Tucker Peak (26 page)

I feigned surprise. “You were the ring leader?”

“No, no. Ring leader… Jeez. No. I guess if I think about it, I suppose he sort of took charge… sometimes.”

I scratched my head. “Huh, this may be tougher than I thought. If I’m going to put you in a good light, I got to know in my gut how you fit into all this. There’re a lot of people involved, after all—we need to know who does hard time and who gets a slap on the wrist.”

His forehead began to glisten. “What do you mean, ‘all this?’ You make it sound like I’m part of some mob or something.”

I downplayed his panic with a wave of the hand. “Oh, a simple foot soldier, you and I know that. Small fry. Still, we had to kill Richie—he’s history. You, you’re a bird in hand.”

He began speaking rapidly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t. I mean, I know I did a bad thing, being drunk and all, and she did kind of lead me on, if that’s okay to say. But you’re putting me somewhere I don’t belong.”

I got up and walked around the tiny room a couple of times, as if totally befuddled. “Kurt, you had the drugs, you had access to the house, you kept company with a known bad guy, you attacked a police officer after she’d identified herself, and I’ve got a small army of witnesses willing and ready to tell the judge that this wasn’t just some isolated night-gone-bad. You were a dealer, Kurt—plain and simple. Maybe not a top player, maybe just selling what fell between the cracks, but still a dealer. If you’re going to tell me you did this all on your own, how am I going to tell our prosecutor to go easy? She’ll bury you alive.”

I stopped and leaned on the table, so my face was inches from his. “You need to tell me where the bigger fish are swimming, Kurt.”

His face was now covered with sweat. “I can’t.”

I stayed put. “Before, it was, ‘I don’t know.’ Now, it’s, ‘I can’t.’ I translate that as, ‘I won’t.’ Is that what I’m hearing?”

“No. I want to help.”

“You better want to help, Kurt, or we’ll throw away the key on you.”

He swallowed. “I’m scared.”

I sat down again. “Can’t blame you there. It’s a scary business… especially if you’re alone. A man like you needs a man like me in times like this.”

He showed a little petulance. “Being in jail is better than being dead.”

I laughed softly. “That’s only because you think it’s an either/or choice. It’s not. It’s a little more complicated than that. See, what you did last night? That was all against us—cops. No innocent bystanders were involved. You broke the law and we can put you in jail, but we can also cut you loose. Merely spread the word that we had a long and fruitful conversation with you and are throwing you back like the little, helpful minnow that you are.”

I paused and added, “’Course, there’s no guarantee the next guy who picks you up will be as friendly, knowing how chatty you’d been.”

“That wouldn’t be legal,” he said tentatively.

“Sure, it would. Just because it sounds like something from a TV show doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen all the time.” I leaned toward him again, “Especially when the stakes are high enough, like my wanting to know who your supplier is.”

He wiped his face with his hand. “This isn’t fair.”

I didn’t respond.

“I think I better talk to a lawyer after all.”

“Be my guest. We won’t overwork him. Like I said, we’ll just say, ‘Thanks for all the info,’ and let you walk. There’s a phone right outside this room.”

He didn’t move. “What happens if I tell you?”

“Depending on how much you say, a lot can happen. You could even start life over with a clean slate, if the planets line up right. Of course, for that, you’d have to be really helpful.”

“No jail time? A new identity?”

“Whoa, remember who you’re talking to. I’m just a cop. None of that’s up to me. You talk, I listen, then we let the people upstairs decide.”

“But you’d tell ’em how I been. You’d tell ’em I was a big help.”

“Everything that’s been said in this room is on the record.”

He placed his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and let out a heavy sigh. After half a minute, he straightened up. “Okay. The guy you want is Andy Goddard.”

· · ·

Kathy Bartlett still worked for the state attorney general in Montpelier, even though she’d been permanently assigned as VBI’s special prosecutor. Her office was a standard box, one of many lining a large central room filled with desks and head-high, sound-absorbent paneling. But it had a door for privacy and a window overlooking the gold-domed state capitol, one of the smallest, most toy-like, and most curiously modest such baubles in the nation. On the grand scale of Vermont’s diminished bureaucracy, often shoved into some pretty eccentric nooks and crannies, Kathy’s quarters were pretty plush.

