Scent of Evil (51 page)

“The debate was finally ended, again through Willy Kunkle. This morning, Willy discovered why Cappelli started shooting before Ron and I identified ourselves as police officers, and why the rest of his gang have gone so far underground. It turns out Cappelli and Hanson were ripped off several months ago of the exact amount of dope we later found in Milly’s apartment. The Boston people were unhappy, perhaps even suspicious of their Brattleboro colleagues, and Cappelli and Hanson were as nervous as cats on a highway.

“Having therefore secured his drugs at no cost, Buddy was less concerned with abandoning them, and more interested in giving his competitors a final shove. We have recently heard that the Boston suppliers have been approached by someone wishing to replace Hanson et al. Even with our breath on his neck, Buddy is still trying for the gold ring.

“Obviously,” I concluded, “Buddy would have preferred to keep both Milly and the drugs in place. But our finding Milly’s prints on the baggie in Jardine’s house had all the potential of disaster. It’s proof of Buddy’s weird brilliance that he could not only plug a sudden leak like that, but turn it to his own advantage.”

“Assuming Buddy is the killer,” Dunn declared with emphasis, dropping his pen on his pad. “Look, I think you have something here, but watch out for the ‘maybes.’ If you want to badly enough, you can turn Buddy into the man who really shot Kennedy. You’ve got some good stuff; chase it down, make it something we can take to a judge. If we can get just enough for a warrant, the rest might open up like a flower, so don’t waste your time running all over the place. Focus.”

He stood up, gave us all a curt nod, and left the room.

· · ·

A half hour later we were all following Dunn’s suggestion, gathering our notes, preparing to head out again and chase down the ideas we’d discussed at the top of the meeting; all of us except me. I stayed slumped in my chair, my chin cupped in my right hand, buried in a debate I’d held earlier with myself.

Willy Kunkle was watching me from his end of the table. “What’s on your mind?”

“Curare.”

The bustling and movement in the room abruptly stopped.

“What about it?” he asked.

“Why curare? Why not just put a plastic bag over his head? The fun of watching would be the same; so would the final result.”

People drifted back near the table. “And the answer is?” Willy asked.

“Because curare shows you’re smart. It’s a signature. It’s not only exotic, it’s hard to find, tricky to administer, and most people don’t even know what it is.”

“So we got a big ego on our hands.”

I shook my head. “We have a high-school graduate needing to prove he’s brighter than everyone else. He reads a lot—he’s always carrying a book in his back pocket—so maybe he’s aware of curare, but he needs to know all about it, to do research—”

“At a library,” Kunkle finished for me, a grin spreading across his face.

I gave him a nod. “You got it, Sherlock.”

THE LIBRARY WAS CLOSED
. We found the head librarian at home, and keeping Kunkle out of sight, Brandt persuaded her of his need to gain immediate access. In fact, her reluctance played to our advantage, since what she finally did was give us the keys and permission to use them, instead of accompanying us personally, as she was no doubt supposed to.

Kunkle’s usually dour mood lightened immediately as soon as he, Brandt, Tyler, and I entered the gloomy building, lit primarily by the ever-changing lights and shadows thrown through the building’s twenty-foot glass front wall by the moon and the vehicles prowling back and forth on upper Main Street. Until we found the main bank of light switches and returned the world to normal, the high-ceilinged room, with its clusters of half-seen furniture and aisles of stacked books, reminded me of a grade-B horror movie from the thirties.

Kunkle hurried over to the card catalog and began pulling out drawers and riffling through their contents, his well muscled fingers a blur. I’d seen him in this hyper-driven mood before and knew better than to ask him if we could help.

After some fifteen minutes, he’d filled both sides of a small square of scrap paper with Dewey decimal figures, and we followed him into the stacks. There, one by one, he began pulling down large, heavy tomes and checking their indexes, all to no avail. Finally, highly irritated, he crossed over to a desk near the middle of the reading room and dialed out on a phone there.

“Doug? It’s Willy. How the fuck do I find out about curare in this dump?… I know it’s closed, just answer the question, okay?… Yeah… Yeah… No shit, really? I’ll be damned… Same to you, asshole.”

