Scent of Evil (10 page)

· · ·

The detective squad does not hold to a regimented schedule. There is no roll call, no single hour at which all members punch in. Usually, they show up at half-hour intervals, a system which allows them to leave in the same order and thereby have the office staffed by at least one person until eight o’clock at night. As a result, on any given morning, I’m lucky to find even one of them in attendance when I usually come in at 7:30.

This morning, it was 7:10, and the entire squad was ready and waiting.

I led the way into the conference room and sat at the head of the long table, waiting until everyone had found chairs, arranged their coffee, doughnuts, and note pads, and had finished the last one-liners.

I gained their attention by tapping my pencil on the edge of the table. “You all did nice work yesterday. Starting cold, we got an identity, a residence, and some inroads on a possible witness. The medical examiner should be coming through with some more on the cause of death either today or tomorrow, and maybe J.P.’s dirt-sifting will add something.”

DeFlorio pretended to wipe some of that dirt off his pad. “It already has.”

“I spent a few hours going through Jardine’s papers last night. I’ve listed his various jobs and what years he held them, along with how much he made, who he banked with, and those places where he seemed to shop most often, at least according to his credit-card slips and canceled checks.”

Harriet Fritter handed out copies of a fact sheet I’d deposited on her desk earlier.

“Charlie Jardine left a pretty good paper trail but not much personal information. We didn’t find any letters, diaries, or tapes. It seems, however, that he did have at least one unusual kink to his personality.” I went on to describe what we’d found at his house, especially the upstairs, omitting only the fact that I’d tied a name to one of the voices on the answering machine.

“I didn’t ask you yesterday, but do any of you have anything on your case loads you cannot move to the back burners?”

I actually knew their case loads pretty well, so the question was largely rhetorical. Still, it seemed a friendly idea to let them decide for themselves. No one said a word.

“Okay.” I looked at each of them as I went around the table. “Sammie, I want you to stick to finding whoever was under that bridge. Ron, dig into Jardine’s background—what he was like at school, who he hung out with. You might want to get Lavoie to help you; he’s probably dying to get out of uniform. Dennis, expand the canvass to Jardine’s neighborhood; check for anyone who saw him the last day he was alive. His next-door neighbor, Ned Beaumont, might be a place to start. By the way, I’m going to hit his business partner, so I’ll tell you what I find there. J.P., just keep sifting, and let me know as soon as you get anything back on that cocaine. I’ll have Harriet photocopy whatever bits of Jardine’s paperwork you might find useful.

“As you can see from the handout, Jardine’s last place of employment before going solo with ABC was Morris, McGill. I’m going to dig into them, too. Okay—questions, comments, ideas?”

For the next fifteen minutes, there was a round-robin discussion, each person letting fly their impressions of the case so the others could benefit—or not—from the experience. At this early stage, it wasn’t very constructive, but I was heartened by the general enthusiasm.

I motioned to Ron Klesczewski to stay back as they all finally filed out the door. “You probably saw in this morning’s dailies that John Woll was driving the patrol car that was parked on Canal.”

Klesczewski nodded. The dailies were a summary of the preceding day’s activities, distributed at the start of every shift.

“Well, you might find in your travels through Jardine’s past that he and Woll went to high school together.”

Ron gave me a rigidly neutral look. “Oh, yeah?”

“I’ve already talked to him about it. John says they were just acquaintances, but let me know if you find out differently. The thing is, keep it subtle. I think the chief’s a little twitchy.”

“Sure. By the way, you didn’t find any old phone bills in Jardine’s files, did you? It might be a way to find out who his friends were.”

I didn’t let it show on my face, but inwardly I cursed Brandt’s decision to keep the Wolls’ connection to Jardine a secret. It hadn’t been more than an hour, and already I was having to lie to my own men about it. Perhaps with a touch of malevolence, I passed the buck: “I found ’em, but the chief’s got them now. I’ll see if I can prod him a little.”

“Thanks.” Klesczewski gathered his things and left. It was true that any calls Jardine might have made to Rose or John Woll would have been local and not on any bill. For that matter, I didn’t even know if Rose had made more than the one call I’d overheard. But I hadn’t had a chance to analyze those bills myself to see if he’d ever called her or John at any recognizable long-distance number, and I didn’t want Klesczewski to get that lucky. It was that bit of subterfuge that left a bad taste in my mouth and sharpened my concern. Keeping this connection a secret could well end up alienating me from my entire squad.

