The wind wasn’t so much blowing as howling off the ocean as I stepped out of my car and placed my hand in front of my eyes, trying to block the cold grains of sand that felt like little needles smacking against my face. I pulled a torn sheet of paper from my pocket to double-check the address, stared at the ramshackle single-story cottage with the flaking white paint and the cracked front step, and realized I was in the right place.
It was a forlorn little structure, sitting in a yard of sand directly on the ocean’s edge, part of a cramped row of similarly forlorn little structures. The difference being, all the other cottages were still boarded up for the winter; this one was not only open, it had smoke drifting from the chimney and blowing against the slate-gray sky — a pretty solid clue that somebody was home.
That somebody, I hoped, was H. Gordon Thomas, for a long while the most famous attorney in the United States, a household name, quite literally the epitome of the garrulous Perry Mason — style trial lawyer, portrayed in movies, studied in law schools, mimicked by every ambitious Young Turk who ever stepped in front of a jury trying to win a case.
And here he was living in a falling-down bungalow with mismatched shutters barely adhered to the rotting frame. I had heard that his life had taken an unfortunate turn, but I had no idea — and I don’t think anyone had any idea — that the turn had been this bad.
The most recent newspaper story I had found on him said that the famed lawyer who spent decades jetting around the nation winning acquittals for some of the most notorious suspects in American history had hit drastic times. First, he began drinking. Soon after, he was sued by a suspected European drug lord whom he had represented on a trafficking case, and had lost many millions in the suit. Then he was disbarred in two states, forcing him into a secluded retirement on what was described as family property on Boston’s South Shore.
I walked tentatively across the sand toward the bare front door of that family property, leaned over the one cracked step, and rapped my fist against the thin wood. The wind continued pounding, penetrating my thin coat. Tempests of sand swirled against my body and stuck in my hair. I love all those faux romantics who say they love walking the beach on a winter’s day. It’s like walking along the edge of hell. How can a place so warm and welcoming in the summer be so cold and lonely at just about every other time of the year?
I knocked again, and in turn heard someone moving around inside — the sound of a door shutting, unsteady footsteps, something dropping on the floor. And then the front door slowly opened, revealing a figure I had seen dozens if not hundreds of times in newspaper photographs and on television news clips.
In some respects, H. Gordon Thomas looked very much how I would have imagined — big and barrel-chested, with crystal-clear blue eyes peering through his trademark enormous, owlish eyeglasses. He must have stood six feet four, must have weighed 240 pounds, all of which belied his age, which must have been at least seventy, and probably a few years beyond that.
In other respects, he looked like his bedraggled brother, if he had one, which I’m not sure he did, but this is no time to get lost in needless detail. His long hair was scraggly, rather than slicked back in that polished way it used to be. He appeared unsteady on his feet. The buttons on his cardigan sweater were adhered to the wrong holes, and the shirt beneath it was untucked. His face, that famous face that juries used to trust so much, carried what must have been three days’ worth of growth.
“Do I know you?” he asked. Not “Can I help you?” Not “Who are you?” But “Do I know you?” delivered slowly, in that famously deep voice of his that still made it seem he was performing before a judge and jury.
“I don’t think so, sir,” I responded. “My name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for the Boston Record. I was hoping to get a word with you, if you had the time.”
He continued to look at me, his gaze as penetrating as the sand and the wind that still cut at my body and face. He said, more quietly this time, “The one in communication with the Boston Strangler.” It was an interesting choice of words — the Boston Strangler rather than the Phantom Fiend — given that he was Albert DeSalvo’s lawyer many years ago and had engineered his client’s confession to the stranglings.
“Yes, sir,” I replied softly.
“Come in,” he said as he quickly looked around the environs of his cottage, perhaps measuring its suitability for visitors. By the time he might have decided it wasn’t, I was already in, so he cleared a stack of legal books from an extremely old and worn couch, pounded the cushion once, and said, “Why don’t you sit here, young man.” So I did.
The cottage was as threadbare inside as it was rickety outside, with just the couch I was on and a mismatched chair on which Thomas sat. Both of them were kitty-corner to a small brick fireplace, which at the moment held the last remnants of a sputtering fire. The carpet was gray, thin, stained, and old. The walls were made of cheap paneling. The ceiling had exposed beams, though not in the stylish way of an expensive downtown loft. The kitchen was nothing more than a sink, an ancient stove, and a small refrigerator pushed against a back wall. Above them, a window looking out at the churning ocean was caked in bird feces that was, in turn, covered with sand. All in all, this wasn’t exactly a visit to the Naples Ritz-Carlton.
Thomas got up and tossed another log on the fire, saying, “I should have gotten this damned place winterized, but every summer I keep telling myself, ‘This is my last year here,’ so I never have.”
He turned the volume down on the small television set that sat atop a folding table. The TV was turned to CNN. He settled heavily back in his chair in the way that old men do who carry too much weight on their tired frames.
I stayed silent. I noticed for the first time an expensive-looking bottle of single-malt Scotch sitting on an upside-down cardboard box next to his chair, and beside the bottle was a half-full crystal tumbler that was completely incongruous with the rest of the room. It was as if he carried the glass and the Scotch from his prior life, and for all I knew, perhaps he had.
He focused on me anew and said, “So you’ve found yourself in quite a maelstrom, young man. You’re undoubtedly a very busy guy. To what does a has-been old lawyer like me owe this particular visit?”
I smiled at the way he spoke, but to myself, not to him. He was rubbing his hands together toward the fire. I kept my coat on because of the dank chill that permeated the thin walls. I said, “You better than anyone knows if the Boston Strangler is still alive today. I came to ask you if he is.”
