Tucker Peak

Chapter 6

Bill Allard sat back in his chair and pensively cupped his cheek in his hand. “God, Joe, it seems awfully thin. Don’t you have anything more linking Marty Gagnon to Tucker Peak than a single call made from his girlfriend’s phone?”

“There’s a speeding ticket he got on the access road,” I told him, hoping to stoke his enthusiasm slowly, using the little I had to its best advantage.

The two of us were in Allard’s office on the top floor of the Department of Public Safety building (also the headquarters of the Vermont State Police) in Waterbury, a conveniently short drive away from the state capitol building, the legislature, and those who controlled the purse strings.

Allard didn’t respond to my comment about the ticket. He was the head of VBI and an ex-trooper from downstairs, a lineage which, given the state police’s sensitivity about us, had made his selection about as politically subtle as choosing a union head to be shop foreman. But he was highly regarded by everyone in the profession and someone I had instinctively liked from the start, which was just as well, since he was my immediate boss.

Now, however, I could tell he was having problems with my latest scheme. Politics were as important to him as they’d been to the people who’d chosen him. They, especially the Commissioner of Public Safety, were watching the entire VBI experiment as something from which the plug could be pulled at a moment’s notice. It was Bill Allard’s job, therefore, not only to manage the budget and the Bureau’s nascent needs but also to make sure the assignments it took on made it indispensable and not too pushy.

I was proposing that both Sammie Martens and I go undercover as employees of Tucker Peak, while Willy and Lester worked the string of burglaries we suspected Marty Gagnon had been running before his disappearance.

Bill began with a question I’d pondered earlier: “Isn’t there a pretty good chance you’ll be recognized? You’ve been a cop a long time-a lot of people know you.”

“I have a fast-growing beard, and I’ll dye and change the way I comb my hair. Shouldn’t be a week before I look pretty different.”

He switched to a more diplomatic concern. “What did Snuffy have to say about it?”

“It’s a win-win for him. He gets extra police presence on the mountain, a specific focus on his biggest current problem, all the credit if we’re successful, and he doesn’t have to pay for any of it.”

“But why not a conventional investigation? The burglaries are common knowledge. People know the cops are looking into them. Seems to me it would be a lot simpler-and cheaper.”

“Simpler, maybe, but higher risk, too. The Tucker Peak crowd might know about the burglaries. They don’t know a murder may be connected to them. If we do this in the open, that’s bound to get out and make our job harder, with the greater chance that we’ll fail and end up with a black eye. But if we let whoever killed Jorja Duval think we’ve hit a brick wall while we’re actually poking around from the inside, it gives us an advantage.”

“Except that you have no idea who killed Duval, or if it’s connected to Marty Gagnon or Tucker Peak or any burglaries anywhere. Going undercover seems pretty fancy for what amounts to a gut instinct. I’d be happier if you had a single, solid lead.”

“In the absence of anything else,” I answered him, “what we have is a lead.”

“A single phone call.”

“To an employee, lasting twelve minutes, just a few days before the Manning place was robbed.” Then, feeling like a trial lawyer pulling his prize witness out of a hat, I removed a sheet of paper from my jacket pocket and slid it onto his desk.

“A pattern we found repeated three more times on his home phone bill.”

Allard gave me a sour look, knowing full well I’d been working him like a game fish. “Now he tells me.”

“Each time,” I continued, “according to Snuffy’s records, a burglary was committed at Tucker Peak several days after Marty called that same number. And each call lasted about as long.”

Allard was studying Gagnon’s phone record. “And each call was made about the same time of day,” he murmured.

“Yeah, the shift change between the day and night crews, meaning the recipient could’ve been from either.”

Bill Allard sat back and gazed at me thoughtfully. “Bottom line, Joe-you really think this is the way to go?”

I answered him as truthfully as I could. “It is a gut feeling-you’re right there-but, yeah, that’s what I think.”

“All right,” he finally gave in. “But short term, okay? You and Sammie do your sniffing around fast. One month tops unless you get something hot.”

Gail Zigman poured herself a glass of red wine and joined me on the couch, where I was already sipping coffee. We were in her condo just outside of Montpelier, a slightly sterile corner of an apartment complex she’d gotten for the panoramic view of the valley below, which right now amounted to a scattering of lights in the night, hovering like small, pale moths around the spotlighted golden dome of the capitol building far in the distance.

