I knew I’d stumbled as soon as the words came out. “Might? I might have invested in that myself, or I might even have murdered Mr. Jardine. Why else should I sign this? Right now, it sounds like a fishing trip.”

  Knowing Harrowsmith, I actually took hope from his words. Had he thought the request was trash, I would already be standing on the curb. “Your Honor, as I pointed out on page two, the circumstances surrounding the birth of ABC Investments are extremely suspicious, more so than any other aspect of Mr. Jardine’s life.” I’d omitted any prejudicial references to Charlie’s bedroom and the coke. “From a one-time glorified bottlewasher, Mr. Jardine was abruptly catapulted to the protégé of a finance hotshot, hooked up to a veteran stockbroker, and encouraged to set up shop for himself in a business he didn’t seem to know existed just a few years earlier. We strongly suspect the roots of his death can be located in those business files.”

  Harrowsmith grunted. “You realize this warrant has to stand on its own merits, not on whether your suspicions are borne out later.”

  “Yes, sir, I realize that.”

  “And that if it doesn’t, chances are good it’ll be suppressed by a later judge and all the evidence you collected under it thrown out.”

  I didn’t answer. He stared at me for a moment, and finally signed his name. “I can live with seeing one of my warrants suppressed. You better think how you can live with seeing your whole case destroyed in court because you jumped too fast.”

  I thanked him and took the warrant. He had a good point. Too many cops thought that if they got the proper paperwork, their asses were covered and their cases were sanctified. But this instance didn’t weigh as heavily on me as Harrowsmith thought. Unless we found a letter written by the killer telling Jardine his days were numbered, I seriously doubted his business papers would hold any earth-shattering news. What I was hoping for was a crowbar—some piece of information I could use to pry either Clyde or Wentworth or whoever else cropped up off balance.

  But I would leave the finding of that crowbar to Ron, Justin Willette, if he agreed to help, and Dennis, to whom I delivered the warrant, while I went instead to the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, where Blaire Wentworth, according to the woman who answered her home phone, was working as a volunteer.

  The BMAC, as it was locally known, was a converted railway station, built of solid stone on the bank overlooking the railroad tracks and the river below. Its front entrance, with a stolidly attractive wrought-iron and glass awning, was located on the Canal Street level; its rear, with the platform still serving the once-a-night Montrealer, was two flights lower down.

  I found Blaire Wentworth at a desk on the middle level, in a dark and narrow hallway, typing some correspondence. Behind her, extending into the gloom, were piles of boxes pushed to one side so that the corridor was reduced to half its already restricted width. There was a single strip of dusty fluorescent tubing overhead. Despite knowing where we were in the building’s overall scheme, I felt we were meeting in the fourth sub-basement of some large and ancient penitentiary.

  “Miss Wentworth?”

  She looked up from her typing, her almost platinum-white hair shining in the light. “Yes?”

  She was stunningly attractive, which made me instantly think back to Klesczewski’s comment. Her eyes were pale blue, her cheekbones high, her mouth full and mobile, quick to smile. She was slim and angular and stylishly dressed and reminded me of a racing yacht ready to unfurl its sails to the wind. There was no air-conditioning in the hall, but she looked cool and fresh. Seeing her that way made me wonder how I looked, which was rarely a concern of mine.

  “My name is Lieutenant Joe Gunther. I’m with the police department.”

  She stuck out her hand, but stayed seated. “I’ve heard of you.”

  Her voice was subdued, which made me study her more closely. Indeed, behind the initial impression of fashion-model imperturbability, I sensed she was at once tense, sad, and very tired—a woman grieving.

  I jumped in with both feet, spurred by her appearance and my own pure instinct. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She looked at me for a long few seconds, her face unchanged by the sudden turmoil of thoughts I was convinced were crowding her brain. This was no Rose Woll. Behind the distress was a mind in motion, analyzing the reasons for my presence and pondering the appropriate responses. The intelligence in those very attractive eyes sharpened my own mental focus; I instantly sensed that unless I was lucky, I wasn’t going to leave this interview with more than she wanted to give me.

