The sprawling lobby of Boston Police headquarters was oddly quiet when I walked through the double doors at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning for my meeting with Commissioner Hal Harrison — maybe due to the fact that Vinny Mongillo and his big mouth had been bailed out by the Record’s attorney about three hours before.
The silver-haired desk sergeant looked at me in silence. I said, “Jack Flynn of the Record here to see the commissioner.” He made a little clucking sound that seemed to emanate from the roof of his mouth, snapped up the phone, and in a moment a young cadet with neither a gun nor an attitude arrived to escort me upstairs.
The commissioner’s suite was empty, and I wondered if even the commissioner himself was in. The cadet asked me to sit in a little waiting lounge that looked to be designed by someone’s grandmother — a grandmother, though, who had an affinity for antique, wall-mounted guns. I didn’t sit, mostly because I was pretty tired of doing as told; standing was my little rebellion. Sometimes you draw your own line in life, even when no one else notices, and this happened to be mine.
The cadet disappeared, returned in a moment, and said, “The commissioner is ready to see you.” No power games here, which was good.
For whatever it’s worth, and maybe that’s nothing, I’ll note that I was feeling about as unsettled as I ever had before. Edgar was still dead, and that wasn’t going to change. Elizabeth Riggs was still threatened, and that wasn’t going to change, either, at least not until this serial murderer was captured. The good news there was that she still had the estimable Hank Sweeney at her side. The bad news was that in the meantime, other women might still die.
All the while, something was clattering around in the hollow spaces of my mind, little shards of information that I needed to piece into actual enlightenment — things people said, stuff they did that didn’t add up, or maybe they did and that was the problem, that I couldn’t do the math. Sometimes it felt like the shards were coming together, creating a whole, and then they’d suddenly blow apart, leaving me grasping at air, figuratively, if not literally as well.
“Nice of you to come in on your day off, Jack.”
That was Commissioner Hal Harrison, standing behind that big oak desk of his, wearing a beige V-neck sweater and a pair of carefully pressed blue pants, the crease so tight you could cut a steak with it, and not some soft tenderloin but a thick sirloin or a well-marbled rib eye.
He leaned over his desk and extended his hand, and as we shook, I almost laughed at the notion of a day off, like I was going to kick back at home with a bag of Fritos and a six-pack of Sam Adams and watch March Madness on TV, not a worry in this delightful little world that we all share. Of course, that made me think again of the Hawaiian resort that was charging me for not being there, which made me think of the prior night with Maggie Kane, which made me happy not to be at that resort. Suddenly, work seemed good. See, life’s really simple, even when it doesn’t necessarily feel that way.
“Nice of you to have me,” I said, the two of us maintaining the veneer of politeness.
The commissioner leaned to the side of his high-backed leather chair. I took a seat across the desk from him. He said, “Jack, you’re a young pup. You weren’t here back in the early sixties when this Strangler stuff was exploding around this town. You don’t have a feel for what it did to Boston, to the people, to the cops like me and the prosecutors I worked with trying to get a handle on it.”
He paused and looked at me, hard. I held firm to his gaze.
“I was here,” he said. “I was in the middle of it. I was one of the lead detectives on the biggest, most comprehensive, most demanding investigations this department has ever undertaken.”
God how politicians love the word I, and that’s what Hal Harrison had become — a politician. You could see it all over his face. You could hear it wrapped around his every word. He wasn’t so much concerned about the victims who had already been killed or those who were about to be. No, he was concerned about his own future, meaning whether this murder spree was going to get in the way of his becoming mayor.
Clank, clank, clank. There were those shards of information, bumping against intuition, almost coming together, painfully close but not quite. And then it all fell apart again, like when you can’t remember someone’s name even when it’s right there on the tip of your tongue.
“Let me tell you, Jack, it wasn’t a good time for this city. Jack Kennedy was assassinated right in the middle of it all. The Vietnam War was brewing. The country was going through huge changes. And we had some bastard, some absolute bastard, strangling women to death right in our midst.”
