Scent of Evil

22

I looked down the length of the conference table. There were none of the usual wisecracks or paper shuffling, no muttered one-liners. The assembled faces of the detective squad looked back at me, silent and glum. Now that the press conference had come and gone like a long-awaited storm, they were more resentful than ever.

My own mood hadn’t improved much either. The encounter with the press had been like standing before a firing squad. Not only had preempting his scoop incensed Katz, but his colleagues from the surrounding area’s newspapers, radios, and two regional TV stations had grilled Brandt, Dunn, and to a lesser extent me, with equal vigor.

What was frustrating was how overblown the reaction had become. From the time Brandt had almost casually decided to keep Woll’s name under wraps, both he and I had known there was an element of risk. On the other hand, most investigations cause names to pop to the surface like corks, and only a few of them eventually prove worthy of attention. Ours is usually a process of elimination. That one of those leads should be a cop had struck us as sensitive, certainly, but hardly as a deliberate cover-up. We’d been dumb perhaps, but not treasonable.

I leaned forward, splaying my fingers on top of the table, a little irritated at my present audience. “I gather we have problems here among ourselves. Or, more to the point, you have a problem with me.”

There was a stifling silence, broken only by a few self-conscious chair creaks.

I let the discomfort hang in the air. Sammie finally spoke up, her voice slightly belligerent. “I don’t have a problem.”

Heads swiveled from her to me. I turned to her, trying to staunch any impressions that she might be trying to cozy up to me; her honesty didn’t deserve that kind of abuse. “Okay. What don’t you have a problem about?”

“About what you and Brandt did.”

“Which was what, as you see it?” I asked them all.

Tyler tossed his pencil contemptuously onto the pad before him. “For Christ’s sake. You guys sat on part of an investigation we were all supposed to be sharing. You didn’t trust us.”

DeFlorio nodded, Ron didn’t move, and Sammie frowned.

I sat down heavily and leaned back in my chair, suddenly exhausted, no longer interested in debating the fine points. Tyler’s words echoed in my head. “Okay, I screwed up. We thought if we could eliminate John from the list of suspects quickly, we could avoid unnecessary bad publicity. We had no idea he would end up at the top of that list, and when he did it was too late.”

DeFlorio nodded, seemingly satisfied.

Tyler, however, wasn’t so simply bought off. “It might have helped if you’d included us.”

I shrugged, but Sammie spoke up for me. “I think they had a point; the more people you bring in, the more chance there is of a leak. Besides, we don’t reveal to the press everyone we’re investigating; we’d get our butts sued inside a week.”

Tyler shook his head. “This isn’t the same. It made the whole department look bad. I’m not after you personally, Joe, but you and Brandt played God and got caught. It was a dumb move, insulting to us and ready-made for the media.”

“That’s too rough,” Ron finally muttered.

“Yeah,” DeFlorio added. “I didn’t feel insulted, just surprised. Wasn’t that big a deal.”

“It was a security thing,” Sammie reiterated. “And we’ve had problems there from the start. Look what happened to Milly Crawford after you announced you’d nailed his prints to the baggie in Jardine’s house.”

Tyler smacked the table with his open hand, surprisingly upset. “Now just wait a goddamn minute-”

I stood up, both arms held high, startled at the sudden rise in emotions. “Hold it, hold it.”

Tyler was still glaring at Sammie, who was holding her own. Silently, I gave her the debate. She’d hit J.P.’s one sore spot, a spot he, along with the rest of us, had obviously been contemplating since Milly’s untimely end. She’d also burst his self-righteous bubble, which, I suspected, had been inflated more by exhaustion than by true outrage.

“Okay. We’re tired, we’re frustrated, we’ve made mistakes. Sammie grabbed the wrong bum off the street; Mark Cappelli is suing us ’cause Ron and I didn’t ID ourselves before he opened fire. The bottom line is we have a bitch of a case, we’re understaffed, we don’t have a lot of experience, and we’re under a microscope. I don’t want to ignore any real unhappiness here, but we can’t let this get the better of us.”

