Strangled - Brian McGrory [65]
My hopes were raised further when the two paramedics went walking back into the house carrying a portable stretcher. At the same time, one of the cops put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Sir, how do you know the Walterses?”
I said, “He’s a retired cop, Boston PD. I’m visiting from Boston.” There wasn’t a lie in either sentence.
The same cop put his hand on my shoulder and said, “There was an accident this morning —”
Before he could finish, the front door opened one more time. This time, a paramedic backed out lugging a stretcher, which seemed to take forever getting through the door. They came slowly down the steps. I strained my eyes. There on the stretcher was Mrs. Bob Walters, her eyes open and blinking, her lips moving, nothing more than incoherent blather coming from her mouth. I hung my head in sadness — for Bob Walters, for the victims he couldn’t help in Boston, and yeah, a little bit for this reporter who didn’t get the full benefit of his knowledge.
The young cop was still talking. “He was very frail, as I’m sure you know. He fell down the stairs sometime this morning. The mailman saw him through the front door on his daily delivery and called 911. By the time we got here, he was dead.”
Fell down the front stairs.
I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year. That’s what Walters had said to me less than two hours before. He didn’t suddenly get out of bed and try his luck hobbling around the house. He wasn’t anywhere near the stairs under his own power. He didn’t fall by accident.
And I also knew something else: his wife had been too drunk to get herself upstairs, drag him out of bed, and push him. She probably wanted to do just that. She probably spent entire days dreaming of this scenario. But it didn’t happen like that, not here, not this morning.
Of course, I couldn’t tell the cops any of this. If I had, they probably would have thought I was some sort of kook — the word that Mac Foley had used to describe the Phantom Fiend. And if they didn’t, they would have wanted me to go downtown to answer questions, and as anyone who knows anything about Vegas knows to their core, you never want to go downtown. Especially me, especially now, when I needed to get back east to deal with the new case of Kimberly May.
So I solemnly nodded to the young cops and told them thanks. I got back in the car and carefully navigated around the emergency vehicles and the coroner’s van, which was also pulling out. I thought of Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens and Kimberly May, and wondered what their lives were like before they didn’t have them anymore. I thought of that poor man, Joshua Carpenter, mourning his wife in the Public Garden, wrong time, wrong place, and now he too was dead. And Bob Walters, just an old retiree with a lot of regrets and a reservoir of knowledge that he had been waiting forty years to share. I got almost all of it, but not enough.
I drove off toward the airport. Success and failure seemed inextricably intertwined, as if good and bad were forever linked. I wondered if most of life was like that, and feared that maybe it was. I had to get back to Boston to figure out how to separate the two.
19
I was in San Francisco International Airport when I saw her. Specifically, I was sprawled across a chair in one of those generic lounges with the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the departing and arriving planes, waiting for my connecting flight to Boston, because the only nonstop out of Vegas with any available seats was the red-eye, and civil people, it must be said, don’t fly on red-eyes. My shirt was untucked. My hair was mussed up. I had circles of worry and exhaustion under my sky-blue eyes. I had my cell phone plastered to my ear, listening to Vinny Mongillo explain that he had once again proven himself to be the world’s most tenacious and talented reporter by producing, in a mere three hours, Paul Vasco’s entire criminal record, his incarceration history, and, most notably, his most recent release date, which, not by coincidence, happened to be six months before. He