The Strangler (20 page)

38

They were like vampires, these Mob guys. They came out at night. Lunch was breakfast, supper was lunch, the workday ended anytime before sunrise. The big boss, Charlie Capobianco, would drive himself into the city from his sprawling oceanfront house in Swampscott after noontime. His workday began at the “clubhouse” on Thatcher Street. Around seven he might sweep into a favored restaurant with his retinue, like a feudal lord paying a call on a vassal. Then it was on to C.C.’s, a bar he owned in the Combat Zone where he kept an office. Sometime around two or three in the morning Capobianco would drive himself home. Hardly anyone knew when he left; hardly anyone was still around.

BPD Station Number One was in the same North End neighborhood, a couple of blocks off Hanover Street, the main drag. It was not unusual for Joe to recognize these guys on the street, big shots like the Capobianco brothers or Vinnie Gargano, or schools of bottom-feeding plug-uglies that cruised the area. Some he knew by name, many more by face. Long before Joe had enlisted in—or been impressed into—the Capobianco organization, he had made it a point to ignore them. Most cops did the same. Leave the gangbuster crap to the movies. In real life, there was only danger for a cop in tangling with these guys. Better to keep a respectful distance. And now that he was lugging around his Big Secret, Joe avoided the North End altogether, lest a wave or a nod betray him.

A shit-cloud had settled over Joe. Every day, bad luck all around. Every fucking day, more trouble. It was all around him, it was inside him, this fucking Trouble, like a virus, and now he would have to ride out the illness right to the end. He was so damn tired. He needed a good long sleep was what he needed. If he could just sleep, then—
then
—maybe he could think this thing through.

After working a last-half, around one in the morning, Joe guided his big Olds Eighty-Eight to a stop behind a fancier black Cadillac on Mass. Ave., across the river in Cambridge. He turned off the ignition. Nearly a full minute passed. Inside the Cadillac the dim silhouette of Vinnie Gargano threw up his hands, and Joe figured he had better get going. He slipped into the passenger seat of Gargano’s Caddy.

“What was that with the sitting? What, are you listening to the radio?”

“No. I was making sure nobody was going to see.”

“Who the fuck’s going to see?”

“I don’t know. People.”

“What people? I got things to do. I’m sitting here thinking, What’s with this guy? Is he waiting for me to come to him or what? This is some crazy fucking cop I found!”

Joe shifted in his seat.

But Gargano was in a lighthearted mood. “If I was that broad from Joe Tecce’s with the tits out to here and the hair out to here, you wouldn’t be able to get in the car fast enough. You’d’a jumped through the window,
pshoo,
with your pants around your ankles.”

“I took care of that thing.”

“Listen to you, ‘I took care of that thing.’”

“I took care of that thing you asked me.”

Gargano gave Joe a disappointed look. All business. This big, dumb mick was rejecting his friendship. Again. So be it.

“I talked to the prosecutor at the BMC. He’s going to file a nol pros.”

“Speak English.”

“He’s going to shit-can the case.”

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“What else do you want to tell me?”

“Nothing.” Joe puzzled over what Gargano might be fishing for. What the hell was Joe doing here with Vinnie The Animal Gargano? Why would Gargano take the time to oversee Joe’s case personally? There were bigger tabs to collect. There were also better ears to occupy Gargano the spymaster. As a fixer or an ear, Joe Daley was not worth the trouble.

Gargano handed him an envelope. “A little walking-around money.”

Joe checked inside. Two hundred. Two or three days’vig. Walking-around money was all it was. Then again, why would Gargano help Joe out of the hole he had dug?
You’re a dummy,
the little voice said. Taking the money would do nothing but seal Joe in further. He took it anyway. He needed it.
Dummy.

“I got something else for you. You know about that Copley job? Half million in diamonds.”

“Read about it in the papers.”

“I need those stones. They belong to a friend of mine.”

“Diamonds? What do I know—? I don’t know from diamonds.”

“I said they belong to a friend of mine.”

“I don’t know about that kind of stuff.”

“I thought you were a detective.”

“Not that kind.”

