Strangled (10 page)

I looked down the long, sun-soaked expanse of the Skywalk in both directions and saw an older man in a Red Sox cap and sunglasses peering through a telescope. From the way he was standing, favoring one leg, I assumed it was Edgar. I replied, “I wasn’t followed, and I haven’t used my phone.”

The Phantom didn’t respond directly to that assertion. Instead, he said without a hint of impatience, “Leave the Prudential Center complex. Drive by taxi to the September 11th memorial in the Public Garden. Go there right away. Again, do not use your cell phone or contact anyone about anything. I will meet you there.”

This Phantom was lucky I had a lot of time on my hands. Truth is, I was starting to doubt his last assertion, that he’d meet me there, and was wondering if this might be some sort of wild serial killer chase, meaning I was going to come away empty-handed and still without a story for the next day’s
Record
. That being the case, I suspected good old Barry Bor would be getting another call on his show, and I’d have yet another miserable morning to follow.

I did as told again. Should I ever reunite with Maggie Kane, this was probably pretty good practice at being married. Again, a cab happened to be out front, but I was less suspicious because it was an actual cabstand. I rode the six blocks down to the Public Garden in anxious silence, got out at the corner of the park, and walked along the sidewalk of Arlington Street toward the main entrance at the base of Commonwealth Avenue.

This park was also familiar ground. It’s where I got engaged to be married, where I first told a former live-in girlfriend named Elizabeth Riggs that I loved her as we tromped through the sunlit snow one Sunday morning in the calm aftermath of a bad blizzard, where I last saw former
Record
publisher Paul Ellis alive the morning he was murdered in the parking lot of his newspaper. And now I was heading for this memorial built in honor of 202 Massachusetts residents killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York; many of the people were aboard the two planes that were hijacked shortly after leaving Logan Airport on the morning of September 11.

When I was about thirty yards from the park gates, I saw a cab roll to a stop at the entrance. The door flung open and a well dressed young man — I say well dressed and young because he looked similar to me — stepped out and strode purposefully inside the park in the direction of the September 11 memorial. Across the wrought-iron fence and through the defoliated trees that separated the Public Garden from Arlington Street, I could see the man sit on one of the stone benches facing a memorial wall etched with the names of all the victims. I slowed down, curious. He slouched with his two hands folded under his chin. He then hung his head low, his hands holding the back of his neck in what I guessed was sad contemplation.

I kept walking toward the gates of the Public Garden, but slower now. I didn’t know if this was the man I was supposed to meet. If it was, I was shocked at his age, which, like I said, was close to mine. I had anticipated someone much older, from the voice on the phone and the fact that the original Boston stranglings had occurred forty-plus years before. More likely, the guy was simply a visitor to the memorial, and a visitor who looked like he wanted some time alone.

It was when I was walking through the grand front gates, toward the memorial, that I heard what could have been a car backfiring, or someone setting off firecrackers, but I knew instantly to my core that it was something else entirely: gunshots. Reflexively, I ran my hands down my arms and torso to see if I had been the target. I felt nothing liquid, which was good. I also didn’t feel any pain, which was better. The sound had come from the area of the memorial, so I instinctively hunched low along the evergreen bushes and trotted along the cement path toward the man I had seen earlier.

I had run maybe twenty yards when, without warning, a figure in black blasted from one of the bushes and slammed directly into my face and chest with such ferocious force that we were both knocked to the ground. My head bounced on the pavement, causing me to see the clichéd stars of comic-book fame. More to the point, I also saw a handgun clank on the ground a few feet from my left arm. Without thinking, which is probably why I did it, I lunged for it, but the guy who knocked me over had already scrambled to his feet and dove on the weapon just ahead of me. He then leapt back up and sprinted toward the park entrance. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and set off in an uncertain pursuit.

I had staggered but a dozen or so steps when I saw the guy fling open the back door of an awaiting van along the curb of Arlington Street. I saw the van peel away. I heard a woman wailing in the distance, “He’s bleeding to death. Someone call for help. He’s dying.”

The next day’s paper would identify the victim as Joshua Carpenter, the husband of a flight attendant who was killed in the September 11, 2001, attack. His family would be quoted saying that, without the actual body of his wife, without a gravestone to mark it, he visited the memorial every morning to mourn her. Police would say that he was the victim of a brazen daylight robbery, and that uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives were calling in all their informants and scouring the city’s most drug-addled sections for any tips on the killers.

