Ricky turned on one light, then lowered all the shades. He made a mental note of where each shade had been.
This would be a leisurely job. He had clocked it only a couple of days—criminal negligence by Ricky’s standards—but Kurt Lindstrom’s one-week engagement with the BSO was a bit of good luck he did not want to miss. Tonight Lindstrom would be in Symphony Hall performing the Pines of Rome, as he had done the two previous nights. The piece was scheduled after the intermission; there was no way Lindstrom would be back before ten.
Ricky searched the front room methodically. He did not touch anything unless it was necessary to see behind or under it, and he meticulously replaced everything.
There was an upright piano in a corner with stacks of sheet music. On the fold-down music shelf of the piano was a handwritten arrangement Lindstrom apparently was working on. Ricky did not read music but he studied the pages anyway. It was written in pencil with a sure hand and no eraser marks or cross-outs. Each line spanned eight full staffs. It looked impossibly complex, coded, mad. Above the piano was a reproduction engraving of a scowling Beethoven.
One wall was lined with bookcases, some improvised from boards and cinder blocks. The books overflowed them and were stacked on the floor in haphazard piles. But there was nothing haphazard about the shelving. In one area were crime novels, everything from Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and volumes of Dostoyevsky to pulps—but mostly pulps. This was a well-thumbed library. More than half were paperbacks, their spines cracked and concave. Lindstrom was a reader and, apparently, a rereader. Ricky rather admired Lindstrom’s library, which was heavy in California noir, Hammett and Chandler of course, but also included a lot of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes, all filed by the author’s name. There were a few mildly risqué titles too, Gang Girl and Hitch-Hike Hussy and that sort of thing. Ricky tipped these out of the line and smirked at the lurid covers: scarlet women in various stages of undress, leering fedora’d men with oversized handguns.
Lindstrom maintained a separate three-foot shelf for his pornographic magazines. They were arranged vertically with spines flush, just as good suburban families arranged their National Geographics in neat yellow ranks in the den. Ricky realized the danger of rifling through this shelf—no doubt it was a portion of the library Lindstrom visited again and again—so he removed the magazines one at a time and replaced them with precision. Ricky was not immune to the fascination of pornography and he was no prude, but Lindstrom’s magazines shocked him. Not the garden-variety pornography, of which there was quite a lot, with an emphasis on bondage and a separate subsection with names like Hellcat Grannies and Gray Foxes. And not the ordinary softcore girlie mags, Black Velvet and Busty and Wicked, the type that included cocktail recipes between the pinups. What jarred Ricky were the others. They were graphically sadistic. It crossed his mind that it might have been illegal merely to possess them. These magazines were printed on cheap newsprint. That the photos were in black and white and poorly shot, underlit, sometimes not even focused, somehow added to their authenticity. Women trussed in contorted positions, with baroque leather strapwork or artlessly calf-roped. Their breasts were clamped or stretched. They were raped, both with objects and by naked, black-hooded, potbellied, small-bottomed men whose penises were not shown. These women winced or stared boggle-eyed at their torturers. In one photo a woman lay dead—playacting, presumably—and bleeding. In another shot, a woman slouched from a whipping post, as if lynched, her arms pulled up behind her at an unnatural, unfake-able angle. Some showed women’s faces badly beaten.
Ricky’s mouth fell open. For a few minutes he forgot the need to sweep the apartment quickly and efficiently then get out. The magazines seemed the opposite of pornography, which existed to stimulate. He could not imagine more dick-shriveling images than these. He stared, transfixed.
Then he saw it.
The images, in a magazine called Bound, might have been crime-scene photos from one of the Boston stranglings—except that the magazine was dated July 1958. The “victim” in the photos was a woman in her fifties, wearing a housecoat and girdle. The “strangler” was dressed, ridiculously, in a thievish cap and mask and hepcat jacket, all of which he wore in every photo. In the first shot he wore black pachuco pants; in the rest, no pants or underpants at all. The victim was bound and “raped,” then “strangled” with a garrote of braided sheets and nylons, which was tied off in a bow in the final photo.
Ricky knew.
Something collapsed inside him. The hidden reserve of strength that had carried him through the night of Amy’s murder and the funeral and the long weeks afterward—in an instant, it crumbled. He replaced the magazine precisely, and moved to inspect the rest of the apartment. But his eyes watered. He wiped them with his upper arm. Thoughts of suffering led immediately to Amy. Only a few, Joe and Michael among them, knew the details of the murder. The rest did not want to know. They did not want to dwell on the fact that a family member had been murdered. They were embarrassed by it. In some obscure way, they felt tainted by their association with murder, however blameless the victim. They did not want the sort of negative celebrity that attaches to a murder survivor: Did you know his daughter/wife/mother was killed by the Strangler? They did not want to be perceived as carriers of murder, or of whatever trait had attracted it, weakness, bad luck, fate, sin. The sexual nature of the crime only doubled their shame. So they pretended the murder never happened. They acted, all except maybe Michael, as if Amy had died of cancer or in a car accident or in some other nonsensational, nonviolent way. Ricky had done it, too. Maybe having known Amy so intimately, having known her body, he was the one who most needed to block out the details of her murder.