I didn’t know where he was going with any of this, so I simply sat in silence and went along for the unusual ride. I could hear church bells peal in the distance. I momentarily imagined older women in their Sunday best marching tentatively into Mass and praying for the safety of their daughters amid this murder spree. My eyes drifted toward the big windows, which revealed a gray, dank morning outside, moist, but still without any rain.
Harrison continued. “We worked like dogs. I worked. A guy by the name of Lieutenant Bob Walters, a good man, my immediate superior, worked. Stu Callaghan worked up in the attorney general’s office. We worked ourselves to the bone, morning, noon, and night. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many leads we pursued, how many tips we chased, how many doors we broke down, how many suspects we interrogated, always grabbing at nothing more than straws and air.”
He paused, collecting himself, surprised, I sensed, at his own eloquence. Maybe he truly was speaking from the heart. Maybe his words flowed out unrehearsed. I usually know these things, but for the moment I couldn’t tell.
“And then we caught ourselves a good old-fashioned break. Jack, we got a confession. Albert DeSalvo knew those murder scenes cold…”
He began explaining just how well DeSalvo knew them, sharing details with me about the intricacies of the various scenes. Meantime, my brain cut out — not over something he said, but something he didn’t. He did not include Detective Mac Foley on his honor roll of those who worked the case hard way back when, and given my suspicions now, this became more than interesting.
I finally cut back in and said, “Mac Foley.” Hey, why not? When was the commissioner going to make himself available to me again? He stopped talking mid-sentence and stared at me, undoubtedly surprised by the interruption as well as the name. I added, “He was your colleague on the investigation. He’s on this investigation now. He’s one of the most successful detectives in BPD homicide. How come you didn’t mention his name?”
Harrison regarded me long and hard. He ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and leaned back in his chair, his fist under his chin. He suddenly leaned forward, thrusting his elbows on his desk, and asked, “Can we talk off the record?”
This wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do, but I nodded, too curious about what he might want to say to ruin the deal.
“Mac’s a good man. He is,” Harrison said, talking lower, his off-the-record tone, I figured. “But I worry about the quality of his work as a detective.” His eyes locked on mine, as if willing me toward complicity. I showed no emotion.
“He was way off the reservation back then, to the point where I was worried about him — his psychological state, if you know what I mean. These days, he’s heading to retirement, kind of phoning it in. Soon as he’s gone, I think this investigation will move a lot swifter.”
I asked, “Why don’t you simply remove him?”
He smiled at me, leaning back again. “Politics, my friend. Politics. City hall. Departmental. News media. You name it. You have to balance a lot of concerns in this chair.”
This was interesting to me, every word, especially those about Mac Foley’s psychological state. Could my wildest suspicions be right? Could he have snapped? On his way out the door, could he be killing women, reliving the toughest investigation of his career? Had he completely lost it?
Or here’s another thought: Was he the Strangler way back then, kind of a police version of the firebug arsonists once so common across the country — firefighters who actually lit the infernos that they were called to put out? But if he was the Strangler back then, why would he have been ticked off over DeSalvo’s confession? Could he have felt that someone else was taking credit for his work?
I was pondering these questions when my back pocket vibrated. I casually pulled my phone out and saw it was Martin calling in, and I put it back. Ten seconds later, he called again, and again ten seconds after that. The guy might have had the journalistic brains of Bob Woodward, but at the moment I wanted to wring his neck.
“What’s your relationship like with Foley?” I asked.
“Nonexistent. Lord knows I’ve tried. We started together. We’re leaving together, but he’s refused to be even civil to me in the forty years since Albert DeSalvo confessed — like I was somehow responsible for his cockamamie theories not panning out on the Strangler case.”
My phone vibrated yet again. I cussed Martin under my breath, pulled it out, glanced at it, and saw it was a 702 area code — a call from Las Vegas.
