Bellows Falls

Chapter 12

I MET WITH KATHLEEN BARTLETT AGAIN the next day in Montpelier, on the second floor of the Pavilion Building, an ornate, Georgian-influenced red brick and white-trim monstrosity with two deep wooden balconies and a broad set of porch steps that reached out to State Street like a bridge spanning a moat. Ironically, I had to circle the block to reach the AG’s offices in a modern addition far to the rear. Where I ended up was disappointingly familiar-a huge room divided into partitioned cubicles, with tasteful fluorescent strips overhead and the continual chirping of tinny, distant phones in the air. There was the usual row of windowed offices corralling it all, from where the privileged few could soak in the sun or call for coffee and assistance from those occupying the wasteland to the interior.

The summons to come here, befitting the summoner, had been pleasant but crisp. Bartlett’s boss had taken the bait, as she put it, so time was officially wasting. I was to pack a bag for a visit of unknown duration and get on the road ASAP.

I had no complaint with that, and not just because she was right about the time. Given the vagueness of most of the allegations I’d parlayed into a hypothetical case, I needed something solid to put my hands on.

Kathy Bartlett met me at the reception desk and escorted me down one side of the central room, eventually ushering me across the threshold of an office near the back wall. “I thought I’d start by introducing you to your partner, since the two of you will be joined at the hip from now on.”

As we entered, a tall, thin man wearing old-fashioned granny glasses rose from a small conference table in the middle of the room and approached us, his hand stuck out in greeting.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Jonathon Michael. How are you?”

Bartlett smiled. “So much for breaking the ice. Jon came to us from the State Police three years ago.”

“From arson investigations,” I completed for her. “We worked together in Gannet, in the Northeast Kingdom-wild case.”

“That it was.” Jonathon Michael smiled.

“Jon’s been figuring out how we can loosen some of the knots in this one. You mind starting right away, Joe? I should’ve offered some coffee, or at least the bathroom.”

I shook my head and grabbed one of the chairs grouped around the table, already littered with papers. “No, I’m fine. Thanks anyway.”

Michael sat where most of the papers were gathered. “I’ve been trying to split this thing into its various components,” he said. “So if you’ll indulge me, I’ll just go from the top and run through the list. We can kick it around afterwards.”

I smiled at the approach. As an arson investigator, Jonathon Michael had been more scholar than cop, always proceeding methodically, never in a rush, shyly explaining things as he went along, even when his audience already knew where he was headed, or couldn’t have cared less. He’d graduated from college as an architectural engineer after seven years of intensive study and had then immediately joined the State Police with no explanation. He was unflappably easygoing, completely self-effacing, and the most private man I’d ever met. He also had a near-perfect solve rate.

He pushed at his glasses absent-mindedly, sliding them up his nose. “The case on top, regardless of its true importance, is the only one actually headed for court,” he said softly. “That’s the Brian Padget illegal possession charge. Joe, have you come up with anything new on that?”

“No, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced both Bouches are involved, and maybe not as I’d first thought.”

He nodded politely. “Right. Kathy told me a little about that. But in terms of concrete leads… ”

I shook my head. “Best I can do right now is a relative shot in the dark. As far as I know, we haven’t run a comparative test between the coke found in the urine sample and the stuff in the bag. Maybe that’s where we’ll get lucky.”

Kathy Bartlett wrote a note on the pad before her. “I’ll get that done.”

“Okay,” Michael continued. “Next up is Emily Doyle. There’s nothing here except innuendo, but there are some strange coincidences. The problem with digging into them openly, though, is that if word gets out, we’ll be caught in a limelight none of us wants, and Doyle may not deserve.”

“Maybe we should approach it indirectly,” I suggested.

He nodded. “I agree. If all this is interconnected, we’ll find where Officer Doyle fits eventually. Next up is Jasper Morgan. Am I correct that not a single sighting of him’s occurred since the night he gave you the slip?”

“As far as I know.”

Michael pursed his lips. “That puts an ominous slant on things. When was the last time you remember a young punk keeping totally underground for more than a week?”

“So we assume he’s dead,” Kathy said flatly.

I agreed with her. “I’ll have the Brattleboro PD grill everyone who knew him. We did that before, when we thought he was just lying low, but people are starting to talk more, supposedly because they’ve reached the same conclusion.”

Jonathon wrote a note to himself. “Good idea.”

I sat back, comforted by how things were progressing. A good twenty-five years my junior, Jonathon Michael was as easy in his supervisory role as I was with my own squad. I had been in other special units where the team leader’s style had been boorish, autocratic, aloof, or downright incompetent. This was obviously to be a much more pleasant experience.

