Scent of Evil

35

“This is an outrage. Take these off.”

Sammie Martens checked Jackson’s handcuffs and gave him a contemptuous shake of the head. “I don’t think so.”

She crossed the room to where Brandt and I were talking with Billy Manierre. “He’s still bitchin’.”

“Okay, thanks Sammie. Did you read him his rights?”

She nodded.

“Great. Why don’t you pile him into your car and take him downtown, but don’t bring him into the building till we get there. I want to keep this under wraps for a while.”

We all waited until she’d escorted Luman Jackson out the door, ignoring his protests as he passed. “What’s your game plan?” Brandt asked.

We were still in the high school, off the cafeteria in a small, windowless dining room. Jackson had been checked for the thump on his head, which all but Brandt assumed I had given him. The troops had been sent home with no explanations and without having seen either McDermott or Jackson. Brandt and Billy had been concocting a properly vague press report to explain all the lights and sirens. The shots were now firecrackers, the whole affair ascribed to “probably teenage vandals,” pending a further investigation.

I answered Brandt with a smile, lightly fingering the bandage I’d wrapped around my cut hand. “I’d like to talk to both of them tonight, before they start thinking too much. Maybe put Jackson in Dunn’s office, for privacy, and have Fred cool his heels in Interrogation. Is Dunn coming himself, or sending a deputy?”

Brandt chuckled. “Not hardly; he’s hooked on this case. Said he’d meet us at the Municipal Building.”

I looked around at the empty room. “Then I guess it’s show time.”

Brandt was driving while I looked out the passenger window at the still city passing by. We were rolling down South Main Street, toward the center of town, following the patrol car carrying Fred McDermott. When I’d been on the graveyard shift, many years back, this had been my favorite time of night-the long quiet pause between the last of the rowdies packing it in and the first stirrings of the early-morning crowd.

Brandt cleared his throat. “So, any wild guesses?”

“I have a question first: What happened to Dennis?”

“Someone snuck up behind him, slapped a black cloth bag over his head, brought him down like a ton of bricks, and tied his hands and feet with wire, all in seconds flat.”

“Just as he was about to report someone coming in the side door.”

“Yup.”

I let that rattle around my head for a minute. “If you were riding shotgun for a buddy on a break-and-enter job, knowing the place was guarded, you’d try to nail the guard before your buddy was spotted, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure, unless I’d had trouble finding the guard.”

“But you’d take the time to find him; otherwise you’d be risking the whole thing. That’d be stupid.”

“Not if there was a timing problem.”

“Like Jackson having to appear at the back hallway just as McDermott walked in the front?”

“Yeah, especially if each didn’t know the other was there. McDermott sure looked like Mr. Innocence himself.”

I mulled that over. “He told me he showed up because someone had phoned him and told him I wanted a meet. That’s possible. Jackson obviously had a fairy godmother watching his back. I wonder if he knew about it?”

Brandt pursed his lips, as interested as I was to kick a few ideas around before interrogating our two suspects. “So, you have two people showing up for a meeting because they were both invited by a third.”

“That looks like it, although ‘invited’ might not work in Jackson’s case. He had a gun, and I suspect Dennis was taken out so he’d have an opportunity to use it.”

Dunn was waiting for Brandt and me on the third floor of the Municipal Building, in the reception area of his small nest of offices. Despite the hour, he looked as dapper as if we’d called him out of a banker’s meeting.

He looked at us without expression. “I gather you hooked a curious fish.”

Brandt smiled. “You could say that.”

“Where is he?”

“In a car downstairs,” I answered. “I wanted you to call the shots on how big we should play this.”

Dunn smiled thinly. “Very diplomatic of you. Why don’t you give me some background before we invite him in?”

Bringing James Dunn up to date, and determining what interrogation strategy to use on Jackson, consumed about twenty minutes, during which the State’s Attorney sat at his polished antique desk and covered the top sheet of a yellow legal pad with small, carefully scripted notes.

