The Strangler (10 page)

“Who said that?” he demanded.

The kids smirked. They wore jeans and short jackets. A couple smoked.

“Who said it?”

“I did,” one responded. He was the biggest of them. He had a swagger. “What, you can’t even say hello to a cop anymore?”

“You the tough guy? Is that it?” Joe was bigger than any of these kids, but they seemed to feel there was safety in numbers. “All tough guys, huh?”

No answer.

“Who’s the toughest guy here?”

After some wordless discussion, they nodded in unison toward the first kid.

“You?” Joe pulled out his pistol. He leveled it directly at the tip of the kid’s nose. “Now I am.”

The kid’s eyes bulged.

“My name’s not ‘cop.’ From now on you call me Detective Daley or Lieutenant Daley or Sir, you got that?”

Nod.

“Answer me.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that guy Moe Wasserman with the deli over near the Garden?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a friend of mine. Somebody broke up his store. I want to know who.”

The kid’s eyes were slightly crossed from staring at the tip of the gun. “I, I don’t know.”

“Find out.”

“Okay.”

Joe put the gun away. “Give me your wallet.”

The kid pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and handed it over. The wallet was warm and ass-shaped. Joe felt queer holding it. But he found the kid’s license and confirmed the name, just in case.

“What’s my name?”

“Daley.”

There was an audible whish from the kid’s lungs, and he doubled over onto Joe’s fist, and Joe looked down at him with something like relief at having thrown a punch, finally. Joe kept him from falling, held him up with a fist still clutched under the kid’s belly. He could feel the lungs spasm. “Breathe,” Joe counseled, “breathe.” He held his right arm locked at a ninety-degree angle while the boy hung over his fist like a magician’s cloth, to be whipped away revealing a bouquet or a rabbit.

“What’s my name?”

“Detective Daley.”

This was how you dealt with wolves.

16

Boston State Hospital, Mattapan.

Seated at his desk, the psychiatrist pondered a photograph. His index finger went to his upper lip and swept back and forth, back and forth, over a brushy mustache. “No,” he decided. He set the photo aside and picked up the next one, another head-and-shoulders photo of an old woman.

His name was Dr. Mark Keating. He was chief of psychiatry at this public mental hospital, which was set in a sprawling woodsy campus in Boston. He had an air of slovenly cultivation: a froth of gray curls that still bore the impression of a hat, snaggled teeth, spectacles rotated a few degrees off horizontal. Michael equated that sort of Einsteinish sloppiness with purity of intellect, or of purpose, or courage or simple eccentricity, or all of these, because Michael knew full well that his own sensible, conformist appearance—the bag suit from Brooks, the brogans which he polished regularly with an old pair of underpants—signaled the opposite. The psychiatrist seemed to take Michael’s visit in stride. He had been treating Arthur Nast and talking to policemen about Arthur Nast for nearly ten years, on and off.

“This was the one, I think.”

The doctor handed the photo across the desk to Michael.

“Helena Jalakian,” Michael said. “She was fifty-six.”

“She looks older.”

“She lost her parents in the Armenian genocide. She was just a child, of course.” Michael frowned. “She lived on Gainsborough Street in the Fenway, so she could walk to Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall. Classical music buff.”

“This was the picture.”

“I don’t understand. She was the first victim. But you said you called the police on August”—Michael checked his notes—“twenty-third, in ’62. There were already seven women dead by then.”

“This picture was in the newspaper. Or a picture just like it, I don’t know. But it was this woman. Until then I wasn’t sure.” He riffled through a bristling file folder, his head shaking. He came to a form with a photo paper-clipped at the corner. He tugged the picture free and laid it beside the first. “You see? This is Arthur Nast’s mother.”

Michael compared the two. The similarity was striking.

“And look,” the doctor said. He arranged three more pictures from Michael’s collection around the tiny shot of Nast’s mother so they formed a cross.

Michael recited, “Ina Lanzmann, Mary Duffy, Jane Tibodeau. Look at that. Amazing.”

“They are all, at least they appear to be, between fifty-five and seventy. Arthur’s mother was fifty-eight when she died.”

“So why did you wait so long to call the cops?”

