“From where?” I couldn’t deny I was interested. I’d heard the chief’s fan in action and understood why he never had it on. My lifting it had been an act of pure desperation.
He gave me a lopsided grin, relieved at my lack of outrage. “Don’t ask me no questions and I won’t tell you no lies-isn’t that what they say?”
I hesitated. “How about a temporary loan, from someone who won’t miss it?”
“Oh, sure. That’s just what I had in mind. Be right back.” He piled his belongings along the wall and headed out the door.
“I’ll be in my office,” I called after him and placed Brandt’s fan on a nearby windowsill.
I returned to my own corner of the building. Under cooler circumstances, I actually enjoyed working here in the middle of the night. It wasn’t only the silence that made it appealing, although the still phones and absence of people were definite pluses; it was also the odd satisfaction of being up when almost everyone else was asleep. I felt in the middle of the night as if I were capable of deeds unachievable in the daylight-as if I were endowed with ethereal powers.
Buddy found me as I was sorting through the contents of Woll’s file, separating the bureaucratic confetti from the reports that might tell me something.
“Here you go.” He wiped a large blue-and-white plastic fan clean with a rag from his pocket and placed it on my desk, fastidiously moving aside a large ashtray filled with paper clips. The fan was enormous and looked brand new. “Even goes back and forth, and it’s got three speeds.”
He got down on his knees and plugged it into a baseboard outlet. The fan began swinging its mechanical head back and forth, as if sighing in resignation at the plainness of its surroundings. It was admittedly the fanciest thing in my office.
“See? Quiet as a whisper.” He was grinning like a sweepstakes winner. Helping the chief of detectives in an interagency theft had obviously made his day. He slightly readjusted the fan’s position.
“It’s great, Buddy. I owe you one. What do I do with it after tonight?”
“No one’s the poorer, I promise.”
“And you won’t tell me where you got it.”
Again, he looked at the floor and grinned. “Nope. I tell you what-if anyone misses it, I’ll take it back. It’ll never happen, though. That okay with you?”
“I’m happy, Buddy. Thanks again.”
I waited until he’d left before I sat down to survey what I’d collected. The fan kept shaking its head mournfully, drying the sweat on the back of my hands and making the heat almost bearable. I pulled the ashtray full of paper clips near to me in case I wanted to mark any pages.
John Woll, as he’d told Billy and me, had graduated from high school ten years earlier. During his senior year, he’d been enrolled in the Law Enforcement and Fire Sciences Program at school and had won a scholarship to college, where he apparently intended to continue his police studies, hoping later to qualify for the FBI. While not a stellar student, he was inordinately “well rounded”-a hard-working perfectionist with a broad interest in extracurricular activities. Plans changed, however, for reasons I couldn’t decipher from the files. The following fall, after marrying Rose, he dropped his college plans, forfeiting the scholarship, and signed up as a special officer with our department. Specials were one of those bureaucratic wonders-a compromise between the budget watchers and the people crying for more cops on the beat. They were allowed to work only a limited number of hours a week and were therefore excluded from the benefit package offered to their full-time colleagues. Also, they had to take only sixty-two hours of training at the Police Academy, instead of the standard fourteen-week course. The result, as I saw it, was a street cop with little training and no sense of job security-a wonderful entity worthy of the minds that had created it.
Whether because of this, or from the same mysterious pressures that had changed his college goals, John’s evaluations started issuing warning signs eighteen months into the job. He was still praised for his pleasant demeanor and his ability to steer clear of any inner-office bickering, but an undefinable uncertainty began entering the evaluators’ comments; phrases like “vague on the future,” “gung ho with little follow-up,” and “workaholic habits, but not much to show for it,” appeared in clumps at this point in his career. One evaluator suggested a counselor be brought in to identify what he thought might be escalating personal problems. That was never done. John Woll quit too soon after that entry appeared.
He went full-time at a local manufacturing plant he’d been working at during his off hours with us, a place that turned out the elastic found in diapers and golf balls and women’s underwear. I knew the building-long, low, and noisy, where every surface was covered by a thin veil of white powdery talc, used to keep the hot rubber from sticking in its course through the huge, high-temperature machines that kneaded it, cooked it, and transformed it from raw, brown rubber blocks into paper-thin elastic strips. It was a mind-numbing environment: the floor-shaking hum of the machines and the air-cleaning equipment relieved only here and there by the tinny sounds of rock ’n’ roll emanating from transistor radios.
The pay was good, the environment stultifying. The psychological nose dive that had swept John Woll from the police department continued unabated in the new job. He began to drink noticeably.
He was never stopped for driving under the influence or for creating a public nuisance; to anyone’s knowledge, he never broke any law as a result of his boozing. But he was caught nevertheless. His shift supervisor smelled liquor on his breath, discovered a bottle among his personal effects, gave him several warnings, and finally found him polishing off a pint in the men’s room. He was ordered to either get some alcohol counseling or leave. He chose the counseling.
The recommendations accompanying his reapplication to the police department four years later were glowing. After the showdown with his supervisor, Woll began turning his life around. He signed up for company-sponsored “self-betterment” classes, made a few highly praised suggestions on improving management-worker relations, and finally ended up as a night supervisor himself. Whatever role his wife, Rose, played in all this was again not clear from what I was reading, but the overall picture was of a man wrestling his devils down to the mat.
When he did reapply to be a cop, we put him through an alcohol screening process, which he passed with flying colors. The good will he’d left behind combined well with his Cinderella comeback. He took the full Police Academy course, and we welcomed him with open arms, no questions asked.
Until now. I closed the file.
For the rest of the night, I studied the documents I’d removed from Charlie Jardine’s house, arranging them in chronological order, trying to get a feel for the subcurrents of his life. What I found showed a combination of steady progression and good luck. Fortunately for me, he was a creature of habit, keeping to the same bank since high school, saving all his IRS returns back to the first one filed. There was no padding, nothing in the collection of a personal nature, like letters, diaries, or personal memos. But the dry, clear-cut residue of a paper-shuffling society more than made up the difference.
Jardine had not graduated from high school with the career goals of John Woll. Where John had turned a teenage interest in law enforcement into immediate employment by the police department, Charlie had stayed at home with his parents, at the same address I’d visited hours earlier, and had drifted about for a couple of years. His W-2 forms indicated a series of short-lived jobs in and around Brattleboro, at restaurants, car washes, gas stations, and finally, five years ago, at a lawyer’s office as a “gofer.” That had been the turning point.