Scent of Evil

37

The library was closed. We found the head librarian at home, and keeping Kunkle out of sight, Brandt persuaded her of his need to gain immediate access. In fact, her reluctance played to our advantage, since what she finally did was give us the keys and permission to use them, instead of accompanying us personally, as she was no doubt supposed to.

Kunkle’s usually dour mood lightened immediately as soon as he, Brandt, Tyler, and I entered the gloomy building, lit primarily by the ever-changing lights and shadows thrown through the building’s twenty-foot glass front wall by the moon and the vehicles prowling back and forth on upper Main Street. Until we found the main bank of light switches and returned the world to normal, the high-ceilinged room, with its clusters of half-seen furniture and aisles of stacked books, reminded me of a grade-B horror movie from the thirties.

Kunkle hurried over to the card catalog and began pulling out drawers and riffling through their contents, his well muscled fingers a blur. I’d seen him in this hyper-driven mood before and knew better than to ask him if we could help.

After some fifteen minutes, he’d filled both sides of a small square of scrap paper with Dewey decimal figures, and we followed him into the stacks. There, one by one, he began pulling down large, heavy tomes and checking their indexes, all to no avail. Finally, highly irritated, he crossed over to a desk near the middle of the reading room and dialed out on a phone there.

“Doug? It’s Willy. How the fuck do I find out about curare in this dump?… I know it’s closed, just answer the question, okay?… Yeah… Yeah… No shit, really? I’ll be damned… Same to you, asshole.”

He slammed the receiver down and smiled. “You’ll love this: The reference librarian says that Buddy Schultz asked him about curare around six months ago.”

Kunkle led the way up the narrow metal stairway to the mezzanine stacks and pulled the biggest book yet from its shelf, the Physician’s Desk Reference, known throughout the medical profession as the PDR. Gripping it against his chest, he took it out to one of the tables lining the balcony overlooking the reading room and slapped it down with a bang.

“This bastard ought to have it; it’s what Doug recommended to Buddy.” He flipped to the back, ran his finger down the list of entries, and muttered, “Bingo.”

Without a word, unconsciously slipping into old cooperative habits born of prior years of working together, Tyler dropped a cotton glove onto the book, which Kunkle pulled onto his hand with his teeth. He then turned to the appropriate page near the front of the book, flattened the page by tugging gently at its corners, and quickly scanned its contents.

“That it?” Tyler asked.

“Yup.”

Tyler withdrew a foot-long cylindrical object from the evidence case he’d brought with him. “You realize this is a shot in the dark. Any prints have to be less than two weeks old for this gizmo to work.”

“Christ’s sake, J.P., just do it. You can run for cover later.”

In official terminology, what J.P. was preparing for use was called a “disposable iodine fuming gun.” Fat and short at one end, long and thin at the other, it looked like a straightened-out bubble pipe. Tyler took the fat end between his fingers and rolled it back and forth, crushing the iodine crystals within and releasing a small amount of gas. He then bent over the page Kunkle was holding open and blew through the slim end of the pipe, using his breath to wash the gas over the surface of the paper. Slowly, as he swept the operating end back and forth, two clear ochre-colored prints began to appear. He concentrated on them, no longer moving about, until they were sharply revealed. He then put down the fuming gun, quickly pulled a fingerprint card from his pocket, and held it next to the two already fading prints he’d uncovered.

There was a noticeable stillness in the small group around him. “It’s a match.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Brandt asked.

Willy slapped Tyler on the back once, an uncharacteristically jovial gesture for him. “’Course, he’s sure; son of a bitch never says anything unless he’s sure.”

We all looked at the page while the prints quickly faded from view. Later, up in Waterbury at the State Police Crime Lab, they would be made to appear permanently through a different process. But for now, this was all we needed. Tyler prepared a cardboard container for the book from materials he’d brought with him.

“All right,” I said. “We’ve got a murder victim with curare in him, a report of missing curare, bottles with Buddy’s prints that were near those stolen bottles, and now we’ve got his prints on an article dealing with curare. Enough for a warrant?”

Brandt nodded. “Certainly enough to try for one.”

Tyler was still troubled. “If the curare was stolen months ago, Buddy must have consulted the PDR back then. Why was I able to find fresh prints?”

