Strangled - Brian McGrory [139]
I asked, “But have you thought about it since?”
He looked me over for a long moment.
“A lot,” he finally said, softer than he had spoken before. “I’ve thought about that a lot.”
His gaze shifted from me to the fireplace to the floor. A wry smile sneaked across his features as he stared down, and he mumbled, “I’ve thought about it too much. Thought about it as I’ve nearly drowned myself to death in vodka, whiskey, and gin. I played fast and loose back then, not only with my own client, who ended up dead, but with a lot of other people whose lives would never be the same because of information they might never know.”
He looked up at me, almost surprised that I was still there, listening. He said, “And the God’s honest truth about all this is that I still don’t know who the hell the Boston Strangler was — or maybe is.”
The burning logs crackled a few times, making the sound that a cap gun might. The wind caused a loose shutter to bang against the thin outer wall.
I asked, “Do you remember Detective Mac Foley?”
“Well.”
“Your impressions?”
Thomas squinted at some distant point in thought and recollection. “An odd guy. A serious guy. Adamant that DeSalvo wasn’t the Strangler, as if he always knew something that no one else did. I could never get a handle on him.”
I decided to leave that alone for a while and return to his heavily finessed and carefully caressed answers on Paul Vasco. I said, “Mr. Thomas, if you were me, if you were in a desperate situation, which I am, if people’s lives were on the line, who would you focus on for the moment? I’ll ask you this real simply: Would you focus on Paul Vasco?”
Thomas looked from me to the floor, and then down at his glass, which he lifted to his lips in another long sip, the liquid draining out as he tilted his head back and shut his eyes. He fingered the bottle for a moment, then removed his hand without ever pouring a fresh drink.
Finally, he peered over at me again and said, “You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.”
Those little pieces in my mind started closing in on one another, started forming a picture that I couldn’t quite see. And then the harder I thought about them, the less clear they became, until they disintegrated against a backdrop of frustration.
I looked at him hard, looked at him until he finally averted his gaze. I said, “I don’t understand what the hell you’re saying, and I don’t have the time or the energy to be semantic here. Please, Mr. Thomas, tell me what you’re talking about.”
He shook his head as he stared straight down at the floor and rubbed the back of his neck with both of his hands.
“That’s all I can tell you, young man. Get it in writing. You’ll know what I mean.”
He never looked up as I walked out his door.
38
It was two, maybe three seconds after I got into the newsroom when Peter Martin appeared at my desk the way the Japanese appeared at Pearl Harbor, which is to say without warning and certainly without apology. He was accompanied by a bald man in sunglasses who looked as out of place at a newspaper as I would at a Milan fashion show.
“This is Buck,” Martin said to me.
“Hi, Buck,” I said.
Buck nodded but didn’t speak, which, for reasons I can’t explain, didn’t actually surprise me.
“What’s this?” Martin said, pointing down at the black dog sitting beside me.
“That’s Huck,” I said. I had stopped home on my way in from police headquarters to get him, and he smacked his tail against my metal desk at the sound of his name.
“Does he bite?”
What is it with these people?
“Viciously,” I replied. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”
Martin slowly, tentatively slid over to the other side of the desk, then said to me, “Come down to my office, would you? We need to get a definitive plan going. And why don’t you leave Huck here.”
That last sentence wasn’t a question.
I told him I’d be right in, snapped up my telephone, and punched out the number for Deirdre Hayes in Las