Bellows Falls (13 page)

Padget lifted both hands, palms up. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know anything about that stuff.”

I took his elbow and sat him on the couch, perching myself on the coffee table opposite him, so our knees were almost touching. “You tested positive for coke, your polygraph came up zero, and now this. If you don’t know anything about how all that happened, you better think of someone who does.”

Fear and longing were all I could read in his face now. He was hunched forward, his hands between his knees, the paleness of his face harshly contrasting with a mild case of acne. His forehead was damp. “There is nobody else.”

“What about the reason I was brought up here in the first place?”

He looked shocked at the mere suggestion. “Jan? She’d never do that.”

“How ’bout her husband?”

His mouth partly opened, but what he said reflected how distracted he was. “Why did I come up positive?”

The incredulity in his voice was palpable—and believable—but I needed to keep him on track. “Who have you had over here lately? Jan?”

He blinked a couple of times. “No. My neighbors are almost in my face they live so close. We thought it was too risky.”

I remembered how Anne Murphy had spotted them making out in an alleyway. They could have spared themselves the discomfort. “Where did you meet, then?”

“Cars, back streets, the woods, a motel room a couple of times. It was always real quick. We were scared we’d get caught.”

“So you haven’t had anybody here, in this house?”

“No, not really.”

“What’s that mean?”

“My parents stayed over once, and Emily’s been here to pick me up when my car was in the shop.”

“That’s Emily Doyle, from your department?”

He nodded dumbly.

“How long ago was that?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“What was wrong with the car?”

“It was running rough. The garage guy said he found water in the gas, so he cleaned it out and tightened a hose fitting.”

“When Emily came over, did she wait outside?”

“Not always.”

“Did she ever use the bathroom?”

Padget sat back as if I’d pushed him, and stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Emily? No fucking way.”

I answered him angrily. “Keep your eye on the ball, Padget. You’re the guy with a one-way ticket to jail right now. The more you tell me what saints all your friends are, the more you look like a total chump. If you’ve been screwed, then somebody did the screwing. Remember who filed the sexual harassment claim against you?”

He flushed. “She was forced to by her husband.”

“Would you let someone force you to get a friend fired from his job?”

He shook his head as if trying to ward me off. “He’s got her under his thumb.”

“What did she tell you about him?”

“Just that she wanted to be free of him. That she felt she couldn’t breathe when he was around. She wanted to be with me—to run away.”

I could almost hear the words in Jan’s own voice, and see her face as she uttered them—pleading, desperate, clinging. They were clichés common to those who knew they carried no weight. “Did she tell you he dealt drugs?”

“Not directly. I didn’t ask and she didn’t say. She wanted our time together to be free of him. But I knew he did. Everybody knows. We were all dying for him to make a single mistake so we could nail him.”

“Didn’t it cross your mind you were sleeping with the best witness against him?” I asked harshly.

It was a mistake, of course. I was too far from his age to remember what that kind of love demanded of a person—how stupid it could make you.

He gave me a pitying look. “I wouldn’t do that.”

I’d blown it already, but I tried one last time. “Brian. Not everybody treats friendship the way you do.”

He stood up, almost knocking me over, and retreated to the window. His frustration made him throw out his arms and shout. “I’m not a kid, okay? I know there’re assholes out there. I deal with them all the time. I’m good at my job and I know how to read people, so don’t give me a lecture. I don’t know how the fuck that shit got in here, or in me, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. Norm Bouch is who you want, not Emily or Jan. Norm Bouch has been giving us the finger since the day he hit town.”

He stopped abruptly and looked around wildly for a moment. Latour, who’d been leaning against the open door, suddenly straightened and stated Brian’s name.

I rose to my feet as Padget slowly settled down on his own. Both Willy and J.P. appeared from the back of the house. I glanced at them inquiringly. Both shook their heads.

“Okay, Brian,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone. We’ll finish up here as quick as we can. You’re not under arrest, since I’m assuming you’ll stay put, but you’ll be cited to appear for arraignment on this.” I waved the bag of coke in the air. “If you can afford a lawyer, you better get one, otherwise the court will appoint a public defender. It’s up to your chief to decide whether your suspension will be with or without pay.”

