The Strangler

PART THREE

Lock picking takes place in a tiny space, the keyway. If it were magnified, the keyway would resemble a narrow corridor with a smooth steel floor and saw-toothed ceiling. Set into that ceiling are four pins (or more, depending on the lock), each of which travels up and down inside a cylinder. When each pin is raised to its proper height, the lock opens. The jagged edge of a key lifts all the pins at once to their assigned heights. The lock picker’s task, simply put, is to raise those pins one by one.

It was a matter of feel, of course. When a pin reached its release point and set properly, Ricky could sense-through the pick in his fingertips, through his ears, his eyes, through no specific sense at all-a little give in the lock, an infinitesimal release like a sigh. But for Ricky lock picking was first and foremost an act of imagination. A good pick like Ricky could visualize the interior of that keyway. He could blow it up to the size of a cathedral and wander inside it and look up at the round bottoms of those pins hanging from the ceiling. He thought that if he were ever locked up in a prison cell, he would spend his days with his eyes shut imagining the insides of locks, impossibly complex locks with baroque devices designed to defeat him, mechanical marvels as yet undreamt by lock makers, and he would pick them for the sheer insolence of it. He would open them pin by pin just as, in dreams, other prisoners would open women’s blouses button by button.

And pin by pin was the proper way to pick a lock, Ricky believed, the only way. There were quicker, dirtier ways, of course, and in practice the need for speed sometimes required a shortcut or two. The most common technique was “scrubbing,” which meant scratching the pick quickly over the pinheads, knocking the pins upward. While scrubbing back and forth with the pick, the lock picker would apply enough torque to the cylinder that the pins would be trapped in their “unlock” positions before they rebounded and zinged back down. But scrubbing had a critical drawback: it scratched the pins and the keyway, and it sprayed metal dust inside the lock-which is to say, it left evidence that the lock had been picked. That sort of sloppiness was anathema to Ricky. A good pick left no trace. And of course, every burglar knew that the best way to open a lock was not to pick it at all but to get the key somehow. Alas, stealing or conning a key to duplicate it-or “smoke” it, in the argot of thieves-was risky as well. It generally required the thief to “show face,” a cardinal sin.

So Ricky became expert at pin-by-pin picking. He crafted his own picks, which were roughly L-shaped, a design lock pickers called a “rake.” The long arm of the L, the handle, was five or six inches long. It was tuned to be flexy enough to provide feedback to the fingertips yet stiff enough to push hard on a pin. The proper stiffness was a matter of endless experimentation. The short arm of the L was dished at the tip so it would seat properly on each pinhead. On big jobs-and at this point big jobs were all that interested him-he researched the locks he would encounter ahead of time, and he made picks customized to those models. The net result of all this effort was that Ricky worked very fast and very clean. To stand behind him while he picked a lock was to watch a man open a door with a slightly sticky key.

Which is why, when Ricky unlocked the door to Carlo Capobianco’s headquarters on Thatcher Street in the North End, the event looked entirely unremarkable. A man walked up to the door, jiggled a key in the lock (or seemed to), and let himself in.

Ricky himself was surprised by the ease of it. The door had a single lock, a simple Yale deadbolt with a beveled keyhole. You could find it at any hardware store. Ricky could disassemble and reassemble that lock in the dark, as a soldier could disassemble and reassemble his machine gun.

But of course it was not the lock that Charlie Capobianco relied on for security. It was the North End itself. Boston’s Little Italy. Insular, watchful, all eyes and ears. Not so much a neighborhood as a village within the city. Capobianco had grown up here on Thatcher Street. The road was barely two cars wide curb to curb, walled in by redbrick tenements. Residents easily carried on conversations from open windows on opposite sides of the street. Capobianco knew that a non-North Ender skulking around or breaking into buildings around here would be noticed. He knew it would get back to him. Then, too, maybe he did not need a lock on the door at all, because who would be foolish enough to break into Charlie Capobianco’s office?

Ricky slid those four tiny pins up and felt the cylinder turn. He eased inside and locked the door behind him. It was three A. M. He had clocked the job for a couple of weeks and determined that this was the ideal time, the quiet Sunday-to-Monday overnight, after the Capobiancos’ nocturnal business had been done and before the city began to stir, which happened around five in this blue-collar neighborhood. The office was on the ground floor. Charlie Capobianco’s mother and one of his brothers were asleep in apartments upstairs.

Ricky stood stock-still, listening, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Which was not quite darkness but a dim stony blue-gray light, fed by the ambient street light, and as Ricky’s eyes adjusted a long room was exposed. Thirty feet deep. A round Formica dining table with four cheapo vinyl chairs around it. A couch and two upholstered chairs, which might have been secondhand. A small desk in the far corner. A kitchenette. No carpet. Everything crummy and used. No evidence of the Capobiancos’ power. None of the equipment you would expect to find in the executive office of a big business-no filing cabinets, no adding machines, just a single telephone-though the Capobianco gambling business was already grossing several million a year, virtually all of it in cash, a torrent of cash that had to be invested or put back out on the street.

Ricky traversed the room slowly. With each step the floor creaked-the ancient floorboards seemed to bend as they accepted his weight-and each noise forced Ricky to freeze again until he was sure no one had heard. His nose wrinkled; the room reeked of garlic.

In the desk he found a few papers, but just a few, and his heart sank. There was a broad clothbound ledger book, rectangular and flat. The binding was held together by two little wing nuts on bolts.

Ricky brought the ledger into the kitchenette. Around a corner was a small sink, the only interior space in the office, shielded from the windows, and here he risked turning on a tiny flashlight, the size of a finger.

Under the flashlight the book was dented and frayed. The cloth cover had faded to a pale green that matched the ledger sheets inside. Long ranks of digits, apparently unlabeled, though Ricky presumed the labels were encoded. Maybe the labels were just numeric as well, as if the accountant who had assembled these ledgers could comprehend only mathematical language-the instinctive language of the Capobiancos. Ricky’s eyes skimmed the arrays of digits. He understood only that this was the wash of money through the system, streaming in from card and crap and barbooth games in the backs of taverns, from bets taken by bookies, and recirculated to the street to be sharked or to cover overhead. Page after page, the digits metering the flow. He came to a page where letters did appear, foreign bodies, like stones in a stream. Names. Names. And one he recognized. His eyes widened.

“What’s Capobianco pay you for?”

“Capobianco? Who Capobianco?”

“I just want to know: What does a mobster get for his money?”

“If I were you, boyo, I’d watch my mouth.”

“It’s a simple question, Brendan.”

“Simple question? You should be embarrassed for even asking me such a thing. All three o’ yuz, you should be embarrassed. That’s all I’m gonna say.” Conroy’s right hand wrung the skin of his cheek. He looked from Michael to Ricky to Joe, his favorite. “You in on this, Joe?”

“It’s like Michael said, Bren: simple question.”

“I didn’t ask what Michael said. I can handle Michael. I’m asking you. Does he talk for you now?”

“Yeah. He does.” Joe’s lips went on moving, as if he had intended to say more but no sound came. The ghost words would have been an apology.

“Big happy family, you three.”

Michael said, “Not so happy.”

“No. I suppose not. You want to tell me what this is about, Michael? You’ve got all the answers. What’s on your mind, Harvard boy?”

“You’re on Capobianco’s pad.”

“Says who?”

“Capobianco.”

“Bullshit.”

“Look, Brendan, why don’t we skip this part, alright? You’re offended, okay, I got that. What we want to know is what he pays you for. What do you do for him?”

“You know, I don’t get you, Michael. I always treated you like a son. Go ahead, make faces. But I was like a father for you, and you know it.”

“Two fathers, then. Lucky me.”

“Lucky you is right, boyo.”

“Two is one too many. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.”

Ricky smirked.

“Well,” Michael said, “good thing we had a spare, eh, Brendan? Where would we be now? Fatherless. Orphans. And who would adopt us? Especially Joe.”

Conroy squinted, bewildered. He wore plain clothes, a coat and tie that did not sit properly on his cambered chest, and the whole of his torso heaved one time-inhale, exhale. Then-too suddenly for Michael to react-too quick even to register the snap in the old man’s mood-Conroy bolted forward-“You fuckin’ little shit”-at almost the same instant Joe charged toward Conroy to intercept him Michael had a flashing image of two long freight trains on transverse tracks, night trains barreling toward the intersection Conroy hit Michael, gathered two fistfuls of his coat, drove him back at the same moment Joe’s shoulder punched into Conroy’s side air chuffed out of Conroy’s mouth, next to Michael’s ear and then Michael was on the floor, the small of his back against the baseboard.

He heard Joe’s voice, low and lethal: “Try that again, Brendan, and I’ll fuckin’ kill you.” Michael blinked up to see Joe kneeling over Conroy with his rock-fist cocked. “I mean it. I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”

“Joe!”

“Joe!”

Joe’s head inclined toward his brothers’ voices, but he did not release Conroy and he did not unclench his fist.

“Joe,” Conroy soothed, “what are you talking about, kill who? Who do you think you’re talking to? Let me go, boyo, come on. This is ridiculous. Let me up, son.”

Joe remained frozen, his left arm locked on Conroy’s shirtfront, right arm cranked back. For a long moment it seemed that he would launch that fist straight down into Conroy’s face and straight through it to the floor. But Joe’s expression faltered and became poignant, and his fist relaxed perceptibly.

“That’s right, Joe. Let me up.” Conroy tapped Joe’s wrist.

The contact seemed to jolt Joe back from his thoughts. Reinvigorated, he agitated Conroy’s shirt and pressed him down into the floor more firmly. He straightened his fingers and balled them again to harden his fist.

Conroy made a short-armed gesture of surrender, palms up.

Michael said, “Joe? You okay?”

“What’s he been telling you, Joe?” Conroy nodded toward Michael. “He’s been filling your head up, hasn’t he?”

Joe shook his head slowly, but the questions diverted him, complicated everything, flooded him with facts and speculations and unknowns, all Michael’s and Ricky’s theories which Joe half understood for a moment only to lose them again. “What about me, Brendan? Did you treat me like a son, too?”

“You know I did.”

Joe shook his head again. He yearned for the words. It was an affliction, this constant clutching for words. It felt as if he had been excluded from a conversation. Intuitions murmured past, thoughts that could not be condensed into language, and were lost before Joe could hear them. He imagined there was more to himself, a secret unrealized Joe hidden in all those mutterings, a Joe that would never be accessed. Now, what did he want to say to Conroy? The simple truthI loved you, you broke my heart- was unsayable, and was not the whole story anyway. But no other words were available.

Joe said, “You’re not my friend.”

Immediately he was embarrassed. What a childish, stupid thing to say. He wished he had not said anything at all. He wished he could go back ten seconds into the past, before he had exposed himself as a dumbshit. But the declaration mesmerized Conroy and Joe’s brothers too, and seeing its impact Joe began to feel he had stumbled onto the right formulation almost by accident, as if he had sat down at a piano and banged the keys and somehow a song had emerged, a miraculous perfect little song. He let go of Conroy’s shirt.

Joe said, “I’m through with you, Bren. Just answer Mike’s question.”

“What’s he been telling you, Joe?”

“Just answer him.”

Conroy labored to his feet. He retreated to the opposite side of the room.

Ricky came over to offer Michael a hand up. “You alright, Mikey?”

“Yeah.”

“You and your new daddy seem to be hitting it off pretty good.”

“Yeah, I think he’s warming up to me.”

Conroy tugged his clothes straight. “You boys act like you’ve discovered some original sin. Well, I’m not very original, I hate to tell you. It’s the way things work.”

Michael said, “Oh Christ, Brendan, nobody gives a shit you were on the sleeve. But from Capobianco? The guy’s a murderer, for Christ’s sake.”

“So what, I took from Capobianco? You think your old man was too good to take Capobianco’s money?”

“Yes.”

Conroy shook his head. “Just let it go, Michael. You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, alright? You hear me? You don’t know from Capobianco, you don’t know what it means to be a cop, you don’t know shit from Shinola, and I’m telling you, as a friend: Just let it alone. The hell do you care about Capobianco, anyways?”

“I’ll tell you what I care. Turns out your boss Capobianco killed my father-I mean my real father, Brendan, the first one, remember him?”

“Wha…? How do you know that?”

“A little bird.”

“What little bird?”

“Goombah named Paul Marolla.”

“Who the hell is Paul Marolla?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, according to you, he’s a witness in a murder. I’m in Homicide. I want to talk to him.”

“That’s not going to be so easy. He’s tied up.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“He’s in the trunk of a car in Revere somewhere. They’ll probably find him in June or July, first good heat wave. The way I heard the story is Marolla took some of Charlie Capobianco’s money and Charlie was not willing to just let it go. So Marolla goes into the trunk and on the way out he starts blabbing: He knows about the West End, he knows about my dad. So you see where this is headed, Brendan: You worked for Capobianco; you were there when Joe Daley died-maybe Capobianco wanted Joe Daley dead. A plus B equals C. But what am I telling you? You’re a homicide detective, you know how this works.”

