The Strangler (7 page)

“No, no, I estimate myself just right. I’m not a detective. I can’t even figure out the cases on
Perry Mason
.”

Byron chortled. “No one’s asking you to be a detective. We’re asking you—no, we’re telling you—to be part of a team, a team that needs your particular skills.”

“What skills? I don’t have skills. Ask anyone.”

“Michael, do you know what I see when I look at you?” Byron fixed his eyes on Michael. “I see a bright young lawyer who is satisfied doing work that is beneath him. He comes from a family of cops, he has a good mind, yet he wants no part of the biggest murder case that ever happened in this city. It makes me wonder, what is he so afraid of? What does he want?”

“Maybe I just don’t want to touch murder cases. Cuts a little close to home, you know?”

“I see. Your father.” The city rustled outside. Byron considered it a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Michael. You help me here, catch me a strangler, and I promise you, you can try eminent domain cases to your heart’s content.”

10

It had begun in the summer of 1962. On June 14, a rainy Thursday evening, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Helena Jalakian was raped and murdered in her apartment near Symphony Hall. The case drew little attention. The newspapers reported that she had been strangled but no details were given. Boston averaged about a murder a week; there did not appear to be anything exceptional about this one. But the stranglings continued. Four more in the next four weeks. And by July, in the humid heat of summer, the panic was on. There was a lull from mid-July to mid-August—no murders. Then two in two days, August 19 and 21. There could be no doubt that the seven stranglings were all the work of one man. At first the newspapers did not know what to call him. They tried out Phantom and Fiend, even The Silk Stocking Murderer, before they finally settled on The Strangler. But they believed in him, they believed he had murdered all those women, and so did everyone else.

And why not? The cases were similar. The victims were all older white women. The youngest, Jalakian, was fifty-six; the oldest was seventy-five. All lived alone, quietly, in smaller apartment buildings, three to six stories high, mostly nineteenth-century structures of stone or brick with thick walls which, it was noted, were highly soundproof. The victims dressed neatly. They looked younger than their true ages. To some, they even resembled one another. With one exception, they had been killed midweek, Monday through Thursday; perhaps the Strangler prowled on his way to or from work. The killer left a signature, too: the garrotes, which were braided together from the victims’ own stockings and cords from their housecoats, were tied off in a big theatrical bow around their necks. The murder scenes were all bloody; the victims had been beaten and raped. Some of the corpses were mutilated. Some were arranged in obscene poses.

The police had no witnesses, no physical evidence of any real value, no sign of forced entry. The police commissioner, a former college football player and by-the-book FBI man named Edmund McNamara, could not do much more than order more and more overtime for detectives. Over and over, he admonished women to keep their doors locked and not open them to strangers, to buy a watchdog, and to call a special emergency phone number if they had any information—DE 8-1212. It became known as the “Strangler Number.” But no arrests.

It was the summer of the Strangler, the summer no one slept.

Then the Strangler went quiet. September passed without a murder, and October and November.

On December 5, he struck. The victim was a twenty-year-old colored girl, very pretty, a student, killed in the apartment she shared with two roommates. On New Year’s Eve, he killed another young girl, this one white, twenty-three, a lovely blond secretary. These two cases did not fit the Strangler pattern. The victims were young, one was a Negro. Both had been strangled, but neither had any external injuries, nor had they been raped. The secretary was found lying in bed, neatly tucked in. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully. To the city Homicide cops, it seemed unlikely that the Strangler had killed these girls. But the press and public instantly credited them to the Strangler. A lone villain in the classical mode made a neater story—easier for the newspapermen to write, easier for readers to grasp.

In 1963 the stranglings were erratic and widely spaced: in March, a sixty-eight-year-old woman in the city of Lawrence, a half-hour’s drive from Boston; in May, a young girl in Cambridge; nothing all summer, then another young girl in September, again outside the city. Through it all, the police and public retained their different views of the cases. The cops saw a dozen murder cases, perhaps related, perhaps not. The public saw only the Boston Strangler.

On November 22, hours after President Kennedy died, the Strangler struck one last time, killing Joanne Feeney in the West End. Another old woman, another obscenely posed corpse. It was a return to the form of those first killings in the summer of ’62, as if the Strangler was announcing,
I’m still here.