  “Thank you,” she finally answered, in a neutral voice. “I will miss him.”

  There were no questions concerning who we were talking about, or how I had known to come see her, or even how I knew she’d be in the bowels of this building.

  “How long had you known Charlie?”

  “Four years.”

  She still hadn’t moved from her seat, nor had she offered me one, which would have been difficult in any case. I gingerly parked myself on one of the wooden crates, my back against the wall.

  “You knew him well?”

  She pursed her lips before speaking. “You know most of the answers to your questions before you ask them, don’t you?”

  I had to smile at that. “Sometimes. So you were lovers.”

  “Friends and lovers.”

  I nodded. “A good combination. Maybe you can help me out a little then. I’m trying to get a handle on Charlie—find out what made him tick.”

  “Life made him tick, Lieutenant, and that’s over with. What do you really want to know?” The tiredness I’d seen in her eyes earlier tainted the harsh tone, making it more despairing than hostile. In fact, I half sensed a double meaning to her question, as if she were undecided whether to thwart me or pump me for whatever information I might be holding.

  I decided to work from the outside in. “I want to know who killed him and why.”

  Her face tightened. “I can’t help you then.”

  “Maybe not directly, but you can tell me something about his habits, his other friends, his general lifestyle. People rarely kill strangers; they kill people they know. The more I can learn about Charlie’s life, the better my chances are of finding out why he died, and who did it.”

  “That won’t do him much good, will it?”

  Now it was my turn to be irritated. “Come on, Miss Wentworth, his death doesn’t mitigate finding his killer, you know that. I’m not preaching revenge or justice here—just about righting a wrong.”

  “Not putting ‘an animal behind bars’?” She was taunting me.

  I looked at her straight, making sure my voice stayed calm and quiet. “I have no idea what kind of person killed him. People kill out of love sometimes.”

  She smiled bitterly and shook her head. “I guess they do, at that.”

  “Might that have happened to Charlie?”

  She leaned her elbows on the desk and covered her face with her hands. Her body seemed to withdraw into itself, shrinking a little in the process. It made her look suddenly frail. With that strikingly youthful face out of sight, I could easily imagine this same body on an eighty-year-old, thin, stoop-shouldered, and powerless. It was a jarring view of a far-distant future.

  She straightened and rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t been crying, I realized, but perhaps reorganizing her thoughts or merely taking a break to settle down. In any case, some of her immediate defenses were noticeably lowered. “I don’t know what happened to Charlie, Lieutenant. One moment he was there, the next he was dead.”

  “So you didn’t feel there was anything preying on his mind, some threat he didn’t want to talk about?”

  “Not a thing. He was perfectly normal.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  She hesitated. “Three, four days ago.”

  “Like a day before he died?”

  “Two days. We spent the night at his place and went our separate ways the next morning. Then I called him at home that night, and that was the last time we ever spoke.” Her voice sounded hollow at the end. I wondered if she kept herself this bottled up when she was alone, and whether she’d allowed herself to truly grieve at all so far.

  “And he sounded fine then?”

  “Absolutely fine.”

  “You left a blouse at his place.”

  She paused a couple of seconds, thrown perhaps by the sudden shift, and then she smiled sadly. “Yes.”

  “Did you have a complete change of clothing there, for when you stayed over?”

  “No. Some oil had spilled on that blouse. Charlie had cleaned it up, but it was wet and he said he’d hand-wash it later, so I left it there. I took one of his shirts instead. He was much better at that kind of thing than I am.”

  “You mean washing?”

  “Washing, cooking, all those things. I have a maid come in. He loved doing it himself. He had a very domestic strain in him.”

  “Were you aware of other women in his life?”

  “Of course. That was no secret.”

  “And no problem, either?”

  She was surprised. “You mean jealousy? You think he was killed by a jealous lover?”