“All I had was the resemblance of the pictures. I needed more. You understand, I’m bound by patient confidentiality. Generally, anything Arthur tells me, I’m forbidden to repeat. I could not come forward until I was convinced Arthur might really be murdering these women. Even then, many of my colleagues would not agree with my telling you these things. If it ever comes out that I revealed all this to you…”

His finger agitated the bristle-ends of his mustache again.

“Look, I’ve had my suspicions about Arthur for a long time. Arthur is not confined here. We do not have the resources to monitor his movements, and he has ground privileges, which means he can leave the campus almost any time he wants. So he has a history of wandering off. And of course he tends to get in trouble on these rambles. Arthur is rather odd looking and quite a large man; people tend to be alarmed when they find him rustling around in their backyards. He’s been arrested several times for breaking and entering, trespassing, that sort of thing. Usually he’s just broken into the basement of a building to sleep there or to take some little thing that’s caught his eye, a bicycle or whatever. But sometimes he does more sinister things.

“After I saw the woman’s photo, to satisfy my curiosity—to allay my fears, really—I checked the dates of Arthur’s absences from the hospital against the dates of the first seven Strangler murders, in that summer of ’62. The dates lined up perfectly.”

“What about the other stranglings?”

“That’s just it. If you remember, the first seven murders were all older women, all in a three-month period from June through August 1962. Those are the warm months, when Arthur tends to wander. Then there were no murders for a while, until the winter, December, I think, and those next two victims were young girls in their twenties. I checked: Arthur was here on those dates. Which made perfect sense to me because Arthur’s anger is not simply directed at all women. It is directed at one woman in particular: his mother.”

“So Nast could not have done them all?”

“I know for a fact he didn’t. It’s the murders involving these old women that concern me. You see, Arthur despised his mother. He first came here in 1956. He’d already been in other institutions—Bridgewater, Tewksbury, the Shattuck. But I first met him in ’56. He’d tried to kill his mother. Threw her down a flight of stairs. The judge pink-slipped him to us for the thirty-day competency evaluation. In the end it did not matter. The mother refused to testify; the case never went forward. But Arthur seemed to form some connection with me in those thirty days, and when the family ultimately decided he should be committed, in ’59, he came back here. I’ve been treating him ever since.”

“And?”

“Over the years he continued to abuse his mother. Punched her, kicked her, eventually he threw her down that flight of stairs. He would be arrested but the charges were never pursued. It’s an awful thing to ask a mother to testify against her own son.”

“What happened to her?”

“I can’t prove it, of course, but it seems fairly obvious to me that he killed her, finally. This was in 1961. She was in the hospital, immobilized in bed, hooked up to an I.V. And then Arthur paid her a visit. Soon after he left, the old woman was found nearly dead on the floor beside her bed. The I.V. had been ripped out of her arm. The bed railing was still raised, so she could not have rolled off the bed. There were bruises on her neck. Arthur had choked her, obviously, ripped out the I.V., and tossed her on the floor. The mother died before she could ever tell what happened. The cause of death was heart attack induced by asphyxiation. So again, he was never prosecuted.”

“Why did he hate her so much?”

“I don’t know, not with any certainty. Look, I can’t tell you everything Arthur has said about her; I do still have some obligation to maintain confidentiality. But I’m not sure it matters anyway. Arthur reports all sorts of abuse when he was a child, some pretty monstrous things, all of which may be gospel truth or, equally likely, all of it could be delusional. It was real enough to Arthur, that’s the important thing. And of course the mother-hatred and the delusions feed on each other until Arthur can no longer see his mother as anything but a complete monster, one who persecutes him even from the grave. I will tell you that Arthur reports he still hears her voice. She berates him, accuses him, doubts him. On and on. So there was motive, if you can call it that.”

“What’s actually wrong with him?”

“A precise diagnosis in a case like Arthur’s is very difficult. He’s deeply disturbed. Likely schizophrenic. That’s how he exhibits, anyway: delusional, with some pretty bizarre illusions; fractured speech and thought; occasional hallucinations; obsessive about certain things, his mother, women, sex. One problem in treating Arthur is that his intelligence is very limited, as is his ability to articulate his thoughts. At times he seems childish, almost autistic. So as a clinician you have this knot of problems: the storm of emotion whipping around inside him, the constellation of behaviors that may or may not signal schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder, and all of it viewed through the fuzzy window of the man’s limited intelligence and ability to communicate. And of course what makes this all so dangerous is that Arthur’s mind is housed in this enormous, powerful body.”