“Undercover? Sounds dangerous.”

I’d been there for over an hour already, but we’d only begun getting conversational. One aspect of living far apart, we’d discovered, was that when we did meet up, we wasted no time taking our clothes off. From the couch, in fact, I could still see a line of shirts, pants, and socks trailing off toward the bedroom. Only now had I told her why I was in the neighborhood.

I waited until she was comfortably settled against several fat pillows, her legs tucked up underneath her thick terry cloth robe.

“The biggest danger so far was getting the go-ahead. We don’t actually have a lot to work with.”

“This connected to the dead girl I read about in the paper?” Gail asked.

“Yup, but I’ll be focusing on Tucker Peak. That’s our only lead right now.”

Her eyes widened. “Tucker Peak? You’re kidding. I’ll guarantee you some activity, even if it’s not what you’re expecting.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were just given the heads-up on a protest there. A bunch of people are unhappy with Tucker’s plans to build a hotel, cut more trails, and tap into a nearby lake for their snowmaking guns. They’re saying it’ll be bad for the land, the fish, and the local bears, among other things.”

I remembered the placard-wielding group Willy and I had passed on our way to Manning’s house-one of the reasons Snuffy was short of help and had brought us in. “Who are they?”

“They call themselves the Tucker Protection League-TPL for short.”

VermontGreen, the firm Gail worked for, often acted as a clearinghouse for such protests, approached by smaller organizations hoping for their blessing, their backing, and their expertise, in that ascending order.

“Are you going to help them out?” I asked.

She paused to take a sip before answering indirectly. “The resort jumped through all the regulatory hoops, and we were watching closely during the entire two-year process. We had a few objections along the way, but Phil McNally took care of them, including the land, fish, and bears.”

“McNally’s the boss?”

“The CEO. I suppose the board’s the boss, technically, but he’s the one we dealt with. Very helpful, unlike some of his counterparts at other mountains. He’s actually cooperating with TPL, giving them space to demonstrate.”

“So why the protest, if everything’s so squeaky clean?”

“Well, that’s always the question, isn’t it?” she mused. “What exactly is squeaky clean? The regulations were put together by politicians, after all. You know how screwy that can get. McNally and his crew, as accommodating as they’ve been, are still corporate types, known to say one thing and do another. And then there’s the science. We all rely on naturalists to give us the straight and narrow, but we’re dealing with human beings on the one hand and Mother Nature on the other. There may not be a straight and narrow. The people bitching now might be right. They might know something the rest of us missed.”

“And they didn’t get around to mentioning it till now?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity from my voice. “I thought this rigmarole took years to reach this stage.”

She laughed. “Okay. I’ll admit they may not be overly organized, but that doesn’t mean they’re not right. They weren’t allowed party status during the regulatory process-in answer to your question-and now that it’s almost a done deal, TPL’s claiming major environmental obstacles were swept under the rug for the sake of big business.”

“But I thought VermontGreen had party status.”

She pursed her lips regretfully. “We did, and we signed off on the project. TPL is calling us traitors because of it.”

I raised my eyebrows, suddenly understanding her earlier hesitation. “Oh. That makes it awkward.”

She put her glass down on the coffee table beside her and crossed her arms. “Yeah. I feel a little funny about it. VermontGreen’s supposed to be the environment’s protective mother ship. I try to be objective about it-I’m a big girl, a lawyer, pretty good at swimming with the sharks-but I used to look at people like me and think they’d sold out. It’s kind of odd. I don’t want them to be right.”

For all her efforts to help the downtrodden, Gail wasn’t an overly sentimental woman. She had a pragmatist’s way of dealing with adversity and could make a deal if it helped her cause. But she held her integrity dear, and her doubts right now made me want to find out more, especially since her protesters and I were going to be sharing the same neighborhood.

“Who are these folks, anyway? They part of a bigger group?”

“Some of them are locals, others are part of the crowd that jump on every passing bandwagon. They don’t have an organization per se, but they do have a steering committee headed by a guy named Roger Betts, who every time you talk to him says he’s not their leader. He’s a good man, pushing ninety, an old-time socialist type from the Woody Guthrie school, I guess. He’s lived near Tucker Peak for decades, and I’ve known him almost since I got here. He’s one of the true gatekeepers of Vermont’s environment, writing articles and giving workshops-taught high school for a living. A sweet man with a powerful moral sense. He’s actually the primary reason I’m worried we may have missed something. Roger’s not prone to tilting at windmills.”

