The Strangler (17 page)

31

Thirty-four steps. That was Michael’s count. He had initially paced it off at a walk and reached a higher number. But his dad had been running and his stride would have lengthened. So Michael ran it, from the end of the access road to the alley, and he counted again, then ran it again and counted again. Thirty-four steps, about half that number of seconds. It had to be wrong. He was missing something. He assumed he was in the jigsawed world of the mystery novel; if the solution was right, the pieces would fit. They would slip together easily. They didn’t.

He went to the alley, stood where the shooter had stood. The killer had beat Dad to this spot, waited for him to come skittering around that corner, and fired. So he had dashed around the corner ahead of Dad, pulled the gun, and was there ready-steady, waiting. A three- or four-second lapse, say.

Michael rehearsed the facts again. Dad and Conroy arrive in a cruiser at the Eastie waterfront, Dad driving. He parks with the driver’s side of the car nearer the access road. Conroy, on the far side of the car, sees the kid and shouts to him, across the roof of the car. The kid, sitting with his back against a wall, looks up, registers
cops!,
and takes off. Then the thirty-four-steps, then the shot.

So how—if Amy was right—did a lard-ass like Brendan Conroy get into position to fire that shot in the alley? How could he possibly have beat Dad from the parked car to the alley?

Michael adjusted the facts to fit the movie in his head. Maybe Conroy had gone ahead earlier, before the sprint, or something had distracted Dad or drawn him away, giving Conroy a head start. Or maybe the car had been parked the other way (though it would have required backing in). Michael could have dreamt up a thousand scenarios to reach the desired climax. What he could not do was imagine a different climax.

He ran it again. He wanted to feel it, make the experience a physical reality. Thirty-four steps,
chick-chick-chick-chick-chick…
Michael’s head jostling. On his right the slate-blue emptiness of Boston Harbor. The water was choppy and whitecapped, the colors of a chalky blackboard in school. It made an oceany whishing sound. Beyond the harbor the city rose up on its little hill a mile away, still a nineteenth-century skyline, ten stories tall, a mean little port city without a skyscraper, an American Marseilles.
Chick-chick-chick,
thirty-two, -three, -four, and the corner. Turn. Gun. Shooter. Bang.

Again. Slow it down.

Turn.

Little four-shot derringer.

Pan up to the shooter’s face—Brendan Conroy’s face. Flushed, maybe a little grimace at having to perform this necessary, distasteful task. Did he say anything first? “Sorry, Joe, hope you understand”?

Dad’s tongue flattens itself against the roof of his mouth, readying to say
No!

Bang.

32

Joe hated working details, but there was no way around it. He needed the money. Of course, what he earned on a detail was peanuts. At $3.50 an hour, he would be lucky to walk away with twenty-five bucks. His bookie debt, by contrast, was now an outlandish twenty thousand dollars or so—twice what Joe made in a year. He was not quite sure of the total debt. It was divvied up among a half dozen bookies, mostly in the South End, all charging different rates, rolling the vig back into the Big Number, pulling figures out of a hat, moving their lips and rolling their eyes toward the ceiling as they did the math, then writing it all down in Chinese in their little notebooks. By the time they’d finished figuring, Joe had no idea what the true number was. So what could you do but take their word for it? If they said you owed, you owed.

His luck was bound to turn, and soon enough he would have plenty of cash to pay the whole thing off, whatever The Number was. He would make everyone happy, even Kat. All he had to do was keep playing, stay in the game long enough for things to even out. It had to happen: bad luck must be balanced by good, ten coin-flips that come up tails must be followed by ten that come up heads. One man simply could not keep losing forever. In fact the longer he kept losing, the more he felt he could not walk away. All the money he had lost was an investment in future good luck. With every lost bet, he figured, the odds shifted a little further in his favor—“flip a coin a hundred times…” The trick was to keep the wolves at bay long enough to ride out the cold streak and reap the reward.

For a long time Joe believed he could do just that. He was able to keep the faith. Oh, it would take a little belt-tightening, he would have to deny himself a few things—not his strong point—and he would have to work a lot of details. But with the hundred bucks a week he got on the sleeve, he could make his nut every week, just about. He needed about six hundred a week to keep up with the vig. Some weeks he had found a way to get it, or to get close enough for a cop. Of course he saw the futility in using his pad-money to pay the bookies. Those dollars came from the North End and, like homing pigeons, they circled right back to the North End. One of Capobianco’s lieutenants paid off a sergeant at Station One; the sergeant paid Joe; Joe then made his rounds through the South End paying off the bookies; and a few days later those same bills were back where they started, all sorted and banded in one of Capobianco’s counting rooms. Charlie Capobianco had set up a vast bucket brigade to move cash, spilling just enough dollars along the away to keep everyone at it. Of course many weeks—most weeks—Joe had been short, sometimes a lot short, and he’d had to bluster and bargain his way through. But it had never been a problem. Cop privilege, Joe figured—his shield was just that, a shield. With it, he’d pull through, somehow.