“The fuck’s the difference? You’re a detective—detect.”

“It’s just, I can’t promise…I don’t know how, where to start.”

“You don’t know where to start? Here, let me give you a fuckin’ clue. Start with your fuck-up of a brother.”

“My brother?” Joe tried to deliver the line in a natural way.

“‘Oh, my brother!’ Yeah, the thief. Something gets stolen, you start with the thief. Whattaya think?”

“But—”

“Just get the stones, Joe. Your brother didn’t do it, fine, I don’t give a shit. I really don’t. Just get the stones, that’s all I care.”

“You want me to squeeze my own brother? I can’t do that.”

“You can. You will.”

“Give me something else. Anything else.”

“They figured you’d say that.”

“Well, they figured right. I’m not gonna do it.”

“They also give me this.” He dug in his jacket pocket for a folded piece of paper and laid it on the dash in front of Joe.

The paper listed Kat and Little Joe’s names, the family’s home address, and Little Joe’s school, all in neat Palmer Method handwriting.

“Let me tell you something about how this thing works. Don’t ever tell me no. You got me? I don’t ever want to hear that word out of you. Just get those stones.”

39

Two policemen at the door. The taller one was Buczynski (he pronounced it buzz-IN-ski) from the Manhattan Burglary Squad. He was average height and thin, and he might have been handsome if only he were better dressed and took all those things—pens, scraps of paper—out of his shirt pocket, and learned not to wear short-sleeve shirts with neckties, and stood up straight, and learned to shave properly and not drench himself so in aftershave. Buczynski did look like a policeman, at least, which was more than you could say for his partner.

This was a little pale-yellow lump of a man with another of those names, Gedaminski—the name rumbled on and on like a freight train behind that G—and no amount of cleaning up was going to salvage him. This man Gedaminski did not seem the police type. He was small, doughy, and rather anemic looking. What chance would he stand against a respectable criminal? One wanted to put him under a warming lamp like a jaundiced baby. He had come all the way from Boston, driven, he said, though one got the sense he would have walked if necessary. He did have a beady little attentiveness about him. Otherwise, nothing. A complete disappointment.

Anyway, it seemed like great fun to talk to policemen. A lark. It would make a marvelous story. To meet them she had dressed simply, in a dove-gray sweater and pants, no jewelry except a watch and very plain stud earrings. She wanted to project that she was more than she seemed—she was the sort of girl who, under different circumstances, would have thrived as a burglary detective, perceptive and ready for action as she was. She did not like that they would make assumptions about her. They would presume. They would dismiss her with two words: Park Avenue. So she was inordinately hospitable. She put out coffee and muffins, the sort of food she imagined policemen enjoyed. She was eager to help.

But really, what could she tell this Gedaminski that she hadn’t already told him on the phone? He had come an awfully long way just to confirm a very simple story.

Gedaminski handed her a photo.

“Yes!” she said. “That’s him.” She was surprised to remember the man so clearly. But he had been handsome. There had been a presence about him. She had thought, upon seeing this man,
He is just like me somehow.
“Tell me his name. Is that alright? Am I allowed to know his name?”

“Richard Daley.”

“Are you sure he’s the one? It seems like a mistake.”

“Why don’t you just tell me the story again.”

“Alright. Well, it’s just what I told you. Does your friend know the story already?”

Buczynski had agreed to drive his counterpart from Boston as a courtesy. They had worked together before. Gedaminski had been to New York chasing this or that suspect, usually Daley. A real pro, a
good thief,
often worked out of town, the better to go unrecognized. Gedaminski had long suspected that Ricky Daley had paid a few visits to Manhattan to steal and not be bothered. Gedaminski knew, too, that Ricky worked with the same fences over and over, a trusted few, and none of them were in Boston. There was no better place to fence jewelry than New York. There it could be quickly broken up and moved. Often the only way to catch a good thief was to follow the swag. It was very easy to steal, but very hard to dispose of stolen things once you’d got them. Most thieves had to settle for twenty or thirty cents on the dollar from a fence. Good thieves did better; there was less risk in dealing with them. Burglary detectives spent much of their time trolling pawnshops and jewelers, tracking the swag. Gedaminski would have given his left nut to know where Ricky Daley fenced his stuff. He and Buczynski had canvassed the usual layoffs in New York several times, with no luck. Gedaminski got along fine with Al Buczynski, though Buczynski talked too much, and the Old Spice he wore gave the Bostonian a roaring headache and made him suspicious of the entire NYPD, since perfume on a man was a sort of subterfuge, and perfume on a cop smelled like corruption.