“Except that this one’s in his own backyard. That may have made him less objective. How come I’ve never heard of him?”

She picked up her wine again and took another sip. “You don’t exactly pursue the same interests. Plus, he’s normally pretty self-effacing. This is the highest-profile I’ve seen him, which probably ties in to what you just said. And you could be right. Proximity may’ve colored his thinking. That’s another reason I’m wobbling. I can’t make up my mind.”

“What exactly are they accusing Tucker of?”

“Cooking the research, paying off a naturalist or two, keeping crucial facts off the books. The idea of laying a pipeline into a lake and drawing water to make snow isn’t so bad all by itself. There’s hardly a mountain around that doesn’t do something like that. Tucker did it about twelve years ago themselves, when they tapped into their current pond. But it’s how many gallons and the rate of extraction and how many times a day or week this new lake will be used that only the mountain will know about. There’s monitoring equipment and on-site inspectors to keep people honest, but who’s kidding who? In a state like Vermont, there aren’t the resources for that to mean much. Machines can be fooled, and there aren’t enough inspectors to go around. And that doesn’t even touch the hotel and the new chairlift and the extra planned trails, all of which will leave footprints on the environment.”

“I thought you said Phil McNally was playing ball,” I reminded her.

Gail made her eyes wide as if she were going nuts and jerked her head around in pantomime. “I know,” she burst out. “That’s my problem. McNally’s a good guy, Betts is a saint, the corporation’s done all the right things. Which only means TPL is either a bunch of cranks led by a sentimental old man, or right on the money and occupying the last line of defense, with VermontGreen as one of the enemy. It’s driving me crazy.”

She paused, relaxed a little, and added, “And it’ll add spice to your life, too, even though you’ve got nothing to do with it.” She suddenly studied me more closely. “Unless you do. You never told me why you’re going undercover. Is it connected to all this?”

“No, we think the girl’s murder may have had something to do with a string of burglaries up there. But what is TPL planning to do? They really going to create havoc?”

She looked unhappy again. “I’m on the suspect list, remember? They wouldn’t tell me. But assuming they fit the model, they’ll try to undermine McNally’s hospitality, mess up the mountain’s day-to-day business, block traffic, slow the lift lines, and be loud and obnoxious. Basically do the civil disobedience thing until the cops run them in and make them front-page martyrs. It might actually turn out to be handy for you. Maybe you can use the chaos to flush out whoever you’re after.”

I had my doubts about that. It sounded like the goal was to fill the resort with protester-busting cops, which was hardly the low-key scenario I’d been hoping for.

I gazed out the dark window at the distant lights and answered her vaguely. “I guess I’ll find out soon enough.”

The next morning, I ran into Sammie Martens as I climbed the stairs to the top floor of the Municipal Building. She was headed down, dressed for the outdoors.

“You get the go-ahead from the chief?” she asked.

“I had to wear him down,” I told her. “And he said if we don’t get something in four weeks, he’ll shut us down.”

That didn’t seem to bother her. “Good. I was hoping he’d bite. I was thinking last night we ought to find someone who used to work at Tucker Peak-to maybe educate us a little-when I suddenly remembered one of Snuffy’s men moonlighted in security. I was going to chat with him, if that’s okay.”

“Is he the one Manning said was crooked?”

“One and the same. I read the internal report about that, though. Clean as a whistle.”

She checked her watch. “And he’s due at his office in ten minutes.”

“But he doesn’t know we’re coming?”

She smiled. “I thought I’d use the personal approach right off, given our reputation.”

I saw her point and changed directions. “Lead the way.”

Forty minutes later, Sammie and I pulled into the parking lot of a converted, two-story family home with a sign outside advertising the county sheriff. Unlike state police barracks buildings all across Vermont, which suffered from a uniform architectural blandness that only made you pity the inhabitants, sheriffs occupied a broader spectrum, which also unfortunately included the odd, windowless municipal basement. Snuffy had been luckier than most.

We walked up the handicap ramp to the front door and into the tiny lobby. Sammie showed her badge to the woman behind the thick pane of glass overlooking the entryway. “Hi, is Tom Newell here yet?”

