Scent of Evil Read online

  “One thing to remember, for those of you who haven’t done too many of these canvasses: We don’t have anything so far. The trick is to make people open up, to give you what they’ve got. Don’t rush them, don’t finish their sentences for them, let them gossip if necessary. Somebody might know somebody who knows somebody who saw something, and we won’t find that last somebody unless we’re all ears right now. Good luck. Ron will give you specific assignments.”

  I broke away from the huddle and crossed to where State’s Attorney James Dunn was getting out of his car. By Vermont law, an appointed representative from the SA’s office is supposed to make an appearance at the scene of a possible homicide. Usually, it’s the low man on the SA’s totem pole. In Brattleboro, it’s usually The Man Himself.

  James Dunn was tall, pale, thin, and arrogant—a stone gargoyle who’d given up his perch to settle disdainfully among us mere mortals. He was good at his job, knew the law inside out, played no favorites, and kept his private passions to himself, except for this one—he loved to see the bodies. No matter the hour or the weather, if we ever came upon a corpse, or even someone close to being one, James—never Jim—Dunn made the show. He never got in the way and was occasionally useful, but I thought this morbid appetite a little odd. And it often made me wonder about his social life.

  “You found a hand?” he asked with a single raised eyebrow.

  “A right hand; buried behind the retaining wall. We’re assuming it was put there last night.”

  He slammed his car door and took long, elegant strides toward the embankment. He was also a bit of a dandy—a lifelong bachelor with an affinity for English clothes. Even in this heat, he wore a dark and natty suit and refused to yield even the slightest sheen of sweat. “Is the hand attached to anyone?”

  “Presumably. We’re finding that out now.”

  J.P., whether following established technique or simply giving in to curiosity, had dug another funnel in the dirt, similar to the one that encased the hand. At the bottom of this one was a man’s face.

  Tyler was delicately whisking away granules of dirt from the body’s mouth, nose, and half-open eyes with a camel’s-hair brush when we arrived at the edge of the road. He leaned back upon hearing us and glanced up. “Look familiar?”

  My own mother wouldn’t have looked familiar. Flat and one dimensional at the bottom of the hole, the pale face looked more like an ancient ceremonial ivory mask, waiting to be discovered and hung on some museum wall.

  Both Dunn and I shook our heads to Tyler’s question. He resumed his excavating.

  I heard Detective Sergeant Dennis DeFlorio, his voice small and tinny, calling me on the radio I had hooked to my belt. “Go ahead,” I answered.

  “You still on Canal Street?”

  “Ten-four.”

  “Can you meet me on the south end of Clark?”

  Clark was the short, horseshoe-shaped residential alleyway behind the small block of businesses facing Canal. Its one-way entrance cut between the businesses and the school to the block’s right, and its outlet appeared back on Canal several hundred yards closer to downtown. Its only function was to provide access to some browbeaten apartments that were shoved hard against the steep wooded slope I’d been studying earlier. As elsewhere in this geographically topsy-turvy town, every square inch of flat land had buildings clustered on it like cows bunched together on hillocks during a flood.

  I started down Clark Street and found DeFlorio coming toward me, his round face red and glistening. The opposite of James Dunn, Dennis was short and fat, given to soiled ties, loose shirttails, and to buckling his belt somewhere out of sight under his belly.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, I figured if I lived here, Clark being the dump it is, I’d be out taking a walk on a hot night, just to get away, you know? Like last night.”

  The one slightly irritating thing about Dennis was his propensity to beat around the bush, as if every declaratory sentence had to be prefaced by an enticing roll of the drum.

  “So where did that lead you?”

  He looked surprised at my thick-headedness. “I know nobody could of seen or heard anything from here, but I figured I’d ask anyway, especially to see if my theory was right.”

  “And it was.”

  “Yeah. I think I nailed down the time of death.” He flipped open the cop’s ubiquitous notebook he held in his soft, damp hand. “A guy named Phil Didry said he was walking along Canal around three this morning when he saw a police car parked with the engine running, right where the body is buried.”

