A moment later, she looked back up at me with glistening eyes and said, “He ruined my whole damned life. He took my husband from me. He took my marriage from me. He left me with nothing to look forward to but my next glass of booze.”
“How, ma’am?”
She raged, “Fuck you. Fuck you for coming into my life and questioning what I have to say.” Then she sobbed again.
I asked, “Ma’am, is your husband here?”
“Fuck him, too. Go tell him you want to talk about his Boston Strangler. Go tell him that. And tell him that they ruined my life, both of them.”
“Where, ma’am? Where can I find him?”
When she looked at me, there was fury in her eyes. I feared that she might throw her water glass, or even the half-filled bottle of vodka.
“He’s upstairs. Go tell him that they ruined my fucking life.” Then, screaming, “Now. Tell him now.”
I got up and walked from the kitchen, legal pad still in hand, my shoes crunching over broken glass, looking for the staircase, hoping though not hopeful that I wouldn’t get a glass in the back of the head.
Behind me, Mrs. Bob Walters began crying again, crying hysterically, her head down on the table, her back quaking in uncontrollable spasms over a series of murders committed forty years before. Sometimes the past never lets up. That’s a fact I know all too well. But I suddenly realized, with no small amount of hope, that there was something else at play here, something that might explain what had been going on in Boston the past week, something that might help me bring it to an end.
16
Bob Walters was propped up in a hospital bed watching a game show on a big, clunky television that was on the other side of the small room from the door. The shades were drawn tight. The nightstands on both sides of the bed were covered by used glasses and dirty dishes. A portable oxygen machine stood on the floor on the near side of the bed, its mask lying haphazardly on the rumpled blankets. The place reeked of disinfectants and the faint odor of illness, which the chemicals failed to cover up.
I stood in the doorway, undetected, instantly depressed over this little world I was about to enter, not to mention amazed that The Price Is Right was still on the air. Come on down, or in this case, come on in. No one had invited me, though, so I cleared my throat loud enough for Bob Walters, the former lieutenant detective with the Boston Police Department, to realize I was there.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he said, his words, though not loud, were as sharp as the broken glass that was strewn across the kitchen floor downstairs. He said this without ever moving his gaze from the television set. “This place is a fucking mess and you’re sitting down there getting smashed, you drunken bitch.”
Okay, so not everyone can be Ozzie and Harriet, but the Walters might have been carrying this to an antithetical extreme.
I cleared my throat again. Walters said, his voice no louder and every bit as sharp, “Get some of this crap out of here before you’re too drunk to get up and down the stairs.”
I said, “Lieutenant Walters?”
He pivoted his head on the pillow so that he was facing me. His eyes were the first thing I noticed. It was almost impossible not to. They were big and yellow and sunken deep into his bony face, vacant eyes that had seen so much of life but now rarely saw anything outside of the four dreary walls of this godforsaken little room. They were the eyes of a man resigned to misery.
The next thing was the stubble, coarse and gray, all along his jawline and neck, most pronounced on his upper lip and chin. He hadn’t shaved — or been shaved — in at least a week, probably longer. Then his hair, all silvery black, mussed in the back, greasy and matted down on his forehead in the front.
And finally his skin, sallow and veiny, more of it than he needed in his current state — the skin of a dead man, really.
He said to me, “Who the hell are you?” His voice was old, tired, raspy, and world-weary, like warm water flowing through sand.
“Sir, I’m Jack Flynn, a reporter for the Boston Record. I’ve flown out here to ask you a few things about the Boston Strangler case. I’m wondering if you have the time to help me out.”
Of course he had the time, I mean, unless he couldn’t bring himself to miss a single glorious episode of Let’s Make a Deal, which was probably on next. The more important question was whether he had the inclination. It’s probably worth mentioning again that a lot of cops, active or retired, are particularly leery of newspaper reporters. Actually, forget leery. They hate reporters. We do the same basic thing, which is try to pull layers of lies away from essential truths, but we go about it in remarkably different ways. The cops do it mostly in the privacy of interrogation rooms or at crime scenes, or in the heat of violent moments when no one is watching but the suspects and God. Reporters, we’re more public, tending toward documents and interviews that will be splashed on the pages of our newspaper.
The biggest schism comes from the fact that reporters tend to get particularly gleeful over policing cops, catching them in penny-ante shenanigans — the vice cop looking the other way on a prostitute because he’s getting free oral sex in the back of his cruiser; the street-crime officer who grabs a couple of thousand dollars in tainted cash when he raids the house of a heroin dealer. On the flip side, cops don’t police reporters; the best weapon they have against us is mere silence, which can be a dangerous weapon for all.
“The Boston Strangler? You want to ask me about the Boston Strangler? A reporter for the Boston Record came all the way out to my castle here to ask me about the Boston Strangler?”
His words were as slurred as his wife’s had been, but I had a feeling that it was caused by either pain or a medication to treat it.
I decided not to mince words or motives. I mean, it looked like any word this guy uttered could be his last. Given that the original stranglings occurred forty-two years ago, I probably should have been prepared for the fact that the people who possessed the most intimate knowledge of them were going to be pretty damned old by now, possibly even infirm, but I wasn’t. Not prepared enough, anyway.
So I said, “Sir, if I can talk honestly with you, I think the Boston Strangler might be killing again.”
This declaration didn’t seem to faze him one tiny bit. He continued to look at me through those distant eyes, his mouth slightly agape, as an announcer on a television commercial was prattling on about the cooling relief of Preparation H. He just kept looking, saying nothing, not at first, anyway.
When he ultimately did speak, he said, “What the hell took him so long? They must have kept him in prison for a long, long time.”
I said, “But Lieutenant, I thought the Boston Strangler was murdered in prison. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death more than thirty years ago.”
“That’s right, kid. Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison. The Boston Strangler wasn’t.”
By now, I had walked into the room and approached the side of his unkempt bed. This far in, the room was even more of a pit, with crumpled old issues of TV Guide and Reader’s Digest strewn about the floor around the bed, old food wrappers on top of the discarded magazines, and stains on the sheets. Outside, it was gorgeous and vibrant, spring in the desert. Inside, the shades filtered out any sense of the world, casting the walls and furniture in a colorless haze.