J.P. rubbed his eyes with his palms. “No… I’m sorry. Maybe Milly getting whacked worked on me more than I thought.”

“That and the fact that you’ve probably had six hours sleep in the last three days,” I added.

Tyler sat back and waved one hand. “Yeah. Okay, look, I’ve had my little fit. Let’s get back to business.”

“Which,” I picked up, “might have suddenly become a little less complicated. We no longer have to worry about John or Rose Woll. If any of us picks up evidence tied to them, we simply pass it along to Dunn’s office.”

“That only works in our favor if the Wolls are innocent.”

That was Tyler again, back on track, applying the logic he held so dear.

I nodded in agreement. “Good point. Let’s put the Wolls on the table and see what we’ve got. J.P., were you able to do anything with the stuff you found in their apartment before Dunn’s people took it over?”

“Nothing solid; impressions, really, and only about the two items you know about. The baggie looked exactly like the ones in Milly’s apartment. But that doesn’t mean much unless the SA can lift some prints off it. The gold watch was engraved on the back, ‘To Charlie with Love,’ and it looked as clean as a whistle. I looked at it under the light and it was polished, front and back. I don’t know about you folks, but my watch always has prints on the face of it.”

Instinctively, and feeling a little foolish afterward, we all consulted our own watches. No one commented on having a polished crystal.

“Of course,” Tyler added, “that doesn’t prove anything either.”

“But it does imply something,” I picked up. “It strikes me that the case against John Woll has been awfully neat and tidy-almost gift-wrapped.”

I held up the fingers on one hand to tick off the items I had in mind. “John is seen at the grave site, lured there, he says, by a flare we never find. Negative implications are: He was there burying Jardine, and he lied about the flare to cover himself.”

I bent down a second finger. “Rose and Charlie were having an affair, a continuation of some romantic triangle they formed in high school. John is a boozer with limited career goals and a low sex drive, going nowhere while Jardine is suddenly a high flyer. Implication: John whacked Jardine out of jealousy, envy, or vengeance.

“Third, in Milly Crawford’s apartment, Ron found a list of telephone numbers, one of which belonged to Mark Cappelli. The others, as you all know by now, belonged to three others we have yet to chase down. There was, in addition, a fifth number, which belonged to John Woll.”

I waited for the bristling body language to settle down before going on. “I told Ron to keep it under his hat. You can add that to the general apology I made earlier. Nevertheless, the inclusion of John’s number indicates that John was somehow tied to Milly’s drug business.

“And now,” I concluded, placing my hand back on the table top, “we have Jardine’s watch and possibly Milly’s cocaine in John’s apartment. The implications there are obvious.”

Sammie shook her head in wonder. “If it is a setup, it’s very good.” Pierre Lavoie’s voice was tentative, torn between curiosity and the fear we might throw him out for speaking up. “I don’t understand why the SA hasn’t arrested him, if he’s got all this evidence against him.”

Ron Klesczewski spoke up for the first time, grateful for an opportunity to take control. I wondered how long it would take him to risk sticking his neck out again, now that the political knife-wielding had caused him to pull back. “For one thing, the evidence isn’t all that strong, and for another, once an arrest takes place, you’ve only got so much time available before you have to wrap the case up and present it in court.”

“Besides,” I added, “Dunn’s got time on his side, if he ignores all the pressure. Right now, the implications I counted off establish a motive, an opportunity, and a bag of circumstantial evidence, all of which cropped up within three days. Chances are, if there’s proof to be had, it’ll surface before long. Then Dunn’ll be able to waltz into court with an airtight case.”

There was a long pause as each of us considered that possibility. Dunn’s record was very good; he rarely “waltzed” anywhere without getting results. So, the last and final implication had to be that if he did go to court with this one, it meant John Woll had killed Charlie Jardine.

“So if John killed Jardine, who killed Milly Crawford?” Ron asked in a barely audible voice.

