Strangled - Brian McGrory [89]
We hadn’t walked five feet when we both stopped short in a clichéd mix of shock and horror as we stared around the dimly lit room at what was hanging on virtually every free inch of his walls.
“Let me explain,” Vasco said calmly, even amusingly.
“That would be good,” I replied.
The follow-up comment that I didn’t make was that it better be good enough.
25
The room had a bare mattress on a single bed covered by a rumpled blue blanket so old that the fabric was almost transparent, but for the hairs and pieces of food stuck in the little balled up pieces of wool. There was a straight-back wooden chair, the type of furniture you’d expect an old grammar school teacher would have used in centuries gone by.
The whole room was maybe a hundred square feet, no bigger than a walk-in closet to the privileged denizens of an upscale town like Weston or Wellesley. By the door, there was an old porcelain sink with those old-fashioned turn handles for hot and cold water that you don’t see much of anymore. Water dripped from the faucet.
At the far end of the room, though the term far end was something of a misnomer in this room, was a single narrow window covered by a torn, drawn shade. Daylight poked through a few of the holes, casting an odd glow across the filthy wood floor.
And then there were the walls — yes, the walls, a different story altogether. The walls were covered with pornographic pictures torn out of magazines. We’re not talking soft porn either, like a bare-breasted woman sprawled across a chaise lounge with a caption that identifies her as someone named Angelica who enjoys baking cookies in the nude and loves riding horses. No, we’re talking about the hardest of hard-core porn, the raunchiest possible raunch — women with animals, women on women, multiple women with men, multiple men with women with prosthetics, women being beaten, dead women, all of them displayed one picture after the next all over the room. There was even the requisite horse, but believe me when I say the woman wasn’t riding him, at least not in the traditional sense.
I was looking at the pictures out of the corner of my eye, shell shocked. Mongillo saw no need for subtlety. He stared at them for many long moments, his eyes drifting from one to the other, from one wall to the next, until he finally turned to Paul Vasco, who was sitting on the edge of his bed, and said, “That’s quite an elaborate collection you have there.”
Vasco didn’t even hint at a smile. Instead, in a dead-toned voice, he said, “Forty-two years and twenty-one days I was in prison. You have any idea what it’s like to spend even one fucking day in there? You have any idea what it’s like to lose all your liberty, all your dignity, all your pride? My first week in, I was raped in the communal shower while two prison guards watched and laughed. I was still bleeding a week later, but nobody gave a fuck. I ate crap. I was given thirty minutes to exercise a day. I read not what I wanted, but what they gave me. I had cockroaches running across my face as I tried to sleep. We were treated like animals, so we acted like animals.”
He paused, looking down at the floor beyond his feet. Mongillo took a seat on the one chair. I leaned on the sink. Vasco said, “When they cut my hair, they had me in handcuffs and leg chains. They put a muzzle over my face. A fucking muzzle, like I was a fucking wild dog.”
He shook his head incredulously. It occurred to me that it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that he was in prison for rape and murder, and what he faced were mere consequences of his incredibly heinous acts. It would be reasonable, but not particularly productive, so I kept my trap shut and continued to listen to him vent. I didn’t get this far in this business because of my moralistic tone.
He looked up, nodded his head around the room, and said, “What you see here is me letting one of my pent-up obsessions run its course.” Another pause, and then: “Not that I owe the two of you any explanation for anything