Scent of Evil (35 page)

Ron looked a little uneasy. “Well, I don’t know. The ABC angle didn’t surface until your talk with Willette last night, which occurred after my check on them. All I found out was pretty routine: what they did, how long they’d worked there, did they have any criminal history… I did find out that Kenny Thomas was reputed to be fond of an occasional toot of cocaine.”

“Reliable source?”

“I think so.”

“But you didn’t interview Thomas or Atwater?”

“No, they weren’t there. I plan to do that today.”

“What about Jake Hanson? You told me he owned two warehouses on Birge Street. How does he check out?”

Klesczewski looked at his notes. “He does have a record. Got nabbed a couple of times hauling goods across the Canadian border illegally. Fish and Game got him once for slipping out-of-season venison into the legitimate market. He was buying from a bunch of poachers, most of them up north, and then selling the meat in Boston and New York, where it was trendy and no questions were asked. He copped a plea and turned in most of the hunters to avoid doing time.”

“Friendly fella,” DeFlorio muttered.

“Any narcotics?” I asked.

“No. The list goes on, but it’s mostly along the same lines; nothing violent, nothing hard-core.”

“Did you check out the warehouses?”

“Yes. Seemed on the up-and-up. He’s got them divided into sections. Some he rents to businesses, like a mail-order outfit, others he just rents the space for storage. There’s a tree surgery business that parks its trucks in one part. I interviewed several of the tenants. Most of them had never met the man, and those who had reported that Hanson was your typical old chummy type, full of bad jokes and easy talk.”

“What about Mark Cappelli?”

Ron pulled another sheet of paper from the folder before him. “Got an armed robbery conviction; several assaults; he’s done time. It’s a grab bag, but it’s all violent, and he seems to keep it up to date.”

I leaned back in my chair and locked my fingers behind my neck. “So what do we make of Milly’s list so far?”

Tyler addressed Ron. “No connections between any of them?”

“Nope—except for Thomas and Paula Atwater, the bankers. They work in the same building. Of course, this is all preliminary. If we dig deeper, we may find something.”

Sammie tapped the tabletop with her pencil. “A guy with a warehouse, an ex-con who drives trucks, two more who handle money, one of which does cocaine. It’s got potential, you have to admit.”

I smiled at that—Sammie had made the same connections I had, especially concerning Thomas’s drug habit. “I agree. I want you and Ron to look for the connection. And keep the ABC angle in your sights, too. It might be pure coincidence that ABC landed the Putney Road Bank’s pension fund, but it also might be that the bank is the link between Jardine, Wentworth, and Clyde on one side, and Milly and his list of folks on the other.”

I looked at Dennis. “What’s happening with your efforts? Both the Jardine and the Crawford canvasses have been dumped in your lap. Anything new?”

Dennis cleared his throat. “Well, technically, it’s no longer our jurisdiction, but I did find someone who claims to have seen John Woll at the embankment the night Jardine was killed. A woman who lives in the Elliot Street Apartments, complete with a pair of binoculars. She says a bright flame first caught her attention. That’s good news, of course, but she also says she thought the policeman was acting ‘very suspicious,’ to use her words, and that he was lighting the flare, not putting it out.”

“But it was a policeman?” I asked.

DeFlorio gave me a lopsided frown. “I have my doubts. That’s what she claims. She may have seen something, but I think the policeman thing came to her after the press reports. There were a few other details that sounded fuzzy, too. Anyhow, it’s out of our hands now.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing much. Jardine was seen going to work the morning of the day he was killed, but that just corroborates what Clyde told us. He wasn’t seen coming home, although he must’ve to change clothes and turn on the air-conditioning. I couldn’t find any restaurant that served him dinner or any storeowners that saw him. I did find his car, by the way, in the lot by his office, covered with parking violations.”

“I took a look,” Tyler interrupted. “Nothing.”

DeFlorio resumed. “As far as I can tell, the guy vanished as soon as he left work.”

“Assuming he did leave work, at least under his own power,” Sammie interjected.

I turned to Pierre Lavoie, the temporary member of our group. “Pierre, what about the background searches into Jardine and the Wolls?”

