The Strangler

55

Boston State Hospital-formerly the Boston Lunatic Hospital-occupied a two-hundred-acre campus in Mattapan, most of which was a virgin wood. A wrought-iron fence enclosed the entire circumference of the property. The few scattered buildings were red brick, vaguely federalist, with shallow roofs and white moldings and trim. The bigger buildings looked like old industrial mills. The smaller ones might have been little schoolhouses or private homes.

The administration building to which Ricky was directed was one of these, a three-story brick house with a white portico. The forest seemed to be closing around this structure. Trees overhung it, vines crawled over its surface, the grass out front was high and weedy.

Like a lot of city boys, Ricky had no real feeling for nature. The work of men was done in cities, and what lay between cities was best hopped over in a plane or sped through on a highway. When circumstances compelled him to the beach or out into the woods, he was uneasy. And in town, where nature erupted out of the concrete, as in this forest in the middle of Mattapan, it was the forest that seemed artificial-a big green obstruction to be got around on the way to where you were going. A big green pain in the ass.

But these woods were not so benign. There were no people around despite the warm weather. When Ricky had been a kid-the Daleys’ house in Savin Hill was just a few miles away-there had been more than three thousand patients here. Now a policy of “deinstitutionalization” had nearly emptied the hospital. Only a few hundred souls remained. The grounds were shabby and dilapidated, almost ghostly. Soon these buildings would be abandoned altogether, the forest would close around them, and that would be that.

Why did all that bother Ricky? A few old buildings moldering in the woods, an old insane asylum being decommissioned-what was the big deal?

But Ricky’s mood remained stubbornly shadowed. He was not so good at playacting anymore. He was no longer a ventriloquist’s dummy; he was too much himself. Amy would have gotten a kick out of that, of course. The thing she had most wished for-Ricky’s genuine presence, his new capacity to feel deeply, to ache-had come about only as a product of her dying. It was a joke she would have appreciated.

Would it be profane of Ricky to enjoy what he was doing, tracking down Amy’s killer? He thought it was precisely what Amy would have wanted. She certainly appreciated the pleasures of sleuthing, of following the clues, feeling the knot relax and come undone in your hand. More important, Amy knew the consolation of hard work. She knew it was all essentially a distraction. The dailyness and busyness of work obscured the bleak realities-that life was short and pointless and precarious and so on and so on. Why think about it? Better to keep your head down, keep on working. Finding Amy’s killer was more productive than grieving. Maybe it was grieving.

At the administration building, a nurse escorted Ricky to the office of Dr. Mark Keating. The title Chief of Psychiatry was stenciled on the frosted glass in the office door.

Inside, the doctor hunched over his desk. His elbows rested on the desktop. The fingers of his right hand picked at his scalp. Dr. Keating hoisted up his head, as if its weight was becoming too much for his neck. “Mr. Daley?” he said, puzzled.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. You’re not the one I spoke to.”

“That was my brother Michael. He gave me your name. It’s about your patient, Arthur Nast.”

“Former patient.” The doctor gestured toward the chair in front of his desk. “I think I told your brother when we spoke: I’m bound by confidentiality. There’s not much I can tell you.”

Ricky sat. “I just have one question.”

The doctor grunted, skeptical. He plowed his fingers into his hair and left them there, with hair kinking out between them. To Ricky, he resembled an old baboon, with his shoulders hunched and his baggy face and electrified hair.

Ricky had a copy of the morning’s Traveler, quarter-folded. He laid the newspaper on the desk. On page one, below the fold, a headline read,

FORMER STRANGLER SUSPECT FOUND DEAD

A small photo showed Arthur Nast, gaunt, bug-eyed. The photo was misleading. It did not suggest Nast’s inhuman qualities, his gigantic size and strength, his Martian, distorted features. He looked merely like a thug.

The doctor glanced at the story and sighed.

“This didn’t happen, did it?” Ricky picked up the paper and read aloud, “‘Arthur Nast, once a leading suspect in the Boston Strangler murders, was found dead early last evening in his locked cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, a secure mental facility. Nast apparently swallowed a fatal dose of an antidepressant medication which he was supposed to take regularly but which he hoarded instead, apparently for the purpose of suicide.’ Now, that didn’t happen, did it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Very much.”

“To who? Nobody cared about him when he was alive.”

“Nobody cares about him now, including me. It matters because the truth matters. So, do you believe Arthur Nast killed himself?”

“I think you’d better tell me who you are.”

“My friend was Amy Ryan, the last girl who got strangled.”

“Ah. And you think Arthur did it?”

“No. Arthur was in Bridgewater when it happened.”

“Why the interest, then? Why not let Arthur have some peace in death, finally?”

“Because I want my peace now.”

“I see. You’re not a policeman, are you?”

Ricky shook his head.

“No, you don’t sound like one. Well, look, there’s not a lot I can tell you. I wasn’t there. I haven’t seen Arthur in several months.”

“You knew him as well as anyone.”

“Alright, then, to be frank, no, I rather doubt that Arthur killed himself. Certainly he did not have the intelligence or the technical knowledge to do it that way-to form the plan, to determine what a fatal dose would be, to hide the pills until he’d accumulated enough. That’s all well beyond Arthur’s capacity. I doubt Arthur would ever have considered suicide in the first place. I don’t think it was in his makeup. He never voiced any inclination toward suicide. He was never depressed, to my knowledge. Of course I can’t rule it out, but it strikes me as very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I can’t imagine who would want to kill Arthur, either.”

“I can.”

“Arthur had no enemies in Bridgewater.”

“He did. He just didn’t know it. Someone did not want him to confess to any of the Strangler murders. Someone didn’t want to see DeSalvo cleared. If Arthur Nast talked, if he laid claim to the murders and described them convincingly-even more convincingly than DeSalvo, which would not be hard to do-then the whole thing would start to fall apart, wouldn’t it? How could people go on thinking DeSalvo was the Strangler if another, better suspect started confessing to the same crimes?”

“Who are you accusing, then? The docs? The guards? The prisoners?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who put those pills in Nast’s hand, but I know why they did it: They’re covering up.”

“May I ask you a question, Mr. Daley?” A skeptical, honeyed tone came into the doctor’s voice. It became the voice of a therapist. The shrink apparently thought Ricky himself was a little crazy, a little grief-sick, delusional, conspiracy-minded. “If you prove all this, a cover-up, if you do find the ‘real Strangler’ who killed your friend Miss…”

“Ryan.”

“Miss Ryan-what then?”

“Then I’ll see that justice is done.”

“How?”

“I’ll see him go to prison. He’ll know he didn’t get away with it.”

“What then?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You said what you want is peace. Will you have it? What then?”

Ricky blinked. His mouth drooped open as if he were about to respond. But his mind, the thought-stream so hard to silence earlier, had gone utterly quiet. What then?