Bellows Falls

Chapter 3

SERGEANT GREG DAVIS HAD been with the Bellows Falls Police Department for seventeen years, a record broken only by his chief. Unlike Latour, however, Davis was an extrovert, stimulated and satisfied by his job. He relished the learning process, in whatever form, and made an effort to attend any conference or meeting he could to pick up pointers and make contacts. As a result, he was both well known and well liked throughout the state.

Also, for the moment, he was the department’s sole sergeant, standing alone between the chief’s office and the rank and file. It was for this reason, along with my general respect for the man, that I sought him out following my reconnaissance. Organizationally, he and I occupied middle rungs on the ladder, a connection I hoped would stand me in good stead.

Since Davis was on duty, he’d told me he’d swing by the police department parking lot to pick me up. It seemed like driving around Bellows Falls was going to be my first day’s primary activity.

“Sorry we’re meeting again under these circumstances,” he said after I’d settled into his passenger seat and exchanged greetings.

“What do you make of all this?” I asked him.

His answer was understandably guarded. “Suppose anything’s possible.”

I looked out the side window at the parade of passing houses, and rephrased something I’d asked Tony Brandt. “Back home, we get a sexual harassment charge, we check it out first ourselves. It’s only after we think it’s real that we bring in an outsider.”

There was a long pause. Davis pulled into one of the side streets and headed west. “What did the chief say?”

The question brought back Latour’s defensive reaction when I’d asked him about Padget’s culpability. “He made hopeful noises that it was smoke with no fire.”

Davis snorted. “Don’t I wish.”

“He also said a few uncomplimentary things about Norman Bouch.”

This time, the other man laughed. “Doesn’t he wish. Latour’s been grinding his teeth about Bouch for years. But he’s never been able to lay a finger on him.”

“He made it sound more personal than that.”

“Now that his fair-haired boy’s in a jam? You bet.”

I chose from several questions triggered by that response. “Was it Bouch’s drug dealing that had him so worked up before, or something else?”

Davis continued negotiating the back streets of the village, his eyes taking in alleys, parked cars, pedestrians, the doors and windows of residences and businesses. With the warm weather, the car’s air conditioning was on, but both windows were rolled down. Veteran cops did that sometimes-it allowed them to be comfortable, but without cutting off the sounds and smells from outside, two extra vital signs a good patrolman learns to appreciate.

“Everybody likes Bouch,” Greg Davis answered. “He makes sure of it. That drives Latour nuts, plus the fact that Bouch goes out of his way to irritate the Old Man. He’ll have some of his teenage rat pack commit minor offenses, knowing we can only slap them on the wrist. Or he’ll slug his wife and get away with it ’cause she refuses to squeal on him. It’s not all calculated-he is a bad guy. But it is a way of gaining him prestige with the people he wants to control.”

“Tell me about the rat pack,” I asked.

“I shouldn’t have made it sound that organized. They hang around his house a lot, though, and I know goddamn well they run errands for him… It’s just another thing we haven’t been able to prove.”

Davis slowed the car to a crawl, watching a group of kids huddled together under a basketball hoop, with no ball visible. The kids looked up as we drew near and sullenly dispersed.

“I guess it’s like a basic morality issue. Latour was brought up on the straight and narrow, and people like Bouch piss him off. The Pied Piper angle gets to him, too. These kids have a slim enough chance as it is.”

“You said Padget was Latour’s fair-haired boy.”

Davis hesitated, but only momentarily. “Padget’s a rising star-everything Bouch isn’t, and probably everything the Old Man wished he’d been. He’s smart, ambitious, good-looking, idealistic, nice to be around. And not too goody-two-shoes, either, although he won’t drink even when he’s off duty. A lot of rookies have to strut their stuff, you know? Bust bad guys, put on an attitude, wear those short black leather driving gloves, supposedly so their hands won’t get messed up when they start pounding the shit out of people.”

I laughed at the sadly familiar image.

