Scent of Evil (9 page)

When he did reapply to be a cop, we put him through an alcohol screening process, which he passed with flying colors. The good will he’d left behind combined well with his Cinderella comeback. He took the full Police Academy course, and we welcomed him with open arms, no questions asked.

Until now. I closed the file.

For the rest of the night, I studied the documents I’d removed from Charlie Jardine’s house, arranging them in chronological order, trying to get a feel for the subcurrents of his life. What I found showed a combination of steady progression and good luck. Fortunately for me, he was a creature of habit, keeping to the same bank since high school, saving all his IRS returns back to the first one filed. There was no padding, nothing in the collection of a personal nature, like letters, diaries, or personal memos. But the dry, clear-cut residue of a paper-shuffling society more than made up the difference.

Jardine had not graduated from high school with the career goals of John Woll. Where John had turned a teenage interest in law enforcement into immediate employment by the police department, Charlie had stayed at home with his parents, at the same address I’d visited hours earlier, and had drifted about for a couple of years. His W-2 forms indicated a series of short-lived jobs in and around Brattleboro, at restaurants, car washes, gas stations, and finally, five years ago, at a lawyer’s office as a “gofer.” That had been the turning point.

I knew the law firm: Morris, McGill. It dealt mostly in corporate and criminal law and represented much of the town’s upper crust—that part which didn’t deal directly with firms in New York or Boston. It was the biggest outfit around and its gloss obviously began to rub off on young Jardine. He started playing the stock market, gently at first, then with increased confidence. He set up an account at a brokerage house. For several years, he kept the same lowly position, but his bank and tax records reflected considerably more ambition and success than the job description implied.

His parents died within six months of one another, and he inherited eighty-five thousand dollars and the house on Marlboro Avenue, free and clear. Now, suddenly situated, financially secure, and filled with an intoxicating sense that the golden ring was his at last, the one-time office boy made a direct leap to entrepreneur: He became founder, part owner, and partner in ABC Investments.

That had been a little over one year ago, which helped explain why the name of the firm had meant nothing to me when Beaumont had first mentioned it.

I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Despite the fan, I felt sticky and unwashed. The inside of my mouth tasted bitter, and I was sure my breath could wilt flowers at twenty yards.

I wondered what connection these two young men shared, besides possibly the wife of one of them. Had they both known Rose in school? That was likely. Had she dated them both? Simultaneously? If so, had their triangle ended on a sour note, as most triangles do?

I crossed my hands on my stomach and stared at the reams of scattered paperwork covering my desk, much of it highlighted with my large pool of paper clips. Despite John having been at the site of Charlie’s grave, and his wife’s appearance on Charlie’s tape machine, I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions pointing to jealousy. I had dealt with people who sought revenge for infidelity. They fit a general type, albeit with rare exceptions, and John Woll was not of that type. He had none of the insecure and possessive qualities that found an outlet in violence upon others. Aside from the self-destructiveness that had marked his early twenties, his career as a cop had been spurred by his own harsh self-criticism. None of us could ever be as hard on him as he was on himself.

I was brought out of my reverie by a gentle tap on the door. Sammie Martens poked her head in. “Morning, Joe.”

I looked at my watch. It was six o’clock. “Christ, Sammie, I just sent you home.”

“I got some sleep. I wanted to come in early to give you my report. You seemed a little distracted last night.”

I motioned to her to come in and sit. Hers wasn’t the only report I’d stifled. Once I’d connected the voice on Jardine’s machine to Rose Woll, I hadn’t been in the mood to play lieutenant. I’d sent everybody home, whether that had suited them or not. “Let me ask you something, Sammie.”

She sat down with her report folder on her lap. “Shoot.”

“You’re aware of the male stud’s vision of what a woman wants most, aren’t you?”

She couldn’t suppress a little smile. As one of the few policewomen in the department, and the only one on the detective squad, she’d had more than her fair exposure to the convoluted and fragile male libido. “Muscles, macho, and fast fucks?”

I chuckled at that. Her flat-footedness was refreshing, especially coming from a woman as slight and demure in appearance as she. “How about mirrors over the bed and in front of a fur rug?”

