The room had a bare mattress on a single bed covered by a rumpled blue blanket so old that the fabric was almost transparent, but for the hairs and pieces of food stuck in the little balled up pieces of wool. There was a straight-back wooden chair, the type of furniture you’d expect an old grammar school teacher would have used in centuries gone by.
The whole room was maybe a hundred square feet, no bigger than a walk-in closet to the privileged denizens of an upscale town like Weston or Wellesley. By the door, there was an old porcelain sink with those old-fashioned turn handles for hot and cold water that you don’t see much of anymore. Water dripped from the faucet.
At the far end of the room, though the term far end was something of a misnomer in this room, was a single narrow window covered by a torn, drawn shade. Daylight poked through a few of the holes, casting an odd glow across the filthy wood floor.
And then there were the walls — yes, the walls, a different story altogether. The walls were covered with pornographic pictures torn out of magazines. We’re not talking soft porn either, like a bare-breasted woman sprawled across a chaise lounge with a caption that identifies her as someone named Angelica who enjoys baking cookies in the nude and loves riding horses. No, we’re talking about the hardest of hard-core porn, the raunchiest possible raunch — women with animals, women on women, multiple women with men, multiple men with women with prosthetics, women being beaten, dead women, all of them displayed one picture after the next all over the room. There was even the requisite horse, but believe me when I say the woman wasn’t riding him, at least not in the traditional sense.
I was looking at the pictures out of the corner of my eye, shell shocked. Mongillo saw no need for subtlety. He stared at them for many long moments, his eyes drifting from one to the other, from one wall to the next, until he finally turned to Paul Vasco, who was sitting on the edge of his bed, and said, “That’s quite an elaborate collection you have there.”
Vasco didn’t even hint at a smile. Instead, in a dead-toned voice, he said, “Forty-two years and twenty-one days I was in prison. You have any idea what it’s like to spend even one fucking day in there? You have any idea what it’s like to lose all your liberty, all your dignity, all your pride? My first week in, I was raped in the communal shower while two prison guards watched and laughed. I was still bleeding a week later, but nobody gave a fuck. I ate crap. I was given thirty minutes to exercise a day. I read not what I wanted, but what they gave me. I had cockroaches running across my face as I tried to sleep. We were treated like animals, so we acted like animals.”
He paused, looking down at the floor beyond his feet. Mongillo took a seat on the one chair. I leaned on the sink. Vasco said, “When they cut my hair, they had me in handcuffs and leg chains. They put a muzzle over my face. A fucking muzzle, like I was a fucking wild dog.”
He shook his head incredulously. It occurred to me that it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that he was in prison for rape and murder, and what he faced were mere consequences of his incredibly heinous acts. It would be reasonable, but not particularly productive, so I kept my trap shut and continued to listen to him vent. I didn’t get this far in this business because of my moralistic tone.
He looked up, nodded his head around the room, and said, “What you see here is me letting one of my pent-up obsessions run its course.” Another pause, and then: “Not that I owe the two of you any explanation for anything I do.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t owe us anything. So we appreciate you taking a moment. You might have some information that we need, and we’re hoping you might see your way to helping us out.”
Something was bothering me about these pictures, nagging me, something unsettling that was hitting at my subconscious, throwing me a little bit off my game. And no, it wasn’t the dead woman being violated by a guy with a whip in his hand, or the two women simultaneously pleasuring the dwarf in the police uniform. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger — or my eyes — on.
Vasco reached under the blanket, and the thought struck me that he might pull out a gun. Instead, he held a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He put one in his mouth, struck a match, and lit it. The smoke instantly filled the tiny room without so much as a vent to seep into.
He said, his tone softer now, “So you, like everyone else, think I’m the Boston Strangler.” I swear he almost let loose with a smile.
Mongillo quickly replied, “Not everyone else. There were some very influential people back then who were very eager to pin everything on Albert DeSalvo, even though a lot of other people didn’t think DeSalvo did it.”
My gaze floated around the room, across the disgusting pictures, looking for something that was scratching at my psyche.
“Tell me your name.” That was Vasco, addressing Mongillo.
“Vinny Mongillo,” he replied.
“Well, Mr. Mongillo, and you, Mr. Flynn, do you have any idea what it takes to kill another person? Do you have any idea what it takes to shed centuries of civility, to cast off all of society’s norms, to disregard the repercussions, and thus to return to our more primitive roots?
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to wrap your hands around a weaker person’s neck and squeeze until there’s blood coming out of their ears and life oozing from their eyes, until their desperation turns to dormancy and you know that the last lucid thought they had was of you taking away every single pathetic thing they ever had?
“Do you?”
