Scent of Evil

3

The carpenter had finished for the day by the time I left Brandt’s office. I noticed the offending saw, lying tilted and silent on a sawhorse, its nerve-jangling screech as neutered as the unplugged electric cord curled up on the floor beneath it. I went down a short, interior hallway to the men’s room to treat my headache with some cool water on the face.

It wasn’t just the police department that was being revamped, but the entire Municipal Building. A half-year earlier, the ribbon had been cut on the new District Court Building across the street, and all the judges, clerks, secretaries, and sheriff’s men who had once shared our quarters had taken their paraphernalia and abandoned us like a departing storm. In the sudden void, we survivors-the police department, the town manager, the planning director, the finance director, the town attorney, the listers, the town clerk, and all the others-had crept warily out of the nooks and crannies into which we’d been stuffed for decades and had begun to explore a vast new domain.

Unfortunately-in the short run-with freedom had come remodeling, and department by department the building was being torn apart. I knew it was for the eventual good, but at the moment I couldn’t imagine a grimmer place to work, a point that was driven home by the notice on the sink in the men’s room: “Disconnected for renovation-please go upstairs.”

I sighed, mopped my forehead with my warm, soggy handkerchief, and crossed the main corridor to the unmarked door of the detectives’ bureau, located opposite the department’s administrative and patrol offices. At least now, though still looking like a battlefield and feeling like a banana republic, the building was quiet.

I found Ron Klesczewski with Harriet Fritter, the detective-unit clerk and, for me, a gift from a bureaucratically sensitive god. They were standing over Ron’s desk, shuffling through the results of the canvass. Here, all construction had been completed. An erstwhile maze of cubbyhole offices had yielded to two large rooms, the first of which was circled by four smaller ones-a lockup evidence room, an interrogation room with a small viewing closet, a lab, and an office for me. This first large room-the squad room-also held a cluster of four desks in its middle, cloistered from one another by head-high sound-absorbent panels. The second large room beyond served as a meeting/training area, with a VCR, a TV, some equipment lockers, and a conference table. All of it was pretty basic, but compared to what we’d had-once the air-conditioning was in place-it would be heaven on earth.

“Anything new?”

Klesczewski looked up. “Not yet. Enough people were wandering around last night, but it seems they all had their eyes closed. I called Hillstrom’s office to see if the autopsy had been done yet, but they’re still at it.”

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Who did you talk to?”

“A secretary, I guess-I got her name here somewhere.” He reached for the note pad near his phone.

I shook my head to stop him. “It doesn’t matter. I just hoped you hadn’t gotten Hillstrom herself. The last thing we want is to breathe down her neck-nothing pisses her off more. She’ll call us when she’s finished-she always does.”

Klesczewski’s face reddened, and I realized I shouldn’t have spoken in front of Harriet. Even if she didn’t give a damn, his were the tender feelings of a man in his twenties, quickly stung by criticism.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry about it. You didn’t know. Can you leave that for a minute?”

His face cleared slightly. “Sure.”

I crossed over to my office, which occupied a corner of the squad room, and closed the door behind us. All these offices had once been taller than they were wide, in traditional turn-of-the-century style, leading some smart ass to suggest that we nail our desks to the walls to take advantage of the wasted space. The current remodelers had realized that for generations of winters we’d been warming the ceilings while the people below them froze. So now we had false ceilings, which were currently keeping the summer’s heat nice and tight around our heads.

My office was, nevertheless, aesthetically appealing-ten by twelve, nice paint job, newly installed fluorescent lighting I never used, and three tall, hard-to-open, wire-covered windows that now stretched up to somewhere beyond the Styrofoam grid overhead. I sat behind my battered wooden schoolteacher’s desk and parked my foot in the lower drawer. I motioned to Klesczewski to grab one of the two molded-plastic chairs, noticing as I did so the pink phone-message slip before me. “Call Gail,” it read.

“So, where’re we at?” I picked up the phone slip and began idly folding and unfolding it.

Klesczewski cleared his throat. “Nothing obvious in the canvass results, but I’m hoping we can find some inconsistency somewhere-a crack we can pry open maybe.”

I nodded. It was a good analogy. Canvasses rarely gave us a man holding a bloody knife in one hand and a written confession in the other, but they did supply us with people’s alibis before much thought and refinement had been put into them, a point that often played in our favor if a particular alibi later came under scrutiny.

Klesczewski continued. “Tyler’s digging through his dirt, along with a couple of people from the afternoon shift. There’ll be overtime filed.”

“That’s okay.”

“DeFlorio’s still out there, catching the home-from-work crowd.”

“That makes me think of something,” I interrupted. “We better look into people from outside the neighborhood who use that route to go to and from work.”

“Night-shift types?”

“Yeah. You got late-night grocery stores and restaurants both above and below that section of Canal. It’s conceivable somebody saw something while they were passing through.”

“They’d have to have been on foot.”

“Not necessarily. You get a pretty good view from the Elm Street bridge, if you happen to look that way. What’s Martens doing?”

