The Strangler
Authors: William Landay
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Psychological, #Historical, #Thriller
Contents
For Henry and Ted, brothers
The Hub of Business and Pleasure…
BOSTON
If you haven’t seen the
New
Boston lately, you’re in for a surprise—America’s city of history is now a city of tomorrow.
Fostered by the unmatched universities here, hundreds of research-based industries have sprung up on all sides, probing the mysteries of the space age—atomics, nucleonics, electronics, automation in all its forms.
Here the executive and the R&D man alike feel at home. They live in new apartment towers right in town, minutes from work. Their children attend topflight schools. Their wives shop at bright modern shopping centers. The whole family enjoys the unique cultural advantages for which Boston is world famous. And best of all, they are surrounded by the friendly faces of Bostonians. Year-round, there’s fun afoot!
For a week, a while, a lifetime…you’ll love Boston. Come see for yourself!
—MAGAZINE AD, 1962
part
one
1
Ricky Daley
In the subway: twenty swaying grief-stunned faces. A man insensible of his own leg pistoning up and down, tapping
tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
on the floor. At Boylston Street the track curved, the steel wheels shrieked against the rails, and the lights flickered off. Passengers let their eyes close, like a congregation beginning a silent prayer. When the lights came on again and their eyes opened, Ricky Daley was watching them.
At Park Street station, Ricky jogged up the stairs to the street, into a stagnant crowd. Offices had closed early, creating an early rush hour, but there was nowhere to go. The news was everywhere, still sensational though everyone had already heard it. Newsboys squawked “Extra!” and “Read it
hee
-yuh!” and “Exclusive!” They lingered on the hissing alien word “Ass-
sass-
inated!” Over on Tremont Street, crowds clumped against parked cars to listen to the news on WBZ; they bowed their heads toward the car radios. But there was no real news, no one knew anything, so eventually they turned away, they loitered on the sidewalk, and shambled in and out of the Common. It was midafternoon, three hours or so
after—
after President Kennedy first slapped at his neck as if he’d been stung by a bee—three hours after but the concussed mood was not dissipating. It was deepening, and more and more the stupor was infused with anxiety: What was next? From what direction would the attack come? How in the hell would they all get through this?
Ricky strolled right through them, working his way west. It was quieter in the Common, away from the street. No one seemed to be speaking. No one knew what to say. In the quiet he could make out the murmur of the city, distant engines and car horns and cops’whistles. He wore a gray overcoat and an itchy hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar suit. His shoes, new black brogans, made squinching sounds when he walked. He had tried to soften them by wearing them around his apartment, but they still pinched across the top of his feet. He had succeeded, at least, in dulling the gloss of the leather by rubbing it with saliva. The shoes should look polished but not new. New shoes might draw attention.
By the Frog Pond, a woman on a slatted park bench held a handkerchief to her mouth, balled up in her fist. Her eyes were watery. Ricky stopped to offer her the stiff new handkerchief tri-folded in his jacket pocket.
“Here,” he said.
“I’m alright.”
“Go on, I don’t use them. It’s just for show.”
Ricky gazed up, granting her the privacy to mop her nose.
“Who would do such a thing?” The woman sniffled.
Ricky looked down again, and he detected a shy grin at the corners of her mouth. Smile, he thought. Go on.
“Who would do this?”
Go ahead and smile. Because who could deny there was a little secret pleasure in it? Kennedy was dead, but they had never felt quite so alive. All these nine-to-five suckers, all the secretaries and waitresses and Edison men—it was as if they had all been drowsing for years only to snap awake, here, together, inside this Great Day. Ricky thought that, if he wanted to, he could explore this girl for information (where did she work? did she have a key? was there an opportunity there?). She was available. Probably she felt a little intoxicated by this feeling of nowness. Until today, she had never felt so thrillingly present in each moment. It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive
now
.
Now
occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel
now,
athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves like Ricky Daley, and even for them the sensation was fleeting, limited to the instant of creative action. Cousy knew the feeling; Miles Davis, too. The boundless improvisational moment. Today this girl was experiencing it, and she wanted to share the experience even with a stranger. Well, Ricky figured, it made sense—Kennedy’s murder was exciting. It was a good day to work.
“Castro,” she decided. “That’s all I can think, is Castro.”
“Maybe.”
“I messed up your handkerchief. I’m sorry. Must be expensive.”
“It’s okay. I stole it.”
“You…? Oh.” She smiled, appraising him. “You’re very nice. What’s your name?”
“It’s a long story.”
