“Hey, you wanna see something cool?”
Michael was staring at The Tonight Show, a Christmas Eve special with Gila Golan and Woody Allen. He had been watching long enough that his eyes were glazed. His crossed feet, in sneakers, were on the coffee table.
“Hey,” Ricky repeated, urging him to wake up, “wanna see something cool?”
They were slouched at opposite ends of the couch. On the cushion between them was a green glass ashtray.
Michael said without turning, “Yeah. What?”
“Get your coat. We got to go for a drive.”
“Oh, forget it. I thought you were just gonna—Forget it. I’m going home. The hell time is it?”
“Twelve-thirty.”
“I’m going home, Rick. It’s been a long day. I’ve had enough.” Michael swigged from his bottle of beer and sat up.
They would both need a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow was Christmas, and Margaret was determined to snow them all under with presents and food and self-conscious cheer so they would not think about Joe. The tree, next to the TV, was over-trimmed, over-lit, over-everything. Ricky advised that no one look directly into it, for fear of burning the retinas.
“Forget it, Ricky. Mum’s a loon. She wants us back here at eight. You probably don’t even remember what eight in the morning looks like.”
“Am I missing anything?”
“Not really.”
“Come on, then. Sleep when you get old, right?”
“You know what you look like when you look like that? A mouse. Anyone ever tell you that? Beady little mouse.”
“Come on, big brother, don’t be a fag. Get your coat. I want to show you something.”
“Some other time.”
“No, it’s gotta be now. It’s a Christmas thing.”
“A Christmas thing. What do you know from Christmas?”
“I’ll show ya.”
They drove into town, Ricky at the wheel. At Park Street, near the State House, he pulled over. “Come on,” Ricky said.
They strolled into the Common, hands jammed deep in their pockets to hide them from the cold. The trees were loosely strung with long saggy strings of Christmas lights that swayed in the wind like women’s necklaces.
At the Nativity scene, Ricky took a quick glance around, then stepped into the manger and grabbed the figurine of the baby Jesus out of His straw bed.
“The fuck are you doing? Put that back.”
“Just wait, Mikey.”
“You can’t take that. It’s…God.”
“Would you relax. It’s not God. It’s just a little statue. God is within you.”
“No, He’s not. He’s in your hand. Now put Him back.”
“Come on. Don’t be such a baby.”
Michael looked up at the sky to address the Lord. “I have no part of this.”
They walked back to the car with the statue stuffed inside Ricky’s coat.
“You know,” Michael said, “I think there’s a special part of hell for people who do this.”
“Yeah, okay, Mikey. Whatever. Come on, get in.”
Inside the car, Ricky took the statue out again and looked it over, front and back.
“What do we do now, Rick? Make a sacrifice to Beelzebub?”
“Something like that.”
Ricky wrapped his hands firmly around the baby’s torso and with a swift up-down he smashed the back of its head on the dashboard. The head snapped off neatly. It rolled on the floor at Michael’s feet.
“What the f—What are you doing? Look what you did!”
“Put out your hands, Mike.”
“Holy shit! Ricky!”
“Put out your hands.”
When Michael did not respond, Ricky wedged the statue between his legs to hold it upright, then cupped Michael’s hands together. He tipped the statue and poured from its open neck. Stones. Cold and heavy and rough-edged in Michael’s palms.
“Jesus saves.” Ricky smirked.
Michael lifted his hands to see better in the light. Diamonds.
coda
Ypsilanti, Michigan. August 8, 1967.
It might be a deer, all hulked up and leathery and melting with rot, or a dog. Animals are always going and getting killed around here, like stupes, as they flash across Geddes and LaForge Roads from one farm field to another then off into the trees. The carcass is small for a deer, though, and big for a dog. And it’s too far from the road to have been launched here by a car, so it must have been put in this spot, just like, set down in this weedy place near the sagging foundation of a farmhouse and a silo. But why here? This spot is a hangout. A stand of box elder trees shields it from the road. Kids park here to drink and make out. They prowl around the old foundation, toss their beer cans and cigarette butts into it. Why dump a deer carcass here? A joke? A stink bomb?
A boy sidles toward the thing. He is fifteen and burned brown from working his father’s farm all summer. He wears a T-shirt and cutoffs and a filthy Tigers cap with the visor pulled down so low that he has to raise his chin just to see where in the hell he’s going. He rotates his chest, unconsciously, so that his left shoulder is slightly forward, as if he means to sneak up on the deer.
At a distance of twenty feet the air is foul, even out in the open like this. The dungy stink of decay. The carcass is old. It is manuring, crumbling in the summer heat.
Another mystery: The boy was here just a week ago—this place is next to his family’s farm, the fields run right on up to it—and he did not see a carcass here, though you could hardly miss it now. So if the animal was moved here recently, it must have been good and rotten already. Who would touch it then?
Closer now, the boy can hear the flies buzz. They are swarming, excited. They hop up and down on the carcass, they jerk around in the air. Their electric zzzzzzz harmonizes with the grumble of a tractor off somewheres, and that is the sound of summer, of hot afternoons, that insect-buzz coming in waves.
Standing over the carcass, though, all the boy can hear is the hum of flies. The black surface of the carcass is seething with them. He can’t see the thing clearly.
The head is misshapen, melted. It seems to have collapsed like some sodden, rotting, black piece of fruit. The flies are clumped thick on it, feasting on the sweet meat inside. The boy gazes at the head a moment until a shape at its center, a little flower of whorls, becomes a recognizable shape—a human ear—and the boy is sprinting, startled, back across the field.
