Scent of Evil (17 page)

Brandt was silent as we both crossed the street, walking toward Canal. He spoke up as I stopped by my car. “You’re also saying someone in the police department told the killer about Milly, right?”

“It looks that way.”

He frowned. “Just like he told him about a bum being under that bridge.”

I didn’t respond.

“Which means we’re back to John Woll.”

“Or we’re being led back to him.”

Brandt pursed his lips, considering that much more complicated possibility. “By who?”

“Take your pick. A lot of people had access to Milly’s identity, just as soon as we did. Tyler dug his card out of the fingerprint file; he made no secret of his pleasure to me, and I doubt he did to anyone else he met on his way to my office. And you gave the paperwork I filled out for the money to your secretary, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She’s out in the open, near where half the department and a good many visitors pass by on the way to the coffee machine or the copier or whatever. Anybody could have paused there to say hi, glanced at the paperwork, and put it all together.”

Brandt shook his head. “That one’s slim.”

“Okay, but I also told Dispatch where I was when I parked here. Someone familiar with how we work could figure it out, especially if Jardine was buried so we would find him. It would further reinforce the theory that this whole investigation is being manipulated somehow.”

“But that points to police involvement again, doesn’t it?”

I doggedly refused to be cornered, if only to stave off becoming too tunnel-visioned. “Not necessarily. Look, someone could have been tailing me. He sees me meet Dummy, follows me here, realizes Milly’s been blown, and goes upstairs to kill him just before Dummy arrives to make the buy. There was a five-minute gap while Dummy and I just watched the front of the building from the car. Same thing identifying the bum angle. We spent a few hours crawling under a bridge that’s obviously served as somebody’s home. What conclusions would you draw, as a reasonably bright onlooker?”

Brandt stared at the sidewalk. He had my sympathies. Not only did he have two homicides in two days—with the attending heat from both media and selectmen—he also had a chief detective who seemed ready to embrace any theory that popped into his head.

In the brief silence, I almost hated counterbalancing my own broad view of the case with John Woll’s latest coffin nail; but there it was, as hard as evidence could get. “One other piece of bad news,” I said, as I circled my car and opened the driver’s door. “The saliva on the cigarette butt found in Jardine’s grave was AB, same as John Woll’s. It’s a pretty rare type.”

Brandt absorbed that glumly. “Which brings up the most obvious possibility of all—that Woll knocked off Milly.”

“True. Tell Ron to look into that, would you? Have him check on John’s whereabouts today.” I slid behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Where’re you going?”

“To change my clothes.” I ignored his look of irritation and backed the car around to face Canal.

Reasonably, I should have stayed at the scene and looked over the shoulders of my men. But they knew what they were doing. I, on the other hand, needed no more than fifteen minutes of meditative quiet, just enough to distance myself from Milly’s grotesque and bloody passing, and my own unknowing escape from his killer. I needed a touch of the routine, a familiar setting in which I could shift gears and begin to move forward again.

My apartment is on the corner of High and Oak, just a stroll up the hill from the center of town. It’s actually a pretty ritzy neighborhood, with lots of Victorian homes, heavy on stained glass and gingerbread molding, made all the more exclusive for being a stroll away from the business district. Gail had once pointed out that, were it not for the building’s appearance, I couldn’t afford to live there. It was true that home wasn’t much to look at. It too had once been Victorian, but a bargain-basement remodeler had pretty much butchered whatever grace it might have had. Now it was just large, lumpy, and painted urine yellow. Also, its location, within immediate earshot of High Street’s grinding gears and squealing brakes, helped keep the rent low and the yuppies away.

I lived on the top floor in a ramshackle place, comfortably old and dusty, as filled with dark wood, ancient overstuffed furniture, and low ceilings as Gail’s place was open and airy and modern. Indeed, its one striking architectural feature was its massive number of books; they lined my walls, were piled in odd corners, and covered much of my furniture. An obsession planted by my educationally minded mother, reading books had become my primary off-duty pastime, besides spending time with Gail. The apartment had therefore become, over the years, a cavelike shelter against the outside world, a museum of my past, my passions, and my deep-rooted pleasure in solitude.

