Scent of Evil

38

It was four in the morning. I was alone in my office. The window was open, the suddenly chilly predawn air actually lifting goose bumps across my bare forearm. I was filled with the exhaustion that follows hard, rewarding manual labor, content in the knowledge that, while Buddy Schultz was still on the lam, his being so was the only loose thread of the case.

Under Judge Harrowsmith’s demanding judicial guidance, we had gathered enough evidence to satisfy even James Dunn. The work had been painstaking and tedious, however, and I had finally told everyone to go home for a few hours’ sleep. Not that I was going to be alone for long; Ron Klesczewski had called to say that he couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to miss out on the kill, and that his leg would be perfectly content propped in a neighboring chair while he pitched in on the paperwork.

I took advantage of the lull, therefore, to make a phone call.

“Where have you been?” She didn’t even sound sleepy.

I put my feet up on my desk and leaned back in my chair. The weather, and Gail’s voice, was like the calm after the storm.

“I’ve been crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”

My satisfaction was obviously bordering on gloating. She laughed uncertainly. “You mean it’s over?”

“Not over over, but we know who’s behind it all. We have to hospital-tuck the corners and actually put our hands on the guy, but at least we know which way is up now.”

She hesitated slightly before asking, “Can you say who the killer is?”

“Deep background? Buddy Schultz, our night janitor.”

There was a stunned silence, as if I’d invoked the butler instead of the janitor. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Pretty driven guy. Lot of hate, lot of envy, a long memory, and sharp as a tack. Bad combination.”

She sighed. “Well, congratulations, Joe. You must feel a thousand pounds lighter.”

I chuckled. “Hell, no more than you. By the way, you might find certain changes on the board; no guarantees, but I’d lay money on it.”

I’d rarely heard her so elated. “Jackson?”

“Yup. Closetful of skeletons; keep Katz busy for a week. I had the distinct pleasure of feeding him some of his own medicine.”

“My God. Tell me more.”

It wasn’t the right thing to do. Indeed, it emulated the very same nasty habit I bemoaned in my fellow police officers, but for the next fifteen minutes, I gossiped. I told her of all our pitfalls and false trails, of all the people we’d suspected of one crime or another, from Paula Atwater, who’d told Dunn she would turn state’s evidence against Hanson, Cappelli, and the smooth-talking Kenny Thomas, to the Wentworths, father and daughter, once so high on the list, who I imagined would continue sharing breakfast in isolated splendor.

I hypothesized that Arthur Clyde would be forced to tend to his wife’s garden, that Rose Woll would find some other human island to latch onto like a shipwreck survivor, and that James Dunn would do everything in his power to throw the book at Luman Jackson. Fred McDermott, I thought, although momentarily startled by what had happened, would plod on toward retirement and pension like the desk-bound soldier he was.

I’d been looking out the window, at nothing in particular, enjoying the sound of Gail’s laughter in my ear, when a slight sound at my door shifted my attention. Standing there, his clothes dark with sweat, his face unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and narrow with fatigue, was Buddy Schultz. He was holding a Colt.45 on me, its barrel looking big enough to stick my thumb in. He nodded at the phone.

“Got to go,” I said, and hung up on Gail in mid-sentence, hoping to hell she’d guess something was wrong.

“Get up. We’re going on a short walk.”

My feet were still on the table, so I had to shift around a bit to do what he asked. In the process, my left hand dropped to the arm of my chair. The sudden pain in my hand reminded me of the deep cut I’d suffered pursuing Jackson through the classroom window. Instinctively, not knowing precisely why, perhaps thinking of Ron’s imminent arrival at the office, I ground my palm down hard on the point of the chair arm, reopening the wound and causing a small trickle of blood to course along my little finger and drip onto the floor. Buddy didn’t notice.

“What’ve you got in mind, Buddy?”

He smiled that absurdly friendly smile, all the more bizarre etched across that now blighted face. “I thought I’d kill you first, and then worry about my next move.”

“Why?” His answer was so senseless, my curiosity almost overtook my rising fear, but not quite.

“You messed me up, man.” He moved next to me, grabbed my left elbow like an escort, and began steering me toward the door. His gun was half buried in my back, making any evasive move a suicidal gesture.

“Buddy, you messed yourself up. You should have just killed Charlie and made his body disappear, instead of trying to pin the murder on John.”

