Read Scent of Evil Online

Authors: Archer Mayor

Tags: #USA

Scent of Evil (7 page)

BOOK: Scent of Evil
7.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I unobtrusively wiped my hand on the seat of my pants. I noticed he did the same with his. “Thanks, Mr. Beaumont. I’m afraid we can’t say much right now—too early yet.”

“Was he murdered? Was he the guy they talked about on the radio? I can’t believe it.”

I liked Beaumont’s open face. His attitude, like his gut, was without guile. This was big news on the block, and he had been the supplier of Jardine’s key—a position of some importance to him. I saw no harm in catering to that and hoped for some fringe benefits. “He may have been. We don’t know for sure, and we’re hoping to keep his name out of the limelight for as long as possible.”

“Oh, sure; mum’s the word. Wow. Murdered. Who did it?”

“We don’t know that either. Where did he work, Mr. Beaumont?”

“ABC Investments. He was one of the partners.”

I’d never heard of the firm; it sounded custom-named for a first listing in the
Yellow Pages
. “Did you know him well?”

“Not too well—just as a neighbor, you know? This was his parents’ house; they’re dead now. They were the ones who gave me the key, a long time ago, you know how neighbors do sometimes. He seemed like a real nice guy… How was he murdered?”

“An autopsy’s being done on him right now so we can find out. When was the last time you saw him?”

Beaumont looked thoughtful, absentmindedly rubbing his stomach. “I guess it was yesterday morning. We go to work about the same time.”

“Did you notice any activity at the house last night—lights, music, his car in the driveway?”

Beaumont smiled ruefully, perhaps with a touch of envy. “Charlie was a bachelor. Him not being home at night wasn’t all that unusual.”

“So nothing all night long?”

He glanced at the house. “Just the way it looks now.”

“What was he like as a neighbor?”

Again, the thoughtful stomach-rubbing. “Nice. He was quiet, no loud parties or anything. He minded his own business; wasn’t too outgoing, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t that he kept to himself so much—he’d say hi when we saw each other and ask about the family, but he never had us over and never accepted our invites for a barbecue or whatever. But he was nice about it. I figured he just liked his privacy.”

“Did you ever see any of his friends?”

Beaumont leered slightly. “Sometimes he’d have a lady friend over. He had real good taste.”

“Did you know any of them by name?”

“Oh, he never introduced them. I would just happen to notice now and then, through the window or when I was in the yard.”

“When was the last time he had a guest, that you know of?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A week, maybe.”

“A woman?”

“Yeah. Sometimes men would come by too, by the way.”

“What did this woman look like?”

“Blonde—short hair… I guess they call it a page-boy. She was real cute. Not much up here,” he patted his own fleshy chest, “but good-looking. She’d been by a few times before.”

“You’ve never seen her anywhere else?”

“Nope, and I’d remember her—it was real blonde hair, almost silvery.”

He looked at Jardine’s house again and shook his head. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

I figured I wasn’t going to learn too much more here, and I knew I could find Beaumont again if I needed him. Also, Santos had opened the door by now, and Klesczewski was standing impatiently on the threshold. I stuck my hand out for another soft, warm, damp handshake. “I want to thank you for your help, Mr. Beaumont, and we appreciate your discretion. I’ll keep in touch.”

He opened his mouth to say something but obviously thought better of it at the last moment. Instead, he backed away a few steps, gave us a half wave as Ron closed the door behind me, and muttered, “Anytime—mum’s the word.”

The inside of Jardine’s house was surprisingly cool, and in the brief moment of quiet before we set to work, I could hear the muted hum of air-conditioning.

Santos noticed the same thing. “He must’ve been doin’ all right to leave the AC on when he was at work.” Santos was a transplant from Queens and had a thick New York accent—a detail that had startled more than one flatlander who’d had their vehicle stopped by him on the road.

“Could be a timer. Or maybe he thought he was coming right back,” I muttered. Just because Beaumont hadn’t seen Jardine at home since the previous morning didn’t make it fact.

We divided our labor. Ron took the upstairs, Santos the basement, and Mayhew the garage. I took the ground floor, which consisted of a living room, a kitchen, a study which had once been a dining room, and a combination utilities and mud room.

