Scent of Evil (38 page)

The letters detailed Paula’s mother’s daily activities in a chatty, over-the-back-fence style. It took some reading, however, to figure out her locale. There was no letterhead, and no attached envelopes, and it was only through references to the new Union Hall clock, the deli department at Morse’s Store, and the fund-raising efforts of the NewBrook Fire Department that I finally figured out that mom must live in Newfane, twelve miles up Route 30 from Brattleboro. That discovery also helped explain the Leland and Gray pennant in the living room: located in Townshend, it was Newfane’s designated high school.

The photo album confirmed my guess, providing me with graduation group shots showing Paula and several family members in front of the Windham County Courthouse. From the date on the senior class banner in the background of one of these, I figured Paula Atwater couldn’t be more than nineteen years old. From her photos, she looked friendly and outgoing, neither chubby nor thin, with a tangled mop of curly brown hair and a mild case of acne. In several of the non-graduation pictures, she and several friends or family members were clowning around on the front lawn of a one-story brown house with a bay window to the left of the front door.

I reached out to the phone on the floor by the side of the bed and dialed the Windham County Sheriff’s Department, headquartered in Newfane. I asked for Lieutenant Norman Powell.

“Hey, Joe, long time no see. What’s up?” Powell and I were old friends, but primarily on a professional basis. Whenever we talked, it was usually business that brought us together.

“I’m looking for someone down here, and I think she flew the coop into your neck of the woods. I have a few pictures with a house in the background. If I drove up there right now, could you take a shot at identifying the building and maybe the family?”

‘What’s the name?”

“Paula Atwater, about nineteen, Leland and Gray graduate.”

There was a short pause. “Doesn’t ring a bell offhand. Sure, come on up. I’ll see what I can do.”

I hung up, pulled some sheets of paper from my small notebook, constructed a couple of quasi-legal forms, and left the apartment with the photo album under my arm. Shirley Barrows’s door opened before I’d knocked on it twice.

She instantly spotted the album. “Oh, hey. You got something.”

“Yeah. I was wondering if you could do me a big favor and sign these two documents. One states that you voluntarily invited me into Paula’s apartment, since you now believe she’s left for good and the property’s yours again, and the other is your acknowledgment that I have removed one item, a photo album, from that apartment.”

She signed both pieces of paper eagerly, her sweaty hand leaving a damp patch at the bottom of each. “This is great. Wait’ll I tell the girls. Just like the movies. Do you think I’ll get my name in the papers?”

· · ·

Route 30, heading northwest toward Newfane, parallels the Upper Dummerston Road, which I’d traveled earlier that day to visit Tucker Wentworth. But where the latter is a narrow, winding, country road, blocked in by trees and homes on either side, the former is a legitimate highway: broad, flat, smooth, and built for speed. It is also one of the prettiest roads in the county, running along the bottom of the West River valley, matching the water’s serpentine bends, a paved mirror image of the broad, sparkling, rock-strewn waterway so attractive to dozens of weekend tubefloaters and sunbathers during Vermont’s brief summers. The valley walls, steep, verdant, punctuated by occasional cliffs and feeder streams, embraced and soothed me despite the hot breeze that lashed at my face through the open window.

The sheriff’s department and the county courthouse face one another across the enormous Newfane village green. However, as if by design, any suggested fraternity between the two has been tempered by Route 30, severe and barren, which lies as a no-man’s land, slicing the common in two. It’s a sad and occasionally traffic-choked modern intrusion, upsetting a near-perfect mix of historic architecture and manicured nature.

I swung right, around the edge of the grass and toward the old jailhouse, marveling at the play of light on the grass and the shimmering white of the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old buildings.

Norman Powell stepped out onto the concrete porch of the old jail as I stopped my car before it. Gray-haired, tall, and lean, he was an ex-Army sergeant who’d joined the department after he’d found retirement at forty not all it was cracked up to be. He nodded at me, his hands on his waist, vaguely reminiscent of some uniformed Texas Ranger squinting into the sun. “Hey, Joe.”