As I put the phone back, I felt Vinny Mongillo’s thank-you note to Bob Walters folded up in my back pocket. So I pulled it out and said, “While we’re off the record, you’ve got to see this. These charges you’ve filed against Vinny Mongillo are bullshit, and this proves it.”
I placed it on his desk and he read it. Afterward, he looked up and said, “This will certainly factor into a complex investigation, and when we empanel a grand jury, I’ll urge the district attorney to allow them to see this.”
“That’s garbage,” I said, my voice thundering out louder than I expected. I knew his game. He was essentially trying to disqualify the Record from driving the story forward by making us a questionable part of it. I could see The New York Times headline now: “Record Reporter Ensnared in Serial Murder Case.” It might be the only time Vinny Mongillo would be called “Mr.” by his peers.
Harrison seemed taken aback, probably not so much by my assertion but by the fact someone would speak to him like that. He said, confidingly again, “So let’s deal. You need me, and whether I like to believe it or not, I may need you at the moment. What else do you have?”
And there we were, at the crux of this meeting, with Commissioner Hal Harrison following the age-old adage that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and at that moment, I might have been the biggest enemy to his mayoral ambitions — at least in the way he perceived the world.
I ran a few scenarios through the reporting calculator that was my mind. Do I share? Do I withhold? I decided quickly, perhaps too quickly, that I was better off placing my suspicions of Mac Foley on the proverbial table, if only to see the chain of events that they might cause.
So I said, “I have some concerns about Mac Foley.”
He arched an eyebrow at me and leaned back again.
I said, “You know from your underlings that I’ve received the driver’s license of New York Times reporter Elizabeth Riggs, for all practical purposes targeting her as the next victim. Take a look at who she was with earlier that day.”
He nodded, still saying nothing, obviously intrigued by what I was telling him.
I continued, “And you might try to ascertain how Mac Foley knew the apartment number of Lauren Hutchens over in the Fenway.”
“What do you mean?” Harrison asked, his features scrunched up in thought and curiosity.
I replied, “I never gave it to him. The cops he sent to the scene said Foley gave the apartment number to them.”
Harrison nodded. He was about to ask something else when there was a knock on his door on the other side of the room. Harrison angrily called out, “What!”
The same cadet who led me up walked in and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but Mayor Laird is on the line and said she needs to speak to you immediately.”
Harrison snapped up the phone and barked, “Commissioner here.”
Silence.
He said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Why are they doing this now?”
My own phone vibrated yet again. It was Martin trying to reach me yet again. This was a lot, even for him.
Harrison stopped to listen to the mayor, his brow furrowed in frustration.
“Well,” he said, “you know what this is? It’s fucking irresponsible. And it’s fucking war. They want to fuck with me, they’re making a big fucking mistake.”
I stepped to the far side of the office, by the windows that held the gray hue of the dull day, and gave Martin a quick call. He picked up on the first ring and without so much as a greeting said, “Justine’s finally agreed with me. She’s running the Phantom’s warning tomorrow — verbatim. This Elizabeth Riggs thing pushed her over the edge. You’re going to write a story, and we’ll put the full text of the note as a sidebar on the front page.”
“Finally, some sense,” I replied, then added, “I’ll call you shortly.”
I hung up just in time to witness Hal Harrison slamming down the phone — on the mayor.
He stared straight down at his desk for a long moment, his hands on either side of his broad head. I took a seat again in front of him. He slowly looked up at me, his eyes darker than they were before, the wrinkles of his face deeper, and he said, “You’re fucking with the wrong guy, Jack.”
He said “Jack” like it was also a profanity, the word propelled from his lips like an arrow.
I said, “Excuse me?”
He stared at me, his eyes as black and distant and angry as any I’ve ever seen. A police commissioner is used to getting his or her own way, especially when the mayor is a weak one with plans to step down.
He said, “You’re fucking with this investigation. You’re fucking with this city. You’re fucking with this commissioner.”
