The Strangler (21 page)

41

Margaret Daley emerged from the bathroom after showering. She scrubbed her hair dry with a hand towel while simultaneously pinning her elbows against her side to secure the bath towel wrapped around her. When she had finished, she stood before a mirror. There was a man in the doorway. Her body jerked and she yelped, “Michael!”

He slouched against the doorpost in his courtroom suit. On his way to work, presumably. He had lost weight. His eyes were baggy with exhaustion.

“What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“Your boyfriend left the door unlocked on his way out.”

“My boyfriend? Michael, are you mental? What’s wrong with you?”

“He’s not your boyfriend?”

“I’m a little old for boyfriends. It’s none of your business anyways what he is.”

“Do you love him?”

“Oh my Lord, Michael, it’s too early to have this conversation. I’m not even dressed yet.” She minced into the bathroom—a big woman simulating a dainty woman’s walk; Michael was not sure whether she walked this way out of habit or because she was self-conscious about her body being so exposed—and she came back out wearing a frayed terry bathrobe. “Is that what you’re so upset about, that I’m with Brendan now?”

“Do you love him?”

“Michael, I’m not going to answer questions like that. It’s absolutely none of your business. Are you crazy, showing up like this in the morning? What did you do, lurk around outside till you saw Brendan go?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t have called?”

“I thought we should talk face-to-face.”

“Michael, sit down.” She flung the blanket over the unmade bed and sat down on the edge. “Sit down.”

He frowned at the bed. “I’d rather stand.”

“Michael, do you feel alright? You know, everybody thinks you’re going mental with this thing.”

“I feel fine.”

“Are you drinking?”

“No.”

“Are you…on drugs?”

“Not yet.”

“Then what is this? You’re like a crazy man already. What’s going on with you?”

“I just don’t like your boyfriend, that’s all.”

“Stop calling him my boyfriend. You sound ridiculous.”

“What should I call him? ‘Daddy’?”

“You call him Brendan. That’s his name, it’s what you’ve been calling him for thirty years. And you better watch your tone with me, young man. I’m still entitled to a little respect even if your father’s not here to keep you three in line.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much. We have Brendan to keep us in line now.”

“Michael, come here. Sit down here now.”

He sat beside her on the bed. The adjacent night table, Joe Senior’s night table, was littered with trash, crumpled tissues, a paperback novel thick as a beefsteak, a nearly empty water glass.

“Michael, you have to stop this. Whatever it is you have against Brendan, it’s time to put it away, you hear me? I can’t stand this. I don’t recognize you anymore. It’s like you’re another person. Where’s my Michael, hm?”

“Do you love him?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes all the difference. It makes all the difference.”

“Why? I don’t get you. Why?”

“Because you had a husband.”

“Had. He’s dead, Michael. I’m not. Did you want me to jump into the box with him and the both of us get buried?”

“I want you to act—I want you to act like you respect him.”

“Of course I respect him. I was married to him for thirty-three years. How could I not respect him?”

“Then what are you doing with this…pig?”

“Pig! Michael!”

“You’re right. That’s not fair. There are plenty of perfectly respectable pigs out there.”

“Michael, where is all this coming from? This…hate? You’ve known Brendan your whole life. Your father—who you seem to think was some kind of saint—”

“I didn’t say that. Not a saint. Not a saint. Just a decent guy. Showed up for work every day, never cheated, did right by his family, that’s all I’m saying. And after that, after forty years almost of being with a good guy, you settle for
this
? Brendan Conroy isn’t worth the half of my father and you know it. You can’t even compare the two. It’s like apples and…a pig.”

“Brendan is a good man.”

“Oh, stop. He’s an obnoxious blowhard. And worse, Ma, believe me. Much worse.”

“Worse?”

“There’s things you don’t know.”

“Oh,
pssh.
Now you really do sound like a mental case.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that Brendan was there the day Dad died?”

“No.”

“That the man you crawl into bed with, who puts his hands on you, who touches you, is the last man who saw your husband alive?”

“Michael, stop this!”

