Bellows Falls (20 page)

Sammie watched me carefully. “Which leads you where?”

I pushed away from the partition and began moving toward my office. “Eventually, to a conversation with the lady herself. Thanks. I know that wasn’t much fun.”

· · ·

After weeks of warm, dry weather, the forecast was warning of a major rainstorm, which prophecy proved true as Jonathon Michael and I approached Bellows Falls early that afternoon. The lead gray sky pressed low upon the broad interstate, making me feel I was racing between two immovable masses—a bug running like hell to escape a descending shoe. The rain was heavy enough to overtake the wipers and made me wary of hydroplaning the tires.

“You get anything on that computer search of Bouch’s assets?” I asked Michael, more to ease the tension than to learn what he would have told me hours earlier had it been relevant.

“Nothing beyond what we already knew,” he said. “No big surprise, of course—if he has any brains, he’s got half a dozen dummy fronts to hide behind. I did get the report back on Padget’s urinalysis. It doesn’t match the sample you found in the toilet tank. What he was carrying around inside him shows no cutting agent whatsoever.”

“It was pure coke?” I asked.

“So they said. What I know about chemistry you could feed to a tick. The bagged stuff was supposedly cut with procaine, and there was none of that in his system. It’s too bad, in a way. Sometimes what they use is exotic enough to trace, but procaine’s pretty common. It’s unregulated and you can buy it through any vet supplies outlet—it’s a topical anesthetic.”

“Huh,” I muttered. “The paper’s informant implied it was all one and the same. I don’t know how or why, but this could be good news for Mr. Padget.”

I entered Bellows Falls from Route 5 and continued on to Atkinson Street. About halfway to the police station at the town’s north end, I turned left onto a rough, dead-end street lined with small, scabby-looking old warehouses. The road was so full of water-filled potholes and patches, it was like driving across a rock-filled pond. At the far end, we stopped next to a cobbled-together, one-story building with a rusting metal roof. A hand-lettered sign over sagging garage doors read “Al’s Auto.”

Jon gave me a questioning glance.

“Quick stop,” I said. “Davis told me this is where Padget had his car fixed when Emily Doyle was taking him to work.”

We got out and ran, hunched over, toward a narrow entrance next to the garage doors. It was no more than a ten-yard dash, but we were drenched by the time we ducked inside.

On a normal day, the building’s interior would have felt dark and hazardous—an evil-smelling hospital for decrepit, oil-bleeding cars. Today, it was almost embracing, its quirkily placed bare bulbs and the thundering rain on the roof giving a sensation of domestic warmth and protection.

We glanced around, seeing no signs of life and hearing nothing over the sound of the rain. I finally made a megaphone of my hands and called out, “Is anybody here?”

The answer came from disturbingly close by. “Yeah.”

We both instinctively stepped back in alarm as two legs appeared from under a pickup I’d been near enough to touch. A man dressed in filthy blue overalls rolled out on a creeper and lay looking up at us. He was holding a flashlight in one hand and a wrench in the other.

“What can I do you for?”

I showed him my badge. “We’re police officers. I was wondering if you could answer a couple of questions.”

The man scowled. “Am I in trouble?”

“Not with us. It’s about a car you serviced—for Brian Padget.”

He pursed his lips, rolled off the creeper onto his hands and knees, and slowly rose to his feet. With blackened fingers, he groped in his breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes and lit his selection from a book of paper matches. I let him take his time.

“What about it?”

“You told Padget there was water in the gas tank. You know how it got there?”

He scratched his cheek, looking from one of us to the other, transparently pondering his best approach. “They say sometimes dealers spike the gas with water to stretch a buck.”

“From what we could find out, Padget buys most of his gas from the same place. There’ve been no other complaints.”

He tilted his head slightly, putting on a philosophical air. “I’ll tell you what I tell some of my customers about that. I warn ’em to stay away from any gas station—even their regular one—when there’s a gas truck filling up the underground tanks. People don’t realize, every one of those storage units has some water in it. Just the nature of the beast. And it’s no big deal as long as nobody stirs it up, ’cause water sinks like lead and stays on the bottom. But you get a big tanker dumping all that gas in there, mixing everything up, and you put that stuff into your car two minutes later, you’re going to be takin’ on some serious water.”

