Bellows Falls (10 page)

“That’s not real convenient, Mrs. Sorvino,” I said. “I came from Vermont to talk to you. I’d appreciate if you could give me a few minutes. It won’t take long—I promise.”

She closed the one eye we could see through the crack and sighed. “All right. But wait a minute, okay? I’m a wreck. Don’t go away.”

She slammed the door. Marchese smiled at me. “Ah, that Vermont country charm.”

I pointed to his upper lip. “I say it’s the mustache.”

Ten minutes later she reappeared, this time opening the door wide. I had to admit, she looked good for having obviously come off an all-nighter. She was wearing a clingy, thin-fabric caftan, a quick touch of makeup, and had brushed her hair. I could smell the toothpaste on her breath as we crossed the threshold. I guessed her to be in her early thirties and figured she divided her time between living hard and keeping fit at the gym. I wondered how long the balance would tilt in her favor.

She ushered us into a pleasant, new-smelling living room, reminiscent of a colonial-style furniture catalogue—a startling contrast to the house’s working-class exterior, and a dead giveaway of how Amy Sorvino had spent some of her newfound cash. “You want coffee?”

“No, thank you,” I answered. Marchese merely shook his head.

She grimaced. “Well, I do. Grab a seat.”

She vanished for several more minutes, during which we heard a microwave being put into service. When she came back, a mug held in both hands, she settled into a wingback armchair, tucking her feet up under her. It made for a very attractive picture, as she no doubt realized.

“So—fire away,” she said with a small laugh. “If that’s not the wrong thing to say.”

I was impressed by her poise. With two cops in the house, their purpose unstated, I might’ve been at least slightly cowed. To this woman—now that she was awake—we were obviously only a source of curiosity. “Mrs. Sorvino—”

“Call me Amy. Who’re you?”

“Joe Gunther, and this is Phil Marchese. I’m from the Brattleboro Police Department. I was working on a case when your name came up—not in any bad way, but just as someone who might be able to tell me a few things.”

“What about?” She took a sip of coffee, still holding on with both hands. Over the rim of the mug, she batted her eyes at me. I couldn’t resist smiling. I liked this woman. She was a hard worker, if a little single-minded.

“Norm Bouch and Jasper Morgan.”

I expected the smile to fade and the conversation to get chilly. Those two names were not associated with the happiest events in Amy Sorvino’s life. But she merely rolled her eyes and laughed. “Oh, those two. What a pair they made.”

“How so?” I asked.

She rested her hand against her stomach, flattening the fabric of her caftan and pulling it tighter against her breasts. “You’re not pretending you don’t know what the three of us had going?”

Despite my best efforts, I flushed slightly. “No, but it’s more the relationship between the two of them that I want to know about, not so much what they were doing with you.”

She stuck her lower lip out. “Gee. That’s not too flattering. What kinds of things are you after?”

“Well, for starters, were they good friends? Some men wouldn’t be, in that kind of situation.”

“We were all friends. That was the point. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Jasper found Norm and me one night. I guess we woke him up with all our noise. I could see he was interested—I mean it wasn’t like I was his real mother or anything. So I invited him in. And Norm was real cool about it. He told him stuff, made it a whole lot easier. It was perfect ’til old George showed up on the wrong night and screwed it all up. He was such a jerk.”

I didn’t have to ask if George was her husband. “Did Norm see Jasper at other times?”

The frown she’d put on disappeared. “Oh sure. That’s what I mean. They were pals. Norm was a much better foster father than old George, any day. They went to ball games, movies, hung out… Norm got him involved in all his schemes. It was great. Jasper loved it. He was sort of a brat when he first came, but me and Norm together settled him down pretty good.”

I thought back to how Jasper had established a false identity to separate his criminal and medical records. Norm looked like a good bet for that piece of inspiration. In those terms, “settled down” took on a distinctly subversive meaning—one that Jasper probably had found very appealing. “What were these schemes you mentioned?”

She laughed again. “Oh, Norm was going to be quite the big-time bad guy. He was going to set up a kind of family, where the kids brought him what they stole and he took care of them. I used to pull his leg and call him Fagin, after the old man in
Oliver Twist
. You ever see that movie? He didn’t see the humor… It was kind of the same thing, though. Anyway, he tried it out on Jasper.”

