Scent of Evil

12

Klesczewski couldn’t stop smiling at my lime-green attire.“No Doctor Kildare jokes.”

He shook his head. We were standing at the threshold to Milly’s ransacked apartment. The pool of blood had congealed and now looked more like a huge spread of dried blackberry jam. Without a body at its center, it took on a horrifying, suggestive aspect, one that prompted me to keep my eyes instead on Tyler and his men as they picked their way from one end of the apartment to the other, scrutinizing and photographing every square inch.

“I take it you didn’t find the shooter.”

Ron shook his head. “We’re still interviewing, but it looks like a clean getaway. I’m not even sure which direction he took.”

I turned and glanced up the hall stairs, not surprised at this bit of news. As spontaneous as I guessed Milly’s murder to have been, it hadn’t struck me as a crime of passion, where the killer would be found, blood-soaked and distraught, lurking around some nearby corner. Milly’s death had been rushed and risky but planned all the same; that much I could feel in my bones. “How many ways out are there?”

He followed my glance upstairs. “Well, that’s one of them. The door to the roof is wide open, for ventilation, and the roof connects to buildings on either side. There’re front and back doors to the place, plus a cellar with a bulkhead entrance. The guy had his pick.”

“Assuming he left at all.” Here I was playing the devil’s advocate, virtually positive the killer was long gone.

“That’s what we’re checking on now, door to door. We sealed the area. The same landlord owns all three buildings, so we’re using him as a passkey. If the killer is here, we should find him, unless he lives here.”

I raised my eyebrows at him silently. He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well, you know, if the killer’s one of the neighbors, then we’ll find him at home, looking perfectly normal.”

I nodded distractedly and sat on one of the steps behind me. Klesczewski felt the need to explain further, his latent insecurity surfacing. “It’s possible this all happened because of a fight between neighbors, especially with someone like Milly. I wouldn’t want him next door.”

I didn’t argue the point. Statistically, Klesczewski was right, not that it altered my private opinion any. “Did anyone hear shots?”

“No-no one, and a couple of them were pretty close by, one right across the street at the same height, open window to open window, and another directly downstairs. I don’t think they’re trying to duck us, by the way; must’ve been a silencer.”

I was suddenly aware of the suffocating heat in the stairwell. Glancing at Klesczewski’s face, I saw it was beaded with sweat. “Is there any shade on the roof?”

He took it in stride, long used to my wandering mind. “Some.”

“Good.” I got up and began climbing the tired, sagging stairs. I could hear him following, judging his earlier observation. “I guess a silencer isn’t the kind of thing you bring to a neighborly dispute.”

I didn’t rub the point in; it was just the kind of thinking I was trying to encourage in him. “Did Dummy come up with anything more?”

“No, and he’s not real happy with you, either. Says you can take him off your list of born suckers. This is the last time he does our work for us.”

“Did you pay him off?” The environment suited the conversation.

Now free to look around, instead of ducking potential bullets and watching people die, I became aware of the drab surroundings-the splintered, bare-wood floors, the dark-lit walls, stained waist-high by the touch of countless unwashed and unsteady fingers. I wondered briefly how many times I had traveled hallways similar to this, and how many more lay ahead.

“Yeah. It didn’t make much of a dent, though. He said you were a lying bastard for setting him up and that I was cheap.”

The door to the roof was on the fourth floor, at the top of a steep half ladder, half staircase. I continued climbing toward the glaring, white-hot rectangle of light. “I did tell him there was no risk.”

Klesczewski let out a laugh. “He heard that part, all right.”

I’d just reached the top step when both our radios squawked. I recognized DeFlorio’s voice asking Klesczewski where I was.

“We’re both on the roof.”

“Chief’s here.”

I looked around briefly and keyed my own radio. “Send him up.”

Klesczewski frowned as he hooked his radio back onto his belt.

“You’re not surprised he showed up, are you?”

He shrugged. “No, I suppose not.”

