The Strangler (6 page)

9

Suffolk Superior Court, Thursday afternoon.

There was a sense in the courtroom at times like these that they were not adversaries. They were a team, fielding their different positions—judge, lawyer, clerk—working together toward a common goal. The outcome of the case was certain. All that remained was the tying up of loose ends, reading the correct words into the record. It was an unspoken awareness. You tended to feel it when weekends or holidays loomed, in summer especially, on Friday afternoons when everyone was anxious to bug out. A certain contented lassitude crept into the lawyers’ voices. They referred to one another with amiable, anachronistic formality as “my brother.” The familiar formulas spilled out of their mouths quickly and with evident pleasure. They were insiders, technicians, and they were wrapping up.

Michael—who relished these moments of teamwork, these truces—spoke without notes, one hand resting in the pocket of his suit coat, JFK style. “It is a hard case, obviously, and the Commonwealth is not unsympathetic to the situation Mr. and Mrs. Cavalcante find themselves in. But then, they are all hard cases and this is all settled law. Like most of these old tenements in the West End, the Cavalcantes’ building was taken by the government in a proper exercise of its power of eminent domain. As tenants in the building, the Cavalcantes’ lease was immediately terminated by operation of law and they became tenants by sufferance, with no standing to raise these sorts of Fifth Amendment or Article Ten objections.” Michael heard the facile, bloodless tone in his own voice, but hadn’t they been through the drill before with these old West Enders? It occurred to him there might be time for a haircut that afternoon, and his pace quickened again. “However, to touch on the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims: First, there is no merit to the argument that the government’s use of its eminent domain power is improper merely because it benefits a private developer. If Farley Sonnenshein can make a buck rebuilding the West End, then so be it. The project still serves a valid public interest by converting a blighted area, a slum really, into a new neighborhood of obvious benefit to the city. As for the claim that the Cavalcantes have been inadequately compensated for the costs of moving, that’s really something they can take up with the Redevelopment Authority. As the court is well aware, the Authority has gone to great lengths to assist West Enders in relocating to new homes. The bottom line is that, without a valid legal claim, we can sympathize with the Cavalcantes but we can’t do anything to help them. They simply have to move. The whole point of eminent domain is that sometimes a few will be called upon to make sacrifices for the common good. ‘Ask not’ and all that.”

Michael lobbed an apologetic smile toward the older couple seated in the gallery. They blinked back at him as if he were speaking a foreign language—which he was, that is, he was not speaking Italian. And with that Michael nodded smartly to the judge, throwing the ball to him just as a second baseman turning a double play will pivot and whip the ball on to first base.

“Well.” The judge sighed. “I find for the Commonwealth essentially on the grounds that counsel just stated.”

Afterward, as Michael stuffed his files back into his trial bag, a court officer and the Cavalcantes approached him from different directions.

Mr. Cavalcante hesitated behind the bar railing. He was a small man, turned out in an old three-piece suit made from a rough, nappy wool. He held his hat over his heart. “Why did you say nothing about the, the”—he turned to his wife—
“delinquenti.”

“Mafiosi,
eh, gengsters, bad guys.”

“Gengsters. Why did you say nothing about the gengsters?”

The court officer handed Michael a slip of paper:
Call Wamsley ASAP.

“You can talk to the Redevelopment Authority,” Michael answered absently.

“The Redevelopment don’t do nothing. They sent the gengsters. Now you send me back to the Redevelopment?”

Michael tried to focus on the old man, but his mind was on the message from his boss. It was rare that Wamsley or anyone from the office would bother him in court. That was the best thing about being on trial: You could not be disturbed. The joke in every lawyer’s office was that there were only two places where you could not be called to the telephone, the bathroom and the courtroom.

“The Redevelopment says, ‘Go to Medford, there is an apartment for you.’ That’s all they know, over and over, ‘there is an apartment for you, there is an apartment for you.’ Nothing about the gengsters.”

