Scent of Evil

14

From the soft mutterings emanating from my portable radio as I crossed the street, I knew that part of the team digging in and around Milly’s apartment had returned to the Municipal Building. Not only was I curious to find out what they’d discovered, I also wanted to make sure I’d overturned every rock available to me before I confronted the Wentworths.

My trip to those rocks, however, was interrupted as I walked through the police department’s doors. Gary Nadeau, the town attorney, was approaching down the hallway, a long-suffering expression on his face. “I’d like to talk to you.”

The town attorney, unlike Brandt or Town Manager Tom Wilson, has no employment contract to protect him. He is appointed by the selectmen and confirmed by town meeting in March of every year. His job, therefore, hangs on the good graces of any three of the five selectmen. It is a political thread always ready to snap.

Over the years, there have been aggressive town attorneys, who made it their business to collect as much dirt on the selectmen as possible in order to keep them muzzled; passive types, who did their jobs and kept a packed bag always ready under their rented beds; and supposedly self-preserving types, who believed survival was based on toadying up to the bosses. The last, to my thinking, was the least reliable variety and matched Gary Nadeau to a gnat’s eyelash.

I was, unfortunately, a minority, for Gary had the reputation of being a ready listener and a good old boy, which made him the repository-and the conduit, as I saw it-of a lot of information he didn’t need to have.

“What’s on your mind, Gary?”

He lightly grabbed my elbow-a gesture I’ve never liked-and steered me toward one of the walls, as if seeking earthquake protection. “Well, it’s a favor, actually, about something that really doesn’t come under my jurisdiction.”

I let him dangle in silence.

“It’s these killings. I’ve been getting some heat from, you know, the big brass. They want to know what’s going on. Could you give me something to tell them, just to get them off my back?”

I made a big show of shaking my head in commiseration, as if I were receiving news of his pet beagle’s death. “I wish I could; there’s just not much to tell yet.”

He tossed that away with a nervous wave of his hand. “I heard one of our officers was near the place where Jardine was found.”

I deadpanned. That information was generally available but to pick it out specifically meant someone was paying very close attention, and I doubted it was just Nadeau. “It was a routine patrol-unconnected.”

He lumbered on-Mr. Casual. “Well, I wondered, you know, because if one of your personnel was somehow involved, I should be informed, since personnel matters do come under my umbrella.”

“When there’s a legal problem, yes.”

There was a long pause, during which I stayed absolutely still, the better to offset Nadeau’s nervous twitches. He finally gave it up with a sigh, shoved his hands into his pockets, and gave me an idiotically false grin. “Right. Well, thanks for the chat. Keep in touch.”

“Glad I could help,” I said, moving across the hall toward Brandt’s side of the building, my course changed by this little non-interview.

The usual cacophonous symphony of hammers, saws, and drills outside the chief’s office had been reduced to single, identifiable outbursts. The carpenters were winding down, putting up trim and fitting hardware to doors. It wouldn’t be long before their efforts were restricted to the officers’ room only.

Brandt removed his oral fog machine. “What’ve you got on Milly?”

“I don’t know yet. I was on my way to find out when Gary grabbed me in the hallway. He’s snooping for the ‘big brass,’ as he calls them-asked me about John’s cruiser being seen near Jardine’s grave. I don’t think he’s on to anything, but I thought you should know. By the way, I just found out that woman’s blouse we found at Jardine’s belonged to Blaire Wentworth.”

“Tucker’s daughter?” He mulled that over for a few seconds. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

I reopened the door. “Yup. I’ll let you know about Milly.”

Brandt suddenly held up his hand. “Hold it. You wanted to know about John Woll’s whereabouts while Milly was being shot?”

“Yeah,” I answered cautiously.

“Not good, I’m afraid. He told me he went for a drive in the country, to get some fresh air. He didn’t stop anywhere, and he didn’t see anyone he knew. Sorry.” He looked at me for a quiet moment before going back to his computer and his smoke production.

J.P. Tyler was hunched over his desk, sorting through piles of various-sized Ziploc bags. I looked around the room and saw only Klesczewski sitting at the long table in the meeting room, doing some paperwork. “Hi, J.P., you two the only ones back?”

Tyler looked over his shoulder. “Yeah. Dennis and the others are still interviewing. I think you were right about how the killer got out, by the way. Lucky he didn’t plug you when you went by.”

I didn’t comment, but it was a sobering thought. It lent credibility to my growing concern that the person behind all this, even while forced to act fast, was still coolly following an agenda. Killing me on the stairway would have been easy and uncomplicating-one less cop was surely an asset. My being left to live was therefore chilling: It made me all the more fearful of what our nemesis was up to.

I nodded at the pile on Tyler’s desk. “What’d you come up with?”