The woman leaned forward slightly to study the badge more closely. “What’s that say?”

Sammie snapped the case shut and put it back in her pocket, fighting her irritation. “VBI. We’re working on a case with your department. Could you tell him Agents Martens and Gunther are here to talk to him?”

The woman smiled slightly and picked up a phone. I couldn’t tell if she’d consciously pulled Sammie’s chain or was simply amused by the reaction she’d received. Sammie’s vote, on the other hand, had clearly been cast. Having been skeptical about VBI myself, when it was staggering to fruition through last year’s legislature, I could sympathize with those who needed proof of its legitimacy. Sammie, however, was younger, prone to forming strong allegiances, and quicker to judge those she deemed were judging her. To her way of thinking, to regard the Vermont Bureau of Investigation with anything other than respect was to be an idiot.

Two minutes later the far door opened, and a tall, slim, broad-shouldered man dressed in the gray pants and dark blue uniform shirt of sheriff’s departments all across the state stepped into the lobby. His expression was markedly wary.

To give her credit, Sammie opened with a wide smile and an extended hand. “Tom Newell? I’m Sammie Martens. This is Joe Gunther. We’re from VBI-wondering if you could help us out with something.”

His face didn’t change as he shook both our hands, but he looked at me closely. “I heard the sheriff’d brought you on board. You used to head up the plainclothes unit at the PD, right?”

“Yup.” I glanced at the year stamped under his name tag, identifying that he’d become a cop five years earlier. “Did we ever meet? I’m sorry I don’t remember.”

“Nope. You want to come on back?”

He led the way into a narrow, dark hallway, at the end of which was a large room used for everything from lunch breaks to staff meetings to general storage. We sat around a long folding table, Newell on one side, Sammie and I on the other. Given his body language, I felt like launching into a speech about how our two countries were destined to become friends, but I didn’t think he’d see the humor. It made me wonder if he thought we might be following up on the accusation that he’d been in on the burglaries.

“What can I help you with?” he asked.

“We heard you work at Tucker Peak,” Sammie said.

He frowned. “Not anymore. I quit.”

I spoke up then, beating Sammie to it, wanting to set a softer, more conciliatory tone. “Sorry to hear that. Snuffy Dawson’s asked us to do a little digging around for him there. We were hoping you could give us the lay of the land. Who’s who, how the politics work,a stuff like that.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, and I realized my instincts had been right. “That’s all?”

“That’s it,” I told him honestly. “Snuffy mentioned Manning’s allegation early on. He also said it was a crock. That was good enough for me.”

A silence fell among us, which Sammie filled encouragingly, having taken my cue. “So, can you help us out?”

He hesitated, and I could tell he was debating whether or not to tell us to pound sand-since this visit was clearly unofficial-or give us the assistance that all cops were supposed to give colleagues without a second’s thought but often did only grudgingly.

Happily, he opted for the second, while maintaining his deadpan expression. “Ask away. I can’t guarantee how much good I’ll be, though. I was mostly outside, on patrol. A lot went on I don’t know anything about.”

“That’s okay,” I told him. “We’re just looking for an overview, enough to give us a jump start, maybe.”

Despite harbored suspicions, he finally opened up. “All right. Stop me if I’m going where you don’t want to go. If you’re talking flow chart, there’s a top man, the CEO, which used to be just ‘general manager’ till somebody figured CEO sounds better. That’s Phil McNally. He works with a CFO named Conan Gorenstein, if you can believe that-a mousy little guy nobody sees much. Then there’s a mountain manager. She’s a hot ticket named Linda Bettina. The only female mountain manager in the business, far as I know-good people, pretty tough, and not so into the women’s lib thing that she can’t yuk it up with the boys.”

He was watching Sammie when he said this, presumably hoping for a reaction. She stuck to taking notes.

Disappointed, he continued, “After that, it spreads out. You have a food and beverage manager, a personnel manager, marketing manager… brass hats like that, and each of them has a bunch of people under them that swells or fades depending on the season.”

“Anyone run the CEO?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. There’s a board of directors. They’re basically invisible except when they use their gold passes to cut to the head of a lift line. I don’t know when they meet or what they do, but none of us ever heard about them. It was all the CEO or CFO on down, and for the operational types mostly Linda and the individual department managers.”