“Well,” the woman said, “it’s just like everybody says: Where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot? I was in Boston. The Harvard-Yale game was that weekend. We were supposed to stay the whole weekend but we didn’t. They wound up postponing the game, anyway. We were staying at the Copley, my husband and I. We sat in front of the TV all afternoon, it seemed like. We were with friends in the Back Bay. And I was drained and just, just exhausted, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear to watch the TV anymore—they were saying the same things over and over again, hour after hour, I couldn’t stand it. So I went back to the hotel, to the room, while my husband stayed to watch.

“When I got back to my floor, I came off the elevator and I was walking down the corridor, getting my room key out and so forth, and there was this sound, not like a gunshot but like a firecracker or a pop, just
crack
. Well, I was spooked already from that whole day, so it frightened me and I kind of stopped there in the hall a moment. When I got to the door of my room, I was fumbling with the key. My hand was trembling. I was—well, I wasn’t crying exactly, but tears were coming out, you know?—and I was just anxious to get into my room and lie down. So while I’m trying to open my door, a few doors down the hall a door opens and out comes this man—this Richard Daley. He looked much nicer than he does in that picture. He was wearing a very nice suit and he had no luggage. I noticed he did not have a room key, he was not locking the door behind him. He just pulled the door shut.

“He came walking down the hall toward the elevators. He saw me struggling with my door and as he went by me he said, ‘Are you okay?’ I told him my hand was shaking and I could not seem to get my door open. He said, ‘Here, let me help you. I’m good with locks.’ I gave him the key and he put it in my lock and opened my door for me. That was it. He said, ‘It’ll be okay,’ and he smiled and he turned to go.

“He was really very nice. Very nice. You know, something in his face made me think, you know, just for a moment,
maybe it really will be okay.
I said to him—not that it mattered, but I just wanted him to stay there for another minute, I don’t know why; I liked him, and it was such a crazy day—I said to him, ‘Hey, you forgot to lock your door.’ So he stops and he kind of looks at the door, and he says, ‘It’s not my room. I just checked in and they gave me the wrong room. I asked for a suite. That room is a single.’ So I said something about ‘Well, it’s a horrible day and you can’t really blame the fellow at the front desk for making a mistake.’ And he smiles—not a happy smile, I mean just a reassuring kind of smile—and he says, ‘No. It’s just a mistake. I’ll go right down and straighten it out.’ And that was it. He went down the hall, and I went into my room, and I never thought anything of it. I never even heard about the robbery in that room. We checked out an hour later and came right home. We didn’t want to be away.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

She picked up the picture and looked at it again. She was absolutely certain and yet she could not quite hold both facts in her head at once—this was the nice, handsome man she had met in the hotel corridor, and this man was a thief. That he would rob someone during the chaos of That Day, well, it was particularly profane and opportunistic, and it added to her confusion.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Richard Daley. But he wasn’t, he didn’t seem…I just—”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

“Yes, it’s the same man but…he was just in the wrong room.”

“Trust me, lady, he’s always in the wrong room.”

40

Ricky was in the wrong room.

With the lights still off, he worked his hands into a pair of leather driving gloves. These were tan calfskin, very thin. He liked them because the thin leather permitted him to feel, they were not too hot to wear nor too bulky to fit in a coat pocket, and they were stylish. He took pride in the hidden aspects of his craft, just as a master cabinetmaker takes pride in perfect dovetails at the backs of drawers. This was what it meant to have an avocation, a calling. That his life’s work would take place entirely in the shadows, unwitnessed, was precisely the reason to do it perfectly. He was a member of a secret guild, and he felt a little thrill of professionalism when he worked his hands into those gloves, flexing and unflexing his fingers, packing the leather down into the crotches between his fingers. He was at work and happy.