  “It happens.”

  She laughed, shaking her head. “Not with Charlie. That kind of possessiveness never came into it.”

  “Maybe not with you; it might have with others. That’s not something you can easily control.”

  I expected her to keep rejecting the idea, convincing herself that her experience with Charlie had been shared by all his women, but her intelligence willed out, and her expression sobered. “It’s hard to imagine, but I suppose you’re right.”

  “Did you know any of these other women?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, and then said no.

  “What were you about to say?”

  “Nothing… Oh, just that we hadn’t formed a club or anything. Maybe there is some jealousy there after all.”

  “You sometimes thought about him making love to another woman?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. I wasn’t faithful to him either, you know.”

  “But it bothered you where it didn’t seem to bother him?”

  “I know it didn’t bother him. That was one of the ground rules. With Charlie, it was like an exchange. He would give you probably the best sex you’d ever had, but only if that’s where it stopped: no love, no commitment, no expectations.”

  “Sounds pretty cold.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, but it was honest, and he delivered on his end.”

  My inner vision blurred slightly, imagining this woman being gratified sexually like another might be pampered by a good hairdresser.

  “What did he get out of it?”

  It was a pretty tactless comment, blurted without thought, but she merely smiled. “I wasn’t a disinterested party, Lieutenant. I played, too.”

  I reddened. “Of course. It just sounded… I don’t know… Almost commercial.”

  “His payment was in power. I think he liked manipulating a woman’s passion, making her lose control. Sometimes he wouldn’t even join in; he’d just gratify me and then quit.”

  “Like he was doing a job,” I reiterated.

  She didn’t take offense at my perseverance. She merely corrected me. “No. It was as if while my pleasure was sexual, his was psychological.”

  “But it was sexual, too, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course, most of the time. But he transcended plain sex. In a way, if I had any jealousy, it was of his pleasure, because of its utter privacy. I felt he was enjoying something beyond what I could ever feel. I’d see him sometimes, watching us making love in one of those mirrors, totally absorbed, as if I didn’t matter, just my body.”

  “Did you two do drugs together?”

  “Sometimes.” The answer was hard and defiant.

  I kept my voice unchanged. “We found some cocaine in the house. Is that what you used?”

  “A little.”

  “Where did he keep it?”

  “You just said you found it.”

  I continued to avoid the emotional edge she was skirting, hoping to pull her back, to show her there was no danger from me. “Yes, but we might have missed a place. I want to make sure we got it all.”

  “It was taped to the back of a drawer, in the bedroom.”

  “Okay. Same stuff then. Ever do any grass or pills?”

  “No. We weren’t into drugs. The coke was to relax, like having a beer.”

  I resisted arguing the point. “You don’t happen to know where he bought the coke, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  “But he always had some?”

  “Yes. Not much, just that one baggie.”

  “How did you two meet?”

  She smiled. “At my father’s office. Charlie worked there before he set up his own company. I guess you know that.”

  I nodded. “So you just bumped into him?”

  “Well, at first, yes. But they spent a lot of time together, so I got to know him pretty well that way.”

  I was a little confused by the phrasing. “You mean they were in the office together when you came to visit?”

  “No. I saw Charlie at the office—around the building, that is—but he’d come over to my father’s house, too, for dinner or whatever. They loved to talk.”

  “Where do you live, Miss Wentworth?”

  “At my father’s. Actually, it’s a separate building, a small cottage, but we usually have breakfast together and lots of dinners. My mother died a long time ago.”

  “Did your father know of your involvement with Jardine?”

  “No. Does he have to find out?” For the first time, I sensed real distress. She leaned forward in her chair, her eyes fixed on mine, her face rigid with sudden tension.

  “I can only say I won’t tell him.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means the media is on the prowl and a lot of people are involved in this investigation. It might get out, even if I bend over backwards to stop it.”

  “And you wouldn’t do that.” She sounded both bitter and resigned, already anticipating how to pick up the pieces before anything was broken.