“You got it wrong.”

“So enlighten me. Just answer the fucking question! What did you do for Capobianco?”

“Same as your old man did! Same as half the department does for someone or other! Capobianco runs bookie joints. It’s not like we don’t know where they are. I didn’t bother with them. That’s it. We let him operate.”

“He pays you too much for just that. I heard you’re one of the highest-paid guys he’s got.”

“He pays me more because I have stripes on my sleeve. Doesn’t mean I do a goddamn thing for him. I worked my way up, same as everyone else. Besides, most of what he gives me is for other people. I’m a middleman. It’s part of my job.”

“Come on, Brendan. I always thought a crooked cop-”

“You righteous little pri-”

“-I always thought a crooked cop had to do a little more and a little more, know what I mean? You fix a ticket, then you fix a little case in the BMC, then maybe you make some evidence disappear, then someday you find yourself picking up the phone if there’s going to be a raid and Mr. Capobianco might want a little fair warning. Work your way up, like you said.”

“What does that have to do with murder?”

“How far up did you work, Brendan?”

“Now that’s enough. This conversation is over.”

Joe parallel-parked his grumbling Eighty-Eight in front of the old house, under the basketball hoop.

In the front passenger seat, Michael realized that, for the first time, he felt no connection to this house. Just a pile of boards, barely distinguishable from the other double- and triple-deckers lining the street, all of them peeling brown and white, and tilting slightly on sunk foundations like uneven teeth. Had he really grown up here? It felt like a hundred years ago. Maybe he would try to convince his mother to sell this old dump, go somewhere nice, maybe near the water, maybe the Cape. She never would, of course. She planned to live here. With Conroy.

Margaret appeared at the top of the stairs before they even got out of the car. The sleeves of her sweater, a fuchsia cardigan, were pushed up to her elbows. Her hair was held back by a headband, a girlish detail, but she did not look young. Her face looked pale. Her thin, lipsticked mouth stood out like a red incision in her porcelain face.

Old women had to be careful about lipstick, Michael thought. They could look so red-mouthed and smeary and ridiculous.

“What are you three up to?” Without unfolding her arms, Margaret glanced at her watch and frowned. They should be at work now. Honest people were all at work now.

Michael said, “We need to talk to you, Ma.”

“Talk,” Ricky advised, “or Joe’ll beat the crap out of you.”

Each of the boys bent to bump-kiss her cheek as they passed. She received these kisses impassively, arms still folded, with a swivel of her head to offer up her cheek.

Michael thought she gave him a particularly cool look, but he could not be sure and in any case he did not, for once, feel quite as vulnerable to her. He felt, vaingloriously, like a prince sweeping past with his retinue.

It was Michael, after all, whom Joe had sought out to confide what had happened up in Revere and to share the tip that the mob had some kind of role in Joe Senior’s murder. It was Michael who had counseled his brothers to solve the mystery together, not so much to pool their various talents but because the outsiders whose job it was to find Senior’s killer had failed and, worse, seemed to have given up. And it was Michael who had directed Ricky to break into Capobianco’s headquarters-though his goal had been to corroborate Marolla’s tip, to find some scrap of evidence that would link the Capobiancos to the murder. The discovery of Conroy’s name in the ledger had been a surprise. Maybe it should not have been.

The Daleys sat in the kitchen, at the little breakfast table. This table had just four seats, so it had been used when Joe Senior was at work during mealtimes. But then, Joe Senior had been at work during most mealtimes. A detective’s work schedule did not have much to do with the ordinary nine-to-five workday. Homicide had been the worst; he would disappear for days at a time, working a case while it was hot. The boys had come to think of this table as theirs-the place where they could laugh out loud and stick green beans in their noses and fight over the sports page. It had an avocado Formica top flecked with little gold asterisks and a scalloped aluminum band around the sides, like you would see in a diner.

When the situation was explained to Margaret, minus a few gruesome or worrisome details, she did not seem to find anything especially new in it. Her husband was still dead, under mysterious circumstances. And Brendan Conroy was still what he was: a bit of a blustery politician but a good man and an old friend. She did not believe Brendan was corrupt, merely that he lived in a turbid atmosphere-you could hardly walk around in this city without it leaving a little grime on your nose. So her boys had scratched up a couple of new details. What had changed, really? Nothing. Michael did not like Brendan-that was what it all boiled down to. Well, those two were just oil and water, and they would have to find a way to get along. That was Michael’s problem, not Brendan’s, and certainly not hers.

But now there was something new. It was not just Michael anymore. Now he had Joe believing it, too, that Brendan was some kind of villain. And Ricky! Joe had always been a get-along go-along sort of boy, an easy mark. But Ricky? God bless ’m, he was a living saint-but Ricky looked out for Ricky. Ricky was the kid who stole the quarters Michael collected to send to the pagan babies in Biafra. Yet here were all three of them, her all-grown-up children, ganging up on her.

Michael said, “I don’t think he should be here anymore.”

“Oh, good Lord, Michael, haven’t we been all through this?”

“Just till we know.”

“I already know. I know Brendan. It’s enough for me.”

“He can’t stay here anymore. When this is over, if I’m wrong, I’ll set it straight with him. But for now it’s better he gets out.”

“Why, Michael? Because some gangster knows Brendan’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Ma,” Joe said, “just do what he says.”

She flicked a withering glance at Joe. Who asked him? “He’s still Brendan. He’s been our friend a long time, Michael, longer than you’ve been alive. You don’t just turn your back like that.”

“Look, you tell him anything you want. Blame it on me. Tell him I’m crazy. But I don’t want him around here, I don’t want him around you. Just till we get this straightened out.”

She shook her head in a noncommittal way.

“Did Dad ever talk to you about Capobianco?”

“No. He never talked about work. He went off to work and he came home. He was never much of a talker, you know that.”

“You ever hear him mention that name? Capobianco?”

“Not to me. He and Amy used to talk about it.”

“Amy?” Michael’s head wavered, as if knocked back.

“You know how Amy was. If she wanted to know something, she wasn’t afraid to ask.”

“What did she ask him about?”

“Well, she was always after your dad for stories. Dope about the police department, about whatever she was working on. It was not a big deal. They were family. They chatted.”

“He was the source.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call him a source- ”

Michael shook his head. His right hand went to his brow, smoothing the eyebrows with two fingers absently and he sensed somewhere in his skull, afloat behind the thick bone-wall of his forehead, the first dim presence of pain, like a ghost.

He saw the two women.

Claire, the career-girl newspaper reporter. Two-legged rats in the West End. Lots of money to be made there. That’s the kind of cheese those rats like. Find the cheese.

And of course he saw Amy, too, the night before she was killed. Why would Brendan Conroy kill Joe Senior? What motive? I have an idea. A wiseacre smirk. I have an idea. And of course she did have an idea: because Senior had been spilling what was going on in the West End. The West End had to be cleared. The New Boston had to come.

The pain hovered in his skull, settling now behind the right eyeball. A tumorous weight leaned against the back of the eyeball. An ache. It draped itself over the ocular nerve like a boa on a tree branch. Still faint.

He tried to empty his head of thought, of stress. He was not his body; he was in his body, and he could control it. Maybe the storm would pass him by, blow out harmlessly to sea.

“You alright, Mikey?”

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

“You don’t look okay.”

“We got to go. There’s something-”

The three of them stood to leave. Michael put his hand on the table to steady himself.

Ricky grabbed his arm. “Sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah.”

Michael let his eyes close.

He was not his body. He was in his body. Empty the mind. Release the pressure.

But it was already too late. The thing was inside him. The anxiety of the last few days. Plunging from one lead to the next, feeling the solution closer and closer. He wished he was not there. He wished he was at home. He did not like people to see him when the migraines came. It was a weakness, this inability to regulate one’s own body.

“You know what?” he said. “Maybe I better just-”

There had been no aura this time. No illusions-no melting surfaces or mosaic vision, no sense of wonder. The aura did not always come. Sometimes it was just pain.

“Mike,” he heard Joe say, “want me to drive you home?”

“No. I’m just gonna go lie down for a while. I’ll catch up with you guys later. Sorry. I hate this.” He shuffled toward the kitchen door. “I hate this.”

Later. An hour, several hours.

There was a sound in the dark, in the deep space: a ticking like the tip of a tree branch tapping a windowpane.

Near its peak, Michael thought. Had to be. It squeezed his head like a helmet. In the interior of his skull there was throbbing, synchronized to his pulse. He felt, or imagined he felt, the beating of vascular arteries as they piped the toxic fluids into his head, the rhythmic earthwormy bunching-and-stretching of peristalsis.

Again, he caught that sound in the darkness. Less faint. Rhythmic. Approaching. Chink-chink-chink. More insistent now, like a child’s finger tapping on the window, demanding to be let in. Chink-chink-chink.

He lay on his side, utterly still, and searched for the sound, but the signal was weak.

Chick-chick-chick-chick.

There it was! Footsteps.

The pain subsided momentarily.

Chick-chick- BANG! As if a door had slammed open and the sound that was distant and external was now inside his head, chick-chick-chick-chick-chick-chick.

He saw feet running, close up, black patrolman’s shoes in a dead sprint, soles scratching the sandy pavement.

Joe Daley, Sr., so vivid! So thrillingly close! His cheeks jounced with each step. His nylon windbreaker luffed and crinkled as the wind filled it. He held one hand over his heart to keep his junk-reading glasses, notebook, smokes-from jumping out of his shirt pocket.

Michael could reach out and touch him. Inches away. Touch his father’s face.

But Joe Senior pulled away. Michael was behind him now. Saw his leg-kick as he ran. Eastie warehouses to the left, harbor to the right.

Farther behind Joe Senior-well behind-was Conroy. He chugged along slowly, then jogged, then stopped altogether. He grimaced. What had he done? What had he done to his friend?

Joe Senior seemed to sense his partner had dropped away. At the corner of one of the big redbrick buildings, he turned around and spread his hands: The hell are you doing, Brendan?

“You go,” Conroy wheezed. “I’ll catch up.”

Joe Senior shook his head. Conroy was a character. How they had lasted this long together he would never know.

Senior disappeared around the corner of the building into the alley.

Enough!

Michael had seen enough. He turned off the movie. He knew how it ended. He knew how to make the pieces fit. There would be time to confirm it later. For now, sleep.

Margaret opened the door and the young man swept in with it, as leaves that have accumulated in a doorway will be pulled inside when the door is opened. He did not step all the way into the house. He stopped directly in front of her.

“Hello, Margaret.”

There was a delay, a fraction of a second, during which Margaret placed him-there were bruises on Kurt Lindstrom’s face, one of his hands was bandaged-then she slammed the door against him with a yelp of surprise and fear. He warded off the door, pressed it open again. Margaret continued to push for a moment but realized she would not be able to force him out, so she stepped back. She behaved as if she had invited him in, as if she was not distressed by his presence. What choice was there? She retreated to the living room.

“Oh, come on, Margaret. What are you so afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“No. No reason to be.”

“I’m not.”

“Course you’re not. Nothing to be afraid of.”

“My sons will be home soon.”

“Will they?” He checked his watch. “It’s late.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Visiting.”

He ambled into the small room. His posture was lazy and pliant, like a teenager’s.

She got out a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table and lighted it in an actressy way. They were talking, at least. That seemed to matter, to suggest that she had a say in what might happen here. She could engage him, steer him.

“What happened to your hand?”

Lindstrom looked at the hand. “Your son.”

She presumed he meant Joe. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you. Why don’t you offer me a drink?”

“A drink?”

“Yes, a drink. What kind of hostess are you?”

“I don’t-what, what would you like to drink?”

“What do you have, Margaret?”

“There’s some beer, I think.”

“No, not beer. How about Scotch. Do you have Scotch?”

“I’ll go see.”

“Why don’t I come along? Maybe you’ll have one, too.”

She led him into the kitchen. She walked with her arms stiff at her sides.

The booze was in a cabinet at eye level. She raised her arm to open it, self-conscious of how the gesture tautened her clothes against her back and shoulder. Should she scream? Run for the door? She doubted she would make it to the door before him, even allowing for the advantage of surprise. A scream, she thought, would alarm him, set him off. As long as they were talking, maintaining the pretense of civility, there was hope.

She said, facing the cabinet still, “How do you want it?”

“Neat. Make one for yourself too, Margaret.”

“I don’t drink it.”

“Alright, then. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

She poured his drink and handed it to him. Should she have thrown it in his eyes? Would it have worked?

“What do you want, Margaret?”

“I’m not thirsty.”

He laughed. “No, not to drink. What do you want, right now?”

“I want you to leave.”

“But I just got here.”

“It’s late. I want to go to bed.”

“Will you have me back another time?”

“Yes.”

“Now, why don’t I believe you?”

She started to say something, a lie to reassure him. She felt her lips move but no sound came. He had no weapon. At least he did not seem to. She could not be sure. In most of the Strangler cases there had been no weapon. The Strangler had used whatever heavy object came to hand to bash his victims, then improvised a garrotte from whatever he had found in their apartments-nylons, bathrobe sashes, scarves, sheets. But in a few of the cases there had been knife wounds, mutilation…

“Margaret?”