He straightened, his eyes bright. This was one happy man. “This is just the small stuff. I don’t know how it ties in with Milly’s murder, but we have just fallen into the biggest coke stash this department’s ever seen. I locked most of it in the evidence room.”

I stared at him. “How much?’

“I haven’t checked through it all yet, but I’d say about a kilo. There’s also a couple of bags of pills and a shitload of grass-maybe another five pounds. Milly was running a small factory out of there.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t fit; Milly was a small-timer.”

Tyler shrugged. “Maybe he was just starting out. Only a couple of the coke bags had been opened and cut, at least by him. We’ll have to have some purity tests done to figure out how much he stepped on, and how pure the stuff was he hadn’t got to yet.”

I suppose I should have been delighted. Considering what Katz had planned for us in tomorrow’s paper-“Police Baffled”-this was publicity made in heaven: “Police Close Down Drug Wholesaler.” Instead, my mind was suddenly filled with questions and doubts. There was no way in hell anyone was going to convince me that Milly Crawford had suddenly become a big-time drug lord: The quantities Tyler had mentioned, depending on the purity, could be worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the street level and would have cost Milly maybe fifty or sixty thousand to purchase. It was the kind of money he’d only had in his dreams.

Furthermore, that kind of transaction took brains, perseverance, and good connections. Nothing in Milly’s history fit that picture. He’d been a small-time opportunist, content to fence shoplifted items for resale to flea market vendors. He’d stolen an occasional car, sold a little dope, committed a petty burglary or two. The only expertise he’d acquired over the years was an inside-out knowledge of who was doing what to whom among Brattleboro’s low-rent criminals.

Which, of course, had a certain value of its own.

I thought of Charlie Jardine, suddenly rich in inherited chips, on the brink of becoming a big man in town, a regular at the Rotary lunches. He had the money and the perseverance. Maybe Milly had built up some valuable connections, which would have made the two of them a very compatible team.

“You didn’t run across any interesting paperwork, did you?” I asked Tyler.

He laughed, still in a good mood. “Like receipts?”

“I found something.” Klesczewski’s voice floated in from the other room.

I stepped away from Tyler’s cubicle and went over to the doorway. Klesczewski was sitting before a small scrap of dirty paper, his note pad, and an open copy of the Johnson Directory, or “crisscross book”-a reference linking telephone numbers to individuals, their addresses, and their professions.

He picked up the scrap and waved it at me. “I found this in the apartment. It’s a list of five phone numbers.”

I took it from him and looked at it, my heart skipping a beat at the last number on the list. I kept my voice neutral. “Why don’t you bring the book into my office so we can kick this around?”

He looked at me oddly for a moment and then nodded. His voice matched mine. “Sure-you got the fan.”

As we passed Tyler, he was back pawing through his envelopes, cataloging them into his evidence book, seemingly oblivious of our strange little dance.

Klesczewski closed my office door behind him. “I guess you recognized John Woll’s number.”

I didn’t answer but pulled a sheaf of papers from my desk and handed them over to him. “Yeah, I did. Those are Jardine’s phone records.”

He glanced at them and sat in the plastic guest chair. “Chief finally let go of them, huh?”

I took a deep breath, in part relieved to finally share a burden I’d borne only reluctantly from the beginning. “Not exactly. He and I were sitting on them for a while. We were afraid one of them might connect Jardine to John and/or Rose Woll.”

Klesczewski looked down at the records in his hand again. “Holy shit.” His voice was low and full of disappointment.

“We weren’t sure we’d find anything, or what it’d mean if we did, but we wanted to tread carefully, since it wouldn’t have been the only thing linking them all together. I’m sorry, Ron. It wasn’t exactly kosher.”

Klesczewski shook his head, his cop’s self-protective and perhaps self-serving instincts immediately grasping the rationale. “Oh, hell, that doesn’t matter; the press would have a field day with this. What’d you think’s going on?”

I turned on the fan, sat on the edge of my desk, and told him about recognizing Rose Woll’s voice on the tape, interviewing John, and my conversation with Rose that morning at the bank. He kept silent throughout, reacting only with an occasional shake of his head. I ended by pointing at the phone records. “That’s just pure paranoia, I suppose; only long-distance calls show up…”

He waved it off. “You think she was lying about ending the affair?”

“Maybe. She might have been into him for the drugs only. I think it was a bit of both. She doesn’t seem to have a great grasp of reality.”

“You think John killed Jardine?”

“The evidence suggests it, circumstantially. You were supposed to check Jardine’s background this morning; did you get anywhere on that?”

He looked mildly embarrassed, for no good reason. “No. I made a few phone calls, but I spent most of this morning clearing my desk of any stuff that had to be done in the next few days. Then, of course, the Milly thing came up.”