  “One of our cars?”

  “Yeah, I figure someone on the graveyard shift. All we got to do is find out who it was, and we’ll have a pretty good idea when the body got planted.”

  I looked quizzically into his beaming face. “I don’t follow you.”

  DeFlorio’s smile faded slightly. “Don’t you see? We can ask him what it looked like—the dirt. If it was disturbed, then the burial happened before three; if it wasn’t, then it happened later.”

  “Dennis, the dirt never did look disturbed.”

  He looked at me blankly, trying to register this anomaly.

  “Did your witness see the policeman?”

  “No. I don’t think he wanted to hang around. None of these people are too pure, you know.”

  “So what makes you think our patrolman was over the embankment? He might have dropped into Ed’s Diner for a coffee.”

  DeFlorio made a fast mental run for safety. “I know that—I just meant on the off chance that if he did take a look, it would help nail down the time.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded thoughtfully. “It’s an excellent point, Dennis. We’ll check it out.”

  I shook my head as DeFlorio retreated back up the street to shake out some more gems. Not that his witness wasn’t a good find, but DeFlorio’s conclusions rubbed in a fact as painfully obvious to me as it seemed inconceivable to Hollywood: Cops are neither routinely corrupt nor preternaturally heroic, and damn few of them are endowed with the instincts of a Sherlock Holmes. They put in their hours, spending half of those doing paperwork and the other half dealing with cranky citizens, and then they go home.

  In Brattleboro, their problems are compounded. The pay approaches the absurd and—where a homicide or bank robbery comes around once in a blue moon—the boredom can be mind-numbing. It was not an environment to attract either geniuses or careerists. Observations like that, however, can cut close to the bone. I’m no genius either, but no one could say I hadn’t made this business a career. It’s all I’ve done professionally since getting out of the service in the mid-nineteen fifties. Of course, my introduction to police work was different. The pay when I entered wasn’t so balefully lopsided, and the neighborhood foot-patrol cop was a popular and respected figure in a small, almost provincial town where crimes were infrequent, unsophisticated, and easy to solve, and the need for a detective squad didn’t even exist. We’d also had to contend with a quarter of today’s paperwork. By the time it had all begun to change, I’d found myself too settled in to do otherwise.

  Klesczewski met me back on Canal, where I noticed James Dunn was still hovering at the edge of the road, like a raptor looking for mice far below.

  “What did Dennis want?”

  “He found someone who saw one of our patrol cars parked out here around three this morning.”

  Klesczewski raised his eyebrows. “That might be handy. You know who it was?”

  “Not yet. I’ll get hold of George Capullo later.” Capullo was the sergeant for the graveyard shift, and the one who handed out assignments.

  “Well, I got something, too. It’s not much, but I figured you ought to take a look.” I thought back to the way DeFlorio had delivered his report; had it been Klesczewski, he would have escorted me to meet the witness and forced me to interview him all over again, just so nothing was left out. It had never surprised me the two men generally kept their distance from one another.

&nbs
p; I followed Klesczewski toward Ed’s Diner and the concrete barricade the road crew had set up weeks ago, which we were now using as a police line to keep out the public. My heart sank a little as we drew near, for standing on the other side of the listless yellow police line we’d strung across the road was the Brattleboro Reformer’s courts-’n’-cops reporter, Stanley Katz.

  My relationship with Katz was emblematic of all that was wrong between the press and the police. We didn’t like each other, didn’t trust each other, and each of us was generally convinced the world would be a better place without the other. Stanley couldn’t hear the time of day from me without smelling a cover-up, and I couldn’t read beyond his byline on an article without feeling that he’d hyped up the gore and screwed up the facts. The irony was that we knew neither perception was accurate, but our reactions were chemical not rational, a fact to which we’d finally become resigned.

  Katz’s narrow face broke into a wide grin at our approach. “Who belongs to the hand, Lieutenant?”

