Scent of Evil

27

I pulled out of the lunch-hour traffic into the parking lot of the Putney Road Bank. Ron Klesczewski was leaning against his car, looking morose. He’d called me on the radio as I was driving back into town from Wentworth’s place, asking me to meet him here. His tone of voice had not been encouraging.

I glanced around as I got out of my car, looking for Sammie, with whom Ron was supposed to be working. “What’s up?”

He read me correctly. “She’s not here. We had a bit of a run-in.”

I suppressed a sigh. The combined pressures on us were beginning to spread. “What happened?”

His face was oddly still as he spoke, his emotions rigidly under control. “I screwed up, I’m afraid. I may have let the birds fly the coop.”

He and Martens were supposed to have researched and interviewed Hanson, Atwater, and Thomas. “All three of them?”

He nodded. “Yup. Hanson for sure. We checked his home, neighbors, business addresses, the works. Nobody knows where he went. All we know about the other two is that they didn’t show up for work today and that neither one is picking up their home phone.”

Part of his depression became clear to me now. Had he been more aggressive yesterday, he might have been grinning in victory instead of standing here empty-handed. I didn’t doubt the hard-charging Sammie Martens had driven that point home, perhaps deeper than usual, in compensation for her own screwup with Milo.

“That’s not all,” he added mournfully. “Sammie also found out that Hanson owns several businesses, not just the warehouses like I thought. None of the others are in his name, but he’s majority owner in all of them.”

“Anything directly relating to this case?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Who knows? Nothing on the surface.”

“So where’s Sammie?” I repeated.

“She went after Kenny Thomas. We did the basic background research on all of them early this morning, in preparation for the interviews. But after we discovered Hanson had taken a powder, I thought we should regroup, maybe talk things over with you. Sammie wanted to go after the other two without wasting any more time.”

He was doing this well, keeping his tone neutral, his account unprejudiced, but I suspected Sammie and he had actually had quite an argument.

“So, anyhow,” he concluded, “I thought I ought to let you know what was up, in case it was mentioned later.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. What’s your plan now?”

He looked toward the bank. “I thought I’d talk to them first, find out what I could about Atwater and Thomas, and then go over to Atwater’s place.”

I smiled despite myself, stimulated by Ron’s unremitting gloominess. “Lighten up, it feels worse than it is. We’ve all messed up at least once so far in this case. If Sammie still has a chip on her shoulder when you see her later, sort it out; but I think you’ll find it’s blown over.”

I opened my car door and slipped behind the wheel. “Look, why don’t we cut it three ways? You take the bankers, I’ll take Atwater, and we’ll leave Sammie to chase after Thomas, okay?”

He smiled weakly and began walking toward the building, a living monument to how a major case could be undermining to one’s self-confidence.

Atwater lived on Organ Street, parallel to Birge and lined up against a long row of ancient Estey Organ warehouses. Typically, however, while only a couple of hundred feet separated the two streets, Organ was some forty feet higher in elevation, perched along the edge of a treacherous slope.

The building I was after, like many in the center of town, dated back before World War I: boxy, two stories tall, with a one-windowed half-third floor tucked in under the gables. It had originally been sided with pine clapboards but was now surfaced with those oddly shaped, fluted composition tiles that some demented designer decades ago had apparently thought were the spitting image of cedar shakes, “only better.” I found Atwater’s doorbell on a mailbox by the front door and pushed it.

“She’s not home. Left yesterday.”

I stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked up. Leaning precariously out of a window was a large woman with a voice to match, wearing a tent-like cotton dress and a headful of brightly colored plastic curlers.

“I know you; you’re Lieutenant Gunther, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” She let out a bellow of laughter. “Just like ‘Dragnet.’ I’ve read about you in the newspaper. What’s up?”

“I’d like to speak with Paula Atwater.”

“She in trouble?” The woman sounded like she didn’t care one way or the other.

“Not with me. You know where she went?”

“Nope. She took off in a big rush late yesterday with a suitcase. You want to look around her place?”

It was a tempting offer, but I had to watch my step. “I don’t have a warrant.”

The woman laughed again. “Oh, hell, that’s no problem. I got the key. Come on up. I own the place.”

Still I demurred. “Can’t do it. Legally, that apartment is her property; we’d be trespassing, even though it’s your house.”