But he wasn’t happy. Unlike when a general appears through the smoke of battle, the arrival of the police chief was not inspiring to the troops. Most department members were uncomfortable around Brandt, seeing him as their political leader, with his own separate arena in which to wage war. His presence among them, especially at a crime scene, gave rise to both self-doubt and resentment that they weren’t being trusted to do their jobs. The fact that Brandt had patrolled more streets and stuck his nose into more potential trouble than any two of them combined meant next to nothing to them. He was the Big Cheese, and best avoided. Having been in his shoes, even for a scant few months, I could sympathize with his peculiar isolation.

“Why don’t you get back to it? I’ll stay put and find out what he wants.”

Klesczewski didn’t need urging. He let out a quick okay and was gone.

The heat on the roof, especially when reflected off its flat tar-and-gravel coating, was no less intense than what it had been in the stairwell, but the location’s openness was a help psychologically. In fact, although the steep bluff that skirted a good portion of lower Canal Street, and which forced Horton Place to double back on itself like a horseshoe, loomed just a hundred feet to my back, the building itself was tall enough to compete with the treetops. Looking northwest along the axis of the Whetstone Brook valley to the distant hills beyond West Brattleboro, I imagined being a raft-borne sailor on a choppy green sea. The verdant stretch of tree crowns was punctuated by oddly shaped rooftops, which, in my craving for cool air, I chose to see as parodies of icebergs. Not that the illusion was wholly satisfactory; I ended up seeking the more palpable comfort of a large maple’s half circle of shade near the rear edge of the roof. There I waited, dimly aware of the city’s murmur below and around me, reflecting on the events of the last few hours.

Brandt found me five minutes later and gestured at my borrowed scrub suit. “I take it Milly didn’t make it.”

I shook my head. “Ron and I were just discussing that whoever hit him probably used a silencer. Also, the slug they dug out of him in the operating room looked like a.38 or a 9-millimeter.”

Brandt grunted. “What did McDermott tell you?”

That came from left field. I gave him a dumb look. “Fred McDermott? I haven’t seen him in over a week.”

“Oh. DeFlorio mentioned he was here when the shooting started. I thought you might have talked to him.”

Fred McDermott was the town’s building inspector, a position that made him intimately familiar with most of the firetraps and health hazards in the city. I wasn’t surprised he’d been seen in a kindling pile like this, but the timing was unusual. “No. I haven’t even seen DeFlorio yet.”

“Well, no big deal. From what I gather, he had nothing to offer.” Brandt moved into the shade next to me and waved his arm to encompass the three adjoining roofs. “So, you think he got away over the top?”

“It’s possible.”

Brandt caught my tone. “But you don’t think so.”

I didn’t share my men’s distrust of Tony Brandt. He was reserved. He didn’t laugh it up with the boys or ask to be treated as a pal. Although politically versed, he lacked the instinctive glibness that marks the common breed of politician. I saw him rather as a policeman who’d chosen to be a chief because he wanted to prove the two weren’t mutually exclusive. That was a subtlety lost on the department’s younger members, too concentrated on their swagger and pride. But to old hands like Billy Manierre and me, Brandt’s attempt to keep the cop in him alive while playing the bureaucrat’s role was an asset; it supplied us with a trusted sounding board that could tell us how our ideas might play to either a professional or a political audience.

I therefore had no qualms about sharing my doubts with him. Besides, with what we knew about the Wolls, we shared a secret, which by definition made us conspirators.

“No, I don’t, although it sounds reasonable enough.” I paused and moved to the edge of the roof. Brandt remained silent. Below me, police cars were parked helter-skelter, like badly aligned toys. “If I wanted to kill someone who lived near the top floor of this building, I’d make my escape over the roofs. It would lessen the chances of anyone seeing me twice and it would allow me two neighboring buildings with all their exits to choose from.”

Brandt still didn’t speak, being used to my ramblings.

“The silencer, assuming there was one, indicates premeditation, which would tie in to a preplanned escape route.” I crossed over to the opposite edge and looked over into the tangle of weeds, bushes, and sun-bleached grass that constituted the backyards of the buildings.