“Look, just call the police. If you want to report a crime, call the police. I’m sorry, Mr. Cavalcante, Mrs. Cavalcante, I’ve got to go, I’m sorry.”

The old couple stood staring. The man turned his head slightly, as if he had not heard the answer or was expecting to hear more.

George Wamsley bore a faint resemblance to Mr. Wizard. His ears protruded like a butterfly’s wings. His hair was forever mussed though he was forever combing it. His teeth were big and horsey. He was rumored to be a genius, and inside the Eminent Domain Division of the A.G.’s office, which Wamsley headed, he was revered. He would sweep through the office with loping strides and a whooping laugh, lavishing extravagant praise on the young lawyers who worked for him, complimenting them on this motion or that brief, engaging in earnest discussions of mundane cases, and in his wake would be a sort of turbulence, a high. You felt ravished and energized by him. Somehow some of his wet and goofy enthusiasm got into you, and you in turn churned up his enthusiasm with your work. Your work! No longer were you a bureaucrat or some mustache-twirling villain out of Dickens, preying on the poor in the name of progress (a turnpike, a parking garage). You were part of a grand, historic effort to build a great city out of a decrepit one. Never had eminent domain seemed so damn interesting.

No doubt at any other time a man like George Wamsley would never have accepted the job of running the Eminent Domain Division. He had had choices. He was a Lowell cousin, a friend of the poet. A gentleman dilettante before the war—the sort of cultivated Yankee crank who dabbled in Negro music and sailboat racing and Oriental mysticism—Wamsley first found his stride after the fighting stopped, as an adjutant in the American sector of Berlin. In the straitened chaos of 1945 and ’46 Berlin, an energetic polymath like George Wamsley could get things done. He spoke three of the four languages that were about. He enjoyed the dives on the Ku’damm and the improvised bar in the ruins of the Hotel Adlon. He collected antiques in exchange for Army beef and Lucky Strikes. War, at least the ruins of it, turned out to be a great adventure. When he returned to the States, Wamsley had drifted back to Mother Harvard, the law school this time, with the vague idea that a law practice might be a nice roost from which to pursue other interests. And then he had ingested the New Boston bug, another city in need of rebuilding, another project of a scale commensurate with his bounding energy. By now he’d even taken up an interest in modernist architecture; he thought he might try architecture school at some point.

Michael never knew what to make of Wamsley. He considered his boss a curiosity, a strange exotic bird from a faraway WASP country of which he’d heard rumors. Wamsley considered Michael a sort of exotic, too, a policeman’s son and an inveterate laconic, maybe a little dull but a Harvard man, a good sober presence to have at one’s right hand. Wamsley had recruited Michael to be
his
adjutant, and Michael felt a suitable gratitude, even affection, for his loony and possibly brilliant boss.

That afternoon when Michael entered the corner office of the Attorney General, it was Wamsley he noticed first. Wamsley was seated in a wing chair facing the A.G.’s desk, and from behind Michael saw only his skinny legs double-crossed. Wamsley unwound his legs and twisted around to peer at Michael over the back of the chair, as a child might. “Ah, Michael. The indispensable man.”

The Attorney General, Alvan Byron, emerged from a bathroom off the office, wiping his hands with a paper towel. “Graveyards are filled with indispensable men. That’s what de Gaulle said.”

“Cheerful thought,” Michael responded.

Alvan Byron was a big man, his torso one enormous barrel. The A.G. favored big collars, French cuffs, and peaked lapels despite the prevailing fashion. His anachronistic suits seemed to place him in an earlier, more glamorous era. Though he was one-quarter Scot, Byron was at the moment considered the highest-ranking Negro elected politician in the country, and his career already seemed to have acquired an irresistible velocity. Alvan Byron was bigger than Boston.

“Big news, Mr. Daley.” Byron settled himself at the desk. “We’re taking over the Strangler case.”

Michael let slip an undecorous guffaw.

“Something funny?”

“No. Just, I know someone who’ll be happy to hear it.”

“A lot of people will be happy to hear it. It’s time for a fresh pair of eyes.”

