Strangled (22 page)

His head was heavy to the point of being — and I don’t like using the expression here — dead weight, his neck slack. His blood was flowing right through my shirt and spilling down my legs.

“Edgar, we’ve got way too much left to do on this story for you to go anywhere, so don’t even think about it.”

The siren was now blaring outside. I could see the flash of blue lights reflected in the front window — a police car, not an ambulance. The doors to the store jolted open as I screamed at the clerk, “Call a fucking ambulance — now!”

In a second, there were two cops flanking me, both of them down on their knees. One of them asked what had happened.

I said, “He was shot three times by a guy who fled out the door about three minutes ago. Bullet wounds in the head, the stomach, and his leg. He’s losing blood. He’s unconscious. He’s barely hanging on.”

Another siren outside, and then another one after that, and still more in the distance. I could see blue lights reflecting in the window, and then red ones, meaning an ambulance was pulling up, thank God.

One of the cops stood up and barked into his radio, “APB for a suspected gunman who fled from the CVS on Charles and Cambridge Streets within the past five minutes.”

He looked down at me and asked, “What’d he look like?”

I still held Edgar’s head in my arms. His face had gone from pained to peaceful, which should have been nice, but instead scared the hell out of me.

“White guy, forties, black trench coat, bloody nose. That’s all I know.”

The cop repeated that into his radio. A whole cadre of police and EMTs burst through the front door. I heard someone drop a stretcher beside me. A guy in a brown uniform knelt down next to me and edged me slowly away from Edgar, saying, “Let me take over from here.” I stood up, and Edgar was surrounded by rescue workers.

The cop who was the first on the scene put his hand on my elbow and asked, “Can I get a word with you?”

We walked a few feet down an aisle that held deodorants and razors on the well-stocked shelves. Don’t ask me why I noticed this; I just did.

“Can you give me a brief account of what just happened?”

That was the cop, doing his job, though at the wrong time. My eyes and my thoughts remained on Edgar. The EMTs had spread him flat on the floor, on his back. One was ripping off his clothing and tending to his wounds. Another was pumping his heart, pushing his forearms down almost violently into Edgar’s chest. A third, a young woman, cupped her hands around Edgar’s mouth and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, that last word appearing to be a misnomer here. Edgar would like that part of the life-saving exercise very, very much. I hoped to hell he realized what was happening.

The EMTs were pumping and breathing feverishly, synchronizing their moves, talking to one another in increasingly loud voices. They did this until they didn’t, until the man pumping his chest placed his ear against Edgar’s heart, lifted his head, and announced to the others, “We’ve lost him. There’s nothing there.”

I pushed past the cop, plaintively yelling, “No! No! Keep trying!”

The three EMTs looked up at me simultaneously. The one on Edgar’s chest climbed off, stood up, and said to me, “I’m sorry. All his vitals have disappeared for too long. He’s gone. There’s nothing we can do.”

I looked down at Edgar Sullivan, sprawled on the floor of a Boston CVS, his clothing haphazardly torn away from his body, and tears immediately began flowing down my face. I thought of the help he had given me in a series of stories I wrote bringing down the mayor. I thought of his various ex-wives, his love of life, the extraordinary wisdom and wherewithal that he brought to his job. I knelt down and kissed his forehead, still warm, and whispered, “Thank you, Edgar. Thank you for everything you did.”

As I got up, the same uniformed officer who had tried questioning me shouted out, “This is a homicide scene. I need to ask everyone to step back and leave the body exactly as it is.”

I stepped away, toward the front counter. The cop walked over and asked the clerk, who had been standing there all this time, what had happened.

“It was a robbery,” the clerk said in a thick accent. “A man in a mask came in and tried robbing the store.”

The cop had a little notebook in his hand, jotting things down in a way not unlike I might have done if I was covering the story — which I wasn’t, but maybe I should have been. He looked at me and asked, “A robbery?”

I thought about that for a long moment. No, in fact, it wasn’t. A robbery would have involved the masked man trying to take money from the cash register. A robbery would have involved the gunman paying closer attention to the store clerk. That never happened. Instead, the assailant seemed hell-bent on executing me.

But was this the kind of information I wanted to share with the police? If I did, it would mean that I’d be thrust even further into the center of a story I was trying to unravel. It might also render me useless, because suddenly I’d be bogged down with detectives, answering questions rather than doing my job and asking them.