Ricky turned on one light, then lowered all the shades. He made a mental note of where each shade had been.

This would be a leisurely job. He had clocked it only a couple of days—criminal negligence by Ricky’s standards—but Kurt Lindstrom’s one-week engagement with the BSO was a bit of good luck he did not want to miss. Tonight Lindstrom would be in Symphony Hall performing the
Pines of Rome,
as he had done the two previous nights. The piece was scheduled after the intermission; there was no way Lindstrom would be back before ten.

Ricky searched the front room methodically. He did not touch anything unless it was necessary to see behind or under it, and he meticulously replaced everything.

There was an upright piano in a corner with stacks of sheet music. On the fold-down music shelf of the piano was a handwritten arrangement Lindstrom apparently was working on. Ricky did not read music but he studied the pages anyway. It was written in pencil with a sure hand and no eraser marks or cross-outs. Each line spanned eight full staffs. It looked impossibly complex, coded, mad. Above the piano was a reproduction engraving of a scowling Beethoven.

One wall was lined with bookcases, some improvised from boards and cinder blocks. The books overflowed them and were stacked on the floor in haphazard piles. But there was nothing haphazard about the shelving. In one area were crime novels, everything from Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
and volumes of Dostoyevsky to pulps—but mostly pulps. This was a well-thumbed library. More than half were paperbacks, their spines cracked and concave. Lindstrom was a reader and, apparently, a rereader. Ricky rather admired Lindstrom’s library, which was heavy in California noir, Hammett and Chandler of course, but also included a lot of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes, all filed by the author’s name. There were a few mildly risqué titles too,
Gang Girl
and
Hitch-Hike Hussy
and that sort of thing. Ricky tipped these out of the line and smirked at the lurid covers: scarlet women in various stages of undress, leering fedora’d men with oversized handguns.

Lindstrom maintained a separate three-foot shelf for his pornographic magazines. They were arranged vertically with spines flush, just as good suburban families arranged their
National Geographic
s in neat yellow ranks in the den. Ricky realized the danger of rifling through this shelf—no doubt it was a portion of the library Lindstrom visited again and again—so he removed the magazines one at a time and replaced them with precision. Ricky was not immune to the fascination of pornography and he was no prude, but Lindstrom’s magazines shocked him. Not the garden-variety pornography, of which there was quite a lot, with an emphasis on bondage and a separate subsection with names like
Hellcat Grannies
and
Gray Foxes
. And not the ordinary softcore girlie mags,
Black Velvet
and
Busty
and
Wicked,
the type that included cocktail recipes between the pinups. What jarred Ricky were the others. They were graphically sadistic. It crossed his mind that it might have been illegal merely to possess them. These magazines were printed on cheap newsprint. That the photos were in black and white and poorly shot, underlit, sometimes not even focused, somehow added to their authenticity. Women trussed in contorted positions, with baroque leather strapwork or artlessly calf-roped. Their breasts were clamped or stretched. They were raped, both with objects and by naked, black-hooded, potbellied, small-bottomed men whose penises were not shown. These women winced or stared boggle-eyed at their torturers. In one photo a woman lay dead—playacting, presumably—and bleeding. In another shot, a woman slouched from a whipping post, as if lynched, her arms pulled up behind her at an unnatural, unfake-able angle. Some showed women’s faces badly beaten.

Ricky’s mouth fell open. For a few minutes he forgot the need to sweep the apartment quickly and efficiently then get out. The magazines seemed the opposite of pornography, which existed to stimulate. He could not imagine more dick-shriveling images than these. He stared, transfixed.

Then he saw it.

The images, in a magazine called
Bound,
might have been crime-scene photos from one of the Boston stranglings—except that the magazine was dated July 1958. The “victim” in the photos was a woman in her fifties, wearing a housecoat and girdle. The “strangler” was dressed, ridiculously, in a thievish cap and mask and hepcat jacket, all of which he wore in every photo. In the first shot he wore black pachuco pants; in the rest, no pants or underpants at all. The victim was bound and “raped,” then “strangled” with a garrote of braided sheets and nylons, which was tied off in a bow in the final photo.