She scowled at me. “I’m not so sure it is her property. Her rent was due three days ago, and she blew out of here saying she didn’t know if or when she’d be back. Even gave me her keys, which she usually doesn’t do. I was thinking of throwing her out anyway-too noisy.”

Without knowing it, she had opened a small legal loophole, implying that Paula Atwater had terminated her lease. “So you don’t expect her back?”

“I was going to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe a few days, but the rent is overdue and I’m not a wealthy woman.”

I smiled and bowed slightly. “Then I’d be charmed if you’d show me her apartment.”

I climbed the central staircase and met my hostess on the second-floor landing. She stuck out a large, sweaty hand I felt obliged to squeeze in greeting.

“I’m Shirley Barrows… Lieutenant Joe Gunther. Damn, you’re a real hero. My girlfriends and I are real fans of yours, ever since that ski-mask murderer. We would get together and read the paper out loud; it was just like watching the soaps.” She paused. “You got your hands full with this one, though, huh?”

“We’re working on it around the clock.”

Her eyes lit up. “And you think Paula’s tied in somehow?”

I made a sad face and started to mouth the usual platitudes, but she plunked me on the shoulder with her ham-sized mitt and took me off the hook. “Don’t say it. You can’t talk, I know; confidential, right?”

I smiled in relief. “Right. Sorry.”

She fished a key ring out of a large pocket on the front of her dress and waddled up one more flight to what had been designed originally as an attic. She fiddled with the door lock on the narrow, dark landing, barely wide enough to hold us both. Her moon-round face looked as grim as a judge’s. “No sorries about it. You take your time in here, and just pound on my door on your way out.”

She turned the key and stepped aside so I could squeeze by. “I can tell the girls we met, can’t I?”

“Absolutely.”

The silence was deafening following her departure. I stood motionless in the living room, looking, smelling, and listening to the muted sounds from outside, trying to absorb initial impressions.

It was obviously a young single woman’s apartment, hung with suggestive posters of Axl Rose and some group named Slash, a Leland and Gray Union High School pennant, and a personality dart board where the target rings had been replaced by a black-and-white photograph of a serious-looking older man in a tie and rimless glasses. I recognized him as the CEO of the Putney Road Bank, a regular at Rotary lunches and benefit affairs for the museum. His bland face had been pockmarked by the passage of darts, three of which now resided in his nose.

There were stuffed animals, open cassette tapes, pillows, and dirty clothing strewn about, but it was not the disarray of a hasty departure. Rather, it looked to me like the residue of a sloppy housekeeper. The air smelled slightly of seeped-in marijuana. The few books that were scattered about were all romances, soft-porn bodice-rippers with beautiful, half-naked people on the covers.

The living room doubled as kitchen, with a small fridge, sink, and counter set into an alcove. Opposite me were two open doors, one leading into a tiny bathroom, the other into a bedroom of barely greater dimensions.

I looked around the living room first, mostly getting a feel for Paula Atwater’s lifestyle. Her music collection ran to heavy metal, the stereo and TV were inexpensive and well used, the food was sparse, prepackaged, and unhealthy.

The bathroom was unremarkable: the usual cabinet supplies, with toothbrush, paste, and blow dryer missing; a hamper with dirty underwear; a couple of mildew-rich towels; tissues, sanitary napkins, Q-Tips, and Clearasil; the empty box of a one-shot pregnancy test. It was hard to tell from these leftovers how long their owner planned to be gone.

The bedroom looked like any unsupervised teenager’s: cyclone-ravaged, dirty, smelling of used clothes, and, in this case, stale sex. The unmade sheets were stained in the right place, the wastebasket under the nightstand had wads of crusty tissues, and crumpled up on the floor was a black, sheer, lacy garment of a type I’d once seen featured in a Victoria’s Secret catalog. In the closet, alongside a limited collection of severe-looking skirts, dresses, and blouses, was a mass of colorful, abbreviated, leather-and-metal-adorned clothing, suitable for the average aspiring punker. It made me wonder with a smile how many other presumably demure people we saw in banks and lawyers’ offices were equally rebellious on their own time.

I sat gingerly on the edge of the water bed and began to go through the waist-high chest of drawers. Working from the bottom up, I found mostly clothing, costume jewelry, and a single spare blanket. The top two drawers, however, held some old bank statements, a small fistful of bills, a photo album, and some letters and postcards, all mixed in with several pieces of old candy, a broken comb, an unopened box of condoms, some spare change, a few colored feathers, an obscene bumper sticker, and a tube of fluorescent lipstick.

