I nodded. “That’s what I’ve heard. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to hear that more and more.”
He laughed a shallow laugh and turned his head back to the television to see a commercial for a soap opera that was going to be on later that day. Then he focused again on me.
“Stranglings?” he asked.
“Two young women so far.”
“The cops making the link from the old serial killer to the new one?”
“Absolutely not.”
He laughed again, this time louder and more gutturally, and that caused him to descend into a coughing fit, which spurred him to stick the oxygen mask over his mouth for several long, deep breaths. As he breathed, his blank eyes stared straight ahead at nothing, a total acceptance of this as his human condition.
When he pulled the mask away, he said, “They wouldn’t, would they?”
“Why not?”
He looked at me like I was a bronze-plated idiot, and maybe I was. But sometimes these are the kinds of questions you have to ask in this grand business of information acquisition — questions that might seem obvious to everyone but the person asking them.
He asked, “Why would the brass want people thinking that the Strangler is killing again? That would be an admission that they didn’t get the right guy back then. That would mean that the grunts, people like me, were right, and that the higher-ups, they were wrong. Why would they want you to think that?”
As he spoke, he grew more animated, even agitated, moving his arms out from under the unwashed sheets. He fell into another coughing fit, then climbed his way out of it by sipping water from a badly smudged glass on the other side of his bed.
When he collected himself, I asked, “All these many years later, the brass is still sensitive about it?”
He shot me another one of those looks that made me feel like the stupid kid at the fifth-grade science fair. You know how they say there’s no such thing as a dumb question? In Bob Walters’s presence, I was the exception to that rule — a living, breathing asker of the dumbest questions he’d ever heard.
Still, he contained himself and said, “Think about who’s where. One of the lead detectives on the case is now the police commissioner, and from what I hear from the few friends I still have on the force, he wants to be mayor. The U.S. senator from your state was the attorney general heading the Strangler investigation. These are just two guys who have staked their whole fucking careers on that one case. And they’re not done yet. Think, kid, think.”
I was, but to no avail. I said, “Tell me about your role. You headed up the investigation, right?”
He swallowed hard. His eyes were transforming right before my eyes, sharpening. He laughed softly and said, “Yes and no. A lot of people headed up that investigation. After DeSalvo confessed, there were probably forty people who claimed to have led the case, every one a fucking tactical genius. I was just one of them.”
I said, “Save your false modesty for your lovely wife. Tell me your role.”
He looked at me — both surprised and amused.
“I headed homicide at the time, so yeah, it was my case. The whole fucking world was coming down on us. Boston had four newspapers at the time, every one of them going crazy with this thing. The Phantom Fiend, the Boston Strangler, another woman dead, read all about it. Women were locking themselves indoors. The mayor was having fits. The Strangler didn’t care about city and county boundaries, and the other police departments and prosecutors were being real pricks.
“And then you’ve got the state attorney general, the most ambitious prick in the world, taking over the case and putting some sham group together called the Boston Strangler Commission, trying to make it all go away in the best possible way so he could have a campaign issue when he ran for president. And my own fucking cohorts in homicide were sticking knives in each other’s backs to get in the next day’s paper. The thing was a pure fucking disaster from the day the first broad was found strangled in Back Bay.”
He paused and took another long sip of water. He pivoted his head along the pillow again, looked at me, and said, “So you want to know my role? That was my role. Bring order to total fucking chaos. I thought I had succeeded until the day I failed, and when I failed, I failed big.”
He shut his eyes and seemed to rest for a moment. I stood in silence on the side of his bed. When he looked at me again, I asked, my tone softer now, “What’s got you laid up?”
“I’m old, kid. I’m old. That’s my problem. You’ll be old someday too, and it sucks.”
Before I could respond, he added, “And I have diabetes, which prevents me from walking. I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year. I get out of here maybe once a month in a wheelchair, when I can get someone over to carry me down the stairs. The doctors want to amputate both my legs. I’m on borrowed time down there. And I’ve got emphysema, which is what’s causing this fucking coughing all the time. I guess I’m on borrowed time everywhere.
“And I’ve got a miserable drunk of a wife who doesn’t give one flying fuck whether I’m dead or alive. You know what, never mind that. She’d much prefer if I was dead so she wouldn’t have to deal with all my bullshit. Kid, I hope your wife is someone special, because like I said, growing old sucks.”
I asked, “If not DeSalvo, then who’s the Strangler?”
“Nobody’s told you that already?”
“I haven’t really asked anyone until now. All respect intended, sir, you were the guy who knew the most back then, the detective that all the other cops looked up to. Speaking of which, Hank Sweeney says to say hello.”
He didn’t, but he probably should have. And far more important, I had a strong sense that dropping his name, showing that I already had easy access among favored members of the fraternity, would help my cause here at a level that I hadn’t yet explored.
Bob Walters brightened at the mention of Hank and said simply, “A good man. An excellent man. Broke barriers and broke cases. You can’t beat that combination.”
I said, “Who is it?”
He lay in silence for another long moment, his gaze moving from me to some faraway place I couldn’t see.
Finally, he said, “A guy who was never on my list until long after the stranglings stopped. A brilliant guy. Pure evil. Poor Boston if he’s back.”
“You’re not helping me,” I said.
He laughed again. Our rapport was growing easier, even as he seemed to be growing tired again.
He said, “DeSalvo was arrested on a rape charge, actually, a string of rape charges, and sent to the Bridgewater Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons while he awaited trial. He wasn’t a suspect in the stranglings, either. But one day, he just ups and confesses. He gave details of each of the murders that impressed the hell out of Stu Callaghan and a bunch of his people. Callaghan was so excited about the confession, about bagging the Strangler, that he never let any of the hands-on detectives interview him, because he knew we had doubts and he was afraid we’d ruin his moment and all the fawning press coverage that went with it. So he only allowed access to DeSalvo to a bunch of his pissant, know-nothing administrators who wanted nothing more than to close the books on the whole thing.”
He paused, then said, “Trust me, Albert DeSalvo couldn’t hit a dog, never mind kill a woman. He was not the Boston Strangler.”
I said, “But the killings stopped as soon as he was arrested.”
“You’re right. They did,” he said. “It ends up that DeSalvo’s cell-mate in Bridgewater is a guy named Paul Vasco. Ever hear of him?”
I shook my head.
“Vasco’s got an IQ of 158. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was a genius — an evil fucking genius. Diabolical. And cold-blooded. He had beaten a murder rap years before on a technicality. Robbed a gas station. Drove halfway out of the parking lot, flipped his car in reverse, went back inside, and shot the clerk in the head just for kicks. Then he left. This was in the ’burbs, and the damned cop forgot to read him his Miranda when he pulled him over later that night and found powder burns on his hand and blood on his shirt. So he walked.