Like J.P. before him, Ron took his time before speaking. “Moody, introverted, bookish, quick to anger and slow to forget, got very good grades but was too broke to go on to college without help. He was a competitor for the scholarship that John won in his senior year, but grades were only a portion of the award’s criteria. John wasn’t straight-A, but he was considered ‘well-rounded.’ Buddy was just the reverse: never a B in his career, but a real oddball. From what I heard, he was resentful as hell when John got it over him.”
“And no doubt doubly so when John threw it away to get married to Rose,” I added.
Ron pulled out another sheet of paper. “More than we guessed. I found out that Buddy’s mother checked him into the Retreat right after graduation. He stayed there for a year, but I don’t know what his diagnosis was. We’d have to get a subpoena for the files.
“Rose might have played a part in his breakdown, in fact. Buddy had a thing for her in high school. Apparently, he and Rose had tried out the back of Buddy’s car, and according to my source, things didn’t go too well. Buddy mooned over Rose for a long time afterward, but by that time she was going with Charlie Jardine. Buddy never forgave Jardine for ‘stealing’ his girl-although the choice for Rose had obviously been easy.”
Dunn broke in. “That’s all too vague. Will your source be any good in court?”
Ron nodded without hesitation. “I think so. I didn’t give him much time, since we were all trying to cover a lot of ground fast, but he implied it was no deep, dark secret. We should be able to tighten up his testimony and get others to back him up.”
Dunn nodded without comment.
“While we’re on the psychological angle,” Ron added, “I did a little checking into what might have triggered Buddy to flip out ten years after getting out of school. Turns out his mother died about a year and a half ago, which is when he began laying the groundwork for his mayhem. I talked to a psychologist friend of mine, who said that if the mother-son attachment had been intense, her death, coupled with Buddy’s long-standing mental problems, might have been enough to push him over the edge.”
“One other background item,” I added, and I described Fred McDermott’s connection to Buddy’s mother. When I finished, I sat back down. “Again, none of this will secure a warrant, but it reveals bad blood between Buddy and several of the victims.”
“What about Jackson?” Sammie asked.
I turned my palm up in a shrug. “Don’t know yet.”
Ron responded. “I heard a rumor that long ago, like twenty years or so, Jackson almost got into serious trouble. I couldn’t get any details, but something sexual was implied.”
“With one of his students?” Dunn asked.
Ron shook his head. “I can’t be sure; that’s the feeling I got. I asked a couple of his contemporaries and got nowhere. But if something was hushed up, surely a retired principal or administrator might know.”
“What do we care, if it happened before Buddy’s time?” Dennis asked.
“It may have given Buddy ammunition,” Brandt explained. Since the beginning, Luman Jackson has displayed an extraordinary interest in this case, above and beyond what might have been expected, even for him. It’s possible somebody was putting the squeeze on him, for whatever reason…” He suddenly stopped and looked at Ron. “Did Jackson ever teach Buddy?”
“Yes.”
“Any feedback on that?”
“Not particularly with Buddy. The general consensus was that Jackson treated all his kids like shit, attacking their weak spots and humiliating them in front of their friends.”
Brandt made a face. “Charming. Still, that would supply Buddy with an ax to grind. What he had on Jackson, I don’t know, but it must have been pretty bad.”
Sammie had been staring at the tabletop through all this talk of Jackson. Now she finally blurted out, “What went wrong at the high school? Why didn’t our trap catch Buddy, if he was the bad guy?”
I hesitated. J.P. and I had already discussed this privately, and while I was going to enter our conclusions in the final report, I thought I’d sit on it within reason until then.
Tyler got me off the hook, however. “Because I screwed the pooch. When Joe told me he thought his office was being bugged, I knew we’d probably have to wander around the building looking for its source. So I went to Buddy for a passkey to all the offices. He must have had a good laugh listening to us later, trying to set him up.”
There was a long, embarrassed silence.
I finally cleared my throat. “I think you’re in good company when it comes to screwing pooches. I’d like to move on to something else, a major facet of the case we haven’t mentioned yet. In the middle of this whole mess, we stumbled over the biggest single stash of dope we’ve ever seen in this town. We were pretty sure from the start that it was tied into the homicides somehow, but we didn’t know how.
“Initially, as you recall, we thought Jardine and Milly might have been partners, with Charlie the money man-perhaps using Wentworth’s money-and Milly handling the street contacts. That had a variety of holes in it, not the least of which was: Who killed them both? Since then, we’ve come to believe Charlie was a peripheral party. It all makes better sense when we make Buddy and Milly partners and have Charlie simply as a customer, which explains how that baggie ended up in his house.
“This new scenario gains credibility because of a few things Willy Kunkle discovered through his sources. We’d thought initially that the numbers on the list found in Milly’s apartment might be Milly’s colleagues. In fact, except for John Woll, they were all from a rival operation; therefore, the list was a double frame, implicating both Woll and Milly’s competition. It worked, of course. Our suspicions of John did increase, and our pursuit of Mark Cappelli led to the collapse of the ring he worked with.
“Another problem we had were the drugs. Why had the shooter-Buddy, for the sake of clarity-killed Milly, planted the list, but left behind a fortune in dope? The simplest explanation was time. Buddy didn’t have enough of it, and it was more important for him to set up the double frame than it was to collect the inventory. But that didn’t make sense to us; by killing his partner, Buddy put himself out of business.
“Now we could see where Milly had become a sudden liability. He knew Buddy, and what he was up to, and he’d sold a baggie of coke to Charlie. He was the bridge that could have led us straight to Buddy. Also, in Buddy’s eyes, he was replaceable.
“But what about the dope? By abandoning it, Buddy not only sacrificed its potential value, but also whatever it had cost him in the first place. That remained our thickest stonewall. We fooled around trying to connect various money sources to Buddy, plugging in Jardine, Wentworth, McDermott, and Luman Jackson as blackmail victims, but all of them had problems.
“The debate was finally ended, again through Willy Kunkle. This morning, Willy discovered why Cappelli started shooting before Ron and I identified ourselves as police officers, and why the rest of his gang have gone so far underground. It turns out Cappelli and Hanson were ripped off several months ago of the exact amount of dope we later found in Milly’s apartment. The Boston people were unhappy, perhaps even suspicious of their Brattleboro colleagues, and Cappelli and Hanson were as nervous as cats on a highway.
“Having therefore secured his drugs at no cost, Buddy was less concerned with abandoning them, and more interested in giving his competitors a final shove. We have recently heard that the Boston suppliers have been approached by someone wishing to replace Hanson et al. Even with our breath on his neck, Buddy is still trying for the gold ring.
“Obviously,” I concluded, “Buddy would have preferred to keep both Milly and the drugs in place. But our finding Milly’s prints on the baggie in Jardine’s house had all the potential of disaster. It’s proof of Buddy’s weird brilliance that he could not only plug a sudden leak like that, but turn it to his own advantage.”