I stripped off the hospital greens, turned on the various fans I’d acquired of late, and settled in my nest of choice, an enormous, comforting, bulging armchair, surrounded by a cluster of lights, books, side tables, and a mismatched ottoman, all of which normally tended to most of my needs.

I didn’t use any of them now, however. This time, their proximity was enough. I stared out across the worn carpet to the battered coffee table with its neat stacks of mail, to the nondescript sofa against the wall of books beyond, and I thought.

A quarter hour later, resolved if not refreshed, I got up and began dressing. If I was to pursue the theory that this entire investigation was being manipulated to incriminate either the department generally or John Woll personally, I had to do more than stand around and watch that process take place. My job now was to focus less on the “who” in both these murders, and more on the “why.”

Which brought me back to Charlie Jardine. Unlike Milly Crawford’s, his death had been planned, carefully executed, and intensely personal.

THE LAW FIRM OF MORRIS, MCGILL
is the biggest one in town. It occupies one of the few wooden structures near the downtown T intersection of High and Main, a long single block down from my own apartment, at exactly the point where High Street’s descent into Main is at its steepest. This geographical detail helps create the unfortunate impression that the building is being crushed between its stalwart brick neighbor below, and the equally heavy but seemingly less surefooted monstrosity above.

No one I knew had any idea who Morris or McGill were. The firm had been a longstanding establishment when I’d first come to Brattleboro in the fifties, so presumably the founding partners were a part of ancient history, if they existed at all. It brought to mind that Brattleboro itself had been named for William Brattle, a Harvard-educated theologist/speculator who died as a colonel for the losing side in the Revolutionary War before ever visiting his namesake.

The receptionist/secretary who greeted me exuded crisp efficiency. I asked to see Tucker Wentworth.

Her expression became professionally crestfallen. “Oh, I’m sorry. Mr. Wentworth is out of the office.”

“Is he due back anytime soon?”

“I’m afraid he’s out of town. Would you like to leave a message with his secretary?”

“No, that’s all right. How about Jack Plummer?”

“Mr. Plummer’s in. Do you have an appointment?”

The sudden inanity of the question stalled me for a second. I pulled out my badge and showed it to her. “If he’s free, tell him Joe Gunther would like a couple of minutes.”

She nodded quickly, got out from behind her desk, and trotted up the flight of stairs along the wall. The building, in keeping with its awkward exterior, was equally odd inside. Like a series of stacked hallways, it was built narrow and deep, which allowed for very few offices with windows, since only the front and the back were free of the two brick behemoths on either side.

The receptionist returned and told me I could go up. Jack Plummer and I had known one another for twenty years. He was a fastidious man, plump and bald as an egg, given to bow ties, French meals, and front-row seats at the nearby Marlboro Music Festival every summer. Our connection, needless to say, was not social. As one of the town’s highest-paid criminal lawyers, which, in truth, wasn’t saying too terribly much, he had gleefully grilled me on many occasions in court, a relationship that had in turn led, paradoxically, to a pretty sound friendship.

His office was on the third floor facing High Street and took up the entire breadth of the building. He was also, this announced, the senior partner of the firm. The door was open, and his secretary waved me in without a word.

Jack was tilted back in his chair with his feet parked on his windowsill—fastidious but not prissy. He was also not one to beat around the bush. “I take it you’re here to discuss Charlie Jardine.”

“Very good.”

He waved it away. “Hardly; the whole town is beginning to hum about your problems. Plus, you’re a little behind the eight ball. Stan Katz has already come and gone.”

That struck a sour note. “Really? When?” Katz would be twice as fired up since McDonald had beaten him to the punch identifying Jardine.

“I don’t know; an hour or two ago.”

“Sent to you by Arthur Clyde?” I wondered how deep he’d dug already.

“He didn’t say. He is an amazingly unappealing little man, isn’t he?”

