“What happened to your hand?”
Lindstrom looked at the hand. “Your son.”
She presumed he meant Joe. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I don’t blame you. Why don’t you offer me a drink?”
“A drink?”
“Yes, a drink. What kind of hostess are you?”
“I don’t—what, what would you like to drink?”
“What do you have, Margaret?”
“There’s some beer, I think.”
“No, not beer. How about Scotch. Do you have Scotch?”
“I’ll go see.”
“Why don’t I come along? Maybe you’ll have one, too.”
She led him into the kitchen. She walked with her arms stiff at her sides.
The booze was in a cabinet at eye level. She raised her arm to open it, self-conscious of how the gesture tautened her clothes against her back and shoulder. Should she scream? Run for the door? She doubted she would make it to the door before him, even allowing for the advantage of surprise. A scream, she thought, would alarm him, set him off. As long as they were talking, maintaining the pretense of civility, there was hope.
She said, facing the cabinet still, “How do you want it?”
“Neat. Make one for yourself too, Margaret.”
“I don’t drink it.”
“Alright, then. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
She poured his drink and handed it to him. Should she have thrown it in his eyes? Would it have worked?
“What do you want, Margaret?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
He laughed. “No, not to drink. What do you want, right now?”
“I want you to leave.”
“But I just got here.”
“It’s late. I want to go to bed.”
“Will you have me back another time?”
“Yes.”
“Now, why don’t I believe you?”
She started to say something, a lie to reassure him. She felt her lips move but no sound came. He had no weapon. At least he did not seem to. She could not be sure. In most of the Strangler cases there had been no weapon. The Strangler had used whatever heavy object came to hand to bash his victims, then improvised a garrotte from whatever he had found in their apartments—nylons, bathrobe sashes, scarves, sheets. But in a few of the cases there had been knife wounds, mutilation…
“Margaret?”
“It’s true. Another time you can come. It’s late.”
He turned his bruised face forty-five degrees and looked at her from an angle, skeptically. “What has Michael told you about me?”
“Michael?”
“Yes, Michael Daley. Your son.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing about the Strangler?”
The air went out of her. The subject had now been introduced and would have to be addressed, finessed, if she was going to maneuver out of the situation. “No.”
Lindstrom offered no response, but something in his posture, a tensioning along his elastic spine, suggested he knew she was lying. They were on different terms now.
“He says,” Margaret elaborated, “there’s more than one strangler.”
“Yes, but one for the old ladies, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t, I don’t know. Most of them, yes, I suppose.”
“Not DeSalvo.”
“No.”
“Me.”
She did not answer.
“Oh, come on, Mrs. Daley. He’s told me as much.”
“I don’t know. I just…”
Lindstrom nodded. He already knew all the answers, knew she was lying, knew why she was lying. None of it mattered at this point. What would happen, would happen. “May I ask you something, Margaret? A personal question?”
Her eyes went to the floor. Sheet linoleum in a pebble pattern of browns and ochers, dull with age.
“Have you ever had it in the ass?”
Her rectum and buttocks contracted. The rest of her, shoulders, neck, backbone, all went slack. She was not really there—this simply could not be happening.
“Have you ever had it in the ass?”
“Oh my God,” she murmured.
“Have you?”
“Oh my God.”
“Well, either you have or you haven’t. It’s a yes-or-no question.”
Her head was bowed. She managed to rustle it back and forth: no.
“Why don’t you get those clothes off?”
“No…no…”
“It’s not so hard.”
“I can’t.”
“You want me to do it?” He put down his glass. “Come over there and do it for you?”
“No.”
“What do you want, then?”
“Want?”
“That’s right. We’re just a couple of old friends here having a chat. You can tell me anything.”
“Oh my God.”
“Just tell me, Margaret. Anything you desire.”
“I want you to please leave.”
“Leave? Just like that?”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“You mean, you know who the Strangler is, the Boston Strangler, but you’ll keep it to yourself? You, a policeman’s wife?”
“I don’t know anything. Some mixed-up kid in some kind of beef with one of my sons…”
He picked up the glass, sipped, and his mouth made a series of puckers as he considered. “Alright, then.”
“You’ll go?”
“On one condition: you tell your son Michael I came around to say goodbye.”
“Where are you going?”
“Parts unknown.”
“Okay. I’ll tell him.”
“One more thing and then I’ll go. I’d like a kiss.”
Her head craned forward slightly, as if she had not heard.
“That’s all. Just a kiss goodbye. Then I’ll go.”
She shook her head.
“Well, then it looks like I’m here for the duration. Shall we get back to our conversation?”
“Just a kiss?”
“A kiss and I’ll go.”
“I have your word?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“One kiss and you’ll go.”
“That’s right.”
She moved in front of him. Lindstrom was younger than Ricky, her youngest, by several years. Maybe it was just his appearance, smooth-skinned, ruddy. He might be half her age. Or less. He smelled of Scotch. She closed her eyes and tipped her head.
“No-no, you kiss me, Margaret. For a count of ten, let’s say. Get my money’s worth.”
