“And now,” I concluded, placing my hand back on the table top, “we have Jardine’s watch and possibly Milly’s cocaine in John’s apartment. The implications there are obvious.”
Sammie shook her head in wonder. “If it is a setup, it’s very good.” Pierre Lavoie’s voice was tentative, torn between curiosity and the fear we might throw him out for speaking up. “I don’t understand why the SA hasn’t arrested him, if he’s got all this evidence against him.”
Ron Klesczewski spoke up for the first time, grateful for an opportunity to take control. I wondered how long it would take him to risk sticking his neck out again, now that the political knife-wielding had caused him to pull back. “For one thing, the evidence isn’t all that strong, and for another, once an arrest takes place, you’ve only got so much time available before you have to wrap the case up and present it in court.”
“Besides,” I added, “Dunn’s got time on his side, if he ignores all the pressure. Right now, the implications I counted off establish a motive, an opportunity, and a bag of circumstantial evidence, all of which cropped up within three days. Chances are, if there’s proof to be had, it’ll surface before long. Then Dunn’ll be able to waltz into court with an airtight case.”
There was a long pause as each of us considered that possibility. Dunn’s record was very good; he rarely “waltzed” anywhere without getting results. So, the last and final implication had to be that if he did go to court with this one, it meant John Woll had killed Charlie Jardine.
“So if John killed Jardine, who killed Milly Crawford?” Ron asked in a barely audible voice.
No one answered immediately. Then Sammie spoke up. “And if John killed Milly to silence him, then why leave a baggie of Milly’s dope taped to the toilet?” No one had to add that leaving Jardine’s watch in a sock drawer also seemed pretty implausible. With questions like that floating around, Dunn’s apparent answer to who killed Jardine could never ring absolutely true.
“Find that out,” I finally answered, “and a whole lot’ll fall into place-probably more than Jardine’s killer intended.”
I began pacing the back of the room. “Ron, where in Milly’s apartment did you find that phone list?”
“Behind the dresser, on the floor.”
I mulled that over for a few seconds. “An inconvenient place to hide something, but a suitably obscure place to plant one, especially if you were in a hurry. Now, we’re pretty sure Milly was knocked off on the spur of the moment, to stop us from talking to him. Without having time to get fancy, the killer must have figured that any planted evidence would be better than none, especially if it linked Milly and John.”
Tyler looked at me, both smiling and doubtful. “Christ, we’re going around and around here.”
But I could tell he was intrigued. “True, so, since we’re not allowed to investigate the Wolls, let’s assume they’re innocent, just for the sake of the investigation, and pursue all our other leads. Considering the doubts we have about Dunn’s case, we might even be right.”
There were a few more chuckles around the table. The incongruity of assuming a suspect innocent out of pure convenience might have seemed laughable, but I’d raised a legitimate point. Furthermore, it cleared the smoke away, allowing us to see both homicides in a new light, perhaps a light we were intended never to see by. That possibility alone was enough to recharge the batteries of every person in the room.
I sat back down, content the squad was back on track, newly braced against the turmoil that had briefly derailed it.
I stopped DeFlorio as he was heading out the door. “I hear the court order was delivered on Jardine’s business records.”
He made a face. “Yeah; piss me off. We spent hours on that junk, all for nothing.”
“You didn’t find anything?” I knew that if Dennis didn’t understand something, he tended to throw it out.
He conceded the point indirectly. “None of it made any sense to me, anyway; stuff’s all Greek. Tell you the truth, I was tickled pink when the court order arrived. Talk to Willette. He might have picked up something.”
I decided to do just that, walking down Main Street to the south side of the public library and a large, clapboard, century-old building that had been converted into a mini-office building. Justin Willette’s two-room suite was at the top of the stairs on the second floor.
Willette grinned and pushed his glasses high up onto his head as I walked in. He rubbed his eyes with both stubby hands. “I wondered when I’d see you. I take it you heard the bad news.”
“That Arthur Clyde got his papers back, or that there was nothing to find in the first place?”
He chuckled. “Is that what Dennis told you? I’m not surprised; he was looking a little microwaved toward the end.”
“Then you did finish?” Willette’s desk was actually a seven-foot long dining table he’d moved in from his house. I sat down opposite him, as if preparing to make a meal of the stacks of paper between us.
The glasses stayed parked up on his broad, pink forehead, giving his face an odd, four-eyed appearance. He settled back into his chair and linked his hands behind his neck. “Well, we finished the short course. Jardine having been in operation for only a year made it a whole lot easier. Still, all I got were impressions. To do it properly would’ve taken days and corroboration from other data sources.”
Justin Willette had never lit the world on fire as a financial high roller. He had not come to Brattleboro after a career on Wall Street or from advising the yacht-owning set on how to screw up American business through LBOs. He had stuck to doing his homework, had worked long hours with firms in Boston getting the basics down, and was now a registered rep of one of the big national stockbrokers. He had the reputation of guiding the little guys through the investment maze with integrity and a minimum of smoke and mirrors.
He also liked a puzzle and had helped us in the past to unscramble a few. Although there was no evidence of it now, I knew he and Dennis had spent the entire day poring over buy-and-sell tickets, market-trend charts, financial newsletters, business correspondence, and God knows what else, all with frequent referrals to the computer glowing on the counter behind him, and all, I had no doubt, at no cost to us.
“So do you smell something fishy?” I asked him.
He pursed his lips. “Yeah. That’s a pretty good way of putting it. Nothing definite, but something wrong. Not court-of-law material, though; keep that straight.”
“Okay.”
He nodded, reassured. “Okay. Small lecture on trading, then. The National Association of Security Dealers, called NASD for short, and the New York Stock Exchange, monitor all trading, as does the SEC, which oversees both of them. Also, with national firms like Merrill Lynch or Prudential-Bache or whoever, senior partners of regional offices tend to keep an eye peeled. What all of them are looking for are patterns, since there’re way too many transactions conducted every day to analyze every one.
“What is a pattern, you ask?” Willette continued, although I had done no such thing. “It’s something like buying AT amp;T stock one week before a merger is announced, and then doing the same kind of thing with another company a few days or weeks later, cashing in both times. That catches people’s attention, especially if it keeps happening and involves a fair amount of cash.”
“Insider trading?”
“Possibly. That’s the tricky part. There’s a lot of analysis that goes on in this business, and there’re a lot of smart people doing it. Look at ‘Wall Street Week’ on TV sometime and you’ll see them in action. They study the trends, look at the figures, sometimes even interview the principal players, and then they make a buy. If the stock then suddenly goes through the roof, is that insider trading? Nope. So the watchdogs have got to tell the difference between a sharp guy with an honest track record, and a crook.”