The Strangler Read online

  “May be nothing.”

  “It is nothing. I just got through saying.”

  The bartender twisted a rag in his hands, anxious to change the subject. He gestured with his chin toward the evening Globe in front of Ricky.

  COP FOILS STRANGLER ATTACK

  Big photo of Joe with his grim scowl and mussed uniform, a damsel swooned in his arms. “What’s with your brother? Can’t keep his mug out of the papers lately.”

  “Who? You mean Elvis?”

  “Yeah, Elvis Daley.” The bartender snorted, but he was plainly worried. “Hey, Rick, no offense, but if you got trouble with Vincent Gargano, I’d just as soon you don’t bring it in here, know what I mean?”

  “It’s no trouble. I told you.”

  “Just the same.”

  A look passed between them. Because of course it was trouble. Vincent “The Animal” Gargano was a stalker for Carlo Capobianco, the North End boss currently waging a campaign to consolidate the countless smalltime bookmaking operations in the city under his own control—a campaign that was building to its own bloody climax.

  Until then, organized crime in Boston had never really deserved the name. No one had ever succeeded in organizing the city, or even tried. Boston had never produced an Al Capone or a Lucky Luciano, a Caesar to unite it. So the city’s gangland remained fragmented and smalltime. It was not even the seat of power for the Mafia in New England. That was Providence, where a heavily Italian population had created more favorable conditions for the Italian Mob than Irish-dominated Boston. It was from Providence that Raymond Patriarca governed New England beginning in the early 1950s, with the blessing of the Genovese and Colombo families in New York. Boston was a backwater. But now perhaps the city had found its Caesar after all, a cocky, pugnacious North Ender, the son of Italian immigrants, whose talent was perfectly aligned with the greatest opportunity: gambling.

  Carlo “Charlie” Capobianco was a born bookie. He had got out of the Navy in 1947; just three years later he was running the bookmaking rackets of the North End consigliere Joe Lombardo. But this, Capobianco found, was no military operation. The bookies Capobianco saw were amateurs. They took bets on the numbers in the back of their groceries or barrooms. They treated the books almost as a secondary business. Most were independents: they paid a tribute to the Mafia in exchange for protection from the cops and from Mob shakedowns, and access to the race wire and layoff bank. Nobody was monitoring them, nobody knew how much they were making or how much more they could afford to pay. It was a mess, run by old Mustache Petes like Lombardo who did not understand the numbers business or the potential of a properly managed, centralized gambling network.

  Capobianco set out to take it over. From now on, there would be no more independents. Everyone worked for Capobianco and everyone paid. The bookies would render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. A tax on your take. A tax on your telephone—your lifeline, your link to the whole operation. A tax just for staying in the business. Charlie Capobianco wanted a piece of every nickel bet.

  He was not interested in anything but bookmaking and the profits it threw off. He did not dabble in other Mob businesses—unions, dockworkers, truck hijacking, pornography, drug trafficking—because that was not where the big money was. Gambling, that was where the money was. Capobianco had grasped a simple truth: The Mafia was in the gambling business. Since the end of Prohibition, gambling had been far and away the Mafia’s biggest source of income. The rest was a sideshow, for dumb-shit Irishmen and grabby New Yorkers. Capobianco meant to stick to his knitting.

  He streamlined the whole operation. Business grew. In boiler rooms in the North End, phones rang off the hook. A dozen guys in each room to handle all the action. Horse races in the afternoon, dog races at night, numbers all day. In the horse room, Danny Capobianco, Charlie’s little brother, carried a roll of half dollars to pay the phone operators, fifty cents a bet.

  But alone, Capobianco could only go so far. He was not a made man. That meant he could not muscle in on crews that operated with Raymond Patriarca’s blessing. He couldn’t collect a debt if the deadbeat also owed Patriarca. He could not even protect himself from the other sharks in Boston’s chaotic crimeworld. When they began to shake Capobianco down—when they taxed him—Capobianco did what he had to do.

