He shook his head incredulously. It occurred to me that it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that he was in prison for rape and murder, and what he faced were mere consequences of his incredibly heinous acts. It would be reasonable, but not particularly productive, so I kept my trap shut and continued to listen to him vent. I didn’t get this far in this business because of my moralistic tone.
He looked up, nodded his head around the room, and said, “What you see here is me letting one of my pent-up obsessions run its course.” Another pause, and then: “Not that I owe the two of you any explanation for anything I do.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t owe us anything. So we appreciate you taking a moment. You might have some information that we need, and we’re hoping you might see your way to helping us out.”
Something was bothering me about these pictures, nagging me, something unsettling that was hitting at my subconscious, throwing me a little bit off my game. And no, it wasn’t the dead woman being violated by a guy with a whip in his hand, or the two women simultaneously pleasuring the dwarf in the police uniform. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger — or my eyes — on.
Vasco reached under the blanket, and the thought struck me that he might pull out a gun. Instead, he held a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He put one in his mouth, struck a match, and lit it. The smoke instantly filled the tiny room without so much as a vent to seep into.
He said, his tone softer now, “So you, like everyone else, think I’m the Boston Strangler.” I swear he almost let loose with a smile.
Mongillo quickly replied, “Not everyone else. There were some very influential people back then who were very eager to pin everything on Albert DeSalvo, even though a lot of other people didn’t think DeSalvo did it.”
My gaze floated around the room, across the disgusting pictures, looking for something that was scratching at my psyche.
“Tell me your name.” That was Vasco, addressing Mongillo.
“Vinny Mongillo,” he replied.
“Well, Mr. Mongillo, and you, Mr. Flynn, do you have any idea what it takes to kill another person? Do you have any idea what it takes to shed centuries of civility, to cast off all of society’s norms, to disregard the repercussions, and thus to return to our more primitive roots?
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to wrap your hands around a weaker person’s neck and squeeze until there’s blood coming out of their ears and life oozing from their eyes, until their desperation turns to dormancy and you know that the last lucid thought they had was of you taking away every single pathetic thing they ever had?
“Do you?”
Neither of us responded to his trancelike recitation. The room fell so quiet that I could hear Mongillo’s telephone vibrating in his back pocket with yet another call. The white smoke continued to float from the end of Vasco’s cigarette toward the low ceiling.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s power unlike anything else you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s ego. It’s the ability to end that which wasn’t ready to be over. It’s total dominance. It’s telling the rest of society to fuck off. It’s sexual.”
He paused for emphasis, then added, “It’s addictive.” He smiled here, an unashamed, no-holds-barred smile, his gnarly yellow teeth clutching the fading cigarette butt between them. “It takes a strong man to kill. It takes a stronger man to kill just once.”
He blew smoke into the air and asked, “How strong do you think I am?”
Mongillo looked at me. I looked at Mongillo. I was pretty happy at this particular moment that I wasn’t interviewing this guy in this room alone.
Vasco asked, “Do you think I’m the one who shoved a shard of glass in Dottie Trevorski’s right eye because she blinked once after she was already supposed to be dead?”
I knew from my reading that Dorothy Trevorski of Chelsea was the fifth victim of the Boston Strangler, when he was still in his elderly victim phase. She was a spinster who was found by her sister sprawled across the living room couch with a pair of stockings formed into one of the Strangler’s trademark looping bows tied around her neck. She had been raped, possibly after she was dead. I don’t recall ever seeing anything about a piece of glass having been shoved in her right eye.
“That’s what you think, that I have no control, even while I have all the control?”
This could well have been a confession, though I wasn’t sure yet, because as I said, I wasn’t sure of the glass in the eye. Maybe it was concocted. If true, maybe it was something he had read in the papers that I had missed. Maybe it was something he learned right from DeSalvo’s lips in their many jailhouse conversations. Or maybe he was trying to tell us something that we needed to know.
He said, “Do you think it was me who couldn’t help but jack off on the floor beside so many of those corpses? Do you think I had absolutely no control, that I’d risk having someone walk into the room?”
I asked, “Were you the Strangler?”
He laughed. It wasn’t a soft laugh, or a subtle laugh, or a fun laugh. No, it was a howl, equal parts indignation and pride. For all his protestations, he liked to be asked, to be considered in the game, capable of such heinous acts, smart enough to have had his secret sprawl across four decades, constantly probed but never penetrated.
He wasn’t answering, so I said, “Well, I’ll put it to you again: Were you the Boston Strangler?”
He rubbed his hands across the top of his smooth head, looked up at me with those funereal eyes, and said, “What difference does any of this make? What fucking difference? People live, people die, or as Plato said, ‘Must not all things be swallowed up in death?’ ”
“In time, yes. In time,” I said. “But must not nature be allowed to work its course?”
“Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny,” Vasco replied.
“That’s Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy.”
“But isn’t it a tyrant who takes a person’s life?”
Look, I don’t know where I was getting this stuff from, and I certainly don’t know how Paul Vasco was pulling these quotes from Greek writers and philosophers out of thin air — or maybe it was his ass he was pulling them from. Either that or he really was that smart, or at least well read.
The bottom line — as I looked at him, squirrel-faced, his black eyes darting about the room as he puffed on his stupid cigarette — was I wanted to grab his neck and squeeze it to show him what it felt like to be on the other side of the situation. I wanted to shake him, to beat a confession out of him that he had already seemed to start, and to know there wouldn’t be any more young women’s driver’s licenses arriving in my mail. Normally I like being at the center of a story, breaking news, but this one, no, and even less so with every passing moment.
I asked, “Mr. Vasco, have you been writing me notes? Have you been sending me the driver’s licenses of your victims?”
He looked at me with that something that leaned toward a smirk, a matter-of-fact, shoulder shrug of a look that pretty much said the victims were worthless and the efforts to solve their murders would be entirely fruitless.
He stared into my eyes and said, “You fancy yourself a writer, Mr. Flynn. You ever read the work of Robert Heinlein, the greatest science fiction author who ever lived?”
I couldn’t say I had, so I didn’t.
Vasco held my gaze and said, “Mr. Heinlein once famously said, and I think this is an exact quote, but please don’t think less of me if I’m wrong, ‘Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.’ ”