A guy walks into a bar with a weight on his shoulders.
All right, the guy was me. The bar was the always luxurious Max Stein’s in the wealthy suburban town of Lexington. The weight was of the whole world — or at least it felt like it at the moment.
Max Stein’s, though, represented something of a respite, a place to gather with legendary Record reporter Vinny Mongillo during what felt like an uneasy calm before a particularly nasty storm. Or maybe it was the eye of the hurricane. I’m trying to think of other suitable weather-related clichés, but none come immediately to mind, except maybe that it was raining trouble, so with sincere apologies, we’ll leave it there.
As I walked through the double doors, the appropriately named Richard Steer, the ever hospitable general manager who I’d known since what felt like the beginning of time, gave me a long, two-fisted handshake. “I’m betting this one’s driving you crazy,” he said. I only needed to nod for him to know that he was as on-point as usual.
Vinny was already at the bar, two glasses of red wine in front of him and one in his hand, which he happened to be holding nearly sideways, peering through the glass, saying to my favorite bartender, Nam, “It’s got terrific legs.”
Who knew wine had legs? Vinny and Nam, that’s who. And probably all the good waiters who were walking through the room carrying groaning plates of dry-aged sirloins and cottage fries and sautéed spinach. I was amazed that Vinny could keep his attention away from it, but he did.
“Hey, Mike Tyson,” he said as I sidled up to the bar. Nam gave me his characteristically cheery hello and my characteristic Sam Adams, icy cold from the back of the chest.
I poured my beer slowly into a glass and said, “Great legs.” But I was looking at a woman down at the far end of the bar.
Well, all right, that really didn’t happen, that last part, but Mickey Spillane would have been proud if it did.
“You doing any better?” Mongillo asked me, meeting me square in the eye.
“I was never doing bad,” I replied, not meaning to sound quite as clipped as I probably had. “I just don’t like being played by a murderer, that’s all.”
Vinny looked at me funny, eyeing my face and then my hands, almost analyzing me. He said, “Wait a minute. You look funny. Like a prune.”
“Long story,” I said. “One that I’d just as soon forget about.”
Vinny did. He took a long sip of wine, and I gulped my Sam. Nam came back over and asked Vinny about the “Russian Valley cab.”
“There’s a taxi here already?” I asked. They ignored me.
“Big nose, very broad, and a little bit acidic,” Mongillo said to Nam.
“You just described my aunt Toni,” I said.
He ignored me again. So did Nam, who was pouring yet another glass of wine. He handed it to Mongillo with a look of concern and said, “Tell me if you think this is too buttery.”
Enough already, so I used the one trump card I hoped I still had with Mongillo and said, “You want to eat?”
He looked at me almost surprised, as if he had forgotten that’s why we were there, though I’m reasonably sure he hadn’t, and said, “Great idea.”
My first one in a long while, actually.
Nam sent a waiter with a tray to ferry Mongillo’s wines to the table, though I’m not sure wine can be made plural like that. I carried my own beer and drank it along the way.
Once we were settled into a booth, Mongillo met my gaze and simply said, “Paul Vasco was the Boston Strangler.”
I wasn’t sure whether to say “No shit,” or ask “How do you know?” So instead I told him, “Go on.”
“Because Dorothy Trevorski really did have a shard of glass shoved into her eye,” he said, his gaze staying on mine. “It was never reported by any newspaper at the time. It was never revealed by the cops. It was one of those bits of info they held back so they’d know whether they had a professional confessor on their hands or the real thing.”
I said, “Well, if that’s the case, then wouldn’t they have known that DeSalvo wasn’t the real thing?”
“Maybe,” Mongillo said. “Or maybe Vasco told DeSalvo about this detail in one of their many prison walks, and he parroted it to the interrogators.”
I said, “Or maybe DeSalvo told Vasco.”
Mongillo thought about that for a long moment. Either that or he was just looking for an excuse to take a drink of wine from the glass he had been swirling.
“I suppose,” he finally said. “But there’s something else, too. Seven of the murder scenes had sperm on the floor several feet from the bodies. Vasco just about admitted pleasuring himself over the corpses. I don’t know if that’s something two guys would have talked about in prison, you know?”
I thought about that myself, and used my thinking time to drain my beer. Before I even put it down, a waiter named Jack, God bless him, appeared with another.
We ordered. I got grilled swordfish with cottage fries. Mongillo basically got the right side of the menu — or at least it sounded that way. Then he asked for the wine list back. I could all but hear Peter Martin’s lines when he looked over the expense account: “Is there a deposit on this dinner that we’re going to get back?”
Once the waiter retreated to the kitchen to inform the chef that there appeared to be a patron at Table 23 in pursuit of the world’s beef-eating record, Mongillo leaned toward me and said, “The most important thing that happened during that session with Vasco, I don’t think you even saw.”
