Strangled - Brian McGrory [108]
The notes showed that he asked the exact question he told me he’d asked in the exact way he described it: “Hey, Paul, DeSalvo’s gone. The case is off the books. But we had the wrong guy, didn’t we?”
Beneath the question, he wrote, “PV remained silent. Didn’t say a word. But he smiled like the devil, making sure I understood exactly what he meant. And I did.” The word devil was underlined three times.
And beneath that he wrote, “Paul Vasco is the Boston Strangler.”
I looked up at Deirdre Hayes, who was looking intently at me as I read the notes. I said, “Do you mind if I take this with me?”
She hesitated for a long moment, anxiously rubbing her hands together at her waist, looking more innocent than she probably should have in that particular outfit.
Finally she said, “I’ve never dealt with reporters before. How do you handle payment?”
Terrific. I fly across a continent and am met by a woman who wants to turn a profit on her old man’s death. Though hell, she probably had it coming to her, given the misery that the guy had caused.
I said, “We don’t.” I said this softly, attempting a tone of understanding, perhaps even empathy. “I’m not allowed to pay for information. Newspapers like mine, reputable news organizations, won’t do it.”
She looked surprised. “So these notebooks aren’t worth anything?”
I said, “They’re worth a lot. This information might someday soon be invaluable to the hundreds and thousands of other people who have been affected by the Strangler case, people not all that much different than you. It may give them some sense of closure, some little bit of freedom from the past. But I’m not allowed to pay for it.”
She stood there in the garage, this beautiful woman dressed like a harlot, exhausted from pushing drinks to obnoxious, leering guys on the overnight shift at a casino bar on the Las Vegas Strip. She probably thought this notebook was about to rescue her from massive credit-card debt, or maybe was an opportunity to buy a nice used car. Instead, some schmuck from the East Coast was explaining to her that once again, she was screwed, just like she’d always been.
So I said, “I’d hate to think that you’d do this, but I feel like I should tell you anyway. A place like The National Enquirer might pay you good money for this.” I could picture the headline, “Good Cop Fingers Real Boston Strangler From the Grave.” The reason I mentioned it to her, aside from the fact that I felt legitimately bad, was that I already had the information from Walters himself.
She looked at the immaculate floor for a long, agonizing moment, and then up at me, and said, “No, I’d rather you had it. My father might have been a bastard, but he meant well most of the time. You’ll do the right thing with it.”
I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get a look at what else is in these boxes.”
She nodded again. Then her brow suddenly furrowed and she said, “I always thought there was another box. For some reason, I always remembered seeing five of them. You know how you have that picture in your mind that just stays there? In this case, five boxes, stacked three and two.”
She shrugged and said, “But I must be wrong. I looked all over, and this is all there is.”
And with that, she walked into the kitchen.
The first box contained a lot of physical paraphernalia, pieces of clothing and various trinkets from every one of the murder scenes that occurred within Boston proper, which was six of them. It was odd, holding a kerchief from one dead woman, a bracelet from another, an ashtray from someone else’s apartment — but no odder than handling the driver