He paused and looked at me. It seemed like he was almost looking through me. He said, his tone as flat as the line on a dead man’s cardiogram, “And if you put the contents of that bullshit note in the paper, you’re going to pay.”
I said, “We’re going to do what we have to do, with our readers, not you, in mind.”
“Bullshit!” he screamed. “Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. He admitted it. He confessed to every one of the crimes in minute detail. And now some joker comes along forty years later in the middle of my mayoral campaign, claiming to be the real Strangler, and you and your whole paper fall for it!”
His voice was bouncing off the walls and windows of his cavernous office and rising toward the high ceilings. Without warning, he picked up a binder that said “Strangler Investigation” from the top of his desk and flung it sidearm across the room. It slammed against the far wall, knocking a bronze plaque to the floor — undoubtedly a commendation of some sort. Somewhere in that act there was symbolism, but it would take a much smarter man than me to be able to say what it was.
“You’re messing with my future, Jack.” He was standing up now, hunched over his desk, his voice lower but no less intense. “You’re messing with every dream I’ve ever had. You’re messing with what’s rightfully mine. You’re digging up the past, and trying to bury me in the fucking hole. And you’re wrong. You’re just fucking wrong.”
I stood up as well, partly in anticipation that he might come over the desk at me, partly because I realized that I wasn’t going to get any more than I needed out of him, so this interview was just about done.
“Sorry you feel this way, Commissioner, but I’m going to keep doing my job as you go ahead and do yours.”
I began to turn around and head toward the door. When I took a couple of strides, he said in a voice that was at once soft and hard as steel, “You better watch yourself.”
I turned around and replied, “What did you just say to me?”
“You heard me. You better watch yourself. You think some funny things have already happened? Your friend gets blown away in a CVS? Your life gets threatened?”
He caught himself here, took a long swallow followed by a deep breath, and said, “Like I said, watch yourself. You run that note, be on your guard.”
I stood near the door, staring at him, incredulous over being threatened by the commissioner of the Boston Police Department, and reasonably certain that his threat included an admission that he was behind the prior attempts on my life. Edgar Sullivan’s kind face popped momentarily into my mind.
As I stared, trembling not out of fear but fury, he seemed to understand what he had just said, what he had just done, the import and gravity of it all. He said in a much different tone of voice, conciliatory, yet edging toward desperation, “What can I do to stop you, Jack? What can I do?”
“Do what you’re paid to do. Be a cop. Solve the damned case.” And with that, I turned around and strode out the door.
Outside, I flagged a cab, got into the first one that pulled up, and slid across the backseat to the far door, which I got out of. I flagged another passing cab and got in that one. It’s a little trick I once saw in a James Bond movie, or maybe it was one of the Naked Guns, just in case the first driver was a plant.
My first call was to Hank Sweeney.
“Everything all right with you guys?” I asked.
“Jack, this is some woman,” he replied. “The hair, the eyes, the walk —”
“Hank, all right, get a grip. I’m not looking for a recitation of that which I no longer have. I’ll call you in a while. Keep her safe — and you as well.”
Next call was to my cell phone voice mail. I deleted the progressively urgent messages from Peter Martin — “Jack, for fricking God’s sake, call me” — until I arrived at a woman’s voice sounding at first strained, and then shaken.
“Jack, it’s Deirdre. Deirdre Hayes. Bob Walters’s daughter in Las Vegas. Listen, I was right, I found that other box I told you about.”
I was nodding as if she was actually talking to me.
She continued, “You need to see this stuff, Jack. You really do.”
Now I was shaking my head. It was ten-forty a.m. Good God, by the time I finished with this story, I’d have enough frequent-flier miles to get me to Bali — which might be exactly where I’d need to go to escape Hal Harrison’s wrath.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said. “You’re not going to believe it.”
Maybe I would. After that little session with Hal Harrison, after learning what I had about Mac Foley, there wasn’t a whole lot left in life that was unbelievable anymore.