I asked, “But have you thought about it since?”
He looked me over for a long moment.
“A lot,” he finally said, softer than he had spoken before. “I’ve thought about that a lot.”
His gaze shifted from me to the fireplace to the floor. A wry smile sneaked across his features as he stared down, and he mumbled, “I’ve thought about it too much. Thought about it as I’ve nearly drowned myself to death in vodka, whiskey, and gin. I played fast and loose back then, not only with my own client, who ended up dead, but with a lot of other people whose lives would never be the same because of information they might never know.”
He looked up at me, almost surprised that I was still there, listening. He said, “And the God’s honest truth about all this is that I still don’t know who the hell the Boston Strangler was — or maybe is.”
The burning logs crackled a few times, making the sound that a cap gun might. The wind caused a loose shutter to bang against the thin outer wall.
I asked, “Do you remember Detective Mac Foley?”
“Well.”
“Your impressions?”
Thomas squinted at some distant point in thought and recollection. “An odd guy. A serious guy. Adamant that DeSalvo wasn’t the Strangler, as if he always knew something that no one else did. I could never get a handle on him.”
I decided to leave that alone for a while and return to his heavily finessed and carefully caressed answers on Paul Vasco. I said, “Mr. Thomas, if you were me, if you were in a desperate situation, which I am, if people’s lives were on the line, who would you focus on for the moment? I’ll ask you this real simply: Would you focus on Paul Vasco?”
Thomas looked from me to the floor, and then down at his glass, which he lifted to his lips in another long sip, the liquid draining out as he tilted his head back and shut his eyes. He fingered the bottle for a moment, then removed his hand without ever pouring a fresh drink.
Finally, he peered over at me again and said, “You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.”
Those little pieces in my mind started closing in on one another, started forming a picture that I couldn’t quite see. And then the harder I thought about them, the less clear they became, until they disintegrated against a backdrop of frustration.
I looked at him hard, looked at him until he finally averted his gaze. I said, “I don’t understand what the hell you’re saying, and I don’t have the time or the energy to be semantic here. Please, Mr. Thomas, tell me what you’re talking about.”
He shook his head as he stared straight down at the floor and rubbed the back of his neck with both of his hands.
“That’s all I can tell you, young man. Get it in writing. You’ll know what I mean.”
He never looked up as I walked out his door.
38
It was two, maybe three seconds after I got into the newsroom when Peter Martin appeared at my desk the way the Japanese appeared at Pearl Harbor, which is to say without warning and certainly without apology. He was accompanied by a bald man in sunglasses who looked as out of place at a newspaper as I would at a Milan fashion show.
“This is Buck,” Martin said to me.
“Hi, Buck,” I said.
Buck nodded but didn’t speak, which, for reasons I can’t explain, didn’t actually surprise me.
“What’s this?” Martin said, pointing down at the black dog sitting beside me.
“That’s Huck,” I said. I had stopped home on my way in from police headquarters to get him, and he smacked his tail against my metal desk at the sound of his name.
“Does he bite?”
What is it with these people?
“Viciously,” I replied. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”
Martin slowly, tentatively slid over to the other side of the desk, then said to me, “Come down to my office, would you? We need to get a definitive plan going. And why don’t you leave Huck here.”
That last sentence wasn’t a question.
I told him I’d be right in, snapped up my telephone, and punched out the number for Deirdre Hayes in Las Vegas, Nevada. I had already called her twice — on the way down to see H. Gordon Thomas, and on the way back, leaving her messages both times. This time it rang through to her voice mail again, which I didn’t like at all. I asked her to call my cell phone as soon as humanly possible.
It was Sunday, early in the afternoon, and as such, the newsroom was operating on a skeletal staff, meaning few editors, no copy editors yet, and just a handful of reporters chasing down the typical fires, car crashes, and press conferences by especially opportunistic politicians who know that the competition for coverage is always weakest on a weekend. I instructed Huck to lie down, which he did with a long groan, followed by a loud sigh, and I made my way through the long newsroom and into Peter Martin’s glass-walled office.
When I walked in, Vinny Mongillo was lovingly unwrapping what we in New England would call a tuna-fish submarine, but those in less educated parts of America might refer to it as a grinder, a melt, or possibly a hoagie. In any part of the country, this wouldn’t have smelled good, so I simply tried to put it out of my mind. Meantime, Justine gave me a look that I believed to be one of apology. Martin sat at the head of the table, peering down at a legal pad peppered with notes. No one said anything, unless you counted Mongillo’s soft moan of satisfaction after his first bite.
Finally, Peter kicked things off, saying, “All right, Vinny, put down the food for a minute and tell us what the hell is going on here.”
Vinny put down the food, in itself an uncharacteristically selfless act. He looked around at the three of us and said flatly, “My mother was a Strangler victim in 1963. I was a baby. I never got to know her. I was ten years old when I overheard my aunt and my grandmother talking about it — right after Albert DeSalvo was killed.”
He drew a breath and continued. “I studied the hell out of the case when I was a teenager. I wrote to police officers. I read books. I called prosecutors. I was convinced, like a lot of others were, that DeSalvo didn’t kill my mother — that DeSalvo didn’t kill anyone at all.
“When Jack received these letters, I was going to tell you — all of you. But then I decided, you know what, this is my chance to do something about what I always thought was a massive deceit. This was my chance to have an impact on behalf of the woman who brought me into this world, but who I never got the chance to know. So I kept my mouth shut. Because if I told you about my history, you rightfully wouldn’t have allowed me to work on the story.”
I sat there spellbound, staring at a guy who never, ever stops surprising me in one good way or another. You think you know someone, you think you’re giving him more credit than he could possibly deserve, yet under all that flesh is someone who’s even better, smarter, and more sensitive than you can possibly allow yourself to believe.
Peter Martin, I could see, was also enraptured, but not to the point of silence. He didn’t have that luxury. He tapped his pen a few times on the legal pad that sat on the coffee table before him and said, “Thank you, Vinny. That’s all very understandable. But why were you arrested? What did you do?”
Vinny flashed me a knowing look, mostly because, well, I already knew. Then he said, “The knife. Many years ago, I was given the blood-soaked knife found in Walpole State Prison that was used to stab Albert DeSalvo to death. One of the lead detectives on the case, Bob Walters, the guy who was trying to help Jack out before he died, he gave it to me.”
More silence. I couldn’t peel my eyes off of Vinny, which may seem a little weird, but so be it. Justine looked from Vinny to Martin to me. Martin bounced his pen on the legal pad a few more times and said, “But Vinny, how did the cops suddenly find out in the middle of this investigation that you had the knife?”