“Then he told some cock-and-bull story about a kid they never found? Your husband was murdered and Brendan was there and they never found the guy. That doesn’t bother you?”

Michael shuffled to the bureau. His fingers sought out the small items she had collected there on a painted tin tray: a Hummel figurine, hair clips, her rosary, coins. In the top middle drawer, which was open, the brown handle of Joe Senior’s service pistol was half buried among the stockings and girdles. He looked back at his mother sitting on the bed. The sheets were mussed. She had twisted to face him. On a wall in the corner was a photo of the three boys when they were fifteen, thirteen, and nine respectively. Nearby was a picture of Jesus with his long hands pressed together in prayer. The picture reminded him of the church, and the church reminded him:

“Do you…? The two of you…”

“Do we what?”

“…use…birth control?”

“Oh my God! Michael! How dare you? That’s it! This conversation is over!
He’s
a pig?”

“Alright, alright!”

“You’re the pig! Pig! Pig!” She shook herself, like a dog shaking water out of its fur. “Oh!”

He said nothing.

“Oh!” she blurted again.

“There are things about Brendan you don’t know, Ma. I don’t think you should see him.”

“Oh, you don’t? Well, that’s just too bad. I’m a big girl. I’ll decide who I see and who I don’t see.”

“This is serious. There’s things Amy knew.”

“Things like what, Michael? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Amy thought—” He checked himself. She would think he was insane even if he credited the story to Amy. She would think he was insane just for believing it. So he hedged. He did not accuse Brendan Conroy, quite. “Brendan knows more about Dad’s murder than he lets on. That’s what Amy thought.”

“Amy thought that, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“You know, this isn’t the first I’ve heard this. Brendan told me what you said the other night. He thinks you’re a nutcase, too, you know. I defended you, but you know what? I think maybe Brendan was right. You might really need help, Michael.”

“Then help me.”

“How? Take you to McLean’s, put you in a padded room?”

“Don’t see him, just for a while. For me. Do it for me.”

“I can’t do that. You know I’m not going to do that.”

“Why not? Tell him you’re sick, tell him you need time to think, it’s moving too fast, you have cancer, whatever. Mum, trust me, women say these things to me all the time. He’ll get the message.”

“But I don’t want to not see him.”

“You do love him.”

She groaned, exasperated. “What is this love-him, not-love-him? Why do I have to love him or not love him? I don’t even know what that means. Do I love him like I loved your father? No, because I’m not eighteen anymore and neither is Brendan. So what is it supposed to feel like, Michael, for me? Why can’t
I
decide? Why can’t I just be with someone? It’s no sin to want to be with someone, you know. Is it such a sin to not want to be alone?”

“No, it’s no sin. Just a mistake.”

42

Claire Downey’s desk at the
Observer
was in a corner of the newsroom, where the racket of clacking wire-service teletypes joined the general clamor of the room—the arrhythmic
whack-
[pause]
-whack-whack
of typewriters, the men in rumpled white shirts speaking in raised voices like a ship’s crew shouting into the wind. At the center of Claire’s desk was a big Royal typewriter. The logo on it had been written over with a marker: “Royal” had been altered to “GoyaKOD.” Surrounding the typewriter were papers, a wire basket, folded newspapers, a Kent cigarette carton converted into a pencil tray, an ominous-looking spike to impale papers. All these things seemed to have collected at random, as if blown onto the desk by a swirling breeze.

Michael hovered near the desk until a woman approached. She wore a plain gray skirt with a white blouse. Her face was broad and square, pretty in a girlish, quick-smiling way. It was framed by brown hair, which she parted on one side of her forehead and pinned on the other, like a bobbysoxer. Michael was disappointed. He’d been expecting Katharine Hepburn.

“Are you Claire?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Michael Daley. My brother Rick and Amy Ryan—”

“Of course.”

“She and Rick…”

She smiled. “I know who you are, Michael. Amy talked about you. I saw you at the funeral, from a distance.”

“You have a minute to talk?”