Only when he was thoroughly satisfied with what we’d told him did he give me the go-ahead to radio Sammie in the car and have Luman Jackson brought upstairs.

What arrived on the SA’s threshold three minutes later was not an attractive sight. Jackson was disheveled, red-eyed, and oddly out of sorts, as if torn between being angry and frightened. I hoped we could use that displacement to our advantage.

Dunn bowed slightly and waved to a small conference table surrounded by hard, wooden chairs. “Please, Mr. Jackson, have a seat.”

Jackson twisted his body around, showing his manacled wrists. “For God’s sake, James, these handcuffs are completely unnecessary.”

Dunn made a conciliatory gesture. “Of course-a necessary formality. Lieutenant?”

I pulled a key from my pocket and set Jackson free. He made a theatrical show of rubbing his wrists as the rest of us gathered around the table. Dunn pointed to one of the chairs and placed a tape recorder before it. “Luman?”

Jackson stared at the recorder as if it were a snake and gingerly sat before it. With a loud click, Dunn turned it on and announced the date, the time, the location, and the identities of the other people in the room.

Then he sat at the end of the table and nodded to me, directly opposite Jackson.

“Would you please state your name?” I asked.

Luman’s face darkened. “Luman J. Jackson.”

“Mr. Jackson, have you been apprised of your rights?”

“Yes.”

“And you fully understand those rights?”

“Of course I do. Look, this is absurd-”

“Do you wish to speak with us now, or do you want an attorney present?”

“I don’t need an attorney, for Christ’s sake. This whole thing is a misunderstanding.”

Dunn spoke up. “I guarantee you, Luman, before this is over, you will need legal representation.”

“However,” I added, I hoped not too hastily, “if you do wish to talk to us now without a lawyer present, you’ll have to sign a waiver.”

I slid the waiver across the table to him and waited, holding my breath. There were times I had no doubt of the outcome of this ritual legal dance, but this man, normally so belligerent, was muted and confused enough to keep me guessing.

He signed the waiver.

I glanced at it before sliding it over to Dunn. “Thank you. What were you doing at the Brattleboro Union High School tonight?”

Jackson glanced across the table at James Dunn briefly and then concentrated on staring at his knuckles as he clasped and unclasped his hands.

“Mr. Jackson?” I repeated.

He sighed and wrestled some more internally. “I went there to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“I… I can’t say.”

“You were carrying a gun. Do you do that normally?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why tonight?”

“I was nervous.”

“I noticed that you had the gun already drawn as you appeared from the hallway; that’s how you got the drop on Officer Lavoie. Why was your gun out and ready to fire?”

Jackson opened his mouth to speak, thought a moment, and then closed it again.

“You entered the building through a locked door. How did you do that?”

A flash of the old Luman crossed his face. “With a key, of course. I had it from when I used to teach there.”

“You were last employed by BUHS five years ago. Weren’t you supposed to hand in all your keys on your last day there?”

He hesitated. “Technically, I guess. I forgot.”

“Were you alone tonight?”

“Of course. Look, instead of all this back and forth, why don’t you just let me tell you what happened?”

“Please do.”

But having made the offer, Jackson looked momentarily stuck. “Well, I… I was supposed to meet someone-a private meeting, perfectly legal-but the time and the location made me… nervous, so I took my gun along, for security.”

His voice slowly gained confidence as the tale weaved itself in his mind. “As I entered the building, I heard voices, and since I was only supposed to be meeting one person, that made me very uneasy, so I drew my gun from my pocket. Then, as I turned the corner, there was a man aiming a gun at me. Naturally, I fired in self-defense, after which, seeing several more people in the room, I fled for my life.”

“You didn’t recognize me?” I asked.

“Of course not. All I saw were guns.”

“If your meeting was perfectly legal, Mr. Jackson,” Brandt interjected, “then why won’t you identify the other party?”

