“Who got the scholarship instead?”
“No one did. Woll didn’t back out until it was too late to assign another recipient; selfish as well as stupid.”
“Who was the girl that got him sidetracked?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gunther, how the hell would I remember that?”
Again, Dunn’s soft voice floated down the table. “Let’s try to stay cooperative, Luman.”
But we’d lost our advantage; no longer unsure of himself, he tilted his head back slightly and stared at us in contempt. “You people don’t know what you’re after, wandering all over the map, asking me about old students. Did you really think you could tie me in with Jardine’s killing? You must be scared to death of me to try something like that.”
Brandt’s voice was tight with anger. “You shot a police officer tonight, Jackson; would’ve killed him if he hadn’t been wearing armor. Shot at Joe, too, for that matter.”
Jackson’s face reddened. “Just a minute; you never identified yourselves as police. I was defending myself, in fear for my life. I could probably sue you for reckless endangerment.”
Dunn rose and looked down at him. “That’s your privilege, certainly.”
“Good. That’s what I’ll do, then. I want to call my lawyer.”
The State’s Attorney smiled thinly. “You can call him on your own time, Luman. Right now, I’m recommending you be formally cited for attempted murder and released pending the appropriate judicial proceedings.”
Jackson looked at us, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “Fuck you, Jimmy boy. You want to get in a pissing match with me? That’s fine, but be prepared to lose a lot more than this bullshit case. And that goes for the rest of you, too.”
Dunn reached over without a word and turned off the tape recorder.
· · ·
By the time I got downstairs to the tiny interrogation room tucked into a corner of the detective bureau, Fred McDermott had been waiting for over an hour. Despite the coffee that Sammie Martens had supplied him, he looked utterly beat, his face drawn, his eyes at half-mast, and his hair tousled where he’d run his fingers through it countless times.
I paused before actually entering the room and stepped inside the observation cubicle adjoining it. A one-way mirror separated the two. Sammie Martens appeared at my side, sipping from a cup.
“What do you think?” I asked her. “What’s his role in all this?”
She shrugged. “Who’s to know? Normally, you get as much evidence against a guy as we have against Fred, he ends up fitting the part. But Fred hasn’t budged from looking as innocent as the first day we focused on him, which in my book either makes him one hell of an actor, or the victim of one hell of a frame.”
“What is the evidence so far?”
“He was at Horton Place when Milly bought the farm, he was dogging Toby’s last residence just before Toby disappeared, he has no alibi for when the van almost ran you over, the bug was found in his office, he’s got a nice, fat secret savings account, and he showed up tonight at the high school.”
“And on the plus side?”
“His wife supplied him with alibis for the nights Jardine and Woll died, and he looks like my uncle, who’s a priest. Also, he’s got no record and has never displayed any obvious signs of wealth. As far as we can tell, that bank account has only received money; nothing’s ever been taken out.”
I nodded. “The chief’s still upstairs with Dunn doing paperwork. Tell him I’m going to interview Fred in the parking lot, just for safety’s sake.”
Sammie glanced up at the ceiling as if it were dripping microphones. “Kind of gives you the creeps, doesn’t it?”
Fred McDermott was obviously delighted to get out of the small interrogation room. He paused on the edge of the parking lot at the back of the Municipal Building and filled his lungs with air as if we were camping by the side of a mountain lake.
It was still dark, but just barely. The first half-light of dawn was beginning to slip between dark objects and their backgrounds, bringing them into relief. I led the way to a grassy slope under some trees and sat down. McDermott joined me, awkwardly placing his hands on his chubby knees. He didn’t ask why I’d brought him out here.
“Fred, you said you got a call telling you to meet me at the high school, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” His head bobbed several times too many, a reflection of just how baffled he still was after the night’s activities.
“Did the voice sound familiar at all? Did he identify himself?”
“No, I didn’t know who it was. He just said he was calling from the police department with a message from you.”
“Did he specify the time and location?”
“Oh, yes; the middle-school entrance on the south side at midnight.”