“How?” I pushed, smiling to encourage her.

“He was a cute kid—small, too—could do things and go places a man couldn’t, without looking suspicious. Plus if he got caught, he was a minor.”

“Were these muggings or burglaries or what?”

She waved a hand impatiently. “I don’t know. They conspired together like a couple of gangsters. I just had fun with them. Anyhow, what they did here wasn’t the point. Norm was going to Vermont. That’s where he’d been planning to do his Oliver Twist thing from the start, and where Jasper was going to be a part of it.”

A pattern was forming in my mind, and with it a growing excitement. I leaned forward in my seat. “Jasper ended up in Brattleboro, back with his folks, and Norm lives in Bellows Falls. Was that something they planned?”

She smiled broadly and shook her finger at me. “Oh, you’re good. Yeah, Norm wanted a bunch of people like Jasper—lieutenants, he called them—and they would run other kids in towns all over Vermont. When old George busted things up, Norm really pushed Jasper to clean up his act, get back with his parents if he could, but at least get up to Brattleboro fast so he could set up shop, recruit some people, and start going with this thing. Norm was hot to trot—I used to laugh at him about it, he got so serious sometimes.”

“And the idea was to start a burglary ring?” I tried again.

“You mean robbing people? Oh, hell no. There wasn’t enough money in that. Norm told me that was just boot camp for the kid. It was drugs he wanted to get into. That’s where the profits were, and he said Vermont was easy pickings—lots of yahoos hungry for dope. He kept saying, ‘I’m going to fill a need, just like Henry Ford’.”

“A history buff,” Marchese spoke for the first time.

She tilted her head back and glanced at the ceiling. “Yeah, he was something else.”

“Did Norm mention the towns he was going to use for his network?” I pressed her.

“The two of them studied maps all the time. They had to be on the interstates, and they had to have the right kind of people. I didn’t pay much attention to all that, but the ones they talked about most were Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Barre, and Burlington. I remember because of all the Bs.”

“Did you ever meet others that were supposed to work like Jasper—as lieutenants? People Norm sent to those towns?”

“No, but they talked about them. The real clever part of this thing was that only the lieutenants would know who their own people were—the kids wouldn’t know each other and the other lieutenants wouldn’t know them. Norm called them ‘cells,’ and said that that way, if one of them got blown, the others could keep on going. Smart, huh? That was about all I knew, though—stuff I heard when we were all at home. Mostly they talked where Norm worked at a garage. I never went there—I’m not even sure exactly where it was—but they had meetings all the time, with kids, just like in that movie.”

“Was Norm’s grand plan ready to go when George suddenly appeared?”

“I don’t think so, but who knows? Our little deal getting busted up, we kind of lost touch. I know Norm and Jasper kept seeing each other, so I guess they were still hot at it.”

For the first time, she appeared vaguely uncomfortable, staring at the floor and fingering the material of her caftan.

I took a wild guess. “Maybe the breakup wasn’t such bad news anyhow.”

She looked at me, surprised, but she took her time before answering and then said unexpectedly, “No. It was time.”

I thought back to the dynamics I’d seen in the Bouch kitchen. “Because of Norm?”

She nodded. “The more that grand plan of his grew, the worse he got—pushing me around, acting like he owned the place. There was something a little scary about it, too.”

I felt I knew what she meant and shared the sadness I saw in her eyes. For the first time in this case, the true impact of all I’d been collecting slipped under my defenses—and darkened my spirit.

· · ·

The sexual harassment case against Brian Padget collapsed like a pierced balloon, as I’d thought it would. After leaving Lawrence and Phil Marchese, I continued playing hooky and spent the rest of the morning in Brattleboro with my squad, suggesting we contact the towns Amy Sorvino had mentioned, to see if Norman Bouch or Oliver Twist-style teenage gangs rang any bells. I had been planning to grill the Bouches later in the day, in far more detail than the day before, but around lunchtime a phone call from Emile Latour turned that idea inside out.

“The Bouches want to come in at two o’clock and make a clean breast about Brian.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Norm called me and said Brian was the innocent victim of a marital spat. He wants to make a formal statement to you and put the whole thing to rest.”

