Strangled - Brian McGrory [90]
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t owe us anything. So we appreciate you taking a moment. You might have some information that we need, and we’re hoping you might see your way to helping us out.”
Something was bothering me about these pictures, nagging me, something unsettling that was hitting at my subconscious, throwing me a little bit off my game. And no, it wasn’t the dead woman being violated by a guy with a whip in his hand, or the two women simultaneously pleasuring the dwarf in the police uniform. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger — or my eyes — on.
Vasco reached under the blanket, and the thought struck me that he might pull out a gun. Instead, he held a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He put one in his mouth, struck a match, and lit it. The smoke instantly filled the tiny room without so much as a vent to seep into.
He said, his tone softer now, “So you, like everyone else, think I’m the Boston Strangler.” I swear he almost let loose with a smile.
Mongillo quickly replied, “Not everyone else. There were some very influential people back then who were very eager to pin everything on Albert DeSalvo, even though a lot of other people didn’t think DeSalvo did it.”
My gaze floated around the room, across the disgusting pictures, looking for something that was scratching at my psyche.
“Tell me your name.” That was Vasco, addressing Mongillo.
“Vinny Mongillo,” he replied.
“Well, Mr. Mongillo, and you, Mr. Flynn, do you have any idea what it takes to kill another person? Do you have any idea what it takes to shed centuries of civility, to cast off all of society’s norms, to disregard the repercussions, and thus to return to our more primitive roots?
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to wrap your hands around a weaker person’s neck and squeeze until there’s blood coming out of their ears and life oozing from their eyes, until their desperation turns to dormancy and you know that the last lucid thought they had was of you taking away every single pathetic thing they ever had?
“Do you?”
Neither of us responded to his trancelike recitation. The room fell so quiet that I could hear Mongillo’s telephone vibrating in his back pocket with yet another call. The white smoke continued to float from the end of Vasco’s cigarette toward the low ceiling.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s power unlike anything else you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s ego. It’s the ability to end that which wasn’t ready to be over. It’s total dominance. It’s telling the rest of society to fuck off. It’s sexual.”
He paused for emphasis, then added, “It’s addictive.” He smiled here, an unashamed, no-holds-barred smile, his gnarly yellow teeth clutching the fading cigarette butt between them. “It takes a strong man to kill. It takes a stronger man to kill just once.”
He blew smoke into the air and asked, “How strong do you think I am?”
Mongillo looked at me. I looked at Mongillo. I was pretty happy at this particular moment that I wasn’t interviewing this guy in this room alone.
Vasco asked, “Do you think I’m the one who shoved a shard of glass in Dottie Trevorski’s right eye because she blinked once after she was already supposed to be dead?”
I knew from my reading that Dorothy Trevorski of Chelsea was the fifth victim of the Boston Strangler, when he was still in his elderly victim phase. She was a spinster who was found by her sister sprawled across the living room couch with a pair of stockings formed into one of the Strangler’s trademark looping bows tied around her neck. She had been raped, possibly after she was dead. I don’t recall ever seeing anything about a piece of glass having been shoved in her right eye.
“That’s what you think, that I have no control, even while I have all the control?”
This could well have been a confession, though I wasn’t sure yet, because as I said, I wasn’t sure of the glass in the eye. Maybe it was concocted. If true, maybe it was something he had read in the papers that I had missed. Maybe it was something he learned right from DeSalvo’s lips in their