Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

There was a long, embarrassed silence.

I finally cleared my throat. “I think you’re in good company when it comes to screwing pooches. I’d like to move on to something else, a major facet of the case we haven’t mentioned yet. In the middle of this whole mess, we stumbled over the biggest single stash of dope we’ve ever seen in this town. We were pretty sure from the start that it was tied into the homicides somehow, but we didn’t know how.

“Initially, as you recall, we thought Jardine and Milly might have been partners, with Charlie the money man-perhaps using Wentworth’s money-and Milly handling the street contacts. That had a variety of holes in it, not the least of which was: Who killed them both? Since then, we’ve come to believe Charlie was a peripheral party. It all makes better sense when we make Buddy and Milly partners and have Charlie simply as a customer, which explains how that baggie ended up in his house.

“This new scenario gains credibility because of a few things Willy Kunkle discovered through his sources. We’d thought initially that the numbers on the list found in Milly’s apartment might be Milly’s colleagues. In fact, except for John Woll, they were all from a rival operation; therefore, the list was a double frame, implicating both Woll and Milly’s competition. It worked, of course. Our suspicions of John did increase, and our pursuit of Mark Cappelli led to the collapse of the ring he worked with.

“Another problem we had were the drugs. Why had the shooter-Buddy, for the sake of clarity-killed Milly, planted the list, but left behind a fortune in dope? The simplest explanation was time. Buddy didn’t have enough of it, and it was more important for him to set up the double frame than it was to collect the inventory. But that didn’t make sense to us; by killing his partner, Buddy put himself out of business.

“Now we could see where Milly had become a sudden liability. He knew Buddy, and what he was up to, and he’d sold a baggie of coke to Charlie. He was the bridge that could have led us straight to Buddy. Also, in Buddy’s eyes, he was replaceable.

“But what about the dope? By abandoning it, Buddy not only sacrificed its potential value, but also whatever it had cost him in the first place. That remained our thickest stonewall. We fooled around trying to connect various money sources to Buddy, plugging in Jardine, Wentworth, McDermott, and Luman Jackson as blackmail victims, but all of them had problems.

“The debate was finally ended, again through Willy Kunkle. This morning, Willy discovered why Cappelli started shooting before Ron and I identified ourselves as police officers, and why the rest of his gang have gone so far underground. It turns out Cappelli and Hanson were ripped off several months ago of the exact amount of dope we later found in Milly’s apartment. The Boston people were unhappy, perhaps even suspicious of their Brattleboro colleagues, and Cappelli and Hanson were as nervous as cats on a highway.

“Having therefore secured his drugs at no cost, Buddy was less concerned with abandoning them, and more interested in giving his competitors a final shove. We have recently heard that the Boston suppliers have been approached by someone wishing to replace Hanson et al. Even with our breath on his neck, Buddy is still trying for the gold ring.

“Obviously,” I concluded, “Buddy would have preferred to keep both Milly and the drugs in place. But our finding Milly’s prints on the baggie in Jardine’s house had all the potential of disaster. It’s proof of Buddy’s weird brilliance that he could not only plug a sudden leak like that, but turn it to his own advantage.”

“Assuming Buddy is the killer,” Dunn declared with emphasis, dropping his pen on his pad. “Look, I think you have something here, but watch out for the ‘maybes.’ If you want to badly enough, you can turn Buddy into the man who really shot Kennedy. You’ve got some good stuff; chase it down, make it something we can take to a judge. If we can get just enough for a warrant, the rest might open up like a flower, so don’t waste your time running all over the place. Focus.”

He stood up, gave us all a curt nod, and left the room.

A half hour later we were all following Dunn’s suggestion, gathering our notes, preparing to head out again and chase down the ideas we’d discussed at the top of the meeting; all of us except me. I stayed slumped in my chair, my chin cupped in my right hand, buried in a debate I’d held earlier with myself.

Willy Kunkle was watching me from his end of the table. “What’s on your mind?”

“Curare.”

The bustling and movement in the room abruptly stopped.

“What about it?” he asked.

“Why curare? Why not just put a plastic bag over his head? The fun of watching would be the same; so would the final result.”

People drifted back near the table. “And the answer is?” Willy asked.

“Because curare shows you’re smart. It’s a signature. It’s not only exotic, it’s hard to find, tricky to administer, and most people don’t even know what it is.”

“So we got a big ego on our hands.”

I shook my head. “We have a high-school graduate needing to prove he’s brighter than everyone else. He reads a lot-he’s always carrying a book in his back pocket-so maybe he’s aware of curare, but he needs to know all about it, to do research-”

“At a library,” Kunkle finished for me, a grin spreading across his face.

I gave him a nod. “You got it, Sherlock.”

The library was closed. We found the head librarian at home, and keeping Kunkle out of sight, Brandt persuaded her of his need to gain immediate access. In fact, her reluctance played to our advantage, since what she finally did was give us the keys and permission to use them, instead of accompanying us personally, as she was no doubt supposed to.

Kunkle’s usually dour mood lightened immediately as soon as he, Brandt, Tyler, and I entered the gloomy building, lit primarily by the ever-changing lights and shadows thrown through the building’s twenty-foot glass front wall by the moon and the vehicles prowling back and forth on upper Main Street. Until we found the main bank of light switches and returned the world to normal, the high-ceilinged room, with its clusters of half-seen furniture and aisles of stacked books, reminded me of a grade-B horror movie from the thirties.

Kunkle hurried over to the card catalog and began pulling out drawers and riffling through their contents, his well muscled fingers a blur. I’d seen him in this hyper-driven mood before and knew better than to ask him if we could help.

After some fifteen minutes, he’d filled both sides of a small square of scrap paper with Dewey decimal figures, and we followed him into the stacks. There, one by one, he began pulling down large, heavy tomes and checking their indexes, all to no avail. Finally, highly irritated, he crossed over to a desk near the middle of the reading room and dialed out on a phone there.

“Doug? It’s Willy. How the fuck do I find out about curare in this dump?… I know it’s closed, just answer the question, okay?… Yeah… Yeah… No shit, really? I’ll be damned… Same to you, asshole.”

He slammed the receiver down and smiled. “You’ll love this: The reference librarian says that Buddy Schultz asked him about curare around six months ago.”

Kunkle led the way up the narrow metal stairway to the mezzanine stacks and pulled the biggest book yet from its shelf, the Physician’s Desk Reference , known throughout the medical profession as the PDR . Gripping it against his chest, he took it out to one of the tables lining the balcony overlooking the reading room and slapped it down with a bang.