Scent of Evil (27 page)

His face was beet red at the end of this tirade, and the rest of us watched in silence for a moment, as if more interested in seeing a blood vessel explode than in addressing his question.

This time, Brandt cleared his throat, but Dunn stepped in again, as unperturbed as before. “Wait, Tony. Tom, I understand the pressures being brought to bear here, but it would be entirely wrong to cater to them. Perhaps we can hone our own focus a bit. Gary, why are you here?”

Nadeau looked as if he’d just been discovered eavesdropping on grownups. “Katz came by my office, too. John Woll is a town employee, and I’m legal counsel where town employees are concerned. My problems may look minor compared to Tom’s, but if Woll is seriously being considered as a murder suspect, I feel I should be intimately involved in the discussion.”

“I disagree,” Dunn stated flatly. “If there were charges pending against Woll, they would be criminal in nature. Your involvement in that case would be limited to writing the letter that suspends him from employment, and you would do that only once Chief Brandt and I had advised you to. Aside from Mr. Katz’s innuendos, however, I have heard nothing to indicate that any of that is germane.”

Now we could watch Nadeau turn fuchsia. He didn’t pull out a knife and stab James Dunn in the heart, as he understandably might have. Instead, he paused a moment to select his words. When they came out, I was impressed at their cogency, and at the restraint in his voice. “That may be true. It still remains that this high-speed pursuit has started talk of one lawsuit and might lead to another from the bridge people Tom mentioned. Both of those would land squarely in my lap, and both have their origins in the police investigation that led to that car chase.”

The State’s Attorney took it in full stride with a wide smile. “Excellent. Then we have no problem. As soon as the police department and my office have determined Officer Woll’s culpability in all this, we’ll let you know. And we’ll try to expedite matters quickly so you might have time to head off any lawsuits.”

There was a very long and awkward pause, during which Gary Nadeau let out a small breath of air through slightly flared nostrils. Finally, he put his hand on the doorknob. “All right. The sooner the better.”

Dunn smiled. “Absolutely. It’ll be among our highest priorities.”

But the door had slammed halfway through the sentence.

“You’re a prick,” Wilson said.

“Perhaps, but I’m also correct. We haven’t the slightest idea how much Katz has collected. To presume too much and allow Nadeau to take confidential information directly to the selectmen would be extremely ill-advised.”

“I talk to the selectmen, too.”

Dunn nodded. “That’s true, so part of what I said to Gary applies to you also. However, some of your concerns are legitimate, and I think we ought to give you credibility for your next encounter with the press.”

Wilson looked at him as if he wanted to scrape him off his shoe. “That’s very big of you, James. I didn’t see you looking too credible out there a few minutes ago.”

“They were interested in car chases. It wasn’t my concern. When Katz publishes what he knows about John Woll, we’ll be faced with an entirely different situation. In fact, we might consider beating him to the punch, holding an official press conference and blowing his exclusive.”

I was fascinated with what had transpired here. In some five minutes of razzle-dazzle, James Dunn had convinced both Wilson and Nadeau that he was the man with all the answers, and that Brandt, myself, and indeed the entire police department had been acting with both his knowledge and his blessing. That he might be just as ignorant as they were had never been allowed to cross their minds.

Brandt, probably having anticipated all this, played an equally cool and rational role in addressing Wilson. “Let me try to put it in terms you can use without offending James’s sense of legal propriety. John Woll is not under investigation as a murder suspect. His name has, however, come up in a few compromising places, which is precisely what got Katz all worked up.”

“Katz all but claimed Woll killed Jardine because Jardine and Woll’s wife were fooling around,” Tom protested.

Brandt passively downplayed it. “They were all in high school together. In fact, John Woll is one of the few on our force who was born and brought up in this town. There are people around here who probably saw his first bowel movement—that kind of intimacy can work against you in bad times.”

“So he’s clean and Katz is full of shit.”

For once, both Brandt and Dunn looked uncomfortable. Brandt answered, I thought because Dunn felt that once you’d strolled out onto the diving board, it was your responsibility to jump on your own.