  “I don’t know, Stanley,” I said, as I squeezed between two of the concrete barricades and under the rope. Klesczewski, who couldn’t tolerate even speaking to Katz, was heading around the corner of Ed’s and down across the sloping Elm Street bridge.

  I saw WBRT news reporter Ted McDonald drive up, park haphazardly near the curb, and struggle to get his massive bulk and tape recorder out of the radio station’s undersized car in one failed fluid movement. His eyes focused on me like a dog’s on dinner.

  “Joe,” he shouted cheerfully.

  I waved to him and heard Katz’s quiet groan. That gave me a gentle pang of pleasure. McDonald was a good old boy, born and raised in Brattleboro, as faithful to the town and its denizens as he was to the flag, and a throwback to the less complicated days I’d been thinking of mere moments ago. In his hourly four-minute news spots, he pretty much reported what he saw and what we told him, with no hype and no prejudicial inflections, which to me was eminently acceptable. Katz had once told me he thought McDonald was a dim-witted, stoolie woodchuck, the last part of which was a derogatory name given local rural folk. Katz was from Connecticut, which we woodchucks saw as a condemnation speaking for itself.

  I waited for Ted to join us, enjoying Katz’s heightening but resigned disgust.

  McDonald’s face was beet red and dripping with sweat. He began fumbling with his tape recorder but stopped when I shook my head. “Sorry, Ted, it’s still too early. We’ve found a body behind the retaining wall, but we haven’t even finished digging it up. We have no who, when, how, or why to give you.”

  Katz gave a condescending smile to the older reporter. “It’s obviously a murder—they just haven’t determined the cause.”

  McDonald’s face brightened, but I smiled and shook my head. “Don’t let him jerk you around. Nobody’s said it was a murder—right now, it’s an unexplained death.”

  Katz fell in beside me as I set off to rejoin Klesczewski. “But he was murdered, right?” Ted lumbered silently behind, noisily pushing buttons on his machine.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “You think he died of natural causes and buried himself? Very considerate.”

  “It’s early on, Stanley. Once we’ve exhumed the body and the medical examiner has had a chance to take a look, we or the state’s attorney’s office will issue a statement.”

  “How was he killed?” Ted asked.

  “We’ve got a hand sticking out of the dirt. We’d like to see the rest of the body first.”

  “So he was killed.” Katz smiled.

  “He’s dead—that’s all we know. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know how he died, and we don’t know if he was killed. We don’t know anything at the moment.”

  “So what are you doing now?”

  We were halfway across the bridge, which sloped steeply from Canal to the Whetstone Brook’s low north bank. Below us, Klesczewski had already jumped the guardrail at the far end of the bridge and was sidestepping down to the edge of the river. I let out a sigh. The sun and the conversation were giving me a headache. “I’m trying to patiently explain that I have nothing to say.”

  Katz tried a more benign approach. “How about off the record? What does the guy look like? What did Dunn have to say?”

  “Nothing. I’m not ducking you, guys. I just don’t have anything.”

  “How about the age of the body? I mean, is it half rotted or does it look fresh?”

  I lifted one leg over the guardrail in order to join Klesczewski. “I got to go to work. Talk to you later.”

  Ted, who by now had gotten the message and was undoing all his button pushing, muttered, “Thanks, Joe.”

  Katz made to follow me.

  I placed my hand gently against his chest. “Where’re you going, Stanley?”

  I half expected some small lecture on the rights of a free press, but even Katz had grown beyond that. Besides, we both knew the unwritten rules of the game, and despite our sparring we observed them. He gave me an infectious grin. “Thought I’d go fishing?”

  I shook my head, unable to suppress a smile myself. “Nice try.”

  I left him on the street and climbed down the bank to where Klesczewski was moodily staring at the water, waiting. “So—what have you got?”

  “It’s over here.” He led the way under the bridge, keeping to the rocks to avoid disturbing the damp soil.