I knew it wasn’t a robbery. I knew this poor man wasn’t the intended victim. And I knew as well that the cops would never find the killer.

But that’s all I knew, and that was a huge problem.

My
plane bounced down at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, as if the pilot was in as big a rush to get to the tables as everyone else. Everyone but me, that is. I had come here to gamble, though not in the same way that my fellow passengers likely would. No, I was in Vegas to pay a visit to one Bob Walters, once one of the lead investigators on the Boston Strangler case, a lieutenant detective now retired from the Boston Police Department for some twenty years.

I’ll admit, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to have called him on the phone instead of flying nearly three thousand miles to knock on his door, except that I subscribe to the theory that in newspaper reporting, and life in general, it’s always better to show up. If there’s only one thing I’ve learned in twenty-plus years in the information negotiation business, it’s this: People tell you things in person that they wouldn’t on the phone. They’re not as likely to slam a door in your face as they are a receiver in your ear. They admire the effort made in pursuit of knowledge, and generally reward it.

I also thought it was a pretty opportune excuse to get the hell out of Boston, given that people kept dying the worst possible deaths, with at least one of those deaths apparently intended to be mine.

The day had been a tense one. Peter Martin, Vinny Mongillo, and I listened to Justine Steele’s rationalization for not running the story that morning, reporting the fact that a serial killer named for the Boston Strangler had murdered at least two women and reached out to a
Record
reporter to warn that more deaths were on the way. I guess being publisher means, among other things, never having to say you’re sorry, because an apology she did not give. What she did give, though, was a promise to run the story the following morning.

That led to the question of whether to report the fact that I had been contacted by someone claiming to be the Phantom who directed me to go to a location — the Boston Public Garden — in which someone was murdered. On this we collectively decided to withhold information, based on reasons I thought were just. It was all too circumstantial. It looked like we were trying too hard to inject ourselves into the story. And the tipster may not have been the Phantom at all. Truth be told, I didn’t think he was.

Which brings me to the most significant question in all this, at least in regard to me: Who wanted me dead, and why? I was reaching the conclusion that it was preposterous, if not downright impossible, that the same figure tipping me off about the strangulation deaths of young women was also trying to kill me. Why guide me with letters and try to kill me in person?

So I updated the story for the following morning’s paper to include the fact that the Phantom had also contacted radio host Barry Bor and led him to a website that contained photographs of a murder scene. That done, I sneaked to the airport in the back of Vinny Mongillo’s car and boarded a nonstop Delta flight for Vegas. Normally I’d be over the moon about an all-expense paid trip to Sin City — a couple of nights in a five-star hotel, dinner at Craft-steak, blackjack at the Wynn Las Vegas, maybe a cocktail or two at the Ghost Bar. But on this particular trip, all I wanted to do was get safely to my room, sleep for seven hours, and make it to Bob Walters’s house in one living piece the following morning.

On Walters, I had an address, courtesy of Hank Sweeney, also retired from the Boston Police Department. I had a brief description that he could be ornery and impatient, but was also regarded as brilliant in his day. I think that actually describes me as well. I also knew that he was eighty-five years on this earth, not all of them particularly good to him.

Once in my room at the Venetian, I gave myself a little tour of the various luxuries, from the motorized drapery opener in the sunken sitting area to the bathroom that was roughly the size of my condominium on the Boston waterfront. I ordered a twenty - seven - dollar - room - service hamburger. I could already hear Martin asking if I paid for the entire steer. I checked my voice mails and realized with another pang of depression that Maggie Kane had not yet bothered to call. In a fit of either whimsy or impatience, I dialed her cell phone number with no idea what I was going to say. Fortunately or unfortunately, it kicked directly into her voice mail. I listened to her recording for several long seconds and hung up.

Nothing from the Phantom, either, by the way.

I fired up my laptop and checked my e-mail. Again, nothing from Maggie and nothing from the Phantom. I flicked on the television, but all the March Madness NCAA basketball previews were over for the night. The most interesting thing on the tube was a hotel video of a dealer giving a lesson in baccarat, which I figured after about a minute of watching him would take me roughly six years and a million dollars to learn.

