Scent of Evil (34 page)

Fred McDermott was the kind of man you assumed had a niche in appointed town government. Short, round, with pale, thinning hair and a fondness for TV bowling tournaments, he had the slightly portly, bland-faced quality of the unimaginative bureaucrat, enforcing the rules as they were passed onto him, without challenge or critical judgment. He agreed with those in power, less because he believed power and wisdom were synonymous, and more because power hired and fired. It was an attitude designed to keep his pension-focused mind riveted to his assigned task.

That I had dismissed this man in the context of a case as easily as I had in day-to-day life was bad enough; that by so doing I might have endangered the life of Tobias A. Huntington bordered on criminal stupidity.

I didn’t delude myself into thinking that just because McDermott had surfaced twice in the context of an investigation, it automatically made him a killer. But overlooking him caused me to wonder how much else I had missed.

It was this unhealthy combination of self-doubt, guilt, and embarrassment that had consumed me since leaving the Brooks House tower room. I had dropped by McDermott’s house, a pleasant, middle-class split-level ranch on Wantastiquet Drive, near the Connecticut River, but had learned from neighbors that he and his wife were out to dinner. That had probably been for the best; to interview him now, when I was emotionally off balance, would have been to compound my error. I needed to think, to take the time necessary to see how McDermott might fit in as a major player. I knew I had time; his office was directly over mine, and he would be appearing as usual, bright and early, with a briefcase and paper in one hand and a lunch box in the other.

From one body, a few footprints, and a cigarette butt, I had amassed a fortune in possibilities, plus an additional corpse.

And, to make sense of it all, I had four detectives and a few borrowed patrolmen whose cumulative experience could have been matched by one New York cop with a month on the job.

Still, I was convinced there had to be some logical pattern. McDermott’s appearance had startled me; he’d been in the right place at the right time. He worked in the Municipal Building and often came downstairs to share the police department’s coffee and to shoot the breeze, and thereby pick up information. But for now he was also, like all the others, merely a loose strand.

The phone rang. I picked it up and answered.

“Joe? Are you okay?”

It was Gail, the wrong person at the wrong time. Instead of finding comfort in the gentle tone of her voice, now I found she merely reminded me of another area where I’d recently dropped the ball.

“You sound depressed.”

“Just a little behind on my sleep.”

“How’s it going?”

“Slowly.” I tried willing myself to be more conversational, to lighten my tone, but I didn’t have it in me.

“I tried calling you at home, but when I got no answer, I thought I might find you there. Would you like to come over after you’re through?”

I hesitated before answering. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be, plus I have to talk to someone at the crack of dawn.”

“You’ve got to sleep sometime.”

“I know.” A long silence stretched between us. “I’m sorry I caused you trouble with Jackson.”

“To hell with him. He just surprised me, that’s all. I’m not sure it would have been any easier even if you had warned me.”

I was glad to hear that, but I still remembered the sting of her accusations. I was both surprised and disappointed to find my self-doubt being replaced by resentment; it revealed to me that I, like many of my colleagues, had slipped into a siege mentality.

“Gail, I’ll take a rain check on tonight. I’m too bushed and too swamped. But thanks for the offer. Maybe once this mess is over, we can make up for lost time—go away for a weekend or something.” They were all mechanical phrases and sounded tinny even to me.

Her voice echoed with disappointment. “Sure. Well, I just wanted to say hello… Don’t stay up too late.”

I thought she was going to add something, but after a long pause, which I only later realized I should have filled, the line went dead. I swore to myself and hung up. I couldn’t have devised a better way to further damage my pride.

I heard the bang of the hallway door being kicked open. I leaned forward over my desk to look through my interior window and saw Buddy wrestling his armload of janitorial paraphernalia into the squad room. He glanced up at my movement and wiggled a couple of free fingers at me in greeting. Through my half-open office door, I heard his mumbled, “Hey, Lieutenant.”

I returned the wave and sat back down, uncertain of how I felt about the interruption. He was sensitive enough that if I merely picked up a folder and pretended to be reading, he’d let me be. But I wasn’t sure I wanted that.

