The Strangler (26 page)

54

Station One.

Joe pushed into the lobby from the wagon house, into a whirl of coming and going, cops drifting in like a rising tide for the shift change. He meant to get up the stairs to his locker, grab his things, get his car, which was double-parked, run out to the house for supper with Kat and Little Joe, then bolt back into town for a detail at Hayes-Bickford’s which he needed because they paid cash on the spot, no waiting, and he needed to turn that cash around to make his nut with Gargano, who cut him no slack for all the work he was doing, all the risks he was taking. Joe always rushed through the stationhouse now. He could not bear to linger. Discreet as he had been about moonlighting as a strong-arm, among cops a taint had attached to him. No one ever said anything. He could not even be sure it was really there. But he seemed to hear disdain in their voices. He thought they swerved to avoid him in the hallway, as if he stank. They fell silent when he entered the locker room. It was not simply that he was crooked, even outstandingly so. No one knew the true extent of it, Joe was sure, and anyway the rule among cops was “see no evil, speak no evil.” The cops who were not on the sleeve, roughly half the force, even if they did begrudge the others their little envelopes of cash, kept their mouths resolutely shut. No, in Joe’s case the real problem was that he had managed the whole business so badly. He’d been a fool. He was marked for a bad end, and no one wanted to be standing nearby when it arrived.

The lieutenant on the desk was a hump named Walsh. Big-bodied, dough-faced loudmouth hump with gray hair spit-combed back over his scalp, and a pencil-line smirk. Kind of guy who always had something to say. Walsh called to Joe, “Hey, Detective”—a message in the formality, a jab—“Conroy wants to see you. He’s in the pool room.”

“What’s he want?”

“To give you a medal. The hell do I know?”

“Well, what did he—? Never mind.”

Joe cast a yearning look toward the stairs. This was the contingency he could not afford, the surprise that disrupted the whole schedule. Already he began to imagine the complications rippling through the rest of the night: the chilly phone call to Kat to say he would have to skip dinner again, the empty promises he would utter about making it up sometime, and his own sour mood as he loafed around Hayes-Bick’s all night. Fuck, he thought. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

There was a pool table in a room on the first floor of Station One. No one was sure why it was there, who had put it there, or how long it had been there. Certainly no one played much pool. There seemed to be a lot of miles on it, though. The baize had gone milk-white and bald in places, particularly where the balls were racked and where the cue ball was spotted.

Joe found Brendan Conroy alone in this room, contentedly maneuvering his way through a solitary game. Conroy’s bulk tended to shrink the table by comparison. In his hands the cue seemed foreshortened, child-sized. But his game was surprisingly delicate and artful. As Joe entered, Conroy neatly pocketed a ball in the corner and drew the cue ball back toward the center of the table with biting backspin.

“You a pool shark, Brendan?”

“How much you got in your pocket?”

“Nothin’. Some gum maybe.”

“Guess you won’t find out, then.”

Conroy surveyed the table. He leaned over the end—stiffly, impeded by his belly—and tapped a deft little touch shot in which the cue ball dawdled from the center of the table to the rail, shouldering the seven ball into the side pocket as it passed. He came around to the side of the table to smack the next ball home along the rail with a happy clack.

“You come here to play pool? ’Cause I got to go. Kat’s waiting. She’ll have my balls in a vise.”

“Let her wait. It’ll be good for her.”

“Jesus, Bren, you don’t know. I got enough trouble.”

“That’s why I’m here. To ease your trouble. You’re moving.”

“Yeah? Where now?”

“Vice and Narcotics.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

Conroy lowered his eyes to the level of the table, seeking a clear path for the cue ball. “I shit…you…not.”

“You want me to chase hookers around all day?”

“Somebody’s got to do it.” Conroy boxed the cue ball into a muddle at the far end of the table where it bumbled around without purpose. “Now look what you made me do.”

“Brendan, if it’s all the same to you, I’d just assume stay where I am. I’ve got some things workin’ here.”

“It’s not all the same to me. I extended myself on your behalf, boyo.”

“I know. It’s just—”

“I extended myself and now I expect you to say thank you and listen to sense. You may not think much of Vice and Narcotics, but it’s a step up. More money. No victims, no pressure. You want to make captain someday? You’ve got to learn every aspect of the business. Learn your trade. A good detective can go anywhere, Homicide, Burglary, Vice and Narcotics, doesn’t matter.”

“I’m no detective, Bren. We both know that.”

“You’re a good police, Joe.”

Joe did not answer.

“You’re a good police, and Vice and Narcotics is where you’re needed at the moment. And it will serve your purpose as well. Two birds with one stone. Take you away from the North End for a while. Get you over to Berkeley Street; time you started meeting some people who matter, and stop pissing people off.”

