Scent of Evil (8 page)

I did and found taped there a Ziploc freezer bag filled with white powder.

“I didn’t touch it, but I don’t guess it’s sugar.” He paused and frowned. “I always thought coke was supposed to kill your sex drive.”

“Maybe he wasn’t the one using it.”

Klesczewski looked slightly abashed. “Oh—right.”

“Holy fuck.”

We both turned to see Al Santos standing at the top of the stairs, looking around as if he’d just been exposed to the Sistine Chapel.

Ron laughed. “Yeah. Literally.”

I placed a call to J.P. Tyler to let him know what we’d found, and asked him to come over and collect the cocaine. He could check the house more carefully tomorrow, but for now I wanted at least that one piece of evidence under lock and key in the Municipal Building.

Santos and Mayhew took us on a tour of other parts of the house.

It became apparent that a good deal of what I’d been missing in my search had merely been relegated to less traveled areas. Both the basement and the garage appeared more normal than the first floor. They were cluttered with skis and winter clothing and empty suitcases and automobile parts and boxes of conventional books. Somehow, that discovery set my mind at ease. I was no closer to finding out why or by whom Charlie Jardine had been killed, but at least now I felt he’d been a real—if slightly exotic—human being.

I had Mayhew relieve Santos in babysitting the house. The graveyard shift would take over in a quarter hour in any case, since it was now almost midnight. The dread of the publicity and the bureaucratic hassles that had crept into me when we’d uncovered Jardine’s body had by now been replaced by the familiar adrenaline of the hunt. Driving back to the police department with a boxful of evidence in my car trunk made me regret that in order to be halfway functional tomorrow, I would have to call it quits soon and go home to bed.

I parked near the department’s private outside door, right beside where John Woll, now in uniform, was getting out of the passenger seat of his own car. His wife, Rose, leaned out the window as he circled around and kissed him good-night.

I’d seen her before at department get-togethers, a pretty, slightly plump, dark-haired woman with an overly and permanently anxious face. I waved to her before I opened my trunk to retrieve the box.

She waved back and then called out to Woll, who was halfway up the steps to the entrance. “John, you forgot your lunch box.”

He returned and took it from her, muttering a greeting to me. I stood at the back of my car, watching her drive away and hearing the door slam shut behind him, my heart hammering and my previous good mood destroyed.

The sense of dread I’d experienced earlier, of being in the way of some threat as implacable as fate, caught hold of me again. Only this time, recognition had made it abruptly more pressing; the urgency I felt now had less to do with solving a complex crime quickly, and more to do with the department’s self-preservation.

The voice I had heard on Charlie Jardine’s answering machine, the hesitant one who’d left no clear message, had belonged to Rose Woll.

I DIDN’T GET TO BED THAT NIGHT
. I’d packed the answering machine’s tape in the box I’d brought back from Jardine’s place, and after I sent all the detectives home, I played it over and over in total silence, trying to hear in Rose Woll’s voice things that weren’t there to hear. I also leafed through Jardine’s desk calendar, fighting the growing conviction that the R’s scribbled there stood for Rose, and that the hours opposite them were for two and three in the morning, when John Woll was on the midnight shift, as he had been for the last two years.

After about thirty minutes of this, I decided the only cure for the depression that now hung over me worse than the heat was to look at this mess analytically. I left my office to dig out Woll’s personnel file.

Everyone’s personnel files were kept locked inside the chief’s office across the hall, available only to the chief and his deputy. Normally, access was only granted under their supervision, but I had asked Brandt earlier if an exception could be made in this one instance. Time, after all, was a crucial element here, and we both knew my penchant toward burning the midnight oil. He’d told me to be as discreet as possible and had handed me his keys.

The chief’s office was located in the room next to the officers’ room, in the corner of which Woll, Manierre, and I had met earlier. Now that both Brandt and Billy Manierre had gone home, however, the only other occupant on that entire side of the building was Dispatch, which was located in an open-doored corner room diagonally across from Brandt’s glass-walled cubicle.

