Strangled - Brian McGrory [98]
“Big nose, very broad, and a little bit acidic,” Mongillo said to Nam.
“You just described my aunt Toni,” I said.
He ignored me again. So did Nam, who was pouring yet another glass of wine. He handed it to Mongillo with a look of concern and said, “Tell me if you think this is too buttery.”
Enough already, so I used the one trump card I hoped I still had with Mongillo and said, “You want to eat?”
He looked at me almost surprised, as if he had forgotten that’s why we were there, though I’m reasonably sure he hadn’t, and said, “Great idea.”
My first one in a long while, actually.
Nam sent a waiter with a tray to ferry Mongillo’s wines to the table, though I’m not sure wine can be made plural like that. I carried my own beer and drank it along the way.
Once we were settled into a booth, Mongillo met my gaze and simply said, “Paul Vasco was the Boston Strangler.”
I wasn’t sure whether to say “No shit,” or ask “How do you know?” So instead I told him, “Go on.”
“Because Dorothy Trevorski really did have a shard of glass shoved into her eye,” he said, his gaze staying on mine. “It was never reported by any newspaper at the time. It was never revealed by the cops. It was one of those bits of info they held back so they’d know whether they had a professional confessor on their hands or the real thing.”
I said, “Well, if that’s the case, then wouldn’t they have known that DeSalvo wasn’t the real thing?”
“Maybe,” Mongillo said. “Or maybe Vasco told DeSalvo about this detail in one of their many prison walks, and he parroted it to the interrogators.”
I said, “Or maybe DeSalvo told Vasco.”
Mongillo thought about that for a long moment. Either that or he was just looking for an excuse to take a drink of wine from the glass he had been swirling.
“I suppose,” he finally said. “But there’s something else, too. Seven of the murder scenes had sperm on the floor several feet from the bodies. Vasco just about admitted pleasuring himself over the corpses. I don’t know if that’s something two guys would have talked about in prison, you know?”
I thought about that myself, and used my thinking time to drain my beer. Before I even put it down, a waiter named Jack, God bless him, appeared with another.
We ordered. I got grilled swordfish with cottage fries. Mongillo basically got the right side of the menu — or at least it sounded that way. Then he asked for the wine list back. I could all but hear Peter Martin’s lines when he looked over the expense account: “Is there a deposit on this dinner that we’re going to get back?”
Once the waiter retreated to the kitchen to inform the chef that there appeared to be a patron at Table 23 in pursuit of the world’s beef-eating record, Mongillo leaned toward me and said, “The most important thing that happened during that session with Vasco, I don’t think you even saw.”
“The fact that you picked up his cigarette butt, which contains his DNA?”
He furrowed his brow and squinted at me. “You saw that?”
“I think Ray Charles would have seen that.” I paused and added, “I was going to do it myself, but you beat me to the punch. Good move.”
Vinny asked, “Do you think Vasco saw it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what that guy sees, besides torture and necrophilia.”
We both fell quiet for a moment, maybe thinking of the women he tortured and the corpses he violated. Or perhaps Vinny was merely regarding his wine. Either way, I said, “You have someone in the BPD crime lab who will run it?”
He nodded his head knowingly. Of course he did.
I said, “It’s too bad we can’t get some of DeSalvo’s DNA. Then we’d have all bases covered — the ability to prove and disprove.”
Mongillo shot me an odd look and said, “We may get lucky on that count. Stay tuned, and don’t ask.”
So I didn’t, which runs entirely antithetical to every cell of my being, but it was that look on his face that gave me pause.
In the gulf of silence, a veritable team of waiters arrived at our table en masse — one of them carrying the seafood platter Vinny had ordered to kick things off,