Kunkle wasn’t worried, predictably. “Who cares? Maybe he came back to refresh his memory on how to inject the stuff. Point is, when the state lab guys do a real job on that page, I bet they’ll find a bunch of prints dating way back.”

“Including a few extras from other people,” Tyler muttered.

Kunkle shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s a recent edition, and I bet there aren’t too many people brushing up on South American poisons around here.”

Brandt chuckled. “In Brattleboro, who knows?”

Buddy Schultz lived on Prospect Street, the single inhabitant of the only run-down, weather-beaten, one-and-a-half-story clapboard building on the street, perched on the edge of a sixty-foot, heavily wooded, almost precipitous incline that overlooked Clark Street and, beyond it, Canal Street. Buddy’s home loomed almost directly over the erstwhile grave of Charlie Jardine.

By the time we reached the building’s sagging front stoop, it had been surrounded by officers, and Tyler and DeFlorio were near certain the place was empty. Under normal circumstances, that would have come as no surprise; it was late at night, when Buddy normally was supposed to be carrying out his janitorial duties at the Municipal Building. We hadn’t been able to locate him tonight, however. But standing here, waiting for the door’s lock to be forced, I had the creepy feeling that he wasn’t far off, and was probably watching us now.

Dennis, J.P., Sammie, and several members of the Special Reaction Team entered first, guns drawn, fanning out inside like a release of lethal, armored locusts.

I stayed outside, listening to the sound of boots pounding throughout the building, enjoying the first hint of coming coolness in the night air. The forecast for tomorrow was for temperatures in the seventies, with an eighty-percent chance of rain. The weather, like the investigation, looked about ready to break.

“Scene’s secure.”

I entered a central hallway, with a small living room to one side, a spare bedroom to the other, the kitchen straight ahead. Even with the lights on, it had a dingy, dark, forgotten feel to it. The wallpaper bellied out from the walls, the wooden floors had been ground into a uniform gray, the light fixtures were bare bulbs. It wasn’t a dirty place but definitely forlorn.

“Joe?” Tyler stuck his head out of a doorway farther down the hall.

I joined him at the entrance of a bedroom/office combination, really just a room with a bed at one end and a desk at the other. But it was obviously the heart of the house and, aside from the bathroom and kitchen, probably the most used room of all; unlike the rest of the place, it looked, if not cheerful, at least comfortable. There was an ancient, overstuffed armchair, a well placed black-and-white TV, stacks of well-thumbed paperback books and periodicals reflecting an eclectic and surprisingly intellectual range. I reminded myself that the inhabitant here had once been a grade-A student with hopes of college and presumably a great deal beyond. It was a sobering reminder of how potentially poisonous the mixture of brains and a damaged psyche could be.

I stepped back into the hallway and whistled loudly. “Yo, people. Your attention for a second.”

Heads appeared from various openings.

“Just a few reminders: One, we have a warrant for curare only; two, if you find it, let out a shout so J.P. can deal with it; and three, if you find anything else that catches your eye, let us know. If it’s juicy enough, we can try to expand the warrant to include it, but do not look in places where a bottle of curare obviously wouldn’t be.”

There was a general murmuring of assent and most of the heads disappeared.

“I think I got something here,” I heard Sammie announce from behind me.

I re-entered the bedroom and crossed over to where she had removed the drawers of the desk; she was flashing a light inside the cavity.

“Looks like one of those soft-sided briefcases.”

I stuck my head in next to hers and saw what she was describing, wedged high up against the back of the desk, just shy of where the drawer back would end up when the drawer itself was closed. “Looks like it could hold a bottle or two. J.P.?”

Tyler came over, took a photograph of the desk, then a close-up of the case in its hiding place, and finally gingerly removed it, wearing his cotton gloves. He unzipped the top and poured the contents out onto the floor. Fanned out before us were a sheaf of documents, notes, and letters, and rolling a short distance away before coming to a stop in the middle of the room was a long black metal cylinder. A silencer.

None of us moved for a moment. I quickly scanned the top sheet and another that poked out farther than the others. The first was a bank account showing Fred McDermott’s address but using the same false name we’d found his slush fund hidden under. The second was a plaintive note from Luman Jackson, agreeing to “the terms you set forth” but demanding, typically, that “this must have an end or I will damn the consequences.”

I turned to Sammie. “The silencer is ours, since it’s illegal in this state, but we’re going to have to get a judge in on the rest of it. See if you can round one up, will you?”

