Scent of Evil (23 page)

She smiled bitterly and shook her head. “I guess they do, at that.”

“Might that have happened to Charlie?”

She leaned her elbows on the desk and covered her face with her hands. Her body seemed to withdraw into itself, shrinking a little in the process. It made her look suddenly frail. With that strikingly youthful face out of sight, I could easily imagine this same body on an eighty-year-old, thin, stoop-shouldered, and powerless. It was a jarring view of a far-distant future.

She straightened and rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t been crying, I realized, but perhaps reorganizing her thoughts or merely taking a break to settle down. In any case, some of her immediate defenses were noticeably lowered. “I don’t know what happened to Charlie, Lieutenant. One moment he was there, the next he was dead.”

“So you didn’t feel there was anything preying on his mind, some threat he didn’t want to talk about?”

“Not a thing. He was perfectly normal.”

“When did you last see him?”

She hesitated. “Three, four days ago.”

“Like a day before he died?”

“Two days. We spent the night at his place and went our separate ways the next morning. Then I called him at home that night, and that was the last time we ever spoke.” Her voice sounded hollow at the end. I wondered if she kept herself this bottled up when she was alone, and whether she’d allowed herself to truly grieve at all so far.

“And he sounded fine then?”

“Absolutely fine.”

“You left a blouse at his place.”

She paused a couple of seconds, thrown perhaps by the sudden shift, and then she smiled sadly. “Yes.”

“Did you have a complete change of clothing there, for when you stayed over?”

“No. Some oil had spilled on that blouse. Charlie had cleaned it up, but it was wet and he said he’d hand-wash it later, so I left it there. I took one of his shirts instead. He was much better at that kind of thing than I am.”

“You mean washing?”

“Washing, cooking, all those things. I have a maid come in. He loved doing it himself. He had a very domestic strain in him.”

“Were you aware of other women in his life?”

“Of course. That was no secret.”

“And no problem, either?”

She was surprised. “You mean jealousy? You think he was killed by a jealous lover?”

“It happens.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “Not with Charlie. That kind of possessiveness never came into it.”

“Maybe not with you; it might have with others. That’s not something you can easily control.”

I expected her to keep rejecting the idea, convincing herself that her experience with Charlie had been shared by all his women, but her intelligence willed out, and her expression sobered. “It’s hard to imagine, but I suppose you’re right.”

“Did you know any of these other women?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, and then said no.

“What were you about to say?”

“Nothing… Oh, just that we hadn’t formed a club or anything. Maybe there is some jealousy there after all.”

“You sometimes thought about him making love to another woman?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes. I wasn’t faithful to him either, you know.”

“But it bothered you where it didn’t seem to bother him?”

“I know it didn’t bother him. That was one of the ground rules. With Charlie, it was like an exchange. He would give you probably the best sex you’d ever had, but only if that’s where it stopped: no love, no commitment, no expectations.”

“Sounds pretty cold.”

She shrugged. “Maybe, but it was honest, and he delivered on his end.”

My inner vision blurred slightly, imagining this woman being gratified sexually like another might be pampered by a good hairdresser.

“What did he get out of it?”

It was a pretty tactless comment, blurted without thought, but she merely smiled. “I wasn’t a disinterested party, Lieutenant. I played, too.”

I reddened. “Of course. It just sounded… I don’t know… Almost commercial.”

“His payment was in power. I think he liked manipulating a woman’s passion, making her lose control. Sometimes he wouldn’t even join in; he’d just gratify me and then quit.”

“Like he was doing a job,” I reiterated.

She didn’t take offense at my perseverance. She merely corrected me. “No. It was as if while my pleasure was sexual, his was psychological.”

“But it was sexual, too, wasn’t it?”

“Of course, most of the time. But he transcended plain sex. In a way, if I had any jealousy, it was of his pleasure, because of its utter privacy. I felt he was enjoying something beyond what I could ever feel. I’d see him sometimes, watching us making love in one of those mirrors, totally absorbed, as if I didn’t matter, just my body.”

“Did you two do drugs together?”

