Scent of Evil (40 page)

“And I can,” Kunkle muttered.

“Yeah. If you can find some hole in his camouflage, maybe we can get the bastard before someone else gets killed.”

“Like me.”

It was said quietly, without rancor, but it hit me hard. I hadn’t actually considered myself or any of my people at risk in all this. Willy’s fatalistic comment was a brutal reminder that whoever the killer was, if cornered, he wouldn’t hesitate to use his teeth. I looked at Kunkle’s useless, shriveled arm. He needed no reminder of how lethal these contests could become.

I leaned forward, propping my palms against one of the steel shelves, and hung my head between my shoulders, suddenly exhausted by the weight of it all. Busting petty crooks and calming domestic quarrels was poor preparation for dealing with a full-blown homicide investigation. Murders were so rare in Vermont that the state police had put together a single five-man flying squad to investigate all homicides within their jurisdiction, just so they’d gain the experience. Police departments like Brattleboro’s tended to shun the state police if they could, but their exposure to such crimes was even more limited. I straightened and let out a sigh. “Forget it, Willy. You’re right. I guess I’m losing my grip.”

He tilted his head to one side and said coldly, “So this is where I say, ‘Bullshit, my heart never left the service; let me do it one last time for you, boss, just like the good old days,’ right? Well, you got the bullshit part down okay. I stuck my neck out once for you guys; peaceful old Vermont’s done me a hell of a lot more damage than ’Nam ever did. You can get somebody else to get their ass shot off for you.”

I knew he was right, but I couldn’t suppress my own growing sense of futility. Somewhere, I knew, there was a weak spot, some fissure in the dam confronting me. I had hoped Willy Kunkle might be the dynamite I needed to turn that weak spot into a gaping hole. But that apparently was not to be.

As I exchanged the library’s cool embrace for the hot and soggy air outside, I found some of Willy’s anger caught in my own throat. He’d been absolutely right, of course. Enlisting him would have been a foolish risk, for him personally, for me politically, and for the legal integrity of the case. But none of that was going to stop me from kicking this case open, one way or another.

Whoever was pulling the strings was privy to a lot of inside information and was counting on us to work within the rules. The trick would be to deny him the first and to play a little loose with the second.

THE PHONE CALL CAUGHT ME AFTER HOURS AGAIN
, alone at my desk, poring over the growing pile of transcribed interviews. I was taking longhand notes, a tissue under my right hand so it wouldn’t stick to the page.

It was Dispatch, on the intercom. “I think you better get over here.”

I did so at a half trot, peeling bits of tissue off my hand. Dispatch’s tone of voice had not been encouraging, and I wondered what new bombshell was about to land at our feet.

“What’ve you got?” I asked, as I turned the corner.

“An MVA on the Canal/Main Street bridge.”

An MVA was a motor-vehicle accident, and the location was a four-road, two-parking-lot intersection with no traffic light—the town’s OK Corral for opposing automobiles. “So?”

“It’s John Woll.”

I borrowed a patrol car and played the blue lights down to the scene. Rescue, Inc.’s boxy orange-and-white ambulance was just pulling up from the other direction. The short concrete bridge spans the Whetstone Brook where Main nominally becomes Canal in a dip between two hills, right across from the Brattleboro Museum, where I’d met Blaire Wentworth earlier. In the dark of night, the whole area was alive with lights, flashing blue, red, and white off the buildings, the trees, and the pale faces gathered around the wrecked car.

I parked just short of the congestion and walked over to the driver’s side of the car. Its nose had become one with a cement pillar securing the south end of the bridge’s railing.

John Woll was sitting at the wheel, his face covered with blood, bubbles of which ran gently from his mouth and down his shirtfront. His eyes were open and unmoving, staring straight ahead out the shattered windshield. Beyond him, on the car floor, I saw the glint of an empty bottle.

“John?”

He didn’t react, which was just as well. I was immediately eased out of the way by several Rescue personnel, who went to work quickly and quietly, putting a cervical collar and an oxygen mask on him, wrapping his upper torso in a brace-like vest, and then transferring him to a long wooden backboard.