I looked through the correspondence. The letters were signed by her mother, and the postcards were addressed to “Pebbles” from “Kenny.” The postmarks on the latter were all from Hartford, Connecticut, scenes of which graced the fronts, and were dated over a one-week period eight months earlier. Despite the fact that the postcards were open to casual scrutiny, their contents were intimate to the point of pornography, detailing Kenny’s longing for his Pebbles’s specific body parts. Passing references were also made to the “banking conference” being “a total drag.” Assumptions are a dangerous habit in police work, but I had few doubts this Kenny was the same one Sammie was hunting across town.

The letters detailed Paula’s mother’s daily activities in a chatty, over-the-back-fence style. It took some reading, however, to figure out her locale. There was no letterhead, and no attached envelopes, and it was only through references to the new Union Hall clock, the deli department at Morse’s Store, and the fund-raising efforts of the NewBrook Fire Department that I finally figured out that mom must live in Newfane, twelve miles up Route 30 from Brattleboro. That discovery also helped explain the Leland and Gray pennant in the living room: located in Townshend, it was Newfane’s designated high school.

The photo album confirmed my guess, providing me with graduation group shots showing Paula and several family members in front of the Windham County Courthouse. From the date on the senior class banner in the background of one of these, I figured Paula Atwater couldn’t be more than nineteen years old. From her photos, she looked friendly and outgoing, neither chubby nor thin, with a tangled mop of curly brown hair and a mild case of acne. In several of the non-graduation pictures, she and several friends or family members were clowning around on the front lawn of a one-story brown house with a bay window to the left of the front door.

I reached out to the phone on the floor by the side of the bed and dialed the Windham County Sheriff’s Department, headquartered in Newfane. I asked for Lieutenant Norman Powell.

“Hey, Joe, long time no see. What’s up?” Powell and I were old friends, but primarily on a professional basis. Whenever we talked, it was usually business that brought us together.

“I’m looking for someone down here, and I think she flew the coop into your neck of the woods. I have a few pictures with a house in the background. If I drove up there right now, could you take a shot at identifying the building and maybe the family?”

‘What’s the name?”

“Paula Atwater, about nineteen, Leland and Gray graduate.”

There was a short pause. “Doesn’t ring a bell offhand. Sure, come on up. I’ll see what I can do.”

I hung up, pulled some sheets of paper from my small notebook, constructed a couple of quasi-legal forms, and left the apartment with the photo album under my arm. Shirley Barrows’s door opened before I’d knocked on it twice.

She instantly spotted the album. “Oh, hey. You got something.”

“Yeah. I was wondering if you could do me a big favor and sign these two documents. One states that you voluntarily invited me into Paula’s apartment, since you now believe she’s left for good and the property’s yours again, and the other is your acknowledgment that I have removed one item, a photo album, from that apartment.”

She signed both pieces of paper eagerly, her sweaty hand leaving a damp patch at the bottom of each. “This is great. Wait’ll I tell the girls. Just like the movies. Do you think I’ll get my name in the papers?”

Route 30, heading northwest toward Newfane, parallels the Upper Dummerston Road, which I’d traveled earlier that day to visit Tucker Wentworth. But where the latter is a narrow, winding, country road, blocked in by trees and homes on either side, the former is a legitimate highway: broad, flat, smooth, and built for speed. It is also one of the prettiest roads in the county, running along the bottom of the West River valley, matching the water’s serpentine bends, a paved mirror image of the broad, sparkling, rock-strewn waterway so attractive to dozens of weekend tubefloaters and sunbathers during Vermont’s brief summers. The valley walls, steep, verdant, punctuated by occasional cliffs and feeder streams, embraced and soothed me despite the hot breeze that lashed at my face through the open window.

The sheriff’s department and the county courthouse face one another across the enormous Newfane village green. However, as if by design, any suggested fraternity between the two has been tempered by Route 30, severe and barren, which lies as a no-man’s land, slicing the common in two. It’s a sad and occasionally traffic-choked modern intrusion, upsetting a near-perfect mix of historic architecture and manicured nature.

I swung right, around the edge of the grass and toward the old jailhouse, marveling at the play of light on the grass and the shimmering white of the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old buildings.

