In the days and weeks after Amy’s murder, Michael was trapped in a whirl of activity. There were the wake and the funeral to get through, and interminable condolence calls with Amy’s family, which he took to be the Daleys’ final earthly interactions with a clan that had never much liked them. The Ryans had hoped Amy would do better than Ricky, whose indefinite profession was always fishy. Ricky had told them he was a car salesman. They figured him for a charming loafer who might be on drugs. In the end, the Daleys mourned separately for Ricky’s “wife.” Well-meaning visitors loitered in Margaret Daley’s living room, many of them virtual strangers. Their presence imposed on the entire family the role of hosts. There were multiple trips to the grocery store, the liquor store, to the corner spa for ice and cigs, back and forth to the rear porch with overflowing garbage cans. The death ritual, Michael thought, was all about make-work. The busyness it created was its only purpose, a distraction, like a magician’s handkerchief.
Only his migraines pulled him away from the group-grieving. They came more frequently after the murder; stress was a trigger. Michael had been getting migraines since he was a teenager, but they had been rare then, once a year or so. In his twenties, the attacks came more frequently, but still only three or four a year. It was Joe Senior’s death that made them a constant threat; now Amy’s death set off a rolling series of attacks that never quite receded. The recurring pattern seemed to intensify the experience. Raw exposed nerves did not have time to heal and toughen between bouts. The onset of an attack, with its visual aura and incipient head-pain, meant he had to drop what he was doing and rush home, resting his forehead on the steering wheel at red lights or stumbling down crowded sidewalks. When he rejoined the mourners a day or two later, he would find the world subtly changed. The bustle would have subsided detectably. The ashtrays were less full; there were fewer empty glasses and beer bottles about; Amy’s death had become remoter. Drained by the headache, Michael would slump in a living-room chair as strangers sat down opposite him and made expansive remarks about the inevitability of death and the importance of moving on. Over and over it was pointed out how unlucky the Daleys were-two family members murdered in the space of a year. Who would be next? A joke circulated: The Roman soldier who pierced Jesus’s side must have been named Daley; now they were cursed forever. With the men, Michael chunked his beer can against theirs and drank. The women tended to flop a hand onto his knee or his wrist as they spoke, which distracted him from whatever bromides they may have been passing along. Why did they bother? Probably they mistook his exhaustion-after a migraine attack he tended to look sallow and hollow-eyed-for prostrate grief.
But Michael was not defeated so much as mortally distracted. He could not focus. The TV lured him. News shows, vapid comedies. He drank. He shuffled out for a pack of Larks only to forget half a block away what it was he had gone out for. The weeks after Amy’s murder took on the feel of a dream.
One thing did hold Michael’s attention: Brendan Conroy, who held court in Margaret Daley’s house and draped his arm around her and pushed in her chair at the table. The more Conroy did, it seemed, the more he was beloved. Wasn’t Margaret lucky to have him? Wasn’t Brendan gracious to insert himself into the family this way? Wasn’t Joe Senior smiling down on them now, seeing his old friend and his old wife together? Michael seethed. He could not take his eyes off this pink, insinuating, coarse intruder. The small scale of the house only exaggerated Conroy’s bulk. Had Conroy murdered Joe Senior, as Amy thought? The suspicion possessed him. A spurious gravity attaches to the words of dead people, who cannot be cross-examined. Amy had known Conroy’s secret, it seemed, and maybe Conroy had killed her too-then slid into Margaret Daley’s bed with the residue of blood still on him. All wild blasphemies Michael did not dare utter. He might simply be going crazy. Certainly he would sound crazy.
On Thursday afternoon, ten days after Amy Ryan’s murder, George Wamsley appeared at the Daleys’ home to pay his condolence call. Michael escorted him around the room making introductions, then they retired to the back porch for a private chat. It was the only place they could be alone, a narrow space crowded with garbage cans.
“So, Michael. What are your plans?”
“Plans. What, um, what plans do you mean, George, specifically? I don’t think I have any.”
“For work.”
“Ah. That.”
“Yes, that. You know there’ll always be a place for you in the office, as long as Alvan is the A.G. You could just go back to Eminent Domain, if you like. Or the Civil Division. You’re a natural litigator. It might be a good step, professionally. It’s really up to you. We’d like to accommodate you if we can.”
“But not the Strangler Bureau.”
“Not the Strangler Bureau. You’re conflicted out. I think you know that.”
Michael searched Wamsley’s placid equine face for a hint of something more, some hidden motive. Michael was the obvious source of the leak behind Amy Ryan’s last story, which cast doubt on DeSalvo’s confession-a leak that compromised the case against DeSalvo, in the public’s mind at least. After that, it was unlikely Michael would be welcomed back to the Strangler Bureau, with or without a conflict of interest. He was not sure he wanted to work the Strangler case anyway. He could not tolerate the vision of Amy strung up on her bed, so he flicked it away, and flicked it away again. One reason Ricky had had an easier time of it, he thought, was that Ricky had not actually seen her. The fact made him jealous. Michael could never un-see what he’d seen. Still, he resented that the decision had been made for him, that he’d been talked about behind closed doors.
