Scent of Evil

32

Despite Kunkle’s lack of interest in the subject, the money angle continued to prey on my mind as I returned to the Municipal Center. It galled me not knowing for certain whether Milly’s stake had come from Jardine, or from a source I knew nothing about. The irritant was the coyness of those involved: Wentworth, Arthur Clyde, and Blaire, while all affected more or less by Jardine’s death, nevertheless seemed preoccupied with details they wanted kept well out of sight.

I was therefore startled when Sammie Martens intercepted me at the Municipal Building’s front door. “I think I found something,” she said, her face flushed with excitement.

I looked at her, not bothering to hide my surprise. It had been a while since I’d touched base with her. “What?”

“I discovered Fred McDermott has an anonymous bank account.”

“McDermott? I thought J.P. was checking into him.”

“I had the contact at the bank, so he let me have a crack at it.”

I smiled at her irrepressible ambition. “How much did you find?”

“Fifty thousand, built up over the last year or so.”

I sat down in the shade on the uppermost step, stunned. Below me, I saw the traffic trying to sort its way through another of the town’s onerous intersections. “What do you mean by ‘anonymous’?”

“It’s under his middle name. The money only goes in; it doesn’t go out. Deposits have been large, and regular as rain. I thought I’d poke a little into his finances, not so much that I’d need a warrant, but just kind of chatting with a friend of mine in the bank. She volunteered that she’d stumbled over this thing a while back-had figured out that the account was really McDermott’s-but hadn’t given it much thought until I brought up his name.”

“How did she make the connection to McDermott?”

“The address. McDermott doesn’t bank there under his real name anymore, but he used to, and his address was still on file. She was checking some accounts, hit the wrong entry on the computer, and discovered the same address under Ellison, which is McDermott’s middle name. And McDermott’s lived in the same place for twenty-five years. I checked.”

“Do you know about this account for a fact?”

She smiled. “No. I didn’t go digging through his files. This was purely conversational. If we can get a subpoena, it’ll hold up in court.”

I shook my head. “I don’t see how we could get one, not at this point. For all we know, he has some investments that’ve been paying off, or some rich aunt who died and left him a fortune.”

“We could ask him.”

“I don’t think so. If he’s dirty, he already knows we’re sniffing around. There’s nothing to be gained by tipping him off we found his nest egg. We’ll have to come at him from another direction. Nice work, though.”

She grinned. “Hey. I got lucky.”

Lucky, indeed, I thought. Just when I want to find a sizable amount of clandestine money, it falls into my lap. Kunkle and I had not worked McDermott into our equation, but now that he was there, he presented some interesting possibilities. His office in the building behind me allowed him casual scrutiny of the police department, his demeanor and general blandness made him a person most people overlooked, and his job as building inspector, if properly manipulated, could be made a large producer of under-the-counter cash.

It occurred to me suddenly that perhaps we’d been too clever by half in our investigation of this case, constructing elaborate schemes involving millionaires, stockbrokers, and rival drug gangs. What if dull Fred McDermott, without fanfare and fuss, had been doing business on the side?

I sat there for thirty minutes, plugging him into the question-and-answer game I’d come to know by heart over the past few days. The results were as unsatisfying as ever. As a suspect, McDermott had his place, along with half a dozen others, it seemed, but it still wasn’t a perfect fit.

I remembered when we were kids, my brother Leo and I would lie on our backs of a sunny Sunday afternoon watching the clouds float by overhead. He would claim to see some form or another in a cloud, and I would try to come up with something completely different. Sometimes, we managed to conjure up four or five different shapes apiece out of a single lumpy cloud.

Was I doing the same thing with this case, I wondered? I sighed, shaking my head, and retreated into the Municipal Building.

My depression did not last long. I hadn’t even reached the detective bureau’s door before Maxine called over to me that Ron Klesczewski had requested I meet him at the West River Veterinary Clinic. Mention of the location alone gave me an enormous lift. Dr. Gramm had said curare might be available at hospitals or veterinary clinics. If Klesczewski had indeed managed to tie a supply source to the curare Gramm had found in Charlie Jardine, we’d taken a giant step toward finding out who had wielded the syringe.