“The fact that you picked up his cigarette butt, which contains his DNA?”
He furrowed his brow and squinted at me. “You saw that?”
“I think Ray Charles would have seen that.” I paused and added, “I was going to do it myself, but you beat me to the punch. Good move.”
Vinny asked, “Do you think Vasco saw it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what that guy sees, besides torture and necrophilia.”
We both fell quiet for a moment, maybe thinking of the women he tortured and the corpses he violated. Or perhaps Vinny was merely regarding his wine. Either way, I said, “You have someone in the BPD crime lab who will run it?”
He nodded his head knowingly. Of course he did.
I said, “It’s too bad we can’t get some of DeSalvo’s DNA. Then we’d have all bases covered — the ability to prove and disprove.”
Mongillo shot me an odd look and said, “We may get lucky on that count. Stay tuned, and don’t ask.”
So I didn’t, which runs entirely antithetical to every cell of my being, but it was that look on his face that gave me pause.
In the gulf of silence, a veritable team of waiters arrived at our table en masse — one of them carrying the seafood platter Vinny had ordered to kick things off, another a plate of fried calamari, and still another a Caesar salad and the wine list. Fortunately, the table was sturdy enough to withstand all the added weight on Vinny’s side.
Vinny asked Jack (the waiter, not the handsome but momentarily frustrated scribe), “Do you have an unoaked Chardonnay muscular enough to withstand shellfish?”
Somehow, Jack the waiter understood. As Mongillo dressed an oyster, I said, “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“How is it that you know so much about DeSalvo, Vasco, and the Boston stranglings? You weren’t even old enough to talk then.”
A pretty good thought, by the way: Mongillo unable to speak.
He sucked down the oyster. Jack the waiter arrived with the wine and the two of them went into their whole overdone uncorking and tasting routine. Finally, that over, Mongillo said to me, “When I was eight, nine, ten, even older, all the kids in the neighborhood, my own brothers, used to go down to the park at the end of the street and play baseball. They’d play for hours, until it got so dark that you couldn’t see the ball, and then they’d come to our house or one of the others and eat Popsicles and talk about how they just played.”
He sipped his wine appreciatively.
“I’d go down to the park and they’d make fun of me. ‘Fat Vinny.’ ‘Tubby.’ ‘Lard ass.’ And a whole lot worse. They wouldn’t let me play. So after a while, why bother trying. The kids were all out playing baseball or kick the can or whatever else, I was inside reading everything I could get my hands on about old Boston crimes. Ask me anything about the Brinks robbery or Sacco and Vanzetti. The Boston Strangler, it’s like I needed to know as much as I could about that one.”
By now, Mongillo’s plates had been cleared without him ever so much as offering me a leaf of romaine lettuce. The entrées arrived and it looked like he had ordered his food by the pound.
I told him about the steam-room incident of a couple of hours before. He immediately snapped up his cell phone and relayed the information to Edgar Sullivan.
When he hung up he said, “You should drink a lot more beer to rehydrate.”
It was touching, this concern, but I said, “It doesn’t work that way.” He didn’t seem to hear.
Idle conversation now. I told him about Maggie Kane and me not calling her back.
“That thing was never meant to be,” he said.
I told him about running into Elizabeth Riggs in the San Francisco Airport.
“Now, there’s a woman who loved you more than anyone you’ll ever meet.”
I paused mid-chew and stared at him. He looked at me defensively, shrugged, and said, “What do you want me to say? She did.”
I asked, “How do you know that?”
“Fair Hair, how do I know anything? Intuition. My own personal radar. She didn’t make it too tough, either, the way she looked at you, the way she talked to you, about you. A good woman. And good-looking, to say the least. That weird to see her?”
Suddenly, my swordfish didn’t have a whole lot of taste and the cottage fries seemed limp, though maybe that was just me.
I mumbled, “Yeah, it was pretty strange.”
Vinny chewed on his steak, took a sip from a glass of ruby-red wine that Jack had brought over, and said, “Yeah, I bet it was bizarre, huh? She still look great? Those big eyes? That flat stomach? God, that hair that frames both sides of her face?”
“All right, never mind. Forget I brought her up.” I pushed my dinner plate a couple of inches away from me, almost reflexively.
Mongillo said, “Oh-oh. Someone’s got a little case of the regrets. Or maybe they’ve come down with love sickness.”
I wanted to tell him she was pregnant. I wanted to tell someone, anyone. But then I didn’t want to have the inane conversation that would inevitably follow, so I said sharply, “Drop it, Vin, okay? Not the time.”
For a moment, he actually looked hurt. That moment passed quickly when Jack returned with dessert menus. He said, offhandedly, “Well, go get her all over again, and this time don’t be such a fuckup.”
Ah, if life really was that easy: me being able to get her all over again, me not being such a fuckup.