But now he knew: He wasn’t going to get out of it, ever. He’d been fooling himself. The hole he was standing in was the hole he’d be buried in. Maybe it had been Amy’s dying. Or the fact that he’d turned to a shylock for the first time, to borrow cash to patch the hole—a fatal mistake, one that inevitably brought out the wolves to surround the wounded limping animal. Maybe it was the new ferocity in the city’s crimeworld. Maybe it was all these things. A gloomy paranoia infected the city after so many murders, high and low.

Charlie Capobianco’s campaign to take over the bookmaking rackets had unleashed a frenzy of killing as surrounding gangs felt the squeeze. The period would later come to be known as the Irish Gang War, but it was nothing as noble or purposeful as war. The Winter Hill crew was systematically exterminating the rival McLaughlin gang, in Charlestown, but most of the violence was just small-timers sharking each other. A gang war, it turned out, was an opportune moment to settle any old score. So the bodies started to turn up. They slumped in abandoned cars…three suitcases were left in an alley beside a hotel downtown, emitting an eggy stench…a headless corpse lay in an unlocked apartment, its windpipe gaping in the neckhole…a mysterious dark syrup leaked from the trunk of a car parked in the hot sun, and people complained of the stink…. By now there were nearly twenty dead, most of them shot, two strangled, one throat slit, one beheaded, one drowned. The preferred method was the double-cross—the bullet usually entered the back of the head. Beware the smiling pal who invites you on a job, or stands back to let you walk through a door first, or offers you the front passenger seat while he sits behind.

Meanwhile Capobianco was tightening the screws not just on the books and shylocks who put his money on the street, but on the suckers who took it. A new policy was now in force: The clock never stopped. A deadbeat was never allowed to pay only principal, even if he’d been bled dry. It was a senseless policy unknown in New York or Chicago, for the obvious reason that the Mob could no longer extract money from a deadbeat once it killed him. But that sort of nuance was lost on Charlie Capobianco. He wanted his money, all of it, right now. In Boston the clock ran until you made your final payment, one way or the other.

So here was Joe, in his too-tight uniform pants and too-small policeman’s cap, standing in the Greyhound bus terminal at one in the morning, wondering whether he could afford the price of new uniform pants, having long ago spent the two-hundred-dollar clothing allowance the department gave out each year. The bus station was, to Joe, the absolute worst detail there was. Some guys got the details at Symphony Hall—Joe got the bus station. It figured. But the bus station was the only detail that hired seven days a week, it was indoors, and it fit Joe’s schedule. He could work a “first half” till midnight, then the detail from midnight till six or seven the next morning. So he took it. Interminable nights of waking up bums with his nightstick and breaking up blowjobs in the men’s room and, mostly, doing nothing at all, and for what? So he could hand over what little he earned to the greaseballs. He had at least figured out that he could park his car nearby and go sleep in it. If he wandered through the bus station once an hour to make it look good, that was enough.

Around one, the place was completely abandoned and Joe was dazed with boredom when the fin of a black Cadillac glided into frame in one of the big windows. Not the sort of car that belonged here at this hour, or any hour. Joe went to the window and watched Vinnie Gargano get out of the car. Gargano stood there, looking around. He shrugged his shoulders and waggled his head like a boxer getting loose before a fight. It was remarkable how these guys appeared at your most vulnerable moment. Joe—who had been turning over in his mind thoughts of Kat and twenty thousand dollars—quickly tried to work up a little of the old confidence. He sucked in his gut and buttoned his pants, which he had opened so he could breathe easier, and tried to find his old chesty GI posture. But his body had lost its memory. When Gargano wandered in through the steel-and-glass doors, Joe was still trying to arrange his shoulders and chest properly.

“Hey,” Gargano said. “When’s the next bus to Poughkeepsie?”

Joe forced the corners of his mouth into a weak smile.

Gargano strolled around the waiting room. The banks of molded-plastic seats were empty, the ticket windows closed. No buses left at this time of night. The station stayed open overnight just to receive the occasional arrival from God-knew-where—a handful of exhausted, bedraggled passengers would shuffle through, like immigrants from some faraway country, then silence again.

“The fuck you doin’ here?” Gargano asked.

“My job.”

“I thought you were some detective. Big shot.”

“What’s it to you?”

“I got a right to know how my taxes are gettin’ spent.”

“You pay your taxes?”

“No.”

“Alright, then.” In Joe’s head, the sentence ran on with its natural momentum:
Alright, then, go fuck yourself.

Gargano strolled around the circumference of the waiting room with the distracted manner of one lost in thought. From the side—which was Joe’s angle of view as he turned slowly on his heels to keep Gargano from moving behind him—Gargano had an unmistakable simian look. His arms hung to his mid-thighs, a beard of fat rounded his face into a snout. The rumor was that Vinnie Gargano had packed that man into three suitcases, even taken care to place the head faceup to greet the cops.

“They told me down the station I’d find you here.”

“Yeah? Who told you that?”

“Some cop, whoever picked up the phone.”

“I’ll have to talk with them about that.”