She glanced up at the clock: two-fifteen. “A minute, not much more. I’m on a deadline. The evening edition.”

“I just have a few questions about Amy.”

“Fifty-five seconds.”

“Okay. You worked with Amy on the Strangler story?”

“Yes.”

“You shared a byline. Did that mean you worked together on all those stories?”

“For the most part. We did our own reporting. We wrote together.”

“Why did you stop tracking the story?”

“We didn’t. The story stopped moving. DeSalvo confessed, and the investigation stopped. The story now is the trial. When the trial starts, we’ll cover it—I’ll cover it.”

“What about the murders themselves?”

“Our reporting was mostly about the police work. Amy and I weren’t investigating the murders; we were investigating the investigation.”

“So you never checked into other suspects? Arthur Nast? Kurt Lindstrom? Never contacted either of them? Never interviewed them?”

“No. We weren’t crazy. Well, Amy might have been crazy. I wasn’t.”

“So Nast or Lindstrom never threatened her, never had a grudge?”

“As far as I know, she never spoke to them.”

“Was she having trouble with anyone else? Threats?”

“No.”

“Did she ever talk about Brendan Conroy?”

“Brendan Conroy? In what way?”

“As someone she was investigating?”

“No. Brendan Conroy was someone she used as a source.”

“On the Strangler stories?”

“On all sorts of stories.”

“What about my father’s murder? Did she ever talk about it?”

“Not with me.”

“She
never
talked about how Conroy’s partner got killed?”

“It was a big case; Amy may have talked about it. But I don’t remember anything specific.” She laid her left hand on Michael’s arm. “I’m sorry about your father, of course.”

Michael noted the wedding band on her finger.

“So what was Amy working on, then?”

“As far as I know, she was preoccupied with two stories: the Strangler and the rats in the West End.”

“Rats in the West End? That’s not a crime story.”

“Two-legged rats.”

“Ah. What about them?”

“I don’t know. But I can guess. There’s a lot of money to be made on that project. That’s the kind of cheese those rats like. Money. You want to figure out what the story was? Find the cheese.”

“How?”

She pointed at the graffiti on her typewriter. “Know what this means? Amy wrote that. It was her little joke. Goyakod. It means: Get Off Your Ass, Knock On Doors. That’s what we do here. That’s all there is to it. Go to the West End and start knocking on doors.”

“But there aren’t any doors in the West End anymore.”

“See? This job isn’t as easy as it looks. Your minute’s up.” She sat down, sandwiched a piece of carbon paper between two sheets, and rolled them into the typewriter platen. “Go. If you find anything, let me know. Now go. Good luck.”

Michael did go, but he paused to watch her from the doorway. Across the room, she sat with her shoulders erect, touch-typing quickly, eyes on her notes. She was the only woman in the room, and easily the best typist. The men tended to tamp the keys with their two index fingers. They held pencils clenched in their teeth or wedged behind an ear and forgotten there. They glanced up nervously at the clock on the wall.

Then and there Michael fell for Claire a little, despite the wedding ring, or because of it. He had always been prone to these little swoons. He could not help it. He found women irresistibly affecting, and there was an onanistic promiscuity in the way he developed and abandoned crushes. But they came less often now. Love is a sort of hope, and Michael was not feeling much of that lately.

43

Seated in a Barcelona chair that forced him into a reclining position just a foot or so off the floor, Joe eyed the receptionist behind the desk, this blond broad with a swirl of hair like whipped cream whom Joe would have liked to bend over the desk right then and there. He tried to haul himself up out of the chair, but it would not let him go. The seat cushions were tipped backward, and the chair was so low he could not get his legs underneath him. The effect was like tossing a sandbag onto Joe’s lap. He could not get up.

The receptionist smiled agreeably.

Rather than struggle like an overturned beetle, Joe decided to wait until she looked away. He occupied himself by imagining her naked. He considered the cost of liberating her from her clothes, the time, the money, the risk that this chick would be the one that finally snapped Kat’s patience. The receptionist was probably worth all that, depending on her ass, which Joe still had not seen and which could change the whole calculation. Probably it was a big, majestic thing, like an enormous cleaved peach, which was Joe’s type. But what if her ass turned out to be one of those no-ass asses that left the back of a skirt to droop, or an overripe ass that slumped like rotten fruit? So much depended on the ass.

