Strangled - Brian McGrory [53]
The biggest schism comes from the fact that reporters tend to get particularly gleeful over policing cops, catching them in penny-ante shenanigans — the vice cop looking the other way on a prostitute because he’s getting free oral sex in the back of his cruiser; the street-crime officer who grabs a couple of thousand dollars in tainted cash when he raids the house of a heroin dealer. On the flip side, cops don’t police reporters; the best weapon they have against us is mere silence, which can be a dangerous weapon for all.
“The Boston Strangler? You want to ask me about the Boston Strangler? A reporter for the Boston Record came all the way out to my castle here to ask me about the Boston Strangler?”
His words were as slurred as his wife’s had been, but I had a feeling that it was caused by either pain or a medication to treat it.
I decided not to mince words or motives. I mean, it looked like any word this guy uttered could be his last. Given that the original stranglings occurred forty-two years ago, I probably should have been prepared for the fact that the people who possessed the most intimate knowledge of them were going to be pretty damned old by now, possibly even infirm, but I wasn’t. Not prepared enough, anyway.
So I said, “Sir, if I can talk honestly with you, I think the Boston Strangler might be killing again.”
This declaration didn’t seem to faze him one tiny bit. He continued to look at me through those distant eyes, his mouth slightly agape, as an announcer on a television commercial was prattling on about the cooling relief of Preparation H. He just kept looking, saying nothing, not at first, anyway.
When he ultimately did speak, he said, “What the hell took him so long? They must have kept him in prison for a long, long time.”
I said, “But Lieutenant, I thought the Boston Strangler was murdered in prison. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death more than thirty years ago.”
“That’s right, kid. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison. The Boston Strangler wasn’t.”
By now, I had walked into the room and approached the side of his unkempt bed. This far in, the room was even more of a pit, with crumpled old issues of TV Guide and Reader’s Digest strewn about the floor around the bed, old food wrappers on top of the discarded magazines, and stains on the sheets. Outside, it was gorgeous and vibrant, spring in the desert. Inside, the shades filtered out any sense of the world, casting the walls and furniture in a colorless haze.
I nodded. “That’s what I’ve heard. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to hear that more and more.”
He laughed a shallow laugh and turned his head back to the television to see a commercial for a soap opera that was going to be on later that day. Then he focused again on me.
“Stranglings?” he asked.
“Two young women so far.”
“The cops making the link from the old serial killer to the new one?”
“Absolutely not.”
He laughed again, this time louder and more gutturally, and that caused him to descend into a coughing fit, which spurred him to stick the oxygen mask over his mouth for several long, deep breaths. As he breathed, his blank eyes stared straight ahead at nothing, a total acceptance of this as his human condition.
When he pulled the mask away, he said, “They wouldn’t, would they?”
“Why not?”
He looked at me like I was a bronze-plated idiot, and maybe I was. But sometimes these are the kinds of questions you have to ask in this grand business of information acquisition — questions that might seem obvious to everyone but the person asking them.
He asked, “Why would the brass want people thinking that the Strangler is killing again? That would be an admission that they didn’t get the right guy back then. That would mean that the grunts, people like me, were right, and that the higher-ups, they were wrong. Why would they want you to think that?”
As he spoke, he grew more animated, even agitated, moving his arms out from under the unwashed