The Strangler

40

Ricky was in the wrong room.

With the lights still off, he worked his hands into a pair of leather driving gloves. These were tan calfskin, very thin. He liked them because the thin leather permitted him to feel, they were not too hot to wear nor too bulky to fit in a coat pocket, and they were stylish. He took pride in the hidden aspects of his craft, just as a master cabinetmaker takes pride in perfect dovetails at the backs of drawers. This was what it meant to have an avocation, a calling. That his life’s work would take place entirely in the shadows, unwitnessed, was precisely the reason to do it perfectly. He was a member of a secret guild, and he felt a little thrill of professionalism when he worked his hands into those gloves, flexing and unflexing his fingers, packing the leather down into the crotches between his fingers. He was at work and happy.

Ricky turned on one light, then lowered all the shades. He made a mental note of where each shade had been.

This would be a leisurely job. He had clocked it only a couple of days-criminal negligence by Ricky’s standards-but Kurt Lindstrom’s one-week engagement with the BSO was a bit of good luck he did not want to miss. Tonight Lindstrom would be in Symphony Hall performing the Pines of Rome, as he had done the two previous nights. The piece was scheduled after the intermission; there was no way Lindstrom would be back before ten.

Ricky searched the front room methodically. He did not touch anything unless it was necessary to see behind or under it, and he meticulously replaced everything.

There was an upright piano in a corner with stacks of sheet music. On the fold-down music shelf of the piano was a handwritten arrangement Lindstrom apparently was working on. Ricky did not read music but he studied the pages anyway. It was written in pencil with a sure hand and no eraser marks or cross-outs. Each line spanned eight full staffs. It looked impossibly complex, coded, mad. Above the piano was a reproduction engraving of a scowling Beethoven.

One wall was lined with bookcases, some improvised from boards and cinder blocks. The books overflowed them and were stacked on the floor in haphazard piles. But there was nothing haphazard about the shelving. In one area were crime novels, everything from Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and volumes of Dostoyevsky to pulps-but mostly pulps. This was a well-thumbed library. More than half were paperbacks, their spines cracked and concave. Lindstrom was a reader and, apparently, a rereader. Ricky rather admired Lindstrom’s library, which was heavy in California noir, Hammett and Chandler of course, but also included a lot of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes, all filed by the author’s name. There were a few mildly risque titles too, Gang Girl and Hitch-Hike Hussy and that sort of thing. Ricky tipped these out of the line and smirked at the lurid covers: scarlet women in various stages of undress, leering fedora’d men with oversized handguns.

Lindstrom maintained a separate three-foot shelf for his pornographic magazines. They were arranged vertically with spines flush, just as good suburban families arranged their National Geographic s in neat yellow ranks in the den. Ricky realized the danger of rifling through this shelf-no doubt it was a portion of the library Lindstrom visited again and again-so he removed the magazines one at a time and replaced them with precision. Ricky was not immune to the fascination of pornography and he was no prude, but Lindstrom’s magazines shocked him. Not the garden-variety pornography, of which there was quite a lot, with an emphasis on bondage and a separate subsection with names like Hellcat Grannies and Gray Foxes. And not the ordinary softcore girlie mags, Black Velvet and Busty and Wicked, the type that included cocktail recipes between the pinups. What jarred Ricky were the others. They were graphically sadistic. It crossed his mind that it might have been illegal merely to possess them. These magazines were printed on cheap newsprint. That the photos were in black and white and poorly shot, underlit, sometimes not even focused, somehow added to their authenticity. Women trussed in contorted positions, with baroque leather strapwork or artlessly calf-roped. Their breasts were clamped or stretched. They were raped, both with objects and by naked, black-hooded, potbellied, small-bottomed men whose penises were not shown. These women winced or stared boggle-eyed at their torturers. In one photo a woman lay dead-playacting, presumably-and bleeding. In another shot, a woman slouched from a whipping post, as if lynched, her arms pulled up behind her at an unnatural, unfake-able angle. Some showed women’s faces badly beaten.

Ricky’s mouth fell open. For a few minutes he forgot the need to sweep the apartment quickly and efficiently then get out. The magazines seemed the opposite of pornography, which existed to stimulate. He could not imagine more dick-shriveling images than these. He stared, transfixed.

Then he saw it.

