“As you can see from the handout, Jardine’s last place of employment before going solo with ABC was Morris, McGill. I’m going to dig into them, too. Okay-questions, comments, ideas?”
For the next fifteen minutes, there was a round-robin discussion, each person letting fly their impressions of the case so the others could benefit-or not-from the experience. At this early stage, it wasn’t very constructive, but I was heartened by the general enthusiasm.
I motioned to Ron Klesczewski to stay back as they all finally filed out the door. “You probably saw in this morning’s dailies that John Woll was driving the patrol car that was parked on Canal.”
Klesczewski nodded. The dailies were a summary of the preceding day’s activities, distributed at the start of every shift.
“Well, you might find in your travels through Jardine’s past that he and Woll went to high school together.”
Ron gave me a rigidly neutral look. “Oh, yeah?”
“I’ve already talked to him about it. John says they were just acquaintances, but let me know if you find out differently. The thing is, keep it subtle. I think the chief’s a little twitchy.”
“Sure. By the way, you didn’t find any old phone bills in Jardine’s files, did you? It might be a way to find out who his friends were.”
I didn’t let it show on my face, but inwardly I cursed Brandt’s decision to keep the Wolls’ connection to Jardine a secret. It hadn’t been more than an hour, and already I was having to lie to my own men about it. Perhaps with a touch of malevolence, I passed the buck: “I found ’em, but the chief’s got them now. I’ll see if I can prod him a little.”
“Thanks.” Klesczewski gathered his things and left. It was true that any calls Jardine might have made to Rose or John Woll would have been local and not on any bill. For that matter, I didn’t even know if Rose had made more than the one call I’d overheard. But I hadn’t had a chance to analyze those bills myself to see if he’d ever called her or John at any recognizable long-distance number, and I didn’t want Klesczewski to get that lucky. It was that bit of subterfuge that left a bad taste in my mouth and sharpened my concern. Keeping this connection a secret could well end up alienating me from my entire squad.
Main Street in downtown Brattleboro is a throwback to New England’s late-nineteenth-century industrial era, its double row of solid, ornate, red-brick buildings a tribute to capitalism’s smug sense of immortality, here largely founded on the Estey family’s parlor-organ empire that had made the town the organ capital of the nation for almost a hundred years. Over recent decades, however, those monuments have yielded their own irony, for while the ground floors have catered to an ever-changing succession of retail businesses, the floors above have become either noisy, smelly, peeling, low-rent apartments or professional offices for hopeful but under-financed entrepreneurs. ABC Investments was on the third floor of number 103, several doors down from the 1930s Art Deco Paramount movie house.
Number 103 was a walkup, like most of its brethren, cored by a wide, linoleum-skinned staircase. If the exteriors facing Main Street combined antique charm and stolid optimism, the interiors of these buildings went deeper. Dark, soiled, sagging, and retrofitted with a crosshatching of pipes and cables to meet modern safety codes and conveniences, these hundred-year-old walls and lofty, cobwebbed ceilings spoke of pure endurance. Once I was within their embrace, their concession to economic survival was revealed by the sounds of typing from behind one door, contrasting with the snarls of a domestic dispute from another.
“ABC Investments Corp.” was carefully painted on the frosted glass upper panel of an otherwise dark wooden door. I entered to the angry buzzing of a dot-matrix printer churning out an endless ream of paper, and into a solid mass of blessed air-conditioning.
A hefty young blonde woman turned from the machine as I closed the door. “May I help you?” She smiled.
“I’m here to see Mr. Clyde.”
Her eyes widened a fraction, but she was no less friendly. “Oh? Did you have an appointment?”
“No, I’m from the police; Lieutenant Gunther.”
That killed the smile. “Oh, dear.” She worked her way around the desk and crossed over to one of two closed doors on the west side of the reception area. She knocked briefly and disappeared.
Jardine and Clyde had gone to some lengths to distance themselves from their stairwell’s appearance. A lower false ceiling had been installed, the walls painted and decorated with soothing Southwestern prints; the floor was covered with a thick wall-to-wall carpet. The furniture also was new and impressively weighty, as recent as, but a step above, what I’d seen at Jardine’s house. Maybe Clyde had been the one to shop for the business.
That hunch was confirmed when the receptionist returned to usher me into Clyde’s office. The room, with two large windows overlooking Main, was quintessential transplanted old Bostonian-lots of burnished wood, padded leather, and glass-paneled bookcases-as incongruous in this building as if it had been on shipboard.
Behind a massive antique partners’ desk was a large, white-haired man in a seersucker suit and a red bow tie, looking vaguely like Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, except for the face, which was square, florid, and utterly without expression.
“Have a seat.” The man’s voice was not unpleasant, but it too lacked any warmth. He hadn’t offered his hand or moved from his chair in greeting, so I followed his suggestion and sat.
But that was all I did. This was not an outgoing man, at least not with strangers, so I thought I might encourage him to talk by keeping my mouth shut. There was also an element here, perhaps a combination of the stuffy furnishings and the coldness of their owner, that rubbed my plebeian fur the wrong way.
The silence lasted a very long thirty seconds. He finally sighed, his brow furrowing, and said, “I’m told you’re from the police.”
I nodded. “Joe Gunther. I was wondering if you could tell me when you last saw your partner.”
There was another pause, this one quite calculated. Clyde’s eyes were as impassive as ever, but I could almost hear his brain whirring at high speed, analyzing the implications of my question. People who deal with other people’s money often have good reason to conjure up private paranoid fantasies. My guess was that I had pushed this man to abruptly struggle with a few of his.
“The day before yesterday. Why do you ask?”
“Was that in the evening-quitting time-or earlier?”
“I last saw him when we closed for the day. Do you plan to tell me why you’re asking these questions?”
I tried to sense something more than simple growing irritation in his voice, but I couldn’t, either because he’d had too much practice avoiding the truth or because he was being honest. I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the head shots of Charlie Jardine that Tyler had taken. I tossed it onto Clyde’s desk. “If that’s him, we found him in a shallow grave yesterday, on Canal Street.”
I don’t know what I’d expected with that melodramatic and tasteless ploy. Whether it was the lack of sleep or the air-conditioning that had lulled my common decency, I was thoroughly embarrassed by the reaction I got. Clyde leaned back in his chair as if I’d pushed him, his mouth half open, his eyes wide with shock, his face suddenly pale. “My God, that can’t be.”
I half rose from my chair. I had guessed Clyde to be a well-preserved seventy years old. Now he looked a hundred. “Are you okay?”
He blinked a couple of times and touched his forehead. “I read about ‘an unidentified body’ in the newspaper this morning. I told my wife how I’d hoped we’d left this kind of thing behind us in Boston. It never occurred to me…” He pushed his chair away from the table and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Charlie… My God.”
When he looked up at me again, I felt like the first three minutes of our meeting had taken place in a dream. The man before me now was old, tired, sad, and perhaps a little frightened. His suit, like his surroundings, looked less like the trappings of establishment arrogance and more like the shell protecting what was left of the ancient turtle within.