The first nonstop flight from Boston to Las Vegas leaves at 7:10 in the morning, and the passenger list isn’t exactly a roster of Boston’s social register. There were guys in tank tops, women with fanny packs, kids with two days’ worth of snot hardened around their noses. And this was first class, which cost me just enough of the Record’s money that Martin would undoubtedly ask if we now owned a percentage of the plane.
I felt a tinge of relief, a lot of trepidation, and overwhelming sadness as we ascended from the runway at Logan International Airport and banked over South Boston — the emotions having nothing to do with the physical act of aviation.
Rather, it felt somewhat good to get the hell out of Dodge, even for a day. Dodge was about the death of someone I loved and truly respected, Edgar Sullivan. Dodge was about another death of a man I never even knew in a place — the Public Garden — where I was supposed to be. Dodge was about the murders of young women whose licenses and videos I received shortly after they died.
I was feeling guilt. I was feeling helpless. And I’ll admit, I was feeling a little more than a little bit of fear. Someone wanted me vacated from this good earth, and, even if incompetent in their execution (pun partially intended), they were going to clever extremes to mask their efforts — a possible drowning, a daytime robbery, a faulty steam-bath door, a store holdup.
A few things happened before my flight that are worth noting, first and foremost being the conversation I had with Deirdre Walters Hayes, daughter of the late Bob Walters, retired detective with Boston PD.
She had known I had been at the house, known I was there because, she said, her mother had a vague recollection, and she found my business card on her father’s dresser. She didn’t seem particularly angry at me, which was a good thing, maybe even a great thing.
After my condolences, I cut to the quick. “Las Vegas Police said they found a key on the stairs above your father’s body,” I said. “Any idea what it unlocked?”
She didn’t hesitate. “An old footlocker that my dad kept in the garage,” she said.
My breath quickened. I asked, “Any idea what’s in it?”
“His life. His career. Things he cherished from his old days in Boston, and things from some old cases that haunted him right to the end. After you left, he must have gotten it in his head that he needed to see some of these things again.”
She hesitated, then said, her voice starting to crack, “But he didn’t have the strength. He should have known that.”
I knew what I needed, and what I needed was to see what was in that box. I also knew that Bob Walters wanted me to see what was in that box, which is why he was trying to get to it before I returned to his house. But I didn’t want to look overeager. So I said to Deirdre, “Listen, I came out there to ask your father some questions about the old Boston Strangler case, and he was phenomenal about answering them. Would you mind if I came back out and took a look to see if there’s anything that might be helpful in that locker?”
“Come on out,” she said. And that was that.
It’s also important to mention the story I filed for that morning’s Record about the murder of Edgar Sullivan. Maybe I shouldn’t have written it, but more probably I should have. Edgar was a lifelong employee of the Record, forty-three years running the newspaper’s security operation, and I think he would have gotten something of a kick being memorialized on his paper’s front page on his way out the door.
It’s one thing to be evasive with cops, quite another to be that way with readers, so in a first-person account, I provided many more details in my story than I let on to detectives at the scene of the crime the night before. That’s not to say I wrote everything. Rather, I described how the older woman was allowed to escape from the store. I indicated that the gunman seemed more concerned with the people in the store than he was with the money in the register. And I went into more graphic detail about the gunfight, portraying Edgar Sullivan to be exactly what he was: a hero who saved the life of a colleague, that colleague being me.
That particular story, written in an hour on deadline, inspired a 6:00 a.m. voice mail from Police Commissioner Hal Harrison to my cell phone, during which he said, and I quote, “I’ll slap you so hard with a subpoena that you won’t be able to spell the words Boston Record.”
Fuck him. Anyway, he’d have to have a Nevada sheriff serve it, and I doubt that was going to happen, mostly because he wouldn’t have any idea where I was — at least that was a key part of the plan.
Speaking of which, the plan called for me to parachute into Las Vegas, though not literally, drive immediately to the home of the newly late Bob Walters, meet his daughter, Deirdre, analyze and possibly retrieve whatever it was that was in that locker, and catch a four o’clock flight that would get me back to Boston by half past midnight. One added benefit of this trip was that it would get me out of the firing range that Boston had become, at least for a few hours.
Of course, I can’t remember the last time anything in my life went according to plan, so why should this day have been any different.
The last time I had pulled up to Bob Walters’s house on Rodeo Road, the county coroner was parked out front and Bob was already zipped up in a shiny black body bag and getting wheeled out the front door. That was not a good day, but then again, not many of them had been lately.
This time, no coroner, no body bags, no police cars, all of which was good news. Just desert serenity, with chirping birds, the distant sound of a gurgling fountain, and the dry, superheated air. I strode up the Walterses’ walkway and knocked on the front door.