He swung me left, away from the tiny corridor leading to the exit, and toward the dead-end conference room.

“Where’re we going?”

He stopped me in front of the row of cabinets at the back of the conference room. Manipulating some mechanisms in the small gap between the cabinets and the side wall, he caused an upper portion of one of the cabinets to swing open on invisible hinges, like the top half of a three-foot-thick Dutch door. Behind it, instead of unpainted wall, there was a man-sized hole revealing a huge vertical air shaft, a remnant of the old building’s original heating system. A wave of hot stale air poured over us, a bottled up memento of the past week’s hellish weather.

“Climb up.”

“How? That’s a four-foot threshold.”

He kicked over a chair, as I’d hoped he might. I positioned it against the lower cabinet, let a surreptitious drop of blood hit the seat, and immediately put my shoe on it as I stepped up. I put my knee on the edge of the square opening, smeared a tiny bit of blood where it could be seen once the secret door was shut again, and crawled halfway in.

He had climbed up behind me to keep me going, not taking time to look around at the trail I’d left behind. “Keep moving.”

“It’s hard to see.” That part was true. Beyond the hole at the end of the three-foot tunnel, it was just a dim void with an odd, empty resonance to it.

“Put your leg over and reach down. You’ll find the bottom; it’s even with the floor.”

I did as instructed. As soon as I gained solid footing, I turned to see if I could catch him off guard, but he was already next to me, having closed the cabinet behind us and leapt down in one easy, practiced movement. Again, I felt the gun’s hard nose nuzzle my spine.

“Straight ahead, there’s a ladder.”

The air was suffocating, as bad as the heat wave of the past week-worse in the total blackness surrounding us. There was a rancid odor of decay, and of something akin to old, moldy wool. My bloody hand located the rungs of a ladder.

“Start climbing, and don’t try to hit me with your heels. I’ll be out of the way.”

The thought had crossed my mind, along with dozens of others. I had seen situations like this in the movies, and I, along with everyone else, had been critical of the hero for not being more aggressive. After all, I’d always reasoned, you’re dead anyway, why not fight for your life?

The problem with all that, I now knew, was that you didn’t really believe you were dead anyway. Despite what he’d told me, I knew there had to be a way out of this; it became too irrational otherwise. I started climbing.

“Where’s this lead?” I asked.

“Up.”

We’d been trained about hostage situations, about creating a bond with the kidnapper, making it harder for him to kill someone who was hell-bent on becoming a friend. But I knew it wouldn’t work on Buddy.

“How far up?”

“You’ll know.”

I had no feeling of my surroundings. I might as well have been climbing into the night sky above a boiling cauldron, swathed in its cloying, invisible steam. I tried focusing on something more tangible. I knew I was climbing one of the four air shafts; there were no other available empty spaces in the building. During the remodeling, there’d been some discussion about taking over the hundred-year-old shafts to create more floor space, since their original purpose had been replaced by modern, less cumbersome technology. But the engineers had vetoed the idea-something about structural integrity. The shafts had stayed.

“You do this during the remodeling? Cover your noise with the carpenters?”

There was no answer. Despite his warning, I tried kicking back with my heels a couple of times, but all I hit was air. I was sweating profusely, not only from the heat, but from the exercise. I felt I’d been climbing a half-mile straight up.

Suddenly, I ran out of rungs. My hand reached up in what was becoming an automatic grasp, closed on nothing, and threw me completely off balance. My foot, in midair, hesitated, missed its placement, and rattled by several rungs as I almost fell backwards into the darkness, arrested only by my throbbing left hand. I heard Buddy grunt below as he ducked to avoid my swinging, kicking feet.

I latched back on and rested, panting hard.

“Reach the top?” Buddy’s voice was· sarcastic.

“What the hell was that? You gonna drop me into a goddamn black pit?”

“I have something better in mind for you. Know where we are?”

I looked around, feeling aimlessly for something solid with one outstretched arm. “The attic?”

“Yeah, the bat cave. That’s what we call it in maintenance. Climb to the top, take one step forward, and freeze. It’s not all floor, so don’t get fancy.”

I stepped off the ladder, but then immediately turned and waited, all my energy directed at sensing when Buddy would come even with the floor so I could kick back at his head.

Instead, I heard his voice slightly off to one side and level with me. “Waiting to send me back down the hard way?”

