Scent of Evil (12 page)

Still she looked distracted, too caught up in the intimacy of her troubles to want to share them, especially with me. “Being part-time… That was part of it.”

I racked my brain to come up with something else, remembering what I knew about John, thinking about what Rose had told me. I was casting on that water, trying to coax something to the surface. “And you were the other part?”

She sighed so deeply her body shuddered. “Yes.”

“Fights?”

She nodded.

“About what?”

Her eyes had strayed to the counter top and now remained fixed there, as if captivated by its cold, white, featureless surface. “Oh, you know…”

That was stretching things a bit, but I gave it another stab. “Married life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?”

“John is so good. So hard-working, forgiving, generous—”

I was getting the gist of it by now. “But boring.”

That stopped her cold.

“Did you begin your affair with Charlie before or after John began to drink?”

Her expression turned to a pout, reminding me how powerful self-delusions can become. “It wasn’t an affair. It was like I needed something only Charlie could give, like therapy.”

“Something to keep your marriage together.”

I hadn’t kept the skepticism from my voice—a calculated risk. She brought her face up sharply and glared at me for a moment. I remained impassive, as if this entire conversation were merely a rerun for me, the veteran of a thousand broken hearts. She finally acknowledged the point, albeit defiantly. “It helped me, and our marriage still works.”

“So when did John hit the bottle, before or after?” I wanted to establish cause and effect here, to make sure I had the sequence of events down accurately.

She seemed to think about that for a while, perhaps cautioned by the way I was forcing the issue. I was grateful she’d chosen to take this conversation more as a counseling session than as part of a murder investigation.

“Before. That was part of the reason I called Charlie; I was starting to climb the walls.”

“But now you think maybe your feelings for Charlie, and your dissatisfaction with John, helped turn John toward the bottle?”

Once again, she began crying. “It was like he was the only one whose problems counted. I thought if I could take care of my needs, then I could help John with his. I could be strong for him like he’d been for me before.”

“When you were pregnant, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I paused for a moment and then took another gamble. “Were you carrying Charlie’s baby?”

She froze, her eyes focused on some middle space. Her lips moved slightly, but a full fifteen seconds elapsed before she answered: “No, of course not.”

It was a straightforward denial, but I found the hesitation significant. I chipped away from another angle. “Didn’t things get a little complicated once Charlie began to do well? I mean, initially, you’d chosen John because you were in trouble and he was supportive and dependable. But it didn’t take long before you returned to Charlie for both support and sex. What happened when Charlie began looking more dependable than John?”

I wasn’t surprised she became angry. In fact, I wondered why she’d taken so long. “That never happened. Charlie was making a lot of money, that’s all. But he was seeing other women, too. John would never have done that. If I’d moved in with Charlie, it wouldn’t have lasted a month. John’s always been the rock in my life; I would never leave him—not for what Charlie had to offer.”

“Rose, how long did you think you could have your cake and eat it too?” I blurted unintentionally.

She looked stricken.

I played the card she’d dealt me earlier, partly to cover my outburst. “You said John had found out about you two just recently?”

She blinked a couple of times, her shoulders slumping. “Last night he told me he did. He’d never let on. He said he understood what I’d done with Charlie. I explained to him that my heart was all his, and that Charlie had just been something I’d needed to keep it all together, like a safety pin to close a coat.”

I thought, instead of the grenade pin I’d mentioned earlier to Billy Manierre. “How did John tell you about Jardine’s death?”

“He was very sweet, very gentle.”

Given John’s brooding character, I found that hard to believe. The choice, therefore, was either that she was lying, or kidding herself, or that John was being more manipulative than I thought. That idea turned me cold.

“Did he say how he’d found out about Charlie’s death?”

She looked surprised. “He said you’d told him, you and Billy. Didn’t you?”

“We talked. Were you and Charlie seeing each other up to the end?”

“Oh, no. After John turned his life around, it ended between Charlie and me. I started thinking that if he could do it, then so could I.”

A deadly quiet settled in my brain, her lie confirming my earlier suspicions. “I heard your voice on Charlie’s telephone tape machine last night, Rose.”