“It’s true. Another time you can come. It’s late.”

He turned his bruised face forty-five degrees and looked at her from an angle, skeptically. “What has Michael told you about me?”

“Michael?”

“Yes, Michael Daley. Your son.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing about the Strangler?”

The air went out of her. The subject had now been introduced and would have to be addressed, finessed, if she was going to maneuver out of the situation. “No.”

Lindstrom offered no response, but something in his posture, a tensioning along his elastic spine, suggested he knew she was lying. They were on different terms now.

“He says,” Margaret elaborated, “there’s more than one strangler.”

“Yes, but one for the old ladies, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t, I don’t know. Most of them, yes, I suppose.”

“Not DeSalvo.”

“No.”

“Me.”

She did not answer.

“Oh, come on, Mrs. Daley. He’s told me as much.”

“I don’t know. I just…”

Lindstrom nodded. He already knew all the answers, knew she was lying, knew why she was lying. None of it mattered at this point. What would happen, would happen. “May I ask you something, Margaret? A personal question?”

Her eyes went to the floor. Sheet linoleum in a pebble pattern of browns and ochers, dull with age.

“Have you ever had it in the ass?”

Her rectum and buttocks contracted. The rest of her, shoulders, neck, backbone, all went slack. She was not really there-this simply could not be happening.

“Have you ever had it in the ass?”

“Oh my God,” she murmured.

“Have you?”

“Oh my God.”

“Well, either you have or you haven’t. It’s a yes-or-no question.”

Her head was bowed. She managed to rustle it back and forth: no.

“Why don’t you get those clothes off?”

“No…no…”

“It’s not so hard.”

“I can’t.”

“You want me to do it?” He put down his glass. “Come over there and do it for you?”

“No.”

“What do you want, then?”

“Want?”

“That’s right. We’re just a couple of old friends here having a chat. You can tell me anything.”

“Oh my God.”

“Just tell me, Margaret. Anything you desire.”

“I want you to please leave.”

“Leave? Just like that?”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“You mean, you know who the Strangler is, the Boston Strangler, but you’ll keep it to yourself? You, a policeman’s wife?”

“I don’t know anything. Some mixed-up kid in some kind of beef with one of my sons…”

He picked up the glass, sipped, and his mouth made a series of puckers as he considered. “Alright, then.”

“You’ll go?”

“On one condition: you tell your son Michael I came around to say goodbye.”

“Where are you going?”

“Parts unknown.”

“Okay. I’ll tell him.”

“One more thing and then I’ll go. I’d like a kiss.”

Her head craned forward slightly, as if she had not heard.

“That’s all. Just a kiss goodbye. Then I’ll go.”

She shook her head.

“Well, then it looks like I’m here for the duration. Shall we get back to our conversation?”

“Just a kiss?”

“A kiss and I’ll go.”

“I have your word?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“One kiss and you’ll go.”

“That’s right.”

She moved in front of him. Lindstrom was younger than Ricky, her youngest, by several years. Maybe it was just his appearance, smooth-skinned, ruddy. He might be half her age. Or less. He smelled of Scotch. She closed her eyes and tipped her head.

“No-no, you kiss me, Margaret. For a count of ten, let’s say. Get my money’s worth.”

She could knee him in the crotch, or run, or search for a weapon. But she would not. She knew she would not do any of those clever, resourceful things people did in movies. It was only a kiss.

She placed her closed lips against Lindstrom’s. One, two, three…

His hand went to the back of her head. His tongue emerged from his lips, thick and eely; it penetrated her mouth. A muffled squeal. He pressed her face against his. The tongue was of a grotesque length. Its surface had a fine nubby grain. The tip of it did something fancy against the roof of her mouth then circled around nearer the gum-line. The broad fleshy body of it flattened itself against her and wiped back and forth, luxuriating.

He let go of her, and she fell back. She thought she might vomit.

He sighed contentedly. “Wasn’t so bad, was it?”

She gave no response.

“Mmmm. Thank you, Margaret.”

“You said you’d go.”

“And so I will.”

They moved toward the kitchen door. He gestured for her to go first. She did not like the thought of him being behind her, but the door was just a few feet away, the whole incident nearly over-she could already see herself ten seconds ahead, relieved, unhurt-and she felt the lure of that so-near moment. It occurred to her, too, that he had gestured her forward exactly the same way in exactly the same spot when he had come to the house the first time.

She went ahead, arms folded. Her tongue mopped the roof of her mouth to scrub away the taste-memory of him. She was disgusted with her body. The filth of him, his spit, his taste, would be piped down her throat into her guts. She would absorb it. But she had to be strong for only a few more seconds, a few more steps.

There was a flash and a hollow sound.

Nothing. An empty moment.

Then she was aware of being on the floor. The hall floor. On her back. She could see up the stairs.

His hands were under her skirt. He was stripping off her nylon stockings. She heard a groggy voice say, “Don’t rip my stockin’s,” and it was a moment before she quite knew that the voice was her own. He tugged the stockings down over her calves, over her heels. Somehow her shoes had already come off.

She screamed.

He punched her face twice. “Don’t scream.”

He sat down heavily on her stomach. She felt the weight of his body oscillate on her stomach as he wound up the stockings together.

Her head was jostled roughly then dropped back down on the floor, hard. She wanted to reach for the back of her head, but he had pinned her arms with his legs.

She felt the nylon rope pull up against the back of her neck as he made the first simple over-under knot, then the rope zipped down tight, it cut into her neck, cinched it shut, and she could not breathe or stand the rocketing pain of it. She thrashed, panicked, and even as she did so she felt him completing the knot, securing the noose.

His weight lifted off her.

She continued to thrash until she could pry her fingers under the nylon and open a little space to gasp a stingy little breath, but already she felt herself being lifted by her hair and pulled up the stairs and she had to kick with her feet to keep her body moving so the top of her head did not get yanked right off.

“Come on, you.”

The stairs banged against her back and her bare heels and she was actually relieved when they reached the smooth upstairs hallway. She kept her legs crab-walking as best she could as she felt her skirt being lowered by the friction of her back and butt against the floor, she felt her shirt untuck and the floor scrape against the bare skin of her lower back.

“Where’s the bedroom!”

He released her hair and she dropped painfully on her shoulder. Her scalp ached. She wondered if the skin that tightly bagged the skull could be separated from it somehow, lifted away from that ball of bone, and whether the two could ever be rejoined as they were before.

She heard the bedroom door open.

Lindstrom made a sound-“Heh”-whose meaning she could not guess and before she could parse that syllable-there was an explosion and Lindstrom staggered back against the wall before her.

She scanned up from his oxblood-red loafers to his khakis where, above the right knee, a red stain had blossomed.

She turned her head, painfully-the nylons-and saw in the darkness of her bedroom, underlighted from the hallway, Michael with his father’s gun. He was ghastly pale, white as marble, as he always was during a migraine attack. In the dim light, shoeless and crazy-haired and wearing his undershirt, he looked like a ghost of himself. Behind him the drawer where the gun was kept was still open, her lingerie spilling out. (It occurred to her that, in Joe Senior’s twenty-three and a half years on the force, it was the first time the gun had ever been fired outside the practice range.) Michael held the gun in one hand, but the weight of it seemed too much for him. It threatened to topple him forward.

Above her, Lindstrom encircled the stain with the fingers of both hands, as if he meant to choke it. But the blossom of red continued to deepen and evolve as he, and she, watched it.

Michael took two unsteady slide-steps toward the bedroom door.

Lindstrom looked from his wound to Michael to Margaret to the gun. He darted off.

Margaret and Michael heard him stomp down the stairs and out the door and away down the street.

Michael took one more slow-motion step in the direction of Margaret before his head rolled to one side and he seemed to glance upward and his body ribboned down to the floor.

Charging up the stairs with Joe, looking up at him from a few steps below with the foreshortened perspective that angle imposes, it occurred to Ricky what an awesome creature Joe really was, a centaur with massive haunches above oddly dainty ankles. He would hardly have been surprised if one of Joe’s sneakers slipped off to reveal a black hoof. Joe had come here to kill Lindstrom. Ricky had no doubt he meant to do it. He had his service pistol with him. If Lindstrom was lucky, Joe would use the gun. For his part, Ricky still was not sure, halfway up the stairs, whether he would help with the killing or prevent it. If he could prevent it, that is, once Joe got started.

Joe kicked in Lindstrom’s door with a single stomp by the door handle. He stood in the doorway panting.

The apartment was empty. All that remained was an old Westinghouse electric fan, unplugged, and a few loose papers on the floor. Kurt Lindstrom was gone.

He would never be seen in Boston again.

Walking on a warm night made Joe think of dying-not afraid, just aware that there could only be so many nights like this, strolling in shirtsleeves, in any one lifespan. So, when he felt a hand grab his upper arm, he was already in a waning mood, prepared, philosophically at least, for the possibility of some Very Bad Thing. And yet he was misled momentarily by the busyness of his surroundings-Boylston Street at Park Square, where a new Playboy Club was under construction-and by the intimacy of the touch-an insinuating wiggle of four fat fingers in the crevice of his armpit-so that when he turned, he was wearing a bemused smile. He was expecting to see a friend.

Instead he found himself face-to-face with one of Gargano’s apes. Joe knew this man. His name was like a birdcall, Chico Tirico. A typical street-soldier type, a slab-faced guinea wiseguy. Tirico was fitter than most of them, though. He had been a heavyweight boxer and stayed in shape. No incipient double chin, no bowling-ball belly dropping out of his shirt. (Gargano himself had been a fighter, too, once upon a time. It was not an unusual background among mob stalkers. The neighborhood boxing gyms were like stud farms. A Golden Gloves kid could always have a muscle job if he wanted it.)

“Hey, cop,” Tirico said.

Joe slapped the guy’s hand away indignantly. He did not like the way it looked, the suggestion that some mook could place him under arrest. He was still a cop, despite everything.

There were three other goons alongside. Alerted by Joe’s gesture, they drew closer.

“Take it easy,” Tirico cooed.

They drew back again, and Gargano came into view. He looked sallow and drugged. Word was that Gargano had been doing heroin for years now, and his habit was getting out of control. His face seemed out of focus; Joe glanced away from him to the grid of red bricks on a wall to be sure his vision was still sharp-that the blurring was indeed in Gargano’s face and not Joe’s eyes.

Gargano said, “Somebody wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“The big boss.”

“Wants to talk to me?”

“That’s right.”

“Bullshit.” Joe gestured with his eyes at the four apes. “Why all the muscle if alls we’re gonna do is talk?”

“It’s just talk, Joe. You have my word.”

“Where?”

“C.C.’s Lounge, right around the corner. You’ll be back in a minute, like nothing ever happened.”

Joe calculated. It was reckless of Gargano to approach him in such a public place, even after dark-a gangster grabbing a cop off a busy downtown street. Joe took it as another sign of his own diminishing life expectancy; Gargano would not risk burning a valuable source if he meant to keep him around much longer. Then again, in a heroin haze Gargano’s erratic behavior might not signal anything at all except his own unraveling. Vinnie The Animal was following a well-worn mob career path: He would go out in a blaze of glory someday, done in by the very wildness that had made him, like Paul Muni in Scarface. But if The Animal had intended to kill Joe, he would not have pulled a stunt like this one. In any case, Gargano had too much muscle on his side. Joe opted for a tactical retreat.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”

“No. Come on, come with us in the car.”

“Pretty crowded car. What, am I gonna ride in the trunk?”

“For fuck’s sake, Joe, I already told you, it’s not like that. I swear.”

“Just the same. Nice night for a stroll.”

Gargano shook his head. People were so mistrustful. “Alright, you stroll, then.”

Chico Tirico gave him a shove. “Stroll, motherfucker.”

Joe let it go.

He walked three blocks through the Combat Zone to C.C.’s Lounge, on Tremont, as Gargano’s black-finned Caddy lurked alongside, tactlessly.

Reassembled there, the group marched through the bar. The early-evening drinkers all turned their heads in silence to watch them pass, the prisoner and his escort.

Down an ancient staircase to a basement office. Grimy, small, windowless. A few chairs, a desk.

Two men waited inside.

Gargano gestured for Joe to go inside, and he did.

The smaller of the two men stood facing him. He was slim and tall, thought not as tall as Joe. Mid-fifties, Italian, with dark thick hair going gray at the sides and in a patch above his forehead. He stood in a theatrically defiant way: arms folded, head tipped back, offering his chin and a Mussolini frown.

“You’re Daley?” the man said.

“Yeah.”

“You know who I am?”

“No.”

“I’m Carlo Capobianco. This is my brother Niccolo.”

Joe had heard of Charlie and Nicky Capobianco. Tonight they were Carlo and Niccolo. They were Italian and Joe was not. At the moment this fact seemed to be all that mattered.