I had no idea how he’d done it. He seemed totally oblivious to the pitch black of our surroundings. Indeed, everything about him had metamorphosed, including his slightly hesitant, boyish speech. A tingling spread across the nape of my neck-a small reminder of panic awaiting.

There was a scraping sound, and abruptly a dim shaft of murky light sliced into the void, outlining the large square hole before me, the top of not one, but two ladders, and the dim perception of a room the size of a closet. Buddy’s shadow stood by the side of the narrow door he’d opened, the gun in his hand shining dully.

“Step right this way.” The gun waved in invitation.

I edged around the shaft hole and stepped through the door. I was on a narrow catwalk, suspended from cables that disappeared into the gloom overhead. Beneath me was a grid work of floor joists and support beams, the square gaps between them filled with musty, dark snowdrifts of rock-wool insulation. I looked to the sides. Nearby I could make out the forty-five-degree slope of a couple of immense rafter beams, along with another catwalk angling off into the dark. The air was almost literally suffocating, rich with the stench of bat dung, rotten wood, and damp insulation, fragments of which I’d smelled at the bottom of the shaft.

“Go down to the end, turn left, and keep going to the platform.”

I reached out tentatively to steady myself. Each catwalk had but one handrail, also made of cable. The other side was left free, presumably to make it easier for workmen to lower ladders to the joists ten feet below. It was a practical idea, but not great for one’s sense of balance. At best, the catwalks were two feet wide. In my present state of mind, a tightrope was no wider.

I followed Buddy’s directions, my earlier thoughts of leaving a trail long gone. The length of the climb, the darkness, the near-unbearable heat had all combined to make the attic as alien to me as the far side of the moon. Only a few dozen feet below, the night-shift policemen were loitering around the coffee machine, or chatting with the dispatcher. Ron Klesczewski was probably hard at work, awkwardly poised over his paperwork, having totally missed my feeble message. Up here, suspended between a pitched roof I couldn’t perceive and a floor that looked like a wood-strewn, blackened sea, I felt utterly abandoned.

The platform he’d mentioned was two steps up from the catwalk and about six feet square. There were no handrails at all here, the area serving as a junction for four catwalks, one branching off from each side. A single chair stood before me, placed near one edge, overlooking the entire attic’s only source of light: a dim, dirt-covered skylight that hung over the building’s top-floor corridor. In the days before electricity, this skylight had matched a similar window cut into the roof above, allowing Mother Nature to illuminate at least a portion of the building’s interior. The outer skylight had long ago been sealed over, leaving its quaint and functionless mate to gather dust. I stepped up onto the platform and looked down onto the grimy glass rectangle, noticing, outlined against the dim glimmer coming from the corridor’s fire-safety lighting, the stiff and tiny body of a sparrow.

The first possibility of escape occurred to me then, justifying in my own mind my docility so far. If I were to merely step off the platform, I could crash through the skylight to the floor below it and maybe get away. From this elevation, it was probably twelve feet to the glass, which in turn was some ten feet above the floor. A long way to go, but survivable, which was more than I thought my chances were with Buddy. Besides, I continued thinking hopefully, even if I broke both legs, I might still be able to crawl to a fire alarm and summon help. I took a small step toward the edge to get into position.

“Cute,” was all I heard from behind me before the back of my head exploded into a painful flash of light and I felt my entire body go weak. My hand flew to the point of impact and was grabbed by Buddy, who pulled me backward off balance into the chair. I landed heavily, my head still swimming, and was only half aware of him quickly handcuffing my wrists behind my back, to the outside rails of the chair back. He ran off two long strips of duct tape and fastened my legs to the front legs of the chair.

If there was one image that had dogged me throughout this case, and had served as a continual reminder that the man we were after was both determined and crazed, it was the picture of Charlie Jardine, bound and helpless, having to watch his own death like a spectator. Superimposing that image on my own situation, I suddenly came face to face with the true meaning of the word “horror.”

I worked my mouth several times, trying to get the words to come out, fighting the fearful nausea and the pain from the back of my head. “Buddy, for Christ’s sake. Why do this?”

He laughed, putting the finishing touches on his handiwork. “This has been my home away from home. No one knows where we are. I’m going to end this the way it began and then I’m history.”

He pulled a small bottle and a packaged syringe from his pants pocket and began preparing an injection.

