Scent of Evil (18 page)

Plummer laughed again. “If they did, they kept their singing low. Yeah, they spent time together, but they both had their own work to do. I used to see Charlie doing a lot of reading in his spare time, presumably homework Tucker had assigned him. I guess they spent non-office hours together, too, but I don’t know for sure. You have to understand that Charlie was amazingly bright. He soaked up information like a blotter. I think a lot of his education from Tucker consisted of just being pointed in the right direction. That’s probably what made it so gratifying to Tucker—it was easy and rewarding. The American Dream.”

I mulled over all he had said for a few moments. “I take it Wentworth knows about his death by now?”

Plummer shook his head sorrowfully. “I guess so; everyone else does. He was in this morning, but he’s out of town until tomorrow night on business. I’m sure he heard the news on the radio, though.”

“So Katz hasn’t talked with him?”

“Not here. That doesn’t mean he didn’t drive his car through the poor bastard’s front door before Tucker left.”

I couldn’t resist asking, “What about McDonald? Did he come by?”

Plummer smiled. “Better manners. He called, but I stiffed him, too.”

I got to my feet. “Will you let me know if anything comes up I might be interested in?”

“Sure, if I think it’s fair to Tucker.”

I nodded. “Okay. Oh, there was something else. Do you know if Wentworth helped finance ABC Investments?”

Plummer looked thoughtful. “Finance it? I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t doubt he steered some business their way, but that would stand to reason. You’ll have to ask him. If he did supply the financing, it’ll be in the public record—by law.”

“And what about Arthur Clyde? Do you know him?”

“Nope. I think I’ve seen him in the building a couple of times, when he was visiting Tucker, but I’m not even sure I’d recognize him if he walked in the door right now.”

“Okay. Thanks, Jack.”

“You bet. Give my best to Gail.”

Jack Plummer’s information had been full, detailed, and enlightening, but all it had done for me was to render Jardine’s portrait even murkier.

Charlie Jardine had come across as a young eager-beaver—bright, a quick learner, full of intelligent questions—a man on the go. Had that jibed with everything else I knew of his past and personality, I really would have been flummoxed by his grisly demise, but the contrasts kept my interest keen. For example, what did a golly-gee, super-motivated gofer have in common with Rose Woll’s portrait of a reckless, irresponsible, sexual sybarite?

And why had a man of minimal education and a dead-end future suddenly shifted gears? Which button had been pushed? Was it the death of his parents and the sudden inheritance? Had there been a bond there that had held him captive, which when severed had allowed him to soar? Or had his apparent aimlessness fresh out of high school merely been the signs of a man finding a foothold? And why the obsession to separate sex from emotion—the manipulativeness implied by all those mirrors and oils and the cocaine? Despite Rose Woll’s appreciation of him, Charlie seemed to me as sensual as an expert lathe operator, producing brilliant, complex results by coldly mechanical means.

People do not get themselves systematically executed like Charlie had without having gotten someone extremely pissed off. And despite his business partner, his employer, and one of his girl friends all agreeing that the dead man had been a very nice guy, I couldn’t shake Plummer’s image of Jardine as a deep, dark emotional well.

The paradox was, I found all that strangely heartening. It made me feel that in pursuing Charlie Jardine, I was following the right track.

The mood didn’t last. As I walked down High Street, Stan Katz poked his nose out of the Dunkin’ Donuts. “I was wondering when you’d get back.”

I looked at him incredulously. “You’ve been staking me out?”

He grinned. “Sure. You think you guys are the only ones who do that?”

“I thought you’d have better things to do. Christ, we came up with a fresh corpse for you. Why aren’t you hanging around down there, or did McDonald beat you out again?”

He gave me a sour expression. “I knew about Jardine before he did; I just don’t have a public outlet every hour on the hour. Besides, it’s no big deal—who cares when a body is ID’d? You people would have ’fessed up soon enough anyhow.”

He shifted gears, barely bothering to sound nonchalant. “I heard somebody call the stiff ‘Milly,’ but that didn’t mean anything to me.”

“Millard Crawford, called Milly for short. You can find out more about him in the court records. He was a regular customer. Shot at close range.”

Katz stared at me, his eyes narrowed. “What’re you up to?”

“Meaning?”

