he’s just broken into the basement of a building to sleep there or to take some little thing that’s caught his eye, a bicycle or whatever. But sometimes he does more sinister things.
“After I saw the woman’s photo, to satisfy my curiosity-to allay my fears, really-I checked the dates of Arthur’s absences from the hospital against the dates of the first seven Strangler murders, in that summer of ’62. The dates lined up perfectly.”
“What about the other stranglings?”
“That’s just it. If you remember, the first seven murders were all older women, all in a three-month period from June through August 1962. Those are the warm months, when Arthur tends to wander. Then there were no murders for a while, until the winter, December, I think, and those next two victims were young girls in their twenties. I checked: Arthur was here on those dates. Which made perfect sense to me because Arthur’s anger is not simply directed at all women. It is directed at one woman in particular: his mother.”
“So Nast could not have done them all?”
“I know for a fact he didn’t. It’s the murders involving these old women that concern me. You see, Arthur despised his mother. He first came here in 1956. He’d already been in other institutions-Bridgewater, Tewksbury, the Shattuck. But I first met him in ’56. He’d tried to kill his mother. Threw her down a flight of stairs. The judge pink-slipped him to us for the thirty-day competency evaluation. In the end it did not matter. The mother refused to testify; the case never went forward. But Arthur seemed to form some connection with me in those thirty days, and when the family ultimately decided he should be committed, in ’59, he came back here. I’ve been treating him ever since.”
“And?”
“Over the years he continued to abuse his mother. Punched her, kicked her, eventually he threw her down that flight of stairs. He would be arrested but the charges were never pursued. It’s an awful thing to ask a mother to testify against her own son.”
“What happened to her?”
“I can’t prove it, of course, but it seems fairly obvious to me that he killed her, finally. This was in 1961. She was in the hospital, immobilized in bed, hooked up to an I.V. And then Arthur paid her a visit. Soon after he left, the old woman was found nearly dead on the floor beside her bed. The I.V. had been ripped out of her arm. The bed railing was still raised, so she could not have rolled off the bed. There were bruises on her neck. Arthur had choked her, obviously, ripped out the I.V., and tossed her on the floor. The mother died before she could ever tell what happened. The cause of death was heart attack induced by asphyxiation. So again, he was never prosecuted.”
“Why did he hate her so much?”
“I don’t know, not with any certainty. Look, I can’t tell you everything Arthur has said about her; I do still have some obligation to maintain confidentiality. But I’m not sure it matters anyway. Arthur reports all sorts of abuse when he was a child, some pretty monstrous things, all of which may be gospel truth or, equally likely, all of it could be delusional. It was real enough to Arthur, that’s the important thing. And of course the mother-hatred and the delusions feed on each other until Arthur can no longer see his mother as anything but a complete monster, one who persecutes him even from the grave. I will tell you that Arthur reports he still hears her voice. She berates him, accuses him, doubts him. On and on. So there was motive, if you can call it that.”
“What’s actually wrong with him?”
“A precise diagnosis in a case like Arthur’s is very difficult. He’s deeply disturbed. Likely schizophrenic. That’s how he exhibits, anyway: delusional, with some pretty bizarre illusions; fractured speech and thought; occasional hallucinations; obsessive about certain things, his mother, women, sex. One problem in treating Arthur is that his intelligence is very limited, as is his ability to articulate his thoughts. At times he seems childish, almost autistic. So as a clinician you have this knot of problems: the storm of emotion whipping around inside him, the constellation of behaviors that may or may not signal schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder, and all of it viewed through the fuzzy window of the man’s limited intelligence and ability to communicate. And of course what makes this all so dangerous is that Arthur’s mind is housed in this enormous, powerful body.”
“Sounds like a real E-ticket ride.”
“That wouldn’t be the clinical term, but…”
“What about young women? When my brother found Nast in that alley, he was choking a college girl, twenty- one years old, very pretty. She sure did not look like his mother.”
“Yes. Well, Arthur’s sexual…impulses are quite primitive and unrestrained. Now, to what extent that’s rolled up with these feelings about his mother, I don’t know. It’s probably a reach to say his hatred for one woman has poisoned his perceptions of all women. In our conversations I have always had the sense that Arthur just does not have any feelings at all toward women except as sexual playthings. He does not empathize with them, he does not even perceive them as human. This is why I found it troubling that there have been old and young Strangler victims but none in between. Women interest Arthur either because they are old enough to be his mother or young enough to be objects of sexual desire. Women who fill neither role are of no interest. He does not see them.”
“But you say he was here when the two young women were strangled, in December of ’62?”
“That’s right.”
“So there’s at least two stranglers?”
The psychiatrist shrugged. Not my job.
“Have you ever confronted him directly about the murders?”
“No. In clinical terms, that would be a very bad idea. He would never trust me again. But one day last year-and I did report this to the police-I found Arthur wandering in the hall in a doctors-only area of the hospital. He said, ‘Dr. Keating, I need to talk to you.’ I asked him what it was about. He said, ‘The stranglings.’ I took him to my office immediately. I was going to inject him with sodium pentothal and question him about the murders. But at just that moment I got an emergency call and I had to leave. I never got the chance to question Arthur directly. He never gave me another opportunity like that.”
“Doctor, do you think Arthur Nast is the Strangler?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Look, all I can tell you is I have a terrible, terrible feeling.”
17
This broad was built like a brick shithouse. Packed into a blue dress pressurized across the bust and butt. Big vaulted Neapolitan nose, lacquered helmet of brown hair. Paula Something-or-other. Joe was partial to the brick- shithouse type, and when he had caught sight of this one progressing down Cambridge Street like a Zeppelin, he had thought she looked like Sophia Loren a little. He knew he could fuck her, he knew it the moment he saw her walking that stroppy walk. He brought her to Joe Tecce’s for dinner, and now, halfway through her veal piccata with a side of pappardelle, this broad Paula was still hungry and Joe was feeling the familiar anticipation of a rich dessert.
When she excused herself to go to the “little girls’ room,” Joe sipped his wine and watched her ass, then he sipped his wine undistracted.
A man sat down in Paula’s chair. “You know who I am?”
“No.”
“Yeah you do.”
Joe topped off his wineglass then offered the bottle to the visitor. When a guy like Vincent Gargano shows up at your table, you make nice.
Gargano was short and doughy, a dark-complected guinea, with the sort of kissy Cupid’s-bow mouth that belonged on an angel on a church ceiling. A street kid in a suit. He was not even gangstered up in the usual pinky ring and hockey-puck-sized watch. Maybe he was purposely guarding his reputation from any indication of softness. Or maybe he just didn’t know any better. But intentional or not, Gargano’s cheap suit and ringless fingers were like a friar’s robe: they suggested a sort of incorruptibility. Vinnie The Animal was not violent for the money; he was just violent.
“You’re Detective Daley, am I right? You just come over to Station One.”
“That’s right.”
