Scent of Evil

6

I didn’t get to bed that night. I’d packed the answering machine’s tape in the box I’d brought back from Jardine’s place, and after I sent all the detectives home, I played it over and over in total silence, trying to hear in Rose Woll’s voice things that weren’t there to hear. I also leafed through Jardine’s desk calendar, fighting the growing conviction that the R’s scribbled there stood for Rose, and that the hours opposite them were for two and three in the morning, when John Woll was on the midnight shift, as he had been for the last two years.

After about thirty minutes of this, I decided the only cure for the depression that now hung over me worse than the heat was to look at this mess analytically. I left my office to dig out Woll’s personnel file.

Everyone’s personnel files were kept locked inside the chief’s office across the hall, available only to the chief and his deputy. Normally, access was only granted under their supervision, but I had asked Brandt earlier if an exception could be made in this one instance. Time, after all, was a crucial element here, and we both knew my penchant toward burning the midnight oil. He’d told me to be as discreet as possible and had handed me his keys.

The chief’s office was located in the room next to the officers’ room, in the corner of which Woll, Manierre, and I had met earlier. Now that both Brandt and Billy Manierre had gone home, however, the only other occupant on that entire side of the building was Dispatch, which was located in an open-doored corner room diagonally across from Brandt’s glass-walled cubicle.

Using my own key, I entered the darkened officers’ room from the hallway, risking my neck by tiptoeing across that carpenters’ battlefield so I wouldn’t have to use the primary entrance, whose lock was electronically controlled by the dispatcher.

I waited at the interconnecting threshold, around the corner from the dispatcher’s open door, until I heard him acknowledging someone on the radio, which he could only do by turning his back to me. I then quickly crossed over to the chief’s office, unseen and unheard. I was not taking Brandt’s admonition to be discreet lightly. Not much happened in the department that didn’t become common knowledge within a day. Being caught going through the personnel files in the dead of night would have been like dropping a lit match into a bucket of gasoline.

Using the parking-lot lights filtering through the window, I located the cabinet I was after and opened the appropriate drawer. I found John Woll’s file by using a small flashlight I always carried in my pocket. It was a bizarre sensation, skulking around my own place of employment like a second-story man, all for the sake of discretion. By the nervous sweat that was beading my forehead, I might as well have been lifting someone’s silverware.

As I eased the file drawer shut, I noticed a dilapidated oscillating fan sitting on top of the cabinet. The temptation was more than I could resist. If I was slated for an entire night in my hot coffin of an office, at least I could have the air being pushed around a bit. I tucked the fan under my arm and started to make my getaway.

I was halfway across the officers’ room, feeling the euphoric rush of the successful thief, when the far door opened, a hand groped along the bare-stud wall, and the entire place was flooded in blinding light. I froze in double shock, not only because I’d been caught, but because I had no idea the lights had been connected.

As it turned out, that revelation served me well, for I blurted out without thinking, “The goddamn lights work.”

Buddy, the night janitor, stared at me in startled amazement.

“Oh… Hi, Lieutenant. Yeah-they hooked ’em up this afternoon.”

I chuckled and shook my head, relieved that my secretive ordeal was abruptly over. “I’ve been poking through here like a blind man, for Christ’s sake.”

Buddy was carrying two buckets full of sponges, rags, solvents, and whatnot, destined to maintain the dispatch office’s brand-new luster. “What’re you doin’ here so late?” He suddenly looked down at the floor, as if the words had blurted out before he could stop them.

He was almost in his thirties, a somewhat scrawny-looking man with a pile of curly hair on his head and a pathetically wispy Vandyke. He’d been the night janitor for years, telling me once that he liked the privacy and the hours because they allowed him time to read. Indeed, he always had a paperback stuck in his back pocket, although I’d never been curious enough to find out what kinds of books he preferred. He was generally quiet, sometimes painfully shy, and, I thought, apparently perfectly suited to his solitary job.

“Actually, I was about to commit a theft.” I waggled the fan that was still tucked under my arm.

His eyes grew round. “That thing? If you don’t mind me saying, that’s not much of a theft-too noisy.” He hesitated, while a nervous smile spread across his face. “You know, Lieutenant, if it’s a fan you want, I could get you one as quiet as a whisper.”

“From where?” I couldn’t deny I was interested. I’d heard the chief’s fan in action and understood why he never had it on. My lifting it had been an act of pure desperation.