“Well, work Rose and John into any questions you ask. But go lightly, okay? If somebody like Katz or McDonald picks up on this, the shit’ll really hit the fan. So,” I added regretfully, expanding both the conspiracy and the risk of discovery, “nothing on paper about them either; just keep it verbal between you, the chief, and me. Sorry I’m putting you in such a position.”

“It’s okay.” He paused, and then asked the obvious: “Have you talked to John about all this?”

I shook my head. “If he’s guilty, he could use the interview to find out how much we have on him. If he’s innocent, it would just make him think we’re out to get him. Either way, this case’ll rest on all the evidence we can dig up, and I want as much of that as possible before sitting down with John.”

I handed the scrap of paper back to him. “So who do those other phone numbers belong to?”

He opened his note pad. “Kenny Thomas, Paula Atwater, Jake Hanson, and Mark Cappelli.”

None of them rang a bell with me.

“According to the crisscross, the first two work at the Putney Road Bank, Hanson isn’t listed as doing anything, and Cappelli works for E-Z Hauling.”

“As what?”

“Cappelli? Doesn’t say.”

I thought about that for a moment; any mention of drugs usually brings to mind transportation. “Did Lavoie say he could help you out on some of this?”

“Yeah, he jumped at it, like you said.”

“Why don’t you have him nail down exactly what these people do for a living? He can also find out who’s around that remembers Jardine from high school. But I want you to do all the actual interviews, both the ones on that list and the general ones, okay? Just in case either one of the Wolls crops up. And do Cappelli first, if you can; the trucking angle interests me.”

“What about Milly Crawford?”

“Dennis can head that up. Personally, I think they’re both the same case anyhow. I just don’t have any way to prove it at the moment.”

Klesczewski stood up and smiled back at me from the door. “Well, I’ll see what I can do about that.”

I sat quietly for a few seconds, thinking about John Woll and his wife. Whatever their involvement, it wouldn’t be too much longer before their world was blown sky-high, unless I either defused the bomb beneath them, detonated it myself, or watched the press do the latter, regardless of the facts. I crossed the hall to Brandt’s office.

“What’s up? You look worried.”

“I am,” I admitted. “I’ve brought Ron into our little secret about John and Rose. He found a piece of paper with John’s home number written on it in Milly’s apartment, along with four other people’s.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know yet; just names. Nobody notorious. The point is, we now have ties to John in both murders. In fact, he’s the only common denominator.”

“He is or Rose is.”

“Okay. One or the other or both; whichever it is, the SA is going to be royally pissed if he discovers we’ve been sitting on this for days, just hoping it’ll go away, and he’ll be right if it turns out the Wolls are dirty.”

“You think they are?”

“She’s not playing straight, I’m pretty sure of that. As for John, I don’t know; it’s not looking good. But that might be exactly what we’re supposed to think.”

“All right.” Brandt removed his pipe and placed both his hands behind his head. “What do you suggest?”

“We’ve got to follow the trail to the Wolls, even if the scent’s suspicious.”

“A search warrant?”

I shook my head. “I doubt we’d get it. We don’t actually have anything truly incriminating against either one of them-it’s all circumstantial.”

I moved over to the window and stared out at the parking lot through the steel grille attached to the frame. As with most such locations in this town, the municipal lot had both predictable urban neighbors, such as the almost windowless State of Vermont District Office Building, and a few more off-beat reminders that Vermonters make poor urbanites: Parked under a shade tree just beyond our chain-link fence was a weary but serviceable wooden fishing boat, mounted on a trailer and ready to roll as soon as its owner knocked off work.

I turned back to face Brandt. “Hypothetical question: Why would John kill Jardine or Milly?”

“Jardine for adultery and supplying his wife with drugs; Milly for being the source of the drugs.”

“So why did Milly have his phone number on a piece of paper?”

Brandt smiled. “It’s Rose’s number, too.”

I tapped my forehead gently against the grille. This whole damn thing was driving me crazy; not just the complexity of the case, but the duplicitous role I’d taken on. “I just lectured Ron on the rationale for not confronting John with all this right now, but I have to admit, it’s a temptation to kick the apple cart over to see what we end up with.”

Brandt smiled in sympathy, but still he held firm. “Let’s see what those other names on Milly’s list are first, to establish if there’s a connection. It would be nice having that under our belts before confronting him.”

I sighed my agreement and headed for the door, pausing as I got there. “By the way, some good news. Tyler tells me we grabbed our biggest dope stash ever in Milly’s apartment. That ought to play well.”

“We may need it.” The weariness in his voice told me I wasn’t the only one feeling the stress. And I had a feeling the worst was yet to come.