“Next up is Jan Bouch,” he continued. “I decided to keep her separate, mostly because you seem to be leaning that way.”

“I’m not sure one way or the other,” I amended. “She could be a complete patsy-she might also have acted independently in some of this. She’s obviously under her husband’s control. I’d like to interview a nurse named Anne Murphy about her. We talked once, but I might be able to get her to open up more.”

“Good. That would be handy.” He sat back and looked at me, the overhead fluorescent lighting glinting off his glasses. “Which brings us, last but not least, to Norman Bouch. I’ve treated him almost like a small company and turned him into a flow chart.”

He extracted two sheets of paper from a folder and handed one copy to each of us. “Under his name are six categories: ‘Sources,’ ‘Network,’ and ‘Clients’ being the basics of most drug operations. I’ve also listed ‘Assets,’ ‘Friends,’ which include employees, and ‘Habits,’ meaning travel routines and weekly and monthly schedules. We don’t have the wherewithal to analyze each one of these, but I thought I’d highlight them to see if one stands out more than the others.”

I looked over the neatly typewritten sheet. “We know nothing about his sources. They might come out of Lawrence, that being his old stomping ground, but Lowell or Boston or New York would fit, too. Same thing for clients. I think our best bet is the network. We’ve got an inkling of how it’s run and where, and we’re pretty sure Jasper Morgan was part of it, as might be Lenny in Burlington.”

“Maybe the local PD’s in-house computer will spit out something on him,” Kathy said, “assuming he has priors.”

“Assets are something else we can use the computer for,” Jonathon added. “I can do that from here.”

I folded the sheet and put it in my pocket. “I suppose the most straightforward approach would be to put Norm under surveillance and tap his phone line… ” Both my companions’ heads shot up, so I quickly added, “I know, I know-I don’t think it would be a good idea anyway. Norm knows goddamn well he’s put a bee up our nose with Padget. I spoke to a psychologist in Lawrence, who told me he’s a control freak and a showoff, so we can assume he’s expecting a reaction and maybe waiting to ambush us with something else.”

Jonathon Michael examined his paperwork. “How ’bout going through Lenny? You learned about him in a roundabout way. If Bouch is playing this like a chess game, he may not even know Lenny’s on the board.”

I nodded. “I can also find out what happened to the void Jasper left behind. Presumably somebody’s replaced him.”

“I doubt that,” Kathleen said, without looking up from her note-taking. “Using Jonathon’s logic, if I’d whacked my regional operator, I’d lie low, especially if I had other sources of income.”

“True,” I agreed. “But it might work to distract Bouch. I’ll dig into Lenny and have my squad chase down the Jasper angle. If I go back to Brattleboro to get them rolling, that ought to put me in Burlington in a day or so.”

“You can pick me up on your way back,” Michael said. He suddenly smiled at an afterthought. “It is a little weird, not doing anything about the only hard-core case we’ve got.”

Kathy Bartlett dropped her pad on the table. “We’ll be running the toxicology comparison, but I think Joe’s right. Let’s avoid the obvious, if for no other reason than to frustrate Norm. We can investigate Brian Padget in a few days, especially if we start feeling his dealings are separate from Bouch’s. Right now,” she added with a smile, “let’s avoid the bait, if that’s what Padget is, and work on finding out how to bite the fisherman.”

Willy Kunkle shifted in his car seat and pointed through the windshield at a scrawny young girl, her long hair swinging across her back, who’d just appeared on the sidewalk and begun walking quickly away from us, down Flat Street toward the shadowy parking lots near the end of the block.

“Give her ten minutes,” he said, “and I’ll guarantee you we’ll catch her dirty. She’s like a Swiss watch.”

We waited in the late night darkness, the warm breeze wafting through the car’s open windows. The girl we were watching was Marie Williams, Jasper Morgan’s erstwhile girlfriend, and-Willy assured me-the weak link among his old inner circle. Weak for the very reason we were here, because she had a nightly rendezvous for a supply of crack, a habit that had been escalating ever since Jasper’s disappearance.

“She was a tough little cookie when I first talked to her,” Willy said softly. “Told me to fuck off. ’Course then Jasper was John Dillinger on the loose, complete with a cop’s stolen gun. Amazing what a little time and loneliness will do to one’s self-confidence.”

I glanced over at him. He would know about such things. A Vietnam vet who’d come home haunted and angry, he’d taken to the bottle and to using his wife as a target for his misery. When that sniper bullet had shattered his arm, he’d been on the threshold of being fired. Crippled, divorced, and temporarily working as the crankiest employee in the history of the municipal library, Willy had somehow rallied. Before I’d approached him with a way to come back to us, he’d already cleaned up his act. Now, as a one-armed man, he was twice what he had been, even if his personality was as maimed as ever.