The images, in a magazine called Bound, might have been crime-scene photos from one of the Boston stranglings-except that the magazine was dated July 1958. The “victim” in the photos was a woman in her fifties, wearing a housecoat and girdle. The “strangler” was dressed, ridiculously, in a thievish cap and mask and hepcat jacket, all of which he wore in every photo. In the first shot he wore black pachuco pants; in the rest, no pants or underpants at all. The victim was bound and “raped,” then “strangled” with a garrote of braided sheets and nylons, which was tied off in a bow in the final photo.

Ricky knew.

Something collapsed inside him. The hidden reserve of strength that had carried him through the night of Amy’s murder and the funeral and the long weeks afterward-in an instant, it crumbled. He replaced the magazine precisely, and moved to inspect the rest of the apartment. But his eyes watered. He wiped them with his upper arm. Thoughts of suffering led immediately to Amy. Only a few, Joe and Michael among them, knew the details of the murder. The rest did not want to know. They did not want to dwell on the fact that a family member had been murdered. They were embarrassed by it. In some obscure way, they felt tainted by their association with murder, however blameless the victim. They did not want the sort of negative celebrity that attaches to a murder survivor: Did you know his daughter/wife/mother was killed by the Strangler? They did not want to be perceived as carriers of murder, or of whatever trait had attracted it, weakness, bad luck, fate, sin. The sexual nature of the crime only doubled their shame. So they pretended the murder never happened. They acted, all except maybe Michael, as if Amy had died of cancer or in a car accident or in some other nonsensational, nonviolent way. Ricky had done it, too. Maybe having known Amy so intimately, having known her body, he was the one who most needed to block out the details of her murder.

But it was impossible to maintain the fiction here, in the room where the Strangler lived, where he had first formed the idea, where he had retreated after the crime. Here it was all too clear. Amy had not died instantly. Her dying had been a process, a long, excruciating, bloody process. To turn away from that fact, to pretend it had not happened-as if she had passed into fiction, a book we could safely put back on the shelf because the subject did not suit us-was not polite or discreet. It was cowardly. Amy had suffered.

He thought, Monstrous, monstrous.

More quickly than before, Ricky scanned some of the other shelves. And here was another impossible juxtaposition: Lindstrom’s psychopathic sexual deviance occupied the same mind as an elaborate intellect. His shelves were crowded with Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Leviathan, the Principia Ethica, The Critique of Pure Reason. Most were paperbacks; all were broken-backed and grungy with fingering. Ricky did not know what linked these books, whether they shared a central concern or not. He opened one book, Hobbes’s Leviathan. It was full of scribbles, little stars, underlinings, brackets, annotations-the leavings of a ravenous mind that had passed this way.

In the bedroom, in a top drawer where Lindstrom kept his own underwear, he found a pair of women’s panties. Ricky nudged them open with his gloved finger. They were large and made of an elastic rubbery material, like a girdle. They were certainly not Amy’s. They were torn at the waistband and flyspecked with a brown liquid that might have been blood. They were a souvenir of a murder, and Ricky was tempted to take them. But he could not take them without betraying that he had been there. Lindstrom did not know he was being watched and certainly did not know he had been found out; Ricky wanted to preserve that advantage. So he balled up the enormous panties and replaced them in the drawer just as he had found them.

He retraced his steps, raising the shades to their original height, turned off the lights, and let himself out. And here was a final glitch, an unprofessional stumble for which Ricky would reproach himself later.

The door had two locks which had to be relocked. The first, in the knob, was simple enough; it locked merely by closing the door. But above it was a drop lock, an old Schlage, one that should not have given Ricky any trouble. This type of lock was very slightly more difficult to pick because of the added weight of the bolt mechanism, which resisted the rotation of the cylinder. The added resistance required a lock picker to secure the cylinder with enough torque that he could overcome the resistance of that weight and turn the lock, yet not so much torque that the pins mis-set as the pick lifted them. It was a matter of touch-a very, very simple thing, especially for an accomplished pick man like Ricky who took pride in his skill and practiced constantly. But he fumbled with the lock. When he tried to rotate the cylinder, it jammed-the pins were mis-set-and he had to start again. Another mis-set, and he had to repeat the process a third time. The whole episode took just seconds. But it was a fumble, and he might have been put in a bad position if someone had come along. No one did come, luckily, and Ricky did manage to relock the door. But the lapse troubled him. It was not a clean job.