I brought the album out of my car and laid it on the hood. He came off the porch and stood next to me as I flipped through to the shots of the family on the lawn. “Know where that is?”

“Yup. If it weren’t for the buildings in between, you could see it from here. Mrs. Adams’s house. That’s not the name you gave me.”

“Paula Atwater?”

He scratched the gray stubble at the back of his neck. “Right. Could be same family, different last names. Glenda Adams was married once before, a long time ago; that might explain it. I’d forgotten about that.” He extended his hand to point down Route 30, the way I’d come. “Glenda lives in Rolling Meadows, behind WW. I’ll show you.”

We got into my car. He could have just given me directions. WW Building Supply, which straddles the entrance road to the long, circular drive that constitutes the Rolling Meadows development, was barely two hundred yards back down the road. But there was a jurisdictional politesse being followed here. While a policeman in Vermont carries his authority with him throughout the state, regardless of which turf he actually calls home, it’s best for him to check in with the locals. Failure to do so usually results in ruffled feathers, unnecessarily tense explanations later, and the inconvenience of frosty relations in the long run. It’s also a dumb move strategically; if something goes wrong, and you send out a call for backup, it takes a while for the locals to figure out who you are and what the hell you’re screaming about.

The house in the photo album was the first on the left-hand branch of the circle. It looked wrong to me somehow, as I parked in the driveway, and it wasn’t until I got out of the car that I realized I’d so cemented Paula’s photograph of this house in my mind that I’d come to expect a lawnful of laughing people to be permanently gathered before it, as if that joyful day had just gone on and on and on.

Powell and I crossed the now-empty lawn, and I worked the heavy brass knocker on the front door. The young woman I’d come to know solely through her possessions opened the door, her expression falling at the sight of Norm’s uniform.

“Yes?” Her voice caught in her throat.

“I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, of the Brattleboro Police Department; this is Lieutenant Powell of the Sheriff’s Department. Are you Paula Atwater?” I used my best official voice and showed her my badge.

“Yes.” Now she was barely audible.

“And you work as a teller at the Putney Road Bank?”

She nodded.

“May we come in?”

She stood aside, and we filed by her into the darkened house, not air-conditioned but surprisingly cool nevertheless.

“Is your mother or anyone else home?” Norm asked.

“No. Mom’s at work.” She led us into a pleasant, comfortable living room and curled up on an armchair, her legs tucked under her, her arms instinctively wrapping themselves around a large pillow she clutched to her stomach. She looked worse than her picture, paler, more drawn, her acne now in high relief, her hair unbrushed and bedraggled. I doubted she’d slept at all last night. I was hoping to use that to my advantage to speed this up. Grilling bewildered teenagers was not my idea of recreation.

“I guess you know you’re in deep trouble,” I said, hoping she’d help me out.

She hugged the pillow tighter, looking from one of us to the other. “I don’t know what you mean.”

I inwardly sighed. “Why aren’t you at work? You didn’t give the bank any explanation. You didn’t tell Shirley Barrows.”

The mention of her landlady made her eyes widen; it told her how thoroughly I’d been hunting for her.

“Who told you and Kenny to get out of Brattleboro, Paula? Cappelli?”

“No,” she answered in a whisper.

“You know, you’re all on your own now. They’re all long gone. They left you holding the bag.”

She bent over the pillow, her eyes fixed on her lap, her face invisible to us. She shook her head.

“Kenny got you into this, didn’t he?”

Her head shot up. “No.”

“Paula, we’re not talking smoking in the bathroom here. I’m running a murder investigation.”

She didn’t move for a couple of seconds; I doubted she even breathed. Then she stared right at me, plainly frightened. “We had nothing to do with that.”

“That’s not what the evidence tells me. It was our investigation of Milly Crawford that led us to you.”

She was beginning to look slightly panicky. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“How long have you known Kenny Thomas, Paula?”

“He’s not a killer. We love each other.” She struggled unsuccessfully for more words that might convince me.

“Where did you meet? At the bank?”

She nodded.

“What’s his position there?”

“New accounts, customer service.”