Jonathon spoke from just behind me. “Do you
know
that’s why the water was in the tank?”

The man pushed out his lower lip and shook his head. “Nope. I dropped it out of the car, emptied it, dried it, bled the lines, and hooked her back up. I checked the container where I poured the gas and saw there was water mixed in. She ran good afterwards, so I told Padget that’s what the problem was.”

“Is this common?”

“It happens, usually when the tank starts to rust through, or after a tanker truck refill, like I told you. But it’s not too often it gets so bad you notice it.”

Jonathon looked around the large room. “What kind of container do you empty the gas into?”

“Big plastic see-through thing. I got it around here somewhere.” But he did no more than glance over his shoulder, as if to summon the container by magnetism.

Jon pressed on. “So you saw exactly how much water there was.”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe a gallon, maybe more.”

“Isn’t that a lot?” I asked.

“Enough to mess things up. The feeder line to the engine comes off the bottom. You get a little water sitting there, no big deal. Maybe you hear a ping now and then, maybe not even that. More water, more of a problem. When you get into a couple of gallons or more, then you’re sucking water and nothin’ else, so the engine doesn’t even fire.”

I looked at Michael and raised my eyebrows. He shook his head slightly. “Okay,” I told the mechanic, “thanks for the help.”

We were almost back to the narrow door when his voice caught up to us. “He in big trouble, Padget?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I told him.

Back in the car, the dampness rising from our clothes like a mist, I began driving toward the Island, between the canal and the bend in the river.

“What’d you think?” Jonathon asked.

“By itself, not much. Combined with everything else, it makes for one hell of a handy way to get Emily Doyle into Padget’s house.”

· · ·

The directions Greg Davis had given me led us past where we’d parked to see the petroglyphs, and down a narrow, tree-choked lane that dead-ended at an enormous, ancient red-brick building that loomed out of the surrounding rain-soaked woods like an ominous vision from a fairy tale.

Jon craned his neck to see the roofline high above us. “I take it this is one of the famous mills? It’s creepy enough.”

I turned left down an embankment, picking my way through the weeds, and rounded the building’s corner. There, the lane widened to a broad, grassy parking area, opposite a row of enormous wooden doors, one of which swung back on its hinges as we stopped.

Backlit by a string of bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling behind him, Greg Davis gestured me right into the mill’s embrace. Like Jonah entering the whale, I drove past him, and saw the grayness of the day vanish as the ponderous door slammed shut with a reverberating echo.

Michael and I emerged from the car slowly, taking in the shadowy archways looping high overhead, the broad, blackened, iron-hard oak floors, and the massive ribbons of ceiling-mounted conveyor belts, once linked to the river’s thunderous power, now as silent and still as sleeping juggernauts. Everywhere we looked, there were electrical lights strung like Christmas ornaments, each one bright individually but cumulatively smothered by the sheer weight of the surrounding gloom. Incongruously small, as well as out of place, a dusty 1930s fire-truck sat parked to one side.

“Boy,” Jonathon said softly as Greg approached us. “You sure know how to pick your spots.”

Greg shook hands. “I’m friends with the owner. It was the one place I could think of where no one would walk in on us. Emily’s waiting upstairs.” He gestured toward a broad flight of worn wooden steps.

Jon was still looking around like a star-struck tourist. “Your friend like paying utility bills?”

Greg laughed. “It’s free. Years back, when the power company bought the land, the man who owned this building demanded that part of the deal be free utilities in perpetuity. The lights burn day and night. It’s not a bad security system, although I know the guy would like to see the place put to better use. He’s tried to interest people in starting a business here, maybe a small manufacturer, but it’s been like moving a mountain with a spoon.”

We reached the top of the stairs and stood in a gigantic empty room, the size of a football field. It was clear of debris or obstacles apart from an orderly forest of regularly spaced steel pillars supporting the flat wooden ceiling. Every wall save one was covered with enormous paned windows, making the room as washed with light as its predecessor had been dark. Near one of these banks of windows was a small cluster of chairs, and sitting in one of them was the compact shape of Emily Doyle. She rose nervously as we approached.