Norman Powell stepped out onto the concrete porch of the old jail as I stopped my car before it. Gray-haired, tall, and lean, he was an ex-Army sergeant who’d joined the department after he’d found retirement at forty not all it was cracked up to be. He nodded at me, his hands on his waist, vaguely reminiscent of some uniformed Texas Ranger squinting into the sun. “Hey, Joe.”

I brought the album out of my car and laid it on the hood. He came off the porch and stood next to me as I flipped through to the shots of the family on the lawn. “Know where that is?”

“Yup. If it weren’t for the buildings in between, you could see it from here. Mrs. Adams’s house. That’s not the name you gave me.”

“Paula Atwater?”

He scratched the gray stubble at the back of his neck. “Right. Could be same family, different last names. Glenda Adams was married once before, a long time ago; that might explain it. I’d forgotten about that.” He extended his hand to point down Route 30, the way I’d come. “Glenda lives in Rolling Meadows, behind WW. I’ll show you.”

We got into my car. He could have just given me directions. WW Building Supply, which straddles the entrance road to the long, circular drive that constitutes the Rolling Meadows development, was barely two hundred yards back down the road. But there was a jurisdictional politesse being followed here. While a policeman in Vermont carries his authority with him throughout the state, regardless of which turf he actually calls home, it’s best for him to check in with the locals. Failure to do so usually results in ruffled feathers, unnecessarily tense explanations later, and the inconvenience of frosty relations in the long run. It’s also a dumb move strategically; if something goes wrong, and you send out a call for backup, it takes a while for the locals to figure out who you are and what the hell you’re screaming about.

The house in the photo album was the first on the left-hand branch of the circle. It looked wrong to me somehow, as I parked in the driveway, and it wasn’t until I got out of the car that I realized I’d so cemented Paula’s photograph of this house in my mind that I’d come to expect a lawnful of laughing people to be permanently gathered before it, as if that joyful day had just gone on and on and on.

Powell and I crossed the now-empty lawn, and I worked the heavy brass knocker on the front door. The young woman I’d come to know solely through her possessions opened the door, her expression falling at the sight of Norm’s uniform.

“Yes?” Her voice caught in her throat.

“I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, of the Brattleboro Police Department; this is Lieutenant Powell of the Sheriff’s Department. Are you Paula Atwater?” I used my best official voice and showed her my badge.

“Yes.” Now she was barely audible.

“And you work as a teller at the Putney Road Bank?”

She nodded.

“May we come in?”

She stood aside, and we filed by her into the darkened house, not air-conditioned but surprisingly cool nevertheless.

“Is your mother or anyone else home?” Norm asked.

“No. Mom’s at work.” She led us into a pleasant, comfortable living room and curled up on an armchair, her legs tucked under her, her arms instinctively wrapping themselves around a large pillow she clutched to her stomach. She looked worse than her picture, paler, more drawn, her acne now in high relief, her hair unbrushed and bedraggled. I doubted she’d slept at all last night. I was hoping to use that to my advantage to speed this up. Grilling bewildered teenagers was not my idea of recreation.

“I guess you know you’re in deep trouble,” I said, hoping she’d help me out.

She hugged the pillow tighter, looking from one of us to the other. “I don’t know what you mean.”

I inwardly sighed. “Why aren’t you at work? You didn’t give the bank any explanation. You didn’t tell Shirley Barrows.”

The mention of her landlady made her eyes widen; it told her how thoroughly I’d been hunting for her.

“Who told you and Kenny to get out of Brattleboro, Paula? Cappelli?”

“No,” she answered in a whisper.

“You know, you’re all on your own now. They’re all long gone. They left you holding the bag.”

She bent over the pillow, her eyes fixed on her lap, her face invisible to us. She shook her head.

“Kenny got you into this, didn’t he?”

Her head shot up. “No.”

“Paula, we’re not talking smoking in the bathroom here. I’m running a murder investigation.”

She didn’t move for a couple of seconds; I doubted she even breathed. Then she stared right at me, plainly frightened. “We had nothing to do with that.”

“That’s not what the evidence tells me. It was our investigation of Milly Crawford that led us to you.”

She was beginning to look slightly panicky. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“How long have you known Kenny Thomas, Paula?”

“He’s not a killer. We love each other.” She struggled unsuccessfully for more words that might convince me.

“Where did you meet? At the bank?”

She nodded.

“What’s his position there?”