“Sounds like a real E-ticket ride.”

“That wouldn’t be the clinical term, but…”

“What about young women? When my brother found Nast in that alley, he was choking a college girl, twenty-one years old, very pretty. She sure did not look like his mother.”

“Yes. Well, Arthur’s sexual…impulses are quite primitive and unrestrained. Now, to what extent that’s rolled up with these feelings about his mother, I don’t know. It’s probably a reach to say his hatred for one woman has poisoned his perceptions of all women. In our conversations I have always had the sense that Arthur just does not have any feelings at all toward women except as sexual playthings. He does not empathize with them, he does not even perceive them as human. This is why I found it troubling that there have been old and young Strangler victims but none in between. Women interest Arthur either because they are old enough to be his mother or young enough to be objects of sexual desire. Women who fill neither role are of no interest. He does not see them.”

“But you say he was here when the two young women were strangled, in December of ’62?”

“That’s right.”

“So there’s at least two stranglers?”

The psychiatrist shrugged.
Not my job.

“Have you ever confronted him directly about the murders?”

“No. In clinical terms, that would be a very bad idea. He would never trust me again. But one day last year—and I did report this to the police—I found Arthur wandering in the hall in a doctors-only area of the hospital. He said, ‘Dr. Keating, I need to talk to you.’ I asked him what it was about. He said, ‘The stranglings.’ I took him to my office immediately. I was going to inject him with sodium pentothal and question him about the murders. But at just that moment I got an emergency call and I had to leave. I never got the chance to question Arthur directly. He never gave me another opportunity like that.”

“Doctor, do you think Arthur Nast is the Strangler?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Look, all I can tell you is I have a terrible, terrible feeling.”

17

This broad was built like a brick shithouse. Packed into a blue dress pressurized across the bust and butt. Big vaulted Neapolitan nose, lacquered helmet of brown hair. Paula Something-or-other. Joe was partial to the brick-shithouse type, and when he had caught sight of this one progressing down Cambridge Street like a Zeppelin, he had thought she looked like Sophia Loren a little. He knew he could fuck her, he knew it the moment he saw her walking that stroppy walk. He brought her to Joe Tecce’s for dinner, and now, halfway through her veal piccata with a side of pappardelle, this broad Paula was still hungry and Joe was feeling the familiar anticipation of a rich dessert.

When she excused herself to go to the “little girls’ room,” Joe sipped his wine and watched her ass, then he sipped his wine undistracted.

A man sat down in Paula’s chair. “You know who I am?”

“No.”

“Yeah you do.”

Joe topped off his wineglass then offered the bottle to the visitor. When a guy like Vincent Gargano shows up at your table, you make nice.

Gargano was short and doughy, a dark-complected guinea, with the sort of kissy Cupid’s-bow mouth that belonged on an angel on a church ceiling. A street kid in a suit. He was not even gangstered up in the usual pinky ring and hockey-puck-sized watch. Maybe he was purposely guarding his reputation from any indication of softness. Or maybe he just didn’t know any better. But intentional or not, Gargano’s cheap suit and ringless fingers were like a friar’s robe: they suggested a sort of incorruptibility. Vinnie The Animal was not violent for the money; he was just violent.

“You’re Detective Daley, am I right? You just come over to Station One.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s some good-looking lady, your wife.”

Joe glanced toward the ladies’ room.

“You’re a lucky guy.”

“That’s not my wife.”

“Even luckier.
Hff,
that’s some broad. Must be your sister.”

“Something like that.”

“She’s somebody’s sister. Not mine, lucky for you.” Gargano grinned. This was charm, a pale version of it. “Listen, I just come over to welcome you to the neighborhood, you know, let you know if there’s ever anything I can do for you, help you out or whatever, something I can do…you know.”

Joe nodded but did not reply.

“I’m offering you my friendship, see?”

“I see.”

“I heard about that thing with The Monkey and that TV show, this whole…mixup. I liked the way you stood up on that. Never said nothin’ about nothin’. You got a lot of fuckin’ balls, Detective Daley, you don’t mind my sayin’ so. That’s what I hear about you and that’s what I think: this man’s got balls like coconuts. Stand-up guy with two big fuckin’ coconuts.”