The clinic was located in the North Shopping Plaza, the second of three malls lining the over-commercialized Putney Road. The plaza, despite its name, was not an open square of shops, but rather a gargantuan spread of black macadam, lined only at the back with one solid wall of stores. I parked next to Klesczewski’s unmarked car.

Ron met me on the sidewalk in front of the clinic’s front door. “I think we hit the jackpot. Aside from the hospital, this is the only source of curare in town. The hospital’s supply is tiny: one bottle buried in the back of a locked cabinet in a very secure area; they never use the stuff. Also, this place was burgled about nine months ago. At the time, nothing was reported missing, but today, after I asked them to check their stock, the people here think that about four vials of curare are missing from a total of ten.”

Inside, Klesczewski introduced me to a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, who led us to a back room, half stock area and apparently half laboratory. The woman’s name was Dr. Thelma Richie.

“We don’t use this room too often,” she explained. “It’s mostly storage. Almost everything is prepackaged these days, and we send out most of our lab work.”

She looked from one of us to the other, her hands in her coat pockets, as if making sure we thoroughly understood.

“In other words, while we come in here fairly frequently, it’s mostly just to grab something, which is why we overlooked the missing tubocurarine.”

Ron added, “Dr. Richie explained that at the time of the burglary, they focused their attention on some destruction in the filing room and one of the offices.”

“Nothing was taken, though,” Dr. Richie interjected. “I mean, that’s what we thought at the time.”

Ron continued. “I figure it was a smoke screen, that the curare was the target all along.”

I gestured to a glass-doored cabinet mounted on the wall, its shelves crowded with rows of small bottles and colorful cardboard containers. “It’s kept in there?”

“That’s correct,” she answered.

“Has anyone used the cabinet since the burglary?”

“No. Your sergeant asked me that, and I’ve checked with the staff.”

Ron and I exchanged glances.

“Want me to get Tyler in with his evidence kit?”

I was about to answer when Dr. Richie interrupted. “You mean to lift prints off the cabinet?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t bother. It gets wiped down regularly, along with everything else. Helps customer confidence if everything looks shiny, even back here.”

Ron pulled a long face, prompting her to add, “But not the contents of the case.”

I crossed over to it and pulled its doors open. “Not locked?”

She looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, none of these are regulated drugs, but, to be honest I lost the key a few years ago.”

“Which is the curare?”

She pointed to the top shelf, where the normally neat rows of bottles had been disturbed. “If you’re after prints, that’s where they’ll be. They pack some of these things in sawdust or plastic peanuts for shipping, so we wipe them off as we unpack them. That should help.”

I couldn’t resist smiling. “Hope springs eternal. Can I use your phone?”

I tried calling Tyler at the Municipal Building, but he was out and didn’t respond to his pager. Unfortunately, that came as no surprise. His pager was ancient and had been slated for replacement for two years, but at five hundred bucks a whack, we’d been told to make do. I hung up and returned to the back room, explaining the situation.

Dr. Richie gave a wide smile. “Is an evidence kit just a way to collect things, to keep them uncontaminated until analysis?”

We both nodded.

“Well, remember, I said we ship most of our lab work out. We probably have most of what you need.”

Indeed they did. Within a half hour, using rubber gloves and tweezers, we’d tucked all the bottles we thought relevant into separate plastic bags, which in turn we placed in a rugged cardboard box filled with packing material. The end result, I thought, would have made Tyler proud.

We gave Dr. Richie our thanks and a receipt and headed out to the slowly dimming parking lot, shading our eyes against the sunset’s reflection in the car windows aligned ahead of us.

We were some forty feet from our cars, with Ron carrying the box in his arms, when I sensed rather than heard a vehicle coming up behind us.

I interrupted Ron, who was remarking on our good fortune. “Better shove over; car coming.”

We glanced over our shoulders and ended up frozen in midstep. Bearing down on us, with a sudden, tire-squealing burst of acceleration, was a dark, rust-spotted van. The driver was wearing a mask.

Instinct taking over, Ron dropped the box, and we both dove to either side, the van cutting between us with inches to spare, or so I thought until I heard Ron’s shout of pain. I’d landed on my side between two parked cars and quickly swiveled around to see Ron curled up in the middle of the traffic lane, both arms wrapped around his left knee. Between us, the box lay unharmed, the wheels of the van having neatly straddled it.

