Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

“It’s boiling in here, and noisy.”

“Oh, I guess it is.” He glanced over at the other two. “Why don’t we take a small break?”

The other two filed past me, no doubt wondering where in their job descriptions they’d missed having to play in dirt in a hundred-degree, hundred-decibel closed box.

Tyler tore a paper towel from a wall dispenser and wiped his face. “Well, we’re getting a few things.”

“Like what?”

“A Camel cigarette butt so far, and some dirt that seems like it came from somewhere else.”

“All that dirt came from somewhere else.”

He smiled ruefully, utterly unoffended-a reaction I could usually count on. Tyler was so lost in his own view of the world that irony, along with most other subtle forms of communication, affected him the way a mouse fart does a high wind. This made him both an excellent technical man and a lousy judge of human character. I hoped, definitely for our sake, and perhaps even for his, that he would never be promoted or hired away from the small niche in police work he so perfectly inhabited.

“You’re probably right,” he admitted. “But I thought I might keep a few samples to compare with whatever Hillstrom or the crime lab in Waterbury might come up with. You know, from the shoes and fingernails and whatever.”

I nodded, remembering how clean I thought the dead man’s fingernails had been at the funeral home. I wasn’t too optimistic. “Did the photos come back yet?”

Harriet Fritter had overheard us. “Yes, they did. I put them in J.P.’s top drawer. There was another envelope with ten copies of the head shot. I gave those to Billy to be distributed to the patrol.”

Harriet was a robust, widowed mother of five, grandmother of eight, and great-grandmother of an infant girl. She seemed born to the task of making order out of chaos and, in the managing of her burgeoning brood, had turned discretion into the Eleventh Commandment. She’d come to us one year ago, looking for a challenging way to fill her hours, and had proved to be a paper-management wizard, an ability which had allowed me to stay being a cop instead of becoming an office jockey. If anyone asked me who really headed the detective bureau, I was hard pressed to deny her the honor.

Tyler tore off his rubber gloves and crossed over to his partitioned cubicle, right next to Klesczewski’s, wiping his sweaty hands on his apron. He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a fat manila envelope. “Needless to say, I haven’t looked at them yet.”

He poured out about seventy eight-by-ten glossies-two film rolls’ worth, one taken by Patrolman Pierre Lavoie right after the construction crew called us in, the other taken by Tyler during the excavation, detailing its progress.

I pulled out one near the top of the pile. “This is what caught Ernie Wallers’s eye-these smooth footprints.” Wallers had been afraid he’d covered them all when he’d dug the hole down to the dead man’s hand, but the photo I was holding showed at least one print, clean and in sharp focus, with a ruler laid alongside for reference. Lavoie had been very thorough.

Tyler looked at the picture carefully, his face peaceful and content. When there was none of this kind of work to be done, he was just another detective, digging into burglaries, car thefts, assaults, or anything else that came our way. To him, those times represented the desert between oases.

“Looks like one of those comfort-tread shoes: soft crepe sole running flat from toe to heel.”

I thought of the print I’d made for Ernie Wallers in the dust. It had been similar, smooth and even, with no cut where standard soles curved away from the ground to make way for a hard, half-round heel. “Like what cops wear.”

“Cops, nurses, ambulance attendants, people with bad feet. Here’s where we found the cigarette.” He showed me a photo of a patch of earth to the right of the partially uncovered body.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s not there; this is an early shot. I’m just saying that’s where it was-some two inches or so below the surface, meaning it was tossed there partway through the burial.”

“Or placed to look that way.”

He gave me an odd look. “You have a devious mind.”

I couldn’t deny it. I’d always thought it was an occupational hazard. “What’d you find under the bridge?”

“Haven’t had time to analyze it yet. One thing, though-the guy obviously loved gum, and he wasn’t particular. What you and Ron found was the latest sample, but he made lots of deposits. The neat thing is, he always lumped three sticks together to make a bigger wad.”

“Three sticks at once? That’s enough to choke on.”

Tyler wrinkled his nose. “Yeah. The point being, it’s a personality trait-something he always does. I thought you might like that as a tidbit till I can really look into the rest of it.”

The phone buzzed on Harriet’s desk. She left Ron’s cubicle, picked it up, and motioned to me to grab it on Tyler’s extension.

“Gunther.”

“Hi, Joe.” I recognized Billy Manierre’s softly paternal voice. “John Woll just walked in-said he heard about the body on the radio. I showed him the photograph. Turns out he knew the guy.”

I thanked him and hung up the phone. It should have been good news, which of course it was. But I didn’t feel elated. Somehow, in my subconscious, a warning bell sounded in the distance. Perhaps it was the coincidence that the same officer who could identify our John Doe was also the one whose squad car was last seen parked near his grave.

John Woll and Billy Manierre were in the patrol lieutenants’ office on the other side of the building’s main corridor. Like my office, it had a rectangular window looking into the larger room outside-the patrol division’s so-called officers’ room. Unlike my office, it had only that window, being an interior room, and its view was one of utter confusion and bedlam. For while the lieutenants’ office had been completed just the week before, the officers’ room still looked like a practice hall for aspiring carpenters.

I stepped over piles of two-by-fours, tangles of extension cords, and around several stranded sawhorses to get to the office door. During the renovation, the patrol division had been relocated across the hall to our side of the building, in a large, dark room with no long-range purpose. Eventually, one corner of it was slated to become Billy Manierre’s office, but for the moment, Billy had commandeered his present abode, despite its being both isolated from the rest of us and located smack-dab in the eye of the renovator’s storm. I noticed as I crossed the threshold that the wall-to-wall carpeting, still smelling strongly of its chemical origins, was embedded with a snow-like trail of sawdust.

Billy Manierre, big-bellied, white-haired, and patrician in the deputy chief’s dark-blue uniform he preferred over street clothes, filled the fanciest tilt-back, swivel office chair in the department, an item we were all convinced he’d intercepted on its way to the equally fancy new Court Building across the street. Opposite him sat John Woll, late twenties, narrow-bodied, thin-haired, wearing a permanent expression of weariness that made him look fifteen years older. He’d been on the force two years, was hard-working if uninspired, and was liked by just about everybody.

I perched on the corner of Billy’s desk, noticing the photograph of the dead man lying next to me. “So, you knew this man?”

Woll nodded. “I went to school with him. His name was Charlie Jardine.”

“What school?”

“Here-Brattleboro Union High.”

“What year was he, same as you?”

“Yeah, ’81.”

I paused to pick up the photograph. Woll’s answers were perfectly straightforward but somehow terse. Given the circumstances-his being the one man in the department with important knowledge-I would have expected more excitement from him. Instead, he was waiting for the questions, apparently unwilling to supply what should have been a torrent of information, both trivial and vital.