“It definitely had a lining. I know that. But I could not see the lining at that point. Just let me-”
“Alright, go ahead.”
“I told her the super sent me to check the windows, and she said she did not hear nothing about it and she wasn’t sure and all this, because of everything that was going on and everything. Everybody worried about the Strangler. So I said, ‘Well, if you’re not interested, if you don’t want to have the work done, I don’t care, it’s all the same to me.’ This is what I always say, you understand me, and this is where they always change their minds. I think maybe it’s because when I say it, I really mean it, you understand? I really don’t care if they let me in or not, at that moment. In fact part of me is kind of hoping they don’t let me in so I don’t do…these things. Like I said, this one, all these ones with the old ladies, it’s not a sex thing. Not exactly.”
“Then what is it, Albert? You do have sex with them.”
“Yeah, but it’s not-I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyways, she lets me in and I tell her the same thing. It doesn’t matter what you say to them, see? I could have said ‘check the pipes’ or ‘check the heat.’ I say different things to them. But this one, I tell her the same thing: I need to see the windows in the bedroom and does she mind showing me where the bedroom is.”
“So she let you in willingly?”
“Yeah. Showed me right in.”
“What did the apartment look like when you went in?”
“It was just…There was like a hallway kind of in the center. And as you come in, I think you go, I think right, and there was a room there with chairs.”
“What kind of chairs?”
“Just, I don’t know, plain chairs.”
“Straight-back chairs, you mean.”
“Yeah, straight-back chairs. And a table. Kind of like a kitchen, like an eating room. And then down the hall, in the back, was the bedroom. So we get in there and she’s kind of leaning over, clearing some things off the windowsill so I can get in there and do the work. And I saw the back of her head and that was when I did it. I hit her. There was a little, like a statue there. I hit her with that right here, behind the ear.
“So she just falls down. I think she was already dead, I’m not really sure. I got a pillowcase offa the bed and I tied it around her.”
“Just a pillowcase?”
“Yeah. I tied it around her neck. She was lying there.”
“What about the pillow? What did you do with it?”
“Oh, I put it under her, under her rear end. I tried to turn off the music, but I could not figure out how to work the hi-fi set, there was something weird about it, so I just left it. Then, you know, I strangled her with the pillowcase. I pulled it tight, twisted it kind of.”
“Did you have sex with her?”
“Yeah, there was sex.”
“Describe it.”
“Describe it? It was just sex. I put my…you know.”
“You penetrated her?”
“Yes, there was definite penetration.”
“In her vagina.”
Pause. “Yes, in her vagina.”
“Did you ejaculate?”
“Definitely.”
“Inside her?”
“I think so. I might have pulled out, but I think it was inside her.”
“You’re sure?”
“No, not absolutely sure. I might have pulled out, you know, come on the floor.”
“You ejaculated on the floor.”
“Yes, I think so. I’m pretty sure of it.”
“What next?”
“I left.”
“Before you left?”
“Well, I put her, I kind of locked her feet in the chair.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t-like I said, I don’t know why I do these things. I don’t like to talk about it because a-the whole thing- well, I gotta talk about it whether I like it or not, don’t I? I don’t know why I did it. I just did it.”
“What did you do next?”
“I just left.”
“You left quickly, you ran out? Or you looked around the apartment first, left it a mess?”
“No, I looked around the apartment. I didn’t make a big mess of it or nothing, but I looked through some of the drawers and everything. She had a little cash there, just maybe five bucks or something, and I took that, but that was all I ever took. That’s not what this was about, you understand? I took that and then I left.”
There was quiet. The tape reels squeaked as they turned. Somewhere outside the room a guard laughed.
The detectives stared.
DeSalvo raised his right hand-later much would be made of the size of his hands, the strength they purportedly carried, but they did not seem exceptional at the time-and he held the hand up in the traditional pose that says I swear.
22
Ricky considered the little man at the door.
Stan Gedaminski wore a grubby wool overcoat that might once have been blue, and the sort of plain black shoes favored by beat cops and mailmen and other professional walkers. His hair was an unfortunate shade of yellow-gray that nearly matched the complexion of his face, so that his head seemed entirely of one color, a sickly shade of flax, like a photo blown out by too much flash.
“Hey, Stan. You got a warrant?”
“No.”
“Alright. Come in, then.”
For obvious reasons, Ricky did not disdain cops as most burglars did. He considered it a mark of his own professionalism that he was no more wary of policemen than any other citizen; it meant he had as little to fear from them. And why should he? A good burglar, happily, ought never to be caught. Prepare each job properly and avoid the cardinal sins of working too often and talking too much, and burglary was about as secure a profession as there was. This neutrality about cops allowed Ricky to maintain a cordial if wary relationship with some of them. Stan Gedaminski was one.
A detective in the BPD burglary unit, Gedaminski had an eerie instinct for the job. He would patrol in vulnerable areas-empty residential streets and apartment houses in midday, hotels in the evenings, businesses overnight-and accurately identify the man in the crowd who was a burglar about to strike. This talent revealed itself early, in Gedaminski’s rookie year on the force. He was in uniform, walking a beat in the Back Bay on a busy afternoon. He saw a man, well dressed but nondescript, and decided to follow him. Later, Gedaminski would be asked what it was about this man that attracted his attention. He did not have an answer. Just a feeling. He followed the man to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and immediately alerted the house detective of a burglary about to take place. Together they arrested this man in the empty room of a woman from Tulsa, where he was calmly pocketing her jewelry. Gedaminski’s gift was a narrow one. He could not sniff out murderers or rapists the way he could burglars, nor did those other crimes interest him. He was content to work burglary cases, a futile specialty. In that, Ricky thought, he was the perfect Bostonian, contentious, rigid, parochial, and so contemptuous of ostentation that he would devote himself to the one crime in which the deck was stacked in the criminal’s favor. You had to respect a guy like that,