“This is the last time you disrespect me. You hear me? Last fuckin’ time. Your whole fuckin’ family. Your brother the thief steals from me, now you make trouble for me, what am I supposed to do?” He glowered.

“Is this about money?”

“Is this about money?” Capobianco’s face tensed.

“’Cause I can get the money up. I swear.”

Capobianco came forward, suddenly and inexplicably pissed off. He stopped a few steps from Joe so that the disparity in their heights would not be so apparent, and he stood with his chest out and chin up like a gamecock. He spoke fast and loud: “Are you fuckin’ stupid? These Irish fuckin’ cops-what, do you got fuckin’ rocks in your head? Answer me, you got rocks in your head? Or potatuhs? Look at ’m: nine feet tall and nothing but potatuhs in his head. This is what we got, a whole police department full of these backward fuckin’ Paddys. How the fuck do you guys ever fuckin’ catch anyone? You walk around with your hand out and your head up your ass-what I want to know is, how the fuck do you ever catch anyone? Huh? Let me ask you something. How is it when the Italians already ruled the fuckin’ world, a thousand years ago or whatever, you fuckin’ Paddys were still running around in the woods like fuckin’ cavemen, digging in the dirt for something to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You fuckin’ stupid?”

“No.”

“No? No? I hear you’re a fuckin’ idiot. I hear you’re about the stupidest Paddy cocksucker on the police force. And that’s saying something.”

It occurred to Joe that, all things being equal, he could break this greaseball guido midget in half with one hand. But all things were not equal.

Capobianco wiped a curl of spittle at the corner of his mouth. “This is the last time you disrespect me.”

“Charlie.” Nick smiled in a way calculated to soothe both men. He was older and cooler-headed than his brother. He wiggled his finger: Let’s get on with it.

Charlie Capobianco said, “You been told to stay out of the West End?”

Joe was thrown. He was prepared to talk about money. Capobianco would threaten him about his spiraling debt, demand he pay it off or else, and Joe in turn would offer whatever empty promises came to mind. It was an exchange he and Gargano had rehearsed many times already. It was supposed to be about money, not the West End.

“You were told, stay out of there, let it alone.”

“Yeah.”

“Then you get moved out of Station One and they tell you again: Stay out of the West End. And still I got to hear about this dumb fuckin’ Paddy cop running around over there. You take my money? Like the rest of the pig cops in Station One, you take my fuckin’ money?”

“I guess so.”

“So how come when I ask you for something you don’t do it?”

“I don’t understand. You asked me for something?”

“Jesus, you are a dumb fuck. I told you to stay out of the West End. You stupid fuck.”

Joe’s thoughts snagged on the word stupid every time it was repeated. He had to force himself to hear the rest. He rotated his head so that one ear was aimed at Capobianco, to be sure he caught it all and could repeat the remainder of the sentence in his mind minus that word. What the hell was Capobianco ranting about?

“What,” Joe said simply, “do you care about the West End?”

“Never mind what I care. Your job isn’t to think. You’re not smart enough to think. Your job is to fuckin’ do what you’re told.” Charlie Capobianco wandered away from Joe, deeper into the small office. “Just do what you’re told or you’re gonna wind up like your thief brother.”

“What’s this got do with my brother? This has got nothing to do with my brother.”

“No. He’s got enough trouble.”

“He didn’t do nothin’.”

“No? Well, just the same, I wouldn’t stand too close to him. Be a shame to lose the both o’ yuz.”

“You stay the fuck away from my brother.”

“What?” Capobianco was livid again, the switch was thrown. “What did you say to me?”

But Joe was too far gone. Fuck Capobianco. Fuck this whole thing. “I said, stay the fuck away from my brother.” He saw Capobianco’s expression coil again, and knew he had fucked up. But it was too late.

Charlie Capobianco said to his brother, “Get this fuckin’ guy out of here. Get him out.” Then to Joe: “I’m through with you, cop. You understand me? Do you know who I am? You better learn your fuckin’ place. Learn your fuckin’ place. This is the last time you’ll disrespect me. You know what a contract is?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t stand too close to your brother.”

Joe absorbed the warning slowly.

“And stay the fuck out of the West End. This is your last warning. You cost me enough money already. And to answer your other question: it’s always about money. Dumb fuck, what’d you think it was about?”

Joe tended to sleep in short snatches of two or three hours. When he had worked nights, years before, his body had become accustomed to the inside-out schedule: first halfs alternating with second halfs-a six-to-midnight shift one night, midnight to eight A. M. the next-six nights a week, or three cycles. “Short days” and “long days,” cops called them. Sleep no longer correlated to night. You slept when you could for as long as you could, but always too little. Joe’s work schedule had improved after he made detective, but by then he seemed to have lost the ability to sleep deeply. At best, he drifted just beneath the surface of waking. As a result, he thought, he tended not to dream, at least he did not remember his dreams. Dreaming occurred during deep sleep; Joe could not submerge that far.

But tonight he did dream. He dreamed he was climbing into the back seat of a car. A coupe of some kind with a tomato-red interior. He thought it might be the new Bel Air by the way the roofline curved downward to enwrap the back-seat passengers. Someone was holding the driver’s seat forward for him; he could not see who. Joe did not want to be in this car. He could not straighten his neck, the roof was too low. He tried to tip his head but his hair rubbed against the headliner, so he slouched down on the bench seat, only to see the roof drop down even farther. He panicked. He knew that if he stayed in the car, coffined in the back seat, he would die there. He struggled to climb out.

And then he was awake, in his body in his bed in his room, with the window open. No longer afraid. The bedroom was cool. A bluish light from the street illuminated everything, as it always did. “Jesus,” he whispered. He reached behind him and his hand found Kat’s substantial rump.

She had been a nurse when he met her, a big square-jawed girl with a sense of command about her. That was what had first attracted him, not her looks but that air of mastery. She was the kind of girl who got things done, who managed. Joe had always known he was just a knockaround guy, but when he was with her he had felt a little of her competence and gravity. He figured maybe he could manage, too. Not anymore, of course. As Joe had dashed himself against the rocks, his wife’s sensibility had only made him feel the more out of control. But once…once.

He rolled onto his back, ran his hand down the slope of her hip. Her nightgown was cool. She did not stir.

He thought of Capobianco’s words, This is the last time you’ll disrespect me, and wondered whether they were meant as an order (Don’t disrespect me again) or a threat (You won’t get another chance to disrespect me). It was ridiculous, even funny, that he might die without ever realizing he had been warned-like a cow he would be herded into the slaughterhouse, unknowing right to the end. It seemed significant that Capobianco had chosen such ambiguous words. He had left room for interpretation. Also, it did not make sense that Capobianco would arrange a personal audience just to inform Joe he would be killed. Clearly his intention was to bar Joe from the West End, just as Capobianco had said. Yes, Joe had fucked up by back-talking, but volatile guys like Capobianco forgot such things as soon as they calmed down, or were swept up by the next outrage. Yes, Capobianco would get around to killing Joe someday, when he had extracted all the cash and advantage he could extract. But not soon. For now, the one in immediate peril was Ricky. Do you know what a contract is?

Through the open window Joe heard the sounds of the city. Kat stirred under his hand. He waited to see if she would roll away to go on sleeping or roll toward him for warmth. She came to him, lifted her head and laid it on his chest. He squeezed her back, her arm, her tit in an experimental way, reminding himself. She was not what she had used to be. Her strong body was now padded with a quilty layer of fat. But she was still herself, and he was reminded that her bigness had been part of the attraction in the first place. She was built, if not to the scale of his own body, then at least to grander specifications than the perfumed broads he usually chased around, who tottered around on spindly heels to raise themselves up. He felt himself begin to get hard, and it occurred to him that all his “cheating” had actually enhanced his appreciation for Kat, and he congratulated himself on his open-mindedness with regard to women. Sampling other women only made him appreciate his wife all the more. What could be more destructive to a marriage than monogamy? You simply had to handle the issue with discretion, as Joe always had. What Kat didn’t know would never hurt her.

“You awake?” he whispered.

“No.”

“I am.”

She felt him. “Jesus, Joe, you’ve got to be kidding. Now? All this time…”

“Lie back,” he said.

Under his hands she lay half sleeping, and even when she lifted her nightgown over her head he thought she might be sleeping. Her arms were clumsy. Maybe to Kat this was a dream.

It was when he was inside her, surrounded by her body’s warmth, that Joe saw this house without him in it. Kat, Little Joe-dying would mean saying goodbye to them, and they would go on living. Would Kat marry someone else? Where would she live? Would she be happy? And Little Joe. He was nearly fourteen now. What would he remember of his old man ten years on, or twenty? Would he think of his dad every day or not at all? Would thinking of Joe make them happy or sad? Who would they go to when they were in trouble? Margaret, Michael? Joe’s dying would be one last thing he would steal from them.

He faltered, felt himself soften.

“You okay, Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

Kat held his face in her two hands and studied him. “What is it, Joe?”

“Just tired.”

“ Now you’re tired?”

He grinned, expelling air from his nostrils.

“Wakes me up in the middle of the night and then he says he’s tired.”

Joe decided to purge his mind of everything that was outside the four corners of the bed. They were two bodies, one partially inside the other, and there was no need to hump the whole thing up with any more significance than that. There was no need to think at all. Animals died by the millions every day. It meant nothing. Why think about it?

A warm night in June.

There were a half dozen women at the corner of Washington and LaGrange. They reposed against the facade of the adjacent building, or smoked, or drifted to the curb and slugged one hip out toward the street, waiting for a car to ease alongside or a pedestrian to make eye contact.

To Joe, some of them weren’t bad-looking broads, and he wondered what grim secret biography could explain this or that one’s becoming a streetwalker. Certainly there were a couple he would consider giving a poke, under different circumstances. Joe was seated in his car farther down Washington Street, a half block from them. He dragged on a cigarette; it tasted like nothing, as if they had stuffed it with straw instead of tobacco. He had no interest in leaving the car to disperse the hookers, let alone arrest them. Didn’t give a shit. Hookers. Waste of time, the whole thing, Vice. Even the name-Vice. What a fuckin’ joke.

One girl, with a very pale and painted face, came to the corner to glare at Joe and flick her cigarette butt in his direction, then she returned to the wall and resumed the group’s attitude of boredom and insolence.

Joe let his head tip forward. Maybe he would sleep. Five, ten minutes of shuteye was all he needed, and no sooner had he decided to nap than his mind switched itself off. That was how it had been lately: He was always on the verge of sleeping, he could give in to it at any moment. He snapped awake once, but he was too heavy-headed to resist it and he closed his eyes again. The air was cool, the windows open. It was nearly nine but not quite dark in the car; he had parked by a streetlight, some of which light illuminated his eyelids. No matter. He could still doze awhile.

He heard street sounds. Snippets of conversation came in clearly, then dopplered away. Cars grumbled past, each one creating a whisk of warm wind in the open window as it went by. Somewhere a man laughed loudly, “That’s right! You gut me! You gut me!” Joe relaxed but did not sleep.

At some point the ambient noise became muffled, blocked. There was an adjustment in the atmosphere, a drop in pressure.

He opened his eyes.

The street scene in his windshield was essentially unchanged. But no pedestrians were nearby. The hookers had drifted around the corner up LaGrange, toward Good Time Charlie’s, out of view.

There was a car parked beside Joe’s. He was aware of it before he actually turned to see it, a long black-hooded car.

A voice: “Hey, cop.”

Joe looked to his right across the passenger seat to see Vinnie Gargano double-parked beside him, so close, the car doors nearly touching, just a few inches between the windowsills. At the same time Gargano seemed far away, in a separate space, tanked inside his own car. Gun.

N Gargano hesitated, perplexed, as if he did not understand what his eyes had just told him: big Joe Daley’s expression had not changed, but a neat dark circle had winked open on his forehead. It appeared so suddenly and-the bullet’s flight being unobservable-inexplicably that for a moment it seemed like a magic trick. The hole seemed to have come from inside him. Daley’s body slumped back, and the hole filled with blood which ran out thick and gleaming as poured paint. Gargano recovered himself, remembered he had work to do-his jobs had become increasingly sloppy and frenzied, the trigger-hysteria getting the better of him-and he emptied his clip into Daley’s body and sped off.

Long day. Michael leaned back, eyes shut, one toe poised on the ledge of an open drawer. The chair reclined with little metallic ticks, his weight transferred from his buttocks to the wings of his back, verte-brae popped into line with agreeable thumps, and when he had found the right balance he removed his foot from the desk and lay there like John Glenn in the Friendship 7, aimed upward into space, and he decided it was the first moment of the day that he had actually enjoyed. This chair might just have been the one good thing about working for the A.G. Maybe he would take it with him when he left. Or maybe he would never leave; he could just hang on here in a dingy state office, a lifer, the type that knew the precise date when his pension would vest.

Outside, something changed.

There was a modulation in the white noise of the city. A shrill siren whined, and another. A car drag-raced, making a perilous clatter in a city of close streets. Michael went to the window. Night had fallen. He saw nothing, of course, nothing but the yellow-brick rear of the State House, the ranks of office windows. But he knew by the change in pitch that something was wrong, some disaster, maybe close by, reflected off the maze-walls of the city. The air thrummed with it.