11

The murder books. In each there was a photo of the victim as she had looked around the time of her murder. There was more, of course. A murder book was the repository of every scrap of paper the police had compiled about a homicide, and Michael dutifully slogged through all thirteen of the Strangler books—detectives’ reports, witness statements, field interrogation reports, autopsy and crime-lab reports, mug shots. But it was the snapshots of the victims’ faces that gave him a frisson of mortality. They were such ordinary women, stern-looking old ladies with outdated names, Eva, Helena, Lillian, Margaret, and smiling pretty young girls named Beverly and Judy and Patty.

In the murder-scene photos Michael searched for those same faces, as if the reality in the earlier photograph would continue until canceled; only a photograph could disprove another photograph. But he could not recognize the women’s faces on their dead bodies. In the wide shots, of bodies outstretched, or trussed, or tossed like rag dolls, the victims seemed to have no faces at all. A smudge, a stain, that was all he could make out. Even in the remorseless granular close-ups of the victims’ heads, he could not find the living women’s faces.

Soon, too soon, he decided he could not stare at the pictures anymore. Enough. It was morbid. The cycle of emotions stirred by violent images was similar to that stirred by pornographic ones: shock, fascination, monotony, finally revulsion. Worse, mortal questions—what did it mean, exactly, to die?—were yawning before him. He slipped the pictures back into their manila envelopes. Decided he would maintain from the outset a greater emotional distance from the whole business. He would reduce these thirteen murders to data. He would organize the essential facts of each case, chart it all in columns labeled
Date, Location, V’s Age, Details of Attack, Other Evidence, Witnesses, Suspects.
Patterns would naturally emerge.

“6/14/62…Back Bay…56…no semen…blood in vagina indicates rape with object…blood in right ear…laceration at rear scalp…neck scratched and bruised…contusion on chin…strangled with cord of light blue housecoat; cord found still tied around neck, in bow…no sign of struggle…Arthur Nast…”

“6/20/62…Brighton…68…external genitalia lacerated…blood and mucus in vagina…blood in both ears…open wine bottle on kitchen counter…”

An image lit up in Michael’s mind, briefly, a strobe flash: a woman thrashing, arms flailing—shrieking,
NO!
—her face, grimaced, teeth clenched—dark hair—a scream—furniture clattering.

And then it was gone. He blinked away the memory of it. He had only the papers on his desk. And the clock ticking.

“8/19/62…Lawrence…53 y.o…. supine on bed, R leg dangling, naked except for open blouse…3 ligatures on neck (2 stockings, 1 leg of brown leotard)…external vagina bruised, bloody…2 half-moon contusions below R nipple, 2 abrasions above and L of it…R thigh contused…raped…V a devout churchgoer…”

“8/21/62…Columbia Rd., Dorchester…67…no forced entry to apt…. blood on floors in kitchen, hall…bra on bathroom floor…V found in bathtub, on her knees, face down in 6 inches water, feet over back of tub, butt up in air…underpants tugged down but no trauma to vagina or anus…blood on R of scalp…two stockings around neck…R hyoid bone fractured…pocketbook open…”

The investigators had only Before and After. The living woman and the broken body. Not the moment of horror. Not the dying. The reality of murder had been excised, like an obscenity. But Michael’s imagination insistently re-created it. A woman thrashed before him. Her hands shoving—he felt it on his skin. Her scream vibrated his ear.

“12/5/62…Huntington Ave…. 20, college student, Negro, engaged…wearing housecoat, menstrual harness, sanitary napkin…mouth gagged…no external injury to genitalia…no head trauma…no blood or menstrual discharge in vagina or rectum…strangulation by ligature…Salem cigarette in toilet…semen stain on rug near body…itinerant seen in stairwell…”

“3/9/63…Lawrence…68, white…beaten, stabbed, strangled…cause of death: blunt force trauma…sperm in vagina: raped…body naked on floor, girdle pulled down to left foot…clothes still on, pulled over head…throat badly contused…head and surrounding floor covered with blood…knife or fork stuck in left breast to handle…”

“5/7/63…Cambridge…26, nurse at Boston State Hospital, a mental facility…stabbed 17 times around left breast…2 parallel horizontal incisions on each side of throat…nude but no evid of rape or sex assault…no injuries to genitalia, no sperm in vagina, rectum or mouth…body supine on bed, hands tied behind her back with scarf…stockings and blouse around neck but no ligature marks…”