“Why haven’t you busted her contact, if he’s so predictable?”

“Small fry. He only carries what he sells her. I haven’t been able to find out where he gets the stuff. I will, though. I only tumbled to this a few weeks ago. She probably got her junk from lover-boy before. Now that was a tight little operation-all my poking around, I never got a look at it.”

He opened his door. “You want to catch her in the act, now’s the time.”

We walked down the street and cut through a loading area to an alleyway near the back of a large, dark parking lot located between two building blocks and a gigantic stone retaining wall that supported Elliot Street high above us. Connecting Elliot and Flat streets was a towering, switchback wooden staircase. In the gloom of this latter structure, we saw the flare of a match and the quick reflected glow of a pale face looming over a glass pipe.

“Don’t do it, Marie,” Willy said sharply.

The pipe fell to the ground and broke, and someone else’s feet scuffled off into the night, ignored by the both of us. Willy had produced a flashlight and was holding Marie Williams frozen like a deer in its harsh, bright halo.

“Who’s there?” Marie’s voice was high and frightened.

We stepped closer, so the light bouncing off her caught us as pale ghosts. “You know us,” Willy said.

She squinted into the light. “You bastards. You made me break my pipe.” But her tone wasn’t angry. It was plaintive, and she had tears in her eyes.

I gently took her arm and steered her around the corner to the bottom of the staircase, sitting next to her on the bottom step. After pocketing the pipe, Kunkle stood opposite us, the “bad cop” of the team.

“Marie. What’re you doing?” I asked. “You know what that stuff does.”

“Fuck you. What do you care?” She was looking down at her hands, clenched together between her knees.

“Enough to be here right now. You think we like seeing people like you kill themselves in slow motion, keeping a bunch of guys like that jerk in business?”

She gave me a sour look. “Oh, right. So I give you his name ’cause you care so much, right?”

“Richie Belleau,” Willy said flatly.

She stared at him in surprise. “What?”

“Eleven o’clock every night, Marie,” he went on. “I set my watch by you two. I liked the yellow T-shirt you had on last night better than that thing, by the way.”

Her mouth opened. “You been following me?”

“Not anymore.”

She slowly woke up to his meaning, and buried her face in her hands. “Oh shit, you’re not going to bust me?”

I put my hand on her skinny back. “Slow down. What was I just telling you? You’re in a jam. We’re here to help you out of it.”

“I tried that,” she said in a weak voice. “I can’t quit.”

“You tried it alone. It’s not like quitting cigarettes, Marie. You need people to give you guidance and support.”

“And rip me off.”

“Not a dime.” There was a long silence. Around us we could hear the familiar sounds of a town crowded in by the country-distant car engines almost covered by the gentle wind in the trees. The scratchings of small nocturnal animals foraging for urban scraps.

“You’ve hit bottom, Marie,” I said finally, using what Willy had told me earlier. “You’re panhandling, giving five-dollar blow jobs, shoplifting, all so you can sleep on a friend’s floor and feed a lousy habit. You’re alone, Jasper’s gone, most of your old pals dump on you now that he’s not around. All you eat is junk and leftovers. You’re either hungry or cramped up all the time… Am I right?”

Under my hand, I could feel her weeping quietly. “We can help you.”

“But you have to help us, first.” Willy’s voice was like a hard squeeze following a caress.

She looked up at him. Her voice shook. “Oh, right. Who’m I supposed to rat on before you make me this big gift?”

“No one,” I said. “We just want to talk about Jasper.”

A deep furrow creased her forehead. “Jesus Christ. You think I’d be here if I knew where he was?”

“We think he’s dead,” Willy said quietly.

She slid off the step and tucked her knees up into a ball against her chest.

“We want to find out what happened to him, Marie,” I said. “You want to know for sure, don’t you?”

She barely nodded.

“When he first disappeared, you thought he’d gone underground. You went to his standard hideaways, places only the two of you knew. Again and again.”

Her voice was muffled by her arms. “He never showed.”

“What was the one place you thought he’d pick over the others?”

“That old motel on Putney Road-the abandoned one near the C amp; S plant. He found a way to sneak in. We used to get away from everybody there.”

“What room?” Willy asked.

“Nine.”

I took her gently by the arms and lifted her to her feet. “Okay. We’re going to take you to some people who’ll help you out.”

She didn’t fight me, but she shook her head. “What’s the point?”

I didn’t answer. I figured she’d heard enough lies.