Neither of us responded to his trancelike recitation. The room fell so quiet that I could hear Mongillo’s telephone vibrating in his back pocket with yet another call. The white smoke continued to float from the end of Vasco’s cigarette toward the low ceiling.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s power unlike anything else you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s ego. It’s the ability to end that which wasn’t ready to be over. It’s total dominance. It’s telling the rest of society to fuck off. It’s sexual.”
He paused for emphasis, then added, “It’s addictive.” He smiled here, an unashamed, no-holds-barred smile, his gnarly yellow teeth clutching the fading cigarette butt between them. “It takes a strong man to kill. It takes a stronger man to kill just once.”
He blew smoke into the air and asked, “How strong do you think I am?”
Mongillo looked at me. I looked at Mongillo. I was pretty happy at this particular moment that I wasn’t interviewing this guy in this room alone.
Vasco asked, “Do you think I’m the one who shoved a shard of glass in Dottie Trevorski’s right eye because she blinked once after she was already supposed to be dead?”
I knew from my reading that Dorothy Trevorski of Chelsea was the fifth victim of the Boston Strangler, when he was still in his elderly victim phase. She was a spinster who was found by her sister sprawled across the living room couch with a pair of stockings formed into one of the Strangler’s trademark looping bows tied around her neck. She had been raped, possibly after she was dead. I don’t recall ever seeing anything about a piece of glass having been shoved in her right eye.
“That’s what you think, that I have no control, even while I have all the control?”
This could well have been a confession, though I wasn’t sure yet, because as I said, I wasn’t sure of the glass in the eye. Maybe it was concocted. If true, maybe it was something he had read in the papers that I had missed. Maybe it was something he learned right from DeSalvo’s lips in their many jailhouse conversations. Or maybe he was trying to tell us something that we needed to know.
He said, “Do you think it was me who couldn’t help but jack off on the floor beside so many of those corpses? Do you think I had absolutely no control, that I’d risk having someone walk into the room?”
I asked, “Were you the Strangler?”
He laughed. It wasn’t a soft laugh, or a subtle laugh, or a fun laugh. No, it was a howl, equal parts indignation and pride. For all his protestations, he liked to be asked, to be considered in the game, capable of such heinous acts, smart enough to have had his secret sprawl across four decades, constantly probed but never penetrated.
He wasn’t answering, so I said, “Well, I’ll put it to you again: Were you the Boston Strangler?”
He rubbed his hands across the top of his smooth head, looked up at me with those funereal eyes, and said, “What difference does any of this make? What fucking difference? People live, people die, or as Plato said, ‘Must not all things be swallowed up in death?’ ”
“In time, yes. In time,” I said. “But must not nature be allowed to work its course?”
“Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny,” Vasco replied.
“That’s Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy.”
“But isn’t it a tyrant who takes a person’s life?”
Look, I don’t know where I was getting this stuff from, and I certainly don’t know how Paul Vasco was pulling these quotes from Greek writers and philosophers out of thin air — or maybe it was his ass he was pulling them from. Either that or he really was that smart, or at least well read.
The bottom line — as I looked at him, squirrel-faced, his black eyes darting about the room as he puffed on his stupid cigarette — was I wanted to grab his neck and squeeze it to show him what it felt like to be on the other side of the situation. I wanted to shake him, to beat a confession out of him that he had already seemed to start, and to know there wouldn’t be any more young women’s driver’s licenses arriving in my mail. Normally I like being at the center of a story, breaking news, but this one, no, and even less so with every passing moment.
I asked, “Mr. Vasco, have you been writing me notes? Have you been sending me the driver’s licenses of your victims?”
He looked at me with that something that leaned toward a smirk, a matter-of-fact, shoulder shrug of a look that pretty much said the victims were worthless and the efforts to solve their murders would be entirely fruitless.
He stared into my eyes and said, “You fancy yourself a writer, Mr. Flynn. You ever read the work of Robert Heinlein, the greatest science fiction author who ever lived?”
I couldn’t say I had, so I didn’t.
Vasco held my gaze and said, “Mr. Heinlein once famously said, and I think this is an exact quote, but please don’t think less of me if I’m wrong, ‘Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.’ ”
He paused and added, confidingly now, “I’ve been writing for a long time. I follow Mr. Heinlein’s sage counsel. I do it in private.”
Mongillo, growing impatient with the upscale discourse, said angrily, “Mr. Vasco, let’s cut through the crap. Did you kill women then? Are you killing women now?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he flicked his cigarette butt the few feet across the room, toward a squat metal pail filled with other butts and an old Jim Beam bottle. Problem was, he missed, and the cigarette landed on the decrepit wood floor, the plume of smoke rising up the wall toward the low ceiling. I followed the smoke for reasons I can’t explain, followed the little cloud until it rose past my waist, then my head, and that’s when I realized what it was that I saw.