Heavy steps in the hall, the jingling of keys and equipment, and Conroy was in the doorway, grim and massive. “Bad news, Michael. We got to go. It’s Joe.”

“What?”

“Come on, we got to go. It’s bad.”

“What happened?”

“It’s-Look, there’s no other way to say it. I’m sorry-Joe’s dead.”

“What!”

“He got shot. That’s all they know. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Come on, Michael, right now, we got to go.”

And this was how suddenly it happened. This was how Joe died, for Michael, with those two electric words: He’s dead.

Then Michael was following Conroy down the hallways. Blood rushed in his ears. Objects seemed to swim-office doors with pebbled-glass windows; a janitor with a mop bucket on wheels; smudgy photos of stern, bushy-bearded politicians from the last century.

Out into the street, where Conroy had an unmarked cruiser waiting. For some reason Michael went to get in the back seat, as if the black Ford was a taxi, and Conroy had to tell him to sit in front. “Come on, Mike, you gotta keep your shit together, Mike. Your mother needs you here.” Michael did as he was told, he sat in the front seat, and even now he detested Brendan Conroy-the worldly paternal tone with its hint that Michael would play novice to Conroy’s mentor; the repetition of his name, Mike, Mike, Mike, as if he had learned the habit in a Dale Carnegie course. Call me Michael, you prick. But he was too bewildered to maintain his contempt.

Conroy rushed the car down the back slope of Beacon Hill and shot across Bowdoin Square.

Michael thought: He should have turned right, to make his way west to Boston City Hospital. Joe must have been taken to Mass. General instead. Maybe when a cop got shot even the remorseless Yankees there would find it in their hearts to let an Irishman in the back door. But again, Michael’s cynicism evaporated almost immediately. He could not hold a thought in his head. His mind continually emptied itself.

The siren made its clarinet wail, and a blue flasher strobed on the dashboard.

“They found him on Washington Street,” Conroy was half-shouting, “right in his car, right there on the street. Can you believe that? I mean, can you believe the balls on these guys? The unmitigated balls on these guys.” He clenched the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock, arms stiff.

Once they crossed Cambridge Street, the view through the windshield went black, like looking out over water at night. Then the buildings beside them disappeared and they sailed off the map, off the street grid, into the empty space of the old West End site. The road faltered. Conroy killed the siren and the blinking blue lights. They bounced over the rocky surface.

“Jesus, Brendan, what the hell, where are you going?”

“Hospital.”

“ This way?”

“Yeah, sorry, I know. Shortcut. Cambridge Street’s a mess. Just let me drive. We’ll be there in a minute. You alright, Michael?”

The answer was no, he was not alright, he was very definitely not alright. A late night at the office had exploded into a catastrophe, and the strangeness, the shock of it, left him feeling unmoored, as if that reclining chair in his office really had been the Friendship 7 and Michael had been rocketed into outer space. He covered his mouth with his left hand and repeated, Joe is dead, Joe is dead, to convince himself of it. How recently had he taken a similar ride, in Joe’s car, to bring similar news to Ricky after Amy was murdered? Six months before. Then, the mantra had been: Amy’s dead, Amy’s dead…What the brain cannot fathom, it simply rejects as untrue.

In front of them stretched a vast empty field, the fifty acres of the old West End razed to the dirt. The light of the moon and the surrounding city illuminated the ground with pale fluorescence. A rubble field of rocks and sandy soil and construction scrap, no trees, no roads. Before them the desolate irradiated landscape sloped gently away to sea level, a quarter mile away, where it ran out into the darkness. Looking over it you could imagine some conquering army had swept across and consumed it. The only things they had left behind were the enormous mounds of building materials heaped up like cairns, bristling with two-by-fours, the remains of demolished buildings. On the far side of the wasteland, lights burned in clusters at Mass. General and, farther away, at the construction site of JFK Park, Farley Sonnenshein’s dream city of the future. The New Boston.

The car yawed and hopped over the rocks. Stones clattered in the wheel wells and chinked against the bottom of the car. Here and there, Conroy had to slow to a crawl to avoid bottoming out on the debris.

Michael tried to gauge his location, but the streets had been completely effaced. So he surrendered to disorientation and simply gawked at what was close: the haystacks of two-by-fours that rose to four and five times the height of the car; the scraps strewn on the ground, concrete, metal, brick; the odd personal item, a mangled baby carriage, a shoe. And stones-stones everywhere, the same rocky untillable soil the ancient pilgrims had found here. He thought-as everyone thought and everyone commented, because the memory was so near, the comparison so irresistible-that it all looked exactly like the old newspaper photos of bombed-out cities in Europe. And this thought, too, led back to Joe. Joe who had marched across Europe all the way to Berlin, only to die here. Joe was dead.

“Who did it? Are there witnesses?”

“Yeah. But don’t you worry about that, Michael. We’ll get the guy. You worry about your family.”

“I should have done something, shouldn’t I? I don’t know; you know? I should’ve helped him.”

“Can’t think like that, boyo, can’t do that to yourself.”

“I should’ve-”

“Nothing anyone could do. Joe got himself into it. It’s nobody else’s fault. It’s over now anyway.”

Conroy picked his way over the rubble. In some places where the roads had been, the ground still bore their impression. On the ghost road of Chambers Street, he could move a little faster, briefly, until it vanished. He aimed the car toward the lights of Mass. General, tacking left and right around obstructions. Near the middle of the expanse St. Joseph’s Church stood alone, islanded. A hunkered-down Romanesque church-it looked more like a mausoleum for a secret society than a church. St. Joe’s had not been designed for splendid isolation. It was a city church, meant to be hemmed in by narrow streets. Now its plain sandstone walls looked unfinished. The car beetled past it and kept on, bearing north through the debris field.

“What do you mean, Joe got himself into it?”

“Huh?”

“Joe got himself into what? How do you know?”

“I just know, is how I know. It’s no big secret.”

“No? So who else knows?”

“Michael? Jesus, would you give it a rest? The hell does it matter now?”

As they neared the northern edge of the rubble field, the lights of Mass. General approached and, to the right, the JFK Park construction site. Construction was already under way on two of the apartment towers. Framed with I-beams that formed ladders and cubes in the air, the towers seemed impossibly high. Barely begun, they were already among the tallest buildings in the city.

Conroy jerked the car toward the construction site. The rear wheels spun out, and the car fishtailed. Rocks chunked off the undercarriage.

“The fuck, Brendan!”

“Hang on.”

“What are you doing! The hospital’s-”

Conroy skidded through an open gate into the construction site, among the skeletal towers. He drove clumsily, hampered by the darkness and the narrow beam of the headlights and the rough surface.

The car slid to a stop at the edge of an enormous pit which had been excavated for yet another apartment tower. A bubble of pale light illuminated the pit, cast by buzzing portable arc lights.

The buildings in JFK Park were named for famous local politicians, in keeping with the presidential theme. This particular hole in the ground would eventually become a tower called Adams. For now it was just a crater, about half the size of a city block and two or three stories deep. The foundation walls were not poured yet; the pit was lined with corrugated steel walls. A dozen I-beams rose above the pit like ships’ masts. These were the steel piles that would carry the weight of the building in the soft subsoil. A crane loomed, and a towering pile driver to ram them into the ground.

“What the fuck is this?” Michael asked. “What are you doing?”

Conroy bolted out of the car.

Michael saw a man walking toward them. Round-shouldered bull of a guy in mod slacks and short jacket zipped over a bulging belly. He tossed away a shovel.

Conroy dogtrotted around the front of the car, through the field of the headlights.

The second man produced a pistol from inside his jacket.

Michael struggled to connect these things, to make sense of it, but already the door was flying open beside him and Conroy was tugging on his arm saying, “Get out here, get out here,” and he heard this other man say, “Come on, get him the fuck out of there already. We don’t have all fuckin’ night.”

Michael dove toward the steering wheel and grabbed it, first the ridged plastic wheel and then the steering column itself, and he hugged it, held on. He heard himself say, “No! No! No!”

The second man came around the car to the driver’s side and smashed Michael’s hands with the butt of his pistol until Michael’s grip loosened and he was dragged across the bench on his belly, out of the car-his forehead banged against the doorsill-and he lay on the ground, shivering with cold and shock and fright.

Above him, Conroy grimaced like a man getting down to an unpleasant chore.

The second man was coming back around the car, crossing through the headlights as Conroy had a moment before, and-impossible-racking his pistol, and it was that sound, the metallic clack-clack of the slide that obliterated all thought and sent Michael scrambling ahead on all fours, toward the pit. It was impossible-impossible-impossible. It was just impossible to die. But Joe was dead. Is this what Joe had felt in his last moment, this frantic denial of one’s own annihilation-impossible!-together with a subsiding sense that one was already gone?

The man was coming on, the gun extended now in one hand, expressionless, mindless.

Michael clambered forward fast, beating ahead on hands and knees. The soil was cold and wet under his hands, it seeped through the knees of his wool pants. Pebbles bit his palms. Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand, then he set his left hand down on-nothing-air-and the hand went down into the hole, and his arm and shoulder went down after it, then his head was pulled in too. The lip of the steel retaining wall scraped his belly and he tumbled over it, into the black space in the pit, and he was in the air, turning.

Conroy said, “Jesus. Get down there and finish this. For Christ’s sake. For Christ’s sake.”

The second man glowered. “Go finish it yourself, pig.”

“I’ve got a homicide scene to get to.”

Michael plummeted through darkness, wind drumming past his ears. The steel retaining wall invisible but perceptibly close; he could sense it beside him. There was a moment of weightlessness, no up or down-aware he was moving through space at fantastic speed, but with no sense which direction he was traveling. Where was the ground? He flailed, then stiffly he dropped through an atmosphere of thickening blackness and wintry cold.

Then the earth drove into him.

On the floor of the pit, thirty feet below the surface, gloom collected in corners and pooled at the base of the high walls. The darkness in these shaded places had a texture, a moist blue density so thick you wanted to dip your finger in it. Overhead, the steel piles tapered upward. The blue dome of the sky was illuminated from beneath by the city’s incandescent light, and some of that radiance washed back down into the pit, even reached the floor, weakly. But none penetrated as far as the corners.

The man with the gun foraged along the base of the steel wall. He paused, looked up its sheer face to estimate his own position and the spot where Michael Daley had gone over the side. He figured that the body ought to be here, right here at his feet, crumpled, dead or dying. But he must have gotten it wrong; again and again he looked up to recalculate. In the gloom, dim silhouettes came forward which might have been bodies in various back-broken poses. But each, upon closer inspection, turned out to be something else, a rolled-up canvas tarp, a toss-pile of debris, or nothing at all, just a wrinkle in the darkness. Shit, what he wouldn’t have given for a flashlight! Without one, there was no choice but to work his way along the wall, pausing now and then to crane his head forward for a better look or to nudge at something with his toe.

A rock chattered nearby. To his left. A few feet away, low in the shadows.

He jerked his gun around and fired, fired, fired, eager for release, as if he had been holding the bullets uncomfortably in his body.

The noise was deafening. The corrugated crazy-angled steel walls echoed the sounds and, it became clear, the bullets themselves.

The man cringed at the ricochets, crouched down, and it was in this position that he felt his right shinbone crack in two, heard the dry snap, then-after a delay, an extended moment-he felt a burst of pain in his leg. He looked down to see his shin grotesquely segmented, his leg two-kneed like an insect’s. He stared, uncomprehending. His right foot lay flat on the ground, instep down. It reminded him of an empty boot dropped on its side. He understood, briefly, that the rock had been tossed to distract him, but already he was toppling onto his back.

Above him, Michael Daley hoisted a sledgehammer a second time. Michael shouted in pain as his arms reached ten o’clock and his shoulder-smashed in the fall-dialed upward. The pain made him dizzy. But the long-handled sledgehammer seemed to know where it was going, as if its design compelled it along a predetermined arc, and so Michael lassoed it above his shoulder and brought it down on the man’s upper chest, just below the hollow of his neck.

The blow shook the man’s body. His arms and legs jumped.

Michael tugged the sledge but it stuck, or seemed to. The illusion held for a moment-it felt like the hammer was sunk in the man’s chest, like an ax head in a fat log-until Michael realized what had actually happened: His own shoulder had failed. He could not budge his right arm, let alone the weight of the sledgehammer. The impact with the ground minutes before had spread open the bones of the shoulder, and now he could feel the displacement in his own skeleton, the ball of the humerus dislodged, grinding the rim of the socket, the arm dangling light and unsprung. The pain, though, was not confined to the area of the jumbled bones. It was general, radiant, a cold electrical current that chilled his entire side. The last two fingers of his hand tingled, as did his neck. Silently he chanted his old migraine prayer: I am not my body; I am in my body. He would master the pain.

With great effort, the man rolled onto his elbows and scraped forward, apparently unaware of the gun he had dropped or the heavy sledgehammer sliding off his body. His breathing was clutched and whispery.

