Strangled (20 page)

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” he said. He paused for effect, then added, “Oscar Wilde.”

I said, “I’m going to nail you so cold on these killings that the jury’s going to cheer when they send you back to Walpole.” I paused for effect, then added, “Jack Flynn.”

Then I slammed the side of my fist against the wall, just below the pictures of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May, and I said, “Did you kill these women?”

Mongillo walked over and got a closer look at what I was talking about.

“Did you kill these women?” My voice was so taut that the words shot out of my mouth like arrows flung from a bow.

No response, though he flashed a smile —
this evil fucking smile,
as Bob Walters had described it to me before he died.

“Let’s go.” That was Mongillo, grabbing me by the shoulder and prodding me toward the door.

I said, “Why have you put me in the middle of a story that I can’t do anything to change? Why are you doing this?”

He stood, finally, and asked, “Would you rather not be part of the story?”

He had me. He had me cold. He was as smart as he seemed.

Vinny continued to pull me away, and I began to follow his lead. Before I got to the door, though, I turned around and seethed, “I swear to God, Vasco, when I prove you killed these women, and I
will
prove you killed these women, I’m going to fucking kill you myself, and it’s going to be slow, and it’s going to hurt like fucking hell.”

He said, “All truths are easier to understand once they are discovered. The point is to discover them. Galileo.”

I was about to lunge. I kept thinking of the driver’s licenses arriving in the mail, the video of the death scene, the guy who needlessly died in the Public Garden, Bob Walters falling down his own stairs seeking something that I didn’t know. Every thought was a jolt, a call to physical action like I’ve never felt before, because of a guy who was screwing with the city and simultaneously messing with my mind. But before I could do anything, before I could say anything, Mongillo flipped open the door to that dismal little room and pulled me into the hallway.

The two of us walked down the stairs in silence and out into the midday sun.

Mongillo grabbed the keys when I pulled them out and said, “I’m driving. You’re out of control.” I didn’t argue. Inside the car, he said, “I’m trying to be like the reporters in
All the President’s Men
. My partner here thinks he’s the star of
Rocky.
”

He started the car and pulled out. I could feel the tension seeping out of my pores, not all of it, but enough for me to take a deep breath and say, “Sorry about that. I don’t know what just happened. This thing’s getting to me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, in a tone far more distant and aloof than his norm, staring straight ahead at the road. Then he added, “It’s getting to me, too. We’re going to have to do something about it.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but wasn’t of the mind to ask.

We both sat in silence for a while. We were crossing the bridge back into Boston when he said, “Until then, rather than try to kick the shit out of everyone, I think I’ve got another plan.”

There
were definitely days in my life that had gone better. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of many, outside of the obvious, that had gone any worse.

It had started out with another communication from the Phantom Fiend, in this case, an order to publish a letter to the people of Boston on the front page of the
Record
. That was quickly followed by a decision by the
Record
publisher not to publish the letter because said publisher, hitherto a respected newswoman, didn’t want to tick off the acting mayor and the commissioner of police. This failure would mean that the Phantom would ratchet up his killing spree because I couldn’t convince my paper to take action. On top of this, I lose my temper with the guy who probably was and probably still is the Boston Strangler or Phantom Fiend or whatever he should be called.

And all this followed the death of Bob Walters — a death that occurred before he could get me the information he said he had. And that, of course, followed the death of Joshua Carpenter, the innocent guy in the Public Garden. And of course, there were the stranglings of three young women in various parts of town.

I bring this up to explain why I was in the gymnasium of the University Club at four in the afternoon on what could have and should have been a critical day of reporting and writing at the
Boston Record
. Mongillo, in his inimitable way, told me, and I quote, “Go get some sleep, some sex, or some exercise, before you ruin this entire story.”

The first presented option, I was too antsy for. The second, I had few possibilities and even less desire. The third, well, I could use a tour through the gym, so that’s where I went.

The place was barren, given the hour. The lunch crowd was long gone, and the evening crowd wouldn’t arrive for another hour, so I sat on an exercise ball and knocked out seventy-five crunches, feeling my abdominal muscles tighten more with each successive one. I worked the lat machine and the bench press, and did some flies. I skipped a little rope. I did more abdominals. I struggled through the shoulder press.

The work felt good. The sweat that opened up on my forehead and flowed down my face felt even better. The stereo system was turned down, and the only sounds in the gym were the plates of weight clinking against one another and my own labored breathing, all of which gave me a little time to think.

I thought of the call I had yet to return to Maggie Kane. I decided we weren’t engaged anymore; that designation expired one way or another with the passage of a wedding day.

I thought of the call I had just received from Peter Martin, telling me that the publisher wasn’t yet ready to run the Phantom’s letter, and maybe never would be. He basically told me to be on high alert the next morning, in expectation that we or someone else would face the Phantom’s wrath.

I tell you, newspapers will break your heart just about every time.

I did one last set of leg lifts, then sprawled across a hard blue mat and felt the energy flow from my torso, down my limbs, and right out of my fingers and toes. After a few minutes of nothingness, I collected myself, wandered downstairs into the locker room, stripped down, and headed for the steam room.

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 voice 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?”