“You going to the hospital?”

I turned to see Billy Manierre’s concerned, fatherly face over an open-necked sport shirt.

“I’d like to, but I don’t want to get in your way.”

“No problem. Ride with me.”

I arranged to have another officer return my borrowed patrol unit to the lot, and Billy and I followed the ambulance in his car.

“What happened?” I asked.

Billy sighed. “He was alone, I guess he fell asleep at the wheel.”

“You saw the bottle?”

He nodded. “I saw several more in the back, too.”

I shook my head in frustration. “I should have known this would happen, or something like it. Did anyone call Rose?”

Billy turned the car into Belmont Avenue, in front of the hospital, and from there nosed his way into the parking lot. “Rose left him.”

I was surprised at that, her words of idealistic support still echoing in my head. “They have a fight?”

“Don’t know. The only three words I got out of him were, ‘She left me.’”

He parked and we got out of the car, hearing the ambulance’s back-up alarm beeping in the night air as it edged toward the emergency room’s loading dock. “He’s in a world of hurt, Joe.”

His voice had the pain of a grieving father.

We sat watching a muted TV in the waiting room while they tended to his needs, giving him X-rays, IV medications, and neurological tests. A nurse came in at one point and asked if we’d like the sound turned up. We immediately declined, preferring the silence.

A half hour later a middle-aged woman with an enormous purse stepped into the room from the lobby. She was small and trim, with shoulder-length straight red hair parted down the middle and held back in a ponytail. She paused when she saw us.

“Are you Lieutenant Gunther?” she asked me.

“Yes.” I rose and shook her hand.

“Barb Southworth.”

I gestured behind me. “Billy Manierre.” Billy half rose and waved.

“John’s told me about both of you. He thinks very highly of you.”

“Glad to hear it. You’re a friend?”

She smiled. “More like a war buddy. I’m an alcoholic, too. John had one of the nurses call me. He wanted me to talk to you.”

A nurse appeared from the hallway. “Did one of you want to interview the police officer?”

Billy stood up and tucked his clipboard under his arm. “I’ll handle the paperwork. You two chat.”

Southworth caught the tone of his voice. “How far is John in trouble?”

“Tonight’s little trick alone is a criminal offense, and the papers are going to have a ball with it. How long have you known him?”

She sat in the chair next to mine. “Several years. We met at the Retreat.”

The Retreat, along with being a mental-health center, also treated for substance abuse. “AA?”

“Yes, but we were there at different levels. I was on the bottom and had little left to lose except my life. John had a long way to go. He was there because his job depended on it.”

I caught the implication, as well as the time reference. Their meeting would have been right after John had been caught drinking on the job at the elastics factory. “Didn’t he kick the habit?”

She shook her head. “How well do you know John? I mean, really know him?”

“Not well. I know his history somewhat; I know what I’ve seen as one of his co-workers. This investigation has brought a lot into the limelight.”

“He’s self-effacing, neat and tidy, eager to please, almost a workaholic at times, right?”

“Close enough. He obviously doesn’t have much self-esteem. I suppose that makes him overcompensate somewhat.”

“You think part of it is because he’s trying to pull himself up by the bootstraps?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

She snorted, stood up, and began pacing before me. The gesture revealed a screwed-down nervousness I hadn’t focused on earlier. Behind the demure clothing and quiet demeanor was a bundle of energy.

“I kept in touch with him over the years after he’d dropped out of the program. He liked me, trusted me, and he used me as a sort of miniature AA, which doesn’t work, of course. You can’t solve this kind of problem by confiding in one person.”

I thought back to when I’d found him at home, the glass balanced on his stomach. I described the scene to Barb Southworth.

“You didn’t test his blood alcohol?”

I was surprised at the question. “No. We had no cause to. It was ginger ale.”

“Well, if you had, I’d lay odds you would have found him fully loaded, or damn near. You saw the glass, jumped to the right conclusion, and then went into full retreat when you found out it wasn’t booze. That’s what he counted on. I guarantee that if you’d looked for it, you would have found an empty bottle hidden somewhere. He was lying there with a full glass of ginger ale either because he saw you coming, or because he’d run out of the real stuff.”