So I nodded my head. “Apparently,” I said.

Please note the Bill Clinton–esque answer. In a court of law, it would allow me to worm my way out, even if in the court of common sense, it would still be known as a lie.

Before he pinned me down any further, I changed the subject, saying, “The guy you’re looking for is going to have a gunshot wound to his wrist.” Then I added, “I need some air. I’m just going to step outside for a moment.”

I walked past Edgar Sullivan’s body, my eyes never for a moment leaving his. Another cop held the front door for me. The sidewalk around the store was cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape and protected by a phalanx of uniformed officers. Police lights still cut through the air, though the ambulance had already left. I leaned against the front of the building and sucked in the cool night air as hard and as fast as I could.

Edgar Sullivan was dead. He died protecting me. And someone was going to pay long and hard for what he had just done.

The
first nonstop flight from Boston to Las Vegas leaves at 7:10 in the morning, and the passenger list isn’t exactly a roster of Boston’s social register. There were guys in tank tops, women with fanny packs, kids with two days’ worth of snot hardened around their noses. And this was first class, which cost me just enough of the
Record
’s money that Martin would undoubtedly ask if we now owned a percentage of the plane.

I felt a tinge of relief, a lot of trepidation, and overwhelming sadness as we ascended from the runway at Logan International Airport and banked over South Boston — the emotions having nothing to do with the physical act of aviation.

Rather, it felt somewhat good to get the hell out of Dodge, even for a day. Dodge was about the death of someone I loved and truly respected, Edgar Sullivan. Dodge was about another death of a man I never even knew in a place — the Public Garden — where I was supposed to be. Dodge was about the murders of young women whose licenses and videos I received shortly after they died.

I was feeling guilt. I was feeling helpless. And I’ll admit, I was feeling a little more than a little bit of fear. Someone wanted me vacated from this good earth, and, even if incompetent in their execution (pun partially intended), they were going to clever extremes to mask their efforts — a possible drowning, a daytime robbery, a faulty steam-bath door, a store holdup.

A few things happened before my flight that are worth noting, first and foremost being the conversation I had with Deirdre Walters Hayes, daughter of the late Bob Walters, retired detective with Boston PD.

She had known I had been at the house, known I was there because, she said, her mother had a vague recollection, and she found my business card on her father’s dresser. She didn’t seem particularly angry at me, which was a good thing, maybe even a great thing.

After my condolences, I cut to the quick. “Las Vegas Police said they found a key on the stairs above your father’s body,” I said. “Any idea what it unlocked?”

She didn’t hesitate. “An old footlocker that my dad kept in the garage,” she said.

My breath quickened. I asked, “Any idea what’s in it?”

“His life. His career. Things he cherished from his old days in Boston, and things from some old cases that haunted him right to the end. After you left, he must have gotten it in his head that he needed to see some of these things again.”

She hesitated, then said, her voice starting to crack, “But he didn’t have the strength. He should have known that.”

I knew what I needed, and what I needed was to see what was in that box. I also knew that Bob Walters wanted me to see what was in that box, which is why he was trying to get to it before I returned to his house. But I didn’t want to look overeager. So I said to Deirdre, “Listen, I came out there to ask your father some questions about the old Boston Strangler case, and he was phenomenal about answering them. Would you mind if I came back out and took a look to see if there’s anything that might be helpful in that locker?”

“Come on out,” she said. And that was that.

It’s also important to mention the story I filed for that morning’s
Record
about the murder of Edgar Sullivan. Maybe I shouldn’t have written it, but more probably I should have. Edgar was a lifelong employee of the
Record,
forty-three years running the newspaper’s security operation, and I think he would have gotten something of a kick being memorialized on his paper’s front page on his way out the door.

It’s one thing to be evasive with cops, quite another to be that way with readers, so in a first-person account, I provided many more details in my story than I let on to detectives at the scene of the crime the night before. That’s not to say I wrote everything. Rather, I described how the older woman was allowed to escape from the store. I indicated that the gunman seemed more concerned with the people in the store than he was with the money in the register. And I went into more graphic detail about the gunfight, portraying Edgar Sullivan to be exactly what he was: a hero who saved the life of a colleague, that colleague being me.