Set amid the glossy, raunchy pornography was something a world apart: three photographs, one each of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May. The pictures were carefully cut out of the Record, then meticulously adhered to identical cardboard mats, hung side by side. Above them was a much larger photograph of two bare-chested blondes, a garden hose, and — well, never mind what was above them. But suffice it to say that it was enough to get my blood boiling, and I don’t mean that in any sexual sort of way.
Vasco was quoting Cicero while trying to explain to Vinny that he was missing the point, but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying, I was so riveted by these photographs. Actually, it wasn’t so much the photographs but their juxtaposition with the overwhelming filth in this room. All over the walls were pictures of abnormally buxom women performing unmentionable acts. In real life, I imagine these photographs were born of desperation, filled with women willing to do just about anything to make a buck. They were probably abused as girls, never infused with a sense of right and wrong, normal and abnormal, respect and disrespect. Here they were, doing anything that the photographer wanted done for as much money as they could possibly get.
And in their midst were three remarkably different women — women, I would dare guess, of some ambition, women with culture, women with style and urbanity, women of emotional means. They didn’t belong. They didn’t fit. And yet, in Paul Vasco’s eyes, they somehow did, because here they were on this wall of shame, mixed in with the rest of the raunch.
I looked at him, still prattling on to Vinny, now about the quote-unquote right questions he should be asking as a reporter, and I wanted to give him a roundhouse punch to his pointed nose. I wanted to see blood gushing down his smug face. I wanted to see his eyes blacken. I wanted to watch as he writhed in pain like all those women I was becoming convinced he had killed.
Instead, I intentionally kept my eyes from the photos of the three dead women, hard as I was finding that to be. I walked over and stamped on the cigarette butt before the whole decrepit place burned down. Still standing, towering over Vasco as he sat on the bed, I said sharply, “Game’s up, Paul. You killed these women. You killed them then, you killed them now. Tell us why. Why’d you start all over again after all those years?”
He whirled from Mongillo to me, craning his neck to look up, and for half a fraction of a fleeting second, I thought I saw fear in his eyes, the kind of fear that liars betray when their lies are up, or that adulterers show when their mates walk in on them in the lurid act. But as fast as that look flashed across his face, it fled, and I was left with him inexplicably smiling at me, his teeth protruding like those of a hamster.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” he said. He paused for effect, then added, “Oscar Wilde.”
I said, “I’m going to nail you so cold on these killings that the jury’s going to cheer when they send you back to Walpole.” I paused for effect, then added, “Jack Flynn.”
Then I slammed the side of my fist against the wall, just below the pictures of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May, and I said, “Did you kill these women?”
Mongillo walked over and got a closer look at what I was talking about.
“Did you kill these women?” My voice was so taut that the words shot out of my mouth like arrows flung from a bow.
No response, though he flashed a smile — this evil fucking smile, as Bob Walters had described it to me before he died.
“Let’s go.” That was Mongillo, grabbing me by the shoulder and prodding me toward the door.
I said, “Why have you put me in the middle of a story that I can’t do anything to change? Why are you doing this?”
He stood, finally, and asked, “Would you rather not be part of the story?”
He had me. He had me cold. He was as smart as he seemed.
Vinny continued to pull me away, and I began to follow his lead. Before I got to the door, though, I turned around and seethed, “I swear to God, Vasco, when I prove you killed these women, and I will prove you killed these women, I’m going to fucking kill you myself, and it’s going to be slow, and it’s going to hurt like fucking hell.”
He said, “All truths are easier to understand once they are discovered. The point is to discover them. Galileo.”
I was about to lunge. I kept thinking of the driver’s licenses arriving in the mail, the video of the death scene, the guy who needlessly died in the Public Garden, Bob Walters falling down his own stairs seeking something that I didn’t know. Every thought was a jolt, a call to physical action like I’ve never felt before, because of a guy who was screwing with the city and simultaneously messing with my mind. But before I could do anything, before I could say anything, Mongillo flipped open the door to that dismal little room and pulled me into the hallway.
The two of us walked down the stairs in silence and out into the midday sun.
Mongillo grabbed the keys when I pulled them out and said, “I’m driving. You’re out of control.” I didn’t argue. Inside the car, he said, “I’m trying to be like the reporters in All the President’s Men. My partner here thinks he’s the star of Rocky.”
He started the car and pulled out. I could feel the tension seeping out of my pores, not all of it, but enough for me to take a deep breath and say, “Sorry about that. I don’t know what just happened. This thing’s getting to me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, in a tone far more distant and aloof than his norm, staring straight ahead at the road. Then he added, “It’s getting to me, too. We’re going to have to do something about it.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but wasn’t of the mind to ask.
We both sat in silence for a while. We were crossing the bridge back into Boston when he said, “Until then, rather than try to kick the shit out of everyone, I think I’ve got another plan.”