Scent of Evil (30 page)

“I apologize for not warning you about John Woll’s involvement. I’ve been carrying this around inside me like heartburn from the start. I should have told you; I almost did last night, but I guess I kept hoping it would go away. You know, even with the shit hitting the fan, we still don’t know if John had anything to do with Jardine’s death. He and his wife might just be patsies. Brandt and I only kept quiet because there was so little to go on; we knew John would be grilled regardless of the evidence. We wanted to make sure of what we had before he was fed to the lions.”

“You could have warned me.” The refrain was the same, but the tone of voice had softened.

“What did Jackson say?”

“It got very personal. I don’t want to repeat it, Joe, but it hurt. I guess I thought it would have hurt less if you’d told me what you were up to.”

I put my arm around her and held her, glad to have her accept the gesture. “I am sorry. I had no idea you’d get flattened like that.”

She looked at me then, her eyes worried. “He actually frightened me, Joe. Remember when I told you he seemed overly interested in all this? Well, it’s more than that; I’ve never seen him so worked up. It’s like he’s gone around the bend almost.”

I’d seen Luman Jackson under full sail, filled with bluster and egotism, and I’d seen Gail handle him with her usual cool aplomb. Her distress disturbed me deeply, introducing a personal, threatening element to an investigation already tinged with some dark and vengeful psychology.

How far would Jackson go in pushing the selectmen and the police department to satisfy his private needs? And, perhaps more to the point, why?

I LOOKED DOWN THE LENGTH
of the conference table. There were none of the usual wisecracks or paper shuffling, no muttered one-liners. The assembled faces of the detective squad looked back at me, silent and glum. Now that the press conference had come and gone like a long-awaited storm, they were more resentful than ever.

My own mood hadn’t improved much either. The encounter with the press had been like standing before a firing squad. Not only had preempting his scoop incensed Katz, but his colleagues from the surrounding area’s newspapers, radios, and two regional TV stations had grilled Brandt, Dunn, and to a lesser extent me, with equal vigor.

What was frustrating was how overblown the reaction had become. From the time Brandt had almost casually decided to keep Woll’s name under wraps, both he and I had known there was an element of risk. On the other hand, most investigations cause names to pop to the surface like corks, and only a few of them eventually prove worthy of attention. Ours is usually a process of elimination. That one of those leads should be a cop had struck us as sensitive, certainly, but hardly as a deliberate cover-up. We’d been dumb perhaps, but not treasonable.

I leaned forward, splaying my fingers on top of the table, a little irritated at my present audience. “I gather we have problems here among ourselves. Or, more to the point, you have a problem with me.”

There was a stifling silence, broken only by a few self-conscious chair creaks.

I let the discomfort hang in the air. Sammie finally spoke up, her voice slightly belligerent. “I don’t have a problem.”

Heads swiveled from her to me. I turned to her, trying to staunch any impressions that she might be trying to cozy up to me; her honesty didn’t deserve that kind of abuse. “Okay. What don’t you have a problem about?”

“About what you and Brandt did.”

“Which was what, as you see it?” I asked them all.

Tyler tossed his pencil contemptuously onto the pad before him. “For Christ’s sake. You guys sat on part of an investigation we were all supposed to be sharing. You didn’t trust us.”

DeFlorio nodded, Ron didn’t move, and Sammie frowned.

I sat down heavily and leaned back in my chair, suddenly exhausted, no longer interested in debating the fine points. Tyler’s words echoed in my head. “Okay, I screwed up. We thought if we could eliminate John from the list of suspects quickly, we could avoid unnecessary bad publicity. We had no idea he would end up at the top of that list, and when he did it was too late.”

DeFlorio nodded, seemingly satisfied.

Tyler, however, wasn’t so simply bought off. “It might have helped if you’d included us.”

I shrugged, but Sammie spoke up for me. “I think they had a point; the more people you bring in, the more chance there is of a leak. Besides, we don’t reveal to the press everyone we’re investigating; we’d get our butts sued inside a week.”

Tyler shook his head. “This isn’t the same. It made the whole department look bad. I’m not after you personally, Joe, but you and Brandt played God and got caught. It was a dumb move, insulting to us and ready-made for the media.”