“New accounts, customer service.”

“But he’s not a teller. He doesn’t handle money or put it into people’s accounts, the way you do.”

I’d begun this conversation as a man in the dark, groping for recognizable objects, hoping they would tell me more about my environs. Now, judging my progress both by her reactions and the instinct I’d formed of Kenny Thomas through his postcards, I sensed I was getting close.

“Kenny came on strong to you, didn’t he? Lots of flattery, gifts, nights on the town. Swept you off your feet, right, Pebbles?”

She flinched at my use of his nickname for her. “We loved each other.” But the tone was softer, more doubtful.

I could almost feel what I was after under my hand. “When did he tell you about his get-rich-quick scheme?”

Again, she was silent.

“Paula, the law holds you as accountable as he is. In fact, I have to tell you that, while you’re not under arrest, you might want to stop talking to us until you can get hold of a lawyer. That’s your right. Do you understand?”

I stopped, hoping I’d planted enough seeds of doubt to make her open up. I let a long silence creep by.

“Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly.

“Then talk to us, Paula; it’ll work in your favor.”

She sighed. She didn’t look up from her lap, but she did begin to speak, softly, like a child. “He told me he’d been waiting for someone like me for a long, long time; someone to share his dream with. We fell in love. He was in love with me. A woman knows things like that.”

I quelled the cynic in me. “I can accept that. What was the plan?”

“Kenny was getting money from someone, maybe it was drug money, I don’t know. He would open different accounts, and I would divide the money between them.”

“How did the cash get into the bank?”

“We brought it in with my lunch. Then, during the day, at odd moments, I would enter it in, never too much at a time.”

“What were the names in those accounts?”

“It didn’t matter. We made them up.”

“Did you ever open accounts under the names Jake Hanson, Mark Cappelli, or Charles Jardine?”

She shook her head, I thought a little too quickly.

“But you knew Cappelli; you all but admitted that a minute ago.”

Her face tightened, but she finally nodded slightly.

“How did you know him?”

“I saw them once. Kenny always picked up the money on his own, usually the night before we would bring it into the bank for deposit. Well, one night, something must’ve gone wrong, because they came by my place late, when Kenny was staying over, and he went down to talk to them. I followed him and saw them, and later I asked Kenny who they were.”

“They?”

“There were two of them.”

“Did he tell you?”

“He was mad at me at first, but he finally did. One of them was Cappelli; the other was Jake Hanson.”

I suppressed a contented smile. Now we had more than a simple list of names linking the four together. “Didn’t Kenny tell you where the money was coming from?”

Still she denied it with a shake of her head.

“What happened to the money after you put it into the phony accounts?”

“Usually it was taken out by wire transfer to another branch of the bank.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know, but they used the names we’d made up. Kenny took care of all that. I don’t know exactly how it worked.”

“How did you and Kenny get your cut?”

“Kenny took care of that, too.”

“Did you ever see any of it?”

“No. We were supposed to wait, so as not to get anybody suspicious.”

I seriously doubted Kenny had waited for his share. “Who told you to get out of Brattleboro?”

“Kenny. He said that we should split up and that he’d contact me later.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“No.”

“Does he know how to get in touch with you here?”

“No.” Her head had slumped so far forward by now, we could only see the top of it.

“Then how could he have contacted you later?”

There was a long silence, during which, from the dark, liquid spots appearing on the pillow against her stomach, I knew that Paula Atwater was crying.

Norm and I exchanged glances. “Paula, you realize you’ve broken a few laws-that you’ll be held accountable?”

She nodded wordlessly.

“Tell your mother what we talked about when she gets home. The two of you can find a lawyer and maybe something can be worked out so you won’t have to go to prison. But listen to me.” I crossed the room and squatted down before her, forcing her to look at me. “You’re going to have to concentrate on saving yourself. Kenny and you are over, not just because you got caught, but because he set you up.”

She began to respond, but I held up my hand. “Don’t talk, just think. Regardless of how you feel now, you’ll find out Kenny was more interested in the money than in you, and that he played you for a loser. The only way you can save yourself is to prove him wrong. Remember that, okay?”

She stared at me, her eyes red and swollen, her face expressionless. I held her gaze a few moments longer, wondering if my words would have any effect later on when she’d need them most.

But there was no way to tell.

I rose and headed for the door, leaving her to soak in her newfound puddle of reality.