I hit the Off switch on the TV’s remote and turned my attention back to the computer as I bided time waiting for my gold-plated burger. I absently flipped back through my laptop’s remote e-mail account and inexplicably clicked on a note that Maggie had sent me eight months earlier.

In it, she was talking about an award she had just been given as the teacher of the year at her school, and what it meant, and why she believed in her heart that the reason she had just won it was because she was a better teacher and a better, happier person since she met me — that the pain in her life, the loss of a child, the breakup of a marriage, the death of her sister, had lessened since she met me. I read the note a second time, this time with a lump in my throat.

I clicked on another e-mail from her about a month later. This one was a short, chatty, flirty little missive. I was on a work trip to New York, due home that night. She asked me to try to get on an earlier shuttle because she didn’t think she could wait another minute to have sex.

I opened up another that said, simply, “I love you.” I clicked on one that she had sent a few minutes later that said, “I want you.” And a couple of minutes after that, she wrote, “Now.”

I couldn’t help but smile, sitting in a dark hotel room that was illuminated by a low-hanging desk lamp and the bright neon of the strip shining through the picture window. It was a smile, yes, but a rueful one. Not for the first time, I thought how tough it is at the beginning of something good to remember that it’s probably going to end bad, such being one of the overriding lessons of my life.

In those first, heady weeks and months of a relationship, it’s impossible to think that the whole thing will fall apart with a phone call made from the Atlanta airport on what’s supposed to be your wedding day. When you start a new job, it’s impossible to picture the day your company is sold and you’re summoned down to the human resources department and told you’ll be given two months’ severance, but they need all your stuff out of the building by the end of that day. When you watch a new puppy romping around the house, you can’t foresee the day you’re lying with him on the floor of a veterinary office while the doctor sticks a needle in his leg that will forever relieve him of his pain.

But that’s the thing about beginnings — they inevitably, invariably, lead to endings. Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens couldn’t foresee their end coming with a ligature around their throats and some freak watching the life vanish from their panic-stricken eyes. That poor widower in the Public Garden, Joshua Carpenter, couldn’t have imagined that his end would come with a bullet to the head while he mourned the loss of his wife, whose ending itself he could never have foreseen. And I never in a million years imagined driving to the hospital with a pregnant wife that morning too many years before and returning home alone that night, completely alone, because Katherine and the daughter I never knew died in childbirth.

I scrolled upward on my computer until I found the name of Elizabeth Riggs, the one I let get away, despite the fact that every sane cell inside of me screamed for me to hold on for the rest of my life. I clicked on the e-mail and it simply said, “The two of you were snoring in stereo.”

That one line just about jumped off my computer screen and kicked me in the gut. I knew instantly what she meant, even if the note was sent some three years before. She had been complaining to me, tongue in cheek, about the lack of sleep from the night before, not because of any wild circus sex, but because I was on one side of her and Baker on the other, both of us with colds, snoring in her ears. I even remembered that night, stretched out long and comfortable in my bed with a woman and a dog I would always love, having no idea that everything — everything — comes to an end.

And then it did, the day she walked down the jetway to board a flight for San Francisco. She told me she loved me, but she knew I couldn’t love her back, not the way she needed me to. And all I could do was stand there like an idiot and mutter good-bye. Very rarely, too rarely, endings come with warnings, but far more often they don’t.

Someone rang the doorbell of the hotel room. I jumped up, startled, then heard a man’s voice call out, “Room service.” When I opened the door, he rolled in a cart and reached into a warmer. For a fleeting moment, I thought he might pull out a gun. Instead, he held out a plate with my hamburger. We exchanged pleasantries, I signed the check, and he left. I took a bite of the burger, which was good, though twenty-seven dollars’ worth of good, I doubted. Of course, at that moment, it could have been the best burger ever and I don’t think I would have tasted a thing. I dropped it back on the plate with a quiet thud and pushed the cart back toward the door.

I looked around the empty hotel room and thought about my empty apartment back home. Had I been the one to die in the Public Garden that day, I wondered how many people would have really, truly cared. Would Maggie have come back for the funeral? Elizabeth? Is that what it would take to be with them again, to finally be at peace in our relationships, for me to be dead?

Wait a minute. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t how I thought. This wasn’t how I looked at life.

I flicked off the desk lamp, leaving the room with just the glare of the red and blue neon outside. And with that, I climbed slowly into bed.