“That’s too rough,” Ron finally muttered.

“Yeah,” DeFlorio added. “I didn’t feel insulted, just surprised. Wasn’t that big a deal.”

“It was a security thing,” Sammie reiterated. “And we’ve had problems there from the start. Look what happened to Milly Crawford after you announced you’d nailed his prints to the baggie in Jardine’s house.”

Tyler smacked the table with his open hand, surprisingly upset. “Now just wait a goddamn minute—”

I stood up, both arms held high, startled at the sudden rise in emotions. “Hold it, hold it.”

Tyler was still glaring at Sammie, who was holding her own. Silently, I gave her the debate. She’d hit J.P.’s one sore spot, a spot he, along with the rest of us, had obviously been contemplating since Milly’s untimely end. She’d also burst his self-righteous bubble, which, I suspected, had been inflated more by exhaustion than by true outrage.

“Okay. We’re tired, we’re frustrated, we’ve made mistakes. Sammie grabbed the wrong bum off the street; Mark Cappelli is suing us ’cause Ron and I didn’t ID ourselves before he opened fire. The bottom line is we have a bitch of a case, we’re understaffed, we don’t have a lot of experience, and we’re under a microscope. I don’t want to ignore any real unhappiness here, but we can’t let this get the better of us.”

J.P. rubbed his eyes with his palms. “No… I’m sorry. Maybe Milly getting whacked worked on me more than I thought.”

“That and the fact that you’ve probably had six hours sleep in the last three days,” I added.

Tyler sat back and waved one hand. “Yeah. Okay, look, I’ve had my little fit. Let’s get back to business.”

“Which,” I picked up, “might have suddenly become a little less complicated. We no longer have to worry about John or Rose Woll. If any of us picks up evidence tied to them, we simply pass it along to Dunn’s office.”

“That only works in our favor if the Wolls are innocent.”

That was Tyler again, back on track, applying the logic he held so dear.

I nodded in agreement. “Good point. Let’s put the Wolls on the table and see what we’ve got. J.P., were you able to do anything with the stuff you found in their apartment before Dunn’s people took it over?”

“Nothing solid; impressions, really, and only about the two items you know about. The baggie looked exactly like the ones in Milly’s apartment. But that doesn’t mean much unless the SA can lift some prints off it. The gold watch was engraved on the back, ‘To Charlie with Love,’ and it looked as clean as a whistle. I looked at it under the light and it was polished, front and back. I don’t know about you folks, but my watch always has prints on the face of it.”

Instinctively, and feeling a little foolish afterward, we all consulted our own watches. No one commented on having a polished crystal.

“Of course,” Tyler added, “that doesn’t prove anything either.”

“But it does imply something,” I picked up. “It strikes me that the case against John Woll has been awfully neat and tidy—almost gift-wrapped.”

I held up the fingers on one hand to tick off the items I had in mind. “John is seen at the grave site, lured there, he says, by a flare we never find. Negative implications are: He was there burying Jardine, and he lied about the flare to cover himself.”

I bent down a second finger. “Rose and Charlie were having an affair, a continuation of some romantic triangle they formed in high school. John is a boozer with limited career goals and a low sex drive, going nowhere while Jardine is suddenly a high flyer. Implication: John whacked Jardine out of jealousy, envy, or vengeance.

“Third, in Milly Crawford’s apartment, Ron found a list of telephone numbers, one of which belonged to Mark Cappelli. The others, as you all know by now, belonged to three others we have yet to chase down. There was, in addition, a fifth number, which belonged to John Woll.”

I waited for the bristling body language to settle down before going on. “I told Ron to keep it under his hat. You can add that to the general apology I made earlier. Nevertheless, the inclusion of John’s number indicates that John was somehow tied to Milly’s drug business.

“And now,” I concluded, placing my hand back on the table top, “we have Jardine’s watch and possibly Milly’s cocaine in John’s apartment. The implications there are obvious.”

Sammie shook her head in wonder. “If it
is
a setup, it’s very good.” Pierre Lavoie’s voice was tentative, torn between curiosity and the fear we might throw him out for speaking up. “I don’t understand why the SA hasn’t arrested him, if he’s got all this evidence against him.”