Joe nodded in a not unfriendly way. He figured Vinnie Gargano’s head was filled with coconuts, but what could you say?

“I remember your old man Joe Daley. You look a little like him, only bigger.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Hey, can I ask you a favor?”

Joe shrugged.

“You don’t mind? I mean, I don’t wanna do anything…”

Another shrug.

“I got this cousin, he’s a good kid, not like me. A little”—he pointed to his temple and made a face:
crazy—
“know what I mean, Joe? You got kids, right? So you know. So this kid, my cousin, he piled up all these parking tickets, with the construction and everything, and cuz he don’t care, since we’re just talkin’ here. So he piles up all these parking tickets. End of the year, he goes down to the registry to renew his plates. Stands in a line around the block, the whole thing. And guess what? They turn him down. Just like that.” He washed his hands together and showed Joe his palms. “I mean, whattaya…? So I told him, ‘Hey,
stugatz,
just go pay the fuckin’ tickets like Joe Citizen and take care of it.’ But he don’t listen. He’s a fuckin’ kid, am I right? Just screws the plates back on the fuckin’ car and off he goes, like nothin’. So some cop over there in your station cites him for an unregistered motor vehicle. So now the kid can’t drive. And if he can’t drive, he can’t work. You see the problem?”

Joe forked a piece of steak and showed it to Gargano. “You mind?”

“Go right ahead. While it’s hot. Don’t mind me. So the thing is, is I want to take care of this thing for this kid, my cousin. We all made mistakes when we were kids, right? So I seen you come in tonight and I figured, hey, that’s Joe Daley’s kid, why not reach out to him, see if he can help me take care of this thing. I mean, it iddn’t like the kid robbed a bank. Am I right or am I right? I would be very grateful if you would do this thing for me. Very grateful. I would consider it a personal favor.”

“Can’t do it.”

“I would consider it a personal favor.”

“Can’t help you. Sorry.”

“If it’s about the cost—”

“It’s not about the cost.”

Joe knew how it worked. He would do Gargano this small favor, then Gargano would slip him an envelope as a way of saying thank you, and that’s how it would start. They would have their hooks in him. Charlie Capobianco’s mob was famous for collecting cops. Their police pad was rumored to include the names of half the downtown cops, including captains and lieutenants in Homicide and Vice, even a special unit assigned to monitor organized crime. It was easy money, but the risk in getting tangled up with these North End guys was too high. Joe was determined to clean up his act. This bullshit with the bookies, and the money washing in and out—he’d had enough of the whole thing. As soon as he got back even, he was giving up the whole thing. Anyway, Capobianco hated cops almost as much as he hated Irishmen, and he harbored a special contempt for Irish cops. The last thing Joe needed was to crawl into bed with a guy like that.

“No offense,” Joe offered.

“No, no. No offense.” Gargano glanced around the restaurant. Joe Tecce’s did a good business even midweek, and the tables were piled in close. “Anyway, like I said, if there’s ever anything I can do for you.”

“Alright.”

“I hear you got a couple little tabs running, Detective.” Gargano stared. The mask of solicitousness slipped just a little. “You hit a little cold streak?”

“Huh?”

“I hear you like the puppies. They don’t like you so much though, lately.”

“Something you can do about that?”

Gargano shook his head. “Can’t help you there. No offense.”

Joe’s eyes fell. He cut his steak with affected concentration.

“Hey, that guy Rick Daley, that’s your brother, iddn’t he?”

“What about him?”

“Just askin’ is all. I need to have a word with him, too. He’s ducking me.”

“Leave him out of it.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you, big brother. We got our own business to discuss, Rick and me.”

Joe glared briefly, and foolishly, but then it is not always an asset to have balls like coconuts.

“Here comes your sister. Jee-zus Christ, would you look at the tits on that broad.” Gargano leered as she processed across the room. “Tits like that, they ought to strap her to the front of a ship, you know? Like one of those fuckin’ statues with the big tits they put on the front of a ship there?”

Joe said nothing.

Gargano turned to him and smirked at his own joke, at Joe’s abased silence. There could only be one alpha dog.

When the girl arrived, Gargano jumped to his feet, pushed in her chair for her, and wished them both a good meal.

“Friend of yours, Joe?”

“No. Come on, baby, let’s get out of here.”

“But I haven’t finished my dinner.”

“You’ll finish it some other time.”