He gave me a lopsided grin, relieved at my lack of outrage. “Don’t ask me no questions and I won’t tell you no lies-isn’t that what they say?”

I hesitated. “How about a temporary loan, from someone who won’t miss it?”

“Oh, sure. That’s just what I had in mind. Be right back.” He piled his belongings along the wall and headed out the door.

“I’ll be in my office,” I called after him and placed Brandt’s fan on a nearby windowsill.

I returned to my own corner of the building. Under cooler circumstances, I actually enjoyed working here in the middle of the night. It wasn’t only the silence that made it appealing, although the still phones and absence of people were definite pluses; it was also the odd satisfaction of being up when almost everyone else was asleep. I felt in the middle of the night as if I were capable of deeds unachievable in the daylight-as if I were endowed with ethereal powers.

Buddy found me as I was sorting through the contents of Woll’s file, separating the bureaucratic confetti from the reports that might tell me something.

“Here you go.” He wiped a large blue-and-white plastic fan clean with a rag from his pocket and placed it on my desk, fastidiously moving aside a large ashtray filled with paper clips. The fan was enormous and looked brand new. “Even goes back and forth, and it’s got three speeds.”

He got down on his knees and plugged it into a baseboard outlet. The fan began swinging its mechanical head back and forth, as if sighing in resignation at the plainness of its surroundings. It was admittedly the fanciest thing in my office.

“See? Quiet as a whisper.” He was grinning like a sweepstakes winner. Helping the chief of detectives in an interagency theft had obviously made his day. He slightly readjusted the fan’s position.

“It’s great, Buddy. I owe you one. What do I do with it after tonight?”

“No one’s the poorer, I promise.”

“And you won’t tell me where you got it.”

Again, he looked at the floor and grinned. “Nope. I tell you what-if anyone misses it, I’ll take it back. It’ll never happen, though. That okay with you?”

“I’m happy, Buddy. Thanks again.”

I waited until he’d left before I sat down to survey what I’d collected. The fan kept shaking its head mournfully, drying the sweat on the back of my hands and making the heat almost bearable. I pulled the ashtray full of paper clips near to me in case I wanted to mark any pages.

John Woll, as he’d told Billy and me, had graduated from high school ten years earlier. During his senior year, he’d been enrolled in the Law Enforcement and Fire Sciences Program at school and had won a scholarship to college, where he apparently intended to continue his police studies, hoping later to qualify for the FBI. While not a stellar student, he was inordinately “well rounded”-a hard-working perfectionist with a broad interest in extracurricular activities. Plans changed, however, for reasons I couldn’t decipher from the files. The following fall, after marrying Rose, he dropped his college plans, forfeiting the scholarship, and signed up as a special officer with our department. Specials were one of those bureaucratic wonders-a compromise between the budget watchers and the people crying for more cops on the beat. They were allowed to work only a limited number of hours a week and were therefore excluded from the benefit package offered to their full-time colleagues. Also, they had to take only sixty-two hours of training at the Police Academy, instead of the standard fourteen-week course. The result, as I saw it, was a street cop with little training and no sense of job security-a wonderful entity worthy of the minds that had created it.

Whether because of this, or from the same mysterious pressures that had changed his college goals, John’s evaluations started issuing warning signs eighteen months into the job. He was still praised for his pleasant demeanor and his ability to steer clear of any inner-office bickering, but an undefinable uncertainty began entering the evaluators’ comments; phrases like “vague on the future,” “gung ho with little follow-up,” and “workaholic habits, but not much to show for it,” appeared in clumps at this point in his career. One evaluator suggested a counselor be brought in to identify what he thought might be escalating personal problems. That was never done. John Woll quit too soon after that entry appeared.

He went full-time at a local manufacturing plant he’d been working at during his off hours with us, a place that turned out the elastic found in diapers and golf balls and women’s underwear. I knew the building-long, low, and noisy, where every surface was covered by a thin veil of white powdery talc, used to keep the hot rubber from sticking in its course through the huge, high-temperature machines that kneaded it, cooked it, and transformed it from raw, brown rubber blocks into paper-thin elastic strips. It was a mind-numbing environment: the floor-shaking hum of the machines and the air-cleaning equipment relieved only here and there by the tinny sounds of rock ’n’ roll emanating from transistor radios.