When he did gently tap at the door to retrieve the wastepaper basket, I made a point of not appearing overly occupied.

He smiled shyly and nodded toward the fan. “Still doing the trick for you?”

“Yeah. Thanks again.”

“No problem. It was a pleasure.”

He pulled a plastic garbage bag from his pocket and snapped it open, preparing it to receive my refuse. He paused and then said tentatively, “You folks sound like you’re in pretty hot water.”

I shrugged. “Sounds worse than it is. That’s what sells newspapers.”

“So you’re doing all right?” he asked, as he reached for my wastebasket.

“Not too bad,” I answered, thinking of McDermott.

He beamed. “That’s good. I was talking to a friend of mine, and he kept saying you didn’t know what you were doing. I said you did, but you couldn’t say so ’cause of security reasons.”

“You got it, Buddy.”

There was an awkward pause. I picked up a folder and opened it. Buddy quickly replaced my empty trash bin. “Well, I got to get back to work, Lieutenant. I’ll close the door on my way out so the vacuum don’t bother you.”

“Thanks, Buddy.”

“No problem.” He smiled awkwardly. “Stay cool.”

I returned the smile as the door shut and he passed in front of the glass panel. Stay cool. That’s what my nemesis was doing: taking care of business until I could find a way to stop him.

I WAS WAITING OUTSIDE
Fred McDermott’s door when he walked in at 7:45.

He looked surprised to see me, perhaps even startled. “Hi, Joe, long time. How’s the investigation going?” He fumbled to extract his keys from his pocket, dropped them, and let out a nervous laugh as he bent over to retrieve them. “Oh, oh. Sign of a bad day coming.”

I followed him inside. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

The dimensions of his office were almost precisely the same as mine, but he still had the older, taller ceiling, and no window to the reception area. The mad renovator had yet to cast his hellish spell on McDermott’s corner of the building. Indeed, he even had an air-conditioner, which he switched on before putting his briefcase on the desk. The initial blast of warm air smelled dusty and oddly electrical.

He motioned me to sit, as he did so himself. He looked quite pleased at my comment. “Bringing me in as an expert witness?”

“No. I’m interested in what you were doing on Horton Place the day Milly Crawford was killed.” I’d picked my words carefully, fully intending their implied suspicion.

His face went through a fast series of expressions, from very still to bemused to mournful. “Yeah, can you believe that? Talk about bad timing. You guys scared the hell out of me.”

“What were you doing there?”

He blinked at me several times in silence, as if slowly getting the gist of my question. “I went there to meet someone…”

“Who?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly. I got a phone call from some guy, telling me he was working on that new motel going up near the
Reformer
building, and that there were a bunch of violations he thought I should know about.”

“He told you to meet in Milly’s building?”

“In the alleyway out back.”

“When did you get the call?”

“Just before. He sounded real nervous, said he’d been sitting on this a long time, trying to get up the nerve to tell someone. I drove right over and got there just as everything went crazy.”

“If the guy was on the motel job, why wasn’t he working then? It was the middle of the day.”

McDermott’s mouth was now half open. “I get calls like that all the time, pissant stuff, like when some tenant gets mad at a landlord.”

“You get a similar call to go to the Brooks House yesterday?”

The mouth fell all the way. “Have you been following me?”

“Let’s say we’ve been bumping into you. What did the guy sound like who called you out to Milly’s neighborhood?”

He gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. Intense—talking about how people were going to die if the motel went up the way it was being built.”

“Didn’t any of that strike you as unusual?”

“Well, sure, but if what he was saying was true… I mean, I wasn’t going to tell him to call my secretary for an appointment.”

“Did you hear or see anyone or anything unusual?”

He loosened his tie. “No. No one showed up.”

“Anyone enter the building?”

“A couple of kids left just before all hell broke loose, but that was it. I never heard any shots or anything.”

“You never heard from the guy who’d called you?”

McDermott shook his head. “I went out to the motel site; checked it over with a fine-tooth comb. Place was as clean as a whistle; it’s being built closer to code than my own house.”