She hesitated a moment, gauging the nature of the question. Her gender had also exposed her to an excess of sexual innuendo and outright abuse. I was gratified when she answered me directly, and with less than an innocent glint in her eye. “Depends who’s on the bottom.”

That was half of what I’d been thinking earlier.

Sammie crossed her legs and hooked an arm over the back of her chair. “What’s this all about?”

Leaving out all mention of Rose Woll, I explained to her what we’d found at Jardine’s place, coupled with the assumption that the initials in his calendar belonged to women. She shrugged at that. “They might all be women—some of them might be men, too. Brattleboro would be a good place for it.”

And that was the second half of my little voice’s chorus. Our city’s homosexual population was impressively large, a point I was pleased she’d thought of too. It was helpful knowing I wasn’t theorizing in a total void. There was one point she didn’t mention, however, and which had always struck me when beds and mirrors were combined: To me, the mirrors not only reflected self-made erotica; they could also confirm one partner’s domination over his or her mate, a significantly less sensual but all too human ambition. It put a definite chill on the image of Charlie Jardine as Casanova.

I got up and stretched. That was the downside to the early stages of an investigation: Nearly everything looks plausible. “Okay, what did you find out last night?”

Sammie opened her folder and began detailing her search for whoever might have spent the night under the Elm Street bridge. She’d covered all the obvious bases—the flophouses and the halfway homes, the cheap hotels and the informal rooming establishments the Fire Department hoped would never catch fire. Windham County called itself the “Gateway to Vermont”; some contended that with every gate you get a doormat, which accounted for Brattleboro’s highly mixed population.

Indeed, from retired hippies to sawmill operators, from fancy doctors to drug pushers, and from established gentry to homeless unemployables seeking the nation’s third-highest welfare check, Brattleboro had it all. Considering that it boasted only a meager twelve thousand inhabitants, that deeply varied demography was to me the city’s biggest asset. It had made what might have been a sleepy, boring town just the opposite.

It also, however, made it a good place to hide, and from Sammie’s conclusion that’s exactly what was happening. “I think maybe he’s spooked.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He’d been there a while—you could tell from the junk. The newspapers he used for the bed go back several weeks. So do the expiration dates on some of the food wrappers. Plus there’re all sorts of cigarette butts and gum wads that indicate the regular lifestyle of a single person. A succession of bums wouldn’t have been that consistent.”

“So who spooked him, us or what he saw?”

Her face turned grim. “That’s more than a rhetorical question. Late last night, just before you told us to punch out, one of the people I interviewed told me another guy had offered him five hundred dollars for the same information.”

I sat up straight. “What guy?”

“He never saw him. My informant, Toby, hangs out on Elliot Street. He said he was leaving the Bushnell Apartment block and had ducked down that steep alleyway to the east—the one with the steps leading down—to do a little private drinking, when some man came up behind him, told him not to turn around, and said he’d pay five hundred bucks to whoever would take him to the latest tenant under the Elm Street bridge.”

“The latest tenant? He said that?”

She apologized. “No—those are my words. Toby said he’d look around; the guy said he’d be back in touch, and then he disappeared. Toby told me it’d been like talking to a ghost. He even climbed back up to street level to double-check, although that doesn’t mean much—he’s a pretty slow mover. In any case, to answer your question, it sounds like our bum has all sorts of reasons to make himself scarce.”

I thought back to yesterday afternoon, when I’d stood where our homeless quarry had, on the bank of the river, looking up at the retaining wall. Was he running from us or some killer, or were they one and the same? After all, how did the killer know about the bum in the first place, unless he was in the police department?

Whatever the case, I couldn’t argue the major point. If I was that bum, I’d be hiding in a hole so deep no one would ever find me.

THIS TIME, I DID BOTHER
to climb the stairs to the building’s upstairs bathroom. I stripped off my shirt, tied it around my waist so I wouldn’t get my pants too wet, and splashed as much cold water as I could on my face and torso to feel halfway revived. I then brushed my teeth, gargled some mouthwash, and put on a shirt I kept in reserve in one of my lower desk drawers. Gail had once commented that the Municipal Building had become a home away from home to me. She didn’t know the half of it.