Just as I turned to check on the van, hoping to make at least a partial ID, I heard again the squeal of its tires and saw it tearing back down on us in reverse.

“Ron, look out.”

Klesczewski began scrambling awkwardly toward the opposite row of cars, and in the split second it took for me to gauge his chances of success, I realized the van wasn’t coming for him. It was aimed diagonally across the lane at the box.

Without pausing for thought, I knew instantly that the contents of that box must be what we’d been looking for from the moment we’d found Charlie’s body in his grave-the one mistake that would link his murder to the man who had committed it. Starting from all fours, only dimly aware of the onrushing vehicle to my right, I flew out from between the cars, my body pitched forward as in a dive, and slapped the box as I sailed over it, my momentum sending both it and me skidding across the asphalt toward where Ron was staring at me openmouthed. The van roared by, just grazing my foot as it was still in midair.

There was a shrieking, metal-crumpling crash as the van’s rear end piled into the parked cars near where I’d been hiding.

“Get the box. He’s after the box.”

Ron spun around, sweeping the box up with one arm, and half rolled, half dove between the far row of cars, with me close on his heels. In our ears, for the last time, we heard the van’s burning tires scream past as our pursuer gave up and blasted out of the parking lot.

Lying there, dirty, bruised, and bleeding from various cuts and scrapes, I instinctively groped for my radio. Ron reached his first, pulling it from his belt savagely enough to tear the metal clip off its back. He reported an approximately ten-year-old, black and rusting van with no side windows, and two unreadable bumper stickers on the rear, heading north out of town on the Putney Road. He paused, after a glance at me, and he added that both Vermont license number and driver identification were unknown.

After receiving acknowledgment, he dropped the radio on the ground and lay back against one of the cars.

There was a long pause, filled only with our rapid breathing, before I asked him, “How’s the leg?”

“Hurt’s like a bitch.”

“Can you move it?”

He tried and winced.

I reached for the radio and added, “You better send Rescue for an injured leg-the North Shopping Plaza parking lot.”

I pulled the box toward me and opened its top. Ron looked at me, his face red and soaked with sweat. “How is it?”

I poked around gingerly and grinned. “Couldn’t be better.”

As it turned out, we both made a trip to the hospital, Ron to have his leg X-rayed and treated for what turned out to be a severe sprain, and I to have some of the gravel dug out of my palms and knees.

J.P. Tyler met me in one of the treatment rooms in the emergency department just as I was pulling the tattered remains of my pants back down over my bandaged knees. The box from the veterinary clinic was sitting safely by my side on the bed.

“What the hell happened?”

“Attempted hit-and-run. And that was the target.” I jerked my thumb at the box and explained about the curare and our hopes that the thief had left his prints behind on some of the other bottles. J.P. gingerly opened the box, shaking his head in wonder at my description of how the drug worked.

“If my guess is right,” I continued, “that holds the major key to this case, or at least the killer thinks it does. Which brings up another point, something I want kept just between the two of us for the moment.”

Tyler reclosed the box and looked at me.

“I want you to sweep my office for a listening device.”

“You’re kidding.”

“This morning I brought Ron into my office and told him about the curare; the only other time I mentioned the stuff was on the phone when I first heard about it. I haven’t written anything yet in the reports; I haven’t even brought Brandt up to date. Yet someone knew enough to ambush us outside the vet’s office. I’m beginning to wonder whether someone hasn’t placed a bug in the office. With all the construction going on, it’s not inconceivable. And it would explain some of the other leaks we’ve been having. It would also explain how the killer knew about my attempt to talk to Milly. We’d thought his killer had just tailed me to Horton Place and then gotten the jump on us, but a bug could’ve given him an even bigger edge. You got something you could sweep my office with?”

He nodded. “I have an AM radio. It’ll work as long as the device isn’t too fancy.”

I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice. I was expecting something higher-tech than an AM radio. I pointed at the box. “All right. Check this out for prints first and guard it like Fort Knox. We’ll do the sweep after hours. And keep this to yourself, okay?”

“You got it.”

I slid off the hospital bed and shuffled painfully down the hall to the nurse’s station.