“Katz? Yeah. What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. He asked if Jardine had worked here. I said yes. He asked if I’d known him. I said no. It went downhill from there. Only lasted a few minutes. He’s probably wining and wooing half my staff by now, looking for the scuttlebutt.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“About Charlie?” Plummer looked thoughtful for a few moments. “Not much, really. Interesting guy in a way. One of the few people I ever met who defied categorization.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he was like a bottomless pit. You could shovel things into him and never hear it land, but you could never get much out of him.”

“Kept to himself, then?”

“No, no. He was all over the place. The guy was an office boy, for Christ’s sake; that’s a job leading nowhere, generally held by nobodies. They pick up mail, deliver memos, go out for pizza, buy stationery supplies. Their curiosity is satisfied by catching a glimpse down some secretary’s blouse. Charlie attacked this place like it was a natural stepping-stone to fame and fortune—a training ground. He read everything he could, asked questions of all of us, even took me out to lunch once just to grill me about criminal law. And his curiosity wasn’t restricted to just the lawyers. I’d hear him asking the girls about how the computers worked, or how our contract with the Xerox people was set up. I don’t doubt he interviewed the janitor on the merits of Ty-D-Bol.”

“He didn’t show any preferences?”

“Oh, sure, eventually he turned Tucker into his favorite port of call, but even then he didn’t lose sight of the rest of us. Amazing drive. I wasn’t surprised he finally succeeded.”

“By getting Wentworth to sponsor him with Clyde?”

Plummer hesitated. “Yeah, well, I meant before that—by getting Tucker to turn him into a sort of protégé. Tucker’s a pretty private man, and I don’t think at first he liked being hounded by the guy who delivered his morning mail. But Charlie was pretty irrepressible; even Tucker had to finally respect that. Jardine had the get-up-and-go we all have envied in other people at one point or another in our lives. When someone like that asks for help, it’s pretty hard to resist.”

“Did it become a personal friendship?”

Again Plummer paused before speaking. “I sensed they were certainly friendly, given their age difference, but I couldn’t say much beyond that. As I mentioned, Tucker’s pretty private, and I don’t know if any of us ever found out what really made Charlie tick, so what they thought about one another is a little hard to guess. But, like you said, Tucker did sponsor him with Clyde, which isn’t something he would have done lightly.”

“Is Tucker really so sharp that Charlie would have picked up so much?”

Plummer laughed. “Tucker Wentworth is a natural. Business finance, in all its aspects, is to him what the sea is to a fish: home.”

“So—no offense—but what’s he doing here?”

Plummer laughed. “Oh, shit, he’s just like the rest of us, practicing on-the-job retirement.” The smile faded from his face. “Actually, his stimulus for leaving the fast lane wasn’t so self-serving. Some twenty years ago, his wife died, I don’t know from what. He doesn’t speak of it, but I’ve heard it was a painful experience. In any case, he had a young daughter whom I supposed he’d never really focused on, and I think it hit him that what he’d been working for all this time had nothing to do with reality. So he stepped back, signed on with us, and began paddling in calmer waters. His daughter and he are very close, he lives in a huge, fancy home with a view of the West River valley that’ll break your jaw, and he’s become a kind of distant elder statesman in his field. Life has become heaven on earth, from what I can tell.”

“So he kept up with his past work—I mean, he didn’t lose touch being out here instead of in New York?”

Jack Plummer leaned over and patted his telephone. “Welcome to the twentieth century, Joe. Between this, the computer, and the fax, all Tucker Wentworth missed out on were the power lunches and the attending heartburn. He’d already culled a lifetime’s worth of contacts. All he had to do when he joined us was maintain them.”

I gave him a skeptical look.

He held up both his hands. “He’s an elder statesman. He doesn’t need to earn his stripes in the fast lane anymore; nor does he need to know all the nitty-gritty about who’s screwing who. He can play a more general game now and be just as successful. He can also afford to be generous, which does Morris, McGill good and obviously didn’t hurt our friend Charlie Jardine.”

“So what made that relationship click?”

Plummer shrugged. “Who knows? The son he never had? Some shared interest I know nothing about? Usually it’s a little thing, some initial connection. It grows from there; I don’t know why.”

“What did they do? Spend hours together in the office doing a
My Fair Lady
imitation?”