Lavoie glanced around uncomfortably. Not only was he low man on the totem pole, but the recent fireworks in the room had made him a little gun-shy. “I’ve found several people who knew all three of them. I didn’t find much new—the Wolls were an item, but Rose had eyes for Jardine as well. It turns out that wasn’t too unusual for her… I mean, Jardine wasn’t the only one.”

“You haven’t found anything about Jardine that might tie into his death?”

“He did a lot of drugs. I was hoping I could track the drugs to a supplier, but so far, it’s been no luck.”

I turned to J.P. and raised my eyebrows.

He started right in. “One of the reasons I checked Jardine’s car was I had found some dirt on his shoes that didn’t correspond to the grave site. Turns out it’s got a lot of fuel oil in it, along with some old brick dust—totally incompatible with any dirt in or around his house. None of it was ingrained, and beneath it was soil that did fit the soil outside the house.”

“Which tells you what?”

“That he picked it up at the time of his death, in an area where number-two crude oil is handled, like around a furnace in a dirt-floor basement somewhere.”

“But not his own basement?”

Tyler shook his head. “No. That’s paved and clean as a whistle. I think it was an older building, possibly one with an old brick foundation where the brick is beginning to erode. I also think either the feeder pipe from the oil storage tank to the furnace is leaking, or maybe the tank itself, because a healthy system doesn’t have that much oil around it. The delivery pipe is almost always outside the building, not only because it’s convenient, but also so no oil can spill inside. One other thing,” he added, “the high concentration of oil also made me think the building’s owner is probably broke or sloppy, or maybe that the building is badly maintained. Otherwise, a serviceman would have been called in to stop the leak. Of course, that last point is pure guesswork.”

“You mentioned searching the car,” I reminded him.

“Right. No oil-tainted dirt, which would have been there if he’d driven at all. Proof again that he got that dirt sometime between when he left his car and when we found him. That means he either drove home, changed, and drove back downtown to meet someone, leaving his car in the lot, or he hitched a ride home with someone straight from work.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged. “That’s it for the car. I compared the gum you found last night in the Brooks House to the stuff we found under the bridge—it’s a match. Otherwise, we don’t have much to show.”

Klesczewski spoke in a cautious voice. “It’s possible the murderer forced Jardine to drive back to the lot after grabbing him at home, to confuse us.”

I conceded the point. “Maybe we ought to expand the canvass to include the parking lot for that night. You up to questioning a whole new batch of people, Dennis?”

DeFlorio shook his head and grinned. “I’ve done half the town already. Why not?”

“I spoke to Billy Manierre last night,” I resumed. “Every one of his people are on the lookout for Toby Huntington, as are the state police and sheriff’s department, so I hope we’ll get lucky there. What about Jardine’s phone records?”

Ron pawed through his notes until he located the right paperwork. “The phone company was very helpful. I talked to some of the most frequently called numbers, male and female friends of his. It’s a little awkward, of course: no eye-to-eye contact, no way to check their stories without help from other departments. I didn’t get anywhere on the drug angle, but I did get a feeling that he played both sides of the fence sexually.”

“He was queer?” DeFlorio burst out.

“I think so.” Ron emphasized the
think
. “No one flat out said as much, but that’s the impression I got.”

“I’ll be damned,” Sammie muttered.

“Yeah, it does open up more possibilities,” I said, “blackmail being the first of them. What about Jardine’s bank files?”

Sammie raised her pencil. “I looked them over.”

“Anything unusual?” I asked her.

“Nothing obvious. I tracked down the parents’ will, to see if he really did inherit eighty-five thousand dollars; it looked legit to me. Also, I bugged Willette a bit while he was going through the ABC material to see if Jardine’s investment claims matched the income he was reporting. Again, he came out looking clean. If he was collecting blackmail money, he was subtle about where he put it.”

I nodded at Ron. “Any other leads on the homosexual angle?”

He shook his head. “The phone records were all long-distance. If Jardine made local calls, we don’t know about them. The two people who implied Jardine was gay were old high-school connections—but they wouldn’t stick their necks out far enough to actually name names.”

“The obvious choices are Wentworth or Clyde,” DeFlorio said. “The two guys with big bucks.”