Using my own key, I entered the darkened officers’ room from the hallway, risking my neck by tiptoeing across that carpenters’ battlefield so I wouldn’t have to use the primary entrance, whose lock was electronically controlled by the dispatcher.

I waited at the interconnecting threshold, around the corner from the dispatcher’s open door, until I heard him acknowledging someone on the radio, which he could only do by turning his back to me. I then quickly crossed over to the chief’s office, unseen and unheard. I was not taking Brandt’s admonition to be discreet lightly. Not much happened in the department that didn’t become common knowledge within a day. Being caught going through the personnel files in the dead of night would have been like dropping a lit match into a bucket of gasoline.

Using the parking-lot lights filtering through the window, I located the cabinet I was after and opened the appropriate drawer. I found John Woll’s file by using a small flashlight I always carried in my pocket. It was a bizarre sensation, skulking around my own place of employment like a second-story man, all for the sake of discretion. By the nervous sweat that was beading my forehead, I might as well have been lifting someone’s silverware.

As I eased the file drawer shut, I noticed a dilapidated oscillating fan sitting on top of the cabinet. The temptation was more than I could resist. If I was slated for an entire night in my hot coffin of an office, at least I could have the air being pushed around a bit. I tucked the fan under my arm and started to make my getaway.

I was halfway across the officers’ room, feeling the euphoric rush of the successful thief, when the far door opened, a hand groped along the bare-stud wall, and the entire place was flooded in blinding light. I froze in double shock, not only because I’d been caught, but because I had no idea the lights had been connected.

As it turned out, that revelation served me well, for I blurted out without thinking, “The goddamn lights work.”

Buddy, the night janitor, stared at me in startled amazement.

“Oh… Hi, Lieutenant. Yeah—they hooked ’em up this afternoon.”

I chuckled and shook my head, relieved that my secretive ordeal was abruptly over. “I’ve been poking through here like a blind man, for Christ’s sake.”

Buddy was carrying two buckets full of sponges, rags, solvents, and whatnot, destined to maintain the dispatch office’s brand-new luster. “What’re you doin’ here so late?” He suddenly looked down at the floor, as if the words had blurted out before he could stop them.

He was almost in his thirties, a somewhat scrawny-looking man with a pile of curly hair on his head and a pathetically wispy Vandyke. He’d been the night janitor for years, telling me once that he liked the privacy and the hours because they allowed him time to read. Indeed, he always had a paperback stuck in his back pocket, although I’d never been curious enough to find out what kinds of books he preferred. He was generally quiet, sometimes painfully shy, and, I thought, apparently perfectly suited to his solitary job.

“Actually, I was about to commit a theft.” I waggled the fan that was still tucked under my arm.

His eyes grew round. “That thing? If you don’t mind me saying, that’s not much of a theft—too noisy.” He hesitated, while a nervous smile spread across his face. “You know, Lieutenant, if it’s a fan you want, I could get you one as quiet as a whisper.”

“From where?” I couldn’t deny I was interested. I’d heard the chief’s fan in action and understood why he never had it on. My lifting it had been an act of pure desperation.

He gave me a lopsided grin, relieved at my lack of outrage. “Don’t ask me no questions and I won’t tell you no lies—isn’t that what they say?”

I hesitated. “How about a temporary loan, from someone who won’t miss it?”

“Oh, sure. That’s just what I had in mind. Be right back.” He piled his belongings along the wall and headed out the door.

“I’ll be in my office,” I called after him and placed Brandt’s fan on a nearby windowsill.

I returned to my own corner of the building. Under cooler circumstances, I actually enjoyed working here in the middle of the night. It wasn’t only the silence that made it appealing, although the still phones and absence of people were definite pluses; it was also the odd satisfaction of being up when almost everyone else was asleep. I felt in the middle of the night as if I were capable of deeds unachievable in the daylight—as if I were endowed with ethereal powers.

Buddy found me as I was sorting through the contents of Woll’s file, separating the bureaucratic confetti from the reports that might tell me something.

“Here you go.” He wiped a large blue-and-white plastic fan clean with a rag from his pocket and placed it on my desk, fastidiously moving aside a large ashtray filled with paper clips. The fan was enormous and looked brand new. “Even goes back and forth, and it’s got three speeds.”

