Strangled - Brian McGrory [57]
I was stunned. The knife could prove to be the Holy Grail in the Strangler case. According to Sweeney, if you found the knife and placed it in the right hands, you could determine that DeSalvo was not, as many people suspected, the Boston Strangler. This, in turn, could possibly mean that the new serial killer in Boston was, in fact, the old serial killer.
I blurted out, “You have the knife?”
As I asked this, I began picturing the burgundy-stained blade sitting in a Tupperware container in the bottom of a box in a corner of Walters’s cellar or garage. Hopefully his old lady hadn’t spilled vodka or gin all over the damned thing and destroyed the most important evidence in the annals of Boston crime.
“I had the knife,” he replied. He paused and added, “I gave it away.”
“You gave it away?” I mean, what the hell, did the old guy sell the Strangler knife on eBay, for chrissakes? Was that how he was living in this house?
“I gave it to the family of one of the victims.”
“You gave it to the family of one of the victims.”
He said, smiling again, “Is there an echo in here?” It was his first token attempt at humor, and for that reason and perhaps that reason alone, I obliged with a laugh.
But quickly I asked, “Why?”
“It gave them closure. That’s a fancy word that all the victim advocates use for helping them get over the fact that the human race sucks. That knife wasn’t doing me a damned bit of good.”
It would now, but I let that obvious fact remain unstated. Instead I asked, “Which family?”
“It was —” And before he could get the words out, he started to cough, that deep, penetrating cough. He reached for his glass again, but the water was gone. The cough was getting harder and longer. He pulled his mask desperately to his face.
At that exact moment, a woman behind me said, “Who the hell are you?” She wasn’t yelling, but each word was as firm as a rod of steel.
I whirled around to see an overweight fiftysomething darkskinned woman in those green medical scrubs that were fashionable to wear many years ago, though I suppose they don’t go out of fashion if you’re in the business of making people well. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the business of making people unwell, or even dead, but that’s a concern for another time.
I gave her the whole Jack Flynn thing. She was uniquely, and might I add bizarrely, unimpressed.
“He can’t be bothered by no reporter.” She said “reporter” as if she was spitting on an already littered sidewalk. I could have pointed out that, in fact, by talking to that reporter, Bob Walters was probably happier than he had been in months or years. I could have said that I, like her, was in the business of saving lives, and Bob Walters was helping me do it.
Instead I said, “We were just wrapping up. If you could excuse us for a moment.”
Walters was still coughing, though not quite as loud or hard as he had been, and he continued to hold the mask over his face. The health worker walked around me to the oxygen tank, turned a knob, and more oxygen came out into the mask with a large swooshing sound. Walters closed his eyes in relief.
She said to me, “He’s done. Get the hell out.”
Maybe she was right, maybe he was done, but the problem was, he had left one key fact dangling at the end of an unfinished sentence. I turned back toward Walters and said, “Sir, the name of the victim’s family?” He pulled the mask off his face and let forth with a phlegm-covered rapid-fire coughing fit. The health worker shot me a look that would kill a weaker man and shrieked, “Get the hell out. Now!”
I looked at Walters, but his eyes were deadened again, staring straight ahead. His body was convulsing in coughs that he was trying unsuccessfully to contain. “I’ll drop by later, Lieutenant,” I said.
He didn’t say anything or do anything in response. He didn’t even look at me. As I walked out the door, I dropped my business card on his soiled side table. He seemed to be in an ongoing struggle for his life.
Downstairs, Mrs. Bob Walters still sat at the kitchen table,