“What’s that mean?”

“This is a small town, boyo.”

“And?”

“Little birdie tells me you paid a visit to Farley Sonnenshein.”

Joe said nothing.

“Now, why would you go and bother a man like that?”

“I was working a case.”

“A B-and-E.”

“It’s not just a B-and-E.”

“No? What is it, then? A few broken windows. They didn’t even take anything. What’ve you got? Trespassing, malicious destruction—misdemeanors. And for that you barge in on a man like Sonnenshein? Foolish.”

“B-and-E in the nighttime isn’t a misdemeanor.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me, boyo. I don’t need a law lesson from you.”

“The case won’t go down, Brendan.”

“It’ll go down. They all do. Someone else’ll make it go down.”

“It’s my case. I want to close it.”

“Good for you. That’s admirable. Now forget it. Go chase hookers and stay out of trouble. Someday you’ll thank me. And let’s leave Sonnenshein alone. They’re the chosen people, Joe. Who are we to bother ’em? Lord knows, He didn’t choose us.” Conroy’s pale blue eyes fixed on Joe until the matter was settled. He then produced an envelope from an inside coat pocket, laid it on the side of the table, and went back to his game.

“What’s that?”

“Going-away present.”

“From who?”

“So many questions, Joe.”

“It’s from Sonnenshein, isn’t it?”

“It’s from a general fund.”

“Well, I don’t want it.”

“Oh, don’t get your shorts all in a bunch, Joe. Every cop gets a little something when he leaves this station, every cop who’s willing. It’s their way of saying thank you.”

“I’ve been thanked enough.”

“Suit yourself.”

Conroy returned his attention to the table. He frowned.

Joe turned to go, but that envelope jerked his leash. He came to the table reluctantly, against his own will, and peeked inside it. He put the envelope down and turned for the door again.

Conroy’s frown deepened. The cue ball was hemmed in. It had been a bad break. There was one shot, perhaps: the ten ball to a corner pocket. But the three ball obstructed the path just enough to spoil the shot. Conroy considered. He extended the cue and nudged the offending ball a half rotation aside.

Joe left the room and closed the door behind him.

Conroy clacked the ten ball home. He sighed,
ahh.

Joe opened the door again, marched to the table, grabbed the envelope, and left.

55

Boston State Hospital—formerly the Boston Lunatic Hospital—occupied a two-hundred-acre campus in Mattapan, most of which was a virgin wood. A wrought-iron fence enclosed the entire circumference of the property. The few scattered buildings were red brick, vaguely federalist, with shallow roofs and white moldings and trim. The bigger buildings looked like old industrial mills. The smaller ones might have been little schoolhouses or private homes.

The administration building to which Ricky was directed was one of these, a three-story brick house with a white portico. The forest seemed to be closing around this structure. Trees overhung it, vines crawled over its surface, the grass out front was high and weedy.

Like a lot of city boys, Ricky had no real feeling for nature. The work of men was done in cities, and what lay between cities was best hopped over in a plane or sped through on a highway. When circumstances compelled him to the beach or out into the woods, he was uneasy. And in town, where nature erupted out of the concrete, as in this forest in the middle of Mattapan, it was the forest that seemed artificial—a big green obstruction to be got around on the way to where you were going. A big green pain in the ass.

But these woods were not so benign. There were no people around despite the warm weather. When Ricky had been a kid—the Daleys’ house in Savin Hill was just a few miles away—there had been more than three thousand patients here. Now a policy of “deinstitutionalization” had nearly emptied the hospital. Only a few hundred souls remained. The grounds were shabby and dilapidated, almost ghostly. Soon these buildings would be abandoned altogether, the forest would close around them, and that would be that.

Why did all that bother Ricky? A few old buildings moldering in the woods, an old insane asylum being decommissioned—what was the big deal?

But Ricky’s mood remained stubbornly shadowed. He was not so good at playacting anymore. He was no longer a ventriloquist’s dummy; he was too much himself. Amy would have gotten a kick out of that, of course. The thing she had most wished for—Ricky’s genuine presence, his new capacity to feel deeply, to ache—had come about only as a product of her dying. It was a joke she would have appreciated.

Would it be profane of Ricky to enjoy what he was doing, tracking down Amy’s killer? He thought it was precisely what Amy would have wanted. She certainly appreciated the pleasures of sleuthing, of following the clues, feeling the knot relax and come undone in your hand. More important, Amy knew the consolation of hard work. She knew it was all essentially a distraction. The dailyness and busyness of work obscured the bleak realities—that life was short and pointless and precarious and so on and so on. Why think about it? Better to keep your head down, keep on working. Finding Amy’s killer was more productive than grieving. Maybe it was grieving.