Ricky knew.

Something collapsed inside him. The hidden reserve of strength that had carried him through the night of Amy’s murder and the funeral and the long weeks afterward—in an instant, it crumbled. He replaced the magazine precisely, and moved to inspect the rest of the apartment. But his eyes watered. He wiped them with his upper arm. Thoughts of suffering led immediately to Amy. Only a few, Joe and Michael among them, knew the details of the murder. The rest did not want to know. They did not want to dwell on the fact that a family member had been murdered. They were embarrassed by it. In some obscure way, they felt tainted by their association with murder, however blameless the victim. They did not want the sort of negative celebrity that attaches to a murder survivor:
Did you know his daughter/wife/mother was killed by the Strangler?
They did not want to be perceived as carriers of murder, or of whatever trait had attracted it, weakness, bad luck, fate, sin. The sexual nature of the crime only doubled their shame. So they pretended the murder never happened. They acted, all except maybe Michael, as if Amy had died of cancer or in a car accident or in some other nonsensational, nonviolent way. Ricky had done it, too. Maybe having known Amy so intimately, having known her body, he was the one who most needed to block out the details of her murder.

But it was impossible to maintain the fiction here, in the room where the Strangler lived, where he had first formed the idea, where he had retreated after the crime. Here it was all too clear. Amy had not died instantly. Her dying had been a process, a long, excruciating, bloody process. To turn away from that fact, to pretend it had not happened—as if she had passed into fiction, a book we could safely put back on the shelf because the subject did not suit us—was not polite or discreet. It was cowardly. Amy had suffered.

He thought,
Monstrous, monstrous.

More quickly than before, Ricky scanned some of the other shelves. And here was another impossible juxtaposition: Lindstrom’s psychopathic sexual deviance occupied the same mind as an elaborate intellect. His shelves were crowded with Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant,
Leviathan,
the
Principia Ethica, The Critique of Pure Reason
. Most were paperbacks; all were broken-backed and grungy with fingering. Ricky did not know what linked these books, whether they shared a central concern or not. He opened one book, Hobbes’s
Leviathan
. It was full of scribbles, little stars, underlinings, brackets, annotations—the leavings of a ravenous mind that had passed this way.

In the bedroom, in a top drawer where Lindstrom kept his own underwear, he found a pair of women’s panties. Ricky nudged them open with his gloved finger. They were large and made of an elastic rubbery material, like a girdle. They were certainly not Amy’s. They were torn at the waistband and flyspecked with a brown liquid that might have been blood. They were a souvenir of a murder, and Ricky was tempted to take them. But he could not take them without betraying that he had been there. Lindstrom did not know he was being watched and certainly did not know he had been found out; Ricky wanted to preserve that advantage. So he balled up the enormous panties and replaced them in the drawer just as he had found them.

He retraced his steps, raising the shades to their original height, turned off the lights, and let himself out. And here was a final glitch, an unprofessional stumble for which Ricky would reproach himself later.

The door had two locks which had to be relocked. The first, in the knob, was simple enough; it locked merely by closing the door. But above it was a drop lock, an old Schlage, one that should not have given Ricky any trouble. This type of lock was very slightly more difficult to pick because of the added weight of the bolt mechanism, which resisted the rotation of the cylinder. The added resistance required a lock picker to secure the cylinder with enough torque that he could overcome the resistance of that weight and turn the lock, yet not so much torque that the pins mis-set as the pick lifted them. It was a matter of touch—a very, very simple thing, especially for an accomplished pick man like Ricky who took pride in his skill and practiced constantly. But he fumbled with the lock. When he tried to rotate the cylinder, it jammed—the pins were mis-set—and he had to start again. Another mis-set, and he had to repeat the process a third time. The whole episode took just seconds. But it was a fumble, and he might have been put in a bad position if someone had come along. No one did come, luckily, and Ricky did manage to relock the door. But the lapse troubled him. It was not a clean job.