Jonathon stepped ahead of me, as we’d agreed earlier. Given the mood of my previous encounter with Emily, I saw no advantage in being the point man. “I’m with the attorney general’s office, Officer Doyle. My name is Jonathon Michael. You’ve already met Lieutenant Gunther.”

She nodded, but made no comment. The fire I’d seen in her earlier had ebbed now that she felt herself in Padget’s shoes—a loss of spirit I took no joy in seeing.

Jon gestured for everyone to sit. Outside, mingling with the rain’s steady hiss was the throaty growl of the nearby river, visible at the bottom of the gorge as a frothing, lethal tumult. Fall Mountain opposite was lost in a veil of colorless mist.

“Before we begin,” he said, “I want to make one thing very clear. Despite what you might feel, you are under no obligation to be here, nor to speak with any one of us. Sergeant Davis is here so he can testify to that later if need be. You are absolutely free to walk away right now, and nothing will be made of the fact.”

A bit of the old Emily flashed across her face. “I doubt that.”

Jonathon didn’t let it pass. “You doubt what, Officer Doyle?”

“That if I walk out of here, it won’t be held against me. You guys’ll think I’m hiding something.”

Jonathon leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his low, calm voice barely containing a sudden passion. “Your name has come up enough times that we wanted to talk with you. If you don’t want to be part of that process, fine, but don’t start thinking you know what’s going on in my head. I happen to know what it’s like being hung out to dry. I know you get distrustful and isolated. I know how conversations die when you enter a room. I won’t be wondering what you’re hiding if you hightail it out of here, because to me that would be the most natural thing in the world. Are we straight on that?”

I had to hand it to him. She merely nodded and said, “I’m sorry.” I did wonder, however, at the allusion he’d made, and the implication that so many of us had at one time or another found ourselves on the outside of a demanding, often stratified system.

He sat back and crossed his legs. “Don’t be. Now—do you want to be here or not? Simple yes or no.”

Now Emily Doyle surprised me. She smiled lopsidedly and said, “No and yes.”

Jon matched her smile and shook his head. “Point taken.” He paused a moment, as if gathering his thoughts, and continued. “One last technicality. As Sergeant Davis is your immediate superior, you might feel more comfortable with him out of earshot. That would also not be held against you.”

Here she was unequivocal. “No. I’d like him to stay.”

“All right. We’ll get started, but keep in mind that we’re groping for answers here, not trading accusations, so try not to get your back up. It is our understanding that you and Brian Padget were intimately involved with one another. When you broke up, was it amicable or were there bad feelings?”

The kaleidoscope of emotions that swept across her suddenly red face was painful to watch. Given the emotional strain this woman had endured, and her inexperience in dealing with it, I was half surprised she didn’t yield to her famous physical prowess and deck Jonathon Michael where he sat.

In fact, once her shock and anger had settled back down, like a suddenly disturbed flock of birds, her response, while tense, was delivered calmly. “We were friends before, and we still are.”

“Did you know early on about his affair with Jan Bouch?”

She pursed her lips briefly. “Soon enough, I guess—town this size.”

“How did you feel about that?”

“It wasn’t any of my business.”

Jon shifted in his chair, becoming slightly more pointed in his body language. “Let’s try that one again.”

“We’d already broken up. It was his choice.” She paused. No one else filled the silence. “I thought he was nuts, risking his career.”

I sensed in a slight widening of her eyes that she wanted to add something. But the moment was so quickly overtaken by Jon’s next question, I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen.

“Did other members of the department feel likewise? Was it a topic of conversation?”

“I knew they were talking about it, but not around me, since Brian and I had been going together. Sergeant Davis approached Brian unofficially, not that it did any good.”

Davis moved slightly, his eyes on the floor. He hadn’t told me of any such conversation and was no doubt feeling awkward. Unnecessarily, I thought—the talk had been confidential, and he’d honored that promise.