Brian McGrory - Strangled

“I can’t, dude. I can’t.”

I hate the word dude, though that’s not entirely why I clenched my fist once again, gritted my teeth, and whispered to him, “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”

“I need a fix.”

Mongillo, intuitively and literally understanding where we were going with this, said, “We’ll get you one — right after.”

I asked, “What’s your name?”

“Marcus.”

“Marcus, we’re going to go for a little ride, and as soon as we’re done, we’ll set you up with whatever you need.”

He nodded, hopeful for the first time in this encounter. The three of us walked out of the room, down the dark, dingy hall, down the stairs, and out into the street. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; I didn’t particularly care.

The goal was to retrace their route. I’m not completely certain why this was so important to me, but it falls in the same category as conducting an interview in person rather than by phone. You always get more from facial expressions, from body language, from being in the same room. You always get more from just showing up.

In the car, Vinny got in the driver’s seat and I sat in the back beside Marcus, with my man Huck squishing over against the door. Before we pulled out, we discerned that Marcus and Vasco had walked to a subway stop. The subway stop was next to where the Celtics played, which meant North Station. They did not switch subway lines. They did not take the subway directly to the train station. They got off the subway and came aboveground at a busy intersection with a large park, then walked to the train station behind a tall glass skyscraper.

I said to Vinny, “Sounds like they took the Green Line to Arlington Street, and walked to Back Bay Station. But why the hell didn’t they just take the Orange Line from North Station right into Back Bay Station?”

Mongillo said, “Maybe Vasco doesn’t know the subway lines well.”

“He’s a genius.” I paused and said, “Drive over to Arlington Street.”

We did. Marcus said it looked familiar. I started feeling like I should work for Scotland Yard. He pointed in the direction they walked, which was toward the train station, and Vinny slowly followed the route.

Marcus, sleepy now rather than feisty, pointed casually out the window and said, “Paul went in there.”

It was a Kinko’s copy store, still open because it was always open.

“He stopped in there?” I asked, incredulous. “For long?”

“No. Five minutes.”

“Then where?”

Marcus said, “We went to the train station.”

I insisted on following the route. It was ten-thirty at night; the streets were virtually void of traffic, giving us the luxury of driving at our own slow pace.

Marcus said, “We took a left here.”

Vinny banged a sharp left, down the wrong way of a one-way street, but that’s all right. What wasn’t all right was that it suddenly didn’t make complete sense, this route, because it took them a block out of their way.

“Marcus, think hard. Where else did you stop?” I said.

“Nowhere. That was it.”

Vinny pulled up to the next intersection, driving the wrong way.

“Think, Marcus. Any little stop. Any short detour. Think.”

Marcus casually pointed out the window and said, “Right there, but just for a second.”

I whirled around in my seat. He was pointing at a U.S. post office, the Back Bay annex. Suddenly things started fitting together in my head like they never had before, pieces creating a whole, the whole being a picture of Paul Vasco mailing a letter to me because he was the Phantom Fiend, and probably the Boston Strangler.

“What happened?” I asked, nearly yelling. Huck sat up for the first time.

Marcus was staring out the back window at the post office. Vinny had pulled to the curb. “Paul handed me an envelope. The building was closed. There were three mailboxes on the sidewalk, and he told me to go put it in the middle mailbox. He said he’d give me twenty dollars if I did. He kept walking toward the train station.”

I asked, “Did you mail it?”

He nodded. “Then I had to run after him. I met him outside the station. He gave me the money, said he had to take another trip, and told me to get to work and not tell anyone what we had done.”

I let out a long breath. Vinny looked back at me and I looked at Vinny. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a pair of twenty dollar bills, handed them to Marcus, and said, “You’re a man of your word. Thanks for your help. Don’t tell anyone about us.”

“I won’t,” he said as he got out of the car, looking back nervously as he shut the door.

I snapped open my cell phone and dialed Peter Martin. “You’ve got to hold that Mac Foley story,” I said. “I think we’re wrong.”

Martin replied, “You think, or you’ve got something else you can write in its place?”

Good question, as usual.

“Give me an hour,” I said, having only some idea just what an hour it would be.

At ten forty-five on a raw Sunday night in the middle of a dismal March, the Pigpen lounge in Chelsea was exactly how I expected it to be, which is to say peopled by some of life’s most exquisite losers — beer-bellied guys with tree-trunk necks wearing ill-fitting black blazers, desperate-looking women in caked-on makeup with skirts that revealed things that no normal man would want to see, coked-out servers who had neither showered nor shaved in days.

The place reeked of stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, and fresh urine, not necessarily in that order. That potpourri actually represented an improvement on the drugstore-quality colognes and perfumes worn by the patrons. If Charles Darwin had ever been able to stop by the Pigpen for a Scotch and a beer chaser, I think he’d have quickly remade his entire theory.

I marched through the front doors and yelled out, “Everyone freeze. Massachusetts Health Department. I’m here to enforce the state’s no-smoking laws.”

Actually, that’s not what I did or said. I didn’t have the luxury of time or humor. Rather, I barged inside, spied old friend Sammy Markowitz sitting in his usual rear booth, and made a beeline for him.

I almost got there, too, but for the two bodyguards who looked as if they had just escaped from the primate exhibit at the Franklin Park Zoo. They stood side by side, blocking my path, their bodies about the width of a football field, and one of them said, “Nobody goes back dere.”

“You must be mistaken,” I pointed out to them. “There are people back there now. So if you’ll excuse me.”

The guy who had spoken to me glanced over at the silent one, as if he was looking for some sort of explanation of what I had meant. He didn’t get one. Then a voice called out from behind them, “He’s good, gentlemen. He’s good.”

The men hesitated, then awkwardly parted in silence. To me, the voice said, “Jack Flynn in the Pigpen. To what do I owe this rarest of pleasures?”

That was Sammy Markowitz, bookmaking kingpin, Pigpen owner, and one of the oldest, most valuable sources of information in my legendary stable. We’d befriended each other years ago when I was reporting out a story on the scope and breadth of his enormously successful criminal enterprise. Desperate for me not to write, he leaked like a sieve about anyone and everyone all around him, from cops to mayors, providing me fodder for a series of stories that nearly — but didn’t quite — win a Pulitzer Prize. We’d remained in occasional touch ever since.

I hadn’t seen him in years, and Father Time had not necessarily been kind. Not exactly Tom Brady to begin with, Markowitz’s jowls now hung so low that they almost rested on the table. His eyes were so bloodshot that I think even his pupils had turned red. His teeth were the color of caramel, most likely from the Camels that were ever present in his mouth, like the one that hung on his bottom lip at that very moment.