“Right. You implied the Woll frame was an extra, thrown in because it was easy. Why even go to that trouble?”
“Because it’s personal. He’s too low-ranking a cop for it to be anything involving the department.”
“Which makes the list an insight into the killer’s personality. That list, with its flimsy frame of John Woll, is the only evidence combining the two tangents here: the drugs and the Charlie-John-Rose triangle, which has roots ten years old.”
Kunkle scowled impatiently. “I can’t deal with the triangle; it’s too complicated, and you’ve got nothing concrete to go on. I think if you follow the dope, you’ll find the shooter.”
“But he didn’t touch the dope. You said yourself he might not have even known it was there.”
Kunkle waved that away. “I know, I know; I don’t believe it, though. You want a gut reaction? People kill each other over dope, even small amounts of it, and I think that’s why Milly got whacked. Why was the dope left behind? It wasn’t only a time problem; otherwise, the shooter would’ve killed you and Dummy both and had plenty of time to pack up. It was left behind because it was small potatoes. That’s the big question here; it’s not whether Wentworth knew about the money, or whether Jardine was or wasn’t a partner of Milly’s. It’s what’s the story behind the dope?”
I looked at his impassioned face, radiating an enthusiasm I hadn’t seen in over a year. “Will you find out the answer?”
He pulled back a little, flexing the hand he’d made into a fist during his last speech. He made it sound nonchalant. “Yeah, I can ask around.”
I couldn’t suppress a smile. For the first time, I felt we might have gained an advantage and with it reached a turning point. If I was right, the manipulator would become the quarry, and the hunt would begin in earnest.
32
Despite Kunkle’s lack of interest in the subject, the money angle continued to prey on my mind as I returned to the Municipal Center. It galled me not knowing for certain whether Milly’s stake had come from Jardine, or from a source I knew nothing about. The irritant was the coyness of those involved: Wentworth, Arthur Clyde, and Blaire, while all affected more or less by Jardine’s death, nevertheless seemed preoccupied with details they wanted kept well out of sight.
I was therefore startled when Sammie Martens intercepted me at the Municipal Building’s front door. “I think I found something,” she said, her face flushed with excitement.
I looked at her, not bothering to hide my surprise. It had been a while since I’d touched base with her. “What?”
“I discovered Fred McDermott has an anonymous bank account.”
“McDermott? I thought J.P. was checking into him.”
“I had the contact at the bank, so he let me have a crack at it.”
I smiled at her irrepressible ambition. “How much did you find?”
“Fifty thousand, built up over the last year or so.”
I sat down in the shade on the uppermost step, stunned. Below me, I saw the traffic trying to sort its way through another of the town’s onerous intersections. “What do you mean by ‘anonymous’?”
“It’s under his middle name. The money only goes in; it doesn’t go out. Deposits have been large, and regular as rain. I thought I’d poke a little into his finances, not so much that I’d need a warrant, but just kind of chatting with a friend of mine in the bank. She volunteered that she’d stumbled over this thing a while back-had figured out that the account was really McDermott’s-but hadn’t given it much thought until I brought up his name.”
“How did she make the connection to McDermott?”
“The address. McDermott doesn’t bank there under his real name anymore, but he used to, and his address was still on file. She was checking some accounts, hit the wrong entry on the computer, and discovered the same address under Ellison, which is McDermott’s middle name. And McDermott’s lived in the same place for twenty-five years. I checked.”
“Do you know about this account for a fact?”
She smiled. “No. I didn’t go digging through his files. This was purely conversational. If we can get a subpoena, it’ll hold up in court.”
I shook my head. “I don’t see how we could get one, not at this point. For all we know, he has some investments that’ve been paying off, or some rich aunt who died and left him a fortune.”
“We could ask him.”
“I don’t think so. If he’s dirty, he already knows we’re sniffing around. There’s nothing to be gained by tipping him off we found his nest egg. We’ll have to come at him from another direction. Nice work, though.”
She grinned. “Hey. I got lucky.”
Lucky, indeed, I thought. Just when I want to find a sizable amount of clandestine money, it falls into my lap. Kunkle and I had not worked McDermott into our equation, but now that he was there, he presented some interesting possibilities. His office in the building behind me allowed him casual scrutiny of the police department, his demeanor and general blandness made him a person most people overlooked, and his job as building inspector, if properly manipulated, could be made a large producer of under-the-counter cash.
It occurred to me suddenly that perhaps we’d been too clever by half in our investigation of this case, constructing elaborate schemes involving millionaires, stockbrokers, and rival drug gangs. What if dull Fred McDermott, without fanfare and fuss, had been doing business on the side?
I sat there for thirty minutes, plugging him into the question-and-answer game I’d come to know by heart over the past few days. The results were as unsatisfying as ever. As a suspect, McDermott had his place, along with half a dozen others, it seemed, but it still wasn’t a perfect fit.
I remembered when we were kids, my brother Leo and I would lie on our backs of a sunny Sunday afternoon watching the clouds float by overhead. He would claim to see some form or another in a cloud, and I would try to come up with something completely different. Sometimes, we managed to conjure up four or five different shapes apiece out of a single lumpy cloud.
Was I doing the same thing with this case, I wondered? I sighed, shaking my head, and retreated into the Municipal Building.
My depression did not last long. I hadn’t even reached the detective bureau’s door before Maxine called over to me that Ron Klesczewski had requested I meet him at the West River Veterinary Clinic. Mention of the location alone gave me an enormous lift. Dr. Gramm had said curare might be available at hospitals or veterinary clinics. If Klesczewski had indeed managed to tie a supply source to the curare Gramm had found in Charlie Jardine, we’d taken a giant step toward finding out who had wielded the syringe.
The clinic was located in the North Shopping Plaza, the second of three malls lining the over-commercialized Putney Road. The plaza, despite its name, was not an open square of shops, but rather a gargantuan spread of black macadam, lined only at the back with one solid wall of stores. I parked next to Klesczewski’s unmarked car.
Ron met me on the sidewalk in front of the clinic’s front door. “I think we hit the jackpot. Aside from the hospital, this is the only source of curare in town. The hospital’s supply is tiny: one bottle buried in the back of a locked cabinet in a very secure area; they never use the stuff. Also, this place was burgled about nine months ago. At the time, nothing was reported missing, but today, after I asked them to check their stock, the people here think that about four vials of curare are missing from a total of ten.”
Inside, Klesczewski introduced me to a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, who led us to a back room, half stock area and apparently half laboratory. The woman’s name was Dr. Thelma Richie.
“We don’t use this room too often,” she explained. “It’s mostly storage. Almost everything is prepackaged these days, and we send out most of our lab work.”
She looked from one of us to the other, her hands in her coat pockets, as if making sure we thoroughly understood.