“9/8/63…Salem…23…found on bed, lying on back, right arm under body, left leg dangling, torso covered with bedspread…bloodstain on bed under head…2 stockings tied around neck…panties on floor with lipstick stain above crotch (used as gag?)…sperm in V’s mouth…crumpled tissues on floor smeared with semen, lipstick…”

“11/22/63…Grove St., West End…63…blood…blood covers entire head, face and ears…slight injuries to external genitalia…no sperm in vagina…manual and ligature strangulation…classical LP (Sibelius) still turning…tied spread-eagle to chair…posed, facing door…”

Already Michael knew he did not have the stomach for this sort of work. He could not live with months of that shrieking woman in his mind’s eye. It had been a mistake to let Byron and Wamsley talk him into this.

He slipped the photos of the last victim out of their envelope. The old woman in the West End, the Sibelius fan.
My God, what did you go through?

Somewhere there was a murder book for Michael’s father, too. Buried in a file at BPD Homicide. No doubt it contained the same sort of photographs, of Joe Daley, Sr., lying dead. It was a scene Michael had imagined a thousand times. He had created for himself a still life, a formal composition of a few elements arranged in a painterly way: body, scally cap, pavement. But had he got it right? The body—had the old man sprawled, or curled, or crumpled? Michael pictured him lying stiff as a fallen tree, a carryover of the distinctive toy-soldier posture Joe Senior had had in life. There would be a tight shot of the face, too, to document the victim’s identity. What had his expression been? Grimaced or peaceful? One cheek on the pavement, or looking straight up to the sky?

In his fingers, Michael adjusted the photo of the murdered old woman in the West End.
My God, what did you go through?

He wanted out. He’d tell Wamsley, maybe tomorrow, but soon. He just wasn’t cut out for this work. He’d had enough of murder books.

12

The night lieutenant in Station Sixteen was a white-haired, florid man. He had a long nose but his every other feature was weak, a combination that gave his face the snouted look of certain rodents or streamlined locomotives. This lieutenant—his name does not matter here—was among the last of the generation of cops that joined the force during the Boston police strike of 1919, when standards were not so much lowered as thrown out entirely. These men were always at a disadvantage in their relationships with other cops, who regarded them as second-rate and incorrigibly lazy, if not scabs. There was something fraudulent about them. They were not quite cops. The wave of young men that poured into the BPD after World War II was particularly disdainful. The young guys were in a hurry. They had a lot of time to make up for. They had fought in the war, then come home and got married and set up house and passed the police exam—only to find their path blocked by these indolent potbellied old men who, if they could be counted on for anything, dependably sought out the least taxing duty in the least busy precincts. Of course there were lazy and second-rate cops among the younger generation, too, and decent cops among the 1919 strikebreakers, but the perception was settled. So, to deflect it, the 1919 men often adopted a showy scrupulousness about the military formalities of BPD life, the saluting and yes-sirring. That sort of punctilio drove the young guys up the fucking wall. They had done their share of saluting, and done it when it counted. But the night lieutenant was positively Prussian in this regard, and it showed in the way he relished the roll call before each shift.

He read out a few advisories. There had been several purse snatches on Boylston Street, and homosexuals loitering in the Public Garden. The men were to remember that the “Strangler corps”—properly called the Tactical Patrol Force, a police unit formed to calm the mounting public hysteria—would be appearing at certain calls. Finally, he called the men to attention and strolled among them as they held up their notebooks and call-box keys for inspection. He marched back to the podium and returned the cops’ lethargic salute with a smarter one of his own. And the whole thing was about to break up, the men about to head out to their beats, when the lieutenant seemed to recall one last thing. “Wait, wait! Sit! I nearly forgot the most important case we have!” He reached into his coat and produced, grandly, an envelope. Inside was a note composed of letters cut from magazines and pasted to the page, a prototypical ransom note. “We have a missing person case, a missing child. Let me see now.” He put on his reading glasses. “‘i H
a
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A
kE
n
Y
OuR L
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a
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ia
H h
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The room broke up.

“‘h
Is bl
OOd bE up
ON
J
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se
P
h
Da
L
EY
.’”

