Scent of Evil (2 page)

I made a mental note to have Tyler check out the end of the probe, and to match whatever he found to the mark it would have left on the body. “Did you notice anything unusual about the dirt before you went for a sample—like footprints or any signs of digging?”

He shook his head. “Just the opposite. I tested there because it looked cleaner than anywhere else. There were footprints—we walk back and forth along there all the time—but not as many, like they’d only been put there today.”

“And that layer of dirt has been there longer than that?”

“Yeah.” Wallers’s voice was picking up interest, now that I’d warmed him up. He got to his feet and I followed him over to the jagged edge of the road. He pointed to the two-hundred-foot long ledge below us. “The way this works, we build up a few feet of wall, and then we fill in behind it, from left to right. Then we tamp it down with a compactor, do some borings to make sure the soil is compressed to within specs, and start all over again. We’d compacted the spot I was testing around mid-morning yesterday. It took us the rest of the day to finish that layer to the far end, and today we’ve just been building wall. So we’ve been walking on that particular dirt for almost two days.”

“Why did you think that one spot was cleaner?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t give it any thought; not then. It just caught my eye, so I drilled it. I have to do a bunch of borings along the whole length of this thing anyway, so it doesn’t much matter where I do them.”

“Can you think back and remember if any of the footprints looked unusual or out of place?”

He smiled. “You mean before I dug that hole and covered them all up?”

I didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question for him and spilled milk for me—at least he’d been curious enough to dig in the first place, and smart enough to stop once he’d uncovered the hand.

Wallers bent his head and thought for a moment, his eyes half closed in concentration. I was pleased with his deliberate cooperation. In over thirty years as a policeman in this town, I’d encountered every conceivable reaction to questioning like this, from obsequious babbling to a wild punch. Thoughtfulness was a cherished rarity, especially at the start of a felony crime investigation.

He rubbed the back of his neck and gave a rueful smile. “I don’t know. The more I think about it, the less sure I am.”

“About what?”

“Well, I think there was something different. We all wear construction boots, with lug soles.” He made an impression in the dust to prove the point. “Maybe there were others there that were smooth, like yours.”

I stepped back, so that my print was next to his. He studied them both for a moment. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’m making it up with all the excitement. It was like an impulsive thing to bore right there, you know? I wasn’t really paying attention.”

I squeezed his elbow. “You’ve been very helpful. Sorry this had to happen.”

He gave a little humorless laugh. “Something I can tell my grandchildren some day.”

I left him and walked back to where Klesczewski was gathering an ever-growing collection of police officers, patrolmen, necktied detectives, and a group of men and women who had obviously been called away either from home or from the off-duty, part-time jobs many of them held down to buttress their meager municipal wages.

“Everyone here?” I asked him.

“Close enough to start handing out assignments.”

I nodded and glanced over the embankment. Tyler—short, thin, bespectacled, and in constant nervous motion—was organizing a small team of policemen/archaeologists to grid, sketch, collect, bag, and label the dirt covering the body. It would take them hours to dig down four feet, and days to sift the dirt and completely analyze what they found.

I turned my back on the construction site and the Whetstone Brook valley beyond it. Across Canal Street, the topography was just the reverse. Behind a low, four-business block of buildings fronting the street and a residential alleyway in back, the ground rose steeply to a wooded plateau that looked deceptively unpopulated. It actually held almost a fourth of the city, but from where I stood, I could just see the roofs of a couple of the older homes high against the skyline—the rest looked like wooded wilderness.

“Not a great place for finding casual eyewitnesses, is it?”

Ron Klesczewski was standing next to me, scanning the same view.

He was right. The street had been blocked off for days; the four businesses opposite the scene were closed at night, as were the warehouses on the other side of Whetstone Brook. To the right of the small block of businesses was a school, to the left were four similar weather-beaten homes of dissimilar colors. On our side of Canal, there was a destitute apartment building clinging to the slope at one end of the retaining wall, and tiny Ed’s Diner at the other end, neither of which had many windows facing the gap between them. Last but not least, this was one of the town’s most rundown sections, populated by people whose pride ran more on what they wouldn’t tell the police than on what they could.

I sighed and turned toward the hot and sweating group clustered in the dusty middle of the street. “Looks like we have a murder. It’s an educated guess that it occurred sometime last night. Go for the obvious places”—I pointed at the dilapidated apartment building and the four small houses opposite it—“but don’t miss the possibility that people were out strolling, that windows were open, that things might have been heard but not seen.”

I aimed my fingers across the narrow valley at the buildings clinging to the slope below Elliot Street. “I’d check over there. It looks far away, but some people have binoculars and telescopes. On a hot night, they tend to hang around the windows, trying to catch the cool air. The high-rise is good for that.”

The high-rise was actually the Elliot Street Apartments, a seven-story, modern brick federal housing project, whose broad but distant front directly faced us. I’d found in the past it had many of the same advantages of a first-class intelligence listening post—it was tall, centrally located, had balconies facing every which way, and was jammed with aspiring spies.

“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.

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.