“Who called you about Brooks House?”

He held up his hand at my renewed, colder tone of voice. “Joe, do you think I’m up to something? ’Cause if you do, maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

Good move, I thought, too much naïveté could be as bad as too little. “Do you feel the urge to call your lawyer?”

He loosened his already tortured tie some more. “The urge? I want to know if there’s a need. What the hell is going on?”

His voice had finally gained an edge. “We have a lot of people out there right now looking under every rock they can find. If a name pops up, we check it out. Yours popped up twice, once at Milly’s place, and again when we were speaking with the manager of the Brooks House. What brought you out to Brooks House, Fred?”

“Again, I got a call, from somebody telling me—”

“Same guy as before?”

“Huh? No, this one had an accent.”

“But it was a man?”

“Yeah.”

“Could the accent’ve been faked?”

He paused, his brow furrowed. “Well, I… Maybe. I don’t know; I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, I hadn’t put the two voices together before.”

“What did the guy tell you?”

“He said Weller was renting out his tower room to a bunch of bums, that they were using the fire escape as a front door, and that, quote-unquote, ‘weird shit’ was going on in the apartment that the town ought to know about.”

“This caller didn’t leave a name or number?”

“No, but when I went over there, I had a feeling there might be something to it. The fire escape had obviously been used, and a few of the other tenants admitted hearing people going over the roof. And Weller was very belligerent. Still, I can’t do anything until I catch them at it, which isn’t likely. I don’t have the staff.”

“You didn’t see any of them?”

“No. Of course, Weller wouldn’t let me into his apartment. He might have had an army of bums in there, for all I know. I looked around from the outside, you know, checking out the fire escape, but I didn’t see anything that caught my eye.”

I let a few seconds of silence pass by. Now was the time for him to flaunt his innocence again, to bring up lawyers and the appearance that he felt he’d been falsely accused.

He remained quiet.

I got up and moved toward the door.

“Joe,” he blurted out, like an actor missing his cue.

I paused at the threshold.

He gave me an awkward smile. “I’m not in any trouble, am I? You’re not thinking I had anything to do with people dying?”

I hesitated. Nothing he’d told me had diminished him as a suspect, which meant he was either as pure as fresh snow or very clever. “I don’t know what to think, Fred. Sure as hell somebody killed those people.”

· · ·

I had left a note with Harriet to schedule a staff meeting at eight, after I’d finished with McDermott. I therefore entered a detective bureau that was fully manned and waiting. Everyone followed me into the meeting room.

I waited for them to sit. “We found Charlie Jardine in the ground four long days ago. That’s not good for our side. Assuming John Woll’s innocent, then the scent that might lead us to Jardine’s killer is getting colder and colder. That means we’re going to have to depend on each other like never before. This is the first time the entire squad has had to work on a single case. We all have different styles, different paces, and I know that can cause problems.”

No one debated the point. “If you start running into each other, I want to hear about it. Maybe we can arrange it so the friction is reduced. But keep in mind, there aren’t enough of us to go around, so there’ll be some head butting.”

There were some barely discernible nods around the table.

“Okay, in case anyone is keeping score, we now have three lawsuits filed against us and a fourth pending. Mark Cappelli and the motorist who almost got swiped by one of our guys have been joined by the bridge-repair people, and Arthur Clyde is still scratching his head on whether to join the crowd or not.”

I paused to let the bad news settle in. “The point to all this is: forget it. Let everyone else focus on the fireworks. The more we stick to our job, the more likely it is we’ll come out ahead. Let’s go over what we have so far.”

I filled them in on what Willette had dug up on Jardine and ABC Investments, underscoring what I’d put in my daily report.

Klesczewski cleared his throat. “It sounds like hard evidence might be a little difficult to come by on that.”

“Maybe. We may not need it if we can get other people to corroborate Willette’s suspicions. Ron, you were looking into the names on Milly’s list; what’ve you got so far? Do the two Putney Road bankers have a connection with ABC?”