“Usually it’s ‘no comment,’ or ‘talk to the SA.’ Why so chatty?”

I turned to cross the street. “Fine. No comment, then.”

He reached out and touched my elbow. “No, no. Don’t get your shorts in a twist. I was just surprised, that’s all.”

“You know, Stanley, I’m not uncooperative just for fun. But you nag and nag and nag like a kid who doesn’t know when to quit. You should learn to win people over.”

He was shaking his head, unconvinced by my contrived irritation: “That’s not it. You want me to chase after Crawford instead of Jardine. Why aren’t you at today’s murder scene right now?”

The clever son of a bitch had me there. That was exactly why I’d given him Milly’s name. “Wouldn’t do any good. Besides, I was the first one there; rode in the ambulance with the guy. Tyler and his boys’re doing the technical stuff now. I’ll get into it later.”

He ignored me, correctly sensing he was on the right track. “In the interest of fair play, I was thinking I should get some comments from you about Jardine before I file my story.”

“Sure.” He’d turned tables on me. Now I was the one wondering what card he had up his sleeve. We may have been natural antagonists, but I had to admit he was tough, determined, and damned good at his job; all qualities I would have admired if he’d been a cop.

“For example, you just went to Morris, McGill, where Jardine was once employed, to investigate the highly unusual connection between that firm and ABC Investments.”

“Really? I thought I went there to hear them laugh about how they told you to take a hike.”

“I also know that you people think Crawford and Jardine were connected, and that you were about to question Crawford before he was killed.”

I smiled at him. “You didn’t even know Crawford’s name two minutes ago.”

He flared. “The name of the guy’s irrelevant; I heard you tell Dispatch you were parked at Horton Place just before all hell broke loose. You were there to interview somebody, only it turns out somebody beat you to it. Crawford and Jardine are part of a pattern.”

I was impressed. Based on a few overheard radio comments, and a knowledge of how we worked, he was close to hitting the nail on the head. It almost saddened me to have to play the charade out to its humdrum conclusion.

“Write what you will, Stanley, but I wouldn’t stick my neck out too far, if I were you. You could end up looking pretty foolish.” Or we could, I thought privately.

· · ·

One Hundred Main, as the boutique was called, was right where Tyler had said it belonged. The lettering of the sign was pseudo-Art Deco, and the windows picked up the theme, with flapper-clad manikins holding 1920s props. Inside, the decor and the cool air exuded exclusiveness and ritzy class. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would have such a store in Brattleboro.

A tall, gray-haired woman in elegant clothes slid up the counter toward me, her penciled-in eyebrows arched in inquiry. “May I help you?”

“I’m Lieutenant Gunther from the police department. One of my men called earlier about a blouse you sold.”

The eyebrows came down, as did the sophisticated manner and the mid-Atlantic accent. “Oh, yeah. The Riviera—that’s what we call it.”

She walked back along the counter to the cash register. “I dug it out of the files. Wasn’t hard; it’s the only one we’ve sold. Real expensive.” She began pawing through a drawer.

“You do a lot of business?”

“No. I think the place is a tax dodge, if you ask me. Still, it’s a job. Ah, here it is.” She handed me a sales slip.

Attached to it was a credit-card receipt. She’d been right; the blouse had cost one hundred and ninety-five dollars. More interesting, though, was the name on the receipt.

“Did you make the sale?”

“Yeah. She was perfect for it. Looked great.”

“Can you describe her?”

“Sure. About my height, slim, not too much up top—that’s what made the blouse look so good on her—and she had very blonde hair.”

I thought back to Ned Beaumont’s description of Jardine’s last female visitor. “Almost silvery, cut in a page boy?”

“That’s right.”

I looked at the receipt again, studying the signature: Blaire Wentworth. So Charlie Jardine’s interest in Tucker Wentworth included his daughter. Maybe Stan Katz was on to something, after all.

FROM THE SOFT MUTTERINGS EMANATING
from my portable radio as I crossed the street, I knew that part of the team digging in and around Milly’s apartment had returned to the Municipal Building. Not only was I curious to find out what they’d discovered, I also wanted to make sure I’d overturned every rock available to me before I confronted the Wentworths.

My trip to those rocks, however, was interrupted as I walked through the police department’s doors. Gary Nadeau, the town attorney, was approaching down the hallway, a long-suffering expression on his face. “I’d like to talk to you.”