“Sometimes.” The answer was hard and defiant.

I kept my voice unchanged. “We found some cocaine in the house. Is that what you used?”

“A little.”

“Where did he keep it?”

“You just said you found it.”

I continued to avoid the emotional edge she was skirting, hoping to pull her back, to show her there was no danger from me. “Yes, but we might have missed a place. I want to make sure we got it all.”

“It was taped to the back of a drawer, in the bedroom.”

“Okay. Same stuff then. Ever do any grass or pills?”

“No. We weren’t into drugs. The coke was to relax, like having a beer.”

I resisted arguing the point. “You don’t happen to know where he bought the coke, do you?”

She shook her head.

“But he always had some?”

“Yes. Not much, just that one baggie.”

“How did you two meet?”

She smiled. “At my father’s office. Charlie worked there before he set up his own company. I guess you know that.”

I nodded. “So you just bumped into him?”

“Well, at first, yes. But they spent a lot of time together, so I got to know him pretty well that way.”

I was a little confused by the phrasing. “You mean they were in the office together when you came to visit?”

“No. I saw Charlie at the office—around the building, that is—but he’d come over to my father’s house, too, for dinner or whatever. They loved to talk.”

“Where do you live, Miss Wentworth?”

“At my father’s. Actually, it’s a separate building, a small cottage, but we usually have breakfast together and lots of dinners. My mother died a long time ago.”

“Did your father know of your involvement with Jardine?”

“No. Does he have to find out?” For the first time, I sensed real distress. She leaned forward in her chair, her eyes fixed on mine, her face rigid with sudden tension.

“I can only say I won’t tell him.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means the media is on the prowl and a lot of people are involved in this investigation. It might get out, even if I bend over backwards to stop it.”

“And you wouldn’t do that.” She sounded both bitter and resigned, already anticipating how to pick up the pieces before anything was broken.

“I can try, assuming I discover you’ve been straight with me.”

“I’ve answered your questions, haven’t I?”

There was an element of the rebellious child in this woman, despite her mature and sophisticated appearance. The revelations that she more or less still lived at home, worked as a volunteer, and went about buying two-hundred-dollar shirts, all helped to reveal a pretty self-indulgent person, free from the constraints of a job, a mortgage, or any worries about money. It made me wonder how free she felt from telling the truth. It also thinned out her natural beauty in my eyes, making it more superficial; no doubt that was partly my working-class prejudices at work.

“I hear your father was a big help to Charlie, training him, setting him up in business. Why did he do that?”

“He liked him.”

“There must have been more to it than that. Your father put a lot of money into ABC Investments.”

“He has a lot to give.”

I didn’t actually know if Wentworth had put a plugged nickel into Jardine’s business, but I’d been hoping for a different reaction than the one I got. Obviously, the father-Charlie part of this conversation was pretty barren land.

“How did Charlie help your father?”

She tossed her head impatiently. “Oh, you know—the father-son bit, I suppose.”

The tone was disinterested, but I wasn’t convinced. From the start, I’d felt Blaire Wentworth was holding more in her hand than she was willing to reveal. Indeed, in a few minutes, she had metamorphosed in my eyes from a cautious mourner to a careful player. I decided to return to what had been a more fruitful topic. “Did Charlie talk about his past much?”

“No. Well, it was selective.”

“How so?”

“He loved to talk about high school. He said that was the most fun he’d ever had. I think it’s because that’s where he discovered sex. He was seriously into that.”

“Did he mention friends or enemies? Any times he got into trouble?”

“Just the usual—the kind of scrapes we all got into. Nothing serious.”

“How about a girl named Rose. Did he ever talk about her?”

“Rose?” She shook her head. “Never heard of her.”

I looked at her; she looked back, her eyes wide and expressionless. Her answer had been immediate, clear, and to the point, and for all those reasons utterly unbelievable.

Abruptly, I decided to call it quits. I rose from my wooden box, thanked her for her time, and left. Blaire Wentworth had plenty more information, but for whatever reasons, she obviously didn’t want to share it with me, at least not yet.

HOW DID IT GO
with Arthur Clyde?”