“Whattaya gonna, ‘I’ll have to talk with them’? You know, this is what I hear about you, over and over again, same fuckin’ thing:You’re some tough prick, nobody wants to deal with you. You know that? Pain in the ass. You go looking for trouble.”

“You heard wrong. I don’t look for trouble.”

“No? Trouble finds you, then.”

“Seems like that.”

“Yeah, seems like that.” Gargano pushed open each bathroom door and poked his head in to confirm it was empty. “So what are we gonna do?”

“About what?”

“About what. Funny guy, ‘about what.’ Listen, shit-for-brains, I know what kind of trouble you’re in. Maybe you can fool a bunch of dumb-fuck cops and these broads you run around with, and maybe you can fool that dumb-fuck brother of yours, the thief/burglar/ whatever-the-fuck-he-is. But you don’t fool me. You don’t fool me. I seen guys like you. I see guys like you every fuckin’ day. You don’t fool me.”

“I’m not trying to fool you.”

Gargano paused, mollified by the note of servility in Joe’s answer.

“I’m not trying to fool nobody,” Joe said, modulating his position. A little wince showed on his face: all balls, no brains, and he knew it.

Gargano ignored it. “What are we gonna do, Joe?”

No answer.

“This is a problem. You got a big tab here, Joe, big tab.” He wagged his finger. “It’s not good. This is a real problem. We got a real fuckin’ problem, you and me.”

“I’ve been paying.”

“No, Joe. See, if you were paying and doing the right thing, see, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I wouldn’t even know your name. You’d be just some dumb cop.”

Gargano moved toward the middle of the room and settled into a seat. “When are you gonna get this money, Joe?”

“Soon.”

“No. I said
when
. You tell me exactly when you’re gonna get it. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, what?”

No answer.

“I’m guessing you don’t have the money.”

“Not right now.”

“Not right now.”

“Not right now.”

“So what are you giving me this bullshit about ‘soon’?”

“I could get some of it.”

“Some of it?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“I don’t, I don’t exactly—”

“
How much?
How fuckin’ much, Joe?”

“I don’t know. Couple thousand.”

“A couple thousand? Is that a joke? You think this is some kind of fuckin’ joke, you make fuckin’ jokes with me? Are you being funny? Tell him a couple thousand and that’s the end of it, like this is some joke. Is that it? You think this is a joke?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, it’s not a joke.”

“Fuckin’ right it’s not a joke. You know, I heard you weren’t the sharpest fuckin’ guy.” He shook his head. “So what are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you gonna get this kind of money?”

“I don’t know.”

“‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ You don’t know much.” Gargano had gradually moved to the edge of his chair, leaning far forward with his hands on his knees, and now he slouched back. “I ain’t leavin’ here till I know where you’re gonna get this money.”

No response.

“How about your brother the thief?”

“Let’s leave him out of it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s my problem, I’ll fix it.”

“He’s got money.”

“Not this kind of money.”

“You hear about that Copley job? He’s got plenty of money, that one.”

Joe was not sure what Ricky was calling himself these days—a car dealer or a realtor or a club owner—but he knew it was not wise to reveal anything to a guy like Vinnie Gargano. Joe didn’t know what he didn’t know, sometimes he didn’t know what he
did
know, and so when it came to Ricky he made it a policy to know nothing at all. Saying too much could get Ricky killed. “My brother doesn’t have that kind of money and he isn’t a thief.”

Gargano grinned. “Jesus, you really are dumber than a box of rocks.”

Joe shrugged. He felt at once defeated and oddly relieved. Gargano’s appearance here felt like a culmination—as if Vinnie The Animal had come into that bus station bodying forth all the bad luck and all the defeats Joe had been enduring, and now at last it might all come to an end somehow. Probably badly, it was true, but any sort of end would be better than this slow slide. Gargano was right, after all: Joe had passed the point where he could hope to pay off the debt. From here the vig would bury him, fast. He had no way to stop the clock, and so time itself had become a burden, the passing of an hour was a reason to suffer. He wanted it to stop.

“So how are you gonna get this money? You got a nice house. I seen it.”

“It’s mortgaged.”

“So sell something. What do you got to sell?”

“
Pfft.
Nothing.”

“You know what I usually say in this situation? I tell the guy, ‘Look, you owe ten grand, fifty grand, whatever it is. You only got one thing that’s worth fifty grand. I’ll buy it from you. You know what it is?’” He paused.

“No,” Joe said. “What is it?”

“It’s your head. I tell him, ‘Sell me your fuckin’ head for fifty grand and we’ll call it even. I’ll take it right now. You want, I’ll even cut it off for you.’ Then I show him the knife.” He reached inside his leather coat and produced a small knife.

“What if the guy really doesn’t have fifty grand?”

“They tend to find it.”

Joe’s eyes closed.

“Relax. Your fuckin’ head isn’t worth fifty cents. Let me tell you what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna come work for me.”

“That won’t—I can’t do that.”

“Please. I seen Nicky Capobianco’s police pad.” Nicky Capobianco was Charlie’s brother, fixer, and money man. “The morning after the prom is a little late to be calling yourself a virgin. You’ve been taking the money. Now you can earn it.”