He left her there. He walked on through the Public Garden. His breath made little clouds in the cold.
At Arlington Street, the doors to the church were propped open. The interior was warm and eggshell white. Through the open doors, Ricky could see an organist, a young man with flushed cheeks and a lick of blond hair that flopped in his eyes until he flipped it back with a toss of his head like a horse. The young man played in a sort of rapture. His eyes were shut, his torso swayed expressively.
Ricky walked on, west through the Back Bay, in a series of zigs and zags. On the residential side streets, he turned each corner, stopped, and looked back for a good long while. He hadn’t noticed any tails, but you never knew. Even on a day like this, with everyone smashed by the news, cops included, it was important to maintain your technique.
At the Copley Plaza Hotel, a doorman in a long overcoat with gold braiding and epaulettes held the door. “Good afternoon, sir.”
“Afternoon.” Ricky took care to glance at the man only for an instant.
He moved quickly through the lobby, but not too quickly. Purposeful, proprietary, calibrating his movements to the room. He had a fingerman at the front desk, who gave Ricky a nod.
On the house phone he dialed room 404. No answer.
He sauntered into the Oak Room to wait at the bar for fifteen minutes, to be sure. A guest might go back up to his room for a forgotten item in the first few minutes after walking out, but he almost never returned once he’d been out for a quarter hour or more. Ricky made a point of checking his coat and tipping the girl a quarter. At the bar he ordered a highball and settled in. Rather than gawk at the luxurious room with its carved plaster ceiling and heavy furniture, he watched the door. He folded his arms across his chest, straining his suit jacket, because he’d noticed that rich people were comfortable in their expensive clothes. They wore a good suit as if it were an old sweater. They didn’t care.
After a half hour of this business, pleased with the way he’d blended into the herd (no one, not even the bartender, would remember him later), he called room 404 again on the house phone and again got no answer. He drained his highball and in a tipsy voice he told the bartender an old joke—about the giraffe who walks into a bar and announces, “The highballs are on me”—before leaving. The bartender’s face puckered: Didn’t this jackass know Kennedy was dead?
Elevator to the fourth floor.
At room 404 he gave a brushy knock, then took a key from his pocket and let himself in.
He checked the room. Empty.
Back to the door. Gloves on. A glance up and down the hallway. He took a paper clip from his pocket, broke an inch of wire from it, slid the wire into the keyhole to plug it, then closed the door.
Checked the dresser. Checked the closets. He worked quickly but without noise and without leaving a mess. Found what he was looking for duct-taped to the inside of the toilet tank (clever prick): a yellow silk jewelry bag.
Ricky emptied the bag onto the bed. Loose diamonds. Some small jewelry pieces. Packets of hundred-dollar bills, banded. He separated out some of the jewelry, the gold plate, the pieces too bulky to conceal. That left a glassy heap. There might have been a half million dollars mounded up there. A cool little cone of diamonds.
The corners of Ricky’s mouth tried to curl up into the tiniest unprofessional smirk, which he smothered.
2
Michael Daley
A bulge rippled across his view. It was, he thought, like looking at the bottom of a stream as a little wave passes over: a transparent swell traveled from right to left across his field of vision. It bloated the damask curtains, the walls, the men’s faces, the bald head of a man at a lectern—and at that point Michael closed his eyes.
He knew what the hallucination signaled. The pain was coming. Soon. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.
His right hand tingled, and a drink slipped out of his fingers and dropped away. The glass remained upright as it fell, as if it were falling straight down a tube. He gazed down into the top of the glass, at the undisturbed ice cubes and soda water and lime wedge, until the floor punched the bottom of the glass and the drink erupted onto the carpet and splattered his shoes.
The spill made no noise, but a little gasp went up from the crowd around Michael. From the lectern, the speaker quipped, “Yes, it’s shocking, I know,” and everyone laughed. Someone chucked Michael on the shoulder, and he mustered a smile for them, though he was not the sort who liked to be looked at, much less laughed at. He picked up the empty glass and made a feeble gesture with it, like a toast, to ward them off, to direct all those eyes back to Farley Sonnenshein and his speech.
Sonnenshein resumed, the usual developer-speak, although he made his pitch with unusual flair. “Gentlemen, let’s not forget where this city was only a few short years ago. Decaying, rotting, shrinking—dying. Young people leaving in droves. Businesses closing. Blight was spreading like cancer in an old man. And the only hope for this man—this ravaged, dying old man—was surgery. Radical surgery.”