Ron Klesczewski spoke up for the first time, grateful for an opportunity to take control. I wondered how long it would take him to risk sticking his neck out again, now that the political knife-wielding had caused him to pull back. “For one thing, the evidence isn’t all that strong, and for another, once an arrest takes place, you’ve only got so much time available before you have to wrap the case up and present it in court.”

“Besides,” I added, “Dunn’s got time on his side, if he ignores all the pressure. Right now, the implications I counted off establish a motive, an opportunity, and a bag of circumstantial evidence, all of which cropped up within three days. Chances are, if there’s proof to be had, it’ll surface before long. Then Dunn’ll be able to waltz into court with an airtight case.”

There was a long pause as each of us considered that possibility. Dunn’s record was very good; he rarely “waltzed” anywhere without getting results. So, the last and final implication had to be that if he did go to court with this one, it meant John Woll had killed Charlie Jardine.

“So if John killed Jardine, who killed Milly Crawford?” Ron asked in a barely audible voice.

No one answered immediately. Then Sammie spoke up. “And if John killed Milly to silence him, then why leave a baggie of Milly’s dope taped to the toilet?” No one had to add that leaving Jardine’s watch in a sock drawer also seemed pretty implausible. With questions like that floating around, Dunn’s apparent answer to who killed Jardine could never ring absolutely true.

“Find that out,” I finally answered, “and a whole lot’ll fall into place—probably more than Jardine’s killer intended.”

I began pacing the back of the room. “Ron, where in Milly’s apartment did you find that phone list?”

“Behind the dresser, on the floor.”

I mulled that over for a few seconds. “An inconvenient place to hide something, but a suitably obscure place to plant one, especially if you were in a hurry. Now, we’re pretty sure Milly was knocked off on the spur of the moment, to stop us from talking to him. Without having time to get fancy, the killer must have figured that any planted evidence would be better than none, especially if it linked Milly and John.”

Tyler looked at me, both smiling and doubtful. “Christ, we’re going around and around here.”

But I could tell he was intrigued. “True, so, since we’re not allowed to investigate the Wolls, let’s assume they’re innocent, just for the sake of the investigation, and pursue all our other leads. Considering the doubts we have about Dunn’s case, we might even be right.”

There were a few more chuckles around the table. The incongruity of assuming a suspect innocent out of pure convenience might have seemed laughable, but I’d raised a legitimate point. Furthermore, it cleared the smoke away, allowing us to see both homicides in a new light, perhaps a light we were intended never to see by. That possibility alone was enough to recharge the batteries of every person in the room.

I sat back down, content the squad was back on track, newly braced against the turmoil that had briefly derailed it.

· · ·

I stopped DeFlorio as he was heading out the door. “I hear the court order was delivered on Jardine’s business records.”

He made a face. “Yeah; piss me off. We spent hours on that junk, all for nothing.”

“You didn’t find anything?” I knew that if Dennis didn’t understand something, he tended to throw it out.

He conceded the point indirectly. “None of it made any sense to me, anyway; stuff’s all Greek. Tell you the truth, I was tickled pink when the court order arrived. Talk to Willette. He might have picked up something.”

I decided to do just that, walking down Main Street to the south side of the public library and a large, clapboard, century-old building that had been converted into a mini-office building. Justin Willette’s two-room suite was at the top of the stairs on the second floor.

Willette grinned and pushed his glasses high up onto his head as I walked in. He rubbed his eyes with both stubby hands. “I wondered when I’d see you. I take it you heard the bad news.”

“That Arthur Clyde got his papers back, or that there was nothing to find in the first place?”

He chuckled. “Is that what Dennis told you? I’m not surprised; he was looking a little microwaved toward the end.”

“Then you did finish?” Willette’s desk was actually a seven-foot long dining table he’d moved in from his house. I sat down opposite him, as if preparing to make a meal of the stacks of paper between us.

The glasses stayed parked up on his broad, pink forehead, giving his face an odd, four-eyed appearance. He settled back into his chair and linked his hands behind his neck. “Well, we finished the short course. Jardine having been in operation for only a year made it a whole lot easier. Still, all I got were impressions. To do it properly would’ve taken days and corroboration from other data sources.”