Luman looked around at us, the coy smile on his face contrasting with the sweat on his upper lip. “It’s a matter of discretion. A romantic situation. I’m sure you understand.”

“Your date showed up. Didn’t you see Fred McDermott by the front door?” I asked.

Jackson’s face turned livid. “That’s disgusting.”

“You’re denying you were there to meet with McDermott?”

“Of course I am.”

He was full of bluster, but I thought I’d heard a catch in his voice. “Mr. Jackson, at the moment, we’re considering charging you with at least illegal trespass, reckless endangerment with a firearm, and attempted murder. This is not a great time to get cute. It is up to the State’s Attorney here to determine what we do with you tonight. Your cooperation will play a large role in that decision.”

There was a moment’s silence in the room. Jackson finally muttered, “I am cooperating.”

“Then tell us who you were planning to meet.”

I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head, considering the options, weighing the risks. It proved to be more than he could handle on short notice. “I refuse to answer.”

I glanced at Dunn and raised my eyebrows. He nodded slightly. I switched subjects. “In your years as a teacher, did you ever have Charlie Jardine as a student?”

Jackson let out a small laugh of surprise. “Jardine? What the hell?…” He looked around at us quizzically.

“Answer the question, please,” Dunn said quietly.

Jackson shrugged. “Sure, let’s say he attended a few of my classes. Biggest troublemaker I ever had, which is saying a lot, given the competition.”

“Memorable, was he?”

“He was a dopehead and a sex maniac, as far as I cared to determine. Halfway through the year I demanded the principal have him transferred to another class.”

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“It was done.”

“What about John and Rose Woll? Her name was Evans then. Ever have them in class? They would’ve been in the same grade.”

“I remember John Woll; very good student, albeit too quiet for his own good. He won a grant to attend college at the end of the year; very prestigious award. Turned it down, the idiot. I think there’s truth to what they say about education being wasted on the young. They’ve abolished the award since, of course, along with anything else having to do with education.”

Jackson was visibly gaining speed and self-confidence on this new ground, the arrogant swagger returning to his voice. “You’d think that meant he had brains, but he was no different from the others; when the time came to decide on the rest of his life, he let his cock do the thinking.”

I smiled at him, encouraging. “You’re kidding. He dumped the scholarship for a girl?”

Jackson gave me a contemptuous look. “I thought you’d been conducting an investigation on the man. Don’t you know anything about him? I shouldn’t be surprised, of course. I don’t doubt you were bending over backwards to sweep the whole thing under the rug, you and your police fraternity.”

“Who got the scholarship instead?”

“No one did. Woll didn’t back out until it was too late to assign another recipient; selfish as well as stupid.”

“Who was the girl that got him sidetracked?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gunther, how the hell would I remember that?”

Again, Dunn’s soft voice floated down the table. “Let’s try to stay cooperative, Luman.”

But we’d lost our advantage; no longer unsure of himself, he tilted his head back slightly and stared at us in contempt. “You people don’t know what you’re after, wandering all over the map, asking me about old students. Did you really think you could tie me in with Jardine’s killing? You must be scared to death of me to try something like that.”

Brandt’s voice was tight with anger. “You shot a police officer tonight, Jackson; would’ve killed him if he hadn’t been wearing armor. Shot at Joe, too, for that matter.”

Jackson’s face reddened. “Just a minute; you never identified yourselves as police. I was defending myself, in fear for my life. I could probably sue you for reckless endangerment.”

Dunn rose and looked down at him. “That’s your privilege, certainly.”

“Good. That’s what I’ll do, then. I want to call my lawyer.”

The State’s Attorney smiled thinly. “You can call him on your own time, Luman. Right now, I’m recommending you be formally cited for attempted murder and released pending the appropriate judicial proceedings.”

Jackson looked at us, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “Fuck you, Jimmy boy. You want to get in a pissing match with me? That’s fine, but be prepared to lose a lot more than this bullshit case. And that goes for the rest of you, too.”

