“Friendly fella,” DeFlorio muttered.
“Any narcotics?” I asked.
“No. The list goes on, but it’s mostly along the same lines; nothing violent, nothing hard-core.”
“Did you check out the warehouses?”
“Yes. Seemed on the up-and-up. He’s got them divided into sections. Some he rents to businesses, like a mail-order outfit, others he just rents the space for storage. There’s a tree surgery business that parks its trucks in one part. I interviewed several of the tenants. Most of them had never met the man, and those who had reported that Hanson was your typical old chummy type, full of bad jokes and easy talk.”
“What about Mark Cappelli?”
Ron pulled another sheet of paper from the folder before him. “Got an armed robbery conviction; several assaults; he’s done time. It’s a grab bag, but it’s all violent, and he seems to keep it up to date.”
I leaned back in my chair and locked my fingers behind my neck. “So what do we make of Milly’s list so far?”
Tyler addressed Ron. “No connections between any of them?”
“Nope-except for Thomas and Paula Atwater, the bankers. They work in the same building. Of course, this is all preliminary. If we dig deeper, we may find something.”
Sammie tapped the tabletop with her pencil. “A guy with a warehouse, an ex-con who drives trucks, two more who handle money, one of which does cocaine. It’s got potential, you have to admit.”
I smiled at that-Sammie had made the same connections I had, especially concerning Thomas’s drug habit. “I agree. I want you and Ron to look for the connection. And keep the ABC angle in your sights, too. It might be pure coincidence that ABC landed the Putney Road Bank’s pension fund, but it also might be that the bank is the link between Jardine, Wentworth, and Clyde on one side, and Milly and his list of folks on the other.”
I looked at Dennis. “What’s happening with your efforts? Both the Jardine and the Crawford canvasses have been dumped in your lap. Anything new?”
Dennis cleared his throat. “Well, technically, it’s no longer our jurisdiction, but I did find someone who claims to have seen John Woll at the embankment the night Jardine was killed. A woman who lives in the Elliot Street Apartments, complete with a pair of binoculars. She says a bright flame first caught her attention. That’s good news, of course, but she also says she thought the policeman was acting ‘very suspicious,’ to use her words, and that he was lighting the flare, not putting it out.”
“But it was a policeman?” I asked.
DeFlorio gave me a lopsided frown. “I have my doubts. That’s what she claims. She may have seen something, but I think the policeman thing came to her after the press reports. There were a few other details that sounded fuzzy, too. Anyhow, it’s out of our hands now.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing much. Jardine was seen going to work the morning of the day he was killed, but that just corroborates what Clyde told us. He wasn’t seen coming home, although he must’ve to change clothes and turn on the air-conditioning. I couldn’t find any restaurant that served him dinner or any storeowners that saw him. I did find his car, by the way, in the lot by his office, covered with parking violations.”
“I took a look,” Tyler interrupted. “Nothing.”
DeFlorio resumed. “As far as I can tell, the guy vanished as soon as he left work.”
“Assuming he did leave work, at least under his own power,” Sammie interjected.
I turned to Pierre Lavoie, the temporary member of our group. “Pierre, what about the background searches into Jardine and the Wolls?”
Lavoie glanced around uncomfortably. Not only was he low man on the totem pole, but the recent fireworks in the room had made him a little gun-shy. “I’ve found several people who knew all three of them. I didn’t find much new-the Wolls were an item, but Rose had eyes for Jardine as well. It turns out that wasn’t too unusual for her… I mean, Jardine wasn’t the only one.”
“You haven’t found anything about Jardine that might tie into his death?”
“He did a lot of drugs. I was hoping I could track the drugs to a supplier, but so far, it’s been no luck.”
I turned to J.P. and raised my eyebrows.
He started right in. “One of the reasons I checked Jardine’s car was I had found some dirt on his shoes that didn’t correspond to the grave site. Turns out it’s got a lot of fuel oil in it, along with some old brick dust-totally incompatible with any dirt in or around his house. None of it was ingrained, and beneath it was soil that did fit the soil outside the house.”
“Which tells you what?”
“That he picked it up at the time of his death, in an area where number-two crude oil is handled, like around a furnace in a dirt-floor basement somewhere.”
“But not his own basement?”
Tyler shook his head. “No. That’s paved and clean as a whistle. I think it was an older building, possibly one with an old brick foundation where the brick is beginning to erode. I also think either the feeder pipe from the oil storage tank to the furnace is leaking, or maybe the tank itself, because a healthy system doesn’t have that much oil around it. The delivery pipe is almost always outside the building, not only because it’s convenient, but also so no oil can spill inside. One other thing,” he added, “the high concentration of oil also made me think the building’s owner is probably broke or sloppy, or maybe that the building is badly maintained. Otherwise, a serviceman would have been called in to stop the leak. Of course, that last point is pure guesswork.”
“You mentioned searching the car,” I reminded him.
“Right. No oil-tainted dirt, which would have been there if he’d driven at all. Proof again that he got that dirt sometime between when he left his car and when we found him. That means he either drove home, changed, and drove back downtown to meet someone, leaving his car in the lot, or he hitched a ride home with someone straight from work.”
“That’s it?”
He shrugged. “That’s it for the car. I compared the gum you found last night in the Brooks House to the stuff we found under the bridge-it’s a match. Otherwise, we don’t have much to show.”
Klesczewski spoke in a cautious voice. “It’s possible the murderer forced Jardine to drive back to the lot after grabbing him at home, to confuse us.”
I conceded the point. “Maybe we ought to expand the canvass to include the parking lot for that night. You up to questioning a whole new batch of people, Dennis?”
DeFlorio shook his head and grinned. “I’ve done half the town already. Why not?”
“I spoke to Billy Manierre last night,” I resumed. “Every one of his people are on the lookout for Toby Huntington, as are the state police and sheriff’s department, so I hope we’ll get lucky there. What about Jardine’s phone records?”
Ron pawed through his notes until he located the right paperwork. “The phone company was very helpful. I talked to some of the most frequently called numbers, male and female friends of his. It’s a little awkward, of course: no eye-to-eye contact, no way to check their stories without help from other departments. I didn’t get anywhere on the drug angle, but I did get a feeling that he played both sides of the fence sexually.”
“He was queer?” DeFlorio burst out.
“I think so.” Ron emphasized the think. “No one flat out said as much, but that’s the impression I got.”
“I’ll be damned,” Sammie muttered.
“Yeah, it does open up more possibilities,” I said, “blackmail being the first of them. What about Jardine’s bank files?”
Sammie raised her pencil. “I looked them over.”
“Anything unusual?” I asked her.
“Nothing obvious. I tracked down the parents’ will, to see if he really did inherit eighty-five thousand dollars; it looked legit to me. Also, I bugged Willette a bit while he was going through the ABC material to see if Jardine’s investment claims matched the income he was reporting. Again, he came out looking clean. If he was collecting blackmail money, he was subtle about where he put it.”