Scent of Evil (16 page)

“BP falling, pulse falling.”

Franklin was now talking to himself. “Looked like the whole back of the atrial wall gave away. Crawford, you bastard, if you’d taken better care of yourself, you might have had a stronger heart. What the fuck do you expect me to do, goddamn it?” He kept looking into the chest. “Keep up the suction and hang more blood.”

“Twenty beats per minute,” the woman’s voice intoned, in the quiet, gloomy room to her motionless audience. Her gradual countdown took five minutes, during which not another voice was heard. “Ten… Two… There’s been one in the last two minutes.” And finally: “No cardiac activity.”

In the stillness greeting this statement, Franklin straightened for the last time. He peeled off his gloves and dropped them on Milly’s stomach, pulled off his hat and mask, and, walking away into the dark, let them both fall to the floor as he vanished stoop-shouldered through the door.

There were a few half mutterings as people followed his example, some to go back to tend to the living, others to get the necessary equipment to clean up the mess.

In less than a minute, I was alone with Milly Crawford, as I had been when I’d first found him in his apartment. His eyes were half open, staring unblinking into the hot, bright lamps. The fat tube protruded from his mouth, silent and without purpose. His body, where it wasn’t covered by the stained green sheets, was as white as marble and would soon be as cold.

“You know who did it?” Harry stepped out from the surrounding darkness, his eyes sad and his voice gentle.

“I was hoping to ask him.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shifted my gaze back to Milly. “So am I.”

KLESCZEWSKI COULDN’T STOP SMILING
at my lime-green attire.“No Doctor Kildare jokes.”

He shook his head. We were standing at the threshold to Milly’s ransacked apartment. The pool of blood had congealed and now looked more like a huge spread of dried blackberry jam. Without a body at its center, it took on a horrifying, suggestive aspect, one that prompted me to keep my eyes instead on Tyler and his men as they picked their way from one end of the apartment to the other, scrutinizing and photographing every square inch.

“I take it you didn’t find the shooter.”

Ron shook his head. “We’re still interviewing, but it looks like a clean getaway. I’m not even sure which direction he took.”

I turned and glanced up the hall stairs, not surprised at this bit of news. As spontaneous as I guessed Milly’s murder to have been, it hadn’t struck me as a crime of passion, where the killer would be found, blood-soaked and distraught, lurking around some nearby corner. Milly’s death had been rushed and risky but planned all the same; that much I could feel in my bones. “How many ways out are there?”

He followed my glance upstairs. “Well, that’s one of them. The door to the roof is wide open, for ventilation, and the roof connects to buildings on either side. There’re front and back doors to the place, plus a cellar with a bulkhead entrance. The guy had his pick.”

“Assuming he left at all.” Here I was playing the devil’s advocate, virtually positive the killer was long gone.

“That’s what we’re checking on now, door to door. We sealed the area. The same landlord owns all three buildings, so we’re using him as a passkey. If the killer is here, we should find him, unless he lives here.”

I raised my eyebrows at him silently. He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well, you know, if the killer’s one of the neighbors, then we’ll find him at home, looking perfectly normal.”

I nodded distractedly and sat on one of the steps behind me. Klesczewski felt the need to explain further, his latent insecurity surfacing. “It’s possible this all happened because of a fight between neighbors, especially with someone like Milly. I wouldn’t want him next door.”

I didn’t argue the point. Statistically, Klesczewski was right, not that it altered my private opinion any. “Did anyone hear shots?”

“No—no one, and a couple of them were pretty close by, one right across the street at the same height, open window to open window, and another directly downstairs. I don’t think they’re trying to duck us, by the way; must’ve been a silencer.”

I was suddenly aware of the suffocating heat in the stairwell. Glancing at Klesczewski’s face, I saw it was beaded with sweat. “Is there any shade on the roof?”

He took it in stride, long used to my wandering mind. “Some.”

“Good.” I got up and began climbing the tired, sagging stairs. I could hear him following, judging his earlier observation. “I guess a silencer isn’t the kind of thing you bring to a neighborly dispute.”

I didn’t rub the point in; it was just the kind of thinking I was trying to encourage in him. “Did Dummy come up with anything more?”