“Did he say the marital spat was because his wife and Brian were fooling around?”

“No—just that Brian had nothing to do with it.”

I frowned at the phone. “Making Norm the only guy in town not to know?”

Latour didn’t answer.

“How’s Brian feel about it?”

There was a telling pause at the other end of the line, from which I assumed Brian had not been informed. “If they do as they claim, we’re not going to pursue it.”

His tone of voice reminded me of when we’d both been in the town manager’s office.

“What’s going on?” I asked, irritated by the memory. “It’s not necessarily ‘we’ who have anything to say in this. If Brian wants to go after them civilly, that’s his right.”

“We’ve got another situation with Brian right now.”

He didn’t elaborate, but I could tell it wasn’t good. “What?”

“I got a call from your newspaper down there. They had a tip Brian is dirty—he’s been dealing and using drugs.”

I scowled at the phone. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. But they wouldn’t identify who tipped them, right?”

“No.”

“Come on, Emile. You use a paper to smear someone, because you know they won’t reveal their source. You’re not actually moving on this, are you? Give the kid a break.”

“I don’t have any choice. If I ignore it, they’ll start yelling about a cover-up. Besides, I think I got it licked. I told Brian about it, and he volunteered for a urine test and a polygraph, then and there. He’s already in Waterbury, doing both at the state lab. They said they’d let me know by late this afternoon, maybe sooner. With that in my hand, I can tell the paper to piss off, no pun intended.”

It was a hopefulness I distrusted. I didn’t believe for a moment that Norm Bouch’s conversion and Brian Padget’s latest hurdle weren’t connected, and I was tempted to call the paper myself to see if a little personal pressure might not yield better results. Using the press to bolster the us-versus-them mania Emily Doyle had demonstrated earlier made me furious. I didn’t know Brian Padget, but I knew for a certainty that if he wasn’t showing some of Emily’s attitude by now, he was missing some major vital functions.

I kept such thoughts to myself, however, and told Latour I’d be at his building at two.

· · ·

I opted to use the Bellows Falls Police Department’s cramped, sterile interrogation room to interview the Bouches rather than Latour’s more spacious office, to help drive home my dissatisfaction with the latest turn of events. Not that my opinion carried any weight, of course. If the Bouches officially withdrew their accusation, my job was over, and since the insult was against the PD, they and Padget became the injured parties, and it was up to them to file the appropriate charges. But I was angry, and I wanted to show it the only way I was officially allowed. I didn’t believe in Norm’s contrition. His and Jan’s appearance today was to be another act, and his pretending not to know about her and Brian’s affair was at the heart of it. Unfortunately, I was now a bystander—a spectator to Norm’s next move.

Latour and I were already seated at the interrogation room’s bare table when an officer escorted in Jan and Norm Bouch. Unsmiling, I removed my recorder from my pocket, laid it on the smooth surface between us, and, as they settled into seats opposite, I pushed the
Record
button.

“Police officers Latour and Gunther interviewing Jan and Norman Bouch in the Bellows Falls Police Department, the latter two people being here of their own free will.” I checked my watch and added the time and date of the meeting.

I clasped the fingers of both hands before me and rested them lightly on the tabletop, watching our guests closely. Jan looked terrible—wan, tired, her eyes puffy and bloodshot, her hair dirty and uncombed. She sat slumped in her chair, staring into space. Norm, by contrast, was predictably pleased with himself, his head tilted back, a small smile working hard to lie still.

“It’s my understanding you are here for an official retraction of allegations you previously made against Officer Brian Padget of this department. Is that correct?” I asked.

Norm unleashed his smile now—failing at a look of embarrassed guilt. “Yeah. Jan and I feel terrible about what we done. I got mad at Brian and got my wife to say things that didn’t happen.”

I ignored the obvious bait. “So there was no conversation between Officer Padget and your wife in which Officer Padget made disparaging comments of a sexual nature?”

“Right—nothing happened. At least not that way. Brian’s been screwing around with my wife, but I guess that’s our problem, and we’re doing our best to sort it out. We shouldn’t have done what we did, and we’re real sorry we put Brian in a pickle.”