Dunn reached over without a word and turned off the tape recorder.

By the time I got downstairs to the tiny interrogation room tucked into a corner of the detective bureau, Fred McDermott had been waiting for over an hour. Despite the coffee that Sammie Martens had supplied him, he looked utterly beat, his face drawn, his eyes at half-mast, and his hair tousled where he’d run his fingers through it countless times.

I paused before actually entering the room and stepped inside the observation cubicle adjoining it. A one-way mirror separated the two. Sammie Martens appeared at my side, sipping from a cup.

“What do you think?” I asked her. “What’s his role in all this?”

She shrugged. “Who’s to know? Normally, you get as much evidence against a guy as we have against Fred, he ends up fitting the part. But Fred hasn’t budged from looking as innocent as the first day we focused on him, which in my book either makes him one hell of an actor, or the victim of one hell of a frame.”

“What is the evidence so far?”

“He was at Horton Place when Milly bought the farm, he was dogging Toby’s last residence just before Toby disappeared, he has no alibi for when the van almost ran you over, the bug was found in his office, he’s got a nice, fat secret savings account, and he showed up tonight at the high school.”

“And on the plus side?”

“His wife supplied him with alibis for the nights Jardine and Woll died, and he looks like my uncle, who’s a priest. Also, he’s got no record and has never displayed any obvious signs of wealth. As far as we can tell, that bank account has only received money; nothing’s ever been taken out.”

I nodded. “The chief’s still upstairs with Dunn doing paperwork. Tell him I’m going to interview Fred in the parking lot, just for safety’s sake.”

Sammie glanced up at the ceiling as if it were dripping microphones. “Kind of gives you the creeps, doesn’t it?”

Fred McDermott was obviously delighted to get out of the small interrogation room. He paused on the edge of the parking lot at the back of the Municipal Building and filled his lungs with air as if we were camping by the side of a mountain lake.

It was still dark, but just barely. The first half-light of dawn was beginning to slip between dark objects and their backgrounds, bringing them into relief. I led the way to a grassy slope under some trees and sat down. McDermott joined me, awkwardly placing his hands on his chubby knees. He didn’t ask why I’d brought him out here.

“Fred, you said you got a call telling you to meet me at the high school, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” His head bobbed several times too many, a reflection of just how baffled he still was after the night’s activities.

“Did the voice sound familiar at all? Did he identify himself?”

“No, I didn’t know who it was. He just said he was calling from the police department with a message from you.”

“Did he specify the time and location?”

“Oh, yes; the middle-school entrance on the south side at midnight.”

“And you were to go inside the building?”

“That’s right; go inside and wait.”

“You didn’t ask why? It was kind of an odd request, wasn’t it?”

“Well, I was curious, but I didn’t really get a chance. He just made sure I had it right, and then he hung up. Oh, and he said it was confidential and to keep it to myself.”

“What time did he call?” I asked.

“It was late, around ten-thirty.”

I paused at that. If he was being truthful, that was right after Pierre’s bogus call to me setting up the meet. Apparently, our elaborate hoax had been a failure from the start. Our eavesdropper must have been standing around, knowing what we were up to, just waiting for the location so he could put his game plan into motion.

“Fred,” I resumed, “do you have any particular bone to pick with Luman Jackson, professionally or otherwise?”

He shook his head. “I barely know the man.”

“But you came to him complaining that we were putting pressure on you.”

He looked surprised. “Oh, no. He came to me. He said he’d heard about it someplace and wanted to know if it was true. I told him we’d talked, that it had startled me a bit, but it hadn’t particularly bothered me. I’d just figured you were doing your job.”

“He didn’t identify his source of information?”

McDermott paused, and his face furrowed in concentration, but I knew what he’d say before he said it.

“No, I’m sure he didn’t say.”