“What about Brendan?”
“What about him?”
“He’s not conflicted out?”
“He doesn’t work for me. I don’t tell BPD what to do. Besides, Brendan’s connection isn’t as close as yours.”
“It will be.”
“Michael, a homicide investigation isn’t a blood feud. Whatever problem you have with Brendan…Anyway, you don’t belong there. The decision’s made. Case closed.”
“But the case isn’t closed, George. Amy Ryan’s murder can’t be a Strangler case. Your man DeSalvo was already locked up in Bridgewater. The phantom fiend is caught, remember? Unless you have the wrong man.”
“We’re treating it as a strangling.”
“Good idea. Keep it in-house. Maybe DeSalvo will confess to it yet. By the time he’s done, he’ll be claiming he killed Kennedy, and the tsar and Julius fucking Caesar.”
“Are you through, Michael?”
“Apparently.”
Wamsley went to the railing and looked out over the scrap of weedy grass that passed for a backyard. He dug a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and took a good long time lighting one.
“Is there a suspect, George?”
“Not an appropriate question.”
“Sorry. Forgot my manners.”
“Come on, Michael-”
“Must be something to do with seeing Amy Ryan strung up-”
“Alright! Alright, that’s enough. What’s got into you?”
“I’ve had a headache.”
“You’re giving me a headache.”
“George, you have no idea.”
“We’re looking at this guy Kurt Lindstrom.”
“The Shakespeare guy!”
Kurt Lindstrom had been among the earliest suspects the police had identified in the Strangler murders. Michael had urged him as one the Strangler Bureau should consider more closely, before Albert DeSalvo’s out-of-left-field confession had essentially terminated the investigation. A 1954 graduate of Harvard, Lindstrom was from a small town in upstate New York. He spoke, or claimed to speak, eight languages. He was an accomplished classical organist who had appeared with the Boston Symphony. He had also been arrested for creating an LSD lab and experimenting with the drug, which was barely known to the cops at the time. Most memorable to Michael, though, was the fact that Lindstrom, an out-of-work actor, spent his days in full Shakespearian costume reciting speeches on street corners, usually in Harvard Square. Lindstrom claimed to have founded a theater troupe which he intended to relocate to New York City when the time was right. The Cambridge PD had picked him up on various trespass and suspicious-person charges. On one occasion he was asked by a bookish Cambridge detective how he managed to make such a convincing Othello. “I use Man Tan,” Lindstrom said. Yes, but why, with the city in a panic over woman-killings, would he choose that role? “Because I understand him.” Lindstrom certainly seemed to understand Othello’s capacity for violence. His record was full of assault and indecent A amp;B charges, to go along with the raft of narcotics and vagrancy-type cases. If Arthur Nast had fulfilled one fantasy of the Mad Strangler, the Frankenstein monster of children’s nightmares, it seemed to Michael that Kurt Lindstrom embodied an even more frightening alternative: the calculating Strangler smarter than the cops pursuing him, the faceless oddball standing next to you at the market.
“Hate to say I told you so, George.”
“Then don’t.”
“And DeSalvo?”
“DeSalvo for all the others.”
“You think that’s gonna fly?”
“I think it’s the truth. Whether it flies or not isn’t my concern. It still makes more sense than a dozen stranglers running around in one city at one time.”
“Does it? I’m not so sure. The more I see…”
“I can see how you would feel that way, after what’s happened.”
“It’s not that, George. I’m more cynical than you give me credit for. What’s Lindstrom’s motive? Or is it just another mad-strangler thing? He picked Amy Ryan by coincidence?”
“The theory is he murdered her because she wrote that story saying DeSalvo is the wrong man. He wanted to prove her right by demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Strangler is still out there. Lindstrom wants DeSalvo cleared. He wants to be the Strangler. He wants to be remembered. If he can’t be Macbeth, he’ll be Jack the Ripper.”
“That’s the theory?”
“That’s the theory.”
“Well, I’ll give you credit, George. It makes as much sense as anything else I’ve heard. Which is faint praise.”
Wamsley tamped his cigarette on the railing and, when he was sure it was out, he dropped it into one of the trash cans. “You’ll come back to Eminent Domain, Michael? Help build the New Boston and all that?”
“Sure. Why not.”
“Okay, then. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Me, too. Say hello to my mother before you leave. She’ll be honored you came. The man who caught the Boston Strangler.”
“I’m surprised to hear you call me that.”
“Eh, what do I care, right? I’m off the case.”