Another wave rolled through Sonnenshein. The developer seemed to ripple like a flag in a light breeze. Michael looked down, pretending to concentrate on the speech. He thought he could hold this pose for a moment before the hallucinations got worse and he would have to leave the room.
This was the aura that preceded a migraine. The word
aura
was a clinical term, but it captured the experience perfectly. The migraine aura swept in like fog; by the time you’d detected it, you were already enveloped, isolated. This particular hallucination—those rolling undulations in his visual field—was new to Michael. He had sometimes seen shivery radiations around the edges of things, like heat rising off hot asphalt, before a migraine set in. But this was new. He wanted to remember it clearly so he could describe it to his doctor.
And he wanted to get out.
Sonnenshein’s voice: “The West End—a crowded ghetto, all fifty-some-odd acres of it—gone! Swept away! Soon it will be replaced with a streamlined complex of shops and apartments. We’ve broken ground on our new Central Artery, an elevated high-speed expressway that will whisk cars right through downtown, relieve our crowded streets, and speed local commerce. Even Scollay Square—”
A mock plea went up, in thick Bostonese,
“Nöt Skully Squay-uh!”
“Yes, gentlemen, even Scollay Square! Goodbye, burlesque houses! Goodbye, tattoo parlors!
Arrivederci,
Scollay Square, you will not be missed. Not when this city has a new, modern Government Center in your place.”
“You call that progress?” someone shouted, and there was a gust of laughter.
Sonnenshein waited for the room to fall quiet. “I call it the New Boston,” he answered, as if this new city were a gift he was granting them. “That’s the Boston your children will know. And the old Boston, my friends,
our
Boston, will seem as vanished and quaint to them as Pompeii.”
Michael looked up. A test. For a moment he saw the scene clearly: Sonnenshein with his hand still poised on the white cloth; the roomful of men watching him, eager, excited at the nearness of Sonnenshein, the Man to See. The picture held for a moment, then it billowed once, and again, and again. Michael closed his eyes only to be dazzled by phosphenes, flashbursts of light that he sensed rather than saw, as if he’d been staring into the sun. He began to make his way toward the door, through the crowd, his eyes open only a crack.
Somewhere behind Michael was Sonnenshein’s voice: “President Kennedy told that wonderful story about the great French marshal, Lyautey. One day Marshal Lyautey asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not bloom for a hundred years. The marshal replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon.’ Gentlemen, we too have trees to plant. Let’s plant them this afternoon. That is how we will honor Jack Kennedy’s memory. With a living memorial in his old hometown. I give you the next piece of the New Boston: JFK Park.”
Michael dared to look back as Sonnenshein slipped the cloth off an architect’s model, a Corbusian apartment complex, four soaring towers set in a swell of green. The model was white, immaculate, futuristic, fantastic. There was an audible contented
mmm
. Applause. Mayor Collins, in his wheelchair, peered between the little clay buildings at eye level, beaming. The Cardinal craned his neck.
“To the future!” someone toasted.
“The future!” came the answer, and a cheer went up.
A blind spot, a white hole, now occupied the center of Michael’s field of vision. He tried to blink it away. The hole faded, scintillated at the edges, and through it he saw Sonnenshein scanning the room, gauging the reaction to his model.
Michael’s boss, an assistant A.G. named Wamsley, materialized at Michael’s side. Jug-eared, grinning his familiar toothy grin. “What’s wrong, Daley, you don’t like the future?”
“Not the immediate future, no.” Michael struggled to hold himself still, to present himself as a healthy man.
“You alright, Michael?”
“No. I have a headache.”
He stumbled out onto School Street. A doorman in his smart Parker House uniform offered a cab, and somehow Michael fell into the back seat. He was holding his head now, pressing two fingers at each temple. Still no pain, but it was coming.
“Beacon and Clarendon,” he told the cabbie.
“You want to take a cab six blocks?”
“Yes.”
“You could walk it quicka.”
“Just do it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. These people.”
Michael lay down on the back seat. It smelled of vinyl and sweat and gasoline and cold. The aura would end, all the kaleidoscopic visions and the exalted, privileged intoxication that accompanied them—all the phenomena that so fascinated the doctors, the
scotomata
and
spectra
of a
classical migraine aura—
they would fade, soon, and in their place would be the first little swell of pain, a bony hump inside the forehead, pressing, always on the right side. You passed through the aura like a dream, and then the dream receded and you were only your body, you were bone and meat, a wounded mortal animal. Your brain, impossibly delicate, would be squeezed. That was what the aura signaled: Pain was coming.
The taxi bounced down Beacon Street. Michael lay with his eyes open. No pain yet. Soon. Soon.