Still the person didn’t appear. Vinny and I were staring at the darkened, open doorway the way Dorothy looked at the stage that supposedly held Oz.
“Who the fuck are you?”
That was the voice, not Dorothy.
I replied, “Sir, may we talk to you in private?”
That inquiry was followed by a spate of silence, which was followed by the sounds of footsteps and the movement of a shadow; suddenly a silhouette appeared in the doorway.
I strained to see him, and what I saw through the gloom was this: a wiry man, about five feet ten inches tall, one of those guys who you suspect is probably about ten times stronger than he first appears. His head was shaved, and his eyes were so dark that I think they might be black. He had about a week’s worth of salt-and-pepper growth on his face. He wore a pair of tattered old jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves haphazardly scissored off, exposing arms that seemed disproportionately large for his frame. He had beads of sweat on his forehead — odd, because it was by no means hot. He looked nowhere near his age, which made me wonder about how much we’re spending on prison health care.
“You may tell me who the fuck you are.” He said this in a tone that was in no small way mocking.
I replied, “I’m Jack Flynn, a reporter with the Boston Record.” As I said this, I stared into his eyes, probing for any sort of flash of recognition. I didn’t see any. “And this is my colleague, Vinny Mongillo. We were hoping to get a little bit of help from you if you had a few minutes.”
He smiled at this, a diabolical little smile, exposing graying, yellowish, misshapen teeth. Perhaps we were saving money on dental care.
“You want to talk about dead women, don’t you,” he said, his tone one of sudden amusement.
“We do,” I answered.
He asked, “Then or now?”
Without missing a beat, I replied, “Both.”
“You scum-sucking assholes can never leave it alone, can you? You can never admit you were wrong. Never leave a guy to live in peace.”
That’s just great, by the way, being called a scum-sucking asshole by a convicted rapist and murderer. Funny part is, if he called us this on one of those cable-television shoutfests, say The O’Reilly Factor, the audience would probably cheer, and O’Reilly would tell him he’s spot-on in his fight for freedom and truth against the elite liberal news media.
Since this was real life, not cable, I answered, “Not when we’re trying to get to the bottom of a serial-murder spree and we think that you might have a little information that would help get us there. We just need a few moments, Mr. Vasco, and you’ll never have to deal with us again.”
“I don’t have to deal with you now.”
He was right, actually, but at this point, I already knew he would. Maybe it was the way he held himself as he continued to lean casually in the doorway, his sizable arms folded against his chest. Maybe it was the look on his face, the one that betrayed how much control he felt over the situation, and the smug satisfaction he seemed to get from this impromptu give-and-take. I don’t imagine the discourse in the Cedar Junction state prison rec room was particularly highbrow or challenging.
Vinny must have sensed the exact same thing I did, because he finally opened his mouth and said, “You’re absolutely right, Paul. But what else do you have going at the moment? Why don’t you let a couple of guys troll for a little bit of information, and see if it might be there?”
He looked at Vinny as if he had just noticed him for the first time. He said, “Those murders are ancient history.”
Interesting choice of words. Not “I didn’t kill anyone.” Not “You’re wasting your time, I don’t know anything.” Not “The Boston Strangler is long-ago dead and buried.” But rather, those murders we wanted to ask him if he committed are so old that they’re not worth anyone’s time.
“Not anymore,” I replied. “Not if the killer is at it again, or even if someone’s just trying to copy him.” I paused here, a new thought clanking around in that broad expanse of my head: If this was a copycat, maybe the real Boston Strangler, Paul Vasco, would be irritated enough by it to guide us. So I added, “We need your help.”
With this, we stared back and forth for a long moment, stared until his eyes finally fell to the floor before they rose up to Vinny. He shook his head as if he had been egregiously burdened with some enormous misfortune, and said, “Then come in.”
He turned and walked into the room. Vinny and I followed, single file, Vinny first. I shut the door behind us.
We hadn’t walked five feet when we both stopped short in a clichéd mix of shock and horror as we stared around the dimly lit room at what was hanging on virtually every free inch of his walls.
“Let me explain,” Vasco said calmly, even amusingly.
“That would be good,” I replied.
The follow-up comment that I didn’t make was that it better be good enough.
25
The room had a bare mattress on a single bed covered by a rumpled blue blanket so old that the fabric was almost transparent, but for the hairs and pieces of food stuck in the little balled up pieces of wool. There was a straight-back wooden chair, the type of furniture you’d expect an old grammar school teacher would have used in centuries gone by.
The whole room was maybe a hundred square feet, no bigger than a walk-in closet to the privileged denizens of an upscale town like Weston or Wellesley. By the door, there was an old porcelain sink with those old-fashioned turn handles for hot and cold water that you don’t see much of anymore. Water dripped from the faucet.
At the far end of the room, though the term far end was something of a misnomer in this room, was a single narrow window covered by a torn, drawn shade. Daylight poked through a few of the holes, casting an odd glow across the filthy wood floor.
And then there were the walls — yes, the walls, a different story altogether. The walls were covered with pornographic pictures torn out of magazines. We’re not talking soft porn either, like a bare-breasted woman sprawled across a chaise lounge with a caption that identifies her as someone named Angelica who enjoys baking cookies in the nude and loves riding horses. No, we’re talking about the hardest of hard-core porn, the raunchiest possible raunch — women with animals, women on women, multiple women with men, multiple men with women with prosthetics, women being beaten, dead women, all of them displayed one picture after the next all over the room. There was even the requisite horse, but believe me when I say the woman wasn’t riding him, at least not in the traditional sense.
I was looking at the pictures out of the corner of my eye, shell shocked. Mongillo saw no need for subtlety. He stared at them for many long moments, his eyes drifting from one to the other, from one wall to the next, until he finally turned to Paul Vasco, who was sitting on the edge of his bed, and said, “That’s quite an elaborate collection you have there.”
Vasco didn’t even hint at a smile. Instead, in a dead-toned voice, he said, “Forty-two years and twenty-one days I was in prison. You have any idea what it’s like to spend even one fucking day in there? You have any idea what it’s like to lose all your liberty, all your dignity, all your pride? My first week in, I was raped in the communal shower while two prison guards watched and laughed. I was still bleeding a week later, but nobody gave a fuck. I ate crap. I was given thirty minutes to exercise a day. I read not what I wanted, but what they gave me. I had cockroaches running across my face as I tried to sleep. We were treated like animals, so we acted like animals.”
He paused, looking down at the floor beyond his feet. Mongillo took a seat on the one chair. I leaned on the sink. Vasco said, “When they cut my hair, they had me in handcuffs and leg chains. They put a muzzle over my face. A fucking muzzle, like I was a fucking wild dog.”