“No, and he’s not real happy with you, either. Says you can take him off your list of born suckers. This is the last time he does our work for us.”

“Did you pay him off?” The environment suited the conversation.

Now free to look around, instead of ducking potential bullets and watching people die, I became aware of the drab surroundings—the splintered, bare-wood floors, the dark-lit walls, stained waist-high by the touch of countless unwashed and unsteady fingers. I wondered briefly how many times I had traveled hallways similar to this, and how many more lay ahead.

“Yeah. It didn’t make much of a dent, though. He said you were a lying bastard for setting him up and that I was cheap.”

The door to the roof was on the fourth floor, at the top of a steep half ladder, half staircase. I continued climbing toward the glaring, white-hot rectangle of light. “I did tell him there was no risk.”

Klesczewski let out a laugh. “He heard that part, all right.”

I’d just reached the top step when both our radios squawked. I recognized DeFlorio’s voice asking Klesczewski where I was.

“We’re both on the roof.”

“Chief’s here.”

I looked around briefly and keyed my own radio. “Send him up.”

Klesczewski frowned as he hooked his radio back onto his belt.

“You’re not surprised he showed up, are you?”

He shrugged. “No, I suppose not.”

But he wasn’t happy. Unlike when a general appears through the smoke of battle, the arrival of the police chief was not inspiring to the troops. Most department members were uncomfortable around Brandt, seeing him as their political leader, with his own separate arena in which to wage war. His presence among them, especially at a crime scene, gave rise to both self-doubt and resentment that they weren’t being trusted to do their jobs. The fact that Brandt had patrolled more streets and stuck his nose into more potential trouble than any two of them combined meant next to nothing to them. He was the Big Cheese, and best avoided. Having been in his shoes, even for a scant few months, I could sympathize with his peculiar isolation.

“Why don’t you get back to it? I’ll stay put and find out what he wants.”

Klesczewski didn’t need urging. He let out a quick okay and was gone.

The heat on the roof, especially when reflected off its flat tar-and-gravel coating, was no less intense than what it had been in the stairwell, but the location’s openness was a help psychologically. In fact, although the steep bluff that skirted a good portion of lower Canal Street, and which forced Horton Place to double back on itself like a horseshoe, loomed just a hundred feet to my back, the building itself was tall enough to compete with the treetops. Looking northwest along the axis of the Whetstone Brook valley to the distant hills beyond West Brattleboro, I imagined being a raft-borne sailor on a choppy green sea. The verdant stretch of tree crowns was punctuated by oddly shaped rooftops, which, in my craving for cool air, I chose to see as parodies of icebergs. Not that the illusion was wholly satisfactory; I ended up seeking the more palpable comfort of a large maple’s half circle of shade near the rear edge of the roof. There I waited, dimly aware of the city’s murmur below and around me, reflecting on the events of the last few hours.

Brandt found me five minutes later and gestured at my borrowed scrub suit. “I take it Milly didn’t make it.”

I shook my head. “Ron and I were just discussing that whoever hit him probably used a silencer. Also, the slug they dug out of him in the operating room looked like a .38 or a 9-millimeter.”

Brandt grunted. “What did McDermott tell you?”

That came from left field. I gave him a dumb look. “Fred McDermott? I haven’t seen him in over a week.”

“Oh. DeFlorio mentioned he was here when the shooting started. I thought you might have talked to him.”

Fred McDermott was the town’s building inspector, a position that made him intimately familiar with most of the firetraps and health hazards in the city. I wasn’t surprised he’d been seen in a kindling pile like this, but the timing was unusual. “No. I haven’t even seen DeFlorio yet.”

“Well, no big deal. From what I gather, he had nothing to offer.” Brandt moved into the shade next to me and waved his arm to encompass the three adjoining roofs. “So, you think he got away over the top?”

“It’s possible.”

Brandt caught my tone. “But you don’t think so.”

