Bellows Falls (5 page)

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.

“I’M GOING TO INTERVIEW BOUCH
and his wife tomorrow,” I said. “I’d like a little more background on them. Who do you suggest I talk to? Preferably somebody without an ax to grind.”

Anne Murphy glanced up at me, a wary, beleaguered expression on her tired face. Dressed in slacks, sneakers, and a blue work shirt, she didn’t look like a typical nurse. But then she didn’t have the typical nurse’s job. Employed by Vermont’s Department of Health, she spent half her time on the road, visiting patients at their homes—generally places the police also knew all too well—trying to inform them about nutrition, child-rearing, battering, and drug abuse. It was a taxing, sometimes dirty and dangerous job, not to be performed in a tidy white uniform.

She was in her office right now—a small, bland cubicle in a Springfield building shared with other state employees—and didn’t seem in a receptive mood. “You the one who called?”

I nodded and extended a hand in greeting. “Yes—Joe Gunther.”

Ignoring me, she waved to a chair opposite hers. “I heard of you. Sit.”

I looked around quickly. The walls were white cinderblock, the lighting antiseptic, the floors easy to clean. The windows, as they always seem to be in state and federal buildings, were placed above where you could see out of them from a sitting position. She’d done her best to soften the tone—a bunch of flowers were on her desk, and several posters on the walls depicted soothing, pastoral scenes.

“What do you want?” she asked.

She sat as if recovering from a long hike up a mountain—slightly slouched, her feet planted, her forearms resting heavily in her lap. But her face spoke of a greater weariness, her eyes especially. In combat I’d seen the same look on men coming off the line after weeks of heavy action. There was resignation added to the exhaustion, which told of damage far beyond the cure of a good night’s sleep.

“I’m on delicate ground here,” I started, hoping she’d appreciate the candor. “I’m conducting an investigation that involves one of your patients, at least according to Greg Davis in Bellows Falls. I know you have confidentialities you can’t violate, but I was hoping you could give me some background material.”

“This about Jan Bouch and Brian Padget?”

I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “Boy—that didn’t take long to get out.” I placed my tape recorder on the desk next to her. “I want to make sure everything stays on the record. Do you mind?”

She looked at the machine for a long moment before saying, “I guess not. I think Norm’s giving them both a bum rap.”

I didn’t take the bait, leery of moving too fast. “Do you know what the charges are against Brian Padget?”

She smiled bitterly. “Fooling around with Jan. Everyone else does that kind of stuff, but I figure it’s against some cop rule or another.”

“How do you define ‘fooling around’?”

Her expression turned incredulous. “Her cheating on Norm. Does turning on that recorder make you a little hard to reach?”

“Just cautious,” I answered. “Did you ever see Jan and Brian together?”

“Once. It was late at night, behind some buildings, not far from her house. They didn’t see me and I left them alone.”

“He was in uniform?”

“No.”

“When was that?”

“A week or two ago.”

“And what were they doing?”

“Kissing.”

“Was she resisting in any way?”

Anne Murphy laughed shortly. “She kept her clothes on. Other than that, she was all over him.”

“Did you ever see or hear anything about Brian harassing her at any time?”

She frowned. “Harassing? She was cheating on her husband with him. Is there a law against that?”

The question seemed genuine. “Not that I know of, but it is contrary to an officer’s code of conduct. My investigation isn’t criminal in nature, Ms. Murphy. Norm Bouch has filed a sexual harassment charge against Padget.”

Her eyes narrowed and she sat forward in her chair. “That’s total bullshit. Norm Bouch would like to fuck every woman in that town, me included. The same way he shakes a man’s hand, he checks out a woman’s tits and ass, and if she gives him half a chance, he makes a grab for them just to see if he gets lucky. I’ve been waiting for him to try that with me for years, only he’s not quite that dumb. If anybody’s a harasser here, it’s not some wet-behind-the-ears, post-pube junior cop, it’s that asshole.”

I let a moment pass to clear the air, before saying, “Okay. Why is Jan Bouch a patient of yours?”

The weariness resettled on her face. “You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?”

“I didn’t think it would hurt to try. How ’bout some more general information? Can you tell me about the Bouches as a couple?”

She pointed soundlessly at the recorder. I leaned forward and turned it off. So much for the record.