That might well be true, but I also knew something else about the Boston Strangler, or at least I thought I did: He was dead, the victim of a murderer in Walpole State Prison sometime in the early 1970s. Best as I could remember, no one was ever charged.
Which is what I told Vinny. Specifically, I said, “The Boston Strangler was killed, wasn’t he? I mean, he’s dead.”
Mongillo looked back at me and held my gaze.
“No,” he said, slowly, firmly, and decisively. “Albert DeSalvo was killed. That’s who you think was the Boston Strangler. That’s who the public was told was the Boston Strangler. But if you ask almost any good cop who was in the area around that time, they’ll tell you that DeSalvo was definitely not the Boston Strangler. The Strangler was never caught. He’s still out there somewhere.”
He paused here, staring at some distant point, or more likely at nothing at all. I cast a glance toward Martin. Normally, even famously pale, he now looked even whiter than usual. He was staring at Mongillo, his thoughts all but bursting out his eyes and ears.
Mongillo said, “Now he’s killing more women. He wants you to write about it. And we’ve got to get to Lauren Hutchens’s place to check it out.”
We pulled up in front of Lauren Hutchens’s address on Park Drive in the Fenway section of Boston. Fenway Park, by the way, is named for the neighborhood, not the other way around, and Park Drive is named for the Fenway, which is a park, though not Fenway Park. This explanation could probably go on all day, like the fact that South Boston and the South End are two different neighborhoods, and Roxbury and West Roxbury are nowhere near each other. Or that the West End doesn’t actually exist. It’s a Boston thing. You live in town, you don’t think anything of it.
Lauren lived — and possibly died — in a tan-colored cinder-block apartment building that stood seven stories tall, and in stark contrast to the ancient Federalist-style brick town houses all around it. This had obviously been built in the 1950s, as architectural taste had taken a decade-long hiatus while the nation had better things to think about, like family cookouts, the GI Bill, and drinking enough whole milk.
I pulled my Honda to the curb and pulled out my cell phone. “You think I should call the cops now?” I asked Mongillo.
The plan was that we were going to position ourselves as close to Lauren Hutchens’s apartment as humanly possible, call the police with the information about the note and the driver’s license, then hopefully get a firsthand view of what had happened inside.
“Hold off for just another minute,” Mongillo said, taking a long sip of his coffee, which he had insisted on stopping for on the way over. He first insisted on stopping at Starbucks, until I pointed out that a woman’s life was potentially hanging in the balance while he waited the requisite twenty minutes for some barrister, or whatever they call themselves, with a nose ring and an art history degree to handcraft his venti, no-foam, whole-milk caramel latte. He agreed to a compromise: Dunkin’ Donuts. Henry Kissinger wasn’t as good at bringing people together as I am.
We stepped out of the car onto the sun-splashed curb on a still chilly March morning. Across the street, the Fenway — the park, not the baseball field — sprawled bare and brown as far as the eye could see, a lonely place until the April rains and the May warmth would bring this city to life again.
“We have an apartment number?” Mongillo asked, looking up at the building.
“We don’t,” I replied, striding now toward the glass front doors. Inside, we looked on the row of mailboxes with names written and typed in mismatched hands and scripts, until I found “L Hutchens,” neatly scrawled in a black pen. There was no apartment number. We rang the buzzer.
I’m not sure what I expected to happen. Probably nothing. But my stomach tightened as we waited what felt like forever for her voice to come over the intercom, asking who was at the front door. Or maybe she thought she knew her visitor and she’d just buzz us inside. But neither happened. The only sounds in that vestibule were Mongillo’s labored breathing and his occasional slurps of coffee.
Another minute elapsed, and Mongillo pressed the button again. I could hear his cell phone vibrating inside his coat, but he ignored it. Still nothing. I looked at the face of my own cell phone and saw that it was 7:32 a.m. Maybe she had left for work already. Maybe she was in the shower and couldn’t hear the alert. Or maybe she was dead.
A minute later, it was my turn to buzz. Truth be told, neither Mongillo nor I knew what else to do. The plan was to call the police, but we also realized that standing here in the lobby, the cops would come, they’d deny us access to the building, and we wouldn’t see anything of the woman’s apartment, including the woman herself. The only thing we’d end up seeing would be several state workers wheeling her body into the coroner’s van. This was not a good way to start the day — not for me, but especially not for Lauren Hutchens.
“Fuck it,” I said to Mongillo, resigned. “I’ll call Mac Foley now. This isn’t doing anyone any good.”
Before he could answer, a twentysomething guy in a wool ski hat wearing a knapsack slammed open the glass doors from inside the apartment building and continued through the second set of doors outside — obviously a grad student of some sort on his way to one of the nearby universities. As I placed my foot inside the closing door, Mongillo called out to the guy, “Any idea what apartment Lauren Hutchens is in?” It was a Hail Mary question, but sometimes these things pan out.
Without stopping, he turned back and called out, “She’s my neighbor, dude. She’s in 416.”
We were in business. Of course, what kind of business, I didn’t know. We took the elevator to the fourth floor. We scouted out Apartment 416. I looked at Mongillo, standing there in the same durable tan pants he always wore, with a plaid hunting jacket wrapped around his enormous frame. He looked at me. His cell phone was vibrating again, but much to his uncharacteristic credit, he continued to ignore it.
There was no doorbell, so I knocked. Mongillo pressed his ear to the door to listen, but apparently heard nothing. Was she alive? Would a fresh-faced woman named Lauren suddenly appear at the door? If she did, what would we say? Or were we standing just a few feet from a horrendous crime scene that the criminal wanted me to know about first?
A minute or so passed and I knocked again. An older woman in the kind of cloth coat that Richard Nixon’s wife once wore appeared out of a nearby apartment. She gave us a suspicious look as she walked past us toward the elevators, but said nothing.
I tried the knob and it was locked. I stepped away from the door, pulled my cell from my coat, and said, “I’m calling.” I was surprised at how breathless I had become. Mongillo nodded. I dialed the number to the Boston PD’s homicide bureau and asked for Detective Mac Foley.
Last I saw Foley was the night before, first when he was pleasantly chatting with me, then when he was eyeing me from across the room, pointing me out to another cop. I didn’t for a second think he appreciated my unintended involvement in the Jill Dawson investigation, and he certainly wouldn’t appreciate my new found role in the Lauren Hutchens case — if, in fact, there was a Lauren Hutchens case. Most of me hoped there wasn’t. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that some embarrassing little granule deep inside my head was excited about it all, but I tried to splash the cold water of human compassion on it.
I was told by the receptionist that Foley wasn’t available, which didn’t surprise me. Mac Foley, as I’ve said, works under the radar of public interest, even as he’s working in the public interest. Truth was, he probably also wasn’t in yet at this hour. I said, “Would it be possible to page him and let him know that Jack Flynn called. I’ve received more correspondence that may be of an urgent nature.” I left my cell phone number.