At the administration building, a nurse escorted Ricky to the office of Dr. Mark Keating. The title
Chief of Psychiatry
was stenciled on the frosted glass in the office door.

Inside, the doctor hunched over his desk. His elbows rested on the desktop. The fingers of his right hand picked at his scalp. Dr. Keating hoisted up his head, as if its weight was becoming too much for his neck. “Mr. Daley?” he said, puzzled.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. You’re not the one I spoke to.”

“That was my brother Michael. He gave me your name. It’s about your patient, Arthur Nast.”

“Former patient.” The doctor gestured toward the chair in front of his desk. “I think I told your brother when we spoke: I’m bound by confidentiality. There’s not much I can tell you.”

Ricky sat. “I just have one question.”

The doctor grunted, skeptical. He plowed his fingers into his hair and left them there, with hair kinking out between them. To Ricky, he resembled an old baboon, with his shoulders hunched and his baggy face and electrified hair.

Ricky had a copy of the morning’s
Traveler,
quarter-folded. He laid the newspaper on the desk. On page one, below the fold, a headline read,

FORMER STRANGLER SUSPECT FOUND DEAD

A small photo showed Arthur Nast, gaunt, bug-eyed. The photo was misleading. It did not suggest Nast’s inhuman qualities, his gigantic size and strength, his Martian, distorted features. He looked merely like a thug.

The doctor glanced at the story and sighed.

“This didn’t happen, did it?” Ricky picked up the paper and read aloud, “‘Arthur Nast, once a leading suspect in the Boston Strangler murders, was found dead early last evening in his locked cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, a secure mental facility. Nast apparently swallowed a fatal dose of an antidepressant medication which he was supposed to take regularly but which he hoarded instead, apparently for the purpose of suicide.’ Now, that didn’t happen, did it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Very much.”

“To who? Nobody cared about him when he was alive.”

“Nobody cares about him now, including me. It matters because the truth matters. So, do you believe Arthur Nast killed himself?”

“I think you’d better tell me who you are.”

“My friend was Amy Ryan, the last girl who got strangled.”

“Ah. And you think Arthur did it?”

“No. Arthur was in Bridgewater when it happened.”

“Why the interest, then? Why not let Arthur have some peace in death, finally?”

“Because I want my peace now.”

“I see. You’re not a policeman, are you?”

Ricky shook his head.

“No, you don’t sound like one. Well, look, there’s not a lot I can tell you. I wasn’t there. I haven’t seen Arthur in several months.”

“You knew him as well as anyone.”

“Alright, then, to be frank, no, I rather doubt that Arthur killed himself. Certainly he did not have the intelligence or the technical knowledge to do it that way—to form the plan, to determine what a fatal dose would be, to hide the pills until he’d accumulated enough. That’s all well beyond Arthur’s capacity. I doubt Arthur would ever have considered suicide in the first place. I don’t think it was in his makeup. He never voiced any inclination toward suicide. He was never depressed, to my knowledge. Of course I can’t rule it out, but it strikes me as very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I can’t imagine who would want to kill Arthur, either.”

“I can.”

“Arthur had no enemies in Bridgewater.”

“He did. He just didn’t know it. Someone did not want him to confess to any of the Strangler murders. Someone didn’t want to see DeSalvo cleared. If Arthur Nast talked, if he laid claim to the murders and described them convincingly—even more convincingly than DeSalvo, which would not be hard to do—then the whole thing would start to fall apart, wouldn’t it? How could people go on thinking DeSalvo was the Strangler if another, better suspect started confessing to the same crimes?”

“Who are you accusing, then? The docs? The guards? The prisoners?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who put those pills in Nast’s hand, but I know why they did it: They’re covering up.”

“May I ask you a question, Mr. Daley?” A skeptical, honeyed tone came into the doctor’s voice. It became the voice of a therapist. The shrink apparently thought Ricky himself was a little crazy, a little grief-sick, delusional, conspiracy-minded. “If you prove all this, a cover-up, if you do find the ‘real Strangler’ who killed your friend Miss…”

“Ryan.”

“Miss Ryan—what then?”

“Then I’ll see that justice is done.”

“How?”

“I’ll see him go to prison. He’ll know he didn’t get away with it.”

“What then?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You said what you want is peace. Will you have it? What then?”

Ricky blinked. His mouth drooped open as if he were about to respond. But his mind, the thought-stream so hard to silence earlier, had gone utterly quiet.
What then?