Michael limped around him, crouched, and demanded, “Where’s Conroy?”

The man belly-crawled a few feet toward the center of the pit. For a moment he did not move, then he raised up on all fours and pawed ahead. Stopped. He arched his back, opened his mouth wide, and released a gush of vomit with no more effort than a dog opening its mouth to drop a ball at its master’s feet.

Michael picked up the gun. Surely it had been emptied, but he did not know how to check. He gathered up the sledgehammer as well. (Should he leave the tool in the pit where he had found it? Mix it in among the others left here by the workmen? Or take it away to avoid leaving evidence?) With these implements, the gun in his right hand, sledgehammer in his left, he felt absurdly well armed and capable. He felt himself grow stronger under their influence.

The injured man was stock-still, on hands and knees. His breathing was shallow.

“Where’s Conroy?”

No response.

Michael raised the gun uncertainly. Where to place it? The man’s head was bowed, so Michael pressed the nose of the gun against the back of his scalp where it nestled in the dense black plush of his hair. “Who are you?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Vi-Vincent Gargano.”

Michael paused. Until now he had known Gargano’s name and reputation but had never seen him. Vincent The Animal Gargano. Holy shit.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

No response.

“Where’s Conroy?”

Gargano lay in the mud, silent.

“Is he here?”

“No.”

Michael’s finger tensioned the trigger, but he paused. “Is Joe Daley really dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Who killed him?”

“I did, you d-” Gargano wet-coughed, then labored to suck in a shallow, congested breath. “Dumb fuck. I did the both of ’em.”

“The both of…who?”

“I clipped your old man, too. Last year. Now I did the other. Ha! Two Joe Daleys. I-” He did not finish, or could not.

Michael snapped the trigger back decisively. The gun hopped in his hand with a springy clack. Empty. He tossed it away.

“Can’t even f-can’t even fuckin’ count.”

“Is anyone here with you?”

No response.

Michael shook his head. He felt a lethal sense of detachment. He was indifferent to the man at his feet, to consequences, to his own former self. The killing mood. He tugged the sledgehammer up and guided it through its parabolic course again-he yelled again as the handle lifted his arms excruciatingly-and he brought it down squarely on the small of Gargano’s back, where the belt of his jacket had pulled up to expose a bulge of soft flab and a cirrus cloud of black body hair. The impact made a fleshy smack.

Gargano’s limbs held him up a moment, then he collapsed.

“Are you alone here?”

Gargano wheezed.

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah.”

Michael sat down carefully in the dirt. Just lowered himself down. The hammer moved off his lap, drawn away by the weight of its heavy head. He cradled his injured arm with his good one, holding it across his belly. In this position the pain was reduced almost to nothing, although the nerves still shivered with the memory of it. His mouth was particled with dirt and stones. A raw scrape burned down his cheek. On the right side of his scalp was a cool wet sensation, as if a flap had been opened and the interior of his head lay exposed to the air. It was not painful. Far from it, the breezy window in his head, if it was that, was rather pleasant.

He closed his eyes and imagined those footsteps again, shick-shick-shick-shick-shick, whisking along the pavement. He dreamed Joe Senior sprinting down that alley as Conroy dropped back, with a grimace of Judas’s remorse on his face. Joe Senior coming around that corner, scuffing to a stop, confronted by a gun, the four-shot derringer, panning up to the face of-this man, Vincent Gargano.

Michael struggled to his feet, shielding his injured arm. With his good hand, he pat-frisked Gargano’s body.

Nearby a hole had been freshly dug, a deep tube drilled straight down in the earth to receive the next pile. The piles were arranged in a grid; the next would be planted here. A crane and an enormous pile driver loomed above it. Michael stood over the hole and looked down. He could see ten feet or so, after that it fell away into darkness. Michael knew about these piles. Everyone who worked downtown did. When the piles were being driven, windows shook in offices a half mile away and people kept their windows closed to muffle the raucous clanging. Gargano had intended to dump Michael’s body in this hole. Tomorrow morning, according to the plan, with each smash of the pile driver, Michael would be rammed down and down.

For now, the scene was quiet, so quiet that Michael could hear the wind fluting softly past the piles. He dropped a pebble into the hole to gauge its depth. He didn’t hear it land.

Gargano gasped. He said something which Michael could not hear until Michael stood right over him: “I c-can’t breathe.”

“Why,” Michael said, “did you do this? Why me?”

“I c-can’t breathe.”

“Why me?”

“Orders.”

“From who?”

“Capobianco.”

“Capobianco? But why me? Why me?”

“Conroy said-”

Gargano’s corpulent body shuddered. When it stopped, he said in a breathy rasp, “Conroy come to Capobianco…he said you knew…said you knew about the cop, your old man. Said you accused him right to his face. You even told him you thought Capobianco ordered it. That’s not something you say out loud.”

“So Capobianco ordered the hit on my old man? Why? What did he ever do?”

“Look around you, you d-dumb fuck.”

“I don’t understand.”

Gargano sniffed. He turned his head slowly. “You’re standing in money. These people are making fucking millions. Fortunes. Fortunes. ”

“What’s that got to do with Capobianco?”

“It’s his money.”

And finally, by degrees, Michael saw it. He saw it. Gangsters not just working construction but doing the strong-arm work to clear the neighborhood for demolition, roughing up the holdouts, rolling up the lame and the halt and the stubborn-work that could take months, even years if it was left to the government. Delinquenti, Mrs. Cavalcante had called them. They say, “You gotta go, Mrs. C, you gotta go. It’s not safe for you here no more.” Capobianco had deployed his troops to evacuate the West End. That some of the soldiers happened also to be policemen was an incidental fact. Cops had acted like gangsters because they were gangsters-they were on Capobianco’s pad, paid to protect his interests. It all made sense only if Capobianco had an investment in the West End, because Charlie Capobianco didn’t do anything, didn’t even cross the street, except for money. He worshiped money as only a truly poor kid would. He wanted this project built, by any means necessary, and for reasons that had nothing to do with some fatuous fantasy of a New Boston. Charlie Capobianco did not give a Chinaman’s fart about Boston, new or old.

“How much does Capobianco have invested in all this?” Michael asked.

But Gargano was weakening. He lay flat on his stomach and his torso moiled about in the mud. His jaw chewed the air a moment until words came out: “I-I can’t breathe. I need a hospital.”

“You’re not going to any hospital.”

Gargano looked up at him with an expression of spite which softened, second by second, into spiteful submission.

“How big a piece of this did Capobianco take?”

“The fuck should I know?”

“What did it have to do with my father?”

“Conroy said-Conroy said he was gonna blow it up.”

“Blow it up how? My father wasn’t the type. He never squawked about cops on the sleeve before.”

“He wanted out. Said he didn’t work for Capobianco, didn’t want the money. They asked him to do some things; he said no. Didn’t want to go any further. All of a sudden he don’t want to go any further? Shh! After all those years he took Mr. Capobianco’s money? Now he’s gonna blow it all up, this chiacchierone? Nobody was gonna let that happen. If Daley had went and ratted about cops on the pad in the West End, or Mr. Capobianco having his fingers in the West End, he would have took down this whole thing. What politician is gonna stand up for a buildin’ owned by Charlie Capobianco? And everybody wants these buildin’s to go up. Everybody. The city, the feds, the developers. Too much money to stop it. Too much fuckin’ money. Your old man was like you: wasn’t smart enough to keep his fuckin’ mouth shut.”

“And Amy?”

“What Amy?”

“Amy Ryan. The reporter.”

“Oh. Whatever. She was gonna write it. Loved crooked-cop stories, this fuckin’ bitch, that’s what Conroy says. Course Conroy didn’t give a shit about nothing except himself anyways; he just didn’t want her writing his name in the papers. That piece of shit wouldn’t last a week in Concord without his badge. So he comes back and says we got to clip her, too. Otherwise she’s gonna spill the whole thing in the newspapers, and, y’know, prob’ly the whole project gets stopped. So we did. We hit her too. No choice.”

“Who…killed her? All the things they did to her?”

“That was Conroy’s idea. Dress it up like the Strangler, he said. He gave us all the details, all this shit we were supposed to do, tie a bow around her neck, whatever. He knew the newspapers’d go crazy for it.”

“And the broom handle? Conroy did not give you that; the Strangler never did it. Whose idea was that?”

“Mine.”

Michael nodded, accepting this boast. The sadistic indifference of it.

He hefted the sledgehammer again, patiently. The hammerhead was cast iron, barrel-shaped. Its weight pulled Michael’s arms into a rigid V. Together with the dangling hammer they formed a Y, and the Y rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A nerveless energy began to build, fed by the rocking and the vision of Amy crucified on her bed.

“And Joe, my brother? What’d he do? He told me he was helping you. Why kill him? He was already on your side, you already had him.”

“You can’t have a cop know that much about your business, see it from the inside. Longer it goes, the bigger the risk. Whole thing was crazy. Someday he’d have burned us. End of the day, a cop is a cop. He woulda woke up, someday. He walked away with too much of Mr. Capobianco’s money anyways. He was lucky he stuck around as long as he did. Dumb shit.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I even know Joe’s really dead?”

“Bullet in the forehead,” Gargano said. “Check it out, you’ll see. Third eye-keep the other two shut.”

“And the gun?”

“You just threw it over there somewhere.”

Michael surveyed the massive pit. The chilly gloom. The forest of piles rising overhead. This place was not part of the city, he felt. It was not part of the earth.

Gargano tortoised forward on his elbows a few inches before laying his head back down, exhausted. “My throat. I think you…”

“Why in the hell,” Michael said, “would Capobianco put his money in this? Since when is he in construction? What does he know about it?”

“Nothing,” Gargano said. “But he runs a cash business, and he can only put so much on the street. He’s got to put it somewhere. He needed a legit investment, a big one. You know how much cash he pulls in? More than you can imagine. Your dad was a cop? Pff, believe me, you can’t imagine.”

“Try me.”

“It’s so much fuckin’ money, the state’s gonna start up its own lottery. You believe that? All these years the government tries to get Capobianco, then they turn right around and go into the numbers business. That’s how much money is in it.”

“And Sonnenshein, how much does he know?”

“Sonnenshein doesn’t know shit. The money’s invested without Capobianco’s name on it, through a trust or whatever. Capobianco always owns things through trusts so the feds can’t take it.”

“So why’s Capobianco interfering? He’s already invested. Why not just watch the project go forward?”

“With that much money riding on it? You don’t know Mr. Capobianco. He don’t take those kind of chances. He’s gonna protect his investment. These buildin’s are goin’ up.” Gargano faltered. He coughed, then spat in an intricate way. “Mr. Capobianco don’t bet. That’s the secret. The book never loses, only the suckers.”

Another fit of racking coughs tossed Gargano’s body. When it was done he lowered a thread of drool from his mouth until it adhered to the ground, like a spider launching a filament out of itself.

Michael laid the hammerhead on the back of Gargano’s head.

Gargano shook it away and dragged himself a few inches.

Michael rested the hammer on Gargano’s head again.

Gargano began to snort in angry dumb protest.

Michael tamped twice, lightly, as if setting a nail in a board before driving it in.

Out front a cruiser and an unmarked car, a detective’s car, were double-parked.

A uniform cop stood guard at the front door, one of the bulls from the nearby stationhouse. He looked Michael up and down.

“This is my mother’s house,” Michael offered.

“Go on in.”

Michael was no stranger to police uniforms, of course. Monkey suits, Joe Senior had called them. Still, in the presence of this uniform Michael hesitated.

“You okay, sir?”

“Yeah.”

The cop opened the screen door for him.

And so it would go, Michael thought. There would be no reckoning for what had happened in that pit. No one would ever know. Because Michael was wearing a uniform too: clean khakis, a clean button-down shirt. (He had stopped at his apartment to wash up and change clothes.) To all appearances he was a grieving brother and a dutiful son. Not a murderer at all. What had he expected this cop to see?

Inside he found Margaret and Kat in the living room and he bent to kiss them. Kat’s eyes were red rimmed, her complexion splotchy. Little Joe sat stone-faced, absently turning a penknife in his hand. Michael bent to kiss him, too, though the teenager did not move to offer his cheek so Michael lightly kissed the crown of his head, with its brush of short soft hair.

“Where’s Ricky?” he asked quietly.

“In the kitchen,” Margaret said.

“Is he okay?”

“Why don’t you go ask him?”

Michael nodded. They didn’t know what he meant; that was his answer. Ricky had not been hurt. Even Ricky had no idea what had gone on in the pit. Michael alone knew everything. How close Michael had come, how close.

He drifted into the kitchen, where Ricky leaned against the counter, arms folded, speaking in murmurs with Tom Hart.

Hart, seeing Michael’s blank expression and apparently misperceiving the shock of a victim there, came across the room to lay a consoling hand on Michael’s shoulder.

Michael flinched at the contact. “Sorry, Tom. Hurt my shoulder the other day. Still a little sore, I guess.”

Ricky’s eyes narrowed.