“What’s McNally like?” Sammie asked, not looking up from her notes.

“He cruises around like the captain of the Love Boat, trying to make everybody feel good-just the opposite of Gorenstein. No one who works there has much time for him, since he didn’t really know anything except how to dress good and play politics, but I guess they needed all of that they could stand.”

“Why?”

“I worked other mountains when I was younger, mostly as a garage mechanic. That’s actually how I started at Tucker, before the security job opened up. The pressure’s about the same everywhere, but some are run well, with the employees taken care of and the equipment kept up, and others are pretty fly-by-night. Like Tucker. So McNally had to sound and look happier than maybe he was. He’s a good enough shit. I mean, I liked the guy, ’cause I knew he was in a jam. He never showed it, though. Always acted glad to see you-and remembered names, too.”

“I heard they were getting ready to spend a fortune,” I said. “Really fix it up.”

Newell looked unimpressed. “Yeah, well, whatever. It would take a fortune just to bring the dump up to code, if you ask me… Not that you are.”

“What about the resort generally? The nightclub and condos, the owners versus the day skiers, the full-timers and the seasonal workers. What’s it like as a society?”

He paused thoughtfully before answering, “It’s a company town-lives and dies with the resort. That makes it like a soap opera, with everybody angling for position and every clubby little group pissing on the other. And there’s a real pecking order. The lifties-that’s the lift operators-they’re probably at the bottom of the heap. Some of them, especially the loaders who just make sure people get seated without killing themselves, they’re barely conscious half the time. Long hair, tattoos, body piercing, into drugs. Not all of ’em, of course, but a bunch.

“At the other extreme, not counting the management types, the ski patrol, and the instructors, you got the snowmakers. They have as many misfits, but they’re big on the job, you know? They get off on making snow, like it was an art form. And they see themselves as Navy SEALs or something-the elite. They tear around on snowmobiles like Harley riders, strut their stuff, pretty much keep to themselves as a group. If ever some employees get into a bar fight or have a run-in with the police, they’re probably snowmakers.”

He’d loosened up during all this, his face relaxing and his hands becoming more expressive. There was something about being part of this culture that clearly captured his imagination. Cops tend to find comfort in a regulated world with rules and parameters and clearly defined social structures, but they’re also tribal by nature. It sounded like Tucker Peak and its brethren offered a perfect mixture of both.

“From what I’ve heard,” he continued, “the mountain’s more like a traveling circus as far as personalities go. People are real loyal to it, even with the shitty pay. They come back year after year-guys like home builders and roofers and others who can’t do their regular work in the winter. And some of the instructors and snowmakers are like gypsies-when we got our summer up here, it’s winter in Australia or New Zealand or South America, south of the equator, so they go and work for resorts down there, skiing year ’round.”

He paused, staring at the tabletop. “’Course, that’s all changing, too. Money’s tight, management’s looking for cheap labor. A lot of the older hands have moved on to better mountains. I got sick of all the deadheads they were hiring, who basically sign up to ski for free and fuck up the equipment. Real foolish, if you ask me. That’s why I quit.” He looked suddenly belligerent. “Not ’cause of that prick Manning.”

“Were you aware of much criminal activity going on?” I asked, blandly ignoring the reference.

He smiled broadly for the first time. “I don’t guess I’m the best one to answer that. Everyone knew I was a cop, or that I wanted to be one in the early days. So they didn’t brag much around me. But look at what you got-bunch of bums, basically, wandering from place to place, leading a hard life with weird hours. You’re going to get some criminals mixed in, and some dopers, guaranteed. Hell, I used to get high just walking through the locker room at shift change, the air was so full of dope.”

“But nothing like a ring.”

He laughed. “Too organized-those people’re way too flaky for that. Anything’s possible, I guess, but I don’t see it. A few tickets would be ripped off, or a till would go light at the end of the day, but I don’t see a gang operating there. I said it was like a separate world, but a small one, too: Everybody knows what everybody else is doing.”

He paused and scratched his cheek. “’Course, on the burglaries, if there were only two guys, maybe-one inside, one out-I could see that.”

“Any candidate you can think of that still works there?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I’d look at the newcomers, the ones without the loyalty. Tucker Peak may be on the skids, but there’s still a shitload of money on that mountain. Given the caliber of some of those employees, I’d say that’s a hot combination.”