It wasn’t a terribly revealing environment, at least not on the surface. I’m a bachelor, too—a widower, actually—and my Oak Street apartment is like an old dog’s kennel, filled with books and the bric-a-brac of a lifetime’s memories. This home was store-bought, displaying more of J. C. Penney’s current fashion statements than any of Jardine’s character. The furniture went well with the wall paint, the calendar-art pictures, the fake-wool area rugs, and the occasional chunk of decorative antique farm equipment. Looking at it from the entryway, I thought the one thing none of this was designed for was a human being or two; it was perfect just the way it was—tastefully bland, neat, cool, and empty.

It also spoke of some quick money and not a lot of it. None of what I was looking at would have been called “quality goods.” Indeed, I’d seen similar interior decorating in upscale motels. From what John Woll had said vaguely about Jardine’s occupation, coupled with his being “a partner” in ABC Investments, I guessed Jardine had benefited somehow from the 1980s feeding frenzy on Wall Street, albeit in a minor way.

The house’s sterility allowed me to make quick work of the living room and kitchen, both of which were immaculate and lacking in telling detail. I discovered that Jardine should have checked more often under his sofa pillows for his missing change, that the last time he’d watched TV he’d been tuned to the Playboy channel, and that his culinary talents, although obviously not flashy, far outshined my own—meaning he made more of a meal than a pig-in-a-blanket and a can of fruit cocktail.

I’d been keeping my hopes high for what his office might yield, however, and after a quick look through Jardine’s laundry—in which I found a woman’s blouse—I settled in his desk chair to see if at last I could peel back a small corner of the blanket that shrouded this man’s history.

First impressions were not encouraging; the top drawer was empty, a discovery I thought symbolic of the entire house.

The underlying question was, why? Was it that Jardine’s moderate wealth had come so suddenly that he’d leapt from having nothing to a house full of furnishings without passing through those years in which the rest of us accumulate tons of junk? That didn’t explain the parents Beaumont had mentioned. Jardine must have bent over backwards to eradicate all signs of their presence here, making an erstwhile family home into what looked like a weekend condo.

I hesitated before checking the other desk drawers, still lost in thought. There were other possibilities—a man without identification traced to a house without individuality. There was an almost ominous blandness to it all, the way aspects of real life are sometimes portrayed artificially on stage. I put that thought into a mental cubbyhole and began going through the rest of the drawers.

There I found the first signs of life—bank statements, insurance papers, credit-card receipts, utility and oil bills, tax returns. I would immerse myself in all those later, fabricating a life from them as an archaeologist does from debris found in the dust. But at first glance, it all seemed utterly normal. Jardine had an income that averaged out to some forty-five thousand dollars a year. There were no gigantic debts, no large, unexplained deposits.

There was a desk calendar, one of those two-ringed plastic easels you can flip through, day by day. Again, it was mostly blank, barring the occasional cryptic note, like “R 2” or “G 730.” Flipping through, I found concentrations of R’s, G’s, T’s, S’s, and more, with some extending throughout the year and others ending at the tail end of a clump. For the most part, whether bunched or spread out, they usually fell on Fridays or Saturdays. With Beaumont’s appraisal of Jardine as a ladies’ man, I was content to think for the moment that the initials stood for women’s first names, some of whom were regulars, while others had apparently been brief and passionate affairs.

I leafed through the calendar a little more carefully a second time, focusing on a single discrepancy. Without exception, R had a single low digit next to it, usually a 2 or a 3, while all the others rated anywhere from 6 to 11, with the occasional 630, 730, and 830 thrown in for good measure. If these numbers stood for rendezvous times, then R had a fetish for either mid-afternoons or the dead of night.

The phone rang suddenly, causing me to drop the calendar in surprise. It stopped after the first ring, there was a click and a soft whirring sound, and then a gentle, modulated male voice filled the room: “Hi, this is Charlie’s machine. Talk to it like you’d talk to me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

There was a beep, a pause, then an irritated woman’s voice muttered, “shit,” and the line went dead.

I stared at the answering machine under the phone. A single beady red light was blinking on its front. I leaned forward and read the various labels imprinted in the black plastic. I couldn’t remember if that light had been on when I’d sat down or not. I found a button marked “messages” and pushed it. Again the machine whirred, and I could hear the tape rewinding. There was another beep, and a woman’s voice asked, “Charlie, I can’t find one of my white blouses. Do you still have it? Call me before Thursday.”