In the back of the room, Joe groaned. He had been suffering already. Bone-tired from working last-halfs. Fish was dogging him to pay off his bookie tab. There was a woman in Brookline who kept calling and wouldn’t get lost, and now she was threatening to call Joe’s wife and spill the whole story. Worse, he was squashed into his uniform pants, which Kat had let out as much as the remaining material would allow. And he was choking on the stiff white collar that he’d crafted years before from a cheap plastic belt, an old cops’ trick to spare their wives from scrubbing the collars of their uniform shirts every night—but he’d made this one when he still wore a seventeen-inch collar. And now this.

The lieutenant basked in the laughter. He was more often the butt of the joke. “The missing child is described as follows. Height: twenty inches. Hair: none. Age: approximately two thousand years, give or take. Last seen wearing a diaper and blanket and emitting a strange heavenly glow.”

The lieutenant had to pause until the laughing subsided.

“The boy’s father—hold on, fellas, hold on now—the boy’s father is a very powerful man. I can vouch for that: I used to be an altar boy—I worked for the guy.”

Joe slouched, tugged the brim of his hat down over his eyes. He smiled defensively.

“Officer Daley,” the lieutenant called. Of course Joe had not lost his rank, but it was no time to quibble. “Shall I send this case up to the detectives?”

“No, sir.”

“You have a suspect then, I trust?”

“Oh yes I do.”

“And who might the…malefactor be?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Alright then, Daley. Just get this poor child back. His birthday’s coming up.”

Standing guard on the Common that night, the baby Jesus’s vacant straw bed inspired in Joe a single thought:
Kill Ricky. Kill that fuckin’ little prick.
He paced.
Skinny little shit. Kill him, wake him up, then kill him again.
The weather had warmed up the last few days and most of the snow had melted, but Joe wouldn’t have felt the cold anyway. He wouldn’t need a shot to warm himself up and he wouldn’t be hiding out in no hotel lobby because his anger at his dickhead little brother could have melted the North fucking Pole. His hands hung bucket-heavy at the ends of his arms. There was twitchy energy loose in his shoulders, his triceps. Ricky just loved making Joe look like a fool and a fuckup, he always fucking had. But it was okay because this time—this time—Joe was going to kick Ricky’s ass but good—

A woman screamed. Somewhere.

The trees rustled.

Joe rucked up his sleeve to check his watch: 11:50.

The scream was choked off. Distant.

Joe listened—there it was again—and he was already running.

A third scream, a panicky shriek: “No! Get away! Get—!”

And already Joe’s legs were driving him, arms pumping, mouth chuffing, down the Hill, down Tremont toward Scollay Square, the Square already beginning to vanish building by building, street by street, the whole city dematerializing like a dream, different every time you saw it, disorienting—

Another yelp, short, softer, a chirrup.

He was running so fast now it felt like one long fall, felt like he had to keep throwing his legs forward just to keep from spilling face-first on the street.

There was a couple on the street, the man pointing, “That way!”

Down Bromfield. A clatter, from an alley.

And there it was, this sudden tableau: A guy, no, a giant, gaunt and gawky but towering. He had a girl pinned against the wall, one hand fisted around her neck, the other exploring under her coat, between her legs. The girl’s feet wavered a few inches off the ground. One shoe had fallen off.

“Hey!”

The giant turned and glared, confused then angry, offended at the cop for intruding.

His face was cadaverous—starved and narrow-skulled, pale skin taut over the cheekbones, bulgy dark eyes, a distinctly ridged brow—and in the alley’s gloom, deeply shadowed, that mask was grotesque enough to freeze Joe for a second. Joe blinked and turned his head slightly, as if refocusing would bring the man’s features back into proportion, convert the monster back into something familiar, a derelict or punk or some other nightwalker.

The man, apparently misapprehending some tolerant impulse in the cop’s hesitation—sympathy, brotherhood, fear, who knew what?—clamped his hand hard between the girl’s legs and agitated her hips against the wall. He gave the cop a little wrinkle-nosed smirk.
Yeah! See that?

Joe decided then and there to fuck this guy up but good. He charged forward.

The giant released his grip on the girl. She landed unevenly on one shoe but righted herself, and stood long enough to watch the cop fly right past her without so much as a glance to see if she was okay—he passed very close, so close that she felt a little draft on her cheek, heard metal equipment clinking under his coat—and she decided just to lower herself to the ground and sit there.