· · ·

Main Street in downtown Brattleboro is a throwback to New England’s late-nineteenth-century industrial era, its double row of solid, ornate, red-brick buildings a tribute to capitalism’s smug sense of immortality, here largely founded on the Estey family’s parlor-organ empire that had made the town the organ capital of the nation for almost a hundred years. Over recent decades, however, those monuments have yielded their own irony, for while the ground floors have catered to an ever-changing succession of retail businesses, the floors above have become either noisy, smelly, peeling, low-rent apartments or professional offices for hopeful but under-financed entrepreneurs. ABC Investments was on the third floor of number 103, several doors down from the 1930s Art Deco Paramount movie house.

Number 103 was a walkup, like most of its brethren, cored by a wide, linoleum-skinned staircase. If the exteriors facing Main Street combined antique charm and stolid optimism, the interiors of these buildings went deeper. Dark, soiled, sagging, and retrofitted with a crosshatching of pipes and cables to meet modern safety codes and conveniences, these hundred-year-old walls and lofty, cobwebbed ceilings spoke of pure endurance. Once I was within their embrace, their concession to economic survival was revealed by the sounds of typing from behind one door, contrasting with the snarls of a domestic dispute from another.

“ABC Investments Corp.” was carefully painted on the frosted glass upper panel of an otherwise dark wooden door. I entered to the angry buzzing of a dot-matrix printer churning out an endless ream of paper, and into a solid mass of blessed air-conditioning.

A hefty young blonde woman turned from the machine as I closed the door. “May I help you?” She smiled.

“I’m here to see Mr. Clyde.”

Her eyes widened a fraction, but she was no less friendly. “Oh? Did you have an appointment?”

“No, I’m from the police; Lieutenant Gunther.”

That killed the smile. “Oh, dear.” She worked her way around the desk and crossed over to one of two closed doors on the west side of the reception area. She knocked briefly and disappeared.

Jardine and Clyde had gone to some lengths to distance themselves from their stairwell’s appearance. A lower false ceiling had been installed, the walls painted and decorated with soothing Southwestern prints; the floor was covered with a thick wall-to-wall carpet. The furniture also was new and impressively weighty, as recent as, but a step above, what I’d seen at Jardine’s house. Maybe Clyde had been the one to shop for the business.

That hunch was confirmed when the receptionist returned to usher me into Clyde’s office. The room, with two large windows overlooking Main, was quintessential transplanted old Bostonian—lots of burnished wood, padded leather, and glass-paneled bookcases—as incongruous in this building as if it had been on shipboard.

Behind a massive antique partners’ desk was a large, white-haired man in a seersucker suit and a red bow tie, looking vaguely like Spencer Tracy in
Inherit the Wind
, except for the face, which was square, florid, and utterly without expression.

“Have a seat.” The man’s voice was not unpleasant, but it too lacked any warmth. He hadn’t offered his hand or moved from his chair in greeting, so I followed his suggestion and sat.

But that was all I did. This was not an outgoing man, at least not with strangers, so I thought I might encourage him to talk by keeping my mouth shut. There was also an element here, perhaps a combination of the stuffy furnishings and the coldness of their owner, that rubbed my plebeian fur the wrong way.

The silence lasted a very long thirty seconds. He finally sighed, his brow furrowing, and said, “I’m told you’re from the police.”

I nodded. “Joe Gunther. I was wondering if you could tell me when you last saw your partner.”

There was another pause, this one quite calculated. Clyde’s eyes were as impassive as ever, but I could almost hear his brain whirring at high speed, analyzing the implications of my question. People who deal with other people’s money often have good reason to conjure up private paranoid fantasies. My guess was that I had pushed this man to abruptly struggle with a few of his.

“The day before yesterday. Why do you ask?”

“Was that in the evening—quitting time—or earlier?”

“I last saw him when we closed for the day. Do you plan to tell me why you’re asking these questions?”

