Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

“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.

“Pretty hard. I guess. He was kind of a strange kid anyway, moody and withdrawn. Very attached to his mother; the two of them had a special bond. She could make him come out of his shell like no one else. Then he could be really sweet. He’s still like that, kind of hot and cold, although I barely see him anymore. He doesn’t start work till after I’ve left, most of the time.”

“Does he hold you responsible for his parents divorcing?”

McDermott tilted his head. “I don’t see how he couldn’t. They probably would have broken up sooner or later anyhow, but I was right in the middle of it.”

“And Buddy knew about you.”

“Oh, yes, I was around, trying to give Mary support.”

“How’s he react to you now?”

“Buddy? We don’t have much to say to each other. It was a long time ago. We mostly just say hi to each other in the hallway once in a while.”

He paused and shook his head as Brandt came out of the building and headed back in our direction, the yearbook in his hand. “It’s odd when you think about it; if things had turned out differently, I might have been his stepfather.”

Brandt stood before us, holding the book open so we could both see its contents. Under the picture of a younger, more sullen-looking Buddy was the caption, “Wendell Schultz, Jr.”

“What do you think?” Brandt asked.

“I think the tables just turned.”

We met in a twenty-by-twenty-foot meeting room at the Quality Inn on the Putney Road, just across from the enormous C amp;S warehouse. I had booked the room in person and had spread the word to everyone to gather there, just twenty minutes before, using the lobby telephone. I was hoping this spur-of-the moment planning would assure me of absolute secrecy. J.P. had swept the rest of the police department by now and had found two other bugs, but I still wasn’t convinced his battered AM radio had caught them all, nor had he made that claim.

I stood up at the head of the long, broad table. Going down either side, with plenty of empty space between each of them, were Brandt, James Dunn, J.P., Sammie, Dennis, Ron with his leg parked on the chair next to him, and now, Willy Kunkle. Willy, predictably, had chosen to sit at the other end, so that we faced each other like estranged parents at an awkward family gathering.

“I appreciate you all coming here on such short notice. I think our security breach is known to you all by now, but in addition, there have been some recent developments I think we should all be aware of without resorting to telephones or memos. Although we think we’ve located the bugs that were in the department, we don’t know if any of our other means of communication have been compromised.”

I stepped away from the table and began to walk back and forth across the front of the room. “First off, I’d like to reintroduce Willy Kunkle. You all know him from the old days. His expertise when he was employed by us was in narcotics, and his knowledge of the local players in that game is still very up-to-date. The docs have told us that Pierre Lavoie sustained a bruise right over his heart, where the vest stopped Jackson’s bullet, so we’ve been advised to put him on sick leave till that clears up. As a result, we’ve now hired Willy as a temporary special officer, just until we see this thing through.”

I paused and looked especially at James Dunn. “What we’ve been examining during the last twelve hours is the possible breakthrough we’ve been hoping for from the start of this case. We have evidence that the man who killed Jardine, Milly Crawford, Toby Huntington, and John Woll is Wendell ‘Buddy’ Schultz, the Municipal Center janitor.”

There was a shifting of bodies around the table. Only Dunn had still been in ignorance of this fact by now, but saying Buddy’s name in the open came like a breath of fresh air. Not only had about half of us gone sleepless for the last twenty-four hours again, but we’d been reduced to either working in virtual silence when in the office, or escaping to parked cars and restaurant booths around town in order to have secure conversations. The strain, and the increasingly fragile tempers, had begun to show toward the end.

“We came up with Buddy’s name in the early hours of this morning. The trick, however, was to pin the evidence to him, item by item, to see if it stuck. We began with his fingerprints. J.P.?”

Tyler scratched his temple, taking a few seconds to organize his thoughts. “We had a set of prints we lifted off the bottles of curare…” He stopped suddenly and gave me a questioning glance.