The Strangler by William Landay Page B

bandage on his right cheekbone, a gauze patch held with white tape, and purplish bruises on his face. On the floor, someone had broomed open a path through the wreckage from the front door to a door at the back.
    Wasserman saw the cop survey it all and he shrugged. “It hasn’t been cleaned. I picked up the food, that’s all. You don’t wash a sock before you throw it out. So.”
    “Why don’t you just tell me what went on here, the whole story, start to finish.”
    “The whole story? What story? This is the story. Look.”
    “Well, any information you can tell us, Mr. Wasserman.”
    “Eh, you won’t catch them. Personally”—he made an apologetic gesture, a flip of the hand that said
Forgive me for saying so, but
…—“I’m surprised you’re even here.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “You’re not from the West End, are you, Detective…?”
    “Daley. Joe.”
    “Detective Daley. You’re not from around here.”
    “I’m from Dorchester.”
    “You haven’t been a policeman around here for long, either.”
    “I’ve been a cop fifteen years.”
    “But not here.”
    Joe frowned. This was echt Boston:
here
did not refer to the region or even the city;
here
meant this neighborhood, these few blocks. To a West Ender, Dorchester might as well have been Greenland. “No,” Joe admitted, “not here.”
    “No. Because I would have seen you. Well, so let me be the one to fill you in, Detective. There haven’t been cops here for a long time. Garbagemen neither; they let the garbage pile up in the street. Why? Because they want to say the West End was a ghetto, it was ‘blighted.’ So what did they do? They stopped cleaning it up, they pulled out the cops, they didn’t fix the roads. That’s how they put the rabbit in the hat, see? They make a ghetto, then they say, ‘Look, a ghetto! Let’s tear it down.’ It’s business. I understand. I’m in business too. But let’s be honest in this here.”
    “I’m here now and I’m a cop.”
    “Yes. I suppose.” The old man sighed dismissively.
You must be some boob of a cop to get sent here now.
    “Well, look, alls I can do is try. And I promise you I’ll try. But I can’t do anything if you won’t even talk to me.”
    “An honest man, heh? Alright, my friend, we’ll try. Here it is: Couple weeks ago, December two, I’m up in my apartment in bed. This is maybe eleven, midnight. I hear a car drive up. Everything’s quiet around here now, it’s empty at night, sounds carry. So, I hear a car.”
    “What kind of car?”
    “Don’t know. I was looking down at it from the window, my bedroom window upstairs. I got an apartment above the store. It was a four-door, dark color, maybe blue, maybe black, that’s all I can see. Four guys get out, big guys with bats. I seen them come up the sidewalk and one of them takes his bat and he smashes my window.”
    “Did you call the cops?”
    “Course I called the cops. What else am I gonna do? What difference does it make? The cops don’t come; I told you. So these guys, they smash my window and they climb right in the front of the store and they just go through it with their bats and they break it all up. They broke everything. I mean, I got insurance, but what am I gonna…? You know how long this place has been here? Thirty, forty years. My father had it. So I get dressed and I go running down to the shop. I figure, if it’s money they want, so what? I’ll give it to them, at least they won’t smash up the whole thing. Because there’s nothing here to steal. What are they gonna take, a corned beef? I go down and I tell them, ‘Just take the money, here it is, what else do you want?’ But they don’t want the money. They just want to smash everything. So that’s what they did. They smashed me, too—not with the bats, thank God. There was money right out on the floor; they smashed the cash drawer. They didn’t even take it. All they had to do was bend down and pick it up. But no. They couldn’t be