Bellows Falls Read online

  Latour was now staring at the polished tips of his shoes, and smiled at my careful phrasing. “He’s got a wife and kids, a decent house, a Harley with all the fixin’s and a late-model Firebird. You figure it out.”

  The conviction in his voice was absolute. I shifted my approach slightly. “Tell me a little about Padget.”

  There was a fleeting glance at the wall. “Best officer I ever had.”

  Given such praise, I was surprised at its brevity. “Local boy? Married? Liked by the others?” I prompted.

  Latour straightened in his seat, suddenly emphatic. “No, he’s not married. But he wouldn’t fool around. I told you, he’s respected and admired—by everybody.”

  I finally sensed what was eating at him. “But you think there might be something to what Bouch is claiming.”

  The chief stood up, crossed the room, and resettled behind the protection of his desk.

  “Are you going to interview him?” he asked.

  “Not until I’ve finished my investigation. If I dig up anything criminal, a statement by him prior to being Mirandized will be thrown out in court—the judge’ll say he was coerced into talking for fear of being fired.”

  Latour flapped his hand as if to shoo me away, no doubt regretting his having called Brandt in the first place. “Criminal? Christ Almighty. Bouch is just trying to bust our chops.”

  “Does Padget know about the allegation?”

  “Sure he does. I told him. He denied it completely. I’ve put him on paid leave till this is cleared up.”

  “And he knows I’ve been asked to check it out?”

  Latour gave a rueful half-smile. “By now, I’d say the whole department does.”

  “What’s the general consensus?”

  “They all think like I do. Bouch is just doing a number. It happens a lot, especially in this town. Do you know what they call Bellows Falls at the police academy? ‘Dodge City’—I kid you not. Our crime stats are in the top four or five for the state year after year, and we’re a quarter Brattleboro’s size—thirty-eight hundred people, tops. Besides me, I got one sergeant, six officers, and a bunch of part-timers. My other sergeant’s with the drug task force for two more years. We’re sitting ducks.”

  “Does Bouch get much of your business?” I asked, hoping to head off more complaining.

  “We’ve gone to his house for disturbances—domestic abuse stuff, drunk and disorderly. We’ve held him overnight to dry out, but no one’s ever filed charges against him.”

  I rose and prepared to leave, my mind chasing after a dozen diverging questions. I had my doubts, however, that Chief Latour was the unbiased source I needed for answers.

  · · ·

  I left to get my bearings—drive around, clear my head, and see the town. Latour had grumpily given me Padget’s and Bouch’s addresses. I wanted to check out the latter’s first but took the scenic route to get there.

  The geographical protuberance I thought of as Bellows Falls’ pregnant belly is called the Island, although it is only the canal that has made it such. Nevertheless, that barrier has led to a wholly separate identity, consisting largely of an empty railroad yard and station, a few half-abandoned factories and warehouses, a couple of businesses, and an impressive view of the cascade and Fall Mountain beyond. It is like a failing industrial park hogging the best real estate in the area.

  The next longitudinal stratum to Bellows Falls, west of the canal, is the downtown corridor I’d driven through on Rockingham Street, resolutely turned in on itself around its oddly shaped square, and—as in Brattleboro and many other older New England towns—with its back turned against the natural scenery.

  Prominent above downtown is Cherry Hill, an oblong rise bisecting the village, and jammed with an assortment of schools, churches, a cemetery, and some of the town’s famous and ubiquitous white clapboard housing—both pleasant Greek Revival single-family homes and several squalid three-deckers, bursting at the seams with down-and-out tenants.

  Skirting Cherry Hill’s western slope, Atkinson parallels Rockingham Street but is overwhelmingly lined with residential buildings. It exposes the village’s social extremes most clearly, with some of its more spectacular mansions snuggling up to the seediest flophouses. Atkinson, and the side streets extending across a narrow flat section to its west, are where the vast majority of the town’s inhabitants live. It is a beehive-like neighborhood—rich, poor, elaborate, and plain—virtually crawling with people and stamped by their passage. Toys, bikes, cars abandoned and functional, swing sets, birdbaths, and assorted debris all lie scattered among the houses like yard sale rejects. More vivid than the dramatic setting, overwhelming the spectacular architecture, is the sense of people in this town. They appear to live everywhere, as on an overloaded riverboat.

  Predictably, from what Latour had portrayed, Bouch had chosen this area to call home.

  His house was easy to spot, being marked by a backhoe and a gravel truck, both looking the worse for wear. But it was the Harley that caught my eye—and the man working on it.

  Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots, Norm Bouch at first glance looked like any other working-class male, his head buried in a motor and his hands covered with grease. But as I drove slowly by, I noticed the precision with which he handled his tools and the perfect balance he maintained as he moved. Like a relaxing predator, he showed confidence and grace and exuded an indefinable sense of menace.