A young woman in white with a small pink teddy bear pinned to her collar looked up at me and smiled. “All set?”

“Yes. Could you tell me what room John Woll’s in? I just want to poke my head in to see how he’s doing.”

She gave me a pleasant shrug. “Better than you, I guess. He checked out.”

“Already? I thought they’d hold him for a while.”

She shook her head. “He just looked bad. Once the alcohol wore off, he was fine. Facial cuts do that sometimes-they look much worse than they are. Lucky guy.”

I thanked her and left, the irony of her last words like a bitter taste in my mouth. Tomorrow, I thought, Dunn or no Dunn, I’d go by John’s place to check up on him.

Tyler was unpacking what indeed looked like a large transistor radio from a briefcase when I limped into the squad room at nine, after dining on a steaming, limp, microwaved ham-and-cheese grinder at the convenience store across from the courthouse. He turned to greet me, but I silenced him by putting my finger to my lips and motioning to him to follow me outside.

“What’d you find?” I asked him in the parking lot.

He wobbled his right hand from side to side. “Good news, bad news. The bottles had prints, enough good ones to make a match but not from my files. If the guy has a record, it’s not with us. I FedExed what I got to both Waterbury and the FBI with a red flag on both. So we’re going to have to wait and pray.”

“How about ruling anyone out?”

“I’m working on that. The easy exclusions are Charlie Jardine and Milly Crawford, and the entire staff at the vet clinic. All their prints were either on file or easily accessible. I don’t know how you’re going to get any from the Wentworths or Arthur Clyde or even Fred McDermott without a legal fight. The biggies, of course, are John and Rose Woll. I called the state’s attorney’s office to see about getting sample prints from them. They said they’d call me back.” His expression told me how much credibility he pinned on that happening any time soon.

“By the way,” he added. “I took a little time to check on Fred McDermott’s whereabouts at the time you and Ron were being run over. He was out of his office all afternoon. They found the van, too, in Dummerston, clean as a whistle. It’d been stolen.”

I was disappointed about the prints, but I thanked him for his speed, complimented him on taking the proper initiative, and led the way back inside. Outside the veterinarian’s, with the squeal of the killer’s tires still in my ears, I was convinced I had my hand on the prize. Now I had to face the possibility that the killer’s prints were not on file at all-leaving us with something, but not the jackpot. Still, I thought as we re-entered the squad room, at least we could eliminate some of the suspects, even the dead ones, and narrow the field a bit.

McDermott, of course, seemed the obvious number-one choice, but what stuck in my craw there was that, if he had been clever enough to present such a sterling facade all these years, why had he been dumb enough to set up an illicit checking account under his own middle name and address? It was an inconsistency that had been tugging at me for most of the day.

Also, that afternoon, Sammie had reported on her search through McDermott’s past. Hours of digging through files at the town clerk’s and the tax assessor’s offices had revealed the man’s life to be as bland as his appearance.

I pointed at the radio on Tyler’s desk and raised my eyebrows. He nodded and switched it on. Tinny music filled the room before he tuned it to soft static between two stations. Shaking my head in doubt, I followed him into my office.

For about three-quarters of an hour, I sat on the edge of my desk and watched him pace slowly back and forth, the extended antenna on his radio hovering like a nervous hummingbird over the phone, the desk, the fan, the carpeting, the walls, the radiator, the wall switch, the filing cabinet, even my office chair. Throughout the entire process, the slight hum emanating from his speaker never altered. Until he reached the false-ceiling panels.

He was standing on a chair by then, working in a three-foot square grid near two intersecting walls, when the static gave out an ever-increasing howl of protest, affronted by what it had found.

He quickly killed the power switch and looked down at me in the now-accusing silence, his face questioning. I motioned him down and took his place on the chair.

Gently, the fingers of both my hands splayed, I carefully exerted pressure on the white-foam panel directly overhead. It resisted at first, but then, with an almost imperceptible pop, it freed itself from the surrounding metal framing. I slowly moved it to one side and peered into the semidarkness captured between the real and false ceilings. There, two feet away, dangling from a wire above and twinkling in the half-light, was a small microphone.

