“Who?”
“We don’t know yet; just names. Nobody notorious. The point is, we now have ties to John in both murders. In fact, he’s the only common denominator.”
“He is or Rose is.”
“Okay. One or the other or both; whichever it is, the SA is going to be royally pissed if he discovers we’ve been sitting on this for days, just hoping it’ll go away, and he’ll be right if it turns out the Wolls are dirty.”
“You think they are?”
“She’s not playing straight, I’m pretty sure of that. As for John, I don’t know; it’s not looking good. But that might be exactly what we’re supposed to think.”
“All right.” Brandt removed his pipe and placed both his hands behind his head. “What do you suggest?”
“We’ve got to follow the trail to the Wolls, even if the scent’s suspicious.”
“A search warrant?”
I shook my head. “I doubt we’d get it. We don’t actually have anything truly incriminating against either one of them-it’s all circumstantial.”
I moved over to the window and stared out at the parking lot through the steel grille attached to the frame. As with most such locations in this town, the municipal lot had both predictable urban neighbors, such as the almost windowless State of Vermont District Office Building, and a few more off-beat reminders that Vermonters make poor urbanites: Parked under a shade tree just beyond our chain-link fence was a weary but serviceable wooden fishing boat, mounted on a trailer and ready to roll as soon as its owner knocked off work.
I turned back to face Brandt. “Hypothetical question: Why would John kill Jardine or Milly?”
“Jardine for adultery and supplying his wife with drugs; Milly for being the source of the drugs.”
“So why did Milly have his phone number on a piece of paper?”
Brandt smiled. “It’s Rose’s number, too.”
I tapped my forehead gently against the grille. This whole damn thing was driving me crazy; not just the complexity of the case, but the duplicitous role I’d taken on. “I just lectured Ron on the rationale for not confronting John with all this right now, but I have to admit, it’s a temptation to kick the apple cart over to see what we end up with.”
Brandt smiled in sympathy, but still he held firm. “Let’s see what those other names on Milly’s list are first, to establish if there’s a connection. It would be nice having that under our belts before confronting him.”
I sighed my agreement and headed for the door, pausing as I got there. “By the way, some good news. Tyler tells me we grabbed our biggest dope stash ever in Milly’s apartment. That ought to play well.”
“We may need it.” The weariness in his voice told me I wasn’t the only one feeling the stress. And I had a feeling the worst was yet to come.
15
Late that afternoon, I pried Billy Manierre out of his reclusive lair in the corner of the future officers’ room and asked him to attend a full meeting of all investigators, including those few patrolmen who’d already been assigned to help us out. My motive, of course, was pure greed-I needed more manpower and wanted Billy to rearrange his three shifts to supply me.
Despite my gut feeling that the Jardine and Crawford murders were connected, and perhaps even committed by the same person, I had to treat them as separate cases. After all, the only tie linking them was a thumbprint on a Ziploc bag and John Woll’s telephone number-and the latter was a secret only three of us shared.
Not that my request of Billy would have been any different had I chosen to lump the two cases together. Either way, I still had four areas that needed lots of plain old conventional police work: the Jardine grave site, the scenic dwelling under the Elm Street bridge, Jardine’s house, and Milly’s apartment.
Billy, as usual, was the soul of generosity. By slimming down the patrol shifts, pulling in all his special officers, and assigning his parking-enforcement crew to wider duties, he met my request while still attending to his own requirements. It would all be reflected in the overtime budget, of course, but that was always a predictable battle in any case.
With the meeting concluded and its participants scattered, I sat alone in the conference room, amid the fetid, motionless air, surveying a long table littered with stub-choked ashtrays, half-empty coffee cups, and crumpled bits of litter. I was suddenly drained of all energy and felt as rooted to my chair as if my legs had been anesthetized. I glanced at my watch. I was due at Gail’s for dinner in twenty minutes.
Ordinarily, I might have called her and begged off, choosing to collapse in my own bed to see if ten hours of sleep might offset thirty-six in overdrive. But I didn’t want to do that. Tonight I needed her company both for the creature comforts it offered and to dampen the guilt I’d been feeling by seeing her as a selectman first and a discreet and trusted friend second.
So I cranked myself out of the chair, clocked out, told Dispatch where I could be reached, and shuffled out to the parking lot.
Gail Zigman and I had met six years ago at an open-air community meeting hosted by Vermont’s Pat Leahy, a U.S. Senator with a penchant for consulting his conscience before running off at the mouth. She had just been elected selectman and was well known around town both as a successful Realtor and a member of damn near every left-leaning, charitably disposed board the town could dish up. I had heard of her, but didn’t even know what she looked like until she sat down next to me and introduced herself. It was a late-summer evening with a tinge of fall coolness in the air, and I ended up lending her my jacket and admiring her clean profile out of the corner of my eye.
It hadn’t been a romance at first glance. Indeed, she’d left that meeting with other people, thanking me for the use of the jacket. But I saw her again on some other occasion, got to talk with her, and found her mind, like her profile, equally free of distracting lumps and bulges.
Our courtship was leisurely. She’d never married, I’d been widowed for quite some time. We were both therefore very comfortable in our respective singlehoods and in no rush to complicate things. But we discovered over time that we had become best friends, turning to one another for advice and companionship over lunch or dinner. Becoming lovers, finally, was a natural extension of that friendship.
Mine had not been an overly populated life. My brother, Leo, and I had been born and brought up on a farm near Thetford Hill, about halfway up the eastern side of the state. Our father had been a silent, hard-working man, considerably older than our mother, who had dedicated herself to supplying her family with virtually all its essential needs, including many of its cultural ones. She did this with such success that Leo and I were content most of the time to stay put on the farm.
As teenagers, we never felt any yearning to escape to the neighborhood watering holes, an isolationist tendency that followed both of us through the years. Leo, several years my junior, never did marry and still lived on the farm with our now wheelchair-bound mother, working as a butcher and dividing his extracurricular interests between classic cars of the fifties and fabulously endowed young women with very short attention spans.
I, on the other hand, had become for a time a nomad, fighting in the Korean War, attending but not graduating from college in California, sampling the early stirrings of what would revolutionize the sixties. I returned to Vermont with an enormous library of eclectic tastes, more questions than I could handle, and was gradually tamed, first by Frank Murphy, who lured me to Brattleboro and the police department, and then by Ellen, whom I met and married shortly thereafter.
Ellen’s death, eight years later, nipped that renascent taste for interdependence in the bud, driving me back to my solitude and my books. Meeting Gail many years later was thus a seriously mixed blessing and had posed the first real threat to my by-now stolid bachelor ways.