“Boston PD isn’t going to be happy to hear it.”

“No.” Byron gave Wamsley a glance. “We have some ideas about that, too.”

Michael sat there nodding, with a dumb, bemused grin. He thought,
You two have absolutely no idea. You could put Sherlock fucking Holmes on the Strangler case and nothing—nothing—you could do would satisfy Boston Homicide.
What he said was: “Well, Criminal Division has a lot of good guys. I’m sure they’ll do a good job.”

“That wasn’t exactly what we had in mind—”

“Criminal Division isn’t getting it,” Wamsley interjected.

“No? Who then?”

“A special bureau we’re creating,” Wamsley enthused. “Kind of an all-star team. With all the men and resources they’ll need, regardless of jurisdiction or expense.”

“Did you see this?” Byron tossed a copy of the morning’s
Observer
across the desk. A splashy three-column headline:

STRANGLER INVESTIGATION RIDDLED WITH ERRORS

The byline read, Amy Ryan and Claire Downey.

“Yes, I saw it.”

“That’s your sister-in-law, isn’t it, this Amy Ryan?” Byron bored in.

“Something like that.”

“Well,” Wamsley continued, “we think she’s hit the nail square on the head. BPD had its chance. They tried the old-fashioned way. Now it’s our turn.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning the case is just too big for one department, even Boston’s. You have thirteen women dead, a serial-murder investigation that spans four cities and three counties. These local departments aren’t used to working together. They don’t know how to communicate. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. What’s needed is a coordinated approach. It’s just the sort of case we should be intervening on. Even more important, what you have in this case is a killer who is canny enough or unpredictable enough or just crazy enough that traditional methods have failed utterly. What’s needed is new thinking.”

“New thinking?”

“Yes, yes.” Wamsley was giddy and sincere, and what he was saying made a superficial sort of sense. You could almost believe it. “An interdisciplinary, unconventional, scientific approach. Detectives unblinkered by experience, by what they know, or think they know, is the right way to investigate a homicide. If experience shows anything, it’s that people tend to see only what they’re looking for. They will overlook the most obvious evidence because it does not fit their preconceived notion of what clues
ought
to look like or where they
should
be found. We think this case could benefit from a fresh approach. We think the answer—the critical clue, the correct suspect—is probably already there in the data, somewhere in that haystack. The trick is to find it, to isolate it from all the background noise, and to do that before the strangler strikes again. If we could just aggregate all the evidence we have, synthesize it, and subject it to rigorous scientific methodology, we could really crack this thing. We could subject all that data to computer analysis—”

“Alright, George,” Byron said. “I think he’s got it.”

“Well,” Michael ventured, “it all sounds very interesting. You mind if I ask why you pulled me out of court to tell me all this?”

“The new bureau is going to be headed up by Mr. Wamsley.”

“It is?”

Wamsley grinned. “It is.”

“George, you don’t have any experience investigating homicides. Do you?”

“Absolutely none.”

Michael thought at this point that he knew why he was here. Nutty as it was, they meant to put Wamsley in charge of the new Strangler bureau, and Michael would be asked to take over Eminent Domain. Michael thought he was up to it despite his relative lack of experience, he thought the others would accept him. And in the New Boston era, who knew where it might lead?

“Michael, George has asked that you be detailed to the new bureau as well.”

“What! I’ve never investigated a homicide in my life.”

“Precisely!” Wamsley boomed.

“Precisely? Look, all I know is eminent domain. What am I gonna do—take away the Strangler’s parking space? This is crazy.”

“It’s not all that crazy, Michael,” Byron insisted. “You’re a bright guy. Your dad was in Boston Homicide, which will give you a little credibility with these guys. And you probably absorbed more from him than you realize. Anyway, your primary responsibility will be administrative. The bureau will be staffed up with detectives and experts and whatnot. Your job, with George here, will just be to synthesize it all, to keep everybody pulling in the same direction. We’re not asking you to do anything you’re unqualified for. We’re not stupid. You underestimate yourself, Michael.”