The town attorney, unlike Brandt or Town Manager Tom Wilson, has no employment contract to protect him. He is appointed by the selectmen and confirmed by town meeting in March of every year. His job, therefore, hangs on the good graces of any three of the five selectmen. It is a political thread always ready to snap.

Over the years, there have been aggressive town attorneys, who made it their business to collect as much dirt on the selectmen as possible in order to keep them muzzled; passive types, who did their jobs and kept a packed bag always ready under their rented beds; and supposedly self-preserving types, who believed survival was based on toadying up to the bosses. The last, to my thinking, was the least reliable variety and matched Gary Nadeau to a gnat’s eyelash.

I was, unfortunately, a minority, for Gary had the reputation of being a ready listener and a good old boy, which made him the repository—and the conduit, as I saw it—of a lot of information he didn’t need to have.

“What’s on your mind, Gary?”

He lightly grabbed my elbow—a gesture I’ve never liked—and steered me toward one of the walls, as if seeking earthquake protection. “Well, it’s a favor, actually, about something that really doesn’t come under my jurisdiction.”

I let him dangle in silence.

“It’s these killings. I’ve been getting some heat from, you know, the big brass. They want to know what’s going on. Could you give me something to tell them, just to get them off my back?”

I made a big show of shaking my head in commiseration, as if I were receiving news of his pet beagle’s death. “I wish I could; there’s just not much to tell yet.”

He tossed that away with a nervous wave of his hand. “I heard one of our officers was near the place where Jardine was found.”

I deadpanned. That information was generally available but to pick it out specifically meant someone was paying very close attention, and I doubted it was just Nadeau. “It was a routine patrol—unconnected.”

He lumbered on—Mr. Casual. “Well, I wondered, you know, because if one of your personnel was somehow involved, I should be informed, since personnel matters do come under my umbrella.”

“When there’s a legal problem, yes.”

There was a long pause, during which I stayed absolutely still, the better to offset Nadeau’s nervous twitches. He finally gave it up with a sigh, shoved his hands into his pockets, and gave me an idiotically false grin. “Right. Well, thanks for the chat. Keep in touch.”

“Glad I could help,” I said, moving across the hall toward Brandt’s side of the building, my course changed by this little non-interview.

The usual cacophonous symphony of hammers, saws, and drills outside the chief’s office had been reduced to single, identifiable outbursts. The carpenters were winding down, putting up trim and fitting hardware to doors. It wouldn’t be long before their efforts were restricted to the officers’ room only.

Brandt removed his oral fog machine. “What’ve you got on Milly?”

“I don’t know yet. I was on my way to find out when Gary grabbed me in the hallway. He’s snooping for the ‘big brass,’ as he calls them—asked me about John’s cruiser being seen near Jardine’s grave. I don’t think he’s on to anything, but I thought you should know. By the way, I just found out that woman’s blouse we found at Jardine’s belonged to Blaire Wentworth.”

“Tucker’s daughter?” He mulled that over for a few seconds. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

I reopened the door. “Yup. I’ll let you know about Milly.”

Brandt suddenly held up his hand. “Hold it. You wanted to know about John Woll’s whereabouts while Milly was being shot?”

“Yeah,” I answered cautiously.

“Not good, I’m afraid. He told me he went for a drive in the country, to get some fresh air. He didn’t stop anywhere, and he didn’t see anyone he knew. Sorry.” He looked at me for a quiet moment before going back to his computer and his smoke production.

J.P. Tyler was hunched over his desk, sorting through piles of various-sized Ziploc bags. I looked around the room and saw only Klesczewski sitting at the long table in the meeting room, doing some paperwork. “Hi, J.P., you two the only ones back?”

Tyler looked over his shoulder. “Yeah. Dennis and the others are still interviewing. I think you were right about how the killer got out, by the way. Lucky he didn’t plug you when you went by.”

I didn’t comment, but it was a sobering thought. It lent credibility to my growing concern that the person behind all this, even while forced to act fast, was still coolly following an agenda. Killing me on the stairway would have been easy and uncomplicating—one less cop was surely an asset. My being left to live was therefore chilling: It made me all the more fearful of what our nemesis was up to.