Bellows Falls (12 page)

I paused a moment to let them protest, but to my surprise no one said a word. I was gaining, I hoped. “I’m not saying Padget and Jan Bouch maybe didn’t fall for each other initially. Those things happen—she’s young, pretty, unhappy; he’s the right age, a Dudley Do-Right, and probably given to every young cop’s urge to save the world. I think Norm’s first reaction—to squeal on the affair to get Padget in trouble—was straight from the gut. He was pissed off. But with this new wrinkle, with Padget’s urine coming up positive, especially after he volunteered for the test himself, I smell a rat, and I bet it’s Norm Bouch. I don’t know how, but I’d be willing to lay down money that Bouch is still involved in Padget’s problems.”

“Based on what?” Derby asked.

“Bouch’s attitude, mostly. First, he’s madder than hell—cheated on by his wife. He gets her to file a complaint against the boyfriend. The Bellows Falls sergeant who gets that call blows it off temporarily, already knowing what’s really going on and hoping it’ll take care of itself. That angers Norm even more. He calls Emile here and demands action, threatening God knows what. That’s when Emile calls Tony, and I get the nod to do the internal. But they flub their story—Jan blows her lines, Norm scrambles to cover up, and by the time I get the chance to corner her all alone, he knows he’s dropped the ball. Faced with a false accusation charge, he beats a fast retreat, says he invented the whole thing because he was angry, and begs forgiveness, which is granted.”

I leaned forward in my chair to emphasize the next point. “But it was the way he did it that got my attention. He should’ve been shitting bricks when he walked in to retract everything he’d said. He was the one in trouble now. The BFPD could file against him, Padget could sue him for civil damages, and maybe more important to a man like Bouch, he could lose face—which is something teenagers pay a lot of attention to. And yet he was cocky as hell, could barely keep from laughing. At the time, I thought it was because he was about to turn the tables on us, putting the affair between his wife and Padget officially on record—a maneuver that still left Padget humiliated and in trouble with his boss, and pretty much pulled the teeth on any reprisal the department might have threatened. That’s why I thought he was so pleased with himself. But as soon as I heard about the anonymous tip claiming Padget was a drug user, I knew Norm was still at work. The fact that the alleged corruption involved drugs, was aimed at Padget, and came right after Bouch’s retraction, convinced me that Norm had to be lurking somewhere behind Padget’s current problems.”

I sat back, almost done. “Every instinct I have tells me that the Padget case will lead us to Norm Bouch. It might even be the only shot we get at Bouch, who’s been clever and careful enough to operate without once getting his hands slapped, except,” I emphasized for effect, “when it comes to women. The only time Emile’s troops have ever gotten close to nailing Norm, it’s been over a woman. Padget fooling around with Jan opened a wound in Bouch’s pride, and Bouch has reacted accordingly. I’m hoping he’s also shown us the one weak spot in his armor.”

I fell silent, drained and slightly baffled at my own enthusiasm for a plan I had only half sketched out before sitting down at this meeting.

There was some shuffling by the others. Derby was the first to break the silence. “Tony? Could you spare him for this?”

“I don’t think I’ll have to. This ain’t gonna fly.”

“But if it did,” Derby pushed.

“I guess. But we’d have to play up the Brattleboro connection to satisfy the powers-that-be. Otherwise, they’re going to start saying I’ve got enough money to staff other departments.”

The SA nodded. “I could help you there.” He paused, still thinking hard. “I have to admit, I like the idea. Getting a bunch of SAs to cooperate on any case is like herding cats, and something like this could be even tougher, assuming the teenage cell concept is accurate. Also, having heard his pitch, I don’t know who besides Joe could pull it off. Giving this to another agency would be like asking a stranger to bring up someone else’s problem child. I’d have to sell the AG’s office on it, of course, but if this is as big as you think it is, they might like the smell of it. Everybody loves to make headlines.”

He hesitated and then asked as an afterthought, “Sound okay to you, Emile?”

Latour looked up, his face pale. “Sure. Great.”

Derby stood, forcing us all to join him. “All right, then. I’ll take care of that end of things. Joe, you own this for the moment. Get the warrant, find out what else Brian Padget might have leaning on him, and keep your fingers crossed that all these connections really exist. If they don’t, and all we end up with is a dirty cop, we’re going to have to start blowing one serious political smokescreen.”

