Scent of Evil

36

We met in a twenty-by-twenty-foot meeting room at the Quality Inn on the Putney Road, just across from the enormous C amp;S warehouse. I had booked the room in person and had spread the word to everyone to gather there, just twenty minutes before, using the lobby telephone. I was hoping this spur-of-the moment planning would assure me of absolute secrecy. J.P. had swept the rest of the police department by now and had found two other bugs, but I still wasn’t convinced his battered AM radio had caught them all, nor had he made that claim.

I stood up at the head of the long, broad table. Going down either side, with plenty of empty space between each of them, were Brandt, James Dunn, J.P., Sammie, Dennis, Ron with his leg parked on the chair next to him, and now, Willy Kunkle. Willy, predictably, had chosen to sit at the other end, so that we faced each other like estranged parents at an awkward family gathering.

“I appreciate you all coming here on such short notice. I think our security breach is known to you all by now, but in addition, there have been some recent developments I think we should all be aware of without resorting to telephones or memos. Although we think we’ve located the bugs that were in the department, we don’t know if any of our other means of communication have been compromised.”

I stepped away from the table and began to walk back and forth across the front of the room. “First off, I’d like to reintroduce Willy Kunkle. You all know him from the old days. His expertise when he was employed by us was in narcotics, and his knowledge of the local players in that game is still very up-to-date. The docs have told us that Pierre Lavoie sustained a bruise right over his heart, where the vest stopped Jackson’s bullet, so we’ve been advised to put him on sick leave till that clears up. As a result, we’ve now hired Willy as a temporary special officer, just until we see this thing through.”

I paused and looked especially at James Dunn. “What we’ve been examining during the last twelve hours is the possible breakthrough we’ve been hoping for from the start of this case. We have evidence that the man who killed Jardine, Milly Crawford, Toby Huntington, and John Woll is Wendell ‘Buddy’ Schultz, the Municipal Center janitor.”

There was a shifting of bodies around the table. Only Dunn had still been in ignorance of this fact by now, but saying Buddy’s name in the open came like a breath of fresh air. Not only had about half of us gone sleepless for the last twenty-four hours again, but we’d been reduced to either working in virtual silence when in the office, or escaping to parked cars and restaurant booths around town in order to have secure conversations. The strain, and the increasingly fragile tempers, had begun to show toward the end.

“We came up with Buddy’s name in the early hours of this morning. The trick, however, was to pin the evidence to him, item by item, to see if it stuck. We began with his fingerprints. J.P.?”

Tyler scratched his temple, taking a few seconds to organize his thoughts. “We had a set of prints we lifted off the bottles of curare…” He stopped suddenly and gave me a questioning glance.

I nodded. “The curare is common knowledge; no need to explain.”

J.P. resumed. “I tried the FBI and the State Police, as well as our own files, but no bells went off. After Joe pegged Buddy, though, that gave me something to go for. Trouble was, how to get Buddy’s prints legally without letting him know?”

“Raid the janitor’s closet,” Dennis muttered.

J.P. smiled. “I thought of that, but he’s not the only person to handle that stuff. Anyway, the Lieutenant remembered that when Buddy stole him a table fan to keep the heat down, he wiped it off before putting it on Joe’s desk. I checked it out, got a perfect set, and made a match with the prints from the curare bottles.”

“You ruled out Lieutenant Gunther’s prints, of course?” asked Dunn, who by now was taking notes.

“Yes, sir.”

I picked it up from there. “That connected Buddy to the curare, but it didn’t necessarily make him the man who used it on Jardine. So we began digging deeper into the similarity between the deaths of John Woll and Toby Huntington. J.P.?”

“What caught our attention was that they, like Milly, had both been shot, and that, as the autopsies revealed, Toby had died first by a day or so. The bullets Hillstrom recovered weren’t in great shape-one of them was in fragments-but the crime lab still managed to make a comparison and came up with the fact that all three of them, including the only good one recovered from Milly, had been fired from the same gun, the gun we found in John’s hand.”

“That,” I broke in, “wasn’t necessarily a mistake on the killer’s part, by the way. Buddy knew that John was still a prime suspect in Charlie’s murder, and a lesser one in Milly’s; the gun would have been concrete evidence linking John to their deaths. The scenario would have been that John shot both Milly and Toby and then used the gun on himself.”

Dennis snorted derisively.

“The mistake he did make was discovered by the crime lab: All three bullets had passed through the same silencer, an item we didn’t find attached to the gun in Woll’s hand.”

Dunn held up his pen. “Hold it. Explain that about the silencer.”