No one answered immediately. Then Sammie spoke up. “And if John killed Milly to silence him, then why leave a baggie of Milly’s dope taped to the toilet?” No one had to add that leaving Jardine’s watch in a sock drawer also seemed pretty implausible. With questions like that floating around, Dunn’s apparent answer to who killed Jardine could never ring absolutely true.

“Find that out,” I finally answered, “and a whole lot’ll fall into place-probably more than Jardine’s killer intended.”

I began pacing the back of the room. “Ron, where in Milly’s apartment did you find that phone list?”

“Behind the dresser, on the floor.”

I mulled that over for a few seconds. “An inconvenient place to hide something, but a suitably obscure place to plant one, especially if you were in a hurry. Now, we’re pretty sure Milly was knocked off on the spur of the moment, to stop us from talking to him. Without having time to get fancy, the killer must have figured that any planted evidence would be better than none, especially if it linked Milly and John.”

Tyler looked at me, both smiling and doubtful. “Christ, we’re going around and around here.”

But I could tell he was intrigued. “True, so, since we’re not allowed to investigate the Wolls, let’s assume they’re innocent, just for the sake of the investigation, and pursue all our other leads. Considering the doubts we have about Dunn’s case, we might even be right.”

There were a few more chuckles around the table. The incongruity of assuming a suspect innocent out of pure convenience might have seemed laughable, but I’d raised a legitimate point. Furthermore, it cleared the smoke away, allowing us to see both homicides in a new light, perhaps a light we were intended never to see by. That possibility alone was enough to recharge the batteries of every person in the room.

I sat back down, content the squad was back on track, newly braced against the turmoil that had briefly derailed it.

I stopped DeFlorio as he was heading out the door. “I hear the court order was delivered on Jardine’s business records.”

He made a face. “Yeah; piss me off. We spent hours on that junk, all for nothing.”

“You didn’t find anything?” I knew that if Dennis didn’t understand something, he tended to throw it out.

He conceded the point indirectly. “None of it made any sense to me, anyway; stuff’s all Greek. Tell you the truth, I was tickled pink when the court order arrived. Talk to Willette. He might have picked up something.”

I decided to do just that, walking down Main Street to the south side of the public library and a large, clapboard, century-old building that had been converted into a mini-office building. Justin Willette’s two-room suite was at the top of the stairs on the second floor.

Willette grinned and pushed his glasses high up onto his head as I walked in. He rubbed his eyes with both stubby hands. “I wondered when I’d see you. I take it you heard the bad news.”

“That Arthur Clyde got his papers back, or that there was nothing to find in the first place?”

He chuckled. “Is that what Dennis told you? I’m not surprised; he was looking a little microwaved toward the end.”

“Then you did finish?” Willette’s desk was actually a seven-foot long dining table he’d moved in from his house. I sat down opposite him, as if preparing to make a meal of the stacks of paper between us.

The glasses stayed parked up on his broad, pink forehead, giving his face an odd, four-eyed appearance. He settled back into his chair and linked his hands behind his neck. “Well, we finished the short course. Jardine having been in operation for only a year made it a whole lot easier. Still, all I got were impressions. To do it properly would’ve taken days and corroboration from other data sources.”

Justin Willette had never lit the world on fire as a financial high roller. He had not come to Brattleboro after a career on Wall Street or from advising the yacht-owning set on how to screw up American business through LBOs. He had stuck to doing his homework, had worked long hours with firms in Boston getting the basics down, and was now a registered rep of one of the big national stockbrokers. He had the reputation of guiding the little guys through the investment maze with integrity and a minimum of smoke and mirrors.

He also liked a puzzle and had helped us in the past to unscramble a few. Although there was no evidence of it now, I knew he and Dennis had spent the entire day poring over buy-and-sell tickets, market-trend charts, financial newsletters, business correspondence, and God knows what else, all with frequent referrals to the computer glowing on the counter behind him, and all, I had no doubt, at no cost to us.

