“He’s not conflicted out?”
“He doesn’t work for me. I don’t tell BPD what to do. Besides, Brendan’s connection isn’t as close as yours.”
“It will be.”
“Michael, a homicide investigation isn’t a blood feud. Whatever problem you have with Brendan…Anyway, you don’t belong there. The decision’s made. Case closed.”
“But the case isn’t closed, George. Amy Ryan’s murder can’t be a Strangler case. Your man DeSalvo was already locked up in Bridgewater. The phantom fiend is caught, remember? Unless you have the wrong man.”
“We’re treating it as a strangling.”
“Good idea. Keep it in-house. Maybe DeSalvo will confess to it yet. By the time he’s done, he’ll be claiming he killed Kennedy, and the tsar and Julius fucking Caesar.”
“Are you through, Michael?”
“Apparently.”
Wamsley went to the railing and looked out over the scrap of weedy grass that passed for a backyard. He dug a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and took a good long time lighting one.
“Is there a suspect, George?”
“Not an appropriate question.”
“Sorry. Forgot my manners.”
“Come on, Michael-”
“Must be something to do with seeing Amy Ryan strung up-”
“Alright! Alright, that’s enough. What’s got into you?”
“I’ve had a headache.”
“You’re giving me a headache.”
“George, you have no idea.”
“We’re looking at this guy Kurt Lindstrom.”
“The Shakespeare guy!”
Kurt Lindstrom had been among the earliest suspects the police had identified in the Strangler murders. Michael had urged him as one the Strangler Bureau should consider more closely, before Albert DeSalvo’s out-of-left-field confession had essentially terminated the investigation. A 1954 graduate of Harvard, Lindstrom was from a small town in upstate New York. He spoke, or claimed to speak, eight languages. He was an accomplished classical organist who had appeared with the Boston Symphony. He had also been arrested for creating an LSD lab and experimenting with the drug, which was barely known to the cops at the time. Most memorable to Michael, though, was the fact that Lindstrom, an out-of-work actor, spent his days in full Shakespearian costume reciting speeches on street corners, usually in Harvard Square. Lindstrom claimed to have founded a theater troupe which he intended to relocate to New York City when the time was right. The Cambridge PD had picked him up on various trespass and suspicious-person charges. On one occasion he was asked by a bookish Cambridge detective how he managed to make such a convincing Othello. “I use Man Tan,” Lindstrom said. Yes, but why, with the city in a panic over woman-killings, would he choose that role? “Because I understand him.” Lindstrom certainly seemed to understand Othello’s capacity for violence. His record was full of assault and indecent A amp;B charges, to go along with the raft of narcotics and vagrancy-type cases. If Arthur Nast had fulfilled one fantasy of the Mad Strangler, the Frankenstein monster of children’s nightmares, it seemed to Michael that Kurt Lindstrom embodied an even more frightening alternative: the calculating Strangler smarter than the cops pursuing him, the faceless oddball standing next to you at the market.
“Hate to say I told you so, George.”
“Then don’t.”
“And DeSalvo?”
“DeSalvo for all the others.”
“You think that’s gonna fly?”
“I think it’s the truth. Whether it flies or not isn’t my concern. It still makes more sense than a dozen stranglers running around in one city at one time.”
“Does it? I’m not so sure. The more I see…”
“I can see how you would feel that way, after what’s happened.”
“It’s not that, George. I’m more cynical than you give me credit for. What’s Lindstrom’s motive? Or is it just another mad-strangler thing? He picked Amy Ryan by coincidence?”
“The theory is he murdered her because she wrote that story saying DeSalvo is the wrong man. He wanted to prove her right by demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Strangler is still out there. Lindstrom wants DeSalvo cleared. He wants to be the Strangler. He wants to be remembered. If he can’t be Macbeth, he’ll be Jack the Ripper.”
“That’s the theory?”
“That’s the theory.”
“Well, I’ll give you credit, George. It makes as much sense as anything else I’ve heard. Which is faint praise.”
Wamsley tamped his cigarette on the railing and, when he was sure it was out, he dropped it into one of the trash cans. “You’ll come back to Eminent Domain, Michael? Help build the New Boston and all that?”
“Sure. Why not.”
“Okay, then. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Me, too. Say hello to my mother before you leave. She’ll be honored you came. The man who caught the Boston Strangler.”
“I’m surprised to hear you call me that.”
“Eh, what do I care, right? I’m off the case.”
31
Thirty-four steps. That was Michael’s count. He had initially paced it off at a walk and reached a higher number. But his dad had been running and his stride would have lengthened. So Michael ran it, from the end of the access road to the alley, and he counted again, then ran it again and counted again. Thirty-four steps, about half that number of seconds. It had to be wrong. He was missing something. He assumed he was in the jigsawed world of the mystery novel; if the solution was right, the pieces would fit. They would slip together easily. They didn’t.
He went to the alley, stood where the shooter had stood. The killer had beat Dad to this spot, waited for him to come skittering around that corner, and fired. So he had dashed around the corner ahead of Dad, pulled the gun, and was there ready-steady, waiting. A three- or four-second lapse, say.
Michael rehearsed the facts again. Dad and Conroy arrive in a cruiser at the Eastie waterfront, Dad driving. He parks with the driver’s side of the car nearer the access road. Conroy, on the far side of the car, sees the kid and shouts to him, across the roof of the car. The kid, sitting with his back against a wall, looks up, registers cops!, and takes off. Then the thirty-four-steps, then the shot.
So how-if Amy was right-did a lard-ass like Brendan Conroy get into position to fire that shot in the alley? How could he possibly have beat Dad from the parked car to the alley?
Michael adjusted the facts to fit the movie in his head. Maybe Conroy had gone ahead earlier, before the sprint, or something had distracted Dad or drawn him away, giving Conroy a head start. Or maybe the car had been parked the other way (though it would have required backing in). Michael could have dreamt up a thousand scenarios to reach the desired climax. What he could not do was imagine a different climax.
He ran it again. He wanted to feel it, make the experience a physical reality. Thirty-four steps, chick-chick- chick-chick-chick… Michael’s head jostling. On his right the slate-blue emptiness of Boston Harbor. The water was choppy and whitecapped, the colors of a chalky blackboard in school. It made an oceany whishing sound. Beyond the harbor the city rose up on its little hill a mile away, still a nineteenth-century skyline, ten stories tall, a mean little port city without a skyscraper, an American Marseilles. Chick-chick-chick, thirty-two, -three, -four, and the corner. Turn. Gun. Shooter. Bang.