“And you were to go inside the building?”
“That’s right; go inside and wait.”
“You didn’t ask why? It was kind of an odd request, wasn’t it?”
“Well, I was curious, but I didn’t really get a chance. He just made sure I had it right, and then he hung up. Oh, and he said it was confidential and to keep it to myself.”
“What time did he call?” I asked.
“It was late, around ten-thirty.”
I paused at that. If he was being truthful, that was right after Pierre’s bogus call to me setting up the meet. Apparently, our elaborate hoax had been a failure from the start. Our eavesdropper must have been standing around, knowing what we were up to, just waiting for the location so he could put his game plan into motion.
“Fred,” I resumed, “do you have any particular bone to pick with Luman Jackson, professionally or otherwise?”
He shook his head. “I barely know the man.”
“But you came to him complaining that we were putting pressure on you.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, no. He came to me. He said he’d heard about it someplace and wanted to know if it was true. I told him we’d talked, that it had startled me a bit, but it hadn’t particularly bothered me. I’d just figured you were doing your job.”
“He didn’t identify his source of information?”
McDermott paused, and his face furrowed in concentration, but I knew what he’d say before he said it.
“No, I’m sure he didn’t say.”
I shifted focus abruptly, trying to catch him off balance. “What’re you doing with almost fifty thousand dollars in the bank, listed under a phony name?”
He looked at me blankly for a moment, then blinked and stared harder, as if my nose had suddenly sprouted flowers. “What?”
I plowed on, despite his blatant incredulity. “We found a listening device in the ceiling of my office, hooked to a transmitter under your filing cabinet. Combining that with your always showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time with these killings, we got a search warrant and dug into your bank records. It wasn’t hidden too well.”
He shook his head, his mouth partly open. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Joe. I’ve never had fifty thousand in the bank. I’ve never had that kind of money anywhere.”
“Regular deposits, nice fat ones, made out to Fred Ellison, who happens to have your home address and your first and middle names.”
He spread his hands out to each side in symbolic surrender. He was so taken aback by the suggestion, he wasn’t even irritated at our invading his privacy. “I swear to God, I don’t know anything about it. I know I keep saying that, like when I showed up at that murder scene just as it was going off, but I’m innocent. I don’t know why, but somebody must have it in for me, ’cause I haven’t done a thing, honest.”
His eyes were wide and soft, devoid of the calculation and malice I’d seen in Jackson’s just a half hour before. I stared off over the parking lot, now lit by an anemic pale-gray sky, plugging what had occurred over the last few hours into what we already knew. McDermott stayed quiet and still beside me.
I finally looked at him again. “Have you ever had anything to do with the Brattleboro Union High School?”
He half shrugged. “Sure, I have to inspect it every once in a while, just like I do all the other schools.”
“How about in some other capacity? Did you attend school there?”
“No. I lived in Rutland as a kid.”
“Ever have any problems in your role as inspector?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Everybody slips up now and then. When I found something out of line at the school, I just told the assistant principal and it was taken care of.”
“A few years ago, they had to tear a lot of asbestos out. Did you catch any flak for that?”
“No. People were unhappy; said they’d lived through it fine and didn’t see that their kids were doing any worse, but that was just normal complaining. I mean, hell, it hit my taxes, too. I wished like crazy I could have told them it was no problem.”
I thought about it some more. “How about any of the people there? Ever get into a tangle with one of the teachers or maintenance staff?”
He just kept shaking his head.
I saw Brandt appear at the back door of the building and look around. I waved to him and turned to McDermott. “Hang on a sec, would you? Be right back.”
Brandt nodded toward McDermott as I approached. “Getting anywhere?”
“Not yet. I just started fishing for a high-school angle.”
“You really think that’s where it all ties together?”
I looked back at the round building inspector, perched on the slope like a soft boulder. “I don’t know… A hunch. I keep thinking all this began a long time ago, like when Jardine and Rose and John Woll first met up.”
