Symphony Hall. Wednesday, three-thirty P. M., final closed rehearsal before the weekend’s performances.
Something was happening inside the music, something was stirring. The musicians seemed to sense it. During a rest they inhaled deeply, as if to fill their lungs with it. The orchestra had been augmented with freelancers to play the piece-Respighi’s Pines of Rome -and the stage was crowded with players and instruments, extra brass, an organist. Some of the horns were stationed in the balconies around the hall, where they stood at attention behind the gilded latticework railing. The conductor was a trim, bald man in a snug black cardigan, like a midshipman’s jacket. His upper body jerked with the movement of his arms. He barked curt German-accented instructions and expressive grunts: Hup! Tick! Ta!
At the back of the hall, Ricky lurked in the shadow of a doorway. Up to this point, he had not liked the piece very much. The earlier movements had reminded him of the corny orchestral music in Disney movies, bright and brassy in some places, self-consciously solemn in others. Probably classical music just wasn’t for him. But around the three-minute mark of the fourth and final movement, he felt it too.
The music unclogged. Out of a stagnant, reedy pianissimo passage, the horns stepped forward and began to blast away. The unstable B-flat opened out onto a major key-“Hah!” the conductor exclaimed-and the brass pulled the entire orchestra into a cycling crescendo that lasted two thrilling minutes, with the horns in the balconies blaring back over the empty hall and the conductor calling for “More!”
At the rear of the stage, the organist tipped his head back, his mouth yawned open, and he played in a sort of ecstasy or sustained orgasm. This was Kurt Lindstrom.
After the rehearsal Lindstrom emerged from the stage door with a couple of older musicians. The threesome stood chatting a moment. One of the men said something at which Lindstrom laughed too loudly, then he left them. He walked away on St. Stephen Street, bouncing on the balls of his feet, chest thrust forward.
Across the street and half a block behind, Ricky walked too. He had tracked any number of suckers with an eye toward taking them off, and he was meticulous about this aspect of his job. He was confident-overconfident-in his ability to size people up. He figured that any semi-intelligent thief could acquire the few basic facts needed to pull off a burglary: the victim’s daily routine, the sort of locks on the door, the jewelry or other things to be taken. What set Ricky apart, he believed, was that his empathy was more acute than that. He thought he understood something about the people he ripped off. When circumstances allowed, he lingered in their rooms, inspected their bookshelves, LP’s, medicine cabinets, and refrigerators, to confirm his impressions. He had a thief’s haughty scorn for his victims, who must be less clever or careful or nimble than he was, otherwise they would not be such easy prey. At the same time, he disapproved of the low-rent burglars-the step-over men and window smashers, opportunists and drug addicts, most of them-who ignored the human aspect of the job. They did not bother to research their victims, let alone study the finer points, lock-picking and the rest of it. They did not prepare, and so they were forced into unnecessary risks. Fools. Between the rich fools Ricky victimized and the poor fools who occupied the bottom rungs of his own profession, it was hard to say whom Ricky disdained more.
The rich ones, probably. As a student of the behavior of rich people-who, after all, had what Ricky wanted-he was stupefied by the mediocrity of the city’s upper classes. To anyone who preached the old fairy tale of America as a meritocracy, Ricky might have invited them to view the wealthy as a burglar would. Was there a more foolish, careless class than these rich old Yankees? They left their inherited jewelry lying around in dresser drawers and strolled out of the house with their doors unlocked, or badly locked-then they stiffed the waitress at lunch on a nickel or dime tip. If this was the ruling class, then it was about time the Kennedys of the world took over. A government run by thieves would, as the saying went, make the trains run on time.
Now here went Kurt Lindstrom loping down St. Stephen Street like some cartoon aristocrat. Something in the young man’s springy walk-like some flightless, fast-running bird-and the stubborn lick of blond hair on his forehead, and the FDR tilt to his chin, signified to Ricky a Yankee jackass of a certain type: foppish, effeminate. It was impossible to accept that this man might have murdered Amy. A musician and out-of-work actor whose only dramatic performances were the Shakespearian speeches he delivered on the sidewalks of Harvard Square, his old college haunt. Amy could have broken this guy in half. But brother Michael believed it, and the cops believed it, so Ricky had set out to prove it.
Lindstrom turned right on Symphony Road and entered number 50, two blocks down. The building was a four-story walk-up. Most of the buildings on the street were of the same type: simple redbrick bowfronts, unadorned except for rough-hewn granite pediments above the doors and windows. This was mostly a student area, and the street had a scruffy look. The bricks needed pointing, the little front yards needed weeding. But there was a genteel Victorian appearance, too, in the uniformity of the buildings, the low scale, the repeating curves of the street wall formed by those bow windows.
Ricky stood across the street and watched the light come on in Lindstrom’s apartment window. After a few minutes he climbed the stoop and noted the apartment number on the entry buzzer.
But he did not immediately leave. He went behind the building, inspected the rear entrance, the garbage cans, noted the cars parked there.
An alley, which was wide enough for a truck to pass through, ran down the center of the block, behind the rows of apartment buildings. About a block down this alley, on the opposite side, was the back of 77 Gainsborough Street, a redbrick bowfront very much like the one Lindstrom lived in. Helena Jalakian-the very first Strangler victim-had lived in a small apartment at 77 Gainsborough Street. She had been murdered there on June 14, 1962, the start of that terrifying summer.
Helena was fifty-six, a seamstress, first-generation Armenian immigrant, and classical music buff. She had taken the apartment in part because it was such an easy walk to Symphony Hall. She had attended the BSO open rehearsals and stood in line for rush tickets. She liked Brahms, disliked Mahler, disliked the new little German conductor who was not warm enough for her taste. She luxuriated in Symphony Hall; the opulence of it would once have seemed unimaginable to her. Had Helena met the young musician who lived nearby, who walked home along the same streets? Had she seen him on stage? Had they chatted by the stage door one day? Would she have opened the door for him willingly, eagerly? Would she have turned away from him to go change out of her housecoat, maybe then to offer him tea and cookies? Helena Jalakian had been clubbed on the back of the head, raped vaginally, apparently with an object (no semen was found; the object was never identified or recovered), beaten, and strangled with the cord of her housecoat, which was tied off in a bow-the first occurrence of that signature knot.
Returning to his own apartment, Ricky found the door smashed, the doorknob dislodged. He eased the door half open with one fingertip, but it caught on something and he had to shove harder.
Inside, the destruction was so complete that the apartment barely resembled the one Ricky had left a few hours before. Drawers were dumped on the floor. The sofa had been stripped down to the frame. The cushions had been sliced open, the cotton batting pulled out and tossed on the floor. The bookcase that had held the hi-fi and the records lay splintered on the floor. Most of the discs were shattered. Ricky would miss them most of all. He had built his LP collection over the course of several years, and sorted it with loving care, alphabetically within jazz genres. What a waste. Leave it to Gargano and his goons-for no burglar would risk making the sort of racket these guys must have made, and no cop would work this hard. They had smashed up a magnificent collection, and for no good reason. Ricky had already told him he did not have the missing stones.