  He drove down to Providence to see The Man. Capobianco handed Ray Patriarca an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars cash and he offered the don a deal: fifty grand down and a guarantee of at least a hundred thousand a year in exchange for a monopoly on bookmaking in Boston. Patriarca accepted.

  The deal changed everything. Capobianco moved in on the bookie rackets citywide, and in the early 1960s Boston got bloody.

  Capobianco unleashed his stalkers, now augmented by a battalion of Mafia strong-arm men, hundreds of them, with orders to bring the bookies to heel. The stalkers confiscated half the bookies’ take—the tax. Bookmaking profits in turn fed a loan-sharking business, as sharks put that money back on the street at three or four percent a week. And that was the fatal formula: enforcers ordered to show no mercy in collecting debts; and debtors everywhere—bookies unable to keep up with the taxes, borrowers unable to keep up with the vig of three, even four hundred percent a year on sharked money. Bodies began to fall, particularly in the run-down South End. A New Boston indeed.

  In the mayhem, a new generation of enforcers flourished. They were feral and vicious. Their violence was flamboyant. They cruised the city like sharks.

  The apotheosis of this new breed was Vincent “The Animal” Gargano. And he was hunting for Ricky.

  14

  Amy had installed a new deadbolt on her apartment door, a monster of a lock that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. It quelled the unease she’d been feeling and it helped her sleep. She did not like to think of this foreboding as Strangler-anxiety; she did not see herself as the hysterical type. But it was getting hard to ignore the alarm on the street. Sometimes it seemed the Strangler was all people talked about.

  In the beauty parlor, Amy had listened, captive, while a half dozen women debated the available tactics.

  ——I don’t know what I should do when I get home. Maybe I should leave the door open and look around, so if the Strangler’s inside I’m not locked in with him. But then I think, what if he’s outside? Maybe I should lock the door as quick as I can.

  ——Even when you’re inside with the door locked, who says you’re so safe? All these ladies he killed, even the young girls, he got in. He finds a way in, this guy.

  ——When I go to bed, I set up soda bottles by the door, so in case he opens it during the night, I’ll hear and maybe he’ll get scared off.

  ——He doesn’t break in! They let him in! He talks his way in, he’s a con man. So just don’t answer the door…

  On and on people talked. Nobody knew anything. Newspapers described the killer as a phantom and a monster, but they had no idea what he actually looked like. They hinted at carnal sadism or ritualistic sexual deviancy and suggested that the Strangler had satisfied his unnatural appetites. But the details were withheld; no one knew exactly what had happened to those thirteen women. Everyone was free to imagine the murders according to her own personal horrors. The victims, on the other hand, were absolutely real. In a city as small as Boston, it was not unusual to know someone who knew someone who knew one of the victims. Even if you could not find such a link, among thirteen victims, young and old, white and Negro, all nice girls, all grandmothers and college girls, it was not hard to find a victim who seemed familiar enough.

  Far from distracting people from it, the Kennedy assassination fed the paranoia. It touched the same nerve. The Strangler too was an enemy within. The phantom fiend, they’d been told, probably looked just like them. If it turned out in the end that the city’s resident monster was just another Oswald, well, they might be disappointed but they would not be surprised.

  And so it went: Priests warned women from the pulpit to keep their doors locked. Jitter
y phone-callers flooded the police with warnings about neighbors who were suspected of harboring fetishes, or men who tried to pick them up on the street, or mysterious hang-up calls. Single women felt their hearts quicken when they entered their darkened apartments. Strangler-anxiety became a fact of life.

  Amy tried not to feel any of it. What the newspapers had said was true: Statistically, you were more likely to be killed by lightning than by the Strangler. Anyway, she had always felt strong, and feeling strong, she believed, made her so. Still, something was off. She wanted that big new lock. It helped her sleep.

  Now she fiddled with the key, sawing in and out, searching for the proper fit as she clutched her purse and the mail and supported a bag of groceries precariously on one raised knee. Finally she was able to get the thing open. She stepped inside, snapped the light on—and screamed.