“But he’s not a teller. He doesn’t handle money or put it into people’s accounts, the way you do.”

I’d begun this conversation as a man in the dark, groping for recognizable objects, hoping they would tell me more about my environs. Now, judging my progress both by her reactions and the instinct I’d formed of Kenny Thomas through his postcards, I sensed I was getting close.

“Kenny came on strong to you, didn’t he? Lots of flattery, gifts, nights on the town. Swept you off your feet, right, Pebbles?”

She flinched at my use of his nickname for her. “We loved each other.” But the tone was softer, more doubtful.

I could almost feel what I was after under my hand. “When did he tell you about his get-rich-quick scheme?”

Again, she was silent.

“Paula, the law holds you as accountable as he is. In fact, I have to tell you that, while you’re not under arrest, you might want to stop talking to us until you can get hold of a lawyer. That’s your right. Do you understand?”

I stopped, hoping I’d planted enough seeds of doubt to make her open up. I let a long silence creep by.

“Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly.

“Then talk to us, Paula; it’ll work in your favor.”

She sighed. She didn’t look up from her lap, but she did begin to speak, softly, like a child. “He told me he’d been waiting for someone like me for a long, long time; someone to share his dream with. We fell in love. He
was
in love with me. A woman knows things like that.”

I quelled the cynic in me. “I can accept that. What was the plan?”

“Kenny was getting money from someone, maybe it was drug money, I don’t know. He would open different accounts, and I would divide the money between them.”

“How did the cash get into the bank?”

“We brought it in with my lunch. Then, during the day, at odd moments, I would enter it in, never too much at a time.”

“What were the names in those accounts?”

“It didn’t matter. We made them up.”

“Did you ever open accounts under the names Jake Hanson, Mark Cappelli, or Charles Jardine?”

She shook her head, I thought a little too quickly.

“But you knew Cappelli; you all but admitted that a minute ago.”

Her face tightened, but she finally nodded slightly.

“How did you know him?”

“I saw them once. Kenny always picked up the money on his own, usually the night before we would bring it into the bank for deposit. Well, one night, something must’ve gone wrong, because they came by my place late, when Kenny was staying over, and he went down to talk to them. I followed him and saw them, and later I asked Kenny who they were.”

“They?”

“There were two of them.”

“Did he tell you?”

“He was mad at me at first, but he finally did. One of them was Cappelli; the other was Jake Hanson.”

I suppressed a contented smile. Now we had more than a simple list of names linking the four together. “Didn’t Kenny tell you where the money was coming from?”

Still she denied it with a shake of her head.

“What happened to the money after you put it into the phony accounts?”

“Usually it was taken out by wire transfer to another branch of the bank.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know, but they used the names we’d made up. Kenny took care of all that. I don’t know exactly how it worked.”

“How did you and Kenny get your cut?”

“Kenny took care of that, too.”

“Did you ever see any of it?”

“No. We were supposed to wait, so as not to get anybody suspicious.”

I seriously doubted Kenny had waited for his share. “Who told you to get out of Brattleboro?”

“Kenny. He said that we should split up and that he’d contact me later.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“No.”

“Does he know how to get in touch with you here?”

“No.” Her head had slumped so far forward by now, we could only see the top of it.

“Then how could he have contacted you later?”

There was a long silence, during which, from the dark, liquid spots appearing on the pillow against her stomach, I knew that Paula Atwater was crying.

Norm and I exchanged glances. “Paula, you realize you’ve broken a few laws—that you’ll be held accountable?”

She nodded wordlessly.

“Tell your mother what we talked about when she gets home. The two of you can find a lawyer and maybe something can be worked out so you won’t have to go to prison. But listen to me.” I crossed the room and squatted down before her, forcing her to look at me. “You’re going to have to concentrate on saving yourself. Kenny and you are over, not just because you got caught, but because he set you up.”

She began to respond, but I held up my hand. “Don’t talk, just think. Regardless of how you feel now, you’ll find out Kenny was more interested in the money than in you, and that he played you for a loser. The only way you can save yourself is to prove him wrong. Remember that, okay?”