“Buddy, we went through your house; we found the silencer and the curare. We know you killed Jardine. Killing me isn’t going to help you.”

He was meticulously measuring how much curare to pull into the syringe barrel, holding it against the skylight’s dim glow. He sounded almost bored. “It doesn’t matter. If I am caught, I’ll be able to get off on an insanity plea, especially after killing you.”

He tapped the syringe with his fingernail and shot a little of the fluid out the end of the needle, to eliminate any air bubbles.

I made a single, convulsive leap against my bonds, hoping for a flaw in the duct tape or a weakness in the chair. I barely moved, though the pain and nausea from my head wound doubled in intensity.

Buddy looked at me and shook his head. “That reminds me: I better tape you down a little better before I stick this in. Wouldn’t want you bouncing around, messing my aim up.”

His words had the proper undermining effect. Had I waited until he was just poised with his needle, I might have been able to knock it out of his hand with my shoulder.

I closed my eyes as he set about taping my elbows painfully together, pinning my upper arm against the back of the chair so tightly I could barely move.

“There we go,” he said happily. “Trussed up like a hog.”

He picked up the syringe from the floor and held it ready. “Any last words? Words become a little difficult after this stuff goes in; that’s what Charlie found anyway.”

“Yeah, Buddy, I’d like to know why? Jardine didn’t steal Rose from you, and losing a scholarship couldn’t have been the end of the world.”

He paused for a long time, giving me a faint touch of hope. “Let’s say I thought it was poetic justice, and leave it at that.”

He did it then with astounding quickness. One moment he was smirking down at me, the syringe held delicately in his hand, and the next it was over, the needle had been withdrawn, and he was carefully putting the small plastic sleeve back over it before slipping the whole thing into his pocket. “Gotcha,” was all he said.

I felt for a moment that my heart had stopped. I turned my head away from him and looked down at the shape of the small, dead sparrow, all my focus turned inward. After a half minute I realized I needed to start breathing, and I took some of the hot, stale air into my lungs, no longer resentful of its poor quality.

“I envy you a bit, you know. I’m curious about how it feels. With Charlie, it was almost like he was going into a trance, until I grabbed his attention, that is. Did you guys figure out exactly how I did it?”

I was beginning to feel very odd. I tried to answer, mostly to see if I could do it, but the effort seemed too much. I wasn’t numb, which was how I’d imagined Charlie had felt. Instead, it was just the opposite. I could sense everything that was going on inside me: the air moving in and out, the blood rushing through the vessels in my neck, the regular thumping of my heart, the sweat pouring down my face. But I could not will myself to do anything, wiggle a toe, or move my tongue, or even swallow. It was as if all the body’s automatic systems had taken over, and all the voluntary ones short-circuited.

Buddy was still chatting, fooling with something beyond my scope of vision, but I no longer listened. All I had left was my ability to concentrate, and to spend what time I had left paying attention to Buddy seemed a waste. At first, though, I didn’t actually know what to think about. The case came to mind, the irony of it ending this way, questions about how they would deal with my death. I wondered if Ron would be made lieutenant, and if Willy Kunkle would bother trying to get back on the force without me goading him.

Gail eventually pushed all that aside, as she often did in real life. I found myself regretting how little time I’d given her this past week, and how I’d allowed the tensions of the investigation to come between us, if only temporarily. I remembered holding her close just recently, having patched up those differences, and the warmth of her voice on the phone a mere twenty minutes ago.

Buddy thrust his face before my own, cutting off my view of the skylight. “Hi, Joe. You haven’t been paying attention. I invented a new toy, something to help me in my work.” He dangled a thin nylon strap in front of me, on which two empty wooden sewing spools had been taped, about an inch and a half apart.

“See, when I killed Charlie, it was hard work; it took a long time and ended up being painful-for me, that is. My thumbs hurt for a couple of days. So this is my new experiment.” He disappeared and I could hear him moving behind me. The strap, held horizontally, reappeared before my eyes, the spools side by side, in the middle.

“It goes around the neck, each spool over an artery, so that when I pull it tight, you can still breathe, but the blood gets shut off. It’s no wear and tear on me, ’cause I just work a tourniquet stick from the back. Whatcha think? Neat, huh?”

I felt his hands around my neck, adjusting the strap, fitting each spool into the depression on either side of my trachea.