Outside, in the SA’s reception area, the three of us huddled briefly like survivors of a storm. I was still slightly in shock. Despite my years on the job, I’m perpetually stunned at how often critical decisions, in a world where multiple legal systems constantly overlap, boil down to a sales pitch overwhelming either precedent or logic.

“You think he can do it?” Latour asked.

Tony looked down at him from his considerable height. “Con the AG’s office? Not without Joe’s help.” He jerked a thumb at me. “This is one grade-A bullshitter here.”

Although my little campaign would undoubtedly be causing him problems down the line, Tony was obviously pleased. He loved stirring things up and never seemed happier than in a stampede of scrambling bureaucrats and/or politicians. It was one of the contradictory things that I thought ranked him among the truly gifted police chiefs.

Latour, by contrast, wasn’t happy at all. “Bad enough I had Padget fooling around with a married woman. Now we’ll be the center of a statewide drug investigation. Just what Bellows Falls needs. Every newspaperman who knows how to dial will be ringing my phone.”

I patted him on the back. “Maybe not.” But I had a feeling he was right. “If it all comes together, you can just forward the calls to the AG.”

He shrugged and we dispersed, Tony and Emile heading for their respective offices, and I returning down the hallway to give Gail a quick visit. As I crossed her threshold, she was only half visible behind a row of paper columns, stacked side by side across her desk.

“You look like you’re preparing for an assault.”

She peered over the top and gave me a weary smile. “Or being buried alive. How’d things go with Jack?”

I didn’t bother asking how she knew about the meeting. In the essentially rural world of Vermont, you got used to people knowing what you were doing even before you did it. “Surprisingly well. He bought my proposal to turn a single cop’s positive urine test into an AG-sanctioned, statewide investigation, with me on board.”

She rolled her eyes. “God—has he got a lot to learn.”

I sat on her windowsill, enjoying the contrast of the sun on my back and the central air-conditioning on my face. “I thought maybe he’d grab this for himself.”

“Crooked cop cases are usually political land mines, and our boy is new yet,” she said, still sorting through her files. “He just needs to be consistent right now. Not that I’m complaining. The whole staff would’ve been sucked into this if it got messy.” She waved a hand at her workload. “This would’ve looked like peanuts in comparison.”

She sat back suddenly and looked at me thoughtfully. “I am curious, though. Why step over the drug task force, the Vermont State Police, and the Association of State’s Attorneys to go to the AG?”

For the next ten minutes, I repeated the pitch I’d just delivered up the hall.

She smiled at the end of it. “Nice snow job. It still doesn’t answer the real question.”

She didn’t elaborate, or need to. “Why me?”

I hesitated before continuing. It was a good point, one I’d rationalized to Derby in procedural terms, but which I hadn’t owned up to emotionally.

“I’m not exactly sure yet,” I answered slowly. “Something clicked when I saw Jan Bouch surrounded by those kids in their kitchen. It was cute on the face of it—all of them clamoring for doughnuts she was holding up high. But she wasn’t having fun. She was at a loss. She couldn’t sort out how to handle it. And then Norm came in, and grabbed the box and threw it outside like he was distracting a pack of dogs.”

I paused again, trying to string thoughts together so they made sense. “Jasper Morgan plays into this, too. When he escaped, raising all that ruckus for no apparent reason, it bugged the hell out of me. Now that he’s resurfaced, and in connection to Bouch, and there’s a cop in the middle who may or may not be dirty… I just don’t want to walk away from it. I want to find out what’s going on. There’s something inside me that needs this settled.”

I’d been staring at the carpet through all this, speaking as much to myself as to Gail, and now shook my head and looked up at her. “You glad you asked?”

Her answer surprised me. “You really think Bouch’s network extends that far?” she asked.

“Yes, but I better come up with some proof. The AG’ll take a couple of days making a decision—listening to Derby, reading through the files, brainstorming with his Criminal Division people. It would help if I dug up a small nugget in the meantime.”

