Strangled - Brian McGrory [52]
I got up and walked from the kitchen, legal pad still in hand, my shoes crunching over broken glass, looking for the staircase, hoping though not hopeful that I wouldn’t get a glass in the back of the head.
Behind me, Mrs. Bob Walters began crying again, crying hysterically, her head down on the table, her back quaking in uncontrollable spasms over a series of murders committed forty years before. Sometimes the past never lets up. That’s a fact I know all too well. But I suddenly realized, with no small amount of hope, that there was something else at play here, something that might explain what had been going on in Boston the past week, something that might help me bring it to an end.
16
Bob Walters was propped up in a hospital bed watching a game show on a big, clunky television that was on the other side of the small room from the door. The shades were drawn tight. The nightstands on both sides of the bed were covered by used glasses and dirty dishes. A portable oxygen machine stood on the floor on the near side of the bed, its mask lying haphazardly on the rumpled blankets. The place reeked of disinfectants and the faint odor of illness, which the chemicals failed to cover up.
I stood in the doorway, undetected, instantly depressed over this little world I was about to enter, not to mention amazed that The Price Is Right was still on the air. Come on down, or in this case, come on in. No one had invited me, though, so I cleared my throat loud enough for Bob Walters, the former lieutenant detective with the Boston Police Department, to realize I was there.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he said, his words, though not loud, were as sharp as the broken glass that was strewn across the kitchen floor downstairs. He said this without ever moving his gaze from the television set. “This place is a fucking mess and you’re sitting down there getting smashed, you drunken bitch.”
Okay, so not everyone can be Ozzie and Harriet, but the Walters might have been carrying this to an antithetical extreme.
I cleared my throat again. Walters said, his voice no louder and every bit as sharp, “Get some of this crap out of here before you’re too drunk to get up and down the stairs.”
I said, “Lieutenant Walters?”
He pivoted his head on the pillow so that he was facing me. His eyes were the first thing I noticed. It was almost impossible not to. They were big and yellow and sunken deep into his bony face, vacant eyes that had seen so much of life but now rarely saw anything outside of the four dreary walls of this godforsaken little room. They were the eyes of a man resigned to misery.
The next thing was the stubble, coarse and gray, all along his jawline and neck, most pronounced on his upper lip and chin. He hadn’t shaved — or been shaved — in at least a week, probably longer. Then his hair, all silvery black, mussed in the back, greasy and matted down on his forehead in the front.
And finally his skin, sallow and veiny, more of it than he needed in his current state — the skin of a dead man, really.
He said to me, “Who the hell are you?” His voice was old, tired, raspy, and world-weary, like warm water flowing through sand.
“Sir, I’m Jack Flynn, a reporter for the Boston Record. I’ve flown out here to ask you a few things about the Boston Strangler case. I’m wondering if you have the time to help me out.”
Of course he had the time, I mean, unless he couldn’t bring himself to miss a single glorious episode of Let’s Make a Deal, which was probably on next. The more important question was whether he had the inclination. It’s probably worth mentioning again that a lot of cops, active or retired, are particularly leery of newspaper reporters. Actually, forget leery. They hate reporters. We do the same basic thing, which is try to pull layers of lies away from essential truths, but we go about it in remarkably different ways. The cops do it mostly in the privacy of interrogation rooms or at crime scenes, or in the heat of violent moments when no one is watching but the suspects