But it was impossible to maintain the fiction here, in the room where the Strangler lived, where he had first formed the idea, where he had retreated after the crime. Here it was all too clear. Amy had not died instantly. Her dying had been a process, a long, excruciating, bloody process. To turn away from that fact, to pretend it had not happened—as if she had passed into fiction, a book we could safely put back on the shelf because the subject did not suit us—was not polite or discreet. It was cowardly. Amy had suffered.
He thought, Monstrous, monstrous.
More quickly than before, Ricky scanned some of the other shelves. And here was another impossible juxtaposition: Lindstrom’s psychopathic sexual deviance occupied the same mind as an elaborate intellect. His shelves were crowded with Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Leviathan, the Principia Ethica, The Critique of Pure Reason. Most were paperbacks; all were broken-backed and grungy with fingering. Ricky did not know what linked these books, whether they shared a central concern or not. He opened one book, Hobbes’s Leviathan. It was full of scribbles, little stars, underlinings, brackets, annotations—the leavings of a ravenous mind that had passed this way.
In the bedroom, in a top drawer where Lindstrom kept his own underwear, he found a pair of women’s panties. Ricky nudged them open with his gloved finger. They were large and made of an elastic rubbery material, like a girdle. They were certainly not Amy’s. They were torn at the waistband and flyspecked with a brown liquid that might have been blood. They were a souvenir of a murder, and Ricky was tempted to take them. But he could not take them without betraying that he had been there. Lindstrom did not know he was being watched and certainly did not know he had been found out; Ricky wanted to preserve that advantage. So he balled up the enormous panties and replaced them in the drawer just as he had found them.
He retraced his steps, raising the shades to their original height, turned off the lights, and let himself out. And here was a final glitch, an unprofessional stumble for which Ricky would reproach himself later.
The door had two locks which had to be relocked. The first, in the knob, was simple enough; it locked merely by closing the door. But above it was a drop lock, an old Schlage, one that should not have given Ricky any trouble. This type of lock was very slightly more difficult
to pick because of the added weight of the bolt mechanism, which resisted the rotation of the cylinder. The added resistance required a lock picker to secure the cylinder with enough torque that he could overcome the resistance of that weight and turn the lock, yet not so much torque that the pins mis-set as the pick lifted them. It was a matter of touch—a very, very simple thing, especially for an accomplished pick man like Ricky who took pride in his skill and practiced constantly. But he fumbled with the lock. When he tried to rotate the cylinder, it jammed—the pins were mis-set—and he had to start again. Another mis-set, and he had to repeat the process a third time. The whole episode took just seconds. But it was a fumble, and he might have been put in a bad position if someone had come along. No one did come, luckily, and Ricky did manage to relock the door. But the lapse troubled him. It was not a clean job.
41
Margaret Daley emerged from the bathroom after showering. She scrubbed her hair dry with a hand towel while simultaneously pinning her elbows against her side to secure the bath towel wrapped around her. When she had finished, she stood before a mirror. There was a man in the doorway. Her body jerked and she yelped, “Michael!”
He slouched against the doorpost in his courtroom suit. On his way to work, presumably. He had lost weight. His eyes were baggy with exhaustion.
“What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“Your boyfriend left the door unlocked on his way out.”
“My boyfriend? Michael, are you mental? What’s wrong with you?”
“He’s not your boyfriend?”
“I’m a little old for boyfriends. It’s none of your business anyways what he is.”
“Do you love him?”
“Oh my Lord, Michael, it’s too early to have this conversation. I’m not even dressed yet.” She minced into the bathroom—a big woman simulating a dainty woman’s walk; Michael was not sure whether she walked this way out of habit or because she was self-conscious about her body being so exposed—and she came back out wearing a frayed terry bathrobe. “Is that what you’re so upset about, that I’m with Brendan now?”
“Do you love him?”
“Michael, I’m not going to answer questions like that. It’s absolutely none of your business. Are you crazy, showing up like this in the morning? What did you do, lurk around outside till you saw Brendan go?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t have called?”
“I thought we should talk face-to-face.”
“Michael, sit down.” She flung the blanket over the unmade bed and sat down on the edge. “Sit down.”
He frowned at the bed. “I’d rather stand.”
“Michael, do you feel alright? You know, everybody thinks you’re going mental with this thing.”
“I feel fine.”
“Are you drinking?”
“No.”
“Are you…on drugs?”
“Not yet.”
“Then what is this? You’re like a crazy man already. What’s going on with you?”
“I just don’t like your boyfriend, that’s all.”
“Stop calling him my boyfriend. You sound ridiculous.”
“What should I call him? ‘Daddy’?”
“You call him Brendan. That’s his name, it’s what you’ve been calling him for thirty years. And you better watch your tone with me, young man. I’m still entitled to a little respect even if your father’s not here to keep you three in line.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much. We have Brendan to keep us in line now.”
“Michael, come here. Sit down here now.”
He sat beside her on the bed. The adjacent night table, Joe Senior’s night table, was littered with trash, crumpled tissues, a paperback novel thick as a beefsteak, a nearly empty water glass.