The pay was good, the environment stultifying. The psychological nose dive that had swept John Woll from the police department continued unabated in the new job. He began to drink noticeably.

He was never stopped for driving under the influence or for creating a public nuisance; to anyone’s knowledge, he never broke any law as a result of his boozing. But he was caught nevertheless. His shift supervisor smelled liquor on his breath, discovered a bottle among his personal effects, gave him several warnings, and finally found him polishing off a pint in the men’s room. He was ordered to either get some alcohol counseling or leave. He chose the counseling.

The recommendations accompanying his reapplication to the police department four years later were glowing. After the showdown with his supervisor, Woll began turning his life around. He signed up for company-sponsored “self-betterment” classes, made a few highly praised suggestions on improving management-worker relations, and finally ended up as a night supervisor himself. Whatever role his wife, Rose, played in all this was again not clear from what I was reading, but the overall picture was of a man wrestling his devils down to the mat.

When he did reapply to be a cop, we put him through an alcohol screening process, which he passed with flying colors. The good will he’d left behind combined well with his Cinderella comeback. He took the full Police Academy course, and we welcomed him with open arms, no questions asked.

Until now. I closed the file.

For the rest of the night, I studied the documents I’d removed from Charlie Jardine’s house, arranging them in chronological order, trying to get a feel for the subcurrents of his life. What I found showed a combination of steady progression and good luck. Fortunately for me, he was a creature of habit, keeping to the same bank since high school, saving all his IRS returns back to the first one filed. There was no padding, nothing in the collection of a personal nature, like letters, diaries, or personal memos. But the dry, clear-cut residue of a paper-shuffling society more than made up the difference.

Jardine had not graduated from high school with the career goals of John Woll. Where John had turned a teenage interest in law enforcement into immediate employment by the police department, Charlie had stayed at home with his parents, at the same address I’d visited hours earlier, and had drifted about for a couple of years. His W-2 forms indicated a series of short-lived jobs in and around Brattleboro, at restaurants, car washes, gas stations, and finally, five years ago, at a lawyer’s office as a “gofer.” That had been the turning point.

I knew the law firm: Morris, McGill. It dealt mostly in corporate and criminal law and represented much of the town’s upper crust-that part which didn’t deal directly with firms in New York or Boston. It was the biggest outfit around and its gloss obviously began to rub off on young Jardine. He started playing the stock market, gently at first, then with increased confidence. He set up an account at a brokerage house. For several years, he kept the same lowly position, but his bank and tax records reflected considerably more ambition and success than the job description implied.

His parents died within six months of one another, and he inherited eighty-five thousand dollars and the house on Marlboro Avenue, free and clear. Now, suddenly situated, financially secure, and filled with an intoxicating sense that the golden ring was his at last, the one-time office boy made a direct leap to entrepreneur: He became founder, part owner, and partner in ABC Investments.

That had been a little over one year ago, which helped explain why the name of the firm had meant nothing to me when Beaumont had first mentioned it.

I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Despite the fan, I felt sticky and unwashed. The inside of my mouth tasted bitter, and I was sure my breath could wilt flowers at twenty yards.

I wondered what connection these two young men shared, besides possibly the wife of one of them. Had they both known Rose in school? That was likely. Had she dated them both? Simultaneously? If so, had their triangle ended on a sour note, as most triangles do?

I crossed my hands on my stomach and stared at the reams of scattered paperwork covering my desk, much of it highlighted with my large pool of paper clips. Despite John having been at the site of Charlie’s grave, and his wife’s appearance on Charlie’s tape machine, I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions pointing to jealousy. I had dealt with people who sought revenge for infidelity. They fit a general type, albeit with rare exceptions, and John Woll was not of that type. He had none of the insecure and possessive qualities that found an outlet in violence upon others. Aside from the self-destructiveness that had marked his early twenties, his career as a cop had been spurred by his own harsh self-criticism. None of us could ever be as hard on him as he was on himself.

I was brought out of my reverie by a gentle tap on the door. Sammie Martens poked her head in. “Morning, Joe.”

I looked at my watch. It was six o’clock. “Christ, Sammie, I just sent you home.”

“I got some sleep. I wanted to come in early to give you my report. You seemed a little distracted last night.”

I motioned to her to come in and sit. Hers wasn’t the only report I’d stifled. Once I’d connected the voice on Jardine’s machine to Rose Woll, I hadn’t been in the mood to play lieutenant. I’d sent everybody home, whether that had suited them or not. “Let me ask you something, Sammie.”