“Not necessarily.”

Wilson leaned forward in his chair and held his head. “What the hell have you guys got us into this time?”

Brandt’s voice took on an edge. “We are conducting a homicide investigation, in the process of which we are uncovering leads and building a list of suspects—a long list—one of whom is John Woll. The others include an unidentified homeless bum, all the way up to one of this town’s top-drawer citizens. Right now, none of them is any more suspect than the others, but some make for better news copy. Am I communicating clearly enough who is getting who into what?”

Wilson straightened, conciliation in his voice. “All right, all right—poor choice of words. You might remember the last time we had a murder in this town, though; the press had a field day. I guess I’m a little gun-shy.”

Brandt stood up and leaned across his desk, staring into Wilson’s face. His voice was icy calm, but I had never before seen him so angry. “Let’s not forget who pulled whose fat from the fire that time, Tom. I went on a long vacation and let you and your pals upstairs make it look like I’d been suspended. That was a favor I didn’t have to do. I’d appreciate your remembering that, without having to be reminded in a less private forum.”

He sat back down in total silence. I, like most, had been a little vague on what exactly had happened a year ago, although I’d been the one tapped to be acting chief in Brandt’s place. This was the first time I’d heard the truth, and it left me stunned. Whatever Brandt’s motivations for taking the heat for Wilson and the selectmen, it had translated into a political debt of staggering proportions. Brandt could reveal the truth and publicly humiliate his “bosses” anytime. I could only think they’d been out of their minds to let him do it, just as he’d been equally nuts to propose it. It was hardball politics on a level I’d never imagined, especially in Brattleboro.

Wilson looked at us all as if he’d suddenly acquired some noxious odor he wished he could deny. His tone was utterly muted when he spoke. “Of course we all appreciate your position, Tony. No offense. Maybe you could give me a little more to dole out. I think James’s idea of a press conference before tomorrow might help us out a bit.”

Brandt smiled his most affable smile. “Sure. What’s your pleasure?”

“Well, I don’t know. How about enough on Woll to take the wind out of Katz’s sails, but not so much that it looks too important. We could make the car chase the lead item, and mention the Woll lead as an incidental, something only a rag like the
Reformer
would bother with.”

The chief looked at me. “What about the chase, Joe?”

I cleared my throat, feeling like the only amateur in the room. “We have no explanation for its cause. We went to ask Mr. Cappelli some routine questions related to the two major investigations we have going, and he responded by shooting at us and running away. We never actually spoke. So, until we can talk to him, the whole thing’s a mystery.”

Wilson nodded, but he didn’t sound happy. “Okay. See if you can dress it up a little.” He stood up, shaking his head. “I’m not casting aspersions here, but I do wish for the good old days sometimes, when a crime wave in this town was two kids stealing hubcaps on a Friday night.”

Brandt also rose, again the smiling host. “I know what you mean, Tom. Thanks for stopping by.”

Wilson, wrapped in his own misery, wandered out the door, closing it softly behind him.

Two down, one to go, I thought.

Dunn was obviously thinking the same thing, with different numbers. He fixed Brandt with his arctic eyes. “I hope you won’t put me in a position like that again any time soon.”

Brandt was unimpressed. “I thought you did very well.”

“Cute. How long were you two going to sit on John Woll? I take it, by the way, that until now, nobody else was in on this?”

“Just us and Klesczewski,” Brandt admitted. He went on to explain about the list of phone numbers found in Milly’s apartment, the one that included John Woll’s number. He also went into what we knew of the John-Rose-Charlie triangle.

Dunn digested it all without comment to the end and then let out a small grunt. “I hope Tom Wilson’s medical insurance covers strokes. I take it you’re going to interview Woll right away.”

Brandt surprised me with his answer. “We’ve already tried to set it up; I called right after Katz left my office. There’s no answer at his home, and a patrol unit reported his car isn’t in the driveway. Until Tom mentioned the press conference, I was going to wait until he showed up for duty tonight.”

“Unless he reacted like Cappelli did and is now long gone.”

Brandt shook his head. “He’s already been given a chance to do that.”