Her cheeks turned bright red, but she looked at me defiantly. “So? We were still friends.”

But from her yearning tone on the tape, I knew she was still hooked on Jardine for something; even if I paid her the benefit of the doubt and agreed that sex was no longer the attraction, that still left one obvious alternative.

“Rose, do you have any idea why Charlie was killed?”

She curled in on herself slightly, her hands back in her lap, her chin on her chest. The room was still for a while. Finally, she shook her head. Her voice was almost a whisper. “All night, I thought about that. He never hurt anybody.”

“When you took cocaine with him, did he ever say where he got it? That crowd plays pretty rough.”

It had been a ham-handed ploy, and it didn’t work. After what I thought was a telling pause—just enough to ruin what should have been innocent spontaneity—Rose gave me a wide-eyed look. “We didn’t do cocaine. Charlie never wanted anything to do with that stuff.”

My patience was wearing thin. She was naïve, true enough, but also selfish, clever, and manipulative, much like Charlie Jardine was beginning to sound. I decided I’d better quit before I gave myself away.

I got to my feet, the fuse-equipped secret Brandt and I shared at the forefront of my mind. If McDonald, Katz, and company got hold of this in its present nebulous, volatile form, there would be hell to pay. “I hope all this hasn’t been too much of a strain, Rose. Right now, we’re all trying to keep you and John out of this; you might want to keep a low profile.”

She stood and I opened the door for her. “Sure, Lieutenant. Thanks.”

In the hallway, a bank officer whom I knew, and whom I thought worked upstairs, came swinging out of the men’s room in front of us. “Hey, Joe, how’re you doing? Oh, oh.” He playfully checked Rose’s wrists for handcuffs. “You’re not busting our customer-relations people, are you? A simple nasty letter would have done the trick.”

Rose and I both handed him weak smiles. He waved and walked on.

So much for the low profile.

MAXINE PARODDY, THE MORNING-SHIFT DISPATCHER
, rolled her office chair across the small room and handed me a phone message through the slot below the bulletproof glass separating her from the entrance hall. “Call Gail,” she said.

I glanced at the pink slip. “There wasn’t something from the medical examiner’s office, was there?”

“Not on this shift. You heard the radio yet?”

“Why?”

“WBRT got hold of Jardine’s name somehow.”

A small pop of disappointment went off in my chest; so much for any press conference. “I was afraid of that. I saw McDonald lurking.” I crossed the hall to the detective bureau. Jardine’s identity was no deep, dark secret, and would have been released soon in any case, but McDonald’s scooping the information early made me feel like a man holding a stray kitten, surrounded by a pack of gathering mongrels. I didn’t doubt they’d be joined by others before too long.

I closed the door to my office and sat at my desk, eyeing the phone and thinking of Gail. I’d been looking forward to our planned dinner the night before with the enthusiasm of a teenager hoping he’d get lucky. It astounded me that, after so many years, such moments of intense sensual anticipation should hit me so hard… and that being deprived of one should make me all the more eager for a rematch. For years after my wife’s death, I never dreamed that the vitality of my courtship days would ever come my way again.

Now, however, my eagerness was tainted with my growing concerns about the case, and I became downright alarmed when her opening words today were: “You’re in deep shit now.”

“Why?” I suddenly knew she was speaking as a selectman, and that Brandt’s and my little conspiracy to keep Woll’s name under wraps had been revealed.

“First, you never went to bed; I have that on high authority. That means you’ve probably been fueling yourself with enough chemical by-products to drop a horse.”

I thought back to the Dunkin’ Donuts, my brain flooding with relief. “Horses are over-bred, makes ’em weak. What’s the second reason?”

“I got a call from Mrs. Morse. She’s beginning to twitch.” Barbara Morse was the chair of the board of selectmen, and one of Gail’s major opponents on most issues. Everyone called her “Mrs.” Morse with the same cringing optimism that they call obnoxious, willful children “sweetheart”; it was an unconscious peace offering made before each and every encounter. I put the relief on hold.