“In high school,” Brandt finished.
“Yeah, the same place Jackson taught.”
“And the same place you chose for your wishful-thinking bushwhacking tonight. You do that on purpose?”
I tilted my head to one side. “I don’t know. Maybe subconsciously. It was the only other place besides the Municipal Building in which a few of the players had a common link.”
Brandt shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve known three of them were connected through high school from the start of this thing. You’ve had people checking into that for days with nothing to show for it.”
“Maybe the fact that we knew it early on made it unremarkable; we knew John and Rose had to have met somewhere, so Jardine having been their classmate was the only coincidence. And in a town this size, it wasn’t much of one. Then came Milly. There was no school connection there, but it introduced the whole drug angle, which introduced us to Cappelli and Atwater and the others. We lost sight of the original connection.”
“Which Luman Jackson has just revived.”
“Yeah; there’s something else, though. Look at who we’re dealing with. It’s not some guy discovering his partner was skimming the profits, or his wife was fooling around. We’re after someone with some serious anger here. Jardine was executed with amazing forethought. His killer thought for a long time, years probably, about the best way to do it. He researched it like a guy building an atom bomb, fantasizing about how he’d like to do it, then finding a way to make the fantasy real. He found out about curare, God knows how, and then discovered how he could get his hands on some. He stole just enough, months in advance. See what I’m saying? This guy was burning like a long, slow fuse.”
“No argument. So how does it connect to high school?”
“Because that’s their common ground. We saw this as a triangle at first—two guys falling out over a woman—but once we figured John Woll was being framed, or at least put it in our thinking, that meant a fourth person had to be factored in. Combine that with the way Jardine was killed, with a calculating hatred, and the way John was framed, and you’ve got someone who must have been a part of the high-school crowd; someone who’d been wounded by Jardine especially, but also by the other two…”
“Joe, down boy. My God, you’re laying this whole thing out like it wasn’t entirely your own imagination.”
“But it fits. If you accept that John was framed and that the list we found in Milly’s apartment was planted, you’ve accepted that the guy we’re after is no dummy. He’s smart; he’s a planner; he’s a puzzle master, if you like. What we’ve been doing is trying to fit the pieces to the puzzle he arranged for us. What we need to do is find the pieces of the puzzle he’s a part of.”
Brandt sighed and shrugged. “Hey, why not? Lead the way.” We both walked back to McDermott and sat on either side of him, the three of us looking like spectators waiting for a parade.
“Fred,” I picked up, “we were talking about any connection you might have had with the high school.”
He nodded. “I don’t really have any. I’ve been thinking about it while you two were talking. I never worked there, never had any major problems with them as inspector. My wife and I are childless, so I didn’t have any kids go there. I can’t think of a thing.”
Brandt spoke up. “How about something less directly connected? A run-in with someone who worked at the school, or some outfit with a major contract with them, like a roofing contractor or something?”
McDermott kept shaking his head.
“Maybe a more personal angle,” I said. “A friend, an enemy, a lover?”
McDermott chuckled. “My wife?”
But I persisted. “How about before her?”
His face reddened slightly. “Oh, you know… Well… There is no connection.”
“What?”
“It’s a little embarrassing. It did happen before I was married, almost twenty years ago. I had an affair with a married woman, but there’s no connection there to the high school.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t work out; I suppose those things rarely do. I did love her, but it became too complicated. The husband was very angry; it ended in divorce. She doesn’t live here anymore; I think I heard she’d died a year or two ago.”
“Were there any kids involved?”
“One, a small boy. You know him, in fact. Buddy Schultz.”
“The janitor?” I said.
“That’s right.”
I pictured Buddy in my mind, a tall, skinny, shy loner with a fondness for books and isolation. He was about the same age as Jardine and the Wolls, just under thirty. I glanced at Brandt.
He got up. “I think Ron has a copy of the school yearbook in his desk. I’ll go get it.”
McDermott and I watched him go.
“How did his parents’ breakup hit him?” I asked.