Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

“Finding much?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I’d say the guy was a monk if it weren’t for all the women on his answering machine. I’ve seen two-year-olds with more material possessions.”

Klesczewski gave an uncharacteristic smirk. “He was no two-year-old, and I think his interests were way outside religion.”

He crooked a finger at me and led the way upstairs. Given the layout of the house on the ground floor, I expected a conventional equivalent above. I was dead wrong. The entire second floor consisted of two enormous rooms-a bedroom and a bathroom, both of which had cathedral ceilings going right up to the apex of the roof.

The contrast didn’t stop there. The rooms were not only disproportionately large, they were also as gaudily furnished as the downstairs was staid. The bed was circular, huge, and covered with a fake-fur coverlet and black satin sheets. It was a four-poster, but instead of supporting the traditional fabric canopy, the posts carried a round mirror reflecting back down on the bed.

There was also a fireplace-gas-fired for intimacy at the twist of a wrist and flanked by mirrored panels-and before it was an eight-foot-square fur rug with pillows. One wall had an elaborate stereo and TV system, controlled by a couple of remote units I saw parked on the half-round headboard of the bed, next to copies of The Joy of Sex and The Sensual Massage . The lighting was dim and indirect, as if designed for some Hollywood seduction scene. The walls were painted a dark, sensuous red.

The bathroom was similarly excessive, with thick rugs, a Jacuzzi, and a separate glass-walled shower stall so big it had several nozzles and a redwood bench inside. Again, mirrors predominated throughout.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered at last. “Looks like a whorehouse.”

“Does seem he had a one-track mind. There’s a ton of massage oils and weird creams in there, plus a couple of vibrators.” He gestured to a cabinet over one of the two sinks.

“What else did you find?” I could tell from his expression that Klesczewski was feeling terribly proud of himself, especially knowing of my own slim pickings downstairs.

He smiled and led me back into the bedroom. Along another wall, next to the closet door, was a long, low set of drawers. Klesczewski pulled one all the way out and laid it on the floor. “Look at the back.”

I did and found taped there a Ziploc freezer bag filled with white powder.

“I didn’t touch it, but I don’t guess it’s sugar.” He paused and frowned. “I always thought coke was supposed to kill your sex drive.”

“Maybe he wasn’t the one using it.”

Klesczewski looked slightly abashed. “Oh-right.”

“Holy fuck.”

We both turned to see Al Santos standing at the top of the stairs, looking around as if he’d just been exposed to the Sistine Chapel.

Ron laughed. “Yeah. Literally.”

I placed a call to J.P. Tyler to let him know what we’d found, and asked him to come over and collect the cocaine. He could check the house more carefully tomorrow, but for now I wanted at least that one piece of evidence under lock and key in the Municipal Building.

Santos and Mayhew took us on a tour of other parts of the house.

It became apparent that a good deal of what I’d been missing in my search had merely been relegated to less traveled areas. Both the basement and the garage appeared more normal than the first floor. They were cluttered with skis and winter clothing and empty suitcases and automobile parts and boxes of conventional books. Somehow, that discovery set my mind at ease. I was no closer to finding out why or by whom Charlie Jardine had been killed, but at least now I felt he’d been a real-if slightly exotic-human being.

I had Mayhew relieve Santos in babysitting the house. The graveyard shift would take over in a quarter hour in any case, since it was now almost midnight. The dread of the publicity and the bureaucratic hassles that had crept into me when we’d uncovered Jardine’s body had by now been replaced by the familiar adrenaline of the hunt. Driving back to the police department with a boxful of evidence in my car trunk made me regret that in order to be halfway functional tomorrow, I would have to call it quits soon and go home to bed.

I parked near the department’s private outside door, right beside where John Woll, now in uniform, was getting out of the passenger seat of his own car. His wife, Rose, leaned out the window as he circled around and kissed him good-night.

I’d seen her before at department get-togethers, a pretty, slightly plump, dark-haired woman with an overly and permanently anxious face. I waved to her before I opened my trunk to retrieve the box.

She waved back and then called out to Woll, who was halfway up the steps to the entrance. “John, you forgot your lunch box.”

He returned and took it from her, muttering a greeting to me. I stood at the back of my car, watching her drive away and hearing the door slam shut behind him, my heart hammering and my previous good mood destroyed.

The sense of dread I’d experienced earlier, of being in the way of some threat as implacable as fate, caught hold of me again. Only this time, recognition had made it abruptly more pressing; the urgency I felt now had less to do with solving a complex crime quickly, and more to do with the department’s self-preservation.

The voice I had heard on Charlie Jardine’s answering machine, the hesitant one who’d left no clear message, had belonged to Rose Woll.

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.