He slammed the receiver down and smiled. “You’ll love this: The reference librarian says that Buddy Schultz asked him about curare around six months ago.”

Kunkle led the way up the narrow metal stairway to the mezzanine stacks and pulled the biggest book yet from its shelf, the
Physician’s Desk Reference
, known throughout the medical profession as the
PDR
. Gripping it against his chest, he took it out to one of the tables lining the balcony overlooking the reading room and slapped it down with a bang.

“This bastard ought to have it; it’s what Doug recommended to Buddy.” He flipped to the back, ran his finger down the list of entries, and muttered, “Bingo.”

Without a word, unconsciously slipping into old cooperative habits born of prior years of working together, Tyler dropped a cotton glove onto the book, which Kunkle pulled onto his hand with his teeth. He then turned to the appropriate page near the front of the book, flattened the page by tugging gently at its corners, and quickly scanned its contents.

“That it?” Tyler asked.

“Yup.”

Tyler withdrew a foot-long cylindrical object from the evidence case he’d brought with him. “You realize this is a shot in the dark. Any prints have to be less than two weeks old for this gizmo to work.”

“Christ’s sake, J.P., just do it. You can run for cover later.”

In official terminology, what J.P. was preparing for use was called a “disposable iodine fuming gun.” Fat and short at one end, long and thin at the other, it looked like a straightened-out bubble pipe. Tyler took the fat end between his fingers and rolled it back and forth, crushing the iodine crystals within and releasing a small amount of gas. He then bent over the page Kunkle was holding open and blew through the slim end of the pipe, using his breath to wash the gas over the surface of the paper. Slowly, as he swept the operating end back and forth, two clear ochre-colored prints began to appear. He concentrated on them, no longer moving about, until they were sharply revealed. He then put down the fuming gun, quickly pulled a fingerprint card from his pocket, and held it next to the two already fading prints he’d uncovered.

There was a noticeable stillness in the small group around him. “It’s a match.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Brandt asked.

Willy slapped Tyler on the back once, an uncharacteristically jovial gesture for him. “’Course, he’s sure; son of a bitch never says anything unless he’s sure.”

We all looked at the page while the prints quickly faded from view. Later, up in Waterbury at the State Police Crime Lab, they would be made to appear permanently through a different process. But for now, this was all we needed. Tyler prepared a cardboard container for the book from materials he’d brought with him.

“All right,” I said. “We’ve got a murder victim with curare in him, a report of missing curare, bottles with Buddy’s prints that were near those stolen bottles, and now we’ve got his prints on an article dealing with curare. Enough for a warrant?”

Brandt nodded. “Certainly enough to try for one.”

Tyler was still troubled. “If the curare was stolen months ago, Buddy must have consulted the
PDR
back then. Why was I able to find fresh prints?”

Kunkle wasn’t worried, predictably. “Who cares? Maybe he came back to refresh his memory on how to inject the stuff. Point is, when the state lab guys do a real job on that page, I bet they’ll find a bunch of prints dating way back.”

“Including a few extras from other people,” Tyler muttered.

Kunkle shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s a recent edition, and I bet there aren’t too many people brushing up on South American poisons around here.”

Brandt chuckled. “In Brattleboro, who knows?”

· · ·

Buddy Schultz lived on Prospect Street, the single inhabitant of the only run-down, weather-beaten, one-and-a-half-story clapboard building on the street, perched on the edge of a sixty-foot, heavily wooded, almost precipitous incline that overlooked Clark Street and, beyond it, Canal Street. Buddy’s home loomed almost directly over the erstwhile grave of Charlie Jardine.

By the time we reached the building’s sagging front stoop, it had been surrounded by officers, and Tyler and DeFlorio were near certain the place was empty. Under normal circumstances, that would have come as no surprise; it was late at night, when Buddy normally was supposed to be carrying out his janitorial duties at the Municipal Building. We hadn’t been able to locate him tonight, however. But standing here, waiting for the door’s lock to be forced, I had the creepy feeling that he wasn’t far off, and was probably watching us now.

Dennis, J.P., Sammie, and several members of the Special Reaction Team entered first, guns drawn, fanning out inside like a release of lethal, armored locusts.