“I’m not saying I don’t like Kurt Peterson’s sworn statement,” she was telling me. “I am saying that in order to get a search warrant that’ll stand up later, it’d be nice to have another leg to the stool. We’re not just running up against some public defender and a judge here. As the new boys on the block, we’re also coming under the scrutiny of every legal entity in the state, many of whom would love to see us fall on our faces.”

I kept to the subject at hand, choosing not to discuss something I could do nothing about. “We don’t have much more to use against Goddard. Whoever he is, he’s been very careful up to now. We have Peterson’s testimony and general scuttlebutt that he’s peddling dope, but no one else’ll go on record.”

“How ’bout wiring Peterson and getting him to make a buy off Goddard?”

“I suggested that. Peterson wasn’t interested, said he’d take hard time over being dead.”

“Goddard’s that scary?”

I waggled my hand in midair. “Peterson thinks so. We discovered Goddard via some roundabout backtracking from the Duval homicide, but I’m not making him into a killer till I know more.”

“Any ties to Marty Gagnon? Maybe that’s our key to opening this up.”

I shook my head. “I tried Gagnon’s name out on Peterson and drew a blank. Richie apparently never introduced them. And Lester Spinney couldn’t find a connection anywhere between Gagnon and Goddard.”

Kathy looked at me helplessly. “Surveillance?”

“I’ll do it if I have to, but it takes time and money, and ever since Richie’s death, patience hasn’t been the boss’s long suit. That’s the flip side to the moving-too-fast scenario—if we don’t move fast enough, the same people’ll pound us.”

“Maybe you can bluff,” she suggested. “Let Goddard know you’re breathing down his neck. Force his hand.”

But I didn’t like that idea. The hand I might force could simply become a disappearing act.

I did, however, have another idea. “It occurs to me,” I said, “that there may be more than one way to conduct a surveillance. What if I were to get hold of something incriminating from inside Goddard’s house, without entering it and without using a knowing proxy to enter for me?”

She smiled encouragingly. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’ve you got in mind?”

· · ·

I didn’t drive all the way to Montpelier to have a conversation with Kathy Bartlett I could have conducted by phone. I’d timed my arrival to coincide with the end of the workday, and so now crossed the street and walked down the block to meet with Gail at a local pub.

She’d beaten me to it and was sitting at a small table by the window, waving to me as I drew abreast.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said as I kissed her and sat down, “but I asked Roger Betts to join us.”

“What’s he in town for?” I asked, caught between curiosity and mild disappointment.

“He’s around here almost as much as I am when the legislature’s active. What’re you having?” She signaled to a waitress.

“Coke,” I called out from halfway across the room. The woman gave me the high sign and turned on her heel. The place was full of people whose purpose in town was made obvious by their very non-rural clothes.

“How’s Kathy?” Gail asked, waving to someone she knew over my shoulder.

“Her usual, hard-nosed self. She said to say hi.”

Gail sipped from her drink, which looked like a Scotch and water. “And the arm?”

I was no longer wearing the sling. “Better. Still sore, but not throbbing like it was. What’s on Betts’s mind? He got something useful to tell me?”

“I think he will have,” she admitted. “I’ve been leaning on him like you asked, mostly because of what you said last time we were together—that someone had almost been killed already, and that all you wanted was a little time-saving guidance.”

“I also think he’s wanted to clear his conscience from the start.” I added. “He’s just had a hard time using a cop to do it.”

She poked at the ice in her drink with her fingernail and smiled. “Good thing he chose you; other cops might not have been so tolerant.”

I shrugged, my mind flashing back to my conversation with Kathy Bartlett, and the internecine squabbling we’d discussed. What an opinionated, stubborn, suspicious, and only occasionally innovative bunch we were in law enforcement, all disguised under the generalized, bland austerity of the uniform and the badge. “Maybe. Maybe not. People put us all in the same box, whether we deserve it or not.”

Gail pursed her lips, obviously weighing that in her mind. “True,” she said slowly, “although you have to admit, most of your colleagues have more of a siege mentality than you do.”