Hart spluttered awhile about how sorry he was, he didn’t have all the right words, Joe was a heckuva guy, just a heckuva guy, and he didn’t deserve a goddamn thing like this, and of course it wouldn’t bring Joe back but they were going to find the guy who did this thing if it took the rest of Hart’s goddamn life.

Michael thanked him. There was a silent moment during which Michael wondered again whether the detective could sense something was wrong.

“I know it’s a terrible time,” Hart said tentatively. “I hate like hell to do this, you know. But you know how these things go, Mike. The first few hours, you know.”

Margaret drifted into the kitchen, then Kat. They knew what was coming, they’d been through it already. Margaret crossed one arm across her belly, and with the opposite hand she covered her mouth, as if she knew, as if she already knew, what Michael was going to say.

“You know how I feel about the lot of you,” Hart was saying. “You too, Mike. But I’m on the job, you know.”

“It’s okay, Tom. Ask what you got to ask.”

“Okay. Okay, then. You know the question, Mike: Is there anything you can tell me about what happened to your brother tonight?”

Michael felt a little grip in the muscles of his jaw.

“Anything at all?”

“No.”

“You’re sure, Michael? Sometimes the smallest thing-”

“No. Nothing.”

“What about the thing we talked about, Amy Ryan and-?”

“Alright then, Tom,” Margaret broke in, “you got your answer. You don’t need to give him the third degree.”

Hart hesitated. A policeman’s wife would not be surprised by the questions. He glanced back at Margaret then at Michael.

But Margaret insisted. “It’s been a hard enough night for everyone. Just let us alone now, Tom. This is a family time. I’m sure you’ve got a long night ahead o’ yuz, too.”

Hart held Michael’s eyes in his own for a long moment. Then: “Yeah. Okay, I’ll leave you folks alone. I’m sorry, you know, I’m real sorry for your loss. I guess you’ve had your share.”

“Thank you, Tom,” Margaret said. “You go on now and do your job.”

“We’ll keep a cop out front, Margaret, just in case. All night, if you want.”

“Go.”

From the kitchen door Margaret watched the Homicide detective let himself out. When the Daleys were safely alone, she went to the sink to wet a dishrag. She came to Michael’s side, draped the towel over her index finger, and wiped Michael’s neck below the right ear. Inspecting the towel, she frowned, then showed Michael a red-brown smear. “Is this what I think it is, Michael?”

He nodded.

“Who did this to you?”

“It’s not mine.”

Next morning.

The ground trembled under Michael’s feet. Vibrations entered the soles of his shoes and shivered his legs, his trousers, his testicles.

“Hey!” a construction worker shouted to make himself heard through the concussed air. “Hahd hats only!” He pointed at his yellow helmet then jiggled one upturned thumb: Get lost.

Michael gave him a friendly little uncomprehending wave. Just a dumb-ass lawyer with his coat flipped over his shoulder, shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows. Just some dumb-ass enjoying the spring morning and the sunshine and the spectacle of a pile driver.

That gorgeous pile driver! The clocklike regularity of its movements. The slow ascent of the dropweight, a little hitch, then the weight released to ride down a chute and crash into the I-beam. Each blow rammed the massive pile a few inches farther into the ground. Each clang rattled in Michael’s ears and sent those tuning-fork shivers up his legs. All night, he had worried the corpse would erupt out of the ground the moment the pile driver began its work. He had envisioned the construction stopped, the site teeming with cops. But here it was. Not a cop in sight, nothing out of place. Workers shuffled about, came and went-with no idea what they were really doing. Which was this: they were ramrodding the body of Vinnie “The Animal” Gargano down into the earth forever.

Michael fantasized the dead man under the bottom of the pile, speared, pinned to bedrock. The truth, no doubt, was not so picturesque. Boston does not sit on bedrock like New York; the subsoil in Boston is mostly muck. The body would roll with the soil’s turbulence or grind along the side of the I-beam. But those were technicalities, mere facts. Who cared? In Michael’s mind, the building would foot down square on Vinnie Gargano for a hundred years.

Yet for all that, on the morning after, Michael still did not feel much of anything about Gargano. Certainly not remorse. Gargano was dead-murdered, alright; call it what you want-but he wouldn’t be missed or even remembered. Someday, no doubt, Michael would forget, too. He would forget the jet of blood that splashed him like warm bathwater, he would forget the way the corpse rolled willingly headfirst into that deep hole. Someday, Michael would gaze up at Farley Sonnenshein’s completed white tower, silent as a pyramid, and it would not seem strange that a man lay underneath it. We are promiscuous forgetters.

At Margaret’s house, they would be waiting for him. Another family meeting, another wake and another funeral to plan. Well, let them wait a while more. Joe would have understood: You do not bury your dead until the battle is over.

Before leaving, Michael took a deep contented breath. When had daylight ever looked so clear, or the sun felt so fine as it reached through the morning chill to warm his forehead? When had this grubby old city ever looked so rare? The priests, of course, would inform the Daleys that Joe had gone on to a better place. But a morning like this, Michael thought, gave the lie to the sanctimony of priests. Lay out a priest on his deathbed, let him feel the danger approach, its wings beating close, and watch how he fights.

Charlie Capobianco glared. “You believe this guy? Are you threatening me?”

Michael shook his head.

“Hey, you speak American, you fuck? I asked you a question. Are you threatening me?”

“No. Sir.”

“You come in here, to my place of business, and give me some story about I got money in this thing, and I did this and that in the West End, and to top it all off I had your brother and your father killed-and you’re not threatening me?”

“No.”

“Then what in the fuck do you want?”

“I’m asking you to let us out. My brother Ricky and me, the both of us-just let us walk away. That’s all we want.”

They were in Capobianco’s shabby Thatcher Street office. Michael sat in a vinyl chair. Charlie Capobianco stood nearby, glowering, chin tipped up. Charlie’s brother Niccolo listened from a couch nearby. Consigliere Nick was keeping his distance, in both senses.

“What are you shakin’ for?” Charlie said.

“I’m not shakin’.”

“You are. I see you. You get all this from Gargano?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would he tell you anything?”

“He was hurt. Maybe he thought he was dying.”

“Why would he think that?”

“He was hurt pretty bad.”

“Who hurt him?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Ah, fuck Gargano. He can take care of himself. But you can’t fuck me, hear me, Paddy? Your brother owes me money. He took those stones. He’s gonna pay me my fuckin’ money.”

“He says he didn’t take them.”

“He can say he’s a fuckin’ elephant-doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“He says he didn’t take them.”

Capobianco sat down next to Michael and leaned in close. His breath had an eggy stink. “Why would I do this for you, some Paddy off the street? I don’t know you.”

“You let us out, you keep your money. I’ll take the whole story to my grave.”

“I could make that happen sooner than you think.”

“I’ve made arrangements. A reporter has the story, someone I know, in case I go to my grave any too soon. If that story comes out, you’ll lose all your money one way or another. A grand jury’ll find it. It doesn’t matter how you invested it, how you kept your name off it. They’ll open up those trusts and find you. The pols’ll probably stop construction, too. Either way, the money’s lost. It’s more than me and Ricky are worth. All you got to do is just let us out. Sir. Just let us out.”

From behind Michael, Nick interjected, “Okay. You’re out.”

But Charlie Capobianco, the boss, was not quite finished. “What kind of guy are you, Paddy? You come in here and tell me I killed your brother, your father, but still you’re willing to make deals.”

“There’s someone else who’s more responsible than you.”

Conroy had spent the night working the Joe Daley homicide. An allnight vigil was typical of the critical early hours of a homicide investigation; it was pursued with a special mission in this case, where the victim was a cop. Night-for-day meant nothing. Almost immediately they had searched for an organized-crime angle. The stink around Joe Daley and the brazenness of the hit pointed the way as clearly as fingerposts. They swarmed out to press witnesses and rats, and in the whisperings a single name swirled continually: Vincent “The Animal” Gargano.

For Brendan Conroy the direction of the investigation was worrisome. If Gargano ever did start talking, who knew where it would lead? But the situation could be managed. In the end, there was no chance Gargano would talk; these North End guinea hardcases didn’t operate that way. That was all that mattered. Conroy was insulated. For now there was nothing to do but stay out front. Over the next few days and weeks in his dual roles as detective and grieving “stepfather,” he would be a paragon.

He got home around nine A. M., but only for a quick stopover. A hot shower and a good stropping toweling-off and a clean shirt, then he would head off to Margaret’s house to join the mourners. He stood in the tub shower, let the water pound him awake, thought of Margaret and of various graceful condolences he might dispense over the next few hours. His position with the Daleys, with Margaret in particular, could only be strengthened by his performance today. He would radiate his imperturbable strength and they would be grateful. How could they not be? It was no good, a manless woman, a manless family. He would lead them. But softly, softly. No need to overstep. Jesus, his back and knees ached. Getting old. His brain was the only goddamn part of him that wasn’t breaking down. Every other goddamn thing, knees and cock and shoulders and eyes and feet, the whole damn thing was starting to go.

He turned the water ice cold-he believed it closed the pores and thus warded off sickness-and withstood the blasting freeze for a full thirty seconds, then turned it off. He yanked the shower curtain back with its metallic screech.

He froze. Shocked, he worried he might piss; his bladder was suddenly engorged, quivering, another betrayal by his aging body.

But he recovered himself to say, in a loving tone-because surely there was still a deal here, a way to talk his way out-“Well now, look at you. And where did you get that?”

It was from the newspapers that Michael learned, later, what sort of gun he brought to Brendan Conroy’s home that morning. It was a Smith amp; Wesson Model 39 nine-millimeter with a blue-black finish and wooden grips. The newsmen were keen to identify the gun precisely, just as the newspapers had been full of Oswald’s 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano carbine. In the absence of meaningful information, minor data can be spun to create an illusion of knowledge. Sometimes it’s the best you can do.

Michael did understand the gun’s logical significance, its value to the detectives who would puzzle over it. Here was the same weapon used to kill Joe Daley the night before. The magazine bore prints of Vincent Gargano’s thumb, index and middle fingers, protected from smudging inside the pistol grip. They would conclude-what else?-that Gargano had killed both Joe Daley and Brendan Conroy. They would not wonder for long over the motive, either: “Two Cops Slain for Anti-Mob Bravery,” the reporters would write. The story would be an easy sell. It is a cop’s job, after all, to stand in a criminal’s way.

Better still, as Amy used to say, that headline would move paper. And who would ever step forward to complicate the official version? Not Gargano, certainly; Vinnie The Animal, it would be widely assumed, had gone underground. Not the cops; still bruised by the bookie- joint controversy and the gossip about mishandling the Strangler case, the Department would happily lay the blame on an olive- skinned baddie in order to close the cases. Michael understood all that. Every murder plays out first as a whodunit-people can’t stand not knowing-and only then as a tragedy. So Michael had been canny enough, even in the hysteria of hammering Vincent Gargano to death, to resolve the whodunit for them. He had retrieved the gun. He had found an extra loaded magazine in Gargano’s jacket. Using the dead man’s wormy fingers, he had rolled the fingerprints onto the magazine. Its smooth oiled finish would hold the prints nicely. When he was finished here at Conroy’s apartment, Michael intended to leave the gun for them to find.

The apartment door was unlocked.

In the living room was a cheap tin snack table on metal-tube legs. Water was dripping somewhere, pink, pink, pink.

It was not too late to stop, of course. He could turn around and walk out and no one would be the wiser. But he had determined to do this thing, and the idea pulled him on. He took Gargano’s gun from his coat, and the gun seemed to lead him by the hand toward the bathroom, toward the sound of the water.

The door was ajar and Michael glimpsed a hairless bone-white knee above the rim of the bathtub.

He did not like to think of that knee-it was naked and animal-and so he focused on the gun in his own hand and what a supremely well-designed tool it was. The way it nestled in his palm. How naturally his fingers curled around the grip, how perfectly sized it was, smaller than a tennis racket handle, thicker than a knife handle. What a sensuous pleasure to raise and point it. It felt like a part of him, an extension of his hand. When he raised the gun and sighted along its barrel when he tapped the door open with it and he beheld Brendan Conroy-round and white and lightly haired, his head lumpy and small under wet hair, his legs incongruously skinny, the little pale-pink rosettes of his nipples, the spatters of orange freckles-an old fat man on his back in the bathtub-sprawled-the vulnerable fleshy clump of his genitals it felt as if the gun barrel was an eleventh finger or, more exactly, as if it were his own index finger extended to absurd length, telescoped outward and didn’t every child know-didn’t He was distracted by Conroy, by that sly shit-eating grin, as if they were sharing a little joke, the two of them. Hey there, boyo, now what did you mean to do with that thing?

Didn’t didn’t every kid in the playground who had ever formed his hand into a gun and said pshoo! -

Conroy, a pinkish blob in the background of the gun sight didn’t every kid know that pointing your finger and pointing a gun were essentially the same gesture? But how godlike, to kill with nothing more than a pointed finger! Like a wizard pronouncing a curse, you had only to point and wish someone dead-you had only to decide it, and bang.