  Ricky was in the armchair in the opposite corner.

  “Jesus! Stop, doing, that!”

  “I don’t have a key.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “So knock! Like a normal person!”

  “Well, but you weren’t home, see, so I just—”

  She cut him off with a look, then lugged her groceries into the little galley kitchen.

  Ricky followed her in and gave her a peck on the mouth.

  “You’ve been drinking. Where were you? No, wait, let me guess. McGrail’s.”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You’re a creature of habit. You should have your mail delivered there.”

  “I’ve been banned.”

  “From McGrail’s? They’ll go broke without you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “What’d you do, run out on a tab?”

  “I consorted with the criminal element.”

  “You are the criminal element.”

  “I mean the real criminal element. This guy came to see me. That’s what I need to talk to you about. I need to disappear for a while, take care of this thing.”

  “What guy?”

  “Amy, really, you don’t want to know.”

  “I do.”

  His face was blank. This was the infuriating thing about Ricky, the secrecy, the way he just disappeared into himself.

  “What’s going on, Ricky?”

  He did not respond.

  “Come on,” she teased. “It’s not so hard. It’s what the little hole in your face is for; that’s where words come out.”

  “Amy…”

  “Fine, Ricky. That’s just…fine.”

  “Amy, it’s nothing. I’ll take care of it. It’s just better we don’t talk about it. Trust me, I have reasons.”

  “What reasons? Tell me.”

  “Amy, please. Just let it go.”

  She studied him. She knew, oh, she knew what Ricky did. But if he chose not to discuss it, then the subject was verboten. That was the unspoken rule. At times like this, though, it killed her to let it go, just killed her. Her temperament, her training, her every day was about finding things out. She was a born finder-out. But, good Lord, did she love that man! Everything about him. His face, his smell, his voice, his body. The more she looked at him, the more she feasted on him. It was just possible, too, that she loved Ricky the more for his tantalizing secrets. He was a story she could never quite get. In any event, there was no sense in pressing him for answers. He wouldn’t talk anyway.

  But in the next moment all that sighing, girlish acceptance was gone. How could you really know a man if you could not discuss his work? What kind of relationship was that? Where was it all headed? They’d been together all these years and still?…Oh, the hell with secrets! Were they a couple or not? Did he love her or not?

  “Ricky, it’s not fair. You can’t just show up and tell me you’re going to disappear for a while without even explaining what’s going on. It’s…”

  “This again. It’s what?”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Not fair? How do you know that? How do you know I’m not doing this for your own good?”

  “I think I can decide what’s for my own good. I’m a big girl.”

  “Well, the answer is no. You don’t get to know this time. It’s better you don’t know. You’ll just have to trust me on that. Now, do you trust me or not?”

  Her mouth fell open. Trust him? Ricky, you hypocrite! What balls! She raised her hand to slap him in the chest, not playfully but because there was nothing else to do, no other way to reach him.

  Ricky snatched her wrist before she could strike him. He held it, and though his face showed nothing, he squeezed her arm hard. His message could not have been clearer: Don’t snoop.

  “Ow, Ricky, stop it, you’re hurting me.”

  He released her, then shook his head, frustrated, inarticulate. “Sorry.”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  15

  Joe was the man of the moment. He had rescued the girl from the clutches of the Mad Strangler, wrestled with the very monster itself—and he’d had the extraordinary good fortune to be photographed in his hour of high heroism. (The incident took place a few blocks from Newspaper Row on Washington Street, where several papers maintained their city rooms.) There was still the matter of attaching a name to the suspect and then finding him, but at least the cops had a description now. Joe received a commendation from the commissioner. True, this was the same commissioner Joe had humiliated a few weeks before on national television, but to Joe the rescue erased everything that had gone before. He presumed he would be rehabilitated. He informed Brendan Conroy that his first choices for reassignment would be Homicide or maybe Alvan Byron’s new Strangler Bureau. Neither would happen.