“Roger,” she said, and headed out to the hall to find a phone.

Borrowing a pair of gloves from J.P., I carefully began sifting through the rest of the documents, feeling as I did that I was being slowly sucked under by the intrigue and anguish that Buddy Schultz had set in motion. What he’d secreted in the desk was more than just the ammunition we’d seen him use, like the bank account and the blackmail of Jackson. There were other items, little gems whose potential spoke for themselves, like the copy of a receipt for the watch Rose had bought Charlie. It hadn’t been used-the planting of the watch among John’s socks had done the trick-but obviously Buddy was a man who liked more than one option at his disposal.

The material concerning Jackson was less blatant. I had to make assumptions in order to piece it all together, and then I knew I’d have to talk to Jackson to have it all make total sense.

I stuck my head out into the hallway again. “George?”

George Capullo, the senior shift man here, appeared from around a corner. “What’s up?”

“Pick up Luman Jackson at his home and bring him here, would you?”

“Just like that? What makes you think he’s not going to piss on my boot?”

“Tell him I’ve got the paperwork that’s been costing him so much. And do it code-three. I want him here now.”

“You got it.”

Sammie gestured to me from the kitchen. She was holding the receiver of a wall phone in one hand. “I’ve got Harrowsmith,” she mouthed soundlessly.

I took the phone and began talking. Harrowsmith, for all his intimidating ways, was a cop’s judge. His demeanor, helped by the enormous hawk nose and bushy eyebrows, imparted a fierceness he was well capable of demonstrating, but it was only provoked by sloppiness. It was his desire to see the bad guys in jail that stimulated him to be tough on us, for he knew that if the case was lost in court, or never got there to begin with, it was usually because we’d screwed up our homework.

Twenty minutes later I’d made my case and had received his official sanction. He’d made it clear, however, that to really make him happy, we should make every effort to locate the only item that did appear in the written warrant: the ever-elusive curare.

I saw flashing lights draw up to the house through the open front door. As I walked through the house to greet my reluctant visitor, Tyler’s voice drifted up the basement stairs. “We’re off the hook; I just found a couple of the bottles, plus I’m pretty sure the dirt down here will match the samples I got off Jardine’s shoes.”

I poked my head through the door. “Great; what was the vet’s count on the total missing?”

“Four.”

“Okay, assuming one was used on Jardine, that leaves one more to find.”

Tyler, the wind strong in his sails, sounded optimistic. “We got a couple of rooms left to go.”

My own good mood was further enhanced as I stepped outside. The air was cooling down rapidly, bringing with it the return of the grouchy, brittle, northern weather we knew so well. I took the first deep breath I’d allowed myself in over a week.

Capullo nodded to me as I approached the car. “I told him to sit tight; figured you two would enjoy the privacy.”

“Thanks.”

Luman Jackson was sitting bolt upright in the rear of the patrol car. He glared at me as I entered and settled down next to him. “What the hell do you mean by rousting me in the middle of the night and having me dragged over here with some nonsensical threat note?”

“If it was nonsensical you wouldn’t be here,” I said flatly. “You came of your own free will. Look, we have two ways of doing this: We can either chat here and now, and get everything out in the open so we can do our best to save your butt on the murder charge, or you can pretend to be outraged and above it all and watch James Dunn turn you into a roman candle, with Stanley Katz lighting the fuse.”

“You are threatening me,” he said in a shocked voice.

I remembered the name I’d read in Buddy’s private document collection. “Who was Cheryl Jacobson?”

He didn’t actually stiffen, but I felt as if he’d suddenly turned to cement.

I waited and finally put my hand on the door handle.

“She was a student of mine.” His voice was a monotone.

I arrested my faked exit. “When?”

“Many years ago.”

I remembered the scuttlebutt I’d heard from Ron at our meeting at the Quality Inn. “You got her in trouble?”

He nodded.

“And you were being blackmailed.”

Again, he nodded.

“You know by who?”

He sighed. “I thought I did.”

My mind flashed back to last night, his pistol instinctively aimed at Pierre Lavoie’s chest. “Fred McDermott?” I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

“Yes.”

“Why him?”

“Recently, we talked a couple of times on the phone. He disguised his voice, but there were certain mannerisms, turns of phrase I’d heard before. It didn’t click until I heard you were sniffing around McDermott, that he’d been at the murder scene on Horton Place. Then I knew who it was…”

“How long ago did this start?”