I moved toward the door, feeling a sudden need for fresh air, stifled by my own officiousness. But I paused on the threshold. “You might line up a mental health counselor, too. The shit is going to hit the fan on this—no way around it—and you’re going to feel like you’re the only guy on the face of the earth before it’s done. You better figure out how to deal with it. And for Christ’s sake, once you’ve cleared the fog from your head, think about who might’ve done this to you. I’ll do the best I can, but I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

· · ·

“You okay?”

I took my eyes off the star-filled skylight over our bed and looked in Gail’s direction. Her hand appeared from under the covers and stroked my cheek. “You’ve been lying that way for over an hour.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you. Can’t turn my brain off.”

“The case?”

“And the people in it. Along with a few thousand others I’ve dealt with over the years. Old ghosts ganging up, I guess.”

Gail shifted around and slipped her arm across my chest. I could hear the clinical neutrality in her voice as she gently prodded. “Are they saying anything that makes sense?”

I laughed to set her at ease. “Yes, doctor. They all agree I’m going nuts.”

She didn’t laugh with me. “Are you?”

I moved my own arm around to cradle her head, embarrassed at trying to put her off. We’d been through a lot together. She deserved honesty when she asked for it. “No. I’m just piling on the baggage with this one. I don’t know if it’s a critical-mass problem or just these particular people, but I’m feeling more and more weighed down by what I’m finding.”

“Like what?”

“Name it: teenage mothers on coke, a young boy in a ménage à trois, a cop probably being set up by his addict lover, a guy using kids to run a drug ring. Things’re looking pretty bleak… ”

“You’ve been wading through the dregs for decades, Joe. Some of it’s got to stick.”

She was right, of course. It began sticking the first year—but dealing with it was a rite of passage. Routine. From the angry, out-of-town motorist cursing your small-town rules, to the fading glance of a drug-dazed, pregnant girl who’d just slashed her wrists to get some sleep, you took it in stride. It became a spectacle occurring beyond a thick pane of glass.

In fact, I’d been noticing the accumulation of all this before I’d been asked to go to Bellows Falls. It had been catching up to me like old age itself. But it took working in that town to bring it into focus. Brattleboro was a part of me, and I’d grown to overlook what I chose to. Bellows Falls was uncharted territory, and I didn’t know the shoals well enough to avoid them. Jan Bouch, Emile Latour, Anne Murphy, Eric Shippee, Emily Doyle, and my own lamb-to-slaughter Brian Padget had all come too close, sharply revealed in their despair. I’d been caught by the exhaustion, the bitterness, and the suspicion I’d been avoiding.

What was keeping me awake was the effort to recall something other than all that misery. Even the woman lying next to me was in this house we shared because a brutal rape had forced her to change her life. I had to reach back to my youth on a farm, halfway up the state, to recall a time when most of the faces around me were smiling and unfettered by turmoil.

I glanced over at Gail, to see if she was still expecting me to explain what I couldn’t. Thankfully, her steady, even breathing answered for her and let me off the hook. I was once again free to peruse my catalogue of lost faces in solitude.

SAMMIE MARTENS LOOKED UP AS I
approached her desk the following morning. “You look terrible.”

“You should be a doctor. What did you find out about the towns Amy Sorvino mentioned? Any Oliver Twist–style teenage gangs on the loose?”

“Burlington is a definite hit, and Kunkle’s been snooping around our own backyard, trying to find out what Jasper Morgan might’ve been up to. You ought to talk to him. Barre I got a lukewarm—there’re kids into drugs, but the PD had no sense they were more organized than usual.”

“Tell me about Burlington.”

“I contacted Audrey McGowen—we went to the Academy together. She checked with the juvie crime squad, who said that in general, they haven’t seen any changes. There are a tiny number of kids that seem vaguely interconnected, but it’s fluid, they come and go like hourly workers at a fast-food joint. And when they do bust one on possession, they can’t find where the drugs came from or where they’re headed—the kids pick it up and drop it off but don’t make contact with buyer or seller. That’s the structured part the PD noticed, ’cause it’s so consistent. Surveillance might crack it open, but who’s got the money, especially with so little to go on? And if all they get is a bunch of kids, the busts won’t justify the overhead.”

“Which Bouch knew from the start,” I said softly.