I replaced the panel, descended from my perch, and pulled a sheet of paper from my desk. On it I wrote, “One bug, coming from above. Let’s try to trace it without being seen.”

He nodded, reached into his pocket, pulled out a key, and mouthed, “master key.”

I chuckled softly and gave him a thumbs-up. Leaving his detector behind, we headed out the door and one flight up.

Avoiding detection was no great feat. Only the police department was manned at this time of night, so the janitor remained our sole other concern.

Nevertheless, we proceeded like cat burglars, walking on the balls of our feet, keeping to the walls, furtively looking about. Had we run into Buddy, he would have thought we’d lost our minds.

We didn’t meet anyone, however, and arrived on the floor over our squad room half embarrassed and half triumphant. We were standing amid a cluster of town offices which clung like satellites to a central reception area. In the corner, directly over my own office, was an approximate clone with a locked door. At eye level was the label: Building Inspections-F. McDermott.

“I’ll be damned,” Tyler whispered.

I resisted telling him of Sammie’s discovery that McDermott, on top of all the other suspicions gathering around him, was rumored to be holding an anonymous fifty-thousand-dollar bank account.

Tyler used his key to get us into McDermott’s office. It was dark, of course, and the remaining coolness of a day’s worth of air-conditioning still lingered. I shook my head at Tyler’s gesture toward the light switch, and instead made my way across the room by the reflected glow from the parking-lot lights filtering through the windows.

Directly over where I’d seen the microphone dangling, near where the two walls met, was a low-profile filing cabinet covered with a neat row of housing-regulation reference books. I shifted the books to the floor, lifted one end of the cabinet, and held it as Tyler slid several of the books underneath to keep it elevated. Then we both got on our hands and knees and followed the beam from my pocket flashlight.

What we saw, nestled in the cavity of the cabinet’s three-inch base, was a small black box with two wires coming from it, both of which vanished through the wall-to-wall carpeting into the floor. Tyler slipped a cotton glove on and gingerly reached in and manipulated the box slightly, studying it in the flashlight’s harsh but narrow glare.

He finally withdrew his hand, turned off the light, and waited for me to lift the cabinet so he could retrieve the books and return everything as we had found it.

Outside, in the reception area, he handed me back my flashlight. “It’s a transmitter, wired right into the building’s electrical supply. Did you see any wires above the false ceiling downstairs?”

“Sure. There were several of them. Looked like they were part of the overhead lighting.”

Tyler nodded. “Probably were. Anyway, it allows him to eavesdrop for as long as he likes without ever having to worry about batteries running low. Very slick. I looked for a manufacturer’s ID, but it’d been melted off, probably with the tip of a soldering iron. With that kind of care, I doubt we’d get fingerprints off it. Anyway, if I dusted it, he’d probably catch on. It’s hard to leave everything exactly as you found it.”

There was a distant clattering outside. I carefully stuck my head out into the hallway and saw Buddy’s assortment of cleaning supplies piled up outside a door at the far end. As I watched, the supply-closet was kicked open and a foot pushed a pail with a mop in it out into the corridor. I ducked back inside before Buddy saw me.

“We better get back downstairs.” We waited until he’d moved all his things into the office he was cleaning, and then we tiptoed back to where our presence wouldn’t seem odd.

“How far does it transmit?” We were standing in the rear lobby, near the back entrance, and yet I still found myself whispering.

“I don’t know specifically, but given its size and simplicity I wouldn’t say much beyond a couple of hundred feet, farther if it was outside.”

“So, the receiver’s inside the building?”

“Probably, but we won’t know where unless we either tear the place apart from top to bottom, or we hire some specialist out of Boston or somewhere, whose equipment is fancy enough to trace the signal’s path to the receiver.”

“The state police don’t have something like that?”

Tyler chuckled.

“Only in their dreams.”

Nevertheless, I was pleased. Whoever our quarry was, we now had his prints, which I still was convinced would yield something, and we knew he was listening, which I hoped I could use against him. Also, Fred McDermott had rung the bell again, this time twice in one day. It wouldn’t be long now before we had enough against him to possibly make something stick.

I grinned at J.P. in anticipation. “Go home; get some sleep. First thing tomorrow, we’ll see if we can’t jerk this guy around a little.”