Strangled (12 page)

“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.

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.”

He laughed again, this time louder and more gutturally, and that caused him to descend into a coughing fit, which spurred him to stick the oxygen mask over his mouth for several long, deep breaths. As he breathed, his blank eyes stared straight ahead at nothing, a total acceptance of this as his human condition.

When he pulled the mask away, he said, “They wouldn’t, would they?”

“Why not?”

He looked at me like I was a bronze-plated idiot, and maybe I was. But sometimes these are the kinds of questions you have to ask in this grand business of information acquisition — questions that might seem obvious to everyone but the person asking them.

He asked, “Why would the brass want people thinking that the Strangler is killing again? That would be an admission that they didn’t get the right guy back then. That would mean that the grunts, people like me, were right, and that the higher-ups, they were wrong. Why would they want you to think that?”

As he spoke, he grew more animated, even agitated, moving his arms out from under the unwashed sheets. He fell into another coughing fit, then climbed his way out of it by sipping water from a badly smudged glass on the other side of his bed.

When he collected himself, I asked, “All these many years later, the brass is still sensitive about it?”

He shot me another one of those looks that made me feel like the stupid kid at the fifth-grade science fair. You know how they say there’s no such thing as a dumb question? In Bob Walters’s presence, I was the exception to that rule — a living, breathing asker of the dumbest questions he’d ever heard.

Still, he contained himself and said, “Think about who’s where. One of the lead detectives on the case is now the police commissioner, and from what I hear from the few friends I still have on the force, he wants to be mayor. The U.S. senator from your state was the attorney general heading the Strangler investigation. These are just two guys who have staked their whole fucking careers on that one case. And they’re not done yet. Think, kid, think.”

I was, but to no avail. I said, “Tell me about your role. You headed up the investigation, right?”

He swallowed hard. His eyes were transforming right before my eyes, sharpening. He laughed softly and said, “Yes and no. A lot of people headed up that investigation. After DeSalvo confessed, there were probably forty people who claimed to have led the case, every one a fucking tactical genius. I was just one of them.”

I said, “Save your false modesty for your lovely wife. Tell me your role.”

He looked at me — both surprised and amused.

“I headed homicide at the time, so yeah, it was my case. The whole fucking world was coming down on us. Boston had four newspapers at the time, every one of them going crazy with this thing. The Phantom Fiend, the Boston Strangler, another woman dead, read all about it. Women were locking themselves indoors. The mayor was having fits. The Strangler didn’t care about city and county boundaries, and the other police departments and prosecutors were being real pricks.

“And then you’ve got the state attorney general, the most ambitious prick in the world, taking over the case and putting some sham group together called the Boston Strangler Commission, trying to make it all go away in the best possible way so he could have a campaign issue when he ran for president. And my own fucking cohorts in homicide were sticking knives in each other’s backs to get in the next day’s paper. The thing was a pure fucking disaster from the day the first broad was found strangled in Back Bay.”

He paused and took another long sip of water. He pivoted his head along the pillow again, looked at me, and said, “So you want to know my role? That was my role. Bring order to total fucking chaos. I thought I had succeeded until the day I failed, and when I failed, I failed big.”

He shut his eyes and seemed to rest for a moment. I stood in silence on the side of his bed. When he looked at me again, I asked, my tone softer now, “What’s got you laid up?”

“I’m old, kid. I’m old. That’s my problem. You’ll be old someday too, and it sucks.”

Before I could respond, he added, “And I have diabetes, which prevents me from walking. I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year. I get out of here maybe once a month in a wheelchair, when I can get someone over to carry me down the stairs. The doctors want to amputate both my legs. I’m on borrowed time down there. And I’ve got emphysema, which is what’s causing this fucking coughing all the time. I guess I’m on borrowed time everywhere.

“And I’ve got a miserable drunk of a wife who doesn’t give one flying fuck whether I’m dead or alive. You know what, never mind that. She’d much prefer if I was dead so she wouldn’t have to deal with all my bullshit. Kid, I hope your wife is someone special, because like I said, growing old sucks.”

I asked, “If not DeSalvo, then who’s the Strangler?”

“Nobody’s told you that already?”

“I haven’t really asked anyone until now. All respect intended, sir, you were the guy who knew the most back then, the detective that all the other cops looked up to. Speaking of which, Hank Sweeney says to say hello.”

He didn’t, but he probably should have. And far more important, I had a strong sense that dropping his name, showing that I already had easy access among favored members of the fraternity, would help my cause here at a level that I hadn’t yet explored.

Bob Walters brightened at the mention of Hank and said simply, “A good man. An excellent man. Broke barriers and broke cases. You can’t beat that combination.”

I said, “Who is it?”

He lay in silence for another long moment, his gaze moving from me to some faraway place I couldn’t see.

Finally, he said, “A guy who was never on my list until long after the stranglings stopped. A brilliant guy. Pure evil. Poor Boston if he’s back.”

“You’re not helping me,” I said.

He laughed again. Our rapport was growing easier, even as he seemed to be growing tired again.

He said, “DeSalvo was arrested on a rape charge, actually, a string of rape charges, and sent to the Bridgewater Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons while he awaited trial. He wasn’t a suspect in the stranglings, either. But one day, he just ups and confesses. He gave details of each of the murders that impressed the hell out of Stu Callaghan and a bunch of his people. Callaghan was so excited about the confession, about bagging the Strangler, that he never let any of the hands-on detectives interview him, because he knew we had doubts and he was afraid we’d ruin his moment and all the fawning press coverage that went with it. So he only allowed access to DeSalvo to a bunch of his pissant, know-nothing administrators who wanted nothing more than to close the books on the whole thing.”

He paused, then said, “Trust me, Albert DeSalvo couldn’t hit a dog, never mind kill a woman. He was not the Boston Strangler.”

I said, “But the killings stopped as soon as he was arrested.”

“You’re right. They did,” he said. “It ends up that DeSalvo’s cell-mate in Bridgewater is a guy named Paul Vasco. Ever hear of him?”

I shook my head.

“Vasco’s got an IQ of 158. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was a genius — an evil fucking genius. Diabolical. And cold-blooded. He had beaten a murder rap years before on a technicality. Robbed a gas station. Drove halfway out of the parking lot, flipped his car in reverse, went back inside, and shot the clerk in the head just for kicks. Then he left. This was in the ’burbs, and the damned cop forgot to read him his Miranda when he pulled him over later that night and found powder burns on his hand and blood on his shirt. So he walked.

“Anyway, Vasco’s arrested at just about the same time as DeSalvo. They spend months in Bridgewater together, walking this route up and down a corridor heading from the cell block to the rec room. Other prisoners I interviewed said that’s all they did, walk and talk, day and night, week after week, walking and talking.