  Once in the shade, I paused and blinked to get used to the low light. It was suddenly delightfully cool, with the sound of water splashing off the concrete bridge that arched overhead, and the shadows flickering with reflected spots of sunlight. There was a slight but permeating odor of rotting vegetation.

  “Nice place.”

  Klesczewski pointed to the narrow wedge where the bank met the underside of the bridge, some six feet up from the water’s edge. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.”

  Running parallel to the brook, a small shelf had been scooped out of the embankment, and on it was a two-inch-thick mattress of old newspapers. Scattered around the shelf was an assortment of everyday trash—bottles, food wrappers, odd scraps of paper, most of it fairly fresh.

  “The Dew Drop Inn, complete with air-conditioning—and recently occupied.”

  Klesczewski nodded. “That’s not all.” He retraced our steps to the opening, so we were half in the shade and half back in the glare. He pointed again to the ground.

  I squatted down, keeping my hands on my knees. Resting on top of the moist, pungent earth was an unusually fat, chewed-up wad of gum, still pink and clean.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Klesczewski looked vaguely uncomfortable. He hadn’t led me all the way down here to hear me ask that. But he had led me, so I knew he’d reached some conclusions.

  “Somebody’s living here, or at least they were, up to a few hours ago. Maybe they saw something.”

  I looked again at the gum, poking at it with a pen I’d removed from my pocket. It was dry, but not rock hard, and its cleanliness attested to its having been spat out within the last half day. “We can’t afford a twenty-four-hour watch on this place, but tell Patrol to keep an eye peeled for anybody coming back here in the next few days. I’d like to talk to the gum-chewer.”

  I glanced over my shoulder, straight across the water and up the opposite bank to where I could see Tyler and his team bent over their work. He didn’t know it yet, but Tyler’s day was going to be full of excavating. At least here, he’d be in the shade.

  2

  BY LATE AFTERNOON WE WERE ALONE, the body and I, in the cool basement embalming room of the McCloskey Funeral Home on Forest Street. Along the walls were a sink and counters, a roll-around cart with a variety of nonsterile surgical instruments whose role here I didn’t want to know, and shelves stocked with row after row of identical plastic bottles filled with variously colored liquids, designed to be injected into bodies to give the skin a perking up. I was sitting in the corner on a metal folding chair. The corpse l
ay face up on a fiberglass table, the bottom of which sloped slightly, so that any fluids accumulating at his feet could be washed down a drainpipe that paralleled one of the table legs.

  Not that there were any fluids. The black-rubber body bag had been completely unzipped, revealing a man still fully clothed in a pair of pale blue slacks and a polo shirt and covered with dirt. He looked like a well-dressed tunnel digger who’d chosen this incongruous spot to catch a couple of minutes of shut-eye.

  The door-to-door canvass for witnesses was continuing, Dunn had finally returned to his office, and Tyler and his crew had switched from the retaining wall to under the bridge. I was waiting for the regional medical examiner, Alfred Gould, to get off the phone and start giving my roommate an external examination.

  The autopsy would not be done in Brattleboro. Beverly Hillstrom, the state’s chief medical examiner, would do that in Burlington, where her office was located. Usually, in a homicide, Hillstrom traveled to the scene, wishing to keep the preliminary autopsy and the crime scene as close to one another as possible. But timing was a problem here; she’d made it clear that if we wanted results within the next forty-eight hours, the body would have to go north, soon.

  It was an irritant. After all, we didn’t know who this man was, and we didn’t know what, or who, had killed him. All we had was the body and little time to pick up a fresh scent. Still, I wasn’t begrudging the point. Although Hillstrom had almost single-handedly made Vermont’s one of the best ME systems around, only her laboratory had all the proper facilities for a complete job. So I had negotiated a compromise: Gould was to do a preliminary once-over before shipping the body north. It was the best deal I could get.

  Alfred Gould walked in, looking starchy and official in a white lab coat he’d borrowed from the funeral director. Examinations of this type were also done at Memorial Hospital, but McCloskey’s was far better for keeping out of sight of the press and other curiosity-seekers.