“Most silencers aren’t in perfect alignment with the barrel, so they’ll mark each bullet slightly on the way out, which means that you can match a bullet to a silencer just like you can match it to an individual barrel. The first tip-off to the lab boys was that, while the gunpowder marks on John’s T-shirt were proximity burns, they were inconsistent with an open barrel.”

As Dunn continued taking copious notes, I broadened the scope somewhat. “Right now, pinning the tail on Buddy is still theoretical; we don’t have enough to get a warrant for him or to search his place, even with the fingerprints. He could, for example, claim he’d been at the vet’s a year ago and had handled those bottles out of curiosity. So we’ve taken a background approach, rechecking all the evidence we’ve accumulated so far, with Buddy’s name plugged into the equation as the bad guy. The results have been encouraging. Ron, you spent most of the day reinterviewing some of your more competent, and discreet, high-school sources. What was the bottom line on Buddy?”

Like J.P. before him, Ron took his time before speaking. “Moody, introverted, bookish, quick to anger and slow to forget, got very good grades but was too broke to go on to college without help. He was a competitor for the scholarship that John won in his senior year, but grades were only a portion of the award’s criteria. John wasn’t straight-A, but he was considered ‘well-rounded.’ Buddy was just the reverse: never a B in his career, but a real oddball. From what I heard, he was resentful as hell when John got it over him.”

“And no doubt doubly so when John threw it away to get married to Rose,” I added.

Ron pulled out another sheet of paper. “More than we guessed. I found out that Buddy’s mother checked him into the Retreat right after graduation. He stayed there for a year, but I don’t know what his diagnosis was. We’d have to get a subpoena for the files.

“Rose might have played a part in his breakdown, in fact. Buddy had a thing for her in high school. Apparently, he and Rose had tried out the back of Buddy’s car, and according to my source, things didn’t go too well. Buddy mooned over Rose for a long time afterward, but by that time she was going with Charlie Jardine. Buddy never forgave Jardine for ‘stealing’ his girl-although the choice for Rose had obviously been easy.”

Dunn broke in. “That’s all too vague. Will your source be any good in court?”

Ron nodded without hesitation. “I think so. I didn’t give him much time, since we were all trying to cover a lot of ground fast, but he implied it was no deep, dark secret. We should be able to tighten up his testimony and get others to back him up.”

Dunn nodded without comment.

“While we’re on the psychological angle,” Ron added, “I did a little checking into what might have triggered Buddy to flip out ten years after getting out of school. Turns out his mother died about a year and a half ago, which is when he began laying the groundwork for his mayhem. I talked to a psychologist friend of mine, who said that if the mother-son attachment had been intense, her death, coupled with Buddy’s long-standing mental problems, might have been enough to push him over the edge.”

“One other background item,” I added, and I described Fred McDermott’s connection to Buddy’s mother. When I finished, I sat back down. “Again, none of this will secure a warrant, but it reveals bad blood between Buddy and several of the victims.”

“What about Jackson?” Sammie asked.

I turned my palm up in a shrug. “Don’t know yet.”

Ron responded. “I heard a rumor that long ago, like twenty years or so, Jackson almost got into serious trouble. I couldn’t get any details, but something sexual was implied.”

“With one of his students?” Dunn asked.

Ron shook his head. “I can’t be sure; that’s the feeling I got. I asked a couple of his contemporaries and got nowhere. But if something was hushed up, surely a retired principal or administrator might know.”

“What do we care, if it happened before Buddy’s time?” Dennis asked.

“It may have given Buddy ammunition,” Brandt explained. Since the beginning, Luman Jackson has displayed an extraordinary interest in this case, above and beyond what might have been expected, even for him. It’s possible somebody was putting the squeeze on him, for whatever reason…” He suddenly stopped and looked at Ron. “Did Jackson ever teach Buddy?”

“Yes.”

“Any feedback on that?”

“Not particularly with Buddy. The general consensus was that Jackson treated all his kids like shit, attacking their weak spots and humiliating them in front of their friends.”

Brandt made a face. “Charming. Still, that would supply Buddy with an ax to grind. What he had on Jackson, I don’t know, but it must have been pretty bad.”

Sammie had been staring at the tabletop through all this talk of Jackson. Now she finally blurted out, “What went wrong at the high school? Why didn’t our trap catch Buddy, if he was the bad guy?”

I hesitated. J.P. and I had already discussed this privately, and while I was going to enter our conclusions in the final report, I thought I’d sit on it within reason until then.

Tyler got me off the hook, however. “Because I screwed the pooch. When Joe told me he thought his office was being bugged, I knew we’d probably have to wander around the building looking for its source. So I went to Buddy for a passkey to all the offices. He must have had a good laugh listening to us later, trying to set him up.”

There was a long, embarrassed silence.