I wasn’t exactly prepared for what happened next, but then again, preparation had hardly been my calling card of late. A woman answered, I don’t know, somewhere in her thirties, maybe about five feet six, 110 pounds, dressed in a miniskirt and a skintight white tank top that could just about make a man — especially this man — buckle at the knees.
Beyond that, she wore heavy eyeliner and bright lipstick, and her wavy auburn hair was bunched back in a ponytail. She said, “You must be Jack. I’m Deirdre Hayes.”
Now, Deirdre is one of those names I associate with navy blue pantsuits and white silk shirts that button to the neck — a conservative name for a conservative woman who, because of that, has probably achieved some modicum of financial success. It’s like Alice or Patricia or Ruth. You don’t expect to see a Deirdre dressed like this.
On the flip side, throw the name Tiffany around and that’s a woman I want to meet, or for that matter Alex or Andi or Jen. Kate can go either way, as can Liz or Anne.
Back to Deirdre. She must have sensed my, um, surprise, because she said, “Forgive my appearance; I’m just getting off the overnight shift. I’m a waitress on the Strip.”
I said, “I’d like to spend a few hours with my good friend Jimmy Beam in that bar.”
Just kidding. What I really said was, “I’m so sorry to intrude like this. Things are crazy back in Boston, and the sooner we did this, the better.”
“No apology necessary.”
She invited me inside. The place smelled strongly of cleaning fluids, which, given what had gone on in there over so many years, was probably a good thing. All the blinds and drapes were pulled open, allowing sunshine to flow inside. Classical music poured through a central speaker system — Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 19 in F, if I’m not mistaken. All right, I’m bluffing here, but someone was tickling the ivories, and it sounded pretty damned good, even if it didn’t seem to go with the woman before me.
Deirdre led me back into the big kitchen and offered me a cup of coffee, which I declined, and then a bottle of water, which I gladly accepted. Last time I was in this room, her mother was flinging a glass against a wall and killing herself slowly with booze. This time, there was no hint of her, so I asked, “Is Mrs. Walters home?”
“My mom’s in rehab,” Deirdre replied, leaning back on a countertop, holding a mug of coffee in both her hands. She paused, then added, “And not by her choice. You saw her. She was a mess. Her whole life had fallen apart. I had to get an appointment by the court to be her guardian, and the first thing I did was send her into a clinic to dry out. She needs the kind of help that I can’t give her.”
Deirdre Hayes said this matter-of-factly, though I was pretty certain the facts of her life had to hurt.
I said, “You’re a good daughter.”
She replied, “Thank you, but for chrissakes, look at me. Hardly good enough, hardly what my old man wanted me to be. My mother’s had a tough life. I’m intensely proud of my father. He was a great detective, and he helped a lot of people over the years — hundreds and hundreds of them. But he was never the same after the Boston Strangler case, and he never made it easy on my mom.”
I nodded. “I think that Strangler case ruined a lot of people’s lives.” Not to mention ended; Edgar Sullivan’s corpse flashed in my mind like a slide in a PowerPoint presentation, but of course I didn’t mention it. What I said was, “I know it’s not exactly making mine a pony ride at the moment.”
Now she nodded knowingly, with a smile, though I wasn’t sure what she actually knew. She said, “Good Lord, he was tough to get along with. My mother’s an alcoholic. I ended up spending my twenties shoving heroin into my arms and up my nose. I lost everything I had. My husband, my child, my job. I’m not blaming my old man, I’m really not. You create your own problems in life. But man, he didn’t make it easy to get out. He was a miserable old guy, right to the end. Maybe the Strangler case was the cause, or maybe it was an excuse. I was never sure.”
I said, “I’m sorry.”
Deirdre Hayes shrugged. “My mother has alcoholism in her family, but my dad brought it all to the fore. If I was her, I can’t tell you I would have done it any differently, except maybe divorcing him and living my own life on my own terms.”
We talked a little bit about my meeting with her father the day that he died. I mentioned how surprising it was that he fell down the stairs that day.
She said, “You triggered something in him. He never got out of bed, but after you left, there was something he had to see.”
I said, “He was trying to tell me something before I left, but he couldn’t get the words out. Then his health worker showed up and kicked me out.”
She nodded. I was beginning to hear the clock ticking toward my return flight, so I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m on a tight schedule, and the truth is, I’m really eager to see what it is that your old man has.”
“Let’s go.”
She led me from the kitchen down a short hall and out a metal door into an obsessively neat two-car garage, where the floor still looked like it was brand-new. There were no vehicles in the garage, giving it a cavernous feel. It was also un-air-conditioned, making it feel hotter than a day in hell, which perhaps this was and someone forgot to tell me.