“Michael, you have to stop this. Whatever it is you have against Brendan, it’s time to put it away, you hear me? I can’t stand this. I don’t recognize you anymore. It’s like you’re another person. Where’s my Michael, hm?”
“Do you love him?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It makes all the difference. It makes all the difference.”
“Why? I don’t get you. Why?”
“Because you had a husband.”
“Had. He’s dead, Michael. I’m not. Did you want me to jump into the box with him and the both of us get buried?”
“I want you to act—I want you to act like you respect him.”
“Of course I respect him. I was married to him for thirty-three years. How could I not respect him?”
“Then what are you doing with this…pig?”
“Pig! Michael!”
“You’re right. That’s not fair. There are plenty of perfectly respectable pigs out there.”
“Michael, where is all this coming from? This…hate? You’ve known Brendan your whole life. Your father—who you seem to think was some kind of saint—”
“I didn’t say that. Not a saint. Not a saint. Just a decent guy. Showed up for work every day, never cheated, did right by his family, that’s all I’m saying. And after that, after forty years almost of being with a good guy, you settle for this? Brendan Conroy isn’t worth the half of my father and you know it. You can’t even compare the two. It’s like apples and…a pig.”
“Brendan is a good man.”
“Oh, stop. He’s an obnoxious blowhard. And worse, Ma, believe me. Much worse.”
“Worse?”
“There’s things you don’t know.”
“Oh, pssh. Now you really do sound like a mental case.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that Brendan was there the day Dad died?”
“No.”
“That the man you crawl into bed with, who puts his hands on you, who touches you, is the last man who saw your husband alive?”
“Michael, stop this!”
“Then he told some cock-and-bull story about a kid they never found? Your husband was murdered and Brendan was there and they never found the guy. That doesn’t bother you?”
Michael shuffled to the bureau. His fingers sought out the small items she had collected there on a painted tin tray: a Hummel figurine, hair clips, her rosary, coins. In the top middle drawer, which was open, the brown handle of Joe Senior’s service pistol was half buried among the stockings and girdles. He looked back at his mother sitting on the bed. The sheets were mussed. She had twisted to face him. On a wall in the corner was a photo of the three boys when they were fifteen, thirteen, and nine respectively. Nearby was a picture of Jesus with his long hands pressed together in prayer. The picture reminded him of the church, and the church reminded him:
“Do you…? The two of you…”
“Do we what?”
“…use…birth control?”
“Oh my God! Michael! How dare you? That’s it! This conversation is over! He’s a pig?”
“Alright, alright!”
“You’re the pig! Pig! Pig!” She shook herself, like a dog shaking water out of its fur. “Oh!”
He said nothing.
“Oh!” she blurted again.
“There are things about Brendan you don’t know, Ma. I don’t think you should see him.”
“Oh, you don’t? Well, that’s just too bad. I’m a big girl. I’ll decide who I see and who I don’t see.”
“This is serious. There’s things Amy knew.”
“Things like what, Michael? What on earth are you talking about?”
“Amy thought—” He checked himself. She would think he was insane even if he credited the story to Amy. She would think he was insane just for believing it. So he hedged. He did not accuse Brendan Conroy, quite. “Brendan knows more about Dad’s murder than he lets on. That’s what Amy thought.”
“Amy thought that, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“You know, this isn’t the first I’ve heard this. Brendan told me what you said the other night. He thinks you’re a nutcase, too, you know. I de
fended you, but you know what? I think maybe Brendan was right. You might really need help, Michael.”
“Then help me.”
“How? Take you to McLean’s, put you in a padded room?”
“Don’t see him, just for a while. For me. Do it for me.”
“I can’t do that. You know I’m not going to do that.”
“Why not? Tell him you’re sick, tell him you need time to think, it’s moving too fast, you have cancer, whatever. Mum, trust me, women say these things to me all the time. He’ll get the message.”
“But I don’t want to not see him.”
“You do love him.”
She groaned, exasperated. “What is this love-him, not-love-him? Why do I have to love him or not love him? I don’t even know what that means. Do I love him like I loved your father? No, because I’m not eighteen anymore and neither is Brendan. So what is it supposed to feel like, Michael, for me? Why can’t I decide? Why can’t I just be with someone? It’s no sin to want to be with someone, you know. Is it such a sin to not want to be alone?”
“No, it’s no sin. Just a mistake.”
42
Claire Downey’s desk at the Observer was in a corner of the newsroom, where the racket of clacking wire-service teletypes joined the general clamor of the room—the arrhythmic whack-[pause]-whack-whack of typewriters, the men in rumpled white shirts speaking in raised voices like a ship’s crew shouting into the wind. At the center of Claire’s desk was a big Royal typewriter. The logo on it had been written over with a marker: “Royal” had been altered to “GoyaKOD.” Surrounding the typewriter were papers, a wire basket, folded newspapers, a Kent cigarette carton converted into a pencil tray, an ominous-looking spike to impale papers. All these things seemed to have collected at random, as if blown onto the desk by a swirling breeze.