I was shaken by what she said, not least because it revealed I’d been as gullible as all the rest. I’d come to pride myself on my powers of observation. To discover that a drunk had persuaded me he was sober was a humbling experience.

And yet, I felt there was still something missing, something more important than just being told that John had never been on the wagon.

“Why are you telling us this? Why did John want us to meet?”

“John is still too self-absorbed to make that an easy question to answer, but I think he wanted me to interpret something for him, something he can’t put into words himself.”

She paused, as if to gather her thoughts. “Alcoholics… all addicts, for that matter… are driven by just one desire, and they will do anything to gratify it. On a street level, where appearances don’t matter, that means they’ll lie, cheat, steal, and even kill to get what they want. At our level, appearances are paramount to survival: We can drink ourselves into the grave as long as no one finds out about us. But in both cases, it’s the addiction that controls everything.”

“So what does that tell us about John Woll?” I asked.

“That he couldn’t have done the things they say he did in the papers, because those things had nothing to do with either satisfying or disguising his addiction.”

“His wife and Jardine were cheating on him.”

Her voice was quiet and calm. “If you were him, being a cuckold might come as a comfort; it would reinforce your rationale for drinking, maybe even make it more acceptable to others. Plus, your self-esteem would be so lousy anyhow that your wife taking a lover might be exactly what you thought you deserved.”

In an abrupt but fluid movement, she picked up her handbag and walked toward the door, as if suddenly irritated at her role in all this. She paused on the threshold. “I’ve said what I think John wanted me to say. You’ve got the wrong man, and while the evidence for that may be psychological, it’s hard evidence all the same. Good night.”

I followed her to the glass door and watched her walk away, her red hair highlighted periodically by the lampposts she passed under. I believed what she had told me. I knew the State’s Attorney would have to complete the dance he’d started, and that McDonald and Katz and everyone else with a press deadline to meet would play the story until the business office told them it was no longer selling air-time or issues. But for me, the John Woll aspect of this case was over, not just because it had been taken from me physically, but because Woll himself was innocent.

I’d assigned him that position before, of course, but only because my hands were tied. Now, truly believing it, I found the entire case taking a different shape in my mind, as if, by removing John, I’d also removed one of the rocks of the avalanche I’d envisioned burying me earlier, and by doing that I’d shifted all the others, revealing aspects of them I hadn’t previously noticed.

For the first time in days, I felt enlightened. I’d beaten the shadow player who was behind all this, by making a lie of his very first premise.

IT WAS ALMOST TWO IN THE MORNING
when I drove up Gail’s steep driveway. Climbing out of the dark embrace of the tree-shrouded road, I was so taken with the vastness of the shimmering, starlit sky that I killed my headlights halfway up to the house and continued the rest of the way without them. It was an almost mystical experience; instead of missing the intense brightness of the car lights, I was overwhelmed by the sky’s generosity. I could see everything without shadow, without glare, and most impressive of all, without color. The landscape’s chromatic vitality had been drained to a mere hint, making me feel as if I were intruding upon a huge and empty stage of a long-closed theater.

I got out of the car, closing the door quietly, letting the sensation carry me for a few moments longer. It was fitting that I could feel ethereally suspended; I’d had so little sleep over the last few nights, my brain felt like warm mush, and I was here to reach back through time and to make amends.

“Joe?”

I peered along the length of the deck above me. About halfway down I saw Gail’s slim shape standing at the rail, outlined in black against the sky.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

I was suddenly embarrassed and tongue-tied. How to explain that watching Barb Southworth walking away, her tale of misery, duplicity, and sorrow in my ears, had made me miss Gail and regret the tensions that had recently wormed their way between us?

I fell back to the mundane. “I needed to tell you something.”

“About John Woll crashing his car?”

I shook my head, beat out by the grapevine again. “No.”

Her arm beckoned against the stars. “Come on up.”