The receptionist busied herself with papers on her desk. The phone in front of her was a sleek white plastic thing that resembled a sleeping cat, and Joe admired it. It looked expensive. It rang and she answered it briskly, “Sonnenshein Development, Mr. Sonnenshein’s office, this is Ingrid.”

How would it feel to lay that phone against his own ear? It must be light, lighter than the prewar models at the station made of heavy black Bakelite, their cords wrapped in gutta-percha. And of course it would still carry the intimate warmth of Ingrid’s ear.

In order to fuck her and do it the right way, he would have to take her out, and that would cost money, which he did not have. Then there was the time it would take sitting in a restaurant or a bar, time he did not have because he had to work details and work off the money he owed. Also, he never saw his kid anymore. He would have to make that up to Little Joe as well, after everything else. The whole thing did not make sense. But there she was, and with an addict’s logic he rationalized,
If I was hungry, I’d eat, so…

“You ever sit in these things?” Joe said.

“No.”

“This has gotta be the most uncomfortable chair on earth. You should try it.”

“Why would I want to sit in the most uncomfortable chair on earth?”

“Because it’s the most of something.”

“Mm, the most of a bad thing.”

“Yeah, well, I know, but most is most.”

Joe rolled out of the chair as if he were falling out of a hammock. On his feet again, he had a look down at the receptionist, who looked right back, and there was a little stir in Joe’s groin, the machinery twitching awake. “You like this job, workin’ here, answering the phone?”

“Sure.”

“Must meet some interesting people. Big shots.”

“Some, I guess.”

He handed her a business card. “You ever need anything, help with any kind of trouble, you give me a call. Sometimes it helps to have a friend.”

She dangled the card by a corner as if it were dripping wet. “A friend?”

“That’s right. Everybody can use a friend.”

“To help me out of trouble.”

“Out, in, whatever.”

Something passed between them, a look, which Joe took to be an agreement of some kind.

Then there was the sound of footsteps and a change in the atmosphere of the room, like the drop in barometric pressure that precedes a storm, and Farley Sonnenshein came out of his office with his hand extended. “Detective. I’m sorry I kept you.”

“Thank you for seeing me, sir.”

“Come in, come in. Coffee? Did Ingrid already offer?”

“She did. I’m all set.”

“A cop who doesn’t drink coffee? I better watch myself.”

Sonnenshein was tall, six-two or six-three, and handsome in an agreeable, unpretty way. He was nearly bald. What little hair he had was cut very short, which made it hard to determine his precise age. He might have been anywhere from fifty to sixty-five.

He led Joe into his office, which continued the spare steel-and-blond-wood scheme of the reception area. There were trophies on the shelves and walls: shovels from groundbreaking ceremonies, hard hats, architectural drawings, photos including one of Sonnenshein with President Kennedy.

The developer directed Joe to a little seating area where they could face each other without a desk in between. Joe sat down and crossed his legs, left ankle on right knee. Sonnenshein crossed his legs, too, but in a more elegant way, knee on knee. Joe tried to imitate this position, but his thighs were too big to do it right and squeezing them together compressed his testicles painfully, so after a graceless attempt he reverted to his original pose.

Sonnenshein was Jewish but looked like a Mayflower Yankee, which made him doubly foreign to Joe, a member of two exotic tribes. Three, if you counted the rich as a distinct supra-ethnicity, as Joe certainly did. Guys like Farley Sonnenshein had been stepping on Irishmen the better part of a hundred years now. The hell with that picture of Sonnenshein and JFK, the Irish martyr. Joe knew full well how rich Yankees and rich Jews saw Kennedy: The president had molted off his Irishness and evolved into a virtual Yankee, a male Grace Kelly. And Joe knew how the rich still perceived guys like Joe Daley: Dorchester micks, common as dirt. It was all Joe would ever be. Queasy with deference and resentment, he was anxious to leave before he’d asked his first question.