Deirdre said, “The day after my father died, I was really sad for all that had happened, not just his death, but what became of his life, and my mother’s life, and my life. I wanted to relive some of it, reach back to the better times and try to figure out what went wrong. I took a peek through his stuff myself. There’s some interesting stuff. Maybe it explains all this — his misery, the way he died. You know?”
I didn’t know. Not yet, anyway. As she said this, she led me to the far rear corner of the garage, where an old footlocker — a chest, really — sat on the floor. The key was already in the hole. She turned it and opened the locker upward, revealing four old boxes in pretty good shape sitting side by side inside.
She opened the top of the second one and pulled out a notebook from inside. She slowly flipped through it to a section in the back that she had tabbed with a Post-it note, and she began reading to herself, getting lost in the words and her own thoughts. Finally, she looked up at me and said, “My father always said he had another prime suspect in the stranglings, but he would never tell anyone who it was. Here it is, in black and white, in his own words.”
With that, she handed me the notebook. As I received it, I could already feel my heart falling. I read through the notes, which were of the exact interview he had already described to me in his bedroom on the morning that he died, the one with Paul Vasco. The session was held in an anteroom in Bridgewater at the prison for the sexually dangerous. Bob Walters was alone with nothing more than his badge and his gun and his total indignation that the state attorney general and some of his cohorts in homicide had fingered the wrong guy. There was no reason for him to be there. Vasco could have offered him a confession, and the other higher-ups would have told him it was all a lie. He was there only because he couldn’t let it go.
The notes showed that he asked the exact question he told me he’d asked in the exact way he described it: “Hey, Paul, DeSalvo’s gone. The case is off the books. But we had the wrong guy, didn’t we?”
Beneath the question, he wrote, “PV remained silent. Didn’t say a word. But he smiled like the devil, making sure I understood exactly what he meant. And I did.” The word devil was underlined three times.
And beneath that he wrote, “Paul Vasco is the Boston Strangler.”
I looked up at Deirdre Hayes, who was looking intently at me as I read the notes. I said, “Do you mind if I take this with me?”
She hesitated for a long moment, anxiously rubbing her hands together at her waist, looking more innocent than she probably should have in that particular outfit.
Finally she said, “I’ve never dealt with reporters before. How do you handle payment?”
Terrific. I fly across a continent and am met by a woman who wants to turn a profit on her old man’s death. Though hell, she probably had it coming to her, given the misery that the guy had caused.
I said, “We don’t.” I said this softly, attempting a tone of understanding, perhaps even empathy. “I’m not allowed to pay for information. Newspapers like mine, reputable news organizations, won’t do it.”
She looked surprised. “So these notebooks aren’t worth anything?”
I said, “They’re worth a lot. This information might someday soon be invaluable to the hundreds and thousands of other people who have been affected by the Strangler case, people not all that much different than you. It may give them some sense of closure, some little bit of freedom from the past. But I’m not allowed to pay for it.”
She stood there in the garage, this beautiful woman dressed like a harlot, exhausted from pushing drinks to obnoxious, leering guys on the overnight shift at a casino bar on the Las Vegas Strip. She probably thought this notebook was about to rescue her from massive credit-card debt, or maybe was an opportunity to buy a nice used car. Instead, some schmuck from the East Coast was explaining to her that once again, she was screwed, just like she’d always been.
So I said, “I’d hate to think that you’d do this, but I feel like I should tell you anyway. A place like The National Enquirer might pay you good money for this.” I could picture the headline, “Good Cop Fingers Real Boston Strangler From the Grave.” The reason I mentioned it to her, aside from the fact that I felt legitimately bad, was that I already had the information from Walters himself.
She looked at the immaculate floor for a long, agonizing moment, and then up at me, and said, “No, I’d rather you had it. My father might have been a bastard, but he meant well most of the time. You’ll do the right thing with it.”
I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get a look at what else is in these boxes.”
She nodded again. Then her brow suddenly furrowed and she said, “I always thought there was another box. For some reason, I always remembered seeing five of them. You know how you have that picture in your mind that just stays there? In this case, five boxes, stacked three and two.”
She shrugged and said, “But I must be wrong. I looked all over, and this is all there is.”
And with that, she walked into the kitchen.
The first box contained a lot of physical paraphernalia, pieces of clothing and various trinkets from every one of the murder scenes that occurred within Boston proper, which was six of them. It was odd, holding a kerchief from one dead woman, a bracelet from another, an ashtray from someone else’s apartment — but no odder than handling the driver’s licenses of recently slain women.