He got down on his knees and plugged it into a baseboard outlet. The fan began swinging its mechanical head back and forth, as if sighing in resignation at the plainness of its surroundings. It was admittedly the fanciest thing in my office.

“See? Quiet as a whisper.” He was grinning like a sweepstakes winner. Helping the chief of detectives in an interagency theft had obviously made his day. He slightly readjusted the fan’s position.

“It’s great, Buddy. I owe you one. What do I do with it after tonight?”

“No one’s the poorer, I promise.”

“And you won’t tell me where you got it.”

Again, he looked at the floor and grinned. “Nope. I tell you what—if anyone misses it, I’ll take it back. It’ll never happen, though. That okay with you?”

“I’m happy, Buddy. Thanks again.”

I waited until he’d left before I sat down to survey what I’d collected. The fan kept shaking its head mournfully, drying the sweat on the back of my hands and making the heat almost bearable. I pulled the ashtray full of paper clips near to me in case I wanted to mark any pages.

John Woll, as he’d told Billy and me, had graduated from high school ten years earlier. During his senior year, he’d been enrolled in the Law Enforcement and Fire Sciences Program at school and had won a scholarship to college, where he apparently intended to continue his police studies, hoping later to qualify for the FBI. While not a stellar student, he was inordinately “well rounded”—a hard-working perfectionist with a broad interest in extracurricular activities. Plans changed, however, for reasons I couldn’t decipher from the files. The following fall, after marrying Rose, he dropped his college plans, forfeiting the scholarship, and signed up as a special officer with our department. Specials were one of those bureaucratic wonders—a compromise between the budget watchers and the people crying for more cops on the beat. They were allowed to work only a limited number of hours a week and were therefore excluded from the benefit package offered to their full-time colleagues. Also, they had to take only sixty-two hours of training at the Police Academy, instead of the standard fourteen-week course. The result, as I saw it, was a street cop with little training and no sense of job security—a wonderful entity worthy of the minds that had created it.

Whether because of this, or from the same mysterious pressures that had changed his college goals, John’s evaluations started issuing warning signs eighteen months into the job. He was still praised for his pleasant demeanor and his ability to steer clear of any inner-office bickering, but an undefinable uncertainty began entering the evaluators’ comments; phrases like “vague on the future,” “gung ho with little follow-up,” and “workaholic habits, but not much to show for it,” appeared in clumps at this point in his career. One evaluator suggested a counselor be brought in to identify what he thought might be escalating personal problems. That was never done. John Woll quit too soon after that entry appeared.

He went full-time at a local manufacturing plant he’d been working at during his off hours with us, a place that turned out the elastic found in diapers and golf balls and women’s underwear. I knew the building—long, low, and noisy, where every surface was covered by a thin veil of white powdery talc, used to keep the hot rubber from sticking in its course through the huge, high-temperature machines that kneaded it, cooked it, and transformed it from raw, brown rubber blocks into paper-thin elastic strips. It was a mind-numbing environment: the floor-shaking hum of the machines and the air-cleaning equipment relieved only here and there by the tinny sounds of rock ’n’ roll emanating from transistor radios.

The pay was good, the environment stultifying. The psychological nose dive that had swept John Woll from the police department continued unabated in the new job. He began to drink noticeably.

He was never stopped for driving under the influence or for creating a public nuisance; to anyone’s knowledge, he never broke any law as a result of his boozing. But he was caught nevertheless. His shift supervisor smelled liquor on his breath, discovered a bottle among his personal effects, gave him several warnings, and finally found him polishing off a pint in the men’s room. He was ordered to either get some alcohol counseling or leave. He chose the counseling.

The recommendations accompanying his reapplication to the police department four years later were glowing. After the showdown with his supervisor, Woll began turning his life around. He signed up for company-sponsored “self-betterment” classes, made a few highly praised suggestions on improving management-worker relations, and finally ended up as a night supervisor himself. Whatever role his wife, Rose, played in all this was again not clear from what I was reading, but the overall picture was of a man wrestling his devils down to the mat.