Strangled - Brian McGrory [23]
Before either me or Martin could reply, Mongillo added, “The news media back then first dubbed the Boston Strangler as the Phantom Fiend. That’s what he was most commonly called at the time. It was later in the murder spree, with all the hype, that his nickname was changed.”
That might well be true, but I also knew something else about the Boston Strangler, or at least I thought I did: He was dead, the victim of a murderer in Walpole State Prison sometime in the early 1970s. Best as I could remember, no one was ever charged.
Which is what I told Vinny. Specifically, I said, “The Boston Strangler was killed, wasn’t he? I mean, he’s dead.”
Mongillo looked back at me and held my gaze.
“No,” he said, slowly, firmly, and decisively. “Albert DeSalvo was killed. That’s who you think was the Boston Strangler. That’s who the public was told was the Boston Strangler. But if you ask almost any good cop who was in the area around that time, they’ll tell you that DeSalvo was definitely not the Boston Strangler. The Strangler was never caught. He’s still out there somewhere.”
He paused here, staring at some distant point, or more likely at nothing at all. I cast a glance toward Martin. Normally, even famously pale, he now looked even whiter than usual. He was staring at Mongillo, his thoughts all but bursting out his eyes and ears.
Mongillo said, “Now he’s killing more women. He wants you to write about it. And we’ve got to get to Lauren Hutchens’s place to check it out.”
We pulled up in front of Lauren Hutchens’s address on Park Drive in the Fenway section of Boston. Fenway Park, by the way, is named for the neighborhood, not the other way around, and Park Drive is named for the Fenway, which is a park, though not Fenway Park. This explanation could probably go on all day, like the fact that South Boston and the South End are two different neighborhoods, and Roxbury and West Roxbury are nowhere near each other. Or that the West End doesn’t actually exist. It’s a Boston thing. You live in town, you don’t think anything of it.
Lauren lived — and possibly died — in a tan-colored cinder-block apartment building that stood seven stories tall, and in stark contrast to the ancient Federalist-style brick town houses all around it. This had obviously been built in the 1950s, as architectural taste had taken a decade-long hiatus while the nation had better things to think about, like family cookouts, the GI Bill, and drinking enough whole milk.
I pulled my Honda to the curb and pulled out my cell phone. “You think I should call the cops now?” I asked Mongillo.
The plan was that we were going to position ourselves as close to Lauren Hutchens’s apartment as humanly possible, call the police with the information about the note and the driver’s license, then hopefully get a firsthand view of what had happened inside.
“Hold off for just another minute,” Mongillo said, taking a long sip of his coffee, which he had insisted on stopping for on the way over. He first insisted on stopping at Starbucks, until I pointed out that a woman’s life was potentially hanging in the balance while he waited the requisite twenty minutes for some barrister, or whatever they call themselves, with a nose ring and an art history degree to handcraft his venti, no-foam, whole-milk caramel latte. He agreed to a compromise: Dunkin’ Donuts. Henry Kissinger wasn’t as good at bringing people together as I am.
We stepped out of the car onto the sun-splashed curb on a still chilly March morning. Across the street, the Fenway — the park, not the baseball field — sprawled bare and brown as far as the eye could see, a lonely place until the April rains and the May warmth would bring this city to life again.
“We have an apartment number?” Mongillo asked, looking up at the building.
“We don’t,” I replied, striding