I stayed outside, listening to the sound of boots pounding throughout the building, enjoying the first hint of coming coolness in the night air. The forecast for tomorrow was for temperatures in the seventies, with an eighty-percent chance of rain. The weather, like the investigation, looked about ready to break.

“Scene’s secure.”

I entered a central hallway, with a small living room to one side, a spare bedroom to the other, the kitchen straight ahead. Even with the lights on, it had a dingy, dark, forgotten feel to it. The wallpaper bellied out from the walls, the wooden floors had been ground into a uniform gray, the light fixtures were bare bulbs. It wasn’t a dirty place but definitely forlorn.

“Joe?” Tyler stuck his head out of a doorway farther down the hall.

I joined him at the entrance of a bedroom/office combination, really just a room with a bed at one end and a desk at the other. But it was obviously the heart of the house and, aside from the bathroom and kitchen, probably the most used room of all; unlike the rest of the place, it looked, if not cheerful, at least comfortable. There was an ancient, overstuffed armchair, a well placed black-and-white TV, stacks of well-thumbed paperback books and periodicals reflecting an eclectic and surprisingly intellectual range. I reminded myself that the inhabitant here had once been a grade-A student with hopes of college and presumably a great deal beyond. It was a sobering reminder of how potentially poisonous the mixture of brains and a damaged psyche could be.

I stepped back into the hallway and whistled loudly. “Yo, people. Your attention for a second.”

Heads appeared from various openings.

“Just a few reminders: One, we have a warrant for curare only; two, if you find it, let out a shout so J.P. can deal with it; and three, if you find anything else that catches your eye, let us know. If it’s juicy enough, we can try to expand the warrant to include it, but do not look in places where a bottle of curare obviously wouldn’t be.”

There was a general murmuring of assent and most of the heads disappeared.

“I think I got something here,” I heard Sammie announce from behind me.

I re-entered the bedroom and crossed over to where she had removed the drawers of the desk; she was flashing a light inside the cavity.

“Looks like one of those soft-sided briefcases.”

I stuck my head in next to hers and saw what she was describing, wedged high up against the back of the desk, just shy of where the drawer back would end up when the drawer itself was closed. “Looks like it could hold a bottle or two. J.P.?”

Tyler came over, took a photograph of the desk, then a close-up of the case in its hiding place, and finally gingerly removed it, wearing his cotton gloves. He unzipped the top and poured the contents out onto the floor. Fanned out before us were a sheaf of documents, notes, and letters, and rolling a short distance away before coming to a stop in the middle of the room was a long black metal cylinder. A silencer.

None of us moved for a moment. I quickly scanned the top sheet and another that poked out farther than the others. The first was a bank account showing Fred McDermott’s address but using the same false name we’d found his slush fund hidden under. The second was a plaintive note from Luman Jackson, agreeing to “the terms you set forth” but demanding, typically, that “this must have an end or I will damn the consequences.”

I turned to Sammie. “The silencer is ours, since it’s illegal in this state, but we’re going to have to get a judge in on the rest of it. See if you can round one up, will you?”

“Roger,” she said, and headed out to the hall to find a phone.

Borrowing a pair of gloves from J.P., I carefully began sifting through the rest of the documents, feeling as I did that I was being slowly sucked under by the intrigue and anguish that Buddy Schultz had set in motion. What he’d secreted in the desk was more than just the ammunition we’d seen him use, like the bank account and the blackmail of Jackson. There were other items, little gems whose potential spoke for themselves, like the copy of a receipt for the watch Rose had bought Charlie. It hadn’t been used—the planting of the watch among John’s socks had done the trick—but obviously Buddy was a man who liked more than one option at his disposal.

The material concerning Jackson was less blatant. I had to make assumptions in order to piece it all together, and then I knew I’d have to talk to Jackson to have it all make total sense.

I stuck my head out into the hallway again. “George?”

George Capullo, the senior shift man here, appeared from around a corner. “What’s up?”

“Pick up Luman Jackson at his home and bring him here, would you?”

“Just like that? What makes you think he’s not going to piss on my boot?”