“But the timing bothers me, and makes me think this wasn’t as premeditated as it looks.” I turned and faced Brandt. “We haven’t heard from Milly Crawford in months-almost a year. He hasn’t come up in any of the local criminal street gossip, as far as I know. So we’ve got to assume he’s been leading his normal low-life existence. Then, all of a sudden, his name pops up, we set up a way to bust him, and he gets himself killed, all in the space of a few hours. Nice and neat.”

Brandt finally spoke up. “How does that connect to a rooftop escape?”

“Not enough time to preplan it. How would you know if the rooftop door would be open, or at least be unlocked? How about the doors leading down in the other two buildings? Also, you need to know the route from beginning to end, and the habits of the people living here. You need to hang around for a while, find out how things work, figure out as many of the intangibles as possible.”

“And you don’t think that happened here?”

“Nope. I think this was an act of desperation, done at the last second to stop us from talking to Milly, but not by a hothead. Whoever it was kept his cool. That tells me we’re facing a planner by nature; someone who thinks before he jumps, even on short notice.”

The radio muttered my name from the back pocket of my green pants.

“Go ahead.”

“You might want to come down here and check this out. Second floor.”

I glanced at Brandt, who shrugged and followed me back into the gloomy, stifling stairwell.

We found several officers, including Ron Klesczewski, gathered on the second-story landing. With them was a red-faced, sullen man with a peeved expression and a large set of keys on a ring.

“This is Mr. Blossom,” Klesczewski said, with a palpable touch of sarcasm. “He’s the landlord here and has been kind enough to open whatever doors need opening.”

Blossom and I nodded curtly to one another. I could see from his face that proffering a handshake would only invite a rebuke and probably a smirk to match.

Klesczewski indicated an apartment door labeled “21.” “No one was home, so we asked Mr. Blossom to do the honors and found out the jamb was busted.”

Brandt gave me a look and bent down to study the door. It opened to the inside and was held shut by a simple keyed doorknob. The interior jamb, where the lock’s catch plate had been mounted, had been splintered by a heavy force coming against the outside of the door.

I pointed at several small wooden shards lying on the inside of the threshold, evidence that the breakage was recent. Brandt grunted, “The exposed wood looks fresh, too.”

The whole setup made me feel slightly hollow.

I didn’t want to say too much in front of Blossom, whom I regarded as little more than a loudspeaker to the neighborhood and the press, which couldn’t be far off. I turned back to Klesczewski. “Better seal this off and get Tyler on it as soon as possible. Be easier all around if he got it done before the tenant comes back home.”

Brandt motioned to me to follow him downstairs. “So what do you make of it?” he asked, once we were out of earshot, heading out the front door of the building.

“Pure guesswork?” I said, with an artificial brightness.

“Sure.”

“Then I think I probably came close enough to the killer to touch him. Either he broke open that door to hide when Dummy came upstairs, which he really didn’t have any reason to do unless they know each other, or he was in Milly’s room when Dummy walked in, ducked downstairs when I was being called from the balcony, and hid behind that door as I was coming up.”

Brandt was silent as we both crossed the street, walking toward Canal. He spoke up as I stopped by my car. “You’re also saying someone in the police department told the killer about Milly, right?”

“It looks that way.”

He frowned. “Just like he told him about a bum being under that bridge.”

I didn’t respond.

“Which means we’re back to John Woll.”

“Or we’re being led back to him.”

Brandt pursed his lips, considering that much more complicated possibility. “By who?”

“Take your pick. A lot of people had access to Milly’s identity, just as soon as we did. Tyler dug his card out of the fingerprint file; he made no secret of his pleasure to me, and I doubt he did to anyone else he met on his way to my office. And you gave the paperwork I filled out for the money to your secretary, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She’s out in the open, near where half the department and a good many visitors pass by on the way to the coffee machine or the copier or whatever. Anybody could have paused there to say hi, glanced at the paperwork, and put it all together.”

Brandt shook his head. “That one’s slim.”

