategy.” He was going to drop me off a block away from my meeting destination. He gave me a cellular phone with a two-way radio, which he had programmed to remain on at all times. He would be ready to descend on the scene if needed, but would stand down otherwise.

  Me, I had an odd sense of faith in this situation, don’t ask me why. The Phantom Fiend was trying to get me information, lurid as that information inevitably ended up being. He didn’t want me dead, because then his conduit to the public at-large no longer existed. No, it was someone else who wanted me dead, but on this night, given that the e-mailer had known about the manifesto, I had faith that it was indeed the Phantom Fiend. Of course, I’ve been wrong about less important things in my life, which might explain why my extremities felt like they were going numb.

  My phone rang — my real phone, not the Hank-issued one — and I almost jumped through the moonroof. And the moonroof, by the way, was closed.

  “Easy there, tabby cat,” Hank said.

  When I answered the call, it was Peter Martin, making sure I was safe and sound and in the company of the security agent named Buck. I explained that I was the former, but not the latter, and that Hank Sweeney was my chaperone and chauffeur.

  “Hold on,” he said. I heard him pick up another line and say, “Hey, Buck, why aren’t you with Jack?”

  Pause.

  “You’re waiting for his flight? Where? Hold on.” Then, to me, “What airline did you come in on?”

  I told him.

  To Buck, “That’s US Airways, not United.” Pause. “No, it’s Las Vegas, not Los Angeles.” Pause. “No, he’s off property. Never mind, just come back here.”

  “Why don’t you put him on the copy desk,” I said to Peter.

  “He’d probably fit right in.”

  He didn’t appreciate that. Instead he told me, “Be careful. Next time I see you, I don’t want to be paying my final respects.”

  At one o’clock on a Sunday morning, the Downtown Crossing side of Boston Common isn’t a place most normal people want to be. Abnormal people, yes, which probably explains all the punked-up Mohawks, the various body piercings, and the bizarre Gothic fashion sported by the dozens of early twentysomethings who gathered in formless clusters near the corner of Tremont and Park Streets, where I stepped out of Hank’s car. I’m not sure what they were waiting for, but I had a feeling it wasn’t coming anytime soon.

  “Be calm, be cool, remember I’m armed, we’ll get out of this just fine.” That was Hank’s last bit of advice to me as I shut the door and walked toward the meeting site.

  I didn’t take the time to tell him that Edgar Sullivan was armed as well.

  Once off Tremont, Winter Street was dead, and again, I don’t use that word loosely anymore. The doors and front windows of the various discount stores were sheathed in steel grating — dark, hulking structures that repelled the vague light from the street-lamps. Even on a gorgeous June afternoon, Downtown Crossing isn’t exactly Piazza Navona, if you know what I mean. In the post-midnight hush of an early spring night, it took on the look of a stage set from the type of horror movie I’d never bother to see.

  Winter Place was little more than a dead-end alley halfway down the block, known only because it is the home of the Locke-Ober, where Hank and I recently dined on that dreamy bisque and those delicious steaks. When I pulled up to the corner, there wasn’t another person around, or at least not within my view. I had a moment where fear dripped into awkwardness because I didn’t know what to do. What I really wanted was a shot of whiskey from the Locke-Ober bar, and I don’t even drink whiskey. But the place was dark for the night, so that wasn’t really an option.

  Instead, I stood in the middle of the street, away from any buildings where a predator might emerge from the shadowy entrances without me having time enough to fight back. Mrs. Flynn of South Boston didn’t raise any fool. I put my hands in my pockets. I took them out. I shuffled my feet. I stood completely still. It felt like an hour; it was really about five minutes. And that’s when my cell phone rang.

  It was as quiet as the country out there, and by country I don’t mean Prague or Helsinki, though I’m not sure those are even countries. Regardless, I mean the American country, like the middle of the country, a wheat farm in Nebraska, where the only sounds in the distant fields are the crops whistling in a summery breeze.

  Which is a long way of saying the chime of my phone sounded not unlike a car crash
for the noise it made. I all but leapt off the ground as I yanked it from my pocket. The caller ID said “Unavailable.” I flipped it open and said, “Jack Flynn here.”

  “Pick up the envelope halfway down the walkway at the end of Winter Place.”

  That was followed by a click, which was followed by silence.

  “Who is this?” I asked, a question that admittedly lacked even a hint of originality. But as I suspected, there was no one on the line to respond. So thinking quickly, as I rarely do anymore, I said, “Okay, the walkway at the end of Winter Place.” I said this for Hank Sweeney’s benefit, and ultimately mine as well.

  That one spare directive had been delivered in a monotone, emphasizing neither words nor syllables. It was a man’s voice, gravelly yet pointed, indiscernible in age. He could have been thirty, he could have been sixty. I truly had no idea, though for some reason I pictured a guy with two days’ of growth on his cheeks and an old ball cap on his head speaking into a pay phone somewhere nearby.

  It was the pickup spot that bothered me more than the voice. The walkway at the end of Winter Place is a long, narrow passage that links on the other side to a short side street called Temple Place. The walkway is effectively a single-file space that exists between two old buildings, another only-in-Boston kind of place. A person walking within it is essentially sitting prey, and no one in their right mind uses it as a shortcut anytime after dark, Arnold Schwarzenegger aside, though I’m not sure he fits into the category of right-minded people.

  With no great enthusiasm, I turned toward Winter Place, which is about forty yards long, and looked suspiciously toward the end. I could disappear within that passageway and never be seen alive again, bound for that celestial place where Bob Walters and Edgar Sullivan were already holding court, not to mention a collection of young women formerly of Boston. I wondered if they’d appreciate my meager efforts on their behalf.