“So do you smell something fishy?” I asked him.

He pursed his lips. “Yeah. That’s a pretty good way of putting it. Nothing definite, but something wrong. Not court-of-law material, though; keep that straight.”

“Okay.”

He nodded, reassured. “Okay. Small lecture on trading, then. The National Association of Security Dealers, called NASD for short, and the New York Stock Exchange, monitor all trading, as does the SEC, which oversees both of them. Also, with national firms like Merrill Lynch or Prudential-Bache or whoever, senior partners of regional offices tend to keep an eye peeled. What all of them are looking for are patterns, since there’re way too many transactions conducted every day to analyze every one.

“What is a pattern, you ask?” Willette continued, although I had done no such thing. “It’s something like buying AT amp;T stock one week before a merger is announced, and then doing the same kind of thing with another company a few days or weeks later, cashing in both times. That catches people’s attention, especially if it keeps happening and involves a fair amount of cash.”

“Insider trading?”

“Possibly. That’s the tricky part. There’s a lot of analysis that goes on in this business, and there’re a lot of smart people doing it. Look at ‘Wall Street Week’ on TV sometime and you’ll see them in action. They study the trends, look at the figures, sometimes even interview the principal players, and then they make a buy. If the stock then suddenly goes through the roof, is that insider trading? Nope. So the watchdogs have got to tell the difference between a sharp guy with an honest track record, and a crook.”

“So what makes you suspicious of Jardine? That he was too new in the business to be any good?” I paused. “How good was he, by the way?” Willette chuckled. “I don’t know about him, but ABC Investments was off to a healthy start. If they’d been wooing me as a customer with their track record, I would have listened. What do you know about Arthur Clyde, by the way?”

It was an embarrassing question, considering the effort this man had expended on our behalf. “Not much, I’m afraid. We would have had more if it hadn’t been for this double homicide; our manpower’s been stretched to the limit. Basically, you’ve been our only Clyde investigator up to now.”

Willette smiled and shook his head. “Didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I know you’re ass-deep in alligators. I did a check on Arthur Clyde. He was cited and suspended by the NASD two years ago for what I’d call irregular paper shuffling. It’s not that rare; people get caught in the rules all the time, and usually it’s no big deal, at least as far as the public is concerned. Unfortunately, the broker can really get pinched, depending on how tough the bureaucrats want to get.”

“How tough did they get with Clyde?”

“Well, that’s the interesting part. It was just a little thing-I called a friend of mine who did some digging. Clyde apparently goofed on some form having to do with a client’s discretionary account. From what I understand, he put things right within a single work day, but the milk had been spilled and NASD was called in to supervise the cleaning up. Normally, that means a hearing, a certain amount of bowing and scraping, a slap on the wrist, a small mountain of paperwork, and that’s it. Only this time, it didn’t work that way. Clyde, with a squeaky-clean record going back God knows how many years, got pissed. He told the NASD boys to screw themselves and refused to attend the hearing. So they found him in contempt, slapped a fine on him, and gave him a six-month suspension; not that it mattered, since he’d already quit his job.”

“Wasn’t that a problem when he went in with Jardine?”

“No. The fine had been paid off, and the six months had long since elapsed. As far as NASD was concerned, it was ancient history.”

“Until now.”

Willette wobbled his head from side to side. “Maybe, just maybe.” This was what he got in return for his labors: the joy of being the oracle, if only briefly, in the midst of a major case. The man knew enough of the world to realize I wouldn’t be in his office if I wasn’t in need of his knowledge. Finally, he laughed. “Okay, I’ll concede. But keep in mind it’s all pretty subtle and will need lots of supporting evidence, none of which I have.”

“Gotcha.”

He propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and built a steeple of his fingers. “I do suspect some insider trading, but not on the order to which we’ve become aware in the news.”

I could feel the crease growing between my eyes.