Sammie, actually Samantha, Martens was the junior-most member of the detective squad, promoted from patrolman after Willy Kunkle lost the use of his arm the year before in a shooting spree with a maniac the local press had dubbed the “Ski-Mask Avenger.” That same case had turned the town on its ear, causing Brandt to leave for a while and putting me in his chair in the interim. It was old news now, but seeing Sammie Martens in plainclothes always reminded me of how out of control a case could become, through no fault of her own. I hoped I wasn’t attending the birth of an instant replay.

“I put Martens on finding whoever was under the bridge. She’s supposed to be combing the flophouses and dives.”

I wrinkled my nose, which brought a smile to Klesczewski’s face. We had both paid our dues traveling the dark side of Brattleboro’s otherwise appealing working-class facade, and we could easily envision Martens holding her breath and watching where she stepped as she navigated the hallways of some of the town’s dreary, ancient, and pestilent rooming houses.

I locked my hands behind my neck, feeling how slippery with perspiration they were. This heat was like nothing any of us could remember-an invisible fog of damp, suffocating, eye-watering steam straight from the equator. Stepping out of a cool shower in the morning, I couldn’t even start toweling off without feeling my own sweat mingling with the water on my body.

It also got inside you, causing the mind to drift. I refocused on Klesczewski. “You have any feel for what we’ve got?”

He scratched his temple. I noticed his hair was dark with dampness. “Not really.”

“No preliminary observations?”

He pursed his lips then shook his head. “I guess I’ll wait for some of the lab results.”

I nodded. It was a legitimate choice and one fitting the man. It hadn’t been a test, or a way for me to expound on my own theory that the body had been planted for discovery. I’d spare him that. I just wanted him to know I was interested-that there was an outlet for something beyond the pure accumulation of facts, where the use of inventive brainstorming would be rewarded. One of the disadvantages of being on a police force that often served young people as a stepping stone to better jobs was that few of them took the time to get their noses out of the paperwork and give their intuition some exercise.

Klesczewski left me. I stared at the now-limp phone message in my hand. I was supposed to have dinner with Gail tonight, dinner and maybe more. I often stayed over on such evenings. Over the years, Gail Zigman and I had become best friends who had only then become lovers, an evolution that had stood us in good stead during rough times.

I called her at home, from where she did much of her work as a Realtor. She laughed when she heard my voice. “My God, the rumors must be right.”

“How do you mean?”

“That the body you found is causing problems. You sound like you’re on a short break from the rack.” Her tone darkened slightly. “It’s not somebody I know, is it?”

I shook my head in wonder. For its size, which isn’t inconsiderable, Brattleboro had the social infrastructure of an isolated mountain village. You could kick a man on one end of town and hear his fifth cousin, four times removed, yell “ouch” on the other. “Gail, we don’t even have a name on him yet, much less whether he was a friend of yours. How did you find out about this, anyway?”

She chuckled again. “It’s been several hours already; Ted McDonald’s made it old news almost. Besides, I’m well connected.”

That she was, being not only a Realtor but also one of five town selectmen. In both capacities, she was frequently one of my primary news sources, as I suppose I was one of hers. “So what about the body is giving us problems?”

“Oh, nothing specific. I just heard there were complications, that the midnight oil was going to burn.”

“Well, that much is true. I can’t make it for dinner.”

“I hope not. I put it in the freezer two hours ago. Do me a favor though, will you?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t replace my dinner with Cheetos and Coke, okay?”

I laughed. “I promise-nothing that glows in the dark.”

She snorted. “I bet, and try to get some sleep.”

“Yes, mother.”

I hung up, crumpled the pink phone message up, and dropped it into the trashcan by my desk, the smile on my face fading as the realities at hand began to settle back around me.

Some of those realities, I knew, might end up involving Gail and me, assuming my dour instincts about this case proved accurate. As selectman and chief of detectives, respectively, we could, in times of crises, occupy opposite corners, with her peers clamoring for information and mine playing close to the chest. And we were not, as I often wished, that detached from our jobs. Experience had shown us that our basic philosophical differences-hers leaning far left, mine stuck in the middle-could put a serious strain on our intimacy when the pressure was on.

I crossed the room to where Tyler had set up a makeshift laboratory in what had once been a good-sized janitor’s closet. I knew the room was occupied because all the boxes that normally lived in it were neatly piled outside.

“Who is it?” Tyler answered my knock. I could hear the strain in his normally placid voice.

“Joe.”

“Come on in.”

I opened the door cautiously and was immediately assaulted by a cloying wave of moist, sweat-anointed heat. The overworked suction fan in the ceiling screeched in an effort to make the air breathable. A second motor, attached to a large vacuum cleaner hooked to the drain of a special “dry sink,” was also howling, trying to keep the dust out of the air, with marginal results. The noise made me wince in pain. J.P. Tyler and two other men were jammed inside a space in which one person could comfortably operate. They were standing at the two-wall counter, sifting dirt through fine-gauge wire meshes into the dry sink. On the floor, several more dirt-filled, labeled garbage bags awaited processing.

Tyler’s face was dripping with perspiration and covered with a fine layer of dust.

“Jesus, you guys look like miners.” I stood in the open doorway, not being able or willing to actually enter the small room.

