Read Online The Strangler by William Landay - Free Book Online Page A

of Dickens, preying on the poor in the name of progress (a turnpike, a parking garage). You were part of a grand, historic effort to build a great city out of a decrepit one. Never had eminent domain seemed so damn interesting.
    No doubt at any other time a man like George Wamsley would never have accepted the job of running the Eminent Domain Division. He had had choices. He was a Lowell cousin, a friend of the poet. A gentleman dilettante before the war—the sort of cultivated Yankee crank who dabbled in Negro music and sailboat racing and Oriental mysticism—Wamsley first found his stride after the fighting stopped, as an adjutant in the American sector of Berlin. In the straitened chaos of 1945 and ’46 Berlin, an energetic polymath like George Wamsley could get things done. He spoke three of the four languages that were about. He enjoyed the dives on the Ku’damm and the improvised bar in the ruins of the Hotel Adlon. He collected antiques in exchange for Army beef and Lucky Strikes. War, at least the ruins of it, turned out to be a great adventure. When he returned to the States, Wamsley had drifted back to Mother Harvard, the law school this time, with the vague idea that a law practice might be a nice roost from which to pursue other interests. And then he had ingested the New Boston bug, another city in need of rebuilding, another project of a scale commensurate with his bounding energy. By now he’d even taken up an interest in modernist architecture; he thought he might try architecture school at some point.
    Michael never knew what to make of Wamsley. He considered his boss a curiosity, a strange exotic bird from a faraway WASP country of which he’d heard rumors. Wamsley considered Michael a sort of exotic, too, a policeman’s son and an inveterate laconic, maybe a little dull but a Harvard man, a good sober presence to have at one’s right hand. Wamsley had recruited Michael to be
his
adjutant, and Michael felt a suitable gratitude, even affection, for his loony and possibly brilliant boss.
    That afternoon when Michael entered the corner office of the Attorney General, it was Wamsley he noticed first. Wamsley was seated in a wing chair facing the A.G.’s desk, and from behind Michael saw only his skinny legs double-crossed. Wamsley unwound his legs and twisted around to peer at Michael over the back of the chair, as a child might. “Ah, Michael. The indispensable man.”
    The Attorney General, Alvan Byron, emerged from a bathroom off the office, wiping his hands with a paper towel. “Graveyards are filled with indispensable men. That’s what de Gaulle said.”
    “Cheerful thought,” Michael responded.
    Alvan Byron was a big man, his torso one enormous barrel. The A.G. favored big collars, French cuffs, and peaked lapels despite the prevailing fashion. His anachronistic suits seemed to place him in an earlier, more glamorous era. Though he was one-quarter Scot, Byron was at the moment considered the highest-ranking Negro elected politician in the country, and his career already seemed to have acquired an irresistible velocity. Alvan Byron was bigger than Boston.
    “Big news, Mr. Daley.” Byron settled himself at the desk. “We’re taking over the Strangler case.”
    Michael let slip an undecorous guffaw.
    “Something funny?”
    “No. Just, I know someone who’ll be happy to hear it.”
    “A lot of people will be happy to hear it. It’s time for a fresh pair of eyes.”
    “Boston PD isn’t going to be happy to hear it.”
    “No.” Byron gave Wamsley a glance. “We have some ideas about that, too.”
    Michael sat there nodding, with a dumb, bemused grin. He thought,
You two have absolutely no idea. You could put Sherlock fucking Holmes on the Strangler case and nothing—nothing—you could do would satisfy Boston Homicide.
What he said was: “Well, Criminal Division has a lot of good guys. I’m sure they’ll do a good job.”
    “That wasn’t exactly what we had in