Joe knew after a few steps that this guy wasn’t going to get far. The guy ran like a fuckin’ retard, all high-stepping Lincoln-long crazy-legs, and Joe had time to ruminate over how best to take him down with maximum injury. As they neared the opposite end of the alley, which opened out onto Winter Street, Joe launched himself—enjoyed a horizontal ecstatic moment—and fell on the guy’s back, engulfed him like some enormous flapping bird. He hugged the giant’s arms to his sides and allowed his own stout legs to become entangled with the giant’s. His intention was to prevent the guy from breaking his own fall, ideally to bounce his face off the pavement.

But immediately it felt wrong.

There was enormous cartilaginous strength in the giant’s torso. He managed to carry Joe a few steps, and Joe felt like he was riding one long smooth muscle, as if he’d jumped on a dolphin’s back. The guy did not fall forward; he did not fall at all. With unearthly power he managed to twist, even as he began to stumble, and Joe felt himself slipping off the side of the giant’s back, and the two men rolled down onto the pavement.

From behind, Joe immediately hooked his right arm around the giant’s neck and locked it with his left. He squeezed. He meant to crush the man’s Adam’s apple in the crook of his right elbow. Choke him, whatever—just take the edge off this fucker, cuff him, and get the hell out of there.

But, incredibly, the guy was already prying Joe’s arm away with his fingers. It was impossible. His fingers! What the fuck! Joe hauled with his opposite arm for leverage. It was no use. Those fingers pried their way under Joe’s arm and levered it away.

Joe’s shock—he could not remember ever being overpowered like this—gave way to panic. He looked around for help. No one. Empty alley, glimpse of an empty street.

And those hands! The strength in them was inhuman. They spread Joe’s arms wide enough that the giant was able to roll over and face Joe like a lover. His hands found Joe’s neck, encircled it. The thumbs met at the fleshy hollow below the Adam’s apple, mashed around a bit as they sought out the windpipe where it was closest to the surface, just above the point where it disappeared into the rib cage, and when the hard pads of his two thumbs were settled on that exposed rubbery tube, he pressed.

A thrash of adrenaline convulsed Joe’s body.

His head snapped forward instinctively to protect the vulnerable spot and, his hands caught uselessly behind the giant’s head, his body beat itself forward and back.

Almost immediately—seconds—his mind began to unfocus, he felt himself beginning to lose consciousness. He looked into the face, inches away.

The giant leered back with those swollen bug-eyes. He seemed to sense there would only be this initial burst of resistance to overcome. He pressed his thumbs again.
Crush it, deform it.

Joe struggled to free his arms. The pain was lessening slightly, losing its electric quality, its urgency. He found the guy’s wrists, tried to rip them away, but Joe’s own arms were stony and heavy. It felt as if both men were immovable, as if he and this fucking monster were petrifying into a sculpture. It was already too late. He was dying—actually dying. Could it happen this quickly? He had not expected—

There was a siren.

The pressure on Joe’s neck lifted a little.

The siren was far off, maybe just a coincidence, city noise.

Then the pressure was back, harder than before, the thumbs crushing Joe’s trachea, as if the giant meant to finish it quickly.

Joe thrashed again, re-adrenalized. Not dead.

He jerked his knee up into the giant’s crotch—scratched at those bulgy eyes—and it was over. Gone. No hands on his neck, no crushing pain in his throat.

The siren was close now, oscillating.

The man was running off. Joe heard his shoes brushing in the grit.

Joe dragged himself to his feet. He shuffled back up the alley to the girl. She lay in a curl with her back against the wall, knees up. Joe held out his hand to her. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“I’ll get you out of here. It’ll be okay.”

Joe slid his arms under the girl and forked her up off the pavement. She was light as a child. Good-looking, maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. He wondered what it would be like to fuck her, what her body looked like, all automatic thoughts for Joe, but he could not work up any enthusiasm for the project, which he took as a worrisome sign that his encounter with the giant had left him unmanned somehow. The girl lay limp in his arms, her head against his chest, arms trailing down in her lap. Joe carried her out of the alley to the street, where he was startled by a blinding flash from a news photographer’s camera.