  That sensation was confirmed a moment later, when a ball came soaring over the garage roof from the backyard and bounced harmlessly against the motorcycle. A screwdriver still in his hand, Bouch picked up the ball and began circling the garage, just as a small boy appeared at its far corner, running full tilt. Both of them froze in their tracks as they caught sight of each other. I could no longer see Bouch’s face, but the boy’s paled with fright, and he began wringing his hands with practiced intensity.

  I stopped the car and continued watching, seeing the boy speaking quickly, no doubt begging forgiveness for the ball’s sudden intrusion. Bouch held it up as if discovering it for the first time and turned it admiringly in his hand. Then in one fluid movement, he stuck it with his screwdriver and tossed it half-deflated at the boy’s feet. The child looked down forlornly and slowly stooped to pick it up. Bouch was already heading back to the Harley, a smile on his face.

  I resumed driving down the street, unnoticed—and wishing to remain that way.

  I didn’t want to interview Norm Bouch—not yet. Internal investigations are ticklish affairs. The cops tend to see you as a potential traitor, and the civilian complainants as a guaranteed whitewasher. So despite the pressure from both camps to come up with results, and a tradition that dictates interviewing the complainant and witnesses first before doing the peripheral homework, I tend to favor a more roundabout method. By approaching the problem from the outside, collecting knowledge on the way in, I often end up with a pretty complete picture before even meeting the primary players.

  It’s unorthodox, slower, and it makes twitchy officials twitchier, but it gives me a better sense of what I’m getting into.

  I therefore drove past to a nearby convenience store, parked in its lot, and sat like a bird-watcher taking notes from the bushes.

  The Bouch home was a two-story, ramshackle, turn-of-the century clapboard pile, probably quite tidy and small when original, now a typical cob job of artless additions and alterations. New England is dotted with such buildings, where the amendments have all but swallowed the original. Norm’s was adorned with the mismatched roof lines, bare sheathing, and patched-on sagging porch exemplifying the least of such examples. The yard was a similar mess—cars, broken toys, a washing machine, and assorted jetsam all vied for space. From my vantage point, I could partially see into the backyard, where the small boy was still holding the flattened ball, but was now surrounded by several other unhappy children.

  A quarter hour later, a pickup truck on testosterone pulled to the curb in a roar of doctored muffler
s, and a heavyset man in a tight tank top swung out to join Bouch by the side of the Harley. Bouch greeted him with a laugh, handed him a beer from a nearby cooler, and engaged in animated conversation, still working on his bike. I didn’t doubt that in the heat of a summer afternoon, variations of this scene were being duplicated a millionfold across the country.

  I have long passed the point of expecting people to look their parts. Emile Latour’s uniformed, round-bodied look of benevolent, innocuous authority hid an anger I’d sensed simmering just below the surface. What I was watching now, I knew, could be anything—two guys bonding over beer and the Harley mystique, or two drug dealers discussing business in a totally placid setting.

  · · ·

  Brian Padget lived in Westminster, several miles south of Bellows Falls. But where most Vermont towns appear sprinkled across a picturesque and hilly topography, Westminster sits on a flat terrace of land, its rigidly placed buildings straddling a wide, straight, smooth stretch of road more conducive to speeding than to the leisurely enjoyment of a small, quaint village. The details of the latter are there, of course—the town predates the American Revolution. But the sturdy, classically built homes and businesses are dwarfed by the numbing, methodical way in which they were laid out, and the overall impression of Westminster remains an anonymous blur.

  Padget’s house was a single-story converted trailer at the edge of town, tightly wedged between two similarly built neighbors. The tiny lawn was cut and trimmed, the one bush out front neatly pruned, and the vinyl clapboards of the house looked freshly washed. I knew from Latour that Padget wasn’t home—he was out of town visiting his folks for the day. As with the Bouch residence, all I was after here was a first impression of the people I was about to investigate.

  Padget’s home was the precise opposite of Bouch’s—on the surface, it spoke of precision and attention to detail, but under that was a concern for appearances, a sense of others standing in judgment. It reflected an underlying insecurity typical of a young unmarried man, who was both relatively new on the job and eager to impress.

  Bouch, on the other hand, had seemed more comfortable with himself. The self-confident blue-collar squalor of his home had been as eloquent as Padget’s cautious ambition. I sensed Norm was positioned to take advantage of the world around him, whereas Brian was more dependent on the blessings of those with clout.

  It made me ponder the forces that had set these two people in opposition. “Sexual harassment,” like a foghorn in the night, covered a range of possibilities—from a mere disturbance to a warning of catastrophe. I didn’t have Emile Latour’s confidence that the former was preordained.

  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.”