I pursed my lips. Why was it friends never identified themselves on the phone? Gail never did either. I was used to it now, of course, but at first it had thrown me for a loop, forcing my brain to scramble through its entire voice catalog in a desperate search for the right one, all while I tried to converse with utter self-confidence.

The machine spoke again—another female voice, hesitant, soft, almost fearful. “Charlie? I was wondering… I’d like to… Call me, okay?”

A beep again and I heard the muted “shit” that had caught my attention to begin with. I thought for a moment, still looking at the machine, and then reached for the telephone book nearby. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“ABC Investments.”

“Hi. Is Mr. Jardine there?”

“The office is closed, sir. This is an answering service. May I take a message?”

“Oh, sure. Actually, it would be for his partner.” I paused.

“Mr. Clyde.”

I quickly flipped to the front of the phone book, talking while I did so. “Yeah, that’s it—he’s the one I really want to chat with.” I found the listing. “Mr. Arthur Clyde.”

The voice on the other end took on a slight edge. “That’s what I said, sir, Mr. Clyde. What’s the message?”

“I changed my mind—it’s a little delicate. I think I’ll wait until I see—” But the line had gone dead.

I smiled to myself and dialed again. A man answered—I could tell I’d woken him up. I altered my voice. “Is this Arthur Clyde, of ABC Investments?”

“Yes.” His tone became slightly wary.

“You around tomorrow? I was wondering if I could come by to discuss some investments I’d like to make.”

The wariness yielded to controlled irritation. “I’m around, but I’d prefer that you called my secretary tomorrow at the office. She’ll set up an appointment. Good night.”

I hung up. Not knowing anything about Clyde or ABC, or even much about Jardine, I didn’t want things to move too quickly. I wanted to learn what I could from Jardine’s records before telling Clyde of his partner’s death, and I knew that task might take me a good part of the night. The phone call had told me I had the right man, and that he’d be available in the morning. I turned to the sound of Ron Klesczewski coming into the office.

“Finding much?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I’d say the guy was a monk if it weren’t for all the women on his answering machine. I’ve seen two-year-olds with more material possessions.”

Klesczewski gave an uncharacteristic smirk. “He was no two-year-old, and I think his interests were way outside religion.”

He crooked a finger at me and led the way upstairs. Given the layout of the house on the ground floor, I expected a conventional equivalent above. I was dead wrong. The entire second floor consisted of two enormous rooms—a bedroom and a bathroom, both of which had cathedral ceilings going right up to the apex of the roof.

The contrast didn’t stop there. The rooms were not only disproportionately large, they were also as gaudily furnished as the downstairs was staid. The bed was circular, huge, and covered with a fake-fur coverlet and black satin sheets. It was a four-poster, but instead of supporting the traditional fabric canopy, the posts carried a round mirror reflecting back down on the bed.

There was also a fireplace—gas-fired for intimacy at the twist of a wrist and flanked by mirrored panels—and before it was an eight-foot-square fur rug with pillows. One wall had an elaborate stereo and TV system, controlled by a couple of remote units I saw parked on the half-round headboard of the bed, next to copies of
The Joy of Sex
and
The Sensual Massage
. The lighting was dim and indirect, as if designed for some Hollywood seduction scene. The walls were painted a dark, sensuous red.

The bathroom was similarly excessive, with thick rugs, a Jacuzzi, and a separate glass-walled shower stall so big it had several nozzles and a redwood bench inside. Again, mirrors predominated throughout.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered at last. “Looks like a whorehouse.”

“Does seem he had a one-track mind. There’s a ton of massage oils and weird creams in there, plus a couple of vibrators.” He gestured to a cabinet over one of the two sinks.

“What else did you find?” I could tell from his expression that Klesczewski was feeling terribly proud of himself, especially knowing of my own slim pickings downstairs.

He smiled and led me back into the bedroom. Along another wall, next to the closet door, was a long, low set of drawers. Klesczewski pulled one all the way out and laid it on the floor. “Look at the back.”

BOOK: Scent of Evil
7.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

By Heresies Distressed by David Weber
STEP BY STEP by Black, Clarissa
The Devil Next Door by Curran, Tim
In a Flash by Eric Walters
Tooth And Nail by Ian Rankin
Unrestrained by Joey W. Hill
Dare to Love by Jennifer Wilde