She could knee him in the crotch, or run, or search for a weapon. But she would not. She knew she would not do any of those clever, resourceful things people did in movies. It was only a kiss.
She placed her closed lips against Lindstrom’s. One, two, three…
His hand went to the back of her head. His tongue emerged from his lips, thick and eely; it penetrated her mouth. A muffled squeal. He pressed her face against his. The tongue was of a grotesque length. Its surface had a fine nubby grain. The tip of it did something fancy against the roof of her mouth then circled around nearer the gum-line. The broad fleshy body of it flattened itself against her and wiped back and forth, luxuriating.
He let go of her, and she fell back. She thought she might vomit.
He sighed contentedly. “Wasn’t so bad, was it?”
She gave no response.
“Mmmm. Thank you, Margaret.”
“You said you’d go.”
“And so I will.”
They moved toward the kitchen door. He gestured for her to go first. She did not like the thought of him being behind her, but the door was just a few feet away, the whole incident nearly over—she could already see herself ten seconds ahead, relieved, unhurt—and she felt the lure of that so-near moment. It occurred to her, too, that he had gestured her forward exactly the same way in exactly the same spot when he had come to the
house the first time.
She went ahead, arms folded. Her tongue mopped the roof of her mouth to scrub away the taste-memory of him. She was disgusted with her body. The filth of him, his spit, his taste, would be piped down her throat into her guts. She would absorb it. But she had to be strong for only a few more seconds, a few more steps.
There was a flash and a hollow sound.
Nothing. An empty moment.
Then she was aware of being on the floor. The hall floor. On her back. She could see up the stairs.
His hands were under her skirt. He was stripping off her nylon stockings. She heard a groggy voice say, “Don’t rip my stockin’s,” and it was a moment before she quite knew that the voice was her own. He tugged the stockings down over her calves, over her heels. Somehow her shoes had already come off.
She screamed.
He punched her face twice. “Don’t scream.”
He sat down heavily on her stomach. She felt the weight of his body oscillate on her stomach as he wound up the stockings together.
Her head was jostled roughly then dropped back down on the floor, hard. She wanted to reach for the back of her head, but he had pinned her arms with his legs.
She felt the nylon rope pull up against the back of her neck as he made the first simple over-under knot, then the rope zipped down tight, it cut into her neck, cinched it shut, and she could not breathe or stand the rocketing pain of it. She thrashed, panicked, and even as she did so she felt him completing the knot, securing the noose.
His weight lifted off her.
She continued to thrash until she could pry her fingers under the nylon and open a little space to gasp a stingy little breath, but already she felt herself being lifted by her hair and pulled up the stairs and she had to kick with her feet to keep her body moving so the top of her head did not get yanked right off.
“Come on, you.”
The stairs banged against her back and her bare heels and she was actually relieved when they reached the smooth upstairs hallway. She kept her legs crab-walking as best she could as she felt her skirt being lowered by the friction of her back and butt against the floor, she felt her shirt untuck and the floor scrape against the bare skin of her lower back.
“Where’s the bedroom!”
He released her hair and she dropped painfully on her shoulder. Her scalp ached. She wondered if the skin that tightly bagged the skull could be separated from it somehow, lifted away from that ball of bone, and whether the two could ever be rejoined as they were before.
She heard the bedroom door open.
Lindstrom made a sound—“Heh”—whose meaning she could not guess and before she could parse that syllable—there was an explosion and Lindstrom staggered back against the wall before her.
She scanned up from his oxblood-red loafers to his khakis where, above the right knee, a red stain had blossomed.
She turned her head, painfully—the nylons—and saw in the darkness of her bedroom, underlighted from the hallway, Michael with his father’s gun. He was ghastly pale, white as marble, as he always was during a migraine attack. In the dim light, shoeless and crazy-haired and wearing his undershirt, he looked like a ghost of himself. Behind him the drawer where the gun was kept was still open, her lingerie spilling out. (It occurred to her that, in Joe Senior’s twenty-three and a half years on the force, it was the first time the gun had ever been fired outside the practice range.) Michael held the gun in one hand, but the weight of it seemed too much for him. It threatened to topple him forward.
Above her, Lindstrom encircled the stain with the fingers of both hands, as if he meant to choke it. But the blossom of red continued to deepen and evolve as he, and she, watched it.
Michael took two unsteady slide-steps toward the bedroom door.
Lindstrom looked from his wound to Michael to Margaret to the gun. He darted off.
Margaret and Michael heard him stomp down the stairs and out the door and away down the street.
Michael took one more slow-motion step in the direction of Margaret before his head rolled to one side and he seemed to glance upward and his body ribboned down to the floor.
Charging up the stairs with Joe, looking up at him from a few steps below with the foreshortened perspective that angle imposes, it occurred to Ricky what an awesome creature Joe really was, a centaur with massive haunches above oddly dainty ankles. He would hardly have been surprised if one of Joe’s sneakers slipped off to reveal a black hoof. Joe had come here to kill Lindstrom. Ricky had no doubt he meant to do it. He had his service pistol with him. If Lindstrom was lucky, Joe would use the gun. For his part, Ricky still was not sure, halfway up the stairs, whether he would help with the killing or prevent it. If he could prevent it, that is, once Joe got started.