“I think it surprised the shit out of him,” Klesczewski said. “If there’s anything incriminating in all that junk, I think we’ll find it, ’cause he didn’t strike me as someone who’d swept his dirt under the rug. He looked totally stunned, and got madder than hell.”

“Did you call in Willette to help sort it out?”

“Yeah. Dennis and him are working on it now. Better them than me.”

I looked over at him. He seemed more relaxed than I’d seen him in a long time—in fact, since his elevation to second-in-command. If nothing else, I thought, this double homicide and its attending chaos was going to make him more comfortable with taking the initiative. That was a personal vindication for me, since Brandt had voiced serious reservations about my decision. He’d favored Tyler—an obvious choice and, I’d thought, a perfect opportunity to see the Peter Principle at work.

E-Z Hauling had its truck depot on the Old Ferry Road, somewhat of a no-man’s land on the edge of town where the north Putney Road becomes Route 5 heading toward Putney and Westminster. The area has been taken over by a mismatched scattering of metal buildings, some modest in size, housing conventional businesses like American Stratford typesetters, others so enormous as to defy the imagination, like the seven-acre main shipping and receiving terminal and the four-and-a-half-acre freezer building of C&S Wholesale Grocers, arguably the largest business in the whole state of Vermont, and one of the ten most profitable companies in New England. In between were operations like Pepsi-Cola Bottling, Northeast Cooperatives—a health food distributor—UPS, Boise Cascade, and various trucking firms. It was no scenic wonderland, but considering it was designed to keep the majority of the area’s heavy truck traffic away from downtown, I’d always thought both planners and developers had done a halfway decent job.

Nothing could alter a metal building’s basic lack of aesthetic appeal, especially if it approached the Pentagon in size, but site location, lots of trees, and self-deprecating paint jobs helped.

Klesczewski slowed at the traffic light and turned right onto Old Ferry, paralleling the length of the main C&S building, which occupied the inside corner of the intersection. E-Z Hauling owned a small lot at the top of a low crest about a quarter mile up the road, also on the right, with a view of the C&S freezer building’s roof.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” I asked.

“Cappelli, Mark Cappelli.” Ron checked his watch. “The dispatcher wasn’t too clear on when he’d be pulling in; just said sometime late this morning.”

It was now 11:35. Ron had bumped into me just as I’d handed Harriet my notes on the Blaire Wentworth interview. The chance to get out of the office and play second fiddle while Klesczewski dealt with Cappelli was too attractive to pass up. Not only would it give me a breather and let me see Ron at work, it would allow me time to think over, once again, the growing pile of evidence in both cases.

“What did you learn about that other guy, the one who didn’t have a profession listed?”

Klesczewski drove through the gate and pulled up opposite a battered metal door in a totally windowless corrugated wall. The door was labeled
OFFICE
. “Jake Hanson. Not much. I found out through the town clerk that he owns a couple of old warehouses on Birge Street. My guess is he lives off the rent.”

We got out of the car. I always felt I should wear a jacket around town, if for no other reason than to hide the gun on my belt, but as I twisted around, trying to pluck the fabric free of my sweat-soaked back, I cursed my sense of etiquette. Ron had no such scruples; he left his coat in the car.

The gum-snapping girl in the office directed us around to the back, where the trucks were parked. It turned out the building was mostly a glorified garage, with three large, open bay doors revealing spaces where trucks could be pulled in for repair and maintenance. About six eighteen-wheelers were parked, side by side, in the rear lot.

We stepped into the slightly cooler shade of the garage, blinking away the sun’s brightness. At the back of the bay, only visible as a shadow, a man’s figure moved back and forth along an extended workbench.

Ron, squinting as I was, spoke up beside me. “Excuse me. Could you tell us where to find Mark Cappelli?”

My vision, adjusting more rapidly now, saw the figure twist around and freeze for a moment, its face pale against the dark back wall. Whoever the guy was, he seemed more focused on Klesczewski than on me, which made me instantly think of Ron’s gun, hanging out in plain view. “Better tell him we’re cops.”