“The trick to this game, as a retail business, is to show people you’re a consistent winner. It’s nice to hit the jackpot, of course, but unless you do it frequently, you’re quickly seen as a flash in the pan. And if you do hit it frequently, pretty soon your place of business is crawling with investigators all wondering how you did it. Word of that gets out fast, too, and can be as bad for the bankbook as unemployment. So you work for a middle ground, enjoying the peaks as they come, but going for solid, respectable returns.”

I kept my mouth shut at the end of this primer, knowing the punch line would come in good time.

“The first thing that caught my eye with ABC was that they hit this steady, predictable stride right off the bat.” He paused.

“And that’s pretty rare?”

“As a snowball in hell. It’s like any other business; it takes you a while to find your sea legs.”

“But what about Clyde? Didn’t he have years of experience and contacts he could bring to bear? And there was Wentworth in the background, too.”

Willette wagged his finger at me, delighted. “All true, but Clyde’s contacts would be on the investment side, not the investor. You can have a great product, but you need clients to buy it; that’s why an operation like this usually takes time to show a profit. As for Wentworth, he’d have the same problem in reverse. He might have the local appeal, but any clients he could round up would want to see a solid track record before they signed on. It’s like a catch-22; you can beat it but not easily, especially with a partner like Jardine, whose résumé would look good only on an application to Taco Bell.”

“But they did it nevertheless.”

“That they did, largely on one account.”

He paused again, and again I played along. “Okay. I give up. Which account?”

“They landed the Putney Road Bank pension fund almost as soon as they’d hung out their shingle.”

Mention of the Putney Road Bank made the short hairs on my neck tingle. Two of the names on Milly’s list were employed there.

“In your digging through ABC’s files, did you run across either Kenny Thomas or Paula Atwater, in connection to the bank?”

For once, Willette looked blank. “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”

I tried a more general approach. “Why would a bank put that much money into a new outfit like ABC? I mean, what would the pitch be to the board of directors or whoever?”

Willette thought about that for a moment before answering. “It would have to hinge entirely on connections-the credibility of the person making the pitch. ABC wouldn’t have anything else.”

“And that would’ve been Wentworth, since Clyde’s a newcomer and Jardine’s a nobody, at least in the bank’s eyes.”

Willette shrugged. “Sure, Wentworth. But not him alone. The real enthusiasm would have to come from within the bank, from officers carrying Wentworth’s torch, and that’s something I don’t think they’d do without some real incentive.”

“Like a kickback?”

“Kickback, payment up front, drugs, sex, or rock ’n’ roll; who knows? You know what they say: ‘Money talks and bullshit walks.’ A lot of bankers I know are either stupid, greedy, or both. If Wentworth paid off a fat sum to the right people, then that, mixed with his own reputation, might do the trick, especially with an outfit like Putney Road Bank. It’s hardly Chase Manhattan, after all; it’s more like a one-horse barn, but perfect to get ABC off to a nice start.”

“You implied ABC got a few other lucky breaks.”

“Yeah, equally intriguing, and again only because of the suspicions it raises. Traditionally, in this business, the slow hard road to success is attained through old-fashioned hustle. You get a tip, you offer it around; people turn you down but watch to see what happens to the stock in question. If it goes up, you don’t make any money, but you gain a little credibility. So you do it again, and again. Eventually, if you keep hitting base runs, and especially if you hit the occasional homer, people start paying you for your advice. It’s pretty elementary.

“The trick, of course, is to come up with enough winner suggestions to get enough clients to keep you from going bankrupt. The hassle, in other words, isn’t just in trying to locate customers, but also in locating juicy investments. Here again, I found ABC to be remarkably well blessed.”

“Reflecting Clyde’s abilities to choose stocks, Wentworth’s influence and number of contacts, and Jardine’s salesmanship in putting the two together.”

Willette chuckled. “Very good-just what they’d want you to think. Old-fashioned American know-how at work.”

“Well, couldn’t it be?”