Davis joined me briefly. “Right. Well, Padget’s not quite a rookie by now, but he’s not too far from it, especially to an old fart like me. But he never pulled that crap. He can be high-strung, and he’s always on the gallop to bring law to the streets, but there’s nothing juvenile about it. He’s one of the true believers.”

“So maybe he’s a little hard to take?”

The sergeant allowed a rueful smile. “He can wear you down, but that’s probably more my fault than his. I get tired, depressed sometimes. Brian just keeps charging ahead.”

“Even now?”

Greg Davis had been wearing dark glasses. At that, he pulled to the side of the road and pushed them up on his forehead so he could look me straight in the eyes.

“No. He definitely felt this one. He’s not talking about it, but he’s been stunned.”

Which brought me to the one question everyone seemed to be skirting. “So the charges against him aren’t just smoke?”

Davis looked at me a moment longer, and then gave me another non-answer, dropping his glasses back into place. “I guess that’s why you’re here.”

I wondered if I’d presumed too much from my friendly acquaintance with this man, or if he was merely stalling while he decided whether to trust me. We left the neighborhood west of Atkinson and slowly drove to the top of Cherry Hill, where the Episcopal church and its small, pretty cemetery crowned the village. From the narrow road among the headstones, the view of Fall Mountain was pastoral and beautiful-the one looking down on the square precipitous.

“How did this first come to the PD?” I asked.

“Jan Bouch called me at work. Said Brian’d been bothering her-watching her house, following her when she went shopping, talking to her when she wanted to be left alone.”

“Sounds like stalking.”

“No, no-‘He’s been sexually harassing me,’ were her exact words, like they’d been rehearsed.” He paused, and then, as if suddenly relieved of a burden, he added, “To be honest, the harassment angle was a surprise, but not his hanging around her. Word had already leaked out about that. This town has a grade-A grapevine, and they’d been seen together, though not the way she was saying-I’d heard it was consensual.”

“I thought her husband filed the complaint.”

Davis looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah. I dropped the ball there. Knowing what I did about Brian and the girl, I let things slide a couple of days, thinking they’d probably just had a spat and she was getting back at him. That’s when Norm Bouch called the chief. Latour chewed me out about it-Bouch whined about how he was worried that, since he’d been in trouble with the law before, Padget and his cronies might frame him for something. Get him sent to jail so Brian could have a free hand with his wife. My inaction supported that scenario. It was a total crock, of course, but Norm played it well and got the chief nervous enough to order an outside internal right off the bat.”

“Did he know about the rumors?”

Davis hesitated. “I asked him. It just made him madder. But he never really answered, so I think he did. Probably didn’t want to admit his chosen boy had clay feet.”

That assessment mirrored some of my own misgivings about Latour. “Tell me about the chief.”

“I think he’s burned out and can’t let go,” Davis said bluntly. “He’s a good guy-don’t get me wrong. I like him. But he’s sort of gotten buried behind that desk, like an old mole backing more and more into his hole.”

We’d reached the square east of Cherry Hill, and were proceeding along Rockingham Street toward one of the bridges heading out to the Island. Davis waved his hand at the buildings around us. “Which in my book says as much about Bellows Falls as about the chief. This town can get to you if you don’t watch out. People who were born and brought up here bad-mouth this town like it was the birthplace of root canal, and then they give you shit if you join in, saying it’s talk like that’ll doom the place forever. It’s a textbook love-hate thing-like being Polish and telling all the worst Polack jokes.

“I think Latour joined the PD ’cause he thought he could help turn things around, and over time it’s just ground him down. And he’s especially bitter now, seeing Bouch do a number on Brian, and Brian having been dumb in the first place.”

I was impressed at the depth of the analysis, and at its probable accuracy. It bolstered my opinion of Davis, but it also begged an obvious question. “Why’ve you hung on so long?”