  One night Conroy showed up at Station Sixteen before last half to tell Joe, “You’ve been resurrected.” But the resurrection was incomplete. Joe was restored to detective, but in Station One, in the North End. The precinct covered parts of downtown and the North and West Ends. But the West End had already been reduced to a construction site, for the most part. And the North End was small and insular; it tended to police itself, without interference from outsiders like the Boston PD. Joe told Conroy he did not want the assignment. It was a step backward. “Now, don’t be stiff-necked, boyo,” the old man advised. “It’s a detective bureau. This is the way back. Take it.”

  And so Joe found himself in plain clothes again, standing before a narrow shopfront in the old West End, near North Station. The big plate glass window had been smashed, and the hole covered over with plywood sheets. Only a transom remained to identify the place, in gold lettering:

  MORRIS WASSERMAN • 26 • DELICATESSEN GROCERY

  Moe Wasserman’s little deli was on the ground floor of one of the few remaining tenements in the area, on one of the few remaining open streets, tethered to the city by a single road that led out to Causeway Street. Joe knew the place. He remembered that missing window. It had been decorated with gold lettering, too, in English and Jewish, and near the door cardboard signs had been taped to it advertising the lunch specials. Sometimes there would be a line out the door at lunchtime. But Joe did not know from Jewish food, and what did he need it for anyway? He knew what he liked. Besides, he’d probably go in there and say the wrong thing. So he had never tried it. Ricky would have tried it. Ricky would have strolled in there and come out gibbering Jewish and munching on a kosher pickle and doing the hokey-pokey and been elected mayor of Jerusalem, because that’s how things went for Ricky. Not Joe. Joe had to work for things.

  The shop was closed, permanently, and Moe Wasserman himself had to come unlock the door for Joe and show him in. Wasserman was thin and tired-looking, handsome but dingy, sixty-five or so. Joe liked him before he had even opened the door. He liked all Jews, he thought. Twenty years before, as a nineteen-year-old Marine, Joe had marched across France into Germany with the Fourth Armored Division and he had seen things. He had seen things. In France he thought he had seen it all in the fighting in the forest, nothing could sho
ck him anymore. Then in Germany he saw what the Germans had been up to. He didn’t like to think about it. Joe had figured out that every country needed its niggers and in Europe of necessity the niggers had been white. Growing up Daley, it had been an article of faith that the Irish were Englishmen’s niggers. From that traditional ethnic underdog-ism, it had been a short leap to pro-Semitism. Even before the war, Joe’s dad had openly admired Jewish boxers and gangsters, the local booze-runners like Charlie “King” Solomon and Louie Fox. Weren’t the Jew-gangsters just looking out for their people the same way the Gustin Gang looked out for the Irish? And hadn’t Hitler taught everyone, finally, the need for niggers everywhere to look out for themselves, to punch back? Joe was inclined to lend his muscle to the cause. His little brother Michael stirred the same feeling in Joe: There were people who just did not like to throw punches, and it was the duty of guys who did to punch back for them, because if you didn’t, if you just stood by and let it happen, then you were guilty too. In a world that killed its niggers, you had to take a side. You had to stand up.

  For his part, Moe Wasserman did not seem to care much what the hulking detective thought about Jews or the war or anything else. He let Joe in and shuffled around flicking the lights on, revealing the destruction in the shop. It was worse than Joe had expected. Everything smashed. The floor strewn with shards of glass, kitchen equipment, furniture. The old man, too: he had a bandage on his right cheekbone, a gauze patch held with white tape, and purplish bruises on his face. On the floor, someone had broomed open a path through the wreckage from the front door to a door at the back.

  Wasserman saw the cop survey it all and he shrugged. “It hasn’t been cleaned. I picked up the food, that’s all. You don’t wash a sock before you throw it out. So.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what went on here, the whole story, start to finish.”

  “The whole story? What story? This is the story. Look.”