  “I can try, assuming I discover you’ve been straight with me.”

  “I’ve answered your questions, haven’t I?”

  There was an element of the rebellious child in this woman, despite her mature and sophisticated appearance. The revelations that she more or less still lived at home, worked as a volunteer, and went about buying two-hundred-dollar shirts, all helped to reveal a pretty self-indulgent person, free from the constraints of a job, a mortgage, or any worries about money. It made me wonder how free she felt from telling the truth. It also thinned out her natural beauty in my eyes, making it more superficial; no doubt that was partly my working-class prejudices at work.

  “I hear your father was a big help to Charlie, training him, setting him up in business. Why did he do that?”

  “He liked him.”

  “There must have been more to it than that. Your father put a lot of money into ABC Investments.”

  “He has a lot to give.”

  I didn’t actually know if Wentworth had put a plugged nickel into Jardine’s business, but I’d been hoping for a different reaction than the one I got. Obviously, the father-Charlie part of this conversation was pretty barren land.

  “How did Charlie help your father?”

  She tossed her head impatiently. “Oh, you know—the father-son bit, I suppose.”

  The tone was disinterested, but I wasn’t convinced. From the start, I’d felt Blaire Wentworth was holding more in her hand than she was willing to reveal. Indeed, in a few minutes, she had metamorphosed in my eyes from a cautious mourner to a careful player. I decided to return to what had been a more fruitful topic. “Did Charlie talk about his past much?”

  “No. Well, it was selective.”

  “How so?”

  “He loved to talk about high school. He said that was the most fun he’d ever had. I think it’s because that’s where he discovered sex. He was seriously into that.”

  “Did he mention friends or enemies? Any times he got into trouble?”

  “Just the usual—the kind of scrapes we all got into. Nothing serious.”

  “How about a girl named Rose. Did he ever talk about her?”

  “Rose?” She shook her head. “Never heard of her.”

  I looked at her; she looked back, her eyes wide and expressionless. Her answer had been immediate, clear, and to the point, and for all those reasons utterly unbelievable.

  Abruptly, I decided to call it quits. I rose from my wooden box, thanked her for her time, and left. Blaire Wentworth had plenty more information, but for whatever reasons, she obviously didn’t want to share it with me, at least not yet.

  18

  HOW DID IT GO with Arthur Clyde?”

  “I think it surprised the shit out of him,” Klesczewski said. “If there’s anything incriminating in all that junk, I think we’ll find it, ’cause he didn’t strike me as someone who’d swept his dirt under the rug. He looked totally stunned, and got madder than hell.”

  “Did you call in Willette to help sort it out?”

  “Yeah. Dennis and him are working on it now. Better them than me.”

  I looked over at him. He seemed more relaxed than I’d seen him in a long time—in fact, since his elevation to second-in-command. If nothing else, I thought, this double homicide and its attending chaos was going to make him more comfortable with taking the initiative. That was a personal vindication for me, since Brandt had voiced serious reservations about my decision. He’d favored Tyler—an obvious choice and, I’d thought, a perfect opportunity to see the Peter Principle at work.

  E-Z Hauling had its truck depot on the Old Ferry Road, somewhat of a no-man’s land on the edge of town where the north Putney Road becomes Route 5 heading toward Putney and Westminster. The area has been taken over by a mismatched scattering of metal buildings, some modest in size, housing conventional businesses like American Stratford typesetters, others so enormous as to defy the imagination, like the seven-acre main shipping and receiving terminal and the four-and-a-half-acre freezer building of C&S Wholesale Grocers, arguably the largest business in the whole state of Vermont, and one of the ten most profitable companies in New England. In between were operations like Pepsi-Cola Bottling, Northeast Cooperatives—a health food distributor—UPS, Boise Cascade, and various trucking firms. It was no scenic wonderland, but considering it was designed to keep the majority of the area’s heavy truck traffic away from downtown, I’d always thought both planners and developers had done a halfway decent job.