Whatever lift my sink bath supplied me with evaporated before I was halfway to Brandt’s office. The cool water of moments ago was replaced by the day’s first prickly sheen of sweat. I didn’t need a forecast to know our heat wave was still entrenched.

Nor did I need a watch to know it was early in the day—the air in Brandt’s office, although as stale as a bar on a Sunday morning, was still smoke-free. The chief was remedying that by holding a lighter to his pipe as I walked into the room and dropped Woll’s file on his desk.

Gray clouds ballooned from his mouth as he glanced at the file, reading the name on the tab. I sat in the chair opposite his desk.

He blew some smoke toward the ceiling and leaned back, propping one foot on the rim of his wastebasket. “Billy mentioned the three of you had gotten together.”

It wasn’t a breach of confidentiality. Billy’s loyalty to the chief was similar to mine. I knew that what he told Brandt would be kept private between them. “Yeah. That was before I heard Rose Woll’s voice on Jardine’s telephone tape machine.”

A deep crease appeared between Brandt’s eyes. “They knew each other?”

“Apparently. The file didn’t tell me anything new; it did remind me that John’s had his rough times.”

Brandt was quiet for a few moments, gazing vacantly out the window and letting loose rhythmically spaced puffs of smoke. He didn’t even twitch when the circular saw outside awoke with a scream that sent me lurching to slam the door.

He waited until I’d sat back down. “You better fill me in.”

I did so, not only on John Woll, but also on our search of Charlie Jardine’s house. The mention of the bedroom setup and the cocaine deepened Brandt’s frown. During the “Ski-Mask Avenger” case of the year before, my best friend and predecessor as chief of detectives, Frank Murphy, had swept an apparently innocuous piece of evidence under the rug in an effort to streamline his investigation—a detail that had only loomed large after Murphy had lost his life and the department had been excoriated by the press and the selectmen. The specter of that mess was obviously beginning to stir in Brandt’s mind.

When I’d finished, he removed the pipe from his mouth and examined it carefully, as if curious to know how it had gotten there. “Do you think Woll’s involved?”

“I think it bears a careful look.”

“That’s not what the press will give it.”

Especially the newspaper, I thought.
The Brattleboro Reformer
had been bought by a large Midwestern media group, which had promptly fired the old editor and replaced him with a
USA Today
graduate with a passion for colorful, bite-sized news bits. His first executive decision had been to change the paper’s logo from black to bright red. The police department’s objections weren’t restricted to the esthetic, however. Stan Katz, whom the old editor had kept somewhat in check, had now been issued a license to kill.

“You want me to keep the double-Woll connection to Jardine under my hat for a while?”

“Yeah. No reports, no memos. If it blows, we’ll own up to it, but not until then.”

“Does that include the State’s Attorney?”

“Yeah.”

That sent a chill down my spine. I too remembered how the shit had hit the fan as a result of Murphy’s tidying up of the evidence. I couldn’t argue with Brandt’s short-term desire to simplify all of our lives, but I worried about the cost of such streamlining further down the road. For the second time in just a few hours, my concerns wandered from the strictly professional. I worried how a decision like this might play between Gail and me later on. “Is that wise?”

Brandt fixed me with his pale eyes. “You going to talk to the Wolls soon?”

“To her, certainly. Then it depends.”

“All right. Let’s keep it quiet, at least till we see what she says. Could be someone else has a voice just like hers. Maybe I’ll tell Dunn then. As for John, I want a pretty good idea of his role here before his name becomes public knowledge. So far, all we’ve caught him doing is his job.”

I got up. “It’s your call.” I thought he was being a little harsh on Dunn, and perhaps foolhardy. Odd as he was, I’d never known the SA to leak information—or to overlook a slight.

Brandt caught my tone of voice. “Think I’m being paranoid?”

I shrugged, still troubled, not wanting my personal concerns to cloud my judgment. “You know the stakes more than anyone. I won’t deny information leaks out of here like a sieve. Still… I’ll let you know what I find out.”