I shifted focus abruptly, trying to catch him off balance. “What’re you doing with almost fifty thousand dollars in the bank, listed under a phony name?”

He looked at me blankly for a moment, then blinked and stared harder, as if my nose had suddenly sprouted flowers. “What?”

I plowed on, despite his blatant incredulity. “We found a listening device in the ceiling of my office, hooked to a transmitter under your filing cabinet. Combining that with your always showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time with these killings, we got a search warrant and dug into your bank records. It wasn’t hidden too well.”

He shook his head, his mouth partly open. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Joe. I’ve never had fifty thousand in the bank. I’ve never had that kind of money anywhere.”

“Regular deposits, nice fat ones, made out to Fred Ellison, who happens to have your home address and your first and middle names.”

He spread his hands out to each side in symbolic surrender. He was so taken aback by the suggestion, he wasn’t even irritated at our invading his privacy. “I swear to God, I don’t know anything about it. I know I keep saying that, like when I showed up at that murder scene just as it was going off, but I’m innocent. I don’t know why, but somebody must have it in for me, ’cause I haven’t done a thing, honest.”

His eyes were wide and soft, devoid of the calculation and malice I’d seen in Jackson’s just a half hour before. I stared off over the parking lot, now lit by an anemic pale-gray sky, plugging what had occurred over the last few hours into what we already knew. McDermott stayed quiet and still beside me.

I finally looked at him again. “Have you ever had anything to do with the Brattleboro Union High School?”

He half shrugged. “Sure, I have to inspect it every once in a while, just like I do all the other schools.”

“How about in some other capacity? Did you attend school there?”

“No. I lived in Rutland as a kid.”

“Ever have any problems in your role as inspector?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Everybody slips up now and then. When I found something out of line at the school, I just told the assistant principal and it was taken care of.”

“A few years ago, they had to tear a lot of asbestos out. Did you catch any flak for that?”

“No. People were unhappy; said they’d lived through it fine and didn’t see that their kids were doing any worse, but that was just normal complaining. I mean, hell, it hit my taxes, too. I wished like crazy I could have told them it was no problem.”

I thought about it some more. “How about any of the people there? Ever get into a tangle with one of the teachers or maintenance staff?”

He just kept shaking his head.

I saw Brandt appear at the back door of the building and look around. I waved to him and turned to McDermott. “Hang on a sec, would you? Be right back.”

Brandt nodded toward McDermott as I approached. “Getting anywhere?”

“Not yet. I just started fishing for a high-school angle.”

“You really think that’s where it all ties together?”

I looked back at the round building inspector, perched on the slope like a soft boulder. “I don’t know… A hunch. I keep thinking all this began a long time ago, like when Jardine and Rose and John Woll first met up.”

“In high school,” Brandt finished.

“Yeah, the same place Jackson taught.”

“And the same place you chose for your wishful-thinking bushwhacking tonight. You do that on purpose?”

I tilted my head to one side. “I don’t know. Maybe subconsciously. It was the only other place besides the Municipal Building in which a few of the players had a common link.”

Brandt shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve known three of them were connected through high school from the start of this thing. You’ve had people checking into that for days with nothing to show for it.”

“Maybe the fact that we knew it early on made it unremarkable; we knew John and Rose had to have met somewhere, so Jardine having been their classmate was the only coincidence. And in a town this size, it wasn’t much of one. Then came Milly. There was no school connection there, but it introduced the whole drug angle, which introduced us to Cappelli and Atwater and the others. We lost sight of the original connection.”

“Which Luman Jackson has just revived.”

“Yeah; there’s something else, though. Look at who we’re dealing with. It’s not some guy discovering his partner was skimming the profits, or his wife was fooling around. We’re after someone with some serious anger here. Jardine was executed with amazing forethought. His killer thought for a long time, years probably, about the best way to do it. He researched it like a guy building an atom bomb, fantasizing about how he’d like to do it, then finding a way to make the fantasy real. He found out about curare, God knows how, and then discovered how he could get his hands on some. He stole just enough, months in advance. See what I’m saying? This guy was burning like a long, slow fuse.”