“Assuming Jardine was blackmailing anyone,” I added. “I plan to see Wentworth today. He was supposed to have returned last night from a trip out of town.”

“What did you learn from McDermott?” Sammie asked.

I glanced at DeFlorio, who along with me had forgotten McDermott’s appearance at Horton Place. He was intensely studying the bottom of his Styrofoam coffee cup. “On the face of it, not much. It sounds like he was at both Milly’s and the Brooks House through sheer coincidence, or because he was set up. But he could also be lying. J.P., go after him, okay? Check out his background, likes and dislikes, finances, and anything else you can.”

Tyler nodded.

I stood up. “Okay then. I guess we’re all set. Anyone feeling underworked?”

There was a general groan around the table.

“There is one more thing,” I added, “and normally this would go without saying, but I think we have to be especially discreet from now on. There’ve been too many leaks from this department already. Things are tough enough without shooting ourselves in the foot.”

The implication that the source of some of those leaks might be sitting in this room left a sour note in the air, one I hoped they would all take to heart. I wanted not only to put an end to the idle chatter, but to plant a reminder that the heat we were beginning to feel the most had nothing to do with the lack of air-conditioning, or with the complexity of the case we were trying to solve.

THE HILLWINDS DEVELOPMENT
on Upper Dummerston Road, also known as Country Club Road, was an unsentimental farmer’s dream come true. For all those exhausted tillers of the soil, rich in land and poor in cash, bruised by climbing taxes and falling milk prices, the erstwhile Hillwinds Farm was an inspiration. Located on a high ridge overlooking the West River valley between Brattleboro and the county seat of Newfane, twelve miles away, this prime acreage had been gracefully converted into one of the highest-priced exclusive pieces of real estate in the area.

The houses placed along the winding ribbon of road that ran the length of the ridge line were, for the most part, rural architectural showpieces, natural wood and glass confections, most often seen and envied in the pages of
Fine Homebuilding
and at the back of the
New York Times Magazine
.

It was not a place to find a surfeit of resident native Vermonters.

It had, on the other hand, managed to avoid looking too much like a wealthy suburb, despite an unnatural absence of free-growing trees and a preponderance of overly manicured lawns. The saving grace was in the setting, for no matter how Aspen-like the buildings or Greenwich-like the grounds, the politely distant trees, the sense of the river far below, and indeed the entire valley was pure, unadulterated Vermont.

I turned off and drove up the steep, clean macadam of the main entrance road, emerging from a shielding line of trees onto the ridge. At the stop sign, I had a choice of going left, back into the trees and the older, more modest section of the development, or right, where the overpriced prima donnas had been placed for all to see. Following Jack Plummer’s directions, I turned right.

I wasn’t sure whether Wentworth would be back yet, but I figured I would take my chances in the hope of catching him by surprise.

Crawling north at ten miles per hour, craning my neck like some visiting rube, I found the hilltop broadening and dipping slightly, until I came to a gentle crest, below which the ridge concluded in a soft, rounded promontory. On either side of me were two stone pillars guarding the road, one of which carried the warning: Dead End, Private Road. Ahead, commanding a vista of the entire valley, was a cluster of outbuildings arranged admiringly around a central main house of truly regal proportions. Two days earlier, Jack had described the view from Wentworth’s house as a jawbreaker. It had not been an overstatement. Whatever else Tucker Wentworth might have been, he was obviously not one either to ignore his creature comforts or to hide his means of begetting them. Seeing this estate from above, and identifying what had to be Blaire Wentworth’s two-thousand-square-foot “cottage” off to one side, helped me to better understand some of the guarded, patrician undercurrents that I’d noticed in my conversation with her the day before.

I rolled down the driveway and parked in the traffic circle before the main house. It was Greek Revival in mimicry, with white clapboards, corner pediments, and a porticoed entrance, but it yielded to modern tastes with its skylights, huge windows, and a gigantic down-slope deck off the back—all highlighting a style meriting its own architectural label: Ostentatious.

My knock on the door, however, was not answered by the expected female domestic in an aproned uniform, but rather by a tall, thin man, dressed in worn gray slacks and an open-necked, button-down shirt with frayed cuffs and collar. His eyes were bloodshot and he needed a shave.