I could tell I’d triggered some underlying notion with my ramblings, but apparently she wasn’t ready to share it. She leaned forward instead, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “We better get cracking, then.”

I didn’t ask, but I wondered what she meant by “we.”

BRIAN PADGET’S HOUSE LOOKED DIFFERENT
to me on my second visit. The concern for appearances that had struck me the first time now seemed violated by the official vehicles parked in his yard. I had asked Latour to be on hand to keep me company, and his car combined with mine threw suspicions on the house’s seeming propriety.

I had also brought two of my own squad to help me. J.P. Tyler, our thin, diminutive forensics expert, and Willy Kunkle, whose withered left arm and infamous bad attitude had made him a statewide law enforcement legend.

Disabled by a sniper years ago, Kunkle had been let go, to much shared relief. But in a move most of my friends, including Gail, had considered a clear sign of dementia, I’d encouraged him to sue the department under the disabilities act and get his job back. He’d never thanked me for that show of faith, and he’d been no easier to work with afterwards, but I’d never rued the decision. For all his temperamental, unorthodox, insubordinate ways, Willy Kunkle was driven to be a cop, and while there were times everyone felt like strangling him, I knew he would get me results regardless of challenge or sacrifice. Unlike any of my other officers, Kunkle came from that slice of society that gave us most of our business—a fact that fueled him with a passion the rest of us would never share.

Tyler, by contrast, fit the scientific stereotype—scholarly, quiet, self-effacing, but also highly efficient. He alone from my squad seemed unaffected by Kunkle’s manner, and perhaps for that reason Kunkle rarely gave him a hard time.

We’d all arrived without fanfare. Nevertheless, the house’s front door opened before I was halfway across the lawn, revealing a broad-shouldered, medium-built young man with the short buzz cut so popular among younger male officers—an affectation I personally believed served no other function than to further alienate us from the public we were supposed to assist.

The look on his face was hard to read. In its various parts I could see surprise, anger, defeat, even disappointment. Overall, however, I was struck by a sense of fatalism, as if our arrival had been anticipated for a long time.

“Brian Padget?” I said as I approached, followed by the others. “I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, of the Brattleboro Police Department. I have a warrant to search your home for illicit drugs.”

A small crease appeared in the middle of his forehead as he stepped to one side of the open door. “I heard you were doing the internal.”

“That’s right. This is different.” I turned to introduce Kunkle and Tyler. Everyone nodded awkwardly in greeting. Emile Latour hovered in the background, waiting until we’d actually entered the building.

“It’s okay,” Latour said from where he stood. No one looked at him, and the meaninglessness of his words floated in the air like a pall.

We crossed the threshold and split up. The warrant specified the toilet tank, or any other likely hiding place, so I went to the bathroom first, hoping to settle the issue quickly. The search would be thorough in any case, but at least the suspense would end if I found what we were after. Latour kept Padget company in the living room.

The discovery was anticlimactic. I found the bathroom between the one bedroom and the central hall, went straight to the tank, lifted its lid, and immediately saw the plastic bag in its depths, weighted down by a stone.

Tyler appeared with a small evidence kit and, wearing gloves, extracted the bag, opened it, tested its powdery contents in a small vial, and quietly announced them to contain cocaine.

“How much, do you think?” I asked him.

He knew what I was after. “It’s a felony possession, Joe. Way over two and a half grams.”

I left him and Willy to finish the job and returned to the living room, carrying the bag in a second plastic envelope Tyler had supplied. Padget and Latour were standing awkwardly by the window, each one silently looking in opposite directions. As I approached, Latour moved off.

I showed Padget the bag. “Recognize this?”

“No.”

“It was hidden in your toilet tank. It’s cocaine.”

He pursed his lips. “It’s bullshit. I don’t know anything about it.”

“We were told by a source that you’re a regular user of the stuff.”

“He’s full of crap.”

“I didn’t say it was a man.”

His eyes widened slightly. “Then she’s full of crap.”

I hefted the bag in my hand. “Listen carefully. This is a felony amount. If we stick you with it, and we’re nine-tenths there, you’re looking at the end of a career and jail time both. Your only way out is to come up with an explanation that’ll clear you. That does not include repeating that you’re innocent. Do you hear what I’m saying?”