“Assuming Buddy is the killer,” Dunn declared with emphasis, dropping his pen on his pad. “Look, I think you have something here, but watch out for the ‘maybes.’ If you want to badly enough, you can turn Buddy into the man who really shot Kennedy. You’ve got some good stuff; chase it down, make it something we can take to a judge. If we can get just enough for a warrant, the rest might open up like a flower, so don’t waste your time running all over the place. Focus.”
He stood up, gave us all a curt nod, and left the room.
A half hour later we were all following Dunn’s suggestion, gathering our notes, preparing to head out again and chase down the ideas we’d discussed at the top of the meeting; all of us except me. I stayed slumped in my chair, my chin cupped in my right hand, buried in a debate I’d held earlier with myself.
Willy Kunkle was watching me from his end of the table. “What’s on your mind?”
“Curare.”
The bustling and movement in the room abruptly stopped.
“What about it?” he asked.
“Why curare? Why not just put a plastic bag over his head? The fun of watching would be the same; so would the final result.”
People drifted back near the table. “And the answer is?” Willy asked.
“Because curare shows you’re smart. It’s a signature. It’s not only exotic, it’s hard to find, tricky to administer, and most people don’t even know what it is.”
“So we got a big ego on our hands.”
I shook my head. “We have a high-school graduate needing to prove he’s brighter than everyone else. He reads a lot-he’s always carrying a book in his back pocket-so maybe he’s aware of curare, but he needs to know all about it, to do research-”
“At a library,” Kunkle finished for me, a grin spreading across his face.
I gave him a nod. “You got it, Sherlock.”
37
The library was closed. We found the head librarian at home, and keeping Kunkle out of sight, Brandt persuaded her of his need to gain immediate access. In fact, her reluctance played to our advantage, since what she finally did was give us the keys and permission to use them, instead of accompanying us personally, as she was no doubt supposed to.
Kunkle’s usually dour mood lightened immediately as soon as he, Brandt, Tyler, and I entered the gloomy building, lit primarily by the ever-changing lights and shadows thrown through the building’s twenty-foot glass front wall by the moon and the vehicles prowling back and forth on upper Main Street. Until we found the main bank of light switches and returned the world to normal, the high-ceilinged room, with its clusters of half-seen furniture and aisles of stacked books, reminded me of a grade-B horror movie from the thirties.
Kunkle hurried over to the card catalog and began pulling out drawers and riffling through their contents, his well muscled fingers a blur. I’d seen him in this hyper-driven mood before and knew better than to ask him if we could help.
After some fifteen minutes, he’d filled both sides of a small square of scrap paper with Dewey decimal figures, and we followed him into the stacks. There, one by one, he began pulling down large, heavy tomes and checking their indexes, all to no avail. Finally, highly irritated, he crossed over to a desk near the middle of the reading room and dialed out on a phone there.
“Doug? It’s Willy. How the fuck do I find out about curare in this dump?… I know it’s closed, just answer the question, okay?… Yeah… Yeah… No shit, really? I’ll be damned… Same to you, asshole.”
He slammed the receiver down and smiled. “You’ll love this: The reference librarian says that Buddy Schultz asked him about curare around six months ago.”
Kunkle led the way up the narrow metal stairway to the mezzanine stacks and pulled the biggest book yet from its shelf, the Physician’s Desk Reference, known throughout the medical profession as the PDR. Gripping it against his chest, he took it out to one of the tables lining the balcony overlooking the reading room and slapped it down with a bang.
“This bastard ought to have it; it’s what Doug recommended to Buddy.” He flipped to the back, ran his finger down the list of entries, and muttered, “Bingo.”
Without a word, unconsciously slipping into old cooperative habits born of prior years of working together, Tyler dropped a cotton glove onto the book, which Kunkle pulled onto his hand with his teeth. He then turned to the appropriate page near the front of the book, flattened the page by tugging gently at its corners, and quickly scanned its contents.
“That it?” Tyler asked.
“Yup.”
Tyler withdrew a foot-long cylindrical object from the evidence case he’d brought with him. “You realize this is a shot in the dark. Any prints have to be less than two weeks old for this gizmo to work.”
“Christ’s sake, J.P., just do it. You can run for cover later.”
In official terminology, what J.P. was preparing for use was called a “disposable iodine fuming gun.” Fat and short at one end, long and thin at the other, it looked like a straightened-out bubble pipe. Tyler took the fat end between his fingers and rolled it back and forth, crushing the iodine crystals within and releasing a small amount of gas. He then bent over the page Kunkle was holding open and blew through the slim end of the pipe, using his breath to wash the gas over the surface of the paper. Slowly, as he swept the operating end back and forth, two clear ochre-colored prints began to appear. He concentrated on them, no longer moving about, until they were sharply revealed. He then put down the fuming gun, quickly pulled a fingerprint card from his pocket, and held it next to the two already fading prints he’d uncovered.
There was a noticeable stillness in the small group around him. “It’s a match.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Brandt asked.
Willy slapped Tyler on the back once, an uncharacteristically jovial gesture for him. “’Course, he’s sure; son of a bitch never says anything unless he’s sure.”
We all looked at the page while the prints quickly faded from view. Later, up in Waterbury at the State Police Crime Lab, they would be made to appear permanently through a different process. But for now, this was all we needed. Tyler prepared a cardboard container for the book from materials he’d brought with him.
“All right,” I said. “We’ve got a murder victim with curare in him, a report of missing curare, bottles with Buddy’s prints that were near those stolen bottles, and now we’ve got his prints on an article dealing with curare. Enough for a warrant?”
Brandt nodded. “Certainly enough to try for one.”
Tyler was still troubled. “If the curare was stolen months ago, Buddy must have consulted the PDR back then. Why was I able to find fresh prints?”
Kunkle wasn’t worried, predictably. “Who cares? Maybe he came back to refresh his memory on how to inject the stuff. Point is, when the state lab guys do a real job on that page, I bet they’ll find a bunch of prints dating way back.”
“Including a few extras from other people,” Tyler muttered.
Kunkle shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s a recent edition, and I bet there aren’t too many people brushing up on South American poisons around here.”
Brandt chuckled. “In Brattleboro, who knows?”
Buddy Schultz lived on Prospect Street, the single inhabitant of the only run-down, weather-beaten, one-and-a-half-story clapboard building on the street, perched on the edge of a sixty-foot, heavily wooded, almost precipitous incline that overlooked Clark Street and, beyond it, Canal Street. Buddy’s home loomed almost directly over the erstwhile grave of Charlie Jardine.
By the time we reached the building’s sagging front stoop, it had been surrounded by officers, and Tyler and DeFlorio were near certain the place was empty. Under normal circumstances, that would have come as no surprise; it was late at night, when Buddy normally was supposed to be carrying out his janitorial duties at the Municipal Building. We hadn’t been able to locate him tonight, however. But standing here, waiting for the door’s lock to be forced, I had the creepy feeling that he wasn’t far off, and was probably watching us now.