subsection with names like Hellcat Grannies and Gray Foxes. And not the ordinary softcore girlie mags, Black Velvet and Busty and Wicked, the type that included cocktail recipes between the pinups. What jarred Ricky were the others. They were graphically sadistic. It crossed his mind that it might have been illegal merely to possess them. These magazines were printed on cheap newsprint. That the photos were in black and white and poorly shot, underlit, sometimes not even focused, somehow added to their authenticity. Women trussed in contorted positions, with baroque leather strapwork or artlessly calf-roped. Their breasts were clamped or stretched. They were raped, both with objects and by naked, black-hooded, potbellied, small-bottomed men whose penises were not shown. These women winced or stared boggle-eyed at their torturers. In one photo a woman lay dead-playacting, presumably-and bleeding. In another shot, a woman slouched from a whipping post, as if lynched, her arms pulled up behind her at an unnatural, unfake-able angle. Some showed women’s faces badly beaten.
Ricky’s mouth fell open. For a few minutes he forgot the need to sweep the apartment quickly and efficiently then get out. The magazines seemed the opposite of pornography, which existed to stimulate. He could not imagine more dick-shriveling images than these. He stared, transfixed.
Then he saw it.
The images, in a magazine called Bound, might have been crime-scene photos from one of the Boston stranglings-except that the magazine was dated July 1958. The “victim” in the photos was a woman in her fifties, wearing a housecoat and girdle. The “strangler” was dressed, ridiculously, in a thievish cap and mask and hepcat jacket, all of which he wore in every photo. In the first shot he wore black pachuco pants; in the rest, no pants or underpants at all. The victim was bound and “raped,” then “strangled” with a garrote of braided sheets and nylons, which was tied off in a bow in the final photo.
Ricky knew.
Something collapsed inside him. The hidden reserve of strength that had carried him through the night of Amy’s murder and the funeral and the long weeks afterward-in an instant, it crumbled. He replaced the magazine precisely, and moved to inspect the rest of the apartment. But his eyes watered. He wiped them with his upper arm. Thoughts of suffering led immediately to Amy. Only a few, Joe and Michael among them, knew the details of the murder. The rest did not want to know. They did not want to dwell on the fact that a family member had been murdered. They were embarrassed by it. In some obscure way, they felt tainted by their association with murder, however blameless the victim. They did not want the sort of negative celebrity that attaches to a murder survivor: Did you know his daughter/wife/mother was killed by the Strangler? They did not want to be perceived as carriers of murder, or of whatever trait had attracted it, weakness, bad luck, fate, sin. The sexual nature of the crime only doubled their shame. So they pretended the murder never happened. They acted, all except maybe Michael, as if Amy had died of cancer or in a car accident or in some other nonsensational, nonviolent way. Ricky had done it, too. Maybe having known Amy so intimately, having known her body, he was the one who most needed to block out the details of her murder.
But it was impossible to maintain the fiction here, in the room where the Strangler lived, where he had first formed the idea, where he had retreated after the crime. Here it was all too clear. Amy had not died instantly. Her dying had been a process, a long, excruciating, bloody process. To turn away from that fact, to pretend it had not happened-as if she had passed into fiction, a book we could safely put back on the shelf because the subject did not suit us-was not polite or discreet. It was cowardly. Amy had suffered.
He thought, Monstrous, monstrous.
More quickly than before, Ricky scanned some of the other shelves. And here was another impossible juxtaposition: Lindstrom’s psychopathic sexual deviance occupied the same mind as an elaborate intellect. His shelves were crowded with Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Leviathan, the Principia Ethica, The Critique of Pure Reason. Most were paperbacks; all were broken-backed and grungy with fingering. Ricky did not know what linked these books, whether they shared a central concern or not. He opened one book, Hobbes’s Leviathan. It was full of scribbles, little stars, underlinings, brackets, annotations-the leavings of a ravenous mind that had passed this way.
In the bedroom, in a top drawer where Lindstrom kept his own underwear, he found a pair of women’s panties. Ricky nudged them open with his gloved finger. They were large and made of an elastic rubbery material, like a girdle. They were certainly not Amy’s. They were torn at the waistband and flyspecked with a brown liquid that might have been blood. They were a souvenir of a murder, and Ricky was tempted to take them. But he could not take them without betraying that he had been there. Lindstrom did not know he was being watched and certainly did not know he had been found out; Ricky wanted to preserve that advantage. So he balled up the enormous panties and replaced them in the drawer just as he had found them.
He retraced his steps, raising the shades to their original height, turned off the lights, and let himself out. And here was a final glitch, an unprofessional stumble for which Ricky would reproach himself later.
The door had two locks which had to be relocked. The first, in the knob, was simple enough; it locked merely by closing the door. But above it was a drop lock, an old Schlage, one that should not have given Ricky any trouble. This type of lock was very slightly more difficult to pick because of the added weight of the bolt mechanism, which resisted the rotation of the cylinder. The added resistance required a lock picker to secure the cylinder with enough torque that he could overcome the resistance of that weight and turn the lock, yet not so much torque that the pins mis-set as the pick lifted them. It was a matter of touch-a very, very simple thing, especially for an accomplished pick man like Ricky who took pride in his skill and practiced constantly. But he fumbled with the lock. When he tried to rotate the cylinder, it jammed-the pins were mis-set-and he had to start again. Another mis-set, and he had to repeat the process a third time. The whole episode took just seconds. But it was a fumble, and he might have been put in a bad position if someone had come along. No one did come, luckily, and Ricky did manage to relock the door. But the lapse troubled him. It was not a clean job.
41
Margaret Daley emerged from the bathroom after showering. She scrubbed her hair dry with a hand towel while simultaneously pinning her elbows against her side to secure the bath towel wrapped around her. When she had finished, she stood before a mirror. There was a man in the doorway. Her body jerked and she yelped, “Michael!”
He slouched against the doorpost in his courtroom suit. On his way to work, presumably. He had lost weight. His eyes were baggy with exhaustion.
“What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“Your boyfriend left the door unlocked on his way out.”
“My boyfriend? Michael, are you mental? What’s wrong with you?”
“He’s not your boyfriend?”
“I’m a little old for boyfriends. It’s none of your business anyways what he is.”
“Do you love him?”
“Oh my Lord, Michael, it’s too early to have this conversation. I’m not even dressed yet.” She minced into the bathroom-a big woman simulating a dainty woman’s walk; Michael was not sure whether she walked this way out of habit or because she was self-conscious about her body being so exposed-and she came back out wearing a frayed terry bathrobe. “Is that what you’re so upset about, that I’m with Brendan now?”
“Do you love him?”
“Michael, I’m not going to answer questions like that. It’s absolutely none of your business. Are you crazy, showing up like this in the morning? What did you do, lurk around outside till you saw Brendan go?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t have called?”
“I thought we should talk face-to-face.”
“Michael, sit down.” She flung the blanket over the unmade bed and sat down on the edge. “Sit down.”
He frowned at the bed. “I’d rather stand.”
“Michael, do you feel alright? You know, everybody thinks you’re going mental with this thing.”
“I feel fine.”
“Are you drinking?”