I finally cleared my throat. “I think you’re in good company when it comes to screwing pooches. I’d like to move on to something else, a major facet of the case we haven’t mentioned yet. In the middle of this whole mess, we stumbled over the biggest single stash of dope we’ve ever seen in this town. We were pretty sure from the start that it was tied into the homicides somehow, but we didn’t know how.

“Initially, as you recall, we thought Jardine and Milly might have been partners, with Charlie the money man-perhaps using Wentworth’s money-and Milly handling the street contacts. That had a variety of holes in it, not the least of which was: Who killed them both? Since then, we’ve come to believe Charlie was a peripheral party. It all makes better sense when we make Buddy and Milly partners and have Charlie simply as a customer, which explains how that baggie ended up in his house.

“This new scenario gains credibility because of a few things Willy Kunkle discovered through his sources. We’d thought initially that the numbers on the list found in Milly’s apartment might be Milly’s colleagues. In fact, except for John Woll, they were all from a rival operation; therefore, the list was a double frame, implicating both Woll and Milly’s competition. It worked, of course. Our suspicions of John did increase, and our pursuit of Mark Cappelli led to the collapse of the ring he worked with.

“Another problem we had were the drugs. Why had the shooter-Buddy, for the sake of clarity-killed Milly, planted the list, but left behind a fortune in dope? The simplest explanation was time. Buddy didn’t have enough of it, and it was more important for him to set up the double frame than it was to collect the inventory. But that didn’t make sense to us; by killing his partner, Buddy put himself out of business.

“Now we could see where Milly had become a sudden liability. He knew Buddy, and what he was up to, and he’d sold a baggie of coke to Charlie. He was the bridge that could have led us straight to Buddy. Also, in Buddy’s eyes, he was replaceable.

“But what about the dope? By abandoning it, Buddy not only sacrificed its potential value, but also whatever it had cost him in the first place. That remained our thickest stonewall. We fooled around trying to connect various money sources to Buddy, plugging in Jardine, Wentworth, McDermott, and Luman Jackson as blackmail victims, but all of them had problems.

“The debate was finally ended, again through Willy Kunkle. This morning, Willy discovered why Cappelli started shooting before Ron and I identified ourselves as police officers, and why the rest of his gang have gone so far underground. It turns out Cappelli and Hanson were ripped off several months ago of the exact amount of dope we later found in Milly’s apartment. The Boston people were unhappy, perhaps even suspicious of their Brattleboro colleagues, and Cappelli and Hanson were as nervous as cats on a highway.

“Having therefore secured his drugs at no cost, Buddy was less concerned with abandoning them, and more interested in giving his competitors a final shove. We have recently heard that the Boston suppliers have been approached by someone wishing to replace Hanson et al. Even with our breath on his neck, Buddy is still trying for the gold ring.

“Obviously,” I concluded, “Buddy would have preferred to keep both Milly and the drugs in place. But our finding Milly’s prints on the baggie in Jardine’s house had all the potential of disaster. It’s proof of Buddy’s weird brilliance that he could not only plug a sudden leak like that, but turn it to his own advantage.”

“Assuming Buddy is the killer,” Dunn declared with emphasis, dropping his pen on his pad. “Look, I think you have something here, but watch out for the ‘maybes.’ If you want to badly enough, you can turn Buddy into the man who really shot Kennedy. You’ve got some good stuff; chase it down, make it something we can take to a judge. If we can get just enough for a warrant, the rest might open up like a flower, so don’t waste your time running all over the place. Focus.”

He stood up, gave us all a curt nod, and left the room.

A half hour later we were all following Dunn’s suggestion, gathering our notes, preparing to head out again and chase down the ideas we’d discussed at the top of the meeting; all of us except me. I stayed slumped in my chair, my chin cupped in my right hand, buried in a debate I’d held earlier with myself.

Willy Kunkle was watching me from his end of the table. “What’s on your mind?”

“Curare.”

The bustling and movement in the room abruptly stopped.

“What about it?” he asked.

“Why curare? Why not just put a plastic bag over his head? The fun of watching would be the same; so would the final result.”

People drifted back near the table. “And the answer is?” Willy asked.

“Because curare shows you’re smart. It’s a signature. It’s not only exotic, it’s hard to find, tricky to administer, and most people don’t even know what it is.”

“So we got a big ego on our hands.”

I shook my head. “We have a high-school graduate needing to prove he’s brighter than everyone else. He reads a lot-he’s always carrying a book in his back pocket-so maybe he’s aware of curare, but he needs to know all about it, to do research-”

“At a library,” Kunkle finished for me, a grin spreading across his face.

I gave him a nod. “You got it, Sherlock.”