“What does she have to twitch about? The body’s barely cold.” I heard the wariness in my own voice.

“You heard the radio?”

“I’ve heard about the radio. What are they saying?”

“That a young, successful local businessman has been found dead and that the police are totally stymied. That’s my shorthand, of course.” Her voice dropped slightly. “I met him once, at a chamber-of-commerce thing. He was a bit like a used-car salesman, but it’s odd knowing someone who’s been killed that way.”

Depends on what you do for a living, I thought. “What does Mrs. Morse’s twitching mean for us?”

“Not too much right now. Most of us are reacting just like you did: It’s too early to start getting hysterical. Still, she’s working the phone, wondering out loud if the town’s going to be turned inside out like it was by your friend in the ski mask, and whether we should be better prepared, just in case. I don’t think she’s getting far. On the other hand, it won’t take much to make the board overreact, once they’ve built up enough steam.”

I let out a sigh; it was depressing, but predictable—so far. Nevertheless, her comments did make me feel the first twinges of guilt. I was indeed keeping her in the dark, because of her official position, which made me feel doubly uncomfortable when I asked, “Do you want to know if you should fasten your seat belt?”

“Nope. I’m calling to ask if you’d like yesterday’s dinner tonight. I just wanted to let you know the drums were beginning to beat.”

I chuckled at that, off the hook again. “What’s on the menu—sliced tofu on sprouts flambé?” Gail was an unbending vegetarian.

“Worse.”

“You got a date… And thanks for the warning.”

“My pleasure. See you soon.”

I hung up and turned on my pilfered fan, both to cut through the heat and to soothe my conflicting emotions.

The state medical examiner, Beverly Hillstrom, and I had become fast friends over time. We were both wary of pat answers and distrustful of the expedience that often pushes through red tape. We had more than once compared notes privately just to make sure her findings hadn’t suffered in translation from her office to mine. But, as I’d reminded Klesczewski, I always waited until I had those findings in hand before I called. Until now.

“Hello, Lieutenant.” Her voice was cool and pleasant, as usual. There were times that second adjective slipped, allowing the first to freeze the air. But this time I’d caught her in her office, presumably grateful for a paperwork interruption. “What can I do for you, as if I couldn’t guess?”

“Ouch. I tried leaving you alone as long as possible, but I’m afraid my sweaty palms got the better of me.”

She chuckled. Despite our friendship, we always referred to one another by title. Somehow, I’d felt early on that was a line she preferred to leave in place, for whatever reasons. “Well, I take it that Dr. Gould told you what he told me.”

“Acute cerebral ischemia?”

“Correct. That was definitely the cause of death.”

“Do you also agree with his hypothesis that the victim was taped to a chair and, quote-unquote, strangled by having his arteries shut off?”

“I find that entirely consistent.”

“What about the possible injection site? Was he shot up with anything?”

Again, I heard her soft laughter. “I give you high marks. A more impulsive man would have made that his first question. It was an injection site—we definitely ruled out an insect bite—and it’s also the reason you don’t have my report yet. I could fill out the death certificate now and be satisfied it was correct, but I agree with you and Dr. Gould that something about this whole thing is off-key.”

There was a pause. I could hear classical music in the background being reduced to a murmur. “So I took the liberty of contacting Dr. Isador Gramm, who works for the Department of Health on environmental matters.”

“Like pollution?”

“Yes. Primarily his focus, and most of his funding, is EPA. But he is also one of the only board-certified forensic toxicologists in New England, which makes him an invaluable resource. We’ve worked together in the past, and I respect him immensely.” Her choice of words, especially when coupled with that almost aloof tone, always made me think Dr. Hillstrom was just two steps away from bursting into Old English.

“How long will it take him to find something?” I asked, knowing full well how scientists, given an intricate puzzle, love to play with it for an eternity.

She didn’t pick up on my suspicious tone, or didn’t choose to. “That depends on what process of elimination he employs. He obviously has to compare our sample to known entities in order to come up with an identification. That’s quite a list, as you can imagine. I think, however, that you’ll be pleasantly surprised. This is an inspired researcher, and we have already given him a leg up.”