“Okay, but I also told Dispatch where I was when I parked here. Someone familiar with how we work could figure it out, especially if Jardine was buried so we would find him. It would further reinforce the theory that this whole investigation is being manipulated somehow.”

“But that points to police involvement again, doesn’t it?”

I doggedly refused to be cornered, if only to stave off becoming too tunnel-visioned. “Not necessarily. Look, someone could have been tailing me. He sees me meet Dummy, follows me here, realizes Milly’s been blown, and goes upstairs to kill him just before Dummy arrives to make the buy. There was a five-minute gap while Dummy and I just watched the front of the building from the car. Same thing identifying the bum angle. We spent a few hours crawling under a bridge that’s obviously served as somebody’s home. What conclusions would you draw, as a reasonably bright onlooker?”

Brandt stared at the sidewalk. He had my sympathies. Not only did he have two homicides in two days-with the attending heat from both media and selectmen-he also had a chief detective who seemed ready to embrace any theory that popped into his head.

In the brief silence, I almost hated counterbalancing my own broad view of the case with John Woll’s latest coffin nail; but there it was, as hard as evidence could get. “One other piece of bad news,” I said, as I circled my car and opened the driver’s door. “The saliva on the cigarette butt found in Jardine’s grave was AB, same as John Woll’s. It’s a pretty rare type.”

Brandt absorbed that glumly. “Which brings up the most obvious possibility of all-that Woll knocked off Milly.”

“True. Tell Ron to look into that, would you? Have him check on John’s whereabouts today.” I slid behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Where’re you going?”

“To change my clothes.” I ignored his look of irritation and backed the car around to face Canal.

Reasonably, I should have stayed at the scene and looked over the shoulders of my men. But they knew what they were doing. I, on the other hand, needed no more than fifteen minutes of meditative quiet, just enough to distance myself from Milly’s grotesque and bloody passing, and my own unknowing escape from his killer. I needed a touch of the routine, a familiar setting in which I could shift gears and begin to move forward again.

My apartment is on the corner of High and Oak, just a stroll up the hill from the center of town. It’s actually a pretty ritzy neighborhood, with lots of Victorian homes, heavy on stained glass and gingerbread molding, made all the more exclusive for being a stroll away from the business district. Gail had once pointed out that, were it not for the building’s appearance, I couldn’t afford to live there. It was true that home wasn’t much to look at. It too had once been Victorian, but a bargain-basement remodeler had pretty much butchered whatever grace it might have had. Now it was just large, lumpy, and painted urine yellow. Also, its location, within immediate earshot of High Street’s grinding gears and squealing brakes, helped keep the rent low and the yuppies away.

I lived on the top floor in a ramshackle place, comfortably old and dusty, as filled with dark wood, ancient overstuffed furniture, and low ceilings as Gail’s place was open and airy and modern. Indeed, its one striking architectural feature was its massive number of books; they lined my walls, were piled in odd corners, and covered much of my furniture. An obsession planted by my educationally minded mother, reading books had become my primary off-duty pastime, besides spending time with Gail. The apartment had therefore become, over the years, a cavelike shelter against the outside world, a museum of my past, my passions, and my deep-rooted pleasure in solitude.

I stripped off the hospital greens, turned on the various fans I’d acquired of late, and settled in my nest of choice, an enormous, comforting, bulging armchair, surrounded by a cluster of lights, books, side tables, and a mismatched ottoman, all of which normally tended to most of my needs.

I didn’t use any of them now, however. This time, their proximity was enough. I stared out across the worn carpet to the battered coffee table with its neat stacks of mail, to the nondescript sofa against the wall of books beyond, and I thought.

A quarter hour later, resolved if not refreshed, I got up and began dressing. If I was to pursue the theory that this entire investigation was being manipulated to incriminate either the department generally or John Woll personally, I had to do more than stand around and watch that process take place. My job now was to focus less on the “who” in both these murders, and more on the “why.”

Which brought me back to Charlie Jardine. Unlike Milly Crawford’s, his death had been planned, carefully executed, and intensely personal.