Tyler’s two equally grimy companions gave me acknowledging looks. Tyler, however, seemed totally oblivious. He wiped one cheek with the back of his rubber-gloved hand, thereby turning dust into a muddy smear, and gave me a broad smile-the lab man in his element. He looked around, as if suddenly discovering where he was. “Yeah. Tight quarters.”

“It’s boiling in here, and noisy.”

“Oh, I guess it is.” He glanced over at the other two. “Why don’t we take a small break?”

The other two filed past me, no doubt wondering where in their job descriptions they’d missed having to play in dirt in a hundred-degree, hundred-decibel closed box.

Tyler tore a paper towel from a wall dispenser and wiped his face. “Well, we’re getting a few things.”

“Like what?”

“A Camel cigarette butt so far, and some dirt that seems like it came from somewhere else.”

“All that dirt came from somewhere else.”

He smiled ruefully, utterly unoffended-a reaction I could usually count on. Tyler was so lost in his own view of the world that irony, along with most other subtle forms of communication, affected him the way a mouse fart does a high wind. This made him both an excellent technical man and a lousy judge of human character. I hoped, definitely for our sake, and perhaps even for his, that he would never be promoted or hired away from the small niche in police work he so perfectly inhabited.

“You’re probably right,” he admitted. “But I thought I might keep a few samples to compare with whatever Hillstrom or the crime lab in Waterbury might come up with. You know, from the shoes and fingernails and whatever.”

I nodded, remembering how clean I thought the dead man’s fingernails had been at the funeral home. I wasn’t too optimistic. “Did the photos come back yet?”

Harriet Fritter had overheard us. “Yes, they did. I put them in J.P.’s top drawer. There was another envelope with ten copies of the head shot. I gave those to Billy to be distributed to the patrol.”

Harriet was a robust, widowed mother of five, grandmother of eight, and great-grandmother of an infant girl. She seemed born to the task of making order out of chaos and, in the managing of her burgeoning brood, had turned discretion into the Eleventh Commandment. She’d come to us one year ago, looking for a challenging way to fill her hours, and had proved to be a paper-management wizard, an ability which had allowed me to stay being a cop instead of becoming an office jockey. If anyone asked me who really headed the detective bureau, I was hard pressed to deny her the honor.

Tyler tore off his rubber gloves and crossed over to his partitioned cubicle, right next to Klesczewski’s, wiping his sweaty hands on his apron. He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a fat manila envelope. “Needless to say, I haven’t looked at them yet.”

He poured out about seventy eight-by-ten glossies-two film rolls’ worth, one taken by Patrolman Pierre Lavoie right after the construction crew called us in, the other taken by Tyler during the excavation, detailing its progress.

I pulled out one near the top of the pile. “This is what caught Ernie Wallers’s eye-these smooth footprints.” Wallers had been afraid he’d covered them all when he’d dug the hole down to the dead man’s hand, but the photo I was holding showed at least one print, clean and in sharp focus, with a ruler laid alongside for reference. Lavoie had been very thorough.

Tyler looked at the picture carefully, his face peaceful and content. When there was none of this kind of work to be done, he was just another detective, digging into burglaries, car thefts, assaults, or anything else that came our way. To him, those times represented the desert between oases.

“Looks like one of those comfort-tread shoes: soft crepe sole running flat from toe to heel.”

I thought of the print I’d made for Ernie Wallers in the dust. It had been similar, smooth and even, with no cut where standard soles curved away from the ground to make way for a hard, half-round heel. “Like what cops wear.”

“Cops, nurses, ambulance attendants, people with bad feet. Here’s where we found the cigarette.” He showed me a photo of a patch of earth to the right of the partially uncovered body.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s not there; this is an early shot. I’m just saying that’s where it was-some two inches or so below the surface, meaning it was tossed there partway through the burial.”

“Or placed to look that way.”

He gave me an odd look. “You have a devious mind.”

I couldn’t deny it. I’d always thought it was an occupational hazard. “What’d you find under the bridge?”

“Haven’t had time to analyze it yet. One thing, though-the guy obviously loved gum, and he wasn’t particular. What you and Ron found was the latest sample, but he made lots of deposits. The neat thing is, he always lumped three sticks together to make a bigger wad.”

“Three sticks at once? That’s enough to choke on.”

Tyler wrinkled his nose. “Yeah. The point being, it’s a personality trait-something he always does. I thought you might like that as a tidbit till I can really look into the rest of it.”

The phone buzzed on Harriet’s desk. She left Ron’s cubicle, picked it up, and motioned to me to grab it on Tyler’s extension.

“Gunther.”

“Hi, Joe.” I recognized Billy Manierre’s softly paternal voice. “John Woll just walked in-said he heard about the body on the radio. I showed him the photograph. Turns out he knew the guy.”

I thanked him and hung up the phone. It should have been good news, which of course it was. But I didn’t feel elated. Somehow, in my subconscious, a warning bell sounded in the distance. Perhaps it was the coincidence that the same officer who could identify our John Doe was also the one whose squad car was last seen parked near his grave.