That particular story, written in an hour on deadline, inspired a 6:00 a.m. voice mail from Police Commissioner Hal Harrison to my cell phone, during which he said, and I quote, “I’ll slap you so hard with a subpoena that you won’t be able to spell the words
Boston Record.
”

Fuck him. Anyway, he’d have to have a Nevada sheriff serve it, and I doubt that was going to happen, mostly because he wouldn’t have any idea where I was — at least that was a key part of the plan.

Speaking of which, the plan called for me to parachute into Las Vegas, though not literally, drive immediately to the home of the newly late Bob Walters, meet his daughter, Deirdre, analyze and possibly retrieve whatever it was that was in that locker, and catch a four o’clock flight that would get me back to Boston by half past midnight. One added benefit of this trip was that it would get me out of the firing range that Boston had become, at least for a few hours.

Of course, I can’t remember the last time anything in my life went according to plan, so why should this day have been any different.

The last time I had pulled up to Bob Walters’s house on Rodeo Road, the county coroner was parked out front and Bob was already zipped up in a shiny black body bag and getting wheeled out the front door. That was not a good day, but then again, not many of them had been lately.

This time, no coroner, no body bags, no police cars, all of which was good news. Just desert serenity, with chirping birds, the distant sound of a gurgling fountain, and the dry, superheated air. I strode up the Walterses’ walkway and knocked on the front door.

I wasn’t exactly prepared for what happened next, but then again, preparation had hardly been my calling card of late. A woman answered, I don’t know, somewhere in her thirties, maybe about five feet six, 110 pounds, dressed in a miniskirt and a skintight white tank top that could just about make a man — especially this man — buckle at the knees.

Beyond that, she wore heavy eyeliner and bright lipstick, and her wavy auburn hair was bunched back in a ponytail. She said, “You must be Jack. I’m Deirdre Hayes.”

Now, Deirdre is one of those names I associate with navy blue pantsuits and white silk shirts that button to the neck — a conservative name for a conservative woman who, because of that, has probably achieved some modicum of financial success. It’s like Alice or Patricia or Ruth. You don’t expect to see a Deirdre dressed like this.

On the flip side, throw the name Tiffany around and that’s a woman I want to meet, or for that matter Alex or Andi or Jen. Kate can go either way, as can Liz or Anne.

Back to Deirdre. She must have sensed my, um, surprise, because she said, “Forgive my appearance; I’m just getting off the overnight shift. I’m a waitress on the Strip.”

I said, “I’d like to spend a few hours with my good friend Jimmy Beam in that bar.”

Just kidding. What I really said was, “I’m so sorry to intrude like this. Things are crazy back in Boston, and the sooner we did this, the better.”

“No apology necessary.”

She invited me inside. The place smelled strongly of cleaning fluids, which, given what had gone on in there over so many years, was probably a good thing. All the blinds and drapes were pulled open, allowing sunshine to flow inside. Classical music poured through a central speaker system — Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 19 in F, if I’m not mistaken. All right, I’m bluffing here, but someone was tickling the ivories, and it sounded pretty damned good, even if it didn’t seem to go with the woman before me.

Deirdre led me back into the big kitchen and offered me a cup of coffee, which I declined, and then a bottle of water, which I gladly accepted. Last time I was in this room, her mother was flinging a glass against a wall and killing herself slowly with booze. This time, there was no hint of her, so I asked, “Is Mrs. Walters home?”

“My mom’s in rehab,” Deirdre replied, leaning back on a countertop, holding a mug of coffee in both her hands. She paused, then added, “And not by her choice. You saw her. She was a mess. Her whole life had fallen apart. I had to get an appointment by the court to be her guardian, and the first thing I did was send her into a clinic to dry out. She needs the kind of help that I can’t give her.”

Deirdre Hayes said this matter-of-factly, though I was pretty certain the facts of her life had to hurt.

I said, “You’re a good daughter.”

She replied, “Thank you, but for chrissakes, look at me. Hardly good enough, hardly what my old man wanted me to be. My mother’s had a tough life. I’m intensely proud of my father. He was a great detective, and he helped a lot of people over the years — hundreds and hundreds of them. But he was never the same after the Boston Strangler case, and he never made it easy on my mom.”