Then the cops come. Sheriffs from Washtenaw County and state police from the Ypsilanti barracks and someone over from Eastern Michigan University where a coed went missing about a month earlier. They close off the roads. They comb through the weeds until they turn up a baggy orange dress and a torn bra and a sandal.
These are sensible men. They have daughters and granddaughters, and they do not like to look at the body—it lies at the center of all this activity; it cannot be moved until the M.E. arrives to handle it—because when they look at the shape on the ground, they see that it is a girl. She lies on her side, nude, her face turned down toward the earth. Once their minds have made this picture, the black carcass seems all the more ghoulish. (It is missing both feet and one forearm. Its chest is riddled with thirty stab wounds.) So they hang back from the corpse. Tight-lipped, they turn their backs to it. They gather on the road to have a smoke and wait while the search continues and the M.E. makes his way over.
A quarter mile away, at the periphery of this scene, well away from the body itself, away from the charged atmosphere, a cruiser is parked across the road and a young deputy directs traffic away.
A car rolls up to this roadblock. The windows are open. The driver is a man, mid-twenties. In the afternoon heat, his blond hair is matted and his cheeks flushed. He wears a damp shirt. The temperature is near eighty-five. “What’s going on?” he says.
“You’ll have to turn it around, sir. Road’s closed.”
“What happened?”
“There was a murder.”
>
“A murder! Oh my God. What happened?”
“They don’t know yet.”
“A murder! Is it that girl, from E.M.U.?”
“What makes you say it’s a girl?”
“What do you mean? She’s been missing, the poor girl. It’s in all the papers.”
“Well, like I told you, they don’t know.”
“How’m I gonna get back to Ann Arbor?”
There is a distinct honk in the man’s voice, a nasal foreign accent, Ann AH-buh, which catches the deputy’s attention. He walks to the back of the car. Massachusetts plates.
“You mind if I ask what you’re doing here today, sir?”
“Heading back to school. I’m at U of M.”
“May I see your license?”
“My license? What’d I do?”
“Just routine, sir.”
“Routine.” The young man makes a skeptical smirk. He knows he’s being harassed but he is willing to play along. The cops are hopped up about a murder in town. It’s understandable. He gets his wallet out of a back pocket, and the license out of the wallet.
The deputy reads, Kurt Lindstrom, 50 Symphony Road, Boston. “This license is expired.”
“Is it? I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized. I moved here pretty recently. So much to do, you know? So much paperwork. Guess I’ll need to get a Michigan license.”
The deputy considers, then he relents and offers the guy a friendly little smile, and hands the license back. Today there are bigger fish to fry. “Take care of it right away.”
“Oh, I will. Thank you, Officer.”
“You’re from Boston?”
“That’s right. Ever been?”
“No.”
“Well, you should go someday. Not in winter, though. It’s murder.”
“Alright, then. I won’t.”
“Good, well,” Lindstrom holds up his expired driver’s license, “thanks for the break. I’ll take care of this, I’m gonna get right on it.”
“Welcome to Michigan, sir.”
Lindstrom executes a cautious three-point turn. But before he drives off, he stops to share a last thought with the deputy. “Hope they catch the bastard that did this.”
author’s note
This is a work of fiction. The Boston Strangler cases have been the object of sensationalism and mythmaking almost from the start. This novel makes no attempt to solve them. The same holds true for other aspects of the story. The West End was razed. A bloody mob war was fought. These are matters of historical record. The book in your hands obviously is not that record.
So, the rules of engagement. Where actual historical figures appear in the novel, I have tried to render them as accurately as the evidence permits. Their dialogue and actions, however, are invented. All of the central characters are products of the author’s imagination, with no intended resemblance to actual people. Among those invented characters are all police and prosecutors and all of the victims of the Strangler murders. The timing of actual events, too, has been altered to serve the story.
I am deeply grateful to Captain John Daley (retired) of the Boston Police Department for sharing his memories of the city and the cop life in the 1960s. (That Captain Daley shares his surname with the family at the center of this novel is a coincidence. Again, no similarity is intended.) Another retired policeman, Ed Tobin, generously related stories of the old West End and the Boston PD, some of which appear in the book. I am also indebted to the following books and authors: The Boston Stranglers by Susan Kelly, The Underboss by Gerard O’Neill and Dick Lehr, Building a New Boston by Thomas H. O’Connor, and Migraine by Oliver Sacks. Finally, I thank Maura Driscoll for an invaluable suggestion; Kate Miciak and Alice Martell; and above all my wife Susan for her constant support and encouragement.
William Landay
Boston, 2006
about the author
William Landay is the author of the highly acclaimed Mission Flats, which was awarded the John Creasey Dagger as the best debut crime novel of 2003. A graduate of Yale University and Boston College Law School, he was an assistant district attorney before turning to writing. He lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next novel of suspense.
THE STRANGLER
A Delacorte Press Book / February 2007
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
Excerpts from CBS Reports: Biography of a Bookie Joint reprinted by permission of CBS News Archives.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2007 by William Landay
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landay, William.
The strangler / William Landay.
p. cm.
1. De Salvo, Albert Henry, 1931—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Serial murderers—Fiction. 4. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.A5477S77 2007
813'.54—dc22 2006023694
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33662-4
v3.0
William Landay, The Strangler
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