I looked at the flow of pedestrians passing along the sidewalk beside me—close enough that if it hadn’t been for the glass, I could have reached out and touched them—and pondered this philosophical tangent. The paradox of proximity combined with isolation seemed pertinent to Gail’s comment. Police officers were expected to be enmeshed in society, were even urged to get out of their squad cars and become interactive—joining neighborhood associations and school groups and being seen as regular citizens, lending a hand to the public good. But they were received differently from firefighters or EMTs or anyone else, for that matter, having to deal with inane jokes about speeding, tickets, jaywalking, and with suspicion bordering on hostility about their motives for intermingling at all.

And unfortunately, it cut both ways. Younger cops especially saw themselves as latter-day knights, chosen to walk the battle line between society and a hostile wasteland, little understanding that there was no such easy divide, that crime and society were as symbiotic as a human body and the ailments attacking it every day. These civilian-soldier hybrids tended to wear militaristic haircuts, affect cynical, swaggering attitudes, and keep one another’s company as much as possible, citing the general population’s lack of understanding as their own explanation for standing aloof. Thankfully, the older they got, the more blunted became this self-protective, unimaginative, almost paranoid edge, although the aftereffects remained. But since most of those veterans were off the street anyway, flying desks instead of cruisers, whatever benefits of maturity they might have gained became lost to the troubled kids on street corners who were most in need of them. And so the cycle continued, with small, hard-won improvements, and those generally achieved with the speed of growing grass.

There were times I found the whole debate both insoluble and overwhelming, and certainly nothing to chat about idly at the end of a long day. Ironically, Roger Betts’s arrival at that point rendered the point moot and now struck me as fortunate.

Settling in gingerly, so his knees didn’t smack against ours under the tiny table, Betts apologized for being late. Gail put him at ease and tried to catch the increasingly busy waitress’s attention. As she did, he told me how distressed he’d been at hearing of my encounter with Richie Lane—or more properly, Rossi’s dog—and asked how I was feeling.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Gail tells me you’ve come to some sort of decision.”

He ducked his head slightly and smiled. “Yes, well. Why don’t we get down to business?”

I didn’t react, although Gail cut me a hard look.

“The reason I took this long to tell you what was troubling me,” Betts began to explain, “was because the nature of what caught my eye was so obviously embroiled in a human drama I didn’t want to add to the agonies this man was already suffering, at least not without being more sure of myself.”

“And now you are more sure?”

He looked crestfallen. “Sadly, no. But I can no longer take the responsibility of possibly risking another life by staying silent. There was a time my idealism would have lent me comfort and resolve in such a dilemma, but age has a way of eroding such self-serving certainties.”

It was like hearing a confession on
Masterpiece Theatre
, his diction was so precise and his choice of words so antique. However, I clearly sensed beyond it the pain of his decision, so while I’d been irritated by his earlier wavering, I couldn’t fault the thoughtfulness that had put him here at last, and I stayed silent to allow him to continue.

“Eight years ago a dear colleague and friend of mine married a younger woman with whom he’d fallen terribly in love. He’d believed himself beyond such happiness after losing his wife to cancer fifteen years before and had thus given himself totally to the environmental cause. There are many different types of people in our ranks—as I’m sure is true everywhere—but we may have a disproportionate number of true believers, even romantics. Norman Toussaint is such a person. But he is also dedicated, idealistic, passionate, and vigorous in standing up for what he thinks is true.”

The waitress had come within hailing distance by now, but none of us cared. Betts was staring at some focal point near the middle of the table, and Gail and I were hanging on his words like kids listening to a bedtime story. I remembered Gail’s mentioning Toussaint and thinking at the time that he seemed the least defined of the three we’d discussed: a well-traveled man with a minor record of resisting arrest, who always seemed to be where the action was hottest among the environmentalist battlefields.

“Norman and I met over two decades ago, when he and his first wife were young and recently married. They were absolutely devoted to the cause, to the point of choosing not to have children until the world was made a healthier place to live. An extremist position, of course, and a naïve one, especially in retrospect, but not uncommon at the time. In any case, you can imagine how that made Norman feel when his wife was then taken by cancer.”