I tried to sense something more than simple growing irritation in his voice, but I couldn’t, either because he’d had too much practice avoiding the truth or because he was being honest. I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the head shots of Charlie Jardine that Tyler had taken. I tossed it onto Clyde’s desk. “If that’s him, we found him in a shallow grave yesterday, on Canal Street.”

I don’t know what I’d expected with that melodramatic and tasteless ploy. Whether it was the lack of sleep or the air-conditioning that had lulled my common decency, I was thoroughly embarrassed by the reaction I got. Clyde leaned back in his chair as if I’d pushed him, his mouth half open, his eyes wide with shock, his face suddenly pale. “My God, that can’t be.”

I half rose from my chair. I had guessed Clyde to be a well-preserved seventy years old. Now he looked a hundred. “Are you okay?”

He blinked a couple of times and touched his forehead. “I read about ‘an unidentified body’ in the newspaper this morning. I told my wife how I’d hoped we’d left this kind of thing behind us in Boston. It never occurred to me…” He pushed his chair away from the table and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Charlie… My God.”

When he looked up at me again, I felt like the first three minutes of our meeting had taken place in a dream. The man before me now was old, tired, sad, and perhaps a little frightened. His suit, like his surroundings, looked less like the trappings of establishment arrogance and more like the shell protecting what was left of the ancient turtle within.

“What happened?”

I retrieved the photograph. “We don’t know. We’re trying to look into every corner of his past to find out.”

He shook his head and stood up, rubbing his hands across his stomach. He suddenly stabbed a button on his intercom. “Ginny, get me a glass of water.”

He stood with his back to me, looking out the window. Ginny came in, nervously glancing at both of us, and placed a glass on the desk. “Will that be all, Mr. Clyde?”

“Yes, thank you.” He waited until she’d left before turning around. He drained the glass, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief from his back pocket, and took a deep breath. I was watching a process of reconstruction so determined, it was like seeing a house rebuild itself brick by brick. He even seemed to reinflate slightly inside his clothes.

When he finally regained his seat, he was almost as I’d first seen him, albeit minutely frayed. “How may I help you?”

It had been an impressive full circle, a roller-coaster ride from utter control, out over an emotional abyss, and back again. “First, an odd question: What was he wearing when you last saw him?”

Clyde’s eyebrows rose slightly. He paused to remember. “Pale tan suit, white shirt, and some light-patterned tie.”

So he’d gone home to change before getting himself killed. Not only had we found him in different, more casual clothes, but I also remembered the suit hanging in the laundry room, presumably for some touching up or ironing. Also, since we had found no automatic timer at the house, it reinforced the theory that the air-conditioning had been turned on in the house by Jardine in expectation of his own return that night.

“When did you first meet Jardine?”

“About a year and a half ago, Tucker Wentworth introduced us.”

Tucker Wentworth was the senior partner of Morris, McGill, Jardine’s prior employer for five years. “Why did he do that?”

That brought a faint, humorless smile to Clyde’s lips. “Because he knew I was becoming bored. I come from Boston, Mr. Gunther, where for my entire professional life I was an investment broker. My wife and I moved up here when I retired, I half believing in her notions of a bucolic life of gardening, reading, and long summer strolls. But within a few months I was about ready to murder her and lay waste to the countryside. The sight of flowers almost made me ill. I needed something to stimulate my mind. Tucker seemed to think Charlie might be the answer.”

“With this business?” I waved my hand around the room.

“Yes. It’s not much, but it did the trick. My background was in analysis; Charlie had a propensity for sales, which I loathe. Tucker suggested we could make a workable odd couple—two men steering a canoe straight by paddling on opposite sides of the boat. That was his image, incidentally. Canoeing is quite a pastime with him.”

By now, all signs of shock had seemingly vanished from Clyde’s countenance. He even interrupted himself to offer me coffee. I turned him down. “What did you know about Charlie Jardine?”

“At first? Nothing. In fact, on first meeting him, I thought Tucker had lost his mind. Charlie’s style and mine are… were pretty far apart. But there was no dishonesty there; we openly discussed how we could and could not work together. Perhaps it was that immediate frankness that appealed to me. There were never any bones made about how I disliked what Charlie did—you know, selling the product—or how he thought the nuts and bolts were ‘a drag,’ to use his phrase.”