I sat in my idling car with the cell phone in my hand and my sunglasses off, wondering what to do next. I didn’t wonder for long. Maybe a minute later, the heavy storm door opened about halfway. I could see the face of an older woman through the screen. She looked around her yard quickly, picked up the bag, and shut the door tight. That was that.
I jumped out of the car, walked briskly back to the front door, and knocked. Again, no answer. So I knocked louder. No answer. If I’d knocked any louder, I’d have ended up knocking the fucking door down, so I backed off, quite literally, and walked across the lawn and around to the rear of the house.
I’ll be honest here: I wanted to look in the windows. If you look in the front windows and a neighbor happens to see you, you’re what’s known as a Peeping Tom. If you look in the back windows where no one sees you, you’re what’s known as an intrepid reporter. They don’t teach you these things at the Columbia School of Journalism, though they do at my alma mater, the School of Hard Knocks.
The backyard, by the way, was as lush and well kept as the front, with a carefully edged garden tucked close to the foundation of the house, and a stone patio leading to the back door. I walked up to the door, which, unlike the front, had two big windows, and looked inside.
I was looking into the kitchen, which seemed to be in need of some updating. My eyes were scanning along the cabinets and countertops and appliances when I saw a flash of movement. Sitting at a small table pushed up against a wall was a woman, undoubtedly the same one who came to the front door. She was sitting alone, sipping from a glass.
On the table before her was a bottle that looked to be vodka, and not one of the fancy new labels from countries I’ve never been to, but some plain old call brand. Beside the bottle was the brown paper bag on its side. The delivery had been from a local liquor store. I gazed back at the counter and saw that a similar but empty bottle sat next to the sink.
As I watched, she unscrewed the bottle and refilled her lowball glass, taking a long swig as she stared straight ahead at the pale green wall. I noticed on the wall some sort of embroidered poem that involved the words home and love, a piece of household kitsch, but was too far away to read anything more.
I stood in the back doorway, the warm desert sun on my neck, playing the unintentional role of the voyeur in what I immediately understood was this woman’s sad and painful life. If anyone saw me, I was as good as arrested, though maybe the Las Vegas jail might be the safest place I could be. I watched as she finished off her drink and tilted the bottle into her glass yet again, spilling a few drops of vodka on the wooden top of her table. She drank again as she stared at things I would never be able to see.
I knocked. It was a soft knock at first, three times against the window in the door. I didn’t want to startle her, and I didn’t. She slowly turned her head in my direction. When her gaze set upon the door, she squinted as if she couldn’t understand what she saw. She didn’t move, though.
So I knocked again, a little harder this time. She slowly pulled herself to her feet and walked unsteadily across the tiled kitchen floor. She was wearing that kind of floral housedress that old ladies tend to wear, formless and unstylish. My guess was that she hadn’t been planning on seeing anyone that day.
When she got to the door, our eyes met through the glass. Hers were bloodshot, exhausted, and slightly confused — yet still oddly serene. She looked at me for a long, awkward, silent moment, and then simply opened the door.
“I thought I left my MasterCard number with the clerk,” she said. Her words were soft yet lurching, the end of one running into the beginning of another.
“I’m not with the liquor store, Mrs. Walters.”
Unfazed, she said, “Come in.” She walked unsteadily back to the kitchen table, took her seat, and asked, “Then who are you?”
I was still standing awkwardly in the doorway. I asked, “Do you mind if I sit down?”
She motioned to the chair. I sat and gave her my whole Jack-Flynn-from-the-Boston-Record thing. She remained entirely unimpressed, with my presence, with my position, with the distance I had traveled to be here.
“What is it you want?” she asked.
Her words came out lazy and a little bit warped. She took a sip out of her glass, the bottle still tall before her, doing nothing to hide the fact she was drinking vodka, straight up, at nine-thirty in the morning.
“I was hoping to talk with your husband,” I said.
This finally got a rise out of her.
“My husband,” she said dramatically, slurring even more the louder she spoke. She squinted at me and added, “You want to speak to my husband?”
Sometimes, in journalism, you have to play along, so I nodded and said without an ounce of disrespect, “Yes, Mrs. Walters, I was hoping to have a word with your husband.”
She took a long gulp of vodka and refilled her glass, never offering me any, not that I would have accepted. She was looking down at the table for so long that I was starting to think I had lost her. Then she cast a glance at me and said, “About what?”
“The Boston Strangler.”
I mean, why lie? Why wander down all sorts of hazy dead-end avenues with a woman too drunk to guide me on a clear path to the place I needed to go? At least the truth would set me forth in the right direction.
Well, maybe not. She coughed loud and hard, reflexively grabbing at her chest in that melodramatic way some people have of showing their distress. When she collected herself, she walked over to the kitchen sink and poured water from the tap into a glass. When she got back to the table, she put the glass down, untouched, and took another sip of booze.
Finally, she said, “You want to speak to my husband about the Boston Strangler?”
Her face was contorting as she spoke, her words slurring more now than the few minutes before when I arrived. This was not going as planned, but should be just a small obstacle, provided I didn’t lose patience.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That’s why I came out here from Boston.”
“What about the Strangler?” she asked. Her words were so wobbly, they almost fell out of her slanted mouth and smashed on the floor.
I fidgeted now, growing uneasy, thinking for the first time that Mrs. Walters might prove to be a bigger obstacle than I had anticipated. I said, “Lots of things, ma’am. I’d rather just ask your husband.”
In one shockingly smooth motion, she picked up her lowball glass and flung it across the kitchen. I whirled around to see it explode against her wooden cabinets, the force sending a spray of booze and shards in all directions.
She screamed, “Damn my husband. Damn the Boston Strangler. And damn you for asking about them.”
All right, so this wasn’t precisely the reaction I had expected to get. I had expected to be greeted at the door by a diminutive elderly woman who would show me into a television room where her husband, a retired Boston Police detective, would pull out his scrapbooks and relive the case with me as his wife readied us some raisin scones in the kitchen.
I wanted to get the hell out of this house, and, for that matter, get the hell out of Vegas, but I sure as hell wasn’t in a position to do that now. I said, “Mrs. Walters, I’m sorry for upsetting you. But what is it? What about the Strangler upsets you so much? That was forty years ago.”
As I was asking this, it occurred to me there might be an obvious answer: He killed people. He violated the civility and livability of a city. He defeated her husband. Maybe she meant all that, but here’s what she said: “He ruined my life.” And after she said it, she looked down at the top of her wooden table and began to sob — one of those tearful, shoulder-shaking sobs that can’t be comforted.