I didn’t share my men’s distrust of Tony Brandt. He was reserved. He didn’t laugh it up with the boys or ask to be treated as a pal. Although politically versed, he lacked the instinctive glibness that marks the common breed of politician. I saw him rather as a policeman who’d chosen to be a chief because he wanted to prove the two weren’t mutually exclusive. That was a subtlety lost on the department’s younger members, too concentrated on their swagger and pride. But to old hands like Billy Manierre and me, Brandt’s attempt to keep the cop in him alive while playing the bureaucrat’s role was an asset; it supplied us with a trusted sounding board that could tell us how our ideas might play to either a professional or a political audience.

I therefore had no qualms about sharing my doubts with him. Besides, with what we knew about the Wolls, we shared a secret, which by definition made us conspirators.

“No, I don’t, although it sounds reasonable enough.” I paused and moved to the edge of the roof. Brandt remained silent. Below me, police cars were parked helter-skelter, like badly aligned toys. “If I wanted to kill someone who lived near the top floor of this building, I’d make my escape over the roofs. It would lessen the chances of anyone seeing me twice and it would allow me two neighboring buildings with all their exits to choose from.”

Brandt still didn’t speak, being used to my ramblings.

“The silencer, assuming there was one, indicates premeditation, which would tie in to a preplanned escape route.” I crossed over to the opposite edge and looked over into the tangle of weeds, bushes, and sun-bleached grass that constituted the backyards of the buildings.

“But the timing bothers me, and makes me think this wasn’t as premeditated as it looks.” I turned and faced Brandt. “We haven’t heard from Milly Crawford in months—almost a year. He hasn’t come up in any of the local criminal street gossip, as far as I know. So we’ve got to assume he’s been leading his normal low-life existence. Then, all of a sudden, his name pops up, we set up a way to bust him, and he gets himself killed, all in the space of a few hours. Nice and neat.”

Brandt finally spoke up. “How does that connect to a rooftop escape?”

“Not enough time to preplan it. How would you know if the rooftop door would be open, or at least be unlocked? How about the doors leading down in the other two buildings? Also, you need to know the route from beginning to end, and the habits of the people living here. You need to hang around for a while, find out how things work, figure out as many of the intangibles as possible.”

“And you don’t think that happened here?”

“Nope. I think this was an act of desperation, done at the last second to stop us from talking to Milly, but not by a hothead. Whoever it was kept his cool. That tells me we’re facing a planner by nature; someone who thinks before he jumps, even on short notice.”

The radio muttered my name from the back pocket of my green pants.

“Go ahead.”

“You might want to come down here and check this out. Second floor.”

I glanced at Brandt, who shrugged and followed me back into the gloomy, stifling stairwell.

We found several officers, including Ron Klesczewski, gathered on the second-story landing. With them was a red-faced, sullen man with a peeved expression and a large set of keys on a ring.

“This is Mr. Blossom,” Klesczewski said, with a palpable touch of sarcasm. “He’s the landlord here and has been kind enough to open whatever doors need opening.”

Blossom and I nodded curtly to one another. I could see from his face that proffering a handshake would only invite a rebuke and probably a smirk to match.

Klesczewski indicated an apartment door labeled “21.” “No one was home, so we asked Mr. Blossom to do the honors and found out the jamb was busted.”

Brandt gave me a look and bent down to study the door. It opened to the inside and was held shut by a simple keyed doorknob. The interior jamb, where the lock’s catch plate had been mounted, had been splintered by a heavy force coming against the outside of the door.

I pointed at several small wooden shards lying on the inside of the threshold, evidence that the breakage was recent. Brandt grunted, “The exposed wood looks fresh, too.”

The whole setup made me feel slightly hollow.

I didn’t want to say too much in front of Blossom, whom I regarded as little more than a loudspeaker to the neighborhood and the press, which couldn’t be far off. I turned back to Klesczewski. “Better seal this off and get Tyler on it as soon as possible. Be easier all around if he got it done before the tenant comes back home.”

Brandt motioned to me to follow him downstairs. “So what do you make of it?” he asked, once we were out of earshot, heading out the front door of the building.

“Pure guesswork?” I said, with an artificial brightness.

“Sure.”

“Then I think I probably came close enough to the killer to touch him. Either he broke open that door to hide when Dummy came upstairs, which he really didn’t have any reason to do unless they know each other, or he was in Milly’s room when Dummy walked in, ducked downstairs when I was being called from the balcony, and hid behind that door as I was coming up.”