Dunn nodded, putting a temporary end to the business. “I take it that’s all of it? No more surprises?”

Brandt smiled. “Not yet.”

“Well, I may have one for you. Arthur Clyde is raising a stink about having his business records removed under warrant, and he’s petitioning the court for return of property, so if you haven’t already, you better read that material fast. I talked to Harrowsmith about Joe’s affidavit, and I think you’re on safe ground, but keep in mind that anything you find in that stuff might turn into smoke down the line.” He looked directly at me. “I tell you this so you can start looking elsewhere for corroborating evidence, and to remind you that we are the good guys here, trained in the law. I realize that Sue Davis of my office looked that affidavit over and gave it a lukewarm approval, but remember: Don’t be too independent, or you’ll end up looking stupid.

“Which reminds me.” He swiveled back to Brandt. “If you get so much as one more hiccup that incriminates or implicates John Woll, I suggest you hand the whole thing over to my office and my investigator, or the entire department, and possibly the town, will be criminally charged for protecting one of its own, and I might be the one filing the charge. If that makes you unhappy, then bring in the state police; but either way, don’t get your butts in a crack. It’ll hurt, and you won’t be able to play political footsie with Wilson to get out of it.”

He stood up and walked to the door. “By the way, what you pulled on Tom is the most cockamamie stunt I ever heard, Tony. I hope it gets you mileage, because you’re going to need it.”

As he left, one of the carpenters, his lunch break over, picked up a circular handsaw and pulled the trigger. The echoing scream sounded an appropriate grace note.

NUMBER 18 BRANNEN STREET
was a three-story, ramshackle, weather-beaten pile of functional, turn-of-the-century architecture, originally called a “three-decker” and designed to house three middle-class families, whose original breadwinners undoubtedly had been employed by the Estey Organ Works, at that time Brattleboro’s largest business and an instrument maker of international renown.

But the organ works had gone out of business in the mid-1950s, and by the looks of it, the life had gone out of this building long before then. It, and many others like it around town, had been cut up by landlords, abused by countless winters, and undermined by a mismanaged real-estate market. It was now a peeling, neglected, compartmentalized collection of six small, airless units, one of which was the home of Rose and John Woll.

I got out of my car and looked around. In the hot stillness of the early evening, with the sounds of birds and rushing water nearby, the locale was as pristine and charming as the building was not. Brannen, or Brennen, depending on which of the two street signs you read, is a short, two-hundred-foot loop off Williams, which meanders alongside the Whetstone Brook between a steep, verdant ravine wall on one side, and a small sylvan pasture on the other side of the water. It’s one of those typical Brattleboro settings where, surrounded by a city of twelve thousand people, you can imagine yourself in the isolated foothills of the Green Mountains.

I slammed the car door and walked toward the back of the building. The Wolls occupied a rear apartment on the second floor, accessible by an ancient roofed staircase that clung to the exterior wall like an afterthought. I climbed it gingerly, uncertain of how much more use it could bear.

I wasn’t here by invitation. As Brandt had mentioned, John Woll had not answered his phone all afternoon, and coming around the building, I could confirm his car wasn’t parked in the drive. On the other hand, I’d remembered his wife had dropped him off on the evening I’d recognized her voice, and I thought it possible that his car might be on the blink.

The impulse that had led me here had been triggered by more than that simple deduction, however. With Katz hot on the Wolls’ connection to Jardine, he had probably tried to confront the subject of this latest political whirlwind with what he knew. If he had, I understood why John Woll was no longer answering his phone.

For some cops, the uniform and the badge offer the security and social courage they lack as civilians; it gives them comfort, much as the military does. That’s where I fit John Woll. He’d stumbled once a few years back and had made the police department his lifeline. If I was right, and Katz had gotten to him, then, guilty or not, John Woll was now in free-fall.

I reached the second-floor landing and found the front door ajar. I knocked, the door widening slightly under my hand. “John? It’s Joe Gunther.”

There was no answer, but I thought I heard a small and distant sound, like protesting bed springs. I entered the apartment.