He laughed and pulled into a parking lot facing the canal and the back of the Windham Hotel. “I like it here. It’s not the cheeriest place in the world, but if you’re into what makes people tick-or at least chew on each other-this is like a science lab. I know several twenty-eight-year-old grandmothers. I can trace family trees of people who intermarry and remarry and breed with their own kin. Any day of the week, I deal with manias, phobias, and flat-out craziness. People steal from each other, fight with each other, sleep with each other. They shift alliances, trade partners, bring up each others’ babies. This is like a ghetto-a parking place for the down-and-out.”

“But,” he continued with a shake of the head, “at the same time it’s beautiful. The river, the old buildings, the mountain, just the feeling of some kind of huge missed potential… I really sympathize with the town boosters who’re always trying to fix the place up. Maybe I even believe they’ll finally make it. I guess the answer for me-crazy as it sounds-is that in the middle of all the crime and poverty, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s hope in the air. It’s like a family to me-too big and dysfunctional-but something I’m used to.”

Davis paused and sighed. “Maybe the chief and I aren’t all that different. He’s just got twenty years on me… Think that qualifies me for the rubber room?”

“I wish I had you on my squad back home.” The cement-bordered slab of water moved by us without a ripple, a smooth runway of solid slate. As discursive as it had been, Davis’s portrait had allowed me to form a context for whatever might come next in this investigation. And the more I heard about the cast of characters, and their unusual interactions, the more background I felt was needed. History was showing through here-dark and complicated-and I wanted to be privy to as much of it as I could get.

“Okay, let’s go back to Norm and Jan Bouch. What’s the skinny on them?”

Davis sighed. “He’s a flatlander. She’s local. He’s about thirty-three. She’s eighteen. He came from Massachusetts in the eighties, when the housing here was cheap and the market was going crazy. He was a renter at first, like most everybody in town, and we didn’t have him on our radarscope for the first couple of years. Then his name started showing up-stuff like, ‘I was at a party at Norm’s,’ ‘I was doin’ some work for Norm,’ ‘Norm can vouch for me… ’ Bouch was making friends, hanging out in the right places with the right people, and for all the wrong reasons. He started to bloom socially, too, dating lots of girls, getting a couple of them pregnant. You been by his house yet? See all those kids?”

I nodded.

“They’re his, by maybe three or four different women. Jan’s the latest, and the only one he married. Two of the kids are hers. That’s how we know him officially-for fighting with those women. We’d get a noise complaint and go charging over. Sometimes you couldn’t tell who’d started it or even who’d won, but nobody would ever file. We’d read ’em the riot act, maybe toss him in the drunk tank, and retreat till the next time.”

“When did the drug business kick in?” I asked.

“Hard to say. You know how Vermonters do business-little bit of this, little bit of that. Things get done without real money changing hands. People on welfare all of a sudden have a used car when they couldn’t buy food the week before. If there was a crime involved, it’s almost impossible to find, much less prove. Somehow or other, Norm started climbing up in the world-a pickup, an odd-job business, the backhoe you saw, finally he bought the house. The man’s a hustler, I’ll give him that. He doesn’t sit around on the couch waiting for favors to roll in. He’s a body in motion, all the time.”

Davis put the car back into gear and eased out of the parking lot, driving past the railroad station toward the Island’s outer shore, where the Connecticut had spent centuries carving a fifty-foot gorge, the steepest along the river’s entire length from Canada to the Atlantic coast.

“Also,” Davis continued, “he’s smarter than your average bad guy. He takes his time, plans ahead, learns about the opposition.” He laughed suddenly. “ ’Course we say he’s smart ’cause we haven’t caught him yet. Anyhow, he’s definitely gotten to know the movers and shakers in town-lawyers, landlords, even the cops-but he’s just as comfortable with the Genesee beer crowd.”

He reflected on this last comment for a moment and then added, “He’s a bit of a chameleon, showing different shades of himself to different people. Women find him seductive, kids think he’s cool. I smell a lot of anger behind all that-and a wicked need to control.”

We were driving on a narrow dirt road, sandwiched between the steep, rocky riverbank and an old, abandoned, curved-wall factory of impressive proportions. Davis saw me craning my neck out the window to take the building in.

