“No. I’m interested in what you were doing on Horton Place the day Milly Crawford was killed.” I’d picked my words carefully, fully intending their implied suspicion.
His face went through a fast series of expressions, from very still to bemused to mournful. “Yeah, can you believe that? Talk about bad timing. You guys scared the hell out of me.”
“What were you doing there?”
He blinked at me several times in silence, as if slowly getting the gist of my question. “I went there to meet someone…”
“Who?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. I got a phone call from some guy, telling me he was working on that new motel going up near the Reformer building, and that there were a bunch of violations he thought I should know about.”
“He told you to meet in Milly’s building?”
“In the alleyway out back.”
“When did you get the call?”
“Just before. He sounded real nervous, said he’d been sitting on this a long time, trying to get up the nerve to tell someone. I drove right over and got there just as everything went crazy.”
“If the guy was on the motel job, why wasn’t he working then? It was the middle of the day.”
McDermott’s mouth was now half open. “I get calls like that all the time, pissant stuff, like when some tenant gets mad at a landlord.”
“You get a similar call to go to the Brooks House yesterday?”
The mouth fell all the way. “Have you been following me?”
“Let’s say we’ve been bumping into you. What did the guy sound like who called you out to Milly’s neighborhood?”
He gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. Intense-talking about how people were going to die if the motel went up the way it was being built.”
“Didn’t any of that strike you as unusual?”
“Well, sure, but if what he was saying was true… I mean, I wasn’t going to tell him to call my secretary for an appointment.”
“Did you hear or see anyone or anything unusual?”
He loosened his tie. “No. No one showed up.”
“Anyone enter the building?”
“A couple of kids left just before all hell broke loose, but that was it. I never heard any shots or anything.”
“You never heard from the guy who’d called you?”
McDermott shook his head. “I went out to the motel site; checked it over with a fine-tooth comb. Place was as clean as a whistle; it’s being built closer to code than my own house.”
“Who called you about Brooks House?”
He held up his hand at my renewed, colder tone of voice. “Joe, do you think I’m up to something? ’Cause if you do, maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
Good move, I thought, too much naïveté could be as bad as too little. “Do you feel the urge to call your lawyer?”
He loosened his already tortured tie some more. “The urge? I want to know if there’s a need. What the hell is going on?”
His voice had finally gained an edge. “We have a lot of people out there right now looking under every rock they can find. If a name pops up, we check it out. Yours popped up twice, once at Milly’s place, and again when we were speaking with the manager of the Brooks House. What brought you out to Brooks House, Fred?”
“Again, I got a call, from somebody telling me-”
“Same guy as before?”
“Huh? No, this one had an accent.”
“But it was a man?”
“Yeah.”
“Could the accent’ve been faked?”
He paused, his brow furrowed. “Well, I… Maybe. I don’t know; I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, I hadn’t put the two voices together before.”
“What did the guy tell you?”
“He said Weller was renting out his tower room to a bunch of bums, that they were using the fire escape as a front door, and that, quote-unquote, ‘weird shit’ was going on in the apartment that the town ought to know about.”
“This caller didn’t leave a name or number?”
“No, but when I went over there, I had a feeling there might be something to it. The fire escape had obviously been used, and a few of the other tenants admitted hearing people going over the roof. And Weller was very belligerent. Still, I can’t do anything until I catch them at it, which isn’t likely. I don’t have the staff.”
“You didn’t see any of them?”
“No. Of course, Weller wouldn’t let me into his apartment. He might have had an army of bums in there, for all I know. I looked around from the outside, you know, checking out the fire escape, but I didn’t see anything that caught my eye.”
I let a few seconds of silence pass by. Now was the time for him to flaunt his innocence again, to bring up lawyers and the appearance that he felt he’d been falsely accused.
He remained quiet.
I got up and moved toward the door.
“Joe,” he blurted out, like an actor missing his cue.
I paused at the threshold.
He gave me an awkward smile. “I’m not in any trouble, am I? You’re not thinking I had anything to do with people dying?”
I hesitated. Nothing he’d told me had diminished him as a suspect, which meant he was either as pure as fresh snow or very clever. “I don’t know what to think, Fred. Sure as hell somebody killed those people.”
I had left a note with Harriet to schedule a staff meeting at eight, after I’d finished with McDermott. I therefore entered a detective bureau that was fully manned and waiting. Everyone followed me into the meeting room.
I waited for them to sit. “We found Charlie Jardine in the ground four long days ago. That’s not good for our side. Assuming John Woll’s innocent, then the scent that might lead us to Jardine’s killer is getting colder and colder. That means we’re going to have to depend on each other like never before. This is the first time the entire squad has had to work on a single case. We all have different styles, different paces, and I know that can cause problems.”
No one debated the point. “If you start running into each other, I want to hear about it. Maybe we can arrange it so the friction is reduced. But keep in mind, there aren’t enough of us to go around, so there’ll be some head butting.”
There were some barely discernible nods around the table.
“Okay, in case anyone is keeping score, we now have three lawsuits filed against us and a fourth pending. Mark Cappelli and the motorist who almost got swiped by one of our guys have been joined by the bridge-repair people, and Arthur Clyde is still scratching his head on whether to join the crowd or not.”
I paused to let the bad news settle in. “The point to all this is: forget it. Let everyone else focus on the fireworks. The more we stick to our job, the more likely it is we’ll come out ahead. Let’s go over what we have so far.”
I filled them in on what Willette had dug up on Jardine and ABC Investments, underscoring what I’d put in my daily report.
Klesczewski cleared his throat. “It sounds like hard evidence might be a little difficult to come by on that.”
“Maybe. We may not need it if we can get other people to corroborate Willette’s suspicions. Ron, you were looking into the names on Milly’s list; what’ve you got so far? Do the two Putney Road bankers have a connection with ABC?”
Ron looked a little uneasy. “Well, I don’t know. The ABC angle didn’t surface until your talk with Willette last night, which occurred after my check on them. All I found out was pretty routine: what they did, how long they’d worked there, did they have any criminal history… I did find out that Kenny Thomas was reputed to be fond of an occasional toot of cocaine.”
“Reliable source?”
“I think so.”
“But you didn’t interview Thomas or Atwater?”
“No, they weren’t there. I plan to do that today.”
“What about Jake Hanson? You told me he owned two warehouses on Birge Street. How does he check out?”
Klesczewski looked at his notes. “He does have a record. Got nabbed a couple of times hauling goods across the Canadian border illegally. Fish and Game got him once for slipping out-of-season venison into the legitimate market. He was buying from a bunch of poachers, most of them up north, and then selling the meat in Boston and New York, where it was trendy and no questions were asked. He copped a plea and turned in most of the hunters to avoid doing time.”