I nodded. “I think that Strangler case ruined a lot of people’s lives.” Not to mention ended; Edgar Sullivan’s corpse flashed in my mind like a slide in a PowerPoint presentation, but of course I didn’t mention it. What I said was, “I know it’s not exactly making mine a pony ride at the moment.”

Now she nodded knowingly, with a smile, though I wasn’t sure what she actually knew. She said, “Good Lord, he was tough to get along with. My mother’s an alcoholic. I ended up spending my twenties shoving heroin into my arms and up my nose. I lost everything I had. My husband, my child, my job. I’m not blaming my old man, I’m really not. You create your own problems in life. But man, he didn’t make it easy to get out. He was a miserable old guy, right to the end. Maybe the Strangler case was the cause, or maybe it was an excuse. I was never sure.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

Deirdre Hayes shrugged. “My mother has alcoholism in her family, but my dad brought it all to the fore. If I was her, I can’t tell you I would have done it any differently, except maybe divorcing him and living my own life on my own terms.”

We talked a little bit about my meeting with her father the day that he died. I mentioned how surprising it was that he fell down the stairs that day.

She said, “You triggered something in him. He never got out of bed, but after you left, there was something he had to see.”

I said, “He was trying to tell me something before I left, but he couldn’t get the words out. Then his health worker showed up and kicked me out.”

She nodded. I was beginning to hear the clock ticking toward my return flight, so I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m on a tight schedule, and the truth is, I’m really eager to see what it is that your old man has.”

“Let’s go.”

She led me from the kitchen down a short hall and out a metal door into an obsessively neat two-car garage, where the floor still looked like it was brand-new. There were no vehicles in the garage, giving it a cavernous feel. It was also un-air-conditioned, making it feel hotter than a day in hell, which perhaps this was and someone forgot to tell me.

Deirdre said, “The day after my father died, I was really sad for all that had happened, not just his death, but what became of his life, and my mother’s life, and my life. I wanted to relive some of it, reach back to the better times and try to figure out what went wrong. I took a peek through his stuff myself. There’s some interesting stuff. Maybe it explains all this — his misery, the way he died. You know?”

I didn’t know. Not yet, anyway. As she said this, she led me to the far rear corner of the garage, where an old footlocker — a chest, really — sat on the floor. The key was already in the hole. She turned it and opened the locker upward, revealing four old boxes in pretty good shape sitting side by side inside.

She opened the top of the second one and pulled out a notebook from inside. She slowly flipped through it to a section in the back that she had tabbed with a Post-it note, and she began reading to herself, getting lost in the words and her own thoughts. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “My father always said he had another prime suspect in the stranglings, but he would never tell anyone who it was. Here it is, in black and white, in his own words.”

With that, she handed me the notebook. As I received it, I could already feel my heart falling. I read through the notes, which were of the exact interview he had already described to me in his bedroom on the morning that he died, the one with Paul Vasco. The session was held in an anteroom in Bridgewater at the prison for the sexually dangerous. Bob Walters was alone with nothing more than his badge and his gun and his total indignation that the state attorney general and some of his cohorts in homicide had fingered the wrong guy. There was no reason for him to be there. Vasco could have offered him a confession, and the other higher-ups would have told him it was all a lie. He was there only because he couldn’t let it go.

The notes showed that he asked the exact question he told me he’d asked in the exact way he described it: “Hey, Paul, DeSalvo’s gone. The case is off the books. But we had the wrong guy, didn’t we?”

Beneath the question, he wrote, “PV remained silent. Didn’t say a word. But he smiled like the devil, making sure I understood exactly what he meant. And I did.” The word
devil
was underlined three times.

And beneath that he wrote, “Paul Vasco is the Boston Strangler.”

I looked up at Deirdre Hayes, who was looking intently at me as I read the notes. I said, “Do you mind if I take this with me?”

She hesitated for a long moment, anxiously rubbing her hands together at her waist, looking more innocent than she probably should have in that particular outfit.

Finally she said, “I’ve never dealt with reporters before. How do you handle payment?”

Terrific. I fly across a continent and am met by a woman who wants to turn a profit on her old man’s death. Though hell, she probably had it coming to her, given the misery that the guy had caused.

I said, “We don’t.” I said this softly, attempting a tone of understanding, perhaps even empathy. “I’m not allowed to pay for information. Newspapers like mine, reputable news organizations, won’t do it.”