“No argument. So how does it connect to high school?”

“Because that’s their common ground. We saw this as a triangle at first-two guys falling out over a woman-but once we figured John Woll was being framed, or at least put it in our thinking, that meant a fourth person had to be factored in. Combine that with the way Jardine was killed, with a calculating hatred, and the way John was framed, and you’ve got someone who must have been a part of the high-school crowd; someone who’d been wounded by Jardine especially, but also by the other two…”

“Joe, down boy. My God, you’re laying this whole thing out like it wasn’t entirely your own imagination.”

“But it fits. If you accept that John was framed and that the list we found in Milly’s apartment was planted, you’ve accepted that the guy we’re after is no dummy. He’s smart; he’s a planner; he’s a puzzle master, if you like. What we’ve been doing is trying to fit the pieces to the puzzle he arranged for us. What we need to do is find the pieces of the puzzle he’s a part of.”

Brandt sighed and shrugged. “Hey, why not? Lead the way.” We both walked back to McDermott and sat on either side of him, the three of us looking like spectators waiting for a parade.

“Fred,” I picked up, “we were talking about any connection you might have had with the high school.”

He nodded. “I don’t really have any. I’ve been thinking about it while you two were talking. I never worked there, never had any major problems with them as inspector. My wife and I are childless, so I didn’t have any kids go there. I can’t think of a thing.”

Brandt spoke up. “How about something less directly connected? A run-in with someone who worked at the school, or some outfit with a major contract with them, like a roofing contractor or something?”

McDermott kept shaking his head.

“Maybe a more personal angle,” I said. “A friend, an enemy, a lover?”

McDermott chuckled. “My wife?”

But I persisted. “How about before her?”

His face reddened slightly. “Oh, you know… Well… There is no connection.”

“What?”

“It’s a little embarrassing. It did happen before I was married, almost twenty years ago. I had an affair with a married woman, but there’s no connection there to the high school.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t work out; I suppose those things rarely do. I did love her, but it became too complicated. The husband was very angry; it ended in divorce. She doesn’t live here anymore; I think I heard she’d died a year or two ago.”

“Were there any kids involved?”

“One, a small boy. You know him, in fact. Buddy Schultz.”

“The janitor?” I said.

“That’s right.”

I pictured Buddy in my mind, a tall, skinny, shy loner with a fondness for books and isolation. He was about the same age as Jardine and the Wolls, just under thirty. I glanced at Brandt.

He got up. “I think Ron has a copy of the school yearbook in his desk. I’ll go get it.”

McDermott and I watched him go.

“How did his parents’ breakup hit him?” I asked.

“Pretty hard. I guess. He was kind of a strange kid anyway, moody and withdrawn. Very attached to his mother; the two of them had a special bond. She could make him come out of his shell like no one else. Then he could be really sweet. He’s still like that, kind of hot and cold, although I barely see him anymore. He doesn’t start work till after I’ve left, most of the time.”

“Does he hold you responsible for his parents divorcing?”

McDermott tilted his head. “I don’t see how he couldn’t. They probably would have broken up sooner or later anyhow, but I was right in the middle of it.”

“And Buddy knew about you.”

“Oh, yes, I was around, trying to give Mary support.”

“How’s he react to you now?”

“Buddy? We don’t have much to say to each other. It was a long time ago. We mostly just say hi to each other in the hallway once in a while.”

He paused and shook his head as Brandt came out of the building and headed back in our direction, the yearbook in his hand. “It’s odd when you think about it; if things had turned out differently, I might have been his stepfather.”

Brandt stood before us, holding the book open so we could both see its contents. Under the picture of a younger, more sullen-looking Buddy was the caption, “Wendell Schultz, Jr.”

“What do you think?” Brandt asked.

“I think the tables just turned.”