We both lit into our beef. I said, “Go on.”
Hank swallowed another bite of sirloin and began anew. “The second detective you may or may not know. Name of Mac Foley. A damned good homicide investigator. He was a young upstart back then, put on the case for his sheer brains. He never believed DeSalvo was the Strangler. Didn’t think he had it in him to commit murder. Thought his confession was too pat. Never bought into any of it.”
I asked, “He thought they were a bunch of copycat killings and that the Strangler was a myth?”
“No. Maybe he thought one or two of them were copycats, but everyone thought that. He had another suspect in mind. He chased that theory to the ends of the earth trying to prove that he was the killer. I remember him being damned close, too. And then one day DeSalvo confesses and the books get shut and all the detectives get sent home, case closed, thank you very much.”
I asked, “And the third?”
“You’ve heard of him. Hal Harrison, then another young, upstart detective. I have no idea what he believed during the killing spree, but when DeSalvo confessed, he bought hook, line, and sinker into that — along with another guy you’ve heard of, Senator Stu Callaghan, who was back then the attorney general. They never seemed to question it, never looked at any other possibility. If DeSalvo said he was the strangler, then in their heads, he was the strangler all right.”
A busboy, who hadn’t been a boy in about five decades, silently cleared the plates, then made way for Luis, who cleaned up our crumbs and presented dessert menus in one seamless exercise. Hank ordered a glass of port; I asked for a plate of the macaroons. Dining at Locke-Ober without having macaroons is like going to Italy without eating pasta.
“Which camp were you in?” I asked.
Before he could answer, my cell phone vibrated in my coat pocket. Normally, I wouldn’t talk on the phone in this dining room. It just didn’t seem right. But given my current circumstances, I apologized to Sweeney and quietly answered the call, which was from Peter Martin.
I hadn’t even offered so much as a hello when Martin said, “Bad news. Justine’s made up her mind. She wants that story held for at least one day, maybe two. I think the acting mayor got to her again and pleaded for more time. I tried like hell.”
I was too stunned to argue and too angry to try. So I said, “Big mistake. We’ll talk in the morning. Hopefully, we’re not playing catch-up when someone else reports a serial killer.”
Martin said, “I know. Believe me, I know. I’ll see you here early.” I looked at my watch — 10:40 p.m. — and knew that Martin was still in the Record newsroom. He had probably been there, no exaggeration, since his call to me at about five in the morning, and didn’t have so much as an exclusive story to show for it in the following day’s paper. Sometimes the news business really sucks.
I hung up. Sweeney said to me, “Good God, son, it looks like the gypsies just ran off with your dog and your baseball glove. What’s going on with you?”
I told him. I told him about the notes from someone identifying themselves as the Phantom Fiend. I told him about the visit to Park Drive that morning, seeing the strangled young woman sitting in a chair, a macabre prop in some madman’s game. I told him about the incident on the river the night before, the anger in the police commissioner’s voice that morning, the fact that Mac Foley was proving to be anything but helpful.
He nodded all the way through, until finally I asked him, “So which camp were you in, Hank?”
“Doesn’t matter who I was with,” he said in that raspy voice. “I was a nothing back then, as junior as an April bud on a New England tree. But if I were you…”
He stopped here, took his first sip of port, gave an approving sigh — suddenly, everyone’s a vino critic — and continued. “If I were you, I would track down Detective Walters, a man who I respected very much — and still do. I would ask him why he believes DeSalvo wasn’t the Boston Strangler. I think you might find what he has to say to be of significant interest.”
He sipped his port again. I said, “I will. I absolutely will. But regardless of what he has to say, how can you ever prove a negative? How can you prove that a dead man wasn’t the killer that everyone believed him to be?”
Hank smiled, his smile turning into a soft, knowing laugh. “That’s easy, son. Easy. Forensics. Science.”
I tapped the table a couple of times, trying to get my mind around what he meant. These murders occurred some forty years ago, back when they used fingerprints, not sophisticated DNA testing, to match murderers to crime scenes and prove guilt beyond any reasonable statistical doubt. Hank saw the look on my face, one of confusion, and continued.
“The killer left his semen — his DNA — at the crime scenes. I’m betting it was pretty well preserved.”
I replied, skeptically, “Okay, but DeSalvo’s dead and buried. Even if you could find those DNA samples, how would you match them to his?”
Hank drained his port and said, “That should be the easiest part of all. The knife.”
He let that linger there for effect before adding, “The knife that was used to kill Albert DeSalvo has his blood — his DNA — all over it. The question everyone’s been wondering for a whole lot of years is, where is it? It was left beside his body by whoever killed him in jail. Evidence in a murder case isn’t supposed to disappear, but my understanding is, this evidence did.”
Another pause, to even greater effect. Say what you will about Hank Sweeney. Call him dramatic. Call him melodramatic. But the guy knows how to hook an audience, which in this case was me.
“Find the knife,” he told me. “Find the knife and you’re on your way to answering the most enduring and troubling question in the history of Boston law enforcement: Was Albert DeSalvo the Boston Strangler?”
I thought of the look on Mac Foley’s face from across the room the night before, the fury in Commissioner Harrison’s voice as he warned us off that day, the grotesque way in which poor Lauren Hutchens was splayed across that chair, the notes that were so brief but said so much.
And I thought too that a knife, any knife, especially this knife, was like that proverbial double-edged sword. The closer I got, the more danger I would undoubtedly find myself in.
11
I was in the middle of this dream when I was awakened by the ringing telephone. I looked at the digital clock beside my bed and it said 5:40 a.m. The first thing I thought was that I had to get myself to Suffolk Downs that day and bet the trifecta, my mind was working on that kind of level. I mean, this was a very meta moment, but meta what, I wasn’t sure.
Second thing I thought of was that I was going to ring Peter Martin’s scrawny little neck, because there was absolutely no one else in the world this could be, and there was precisely no good reason for him to call. I reached for the cordless phone and mistakenly knocked it to the floor, where it kept ringing, ringing, ringing — the sound penetrating through my eye sockets and into my skull. When I finally grabbed it and said hello in a voice still thick with sleep, all I heard in return was a dial tone.
I flopped back down in the dark room, muttering to myself, “That goddamned bastard.” In other words, a terrific way to start the new day.
Seconds later, the phone rang anew. “What,” I said.
“Turn on the radio.”
It was, as predicted, Peter Martin, failing in what was becoming too typical a way to wish me a good morning or to inquire about my relative health or spirits, or even offer an apology for not prevailing on the publisher to run the most important story in the city that day. No, just an order to listen to the radio.