“Bang,” Michael whispered aloud. He lowered the gun.

Conroy was already dead. A single bullet hole in his chest, at the heart-where, Amy had once said, a lucky marksman could kill a man with one shot. Already dead.

The tub spout dripped. Pink, pink.

Michael stared. Would he have done it? Yes, he assured himself. Maybe. He thought he would have. Then: No, of course not.

He came to the side of the tub.

Dark wet blood was gelled over the hole in Conroy’s chest. No blood or damage on the walls of the shower stall; the slug must still be inside the body. Conroy had been standing naked in his tub when he took the bullet into himself, absorbed it in the thick mass of his torso. Another remarkable thing, that: The bullet had emerged from inside the gun only for a millisecond before burying itself again inside this man, leaping from one host to the next. Then Conroy had fallen, or sat, and died with this ambiguous expression on his face, not so much wounded as astonished. There was water beaded on his skin, and pink watery streaks of blood that marbled his belly in intricate thready patterns like veins.

There was still work to do, of course. It was not enough that Conroy was dead; the murder had to be explained, the whodunit resolved, the story spelled out.

So Michael pulled the shower curtain closed, feeling fastidious and cunning both, but not really deciding anything now, just following through on a course he had already committed to-finishing. The curtain rod screeched.

Carefully, so as not to disturb the fingerprints, he slipped the magazine out of the pistol grip, pried up the top bullet with his finger, and dropped it in his pocket. True, the slug already in Conroy’s body would not match the slugs fired from Gargano’s Smith amp; Wesson, but it would take a careful ballistics test to reveal that. It would require no special knowledge to count the slugs, though, and to realize that Conroy’s body held one more bullet than Gargano’s gun could have fired.

Ready now, Michael chambered a round, wrapped his arm inside the shower curtain, and tensioned the trigger. But the trigger pull was tight and the gun did not fire.

An inch or two from Michael’s nose, the shower curtain-an opaque sunflower-yellow vinyl stamped with a flower print-reflected the sound of his frustrated sigh.

He plunged his finger down hard, once. The thunder echoed in the small bathroom, amplified by the tiles, and an after-explosion in his ears, trailed by a ringing sound. The spasm of the gun’s recoil sent a wave of pain through his injured right shoulder. The bullet casing carelessly tossed away. The homey, smoky-fireplace smell of the burned powder.

He had the feel of it now, he thought, and he pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled the trigger, and this time he counted, as Gargano had instructed. Seven rounds. One fewer than the magazine in a Smith amp; Wesson Model 39 could hold.

Michael slipped into church and glanced about, as if he meant to steal the candlesticks.

The pews were nearly empty. Two old men sat far apart from one another, barely moving. Michael recognized them both as parishioners at St. Margaret’s. He’d seen these old-timers here a thousand times, back when Michael was a kid and going to Mass regularly, but now he could not for the life of him remember their names. They seemed to be waiting, these old men, though for what Michael did not know. It was mid-morning. No Mass was scheduled.

He slunk down the center aisle, clearing his throat softly, selfconscious about the rustle of his clothes and the shushing of his shoes.

Seated in the front row, characteristically, was Michael’s mother. From the back, her shape and posture struck Michael as very oldlooking. Her spine and shoulders were beginning to warp. Even so, she was still very much the iron lady, the morning after her son was murdered. She gave Michael a brief glance, then turned her attention back to the altar. There was no trace of tears on her face.

“You okay, Mum?”

“Yes.”

He sat down.

Margaret’s black pocketbook stood between them on the bench. A big black faux-patent-leather thing with a stiff strap for a handle. Michael eyed the handbag, then he picked it up and opened the clasp.

Margaret gave him another sidelong look but did not protest. Her expression suggested to Michael that she was not defeated, she was not giving in to him; she simply did not care what he found in the purse or what he thought. Go on, then, she seemed to be saying, see for yourself.

He opened the purse and looked down into it. Joe Senior’s service pistol was nestled inside, among the clutter of balled-up tissues, the compact and lipstick, the wallet and keys. The gun lay on its back. Michael was transfixed a moment, before he realized the risk and clicked the pocketbook shut. The clasp, with its overlapping gold beads, reminded him of a schoolgirl’s crossed knees. He put the pocketbook back down on the bench.

Beside him, Margaret had willed herself-her face, her posture-into a resolutely ordinary pose. She had nothing to say about Conroy’s multiple betrayals, of her husband and her sons and of Amy, and she made no excuses for the pistol in her pocketbook-down one bullet, surely, and mustn’t Brendan Conroy have been dazzled by the sight of her taking aim square at his breastbone. She picked up the purse and threaded her forearm through the strap.

“Come on, Ma, we got to go. There’ll be people at the house.”

“All night and day there’ll be people over to the house, talking us half to death, eating us out of house and home. We’ll all be fit for the loony bin before it’s over.”

“Okay, Ma.”

He stood and offered his elbow, which she took, and as they processed down the aisle she nodded at the two old parishioners who, she informed Michael in a stage whisper, were a drunk and a philanderer respectively, though the one still drank like a demon while the other’s philandering days were long behind him. The two of them together, she said, didn’t have enough sense to tie their own shoelaces. But the Lord is in no hurry to come collect His fools. Only the good ones like Joe He comes for. Only the good ones. “Only my Joe,” she whimpered, and Michael felt her weight on his arm and he stiffened his elbow to support her.

1963 and the first half of ’64 had been murderous years. Michael’s father, his brother, Amy, even Brendan Conroy-all dead. But they had not quite left. Michael had the feeling that any of them might wander into the room at any moment. They left their things around, too: Joe Senior’s coat still hung in the hall closet, Amy’s handwriting lingered in a notepad. When the newspapers were filled with the Gulf of Tonkin question, Michael wanted to hear Amy boil it all down with her cheerful cynicism. It came back to him that of course Amy was dead; the memory still carried a faint sting of surprise.

Yet life went on. The summer and fall of 1964 were strangely normal. In Michael’s presence, people pretended nothing had happened. They were determinedly cheery and superficial, until the merest mention of tragedy, any tragedy, started them stammering. The possibility that Michael might launch into a discussion of his losses terrified them. They would rather whistle past the graveyard-better yet, they would rather not acknowledge the graveyard at all. They wanted to go on pretending that murder could never touch them. The truth was, Michael felt hardly anything at all. He was as hard, or at least as numb, as a stone.

Michael felt no remorse for the blood on his own hands. The only question was: Could a man go from ordinary citizen to killer and back again? He assured himself that he could. Soldiers did it all the time. And if Michael were ever called upon to pass from citizen back to killer again? Well, he thought, soldiers did that, too, and so, if need be, could he.

So went 1964, or most of it.

On Christmas Eve, that desultory semi-holiday, Michael closed up his office in the middle of the afternoon. He had spent the day working, with no particular pleasure or urgency, on an eminent domain action: a few parcels around Scollay Square, which was already being razed to make way for a new “government center.” It was good, dull work. Michael made his way through the gloomy, nearly empty corridors of the State House.

At the Strangler Bureau, Tom Hart and a couple of the BPD Homicide detectives were lugging cardboard boxes out to the street.

“They’re shutting it down,” Hart said.

“Shutting down the Strangler Bureau? They haven’t even charged the guy, never mind tried him.”

“They’re not going to charge him. There isn’t going to be a trial.” Hart grabbed a box labeled Feeney, J., 11/22/63, and he hoisted it into Michael’s arms. “Here, make yourself useful.”

Hart took a box of his own and together they made their way out to the street.

“So,” Michael said, “the Boston Strangler is going to walk.”

“DeSalvo’s not going to walk. He’s doing life, on those rapes. He’ll be parole-eligible in ten years, but let’s face it: No parole board is ever going to release a guy who the whole world thinks is the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo is going to do life.”

“But if DeSalvo’s the wrong guy…?”

“If DeSalvo’s the wrong guy…I’d rather not think about it.”

“So what happens to the cases?”

“Nothing. They sit. Technically, if the A.G. does not want to pursue the case, it comes back to us. But realistically it would be impossible to convict anybody on these murders now. Where are you going to find a jury that doesn’t already ‘know’ DeSalvo is the Strangler? No prosecutor is going to touch it. The Strangler cases are closed.”

“So they wait till Christmas Eve to announce that the case against DeSalvo is going to be dropped. And hope no one notices.”

“The stranglings have stopped. If DeSalvo is the wrong guy, then the real Strangler has probably moved on. Or he’s in custody. No sense telling everyone the Strangler got away. It’d just start a panic.”

“Come on, Tom, listen to you. It’s politics.”

“No, it’s government.”

“What’s the difference?”

The detective thought it over. “There is none.”

They came out into the cold. Gray, sunless New England winter. Sunset coming earlier and earlier, daylight already beginning to dim in mid-afternoon.

“So what happens now, Tom?”

“Byron runs for governor or senator or whatever. DeSalvo sells his story to the movies. The rest of us just go about our business.”

“It’ll never work. They can’t keep it quiet forever.”

“The only one who could blow it up is DeSalvo. But he’d have to recant the confession, and he’s not going to do that. He’d rather be the Boston Strangler than be nobody at all.”

“A few years in Walpole will cure him of that.”

“Maybe.” Hart slid his box into the back seat of an unmarked cruiser, then relieved Michael of his box. “Merry Christmas, Mike.”

“Merry Christmas, Tom. Let’s hope the guy coming down the chimney tonight is Santa.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry. Whoever the Strangler is, he’s probably skipped town. He hasn’t made many mistakes. I bet he’s someplace far away, someplace no one is looking for him.”

“There’s no way this stays quiet. No way in the world.”

“Michael,” Hart said, “this isn’t the world. This is Boston.”

“Hey, you wanna see something cool?”

Michael was staring at The Tonight Show, a Christmas Eve special with Gila Golan and Woody Allen. He had been watching long enough that his eyes were glazed. His crossed feet, in sneakers, were on the coffee table.

“Hey,” Ricky repeated, urging him to wake up, “wanna see something cool?”

They were slouched at opposite ends of the couch. On the cushion between them was a green glass ashtray.

Michael said without turning, “Yeah. What?”

“Get your coat. We got to go for a drive.”

“Oh, forget it. I thought you were just gonna-Forget it. I’m going home. The hell time is it?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

“I’m going home, Rick. It’s been a long day. I’ve had enough.” Michael swigged from his bottle of beer and sat up.

They would both need a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow was Christmas, and Margaret was determined to snow them all under with presents and food and self-conscious cheer so they would not think about Joe. The tree, next to the TV, was over-trimmed, over-lit, over-everything. Ricky advised that no one look directly into it, for fear of burning the retinas.

“Forget it, Ricky. Mum’s a loon. She wants us back here at eight. You probably don’t even remember what eight in the morning looks like.”

“Am I missing anything?”

“Not really.”

“Come on, then. Sleep when you get old, right?”

“You know what you look like when you look like that? A mouse. Anyone ever tell you that? Beady little mouse.”

“Come on, big brother, don’t be a fag. Get your coat. I want to show you something.”

“Some other time.”

“No, it’s gotta be now. It’s a Christmas thing.”

“A Christmas thing. What do you know from Christmas?”

“I’ll show ya.”

They drove into town, Ricky at the wheel. At Park Street, near the State House, he pulled over. “Come on,” Ricky said.

They strolled into the Common, hands jammed deep in their pockets to hide them from the cold. The trees were loosely strung with long saggy strings of Christmas lights that swayed in the wind like women’s necklaces.

At the Nativity scene, Ricky took a quick glance around, then stepped into the manger and grabbed the figurine of the baby Jesus out of His straw bed.

“The fuck are you doing? Put that back.”

“Just wait, Mikey.”

“You can’t take that. It’s…God.”

“Would you relax. It’s not God. It’s just a little statue. God is within you.”

“No, He’s not. He’s in your hand. Now put Him back.”

“Come on. Don’t be such a baby.”

Michael looked up at the sky to address the Lord. “I have no part of this.”

They walked back to the car with the statue stuffed inside Ricky’s coat.

“You know,” Michael said, “I think there’s a special part of hell for people who do this.”

“Yeah, okay, Mikey. Whatever. Come on, get in.”

Inside the car, Ricky took the statue out again and looked it over, front and back.

“What do we do now, Rick? Make a sacrifice to Beelzebub?”

“Something like that.”

Ricky wrapped his hands firmly around the baby’s torso and with a swift up-down he smashed the back of its head on the dashboard. The head snapped off neatly. It rolled on the floor at Michael’s feet.

“What the f-What are you doing? Look what you did!”

“Put out your hands, Mike.”

“Holy shit! Ricky!”

“Put out your hands.”

When Michael did not respond, Ricky wedged the statue between his legs to hold it upright, then cupped Michael’s hands together. He tipped the statue and poured from its open neck. Stones. Cold and heavy and rough-edged in Michael’s palms.

“Jesus saves.” Ricky smirked.

Michael lifted his hands to see better in the light. Diamonds.