Sammie nodded. “He also knows to keep it small. The numbers Audrey gave me didn’t come to more’n six kids, max. ’Course, who knows? And the profit margin’s huge. She told me a ten-dollar bag of coke in New York’ll bring you thirty-five in Burlington. They’re hungry up there.”

“Did she know Norm Bouch by name?”

Sammie smiled broadly. “Yeah, and it’s from an interesting angle. They’ve got a special unit up there—some sort of multi-jurisdictional thing… ”

“CUSI,” I said. “Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations. I thought that was mostly sex-related crimes.”

“Exactly. That’s where Bouch’s name popped up on her screen. It’s a little dated now—a few years at least. But his interest in minors made him a natural for them. They never caught him abusing kids or anything, but they talked to juvies who knew him well—like you were telling us about those Bellows Falls kids, he was a Pied Piper. Keep in mind, though,” she emphasized, “I got the clear impression Audrey wasn’t blown away by any of this. Bouch is small potatoes—one name out of thousands they have on file, and an old one at that.”

I rose to my feet. “I don’t mind that. I’d just as soon have this whole thing run low-key. The fewer people get interested in it, the more likely it is we get the nod to run the case for the AG. If Norm Bouch was seen as a big deal, we’d have DEA, the task force, and everybody else wanting to grab some of the action. We’ll probably get a little of that anyhow. Drug busts make for happy voters and keep the grant money flowing.”

Sammie stopped me as I was about to leave. “That reminds me—I got something else you might like. You must’ve tickled Phil Marchese’s fancy, ’cause he did some poking around after you left Lawrence. Norm Bouch’s NCIC records I think you already know about… ” she quickly checked her notes. “DWI, check fraud, two misdemeanor possessions, and a first-degree unlawful dealing with a child, for selling beer to a bunch of minors. What doesn’t appear, ’cause it was supposed to stay off the books, was that Bouch participated in a special program the Lawrence PD and the local parole board had going under a short-term federal grant. It wasn’t therapy, so there’s no patient confidentiality to worry about, but it involved psychologists trying to find out what makes the bad guys tick when they’re out on the street, instead of when they’re in jail. It was like a big brother program of sorts—or big sister in this case. It folded fast, of course—you can pick your reasons why—but Marchese found a woman named Molly Bremmer who dealt with Bouch for several months. He said she’d be willing to talk to you.” She gave me Bremmer’s name and number on a slip of paper.

I looked at it appreciatively. “Nice work, Sam.” I hesitated a moment before adding, “Do me another favor, would you? This is off the record, so be discreet, but I’d like to find out about a Bellows Falls policewoman named Emily Doyle—as much personal information as you can find. She wasn’t too thrilled to talk to me when I asked her about Padget, and I found out last night she was in a position to plant that dope at his place. I have no reason to suspect her of anything, but I am curious. When I talk to her, I’d like to know more about her than she thinks I do.”

Sammie wasn’t too thrilled but nodded her assent.

Harriet Fritter handed me the newspaper as I walked toward my office. “Front page,” she said. “You’ll find it interesting.”

I took the paper and sat down at my desk. “Bellows Falls Police Officer Suspended on Drug Charge,” read the headline. In smaller type underneath it continued, “Chief promises thorough investigation.”

I sighed deeply. It hadn’t taken long for the carnival to begin. The only good news was that since I was hearing of it just now, apparently no one had given the paper my name. I began to read carefully, hoping I was correct.

For most of its length, the article toed the line, outlining how police, acting on a tip given them through the
Reformer
, had secured a search warrant for the home of Officer Brian Padget, of the BFPD, and had discovered “several” grams of what was believed to be cocaine. Padget, who had earlier tested positive for drugs in a urine analysis, was unavailable for comment and was said to be on paid suspension while awaiting arraignment. That much was pretty mundane, although I wondered at the speed with which the paper had secured its information. The answer to that was supplied on the last page, where the article concluded, “Holding a brief press conference with Town Manager Eric Shippee, Bellows Falls Police Chief Emile Latour told reporters last night, ‘We will nip this thing in the bud. There will be no dirty cops tolerated on the force. The public can expect a full and speedy accounting for this whole sorry affair.’”