Thomas stared into the fire through those huge glasses without betraying even a hint or whisper of emotion. He stayed quiet for so long that I said, “You made reference to the Boston Strangler at your front door, as if you wouldn’t be surprised if he was still alive. Is that an accurate read?”
His eyes still didn’t move from the fireplace, though I thought I saw his eyebrows raise. Finally, he looked over at me and asked, “Who do you think the Boston Strangler was, young man?”
“Back then?”
He nodded.
I said, “Not Albert DeSalvo.”
He laughed for the first time, looked at me more warmly, and replied, “No one with a brain in their head thought Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. Unfortunately, that includes the nice men and women of the jury who convicted him of those rapes rather than believe my argument that he was a ferocious, sociopathic serial killer who strangled so many women that they had to deem him innocent by reason of insanity.”
He paused, stared straight ahead, and added, “Dumbest strategy I ever employed, and the biggest case I ever lost. I’ve regretted it every day since.”
For the first time, he picked up his crystal tumbler of Scotch and took a long, savoring sip, almost as if it was coffee on a cold winter’s morning and he was contemplating a full day ahead. He put the glass down and continued to stare at something that I couldn’t see, would probably never see, that appeared somewhere above the flames.
I kept silent, again employing that old adage that you never interrupt someone in the process of giving you news.
Finally he added, softly now, “And look at what I’ve caused.”
“How do you mean, sir?” I asked this softly, leaning toward him with my elbows on my knees, speaking in confidence, just two guys sharing some thoughts on a Sunday morn.
He shook his head, not accepting the bait. I said, “The police believed DeSalvo’s story.”
He laughed again, not necessarily a deep laugh but a full one, and he regarded me again with a glint in his eye, as if I was someone he could get to like. I had a gut feeling that he may not have had a visitor here in a long time, and might not have another again for a long time.
“They believed exactly what they wanted to believe, what was easiest for them to believe,” Thomas said. “They had a suspected rapist who had never been within their wide orbit of suspects suddenly confessing to every one of the strangulations, sharing intimate details of the murder scenes.”
He laughed again and added, “Stu Callaghan, God bless him, didn’t ask a whole lot of questions — and he didn’t allow anyone else to ask any, either. He merely thanked his lucky stars, got DeSalvo behind bars on the rape charges, and waltzed all the way into the United States Senate.”
He paused. I recalled Lieutenant Detective Bob Walters’s assertions that he was never allowed to interview DeSalvo, and that none of his men were, either.
He wasn’t speaking any further, so I prodded him, asking, “If not DeSalvo, then who?”
“Young man, it could have been anyone — maybe someone we knew, maybe someone we didn’t —”
“Paul Vasco?” I asked, interrupting him.
He smiled at me yet again. “You ask a lot of tough questions. You undoubtedly know that Paul Vasco was my client as well.” He let forth a shallow little chuckle. “I was a busy guy back then, wasn’t I?
“Vasco was a fascinating guy, brilliant, creative, brutal, evil — a demonstrated killer with no capacity for remorse. Could he have been the Boston Strangler? I didn’t allow myself to think about that at the time, because that would have interfered with my defense of DeSalvo at his rape trial. I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t know.”
I asked, “But what about after DeSalvo’s rape conviction?”
“Vasco was still my client on another case. I never asked him about the stranglings. Like I said, I didn’t want to know.”
I asked, “But have you thought about it since?”
He looked me over for a long moment.
“A lot,” he finally said, softer than he had spoken before. “I’ve thought about that a lot.”
His gaze shifted from me to the fireplace to the floor. A wry smile sneaked across his features as he stared down, and he mumbled, “I’ve thought about it too much. Thought about it as I’ve nearly drowned myself to death in vodka, whiskey, and gin. I played fast and loose back then, not only with my own client, who ended up dead, but with a lot of other people whose lives would never be the same because of information they might never know.”
He looked up at me, almost surprised that I was still there, listening. He said, “And the God’s honest truth about all this is that I still don’t know who the hell the Boston Strangler was — or maybe is.”
The burning logs crackled a few times, making the sound that a cap gun might. The wind caused a loose shutter to bang against the thin outer wall.
I asked, “Do you remember Detective Mac Foley?”
“Well.”
“Your impressions?”
Thomas squinted at some distant point in thought and recollection. “An odd guy. A serious guy. Adamant that DeSalvo wasn’t the Strangler, as if he always knew something that no one else did. I could never get a handle on him.”
I decided to leave that alone for a while and return to his heavily finessed and carefully caressed answers on Paul Vasco. I said, “Mr. Thomas, if you were me, if you were in a desperate situation, which I am, if people’s lives were on the line, who would you focus on for the moment? I’ll ask you this real simply: Would you focus on Paul Vasco?”
Thomas looked from me to the floor, and then down at his glass, which he lifted to his lips in another long sip, the liquid draining out as he tilted his head back and shut his eyes. He fingered the bottle for a moment, then removed his hand without ever pouring a fresh drink.
Finally, he peered over at me again and said, “You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.”
Those little pieces in my mind started closing in on one another, started forming a picture that I couldn’t quite see. And then the harder I thought about them, the less clear they became, until they disintegrated against a backdrop of frustration.
I looked at him hard, looked at him until he finally averted his gaze. I said, “I don’t understand what the hell you’re saying, and I don’t have the time or the energy to be semantic here. Please, Mr. Thomas, tell me what you’re talking about.”
He shook his head as he stared straight down at the floor and rubbed the back of his neck with both of his hands.
“That’s all I can tell you, young man. Get it in writing. You’ll know what I mean.”
He never looked up as I walked out his door.