“Well,” Sonnenshein said, “what can I do to help you?” He seemed to feel no apprehension about a visit from the police.

Joe reviewed the facts of the B-and-E at Moe Wasserman’s grocery, the four apes in a dark-colored sedan with baseball bats, their lack of interest in the cash that was in the register, and Wasserman’s subsequent identification of one of the thugs working construction on the West End site.

“I see,” Sonnenshein said. “So you want to know whether I sent that gang to roust the old man from his—what was it, a grocery store? The answer is no.”

“So how does this guy Paul Marolla find his way onto your construction crew?”

“I have no idea. I certainly don’t keep track of individual laborers. On a project of this scale we use so many subcontractors, I rather doubt this Marolla works for us anyway. Most of the crews on the site are subs. Have you ever worked construction, Detective?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know how it works. I have my own crews, but I’m also a broker. I bring together the people needed to make the project happen.”

“And the shopkeeper? What do you remember about that building, the little old man who refused to sell?”

“Well, I know you read the newspapers, Joe—may I call you Joe?—so you realize there have been a lot of cases like that in the West End. Lots of little old ladies and little old men. You remember Mrs. Blood? She became something of a
cause célèbre
. And of course I was cast as the villain. No matter. I take my lumps. So be it. If your question is ‘Do I remember the little old grocer near North Station?’ then my answer is no. If you’re asking me whether I remember the
building
near North Station that delayed a portion of this project, then the answer is yes, I most certainly do. Of course.

“But this is nothing personal, Joe. I don’t know what that man may have told you, and I’m certain he feels abused—how else could he feel?—but this is just business. More important, this is about a project that’s vital to our city, Joe. Absolutely vital to our future. We can’t forget: For every old man or old woman who is inconvenienced, there will be a hundred or a thousand who benefit, directly or indirectly. You know, Jack Kennedy had a saying, ‘to govern is to choose.’ Choices sometimes have to be made. Nobody enjoys making them, I assure you. There are no bad guys here, Joe.”

“Somebody broke up this guy’s store—”

“You’re a determined man, Joe, a real detective, I appreciate that. But I’m asking you to expand your focus just for a moment, see the big picture. Did you know that at the end of World War One Boston was the fourth-largest city in the country? Do you know what it is now, Joe? Thirteenth, and still falling. In the last twenty years, while the whole country has been booming, only one major city actually lost population: Boston. You see what I’m getting at, Joe? We can feel sorry for the little guys who get hurt, but this city is fighting for its life. I’m sorry for Moe What’s-his-name and his shop, but what I’m really worried about here is: Will this city live or will it die?”

“Hey, alls I’m asking is who smashed up that shop?”

“I don’t know.”

“No offense, but the one with the motive is you.”

“I had no motive to do that, Joe. We obtain these properties through perfectly legal means. The city and state take them through eminent domain. Why would we ever want to get involved in that bullyboy stuff? We don’t operate that way. We don’t have to.”

“Mr. Wasserman says you won’t pay him what the building’s worth. Says you two are in a beef over it.”

“What’s any building worth? Whatever the seller decides?” Sonnenshein smiled, taking Joe into his confidence. “There is a charming local custom in this town, Joe: A covered wagon comes through, and everyone tries to rob it. It’s one reason so little gets done. After a while, the covered wagons decide to go elsewhere.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“No, I imagine you don’t.” Sonnenshein nodded. “Let me assure you, I have no information about your shopkeeper being roughed up. I don’t know anything about it. I would never do anything that would endanger the success of a project like this one. There’s just too much at stake. I think that answers all your questions. Now, was there anything else, Detective?”

“Um, no, I guess that’s it.” Joe nodded, defeated. “I’m sorry to bother you. If I think of anything else—”

“It’s no bother. No bother at all. You think of anything else, you go right ahead and call me, Joe. I don’t like the idea that people are out doing these things to make me out like a thug.”