“That’s the old creamery. Used to fill up fourteen railroad cars of milk a day before the bulk-shipping laws changed and gutted the business. I guess the times changed, too… Anyway, we got wind of Norm’s dabbling in drugs through the usual grapevine-some guy would get busted in Burlington or down in your town, and talk about how Norm was part of a drug highway. Or we’d bust a local kid who’d then try to cop a plea by squealing on Norm, ’cept he didn’t have anything we could work with. Stuff like that-lots of noise in the woods but no clear shot.”

We came to a stop at Bridge Street, which crossed the river from the Island into New Hampshire on a massive, double-arched concrete span whose central column was buried in an immense granite outcropping. Davis waited for the traffic to pass and then nosed the cruiser into an overgrown dirt track on the other side. He parked it some fifty feet farther on.

“Ever see the petroglyphs?” he asked, swinging out of the car.

I joined him at a gap in the shrubbery and followed him down a well-worn steep embankment to the top of the rock cliff lining the river’s edge like a huge sluiceway. Far below us the water coursed by peacefully, wending its way around countless jagged boulders and swirling over smooth, kettle-shaped holes carved by thousands of years of turbulence. The view, coming as it did after being hidden by the bushes, was abrupt and dizzying. I felt pulled forward by the void before me and was acutely aware of the steep angle at my feet.

“They’re over here,” Davis said lightly, traveling across the smooth rock face like a billy goat. He paused by a shelf and pointed. At his feet was a cluster of round carvings in the stone, each looking exactly like a surprised smiley face, with its smile replaced by an O. Some of the heads were adorned with antennae, and all were grotesquely outlined in modern yellow paint, apparently so they could be seen from a distance.

“Weird, huh? Nobody knows where they came from or how old they are. They look like they’re from outer space.”

I glanced above and over my shoulder to where we’d started out. “I take it this isn’t always so peaceful.”

Davis began heading back. “That’s no lie. Right now, the water’s being diverted down the canal to the power station. If we get a good rain up north, though, or during the spring thaw, they open the dam’s Tainter gates and this place looks like a tidal wave hit it. Anything falls in then, it’s good-bye Charlie.”

We paused again at the top to survey the peaceful scene. Even knowing there was no danger at the moment, I felt the threat of calamity lingering, like a growl in the throat of a restless beast.

“Fifteen years I’ve been looking at this-still knocks me out,” Davis admitted.

I picked up the thread we’d dropped several minutes ago. “If Norm’s as dirty as you think he is, doesn’t the Southern Vermont Drug Task Force have something on him?”

The other man shook his head and headed back up the embankment to the car. “Not that I’ve heard, and we’re in a position to know. Our other sergeant, the guy who normally shares the shift supervision with me, he’s on assignment with them, has been for over half a year now. We talk all the time, and he’s never said a word about it. I guess they either don’t consider Norm a big enough fish, or they just haven’t got to him yet.”

We returned downtown in the cruiser. After mulling it over a while, Davis added, “’Course, it might also have something to do with his coming from here. Could be the task force doesn’t want to waste its time.”

I glanced over at him, seeing his neutral expression. Even Greg Davis, who despite his demeanor was obviously a town enthusiast, shared the dismissive, self-deprecating, pessimistic trait that so deeply stamped the citizens of Bellows Falls.

Brattleboro was considerably larger than this town, as was its welfare population. But it was also a feisty, combative, opinionated urban hub, which took its social woes in stride. Bellows Falls, by contrast, seemed resigned to living off table scraps, wondering when someone or something from the outside would appear to make everything better.

This was interesting sociology, but I had a more pertinent motive in pondering it. It made me think about Norman Bouch, and how and why he’d chosen this particular piece of real estate on which to settle down. A contractor’s haven it was not. On the other hand, given its population, its attitude, and its proximity to one of Vermont’s two interstates, it did seem a custom fit for Norm’s other supposed source of income.

All of which made for some curious ingredients in what Emile Latour was hoping would be a cut-and-dried case.