“Sure, it could be, but not probably. See, Joe, I live in this part of the jungle. On the face of it, you’d be right, maybe. A lot of guys, mostly in the old days, did get to the top à la Horatio Alger. But it took a lot of work, and I mean real ball-busting, year-after-year stuff-not very appealing to either the young modern male or the old guy in his twilight years who still has a greedy twinkle in his eye.”

I sighed, a little depressed at how cannily accurate it all sounded. “So how do you think they did it?”

“It’s a little off the wall-really just a guess on my part-but I’d say they were giving license to a moral difference of opinion with the law.”

I shook my head, not even bothering for an explanation. He was now in his role of alchemist, turning the lead weight of Wall Street number crunching into the gold of human nature, unfortunately in one of its least appealing aspects. I got up from the table and crossed over to the window that looked down onto Main Street and the drive-in bank opposite. The people on the sidewalk strolled back and forth like Bedouin wanderers: slow, dehydrated, flattened by the post-sunset heat.

Justin Willette continued with his treatise. “The laws against insider trading are seen by many investment types as an unrealistic, knee-jerk political reaction catering to a bunch of socialist bleeding hearts. They were designed to give everyone a fair shot at grabbing the gold ring, from the little guy with enough change for a stock or two, to the corporate giants investing the assets of entire countries. Problem is that nowadays most everybody uses the same outfits to buy and sell; both the little guys and the giants give their money to say, Merrill Lynch, or Shearson, or Kidder Peabody to invest. So who’s getting screwed by the insider-trading laws, these people ask? Everybody, big and small.”

“And you’re saying Wentworth and/or Clyde followed that line of reasoning?”

“I have my suspicions. But I think they were very subtle about it. Too subtle for me to nail down their exact technique with the little I’ve seen, and maybe not even then. After all, neither one of them needs to land in the slammer at this point in their lives, nor do they appear to need any more money. The trick was to play the game just enough to get ABC on its feet. After that, it would be Jardine’s baby, with the two older guys in the background giving him perfectly legitimate advice now and then.”

The frustration was making my head pound, even with the air-conditioning. “But why, Justin? That’s what bugs me. Why the hell take the risk at all? You steal a hundred bucks or you steal a million; it’s still stealing, and if you get caught, you still get the book thrown at you. I understand why it all made sense for Charlie Jardine, but Clyde and Wentworth are a total mystery to me. Could Clyde have been ignorant of the whole thing?”

Willette shook his head. “Not a chance. Wentworth might have been. I didn’t find any documentation linking him financially to ABC. There were a lot of letters from and to him in the files, but they were all legit. Morris, McGill, after all, drew up the papers that created ABC. As for motivation, I can only take a shot at Clyde; the other two are too murky for me.”

I left the window and faced him, still standing. “So what’s your shot?”

“Revenge. I think he got back into the game to stick it to ’em. He felt he’d been nailed for some paperwork screw-up after a lifetime of minding his p’s and q’s, and that this was the perfect payback.”

I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face, not that it fazed him in the slightest. “Hey, it’s just a guess-an educated one, I might add. Old-timers like Clyde have a tough time retiring, and from what I heard from my sources, he was pissed something royal by the treatment he got. Guys like that can be competitive as hell; it’s what keeps ’em on top. Revenge is as natural to them as Velveeta is to you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Joe, I know it’s not much, certainly nothing you can bring to court, but it’s all I could glean. Maybe if you could get another warrant and get a whole team to really give ABC a microscopic look, you might find your smoking gun, but I kind of doubt it. It was too small an operation, run by some canny old farts. They wouldn’t have left too much lying around.”

“Then why the court order to return the papers to Clyde?”

“Instinct. We like to see ourselves as riverboat gamblers, secretly, of course. It’s bad form to let someone see your cards, even if you’re about to fold.”

I thanked him for all his time, energy, and insight and left. The image of a circle of card players stuck with me, though. It brought to mind again the notions of calculation and manipulation. The further I progressed into this case, the more I felt the pressure of vested interests at work-of egos bruised, ambitions run amok, and of minds working overtime toward specific, malevolent ends.