She sat down with her report folder on her lap. “Shoot.”

“You’re aware of the male stud’s vision of what a woman wants most, aren’t you?”

She couldn’t suppress a little smile. As one of the few policewomen in the department, and the only one on the detective squad, she’d had more than her fair exposure to the convoluted and fragile male libido. “Muscles, macho, and fast fucks?”

I chuckled at that. Her flat-footedness was refreshing, especially coming from a woman as slight and demure in appearance as she. “How about mirrors over the bed and in front of a fur rug?”

She hesitated a moment, gauging the nature of the question. Her gender had also exposed her to an excess of sexual innuendo and outright abuse. I was gratified when she answered me directly, and with less than an innocent glint in her eye. “Depends who’s on the bottom.”

That was half of what I’d been thinking earlier.

Sammie crossed her legs and hooked an arm over the back of her chair. “What’s this all about?”

Leaving out all mention of Rose Woll, I explained to her what we’d found at Jardine’s place, coupled with the assumption that the initials in his calendar belonged to women. She shrugged at that. “They might all be women-some of them might be men, too. Brattleboro would be a good place for it.”

And that was the second half of my little voice’s chorus. Our city’s homosexual population was impressively large, a point I was pleased she’d thought of too. It was helpful knowing I wasn’t theorizing in a total void. There was one point she didn’t mention, however, and which had always struck me when beds and mirrors were combined: To me, the mirrors not only reflected self-made erotica; they could also confirm one partner’s domination over his or her mate, a significantly less sensual but all too human ambition. It put a definite chill on the image of Charlie Jardine as Casanova.

I got up and stretched. That was the downside to the early stages of an investigation: Nearly everything looks plausible. “Okay, what did you find out last night?”

Sammie opened her folder and began detailing her search for whoever might have spent the night under the Elm Street bridge. She’d covered all the obvious bases-the flophouses and the halfway homes, the cheap hotels and the informal rooming establishments the Fire Department hoped would never catch fire. Windham County called itself the “Gateway to Vermont”; some contended that with every gate you get a doormat, which accounted for Brattleboro’s highly mixed population.

Indeed, from retired hippies to sawmill operators, from fancy doctors to drug pushers, and from established gentry to homeless unemployables seeking the nation’s third-highest welfare check, Brattleboro had it all. Considering that it boasted only a meager twelve thousand inhabitants, that deeply varied demography was to me the city’s biggest asset. It had made what might have been a sleepy, boring town just the opposite.

It also, however, made it a good place to hide, and from Sammie’s conclusion that’s exactly what was happening. “I think maybe he’s spooked.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He’d been there a while-you could tell from the junk. The newspapers he used for the bed go back several weeks. So do the expiration dates on some of the food wrappers. Plus there’re all sorts of cigarette butts and gum wads that indicate the regular lifestyle of a single person. A succession of bums wouldn’t have been that consistent.”

“So who spooked him, us or what he saw?”

Her face turned grim. “That’s more than a rhetorical question. Late last night, just before you told us to punch out, one of the people I interviewed told me another guy had offered him five hundred dollars for the same information.”

I sat up straight. “What guy?”

“He never saw him. My informant, Toby, hangs out on Elliot Street. He said he was leaving the Bushnell Apartment block and had ducked down that steep alleyway to the east-the one with the steps leading down-to do a little private drinking, when some man came up behind him, told him not to turn around, and said he’d pay five hundred bucks to whoever would take him to the latest tenant under the Elm Street bridge.”

“The latest tenant? He said that?”

She apologized. “No-those are my words. Toby said he’d look around; the guy said he’d be back in touch, and then he disappeared. Toby told me it’d been like talking to a ghost. He even climbed back up to street level to double-check, although that doesn’t mean much-he’s a pretty slow mover. In any case, to answer your question, it sounds like our bum has all sorts of reasons to make himself scarce.”

I thought back to yesterday afternoon, when I’d stood where our homeless quarry had, on the bank of the river, looking up at the retaining wall. Was he running from us or some killer, or were they one and the same? After all, how did the killer know about the bum in the first place, unless he was in the police department?

Whatever the case, I couldn’t argue the major point. If I was that bum, I’d be hiding in a hole so deep no one would ever find me.