The second box was filled with newspaper clippings on every one of the eleven murders, all of them yellowed, some of them crumbling, each one more fascinating than the last. I love reading old papers, partly for the simplistically done ads for products that probably no longer exist, partly for the more formal writing tone that reporters used to take. I had to convince myself not to get lost in the stories or I’d end up spending the night in Vegas, which may or may not have been a bad idea. Edgar Sullivan would have probably advised me to stay.
The third box was a collection of official-looking police reports, transcripts of interviews with witnesses and perhaps suspects, and minutes of various meetings convened by the state attorney general and a group of police and prosecutors dubbed the Boston Strangler Commission. I gave it a quick scan, but had neither the time nor the patience to give it a thorough review.
Should this stuff have been walked out the police department doors — read: stolen — and be hidden away for years in some anonymous garage in the middle of a sun-baked housing development? Absolutely not. But was it a common occurrence for police to grab documents and other various trinkets from cases that were dear to their hearts? It happened every day, and Bob Walters appeared no different than anyone else.
The last box contained many of Walters’s personal mementos and correspondence that he undoubtedly pulled from his desk when he walked out of the homicide bureau that final time, at the end a bitter man. There were plaques from various victims’ groups, awards from civic associations, framed letters of commendation from the commissioner. I was about to pack them all away, call it a day, and head for the airport, when a leather-bound scrapbook in a corner of the locker caught my eye, and I flipped it open.
In it were various notes and letters. The first was from Hal Harrison, then a homicide detective, urging Bob Walters to take some time off in the midst of the Boston Strangler case. Right after it was a hand-scrawled note from a detective by the name of Mac Foley — yes, I believed, the same Mac Foley — telling Walters he was absolutely right about DeSalvo and to keep pounding away on the issue. It didn’t elaborate.
I flipped through page after page of what seemed to be meaningless material until I arrived at a handwritten note that gave me pause for reasons I can’t fully explain. Maybe it was the penmanship, which seemed vaguely, oddly familiar, or maybe it was something else. I honestly don’t know.
Regardless, the letter, dated November 1976, began, “Dear Detective Walters, I agree with you completely that Albert DeSalvo did not kill my mother. Thank you for telling me what you know, and for being honest about what you don’t. My dying grandfather, though, needs to believe that my mother’s killer has been caught and killed. He’s been very sick with cancer, and as he tries to cope with his pain, it helps him to think that DeSalvo was the murderer. That’s why your package was so helpful to him. Thank you for sending it. Me and my family truly appreciate all that you have done. Sincerely yours.”
I had to read the signature twice, and then a third time, to make sure my eyes or my brain weren’t playing tricks on me. It was jarring to see it there, like seeing an apparition, only this was the opposite: a living person so closely, unexpectedly associated with the dead.
I read it yet again, following the curve of the many letters with my eyes, picturing how old he must have been when he wrote his name across the bottom. And then I said it out loud, just to hear it, to put it in the public realm.
“Vincent Mongillo.”
My colleague, my friend, a victim of the Boston Strangler, and he kept it secret all these years and, as important, all these crucial days. I reread the letter, which had to have been written when he was about fifteen years old.
I recalled being surprised at his breadth and width of knowledge on the Strangler case, and I recalled asking him why he knew what he knew. That’s when he gave me the never — pickedin — the — neighborhood — baseball — games thing, that whole explanation of spending all that time sitting at home reading about old Boston crimes. Why hadn’t he wanted me to know?
I looked over at the door to the house, which was ajar. I pulled the letter from the scrapbook and placed it in my coat pocket, separate from the pile of materials I was going to take back to Boston.
Quickly, I reloaded the boxes back into the locker and pushed it back into the corner. I headed into the house and told Deirdre I needed to get back to the airport. She had changed from her tank top and miniskirt into a loosely fitting T-shirt and a pair of short shorts — and still looked great, albeit exhausted.
She kissed me on the left cheek and hung on what felt like a moment longer than I had expected. I kissed her cheek in return and again told her how sorry I was about what had happened, and how appreciative I was about her help.
On my way toward the front hall, I felt in my pocket for the small roll of hundred-dollar bills I had brought on the trip. I placed it next to a stack of unopened mail atop an entry table by the door.
I could probably be fired for doing that, but no one would ever know, no one but me and Deirdre Hayes. It seemed like the right thing to do.
I got in the rental car and pulled down Rodeo Road for what I expected would be the final time in my threatened life and had no complaint about this fact. As I turned the corner, my cell phone vibrated in my back pocket. If I thought for a moment that Mongillo’s name would be the biggest surprise of the day, I was about to be proven woefully, frighteningly wrong.