“Over a year.”

“You said you spoke on the phone recently. How were communications handled before?”

“By letter, always.”

Of course, I thought. Buddy held off implicating Fred until he was good and ready. “And last night at the high school? Were you gunning for Fred?”

He moved for the first time since we began talking, twisting his body around to face me. “I didn’t go there to kill him. I only wanted to talk.”

Presumably, Buddy had needed Jackson’s money both to finance his criminal ambitions-buying listening devices, for instance-and to implicate Fred McDermott, whom he resented for busting up his parents’ marriage. That done, what better conclusion than to have Jackson shoot McDermott? Jackson would be ruined, and McDermott’s slush fund would surface to sully his good name. A nice double play and a monument to Buddy’s late mother.

Jackson let out a deep sigh and looked out the side window at the darkness, not realizing how lucky he was. Still, I felt most of the bluster had gone out of him. “Come on, Jackson, don’t make me pull it out of you word by word. Let’s have it all. Now.”

He rubbed his forehead. “All right.” But he remained silent.

Exasperated, I hit the door handle and swung half out of the car, stopped only by his anguished cry. “I’m trying, all right? It’s hard. I’ve carried this son of a bitch around inside me for decades.”

I relented, moved by the unprecedented intensity of his emotion. I had no problem imagining how the burden of his secret had worn him down over the years. Nevertheless, I left the car door open as a warning.

The fresh air seemed to wash the rest of his reserve away. “She died trying to self-abort. She literally used a coat hanger, like in some bad melodrama. She left a note, naming me, blaming me even, for what she’d done to herself. I couldn’t believe it. Her mother was a conniving old bitch; got hold of the school, put on the pressure. I had to settle with her just to keep my job.”

“They didn’t fire you?” I asked.

“They had no grounds. She backed off after I paid her; told them it was a mistake, that her daughter had been a hysteric with a long history of blaming her problems on people she didn’t like. I’ll give the bitch that much: She was convincing. Still, I was under a microscope for quite some time. It was hell, and it became hell again.”

“How did the blackmail start?”

“There was a warning-a note-telling me ‘the shit was going to hit the fan,’ a phrase I’ve always despised, and that if I didn’t mind my p’s and q’s all this ancient history would be given to the press.”

“What were you supposed to do?”

He laughed shortly. “Pay, of course.”

“How much?”

“Damn near everything I had; about seventy thousand dollars overall.” He softly hit the back of the driver’s seat with his open hand, an oddly effeminate gesture. “Talk about a nightmare. When I finally figured out who it was, I wanted to tear his head off.”

Or shoot him in cold blood, I thought. “You mentioned you figured out it was McDermott from his slips of the tongue. But how did you know where to find him that night? Somebody must have told you.”

He hesitated just enough that I knew he was about to lie. “I had an informant.”

“Who?”

He gave me his superior look; he was starting to pull back, trying to cut his losses. “Sorry, Lieutenant, I have to protect my sources, too.”

“You’ve been played for a complete sucker, Jackson: blackmailed on the one hand, and set after us like an attack dog on the other. Your ‘informant’ used some of your money to fake a slush fund in McDermott’s name.”

Jackson stared at me, his mouth partly open.

“He also told you the blackmailer was going to be at the high school that night. You never wondered how he knew that? Maybe you thought he was a cop, privy to everything. But you took off, gun in hand, to lay your personal devil in his grave. He made a fool out of you, and you cooperated every step of the way. You screwed yourself by paying him off, and you fucked us over by getting in the way.”

His cheeks flushed red. “Now just a minute. You can’t…”

“The hell I can’t. How many times did you listen to your informant, so greedy for the shit he was doling out, you never once wondered how true it might be?”

“I don’t…”

“Even while you were being blackmailed, you never guessed the information you were fed came from the very man who was sucking you dry. What’s it like being that vain, Luman?”

I got out of the car and leaned back in. “This’ll all come out, one way or the other, and I hope like hell they ride you out of town on a rail.” He began to speak, but I quieted him with an abrupt hand gesture. “And if you throw that I’ll-sue-you crap at me again, I’ll make sure that rail is labeled with Cheryl Jacobson’s name.”

I slammed the door and left him with his mouth open.