Scent of Evil by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online Page B

main corridor. Like my office, it had a rectangular window looking into the larger room outside—the patrol division’s so-called officers’ room. Unlike my office, it had only that window, being an interior room, and its view was one of utter confusion and bedlam. For while the lieutenants’ office had been completed just the week before, the officers’ room still looked like a practice hall for aspiring carpenters.
    I stepped over piles of two-by-fours, tangles of extension cords, and around several stranded sawhorses to get to the office door. During the renovation, the patrol division had been relocated across the hall to our side of the building, in a large, dark room with no long-range purpose. Eventually, one corner of it was slated to become Billy Manierre’s office, but for the moment, Billy had commandeered his present abode, despite its being both isolated from the rest of us and located smack-dab in the eye of the renovator’s storm. I noticed as I crossed the threshold that the wall-to-wall carpeting, still smelling strongly of its chemical origins, was embedded with a snow-like trail of sawdust.
    Billy Manierre, big-bellied, white-haired, and patrician in the deputy chief’s dark-blue uniform he preferred over street clothes, filled the fanciest tilt-back, swivel office chair in the department, an item we were all convinced he’d intercepted on its way to the equally fancy new Court Building across the street. Opposite him sat John Woll, late twenties, narrow-bodied, thin-haired, wearing a permanent expression of weariness that made him look fifteen years older. He’d been on the force two years, was hard-working if uninspired, and was liked by just about everybody.
    I perched on the corner of Billy’s desk, noticing the photograph of the dead man lying next to me. “So, you knew this man?”
    Woll nodded. “I went to school with him. His name was Charlie Jardine.”
    “What school?”
    “Here—Brattleboro Union High.”
    “What year was he, same as you?”
    “Yeah, ’81.”
    I paused to pick up the photograph. Woll’s answers were perfectly straightforward but somehow terse. Given the circumstances—his being the one man in the department with important knowledge—I would have expected more excitement from him. Instead, he was waiting for the questions, apparently unwilling to supply what should have been a torrent of information, both trivial and vital.
    “Were you friends?”
    “More like acquaintances.”
    Again, I expected more and got nothing. “Did you keep up with him? Did he live around here?”
    “Yeah, he lived in town—I’m not sure where.”
    “What did he do?”
    Woll shifted in his chair. Throughout, his eyes had kept to the carpet. This wasn’t unusual. He avoided eye contact as a rule and generally appeared uncomfortable with superior officers. In fact, he was somewhat reserved with everybody. But I was still hearing the echoes of that distant alarm bell.
    Woll very quietly cleared his throat. “I don’t know exactly. We didn’t keep up. But I think he invested in things.”
    “Stocks?”
    “Stocks, bonds, probably more. I don’t know for sure.”
    “Successful?”
    “I guess.”
    “When we found him, he was wearing a fancy silver ring and a chain around his neck. Does that sound right?”
    He nodded. “Yeah, he was sort of flashy—popular with women.”
    “Was he married?”
    “No.”
    The answer was both abrupt and curiously final, and I wondered why. But I didn’t ask—I didn’t want to make this too personal. Not yet.
    “When was the last time you saw him?”
    John Woll shook his head and let out a sigh. “Oh, gee. I don’t know. I’d see him around town, you know? In a car or walking on the sidewalk. But I haven’t talked to him in years. We weren’t friends or anything.”
    I lightened my tone of voice. “Well, it won’t take long to get some kind of line on him. I gather you were on patrol last night near where Jardine’s body was