Joe kicked in Lindstrom’s door with a single stomp by the door handle. He stood in the doorway panting.
The apartment was empty. All that remained was an old Westinghouse electric fan, unplugged, and a few loose papers on the floor. Kurt Lindstrom was gone.
He would never be seen in Boston again.
Walking on a warm night made Joe think of dying—not afraid, just aware that there could only be so many nights like this, strolling in shirtsleeves, in any one lifespan. So, when he felt a hand grab his upper arm, he was already in a waning mood, prepared, philosophically at least, for the possibility of some Very Bad Thing. And yet he was misled momentarily by the busyness of his surroundings—Boylston Street at Park Square, where a new Playboy Club was under construction—and by the intimacy of the touch—an insinuating wiggle of four fat fingers in the crevice of his armpit—so that when he turned, he was wearing a bemused smile. He was expecting to see a friend.
Instead he found himself face-to-face with one of Gargano’s apes. Joe knew this man. His name was like a birdcall, Chico Tirico. A typical street-soldier type, a slab-faced guinea wiseguy. Tirico was fitter than most of them, though. He had been a heavyweight boxer and stayed in shape. No incipient double chin, no bowling-ball belly dropping out of his shirt. (Gargano himself had been a fighter, too, once upon a time. It was not an unusual background among mob stalkers. The neighborhood boxing gyms were like stud farms. A Golden Gloves kid could always have a muscle job if he wanted it.)
“Hey, cop,” Tirico said.
Joe slapped the guy’s hand away indignantly. He did not like the way it looked, the suggestion that some mook could place him under arrest. He was still a cop, despite everything.
There were three other goons alongside. Alerted by Joe’s gesture, they drew closer.
“Take it easy,” Tirico cooed.
They drew back again, and Gargano came into view. He looked sallow and drugged. Word was that Gargano had been doing heroin for years now, and his habit was getting out of control. His face seemed out of focus; Joe glanced away from him to the grid of red bricks on a wall to be sure his vision was still sharp—that the blurring was indeed in Gargano’s face and not Joe’s eyes.
Gargano said, “Somebody wants to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“The big boss.”
“Wants to talk to me?”
“That’s right.”
“Bullshit.” Joe gestured with his eyes at the four apes. “Why all the muscle if alls we’re gonna do is talk?”
“It’s just talk, Joe. You have my word.”
“Where?”
“C.C.’s Lounge, right around the corner. You’ll be back in a minute, like nothing ever happened.”
Joe calculated. It was reckless of Gargano to approach him in such a public place, even after dark—a gangster grabbing a cop off a busy downtown street. Joe took it as another sign of his own diminishing life expectancy; Gargano would not risk burning a valuable source if he meant to keep him around much longer. Then again, in a heroin haze Gargano’s erratic behavior might not signal anything at all except his own unraveling. Vinnie The Animal was following a well-worn mob career path: He would go out in a blaze of glory someday, done in b
y the very wildness that had made him, like Paul Muni in Scarface. But if The Animal had intended to kill Joe, he would not have pulled a stunt like this one. In any case, Gargano had too much muscle on his side. Joe opted for a tactical retreat.
“Alright,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
“No. Come on, come with us in the car.”
“Pretty crowded car. What, am I gonna ride in the trunk?”
“For fuck’s sake, Joe, I already told you, it’s not like that. I swear.”
“Just the same. Nice night for a stroll.”
Gargano shook his head. People were so mistrustful. “Alright, you stroll, then.”
Chico Tirico gave him a shove. “Stroll, motherfucker.”
Joe let it go.
He walked three blocks through the Combat Zone to C.C.’s Lounge, on Tremont, as Gargano’s black-finned Caddy lurked alongside, tactlessly.
Reassembled there, the group marched through the bar. The early-evening drinkers all turned their heads in silence to watch them pass, the prisoner and his escort.
Down an ancient staircase to a basement office. Grimy, small, windowless. A few chairs, a desk.
Two men waited inside.
Gargano gestured for Joe to go inside, and he did.
The smaller of the two men stood facing him. He was slim and tall, thought not as tall as Joe. Mid-fifties, Italian, with dark thick hair going gray at the sides and in a patch above his forehead. He stood in a theatrically defiant way: arms folded, head tipped back, offering his chin and a Mussolini frown.
“You’re Daley?” the man said.
“Yeah.”
“You know who I am?”
“No.”
“I’m Carlo Capobianco. This is my brother Niccolo.”
Joe had heard of Charlie and Nicky Capobianco. Tonight they were Carlo and Niccolo. They were Italian and Joe was not. At the moment this fact seemed to be all that mattered.
“This is the last time you disrespect me. You hear me? Last fuckin’ time. Your whole fuckin’ family. Your brother the thief steals from me, now you make trouble for me, what am I supposed to do?” He glowered.