The Strangler

4

Joanne Feeney’s apartment on Grove Street had a kitchen window overlooking the West End, or what was left of it. The old neighborhood had been leveled. Rubble, acres and acres of nothing. Only a few buildings had been spared, a couple of churches, Mass. General Hospital. Outside the window now, in the distance, a crane idly swung a wrecking ball into the remains of a tenement. With each tap of the ball, the building shed a few crumbs.

Mrs. Feeney hadn’t had much to do-she was sixty-three-so she had formed a habit of watching the demolition day by day. From her window she studied the wasteland, overlaying it with her memories of the West End, the narrow streets where she’d grown up. When she was a girl, there had been a bicycle shop on Chambers Street where you could rent a bike for a nickel an hour, and Mrs. Feeney had ridden around and around those vanished streets: Chambers Street, Allen, Blossom.

Now the window was open. Cold air blew in.

Classical music played on the hi-fi set. Her son had bought the hi-fi for her; she could barely work the thing. But now it was playing Sibelius, the Fifth Symphony. The record ticked and crackled, but oh, the music! It swayed in a three-note theme, over and over, over and over-the long, gathering crescendo.

A long smear of blood.

A red handprint.

Mrs. Feeney lay on the floor. Her robe ripped open, legs wrenched apart, ankles pinned in the slats of two dining-room chairs to hold them spread, a pillow tucked under her rear end to prop it so that her pudendum was aimed at the front door. A pillowcase and stockings were wrapped around her neck, tied off with a big bow. Bluish bruises and the pink lividity of pooling blood mottled her skin around the garrote. Her mouth was still moist. In her eyes were tiny red spiders, capillaries that had burst.

The Sibelius symphony reached its climax. Five identical chords-irregularly spaced, like a dying heartbeat-each chord separated by a long, breathless pause. In an unstable B flat, the music pulsed twice-three-four-five times-then fell, exhausted, into its natural key of E flat-and it was over. The needle caught in the gutter and scratched there.

A fly, a lethargic November fly, flicked onto the dead woman’s cheek. It tasted the corner of her mouth and scrubbed its forelegs together.