“Of course, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to using my thumbs, but let’s give it-”

Silence fell like a cleaver. The strap went slack. I couldn’t move my head, but I shifted my eyes from the skylight and scanned what little I could see of the darkness beyond. Behind me, I could hear Buddy quietly pulling the hammer back on his gun. Whatever had caught his attention was quiet now.

He moved as gently as a cat, sliding into my field of vision from the right, his gun in his hand, gliding down the two steps from the platform to the one catwalk I could see in my frozen state, the same one we’d traveled from the air shaft.

My heart beat faster, the hopeful memory of the trail of blood drops springing back to mind. Gail must have done something, called someone. And told them what? That I’d hung up on her and wouldn’t answer when she called back? She had done something, I was utterly convinced. She had set salvation into motion. I knew, just as Buddy obviously knew, that that one sound, whatever it had been, had come like a knock on a door. It had to be answered, or the door would be kicked in.

Buddy vanished into the gloom and I tried willing myself to see further, surprised to find I could actually squint a little. I remembered then what Hillstrom’s toxicologist had told me, that curare only lasted a few minutes, and that without booster injections, its effects wore off quickly. The simple act of squinting gave me hope I was on the upswing. If Buddy could be taken out, I’d survive, even without medical intervention.

But this was no textbook assault by a police SWAT team. In fact, it might be no more than an animal scratching at some rotten wood. If that were true, Buddy would satisfy his curiosity, retracing our steps to the air shaft, perhaps checking out parts of the maze of catwalks he knew more intimately than anyone, and then he’d return to conclude his little fantasy.

There was a sudden, blinding, conical stab of light. I saw Buddy arrested in midstep, like a tightrope artist at the circus trapped by a spotlight in the gloom above the audience. There was a double explosion accompanying two long, fiery, swordlike muzzle flashes, one from Buddy’s gun, the other from the darkness beyond the source of the light. That light, obviously a flashlight, spun out of control, landed with a thud on the catwalk, rolled over the edge, and in a final end-over-end sparkle, vanished into the soft, absorbing insulation below.

There was a long moment of silence, punctured only by the rasping of my own breathing. Then I heard movement, slow, cumbersome, no longer stealthy. I kept my eyes on the distant end of the catwalk, as intent on it as a gambler on the flip of a coin. A shadow moved there, too vague to decipher, a man using the one handrail for balance, lurching, fighting for control, half dragging himself along, the glow from the skylight still too weak to pick out his emerging features.

Finally, almost mercifully, the dim light picked up Buddy’s twisted face, his eyes screwed tight in pain, one hand clutched across a blood-soaked chest, the other still awkwardly holding the.45 as it slid uncertainly along the handrail. I let out a sigh, the suspense over, my fate at his hands looking unchanged for all the damage he'd sustained. He may have been mortally wounded, but he wasn’t going to let that thwart his final ambition.

Buddy paused some fifteen feet away, his body swaying, his breathing a ragged string of gurgles. He tried once to let go of the railing, failed, tried again, and half succeeded, holding his gun hand only a foot away from the cable, testing his balance. Satisfied, he finally looked up at me, his eyes glistening with a malevolence I wouldn’t have thought possible in another human being.

The hand with the gun slowly rose and leveled out, the black eye of the barrel seeking my motionless forehead. But the white-orange blast, when it came, came from behind, and it threw Buddy up like a leaf caught by the wind and tossed him lightly into the air. Spread-eagled, he landed with a crash on the skylight, his weight taking the entire pane of glass with him to the floor below, where it blew apart with a crystalline shattering. The cool air from the hallway beneath washed up and surrounded me like the after-splash from someone leaping into a pool.

Ron Klesczewski appeared out of the darkness, his stiff leg making him look like some peg-legged sailor of old. His face was both quizzical and lined with pain. There was a crimson gash on his forehead but no blood to speak of-“a scratch,” as they say.

I looked back through the skylight opening. Buddy’s corpse lay as a child’s in sleep, half curled up on itself, its fetal memories still strong. Near his face, like a prized possession almost cupped in one hand, was the dead sparrow.

In the quiet, soothed by the cool air pushing by me, I closed my eyes for a moment, once again aware of my own breathing and heartbeat. I felt a drop trickle down my cheek and fall away soundlessly, but whether sweat or a tear I didn’t know.