Strangled - Brian McGrory [100]
My car was already parked right out front, so I fidgeted in my pocket for a ten-dollar bill and asked the valet for the keys.
“I don’t have them,” the kid said.
Great.
“Who does?” I mean, it’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask a professional valet about the keys to my own car.
“He does,” he said, and as he said it, he pointed to someone or something behind me. I turned suspiciously around and found myself face-to-face with none other than Edgar Sullivan.
“Hello, Edgar,” I said. “You’re my designated driver?”
“I’m your guardian angel,” he replied.
He was sitting on a bench tucked amid some shrubbery and surrounded by two ornate buckets that were nothing more than glorified ashtrays. Massachusetts forbids smoking in all public places, and this bench was obviously put here as a little haven for the nicotine addicted. It’s one bad habit I never took up, though perhaps I still had time.
Edgar stood up slowly, the way old men always seem to do, his knee audibly cracking as he breathed a tiny sigh. He smoothed out his pants and walked stiffly toward me, thrusting out his right hand and saying, “I heard you almost melted to death today. I’m you, I’d be really steamed.”
“Didn’t I see you on Comedy Central last week?”
He smiled, not quite embarrassedly, but almost. “You sound like my second wife,” he said.
“Was that the really young one?” I asked.
“No, she was twenty-eight,” he replied.
I left the obvious question unstated.
A few stragglers were leaving the restaurant and handing their stubs to the valets. Others waited patiently and impatiently in the cool night air for their various BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes to be wheeled around. Edgar jingled my keys and said, “Come on, I’ll get you home safely.”
Truer words had never been spoken, but in retrospect, the cost was almost too much to bear.
We were floating down the wonderful riverside highway known as Storrow Drive, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. Ends up, I was learning, the young wife, the third one, was twenty-three years old. The first one was thirty. The fourth was an age-appropriate fifty-four.
“The next meaningful relationship I have is going to be completely platonic — with a dog,” Edgar said. He shook his head and added, “Sounds good when I say it, but don’t bet on it. I can’t help myself. I love wedding days. The celebrations, the well-wishers, the high expectations. It’s the marriages that don’t turn out so well.”
The Charles River was on our left, with Cambridge beyond it. The Back Bay of Boston — a neighborhood, not a body of water — was on our right. We were rolling toward the waterfront when I checked the clock on the car and said to Edgar, “Do you mind pulling off on Beacon Hill for a minute? I want to grab tomorrow’s paper.”
And he did. I wanted to see what the Phantom Fiend would see when he opened the Boston Record in a few hours — or more to the point, what he wouldn’t see, which was his miniature manifesto, if a manifesto can be done in miniature, which I don’t think it can. I wanted to know what he’d be reading instead of his own words, to get some empathic sense of what might set him off, and how.
I requested Beacon Hill because for whatever reason, the Record delivers the third batch of papers fresh off the press to a twenty-four-hour drugstore on the back slope of Beacon Hill. The first batch, by the way, goes directly into the newsroom, and keeping with tradition, the second batch always gets hand-delivered to the newsroom of the Boston Traveler, our main competition. They, in turn, send a stack from their early run over to us.
Edgar pulled off onto Cambridge Street, which isn’t in Cambridge, but go figure. I don’t know if Cambridge has a Boston Street, but I kind of doubt it. He glided up in front of the all-night CVS, stuck the car in a no-parking