The Strangler: A Novel by William Landay

Author:William Landay [Landay, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense
ISBN: 9780385336154
Google: lv4cmQEACAAJ
Amazon: B000NJL7MS
Goodreads: 1073356
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Published: 2007-01-30T06:00:00+00:00

37

Parts of the West End construction site were surrounded by an eight-foot plywood wall. Here and there the wall was decorated with propagandistic posters: “Coming Soon: A New Boston” and “The Future Is Now … Here!” Bostonians took these promises with a grain of salt. Politicians and other gasbags had been talking about a “new Boston” long enough that they wondered where the hell it was, just as Old Englanders once upon a time must have wondered where the New one was. So the wall was defaced in predictable ways, lewd and anti-authoritarian. One sign was somehow graffiti-proof, though. It was enameled steel, very large, and it hung at the corner of Cambridge and Charles Streets, near the jail. The sign showed an architect’s pen-and-pastel sketch of those four white towers in a grassy park—dreamlike, impossibly modern. There were no cars in the drawing; the buildings apparently would be accessed by spaceships. Pedestrians tended to pause before this picture, stumped, awed by it. Buildings like these simply did not exist in Boston. They were too good for Boston, too good for the likes of us. The image arrested everyone who passed, thin-lipped women with shopping bags and gray men in blue suits with brown shoes. They tended to stand there and shake their heads with schoolmarmish disapproval: the ostentation of it all, the naked, gaudy ambition. To the side of the picture was the opportunistic name of the project, JFK PARK, and a long list of credits like the roll call at the end of a movie:

A SONNENSHEIN DEVELOPMENT • CITY OF BOSTON • MAYOR JOHN COLLINS • BOSTON REDEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY • URBAN RENEWAL ADMINISTRATION • SONNENSHEIN CONSTRUCTION CO. • FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON • THE NEW BOSTON TRUST

Moe Wasserman arranged to meet Joe near this sign. It was an unseasonably warm day in early April, an early intimation of spring. Wasserman was agitated. When Joe showed up, Wasserman blurted, “He’s here! Come see!” The old man hustled Joe down Charles Street, along the perimeter of the site, to a chainlink gate where a dozen men loafed around a cafeteria truck. A small army of construction workers swarmed over the site, which occupied about a quarter of the old West End footprint, but somehow Wasserman had found his man.

“There!”

“Which one?”

“In the red jacket. Drinking his coffee like he don’t know I’m lookin’ at him. He was there. Not the one in charge, but he was there.”

“You’re sure?”

“Course I’m sure.”

“How sure?”

“Listen to this guy, ‘how sure?’ If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t have brung you.”

“Alright. I’ve got to be sure is all.”

“Detective, I’m not asking you to shoot him, just talk to him. How sure do you got to be?”

Joe walked onto the construction site with the happy sense of trespassing.

The man looked up. Early twenties. A sleek, dense mat of hair opalescent with Brylcreem. Slit eyes. He was squat and thick-bodied. A white tank top showed off his inflated shoulders and arms. On his right biceps was a tattoo of a red devil wearing boxing gloves above the initials U.

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