When I got inside the J.P.D. office, I thought it was deserted. Chief Stilwell must’ve heard me come in, though, because he called out from a room in the back. I went past the front counter and down the short hall, and there he was—sitting behind a desk that was probably normal size but, since he was such a big bear of a guy, looked like doll furniture.
“Alex Bernier,” he said, dragging my name out—Berrrrn-YAAAAY—in a way that made me feel vaguely like I was being made fun of. “Have a seat.”
He waved a meaty paw at the two fifties-era chairs facing the desk. They were made of curved wood and, like Chief Stilwell himself, looked to be rock solid. I sat in the one on the right and pulled out my notebook.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said. “Like I said on the phone, I—”
“You want to talk about drugs and Melting Rock.”
“Um… That’s right.”
He leaned back in his chair, which took his weight without a groan. “Important topic.”
“I think so. I’m doing a story on it. It’s part of a bigger piece on kids and drugs.”
He raised a bushy black eyebrow at me. “You say ‘kids’ like you’re not practically one yourself.”
“I’ll be twenty-eight next month.”
“Ah. I thought you were younger.”
“Most people do.”
“Anyhow, you’re still just a kid from where I’m sitting.”
“To tell you the truth, a few days at Melting Rock made me feel pretty ancient.”
He stroked his salt-and-pepper mustache. I’m not generally a facial-hair fan, but somehow he managed to pull it off.
“Now, now,” he said, deadpan. “You know Melting Rock’s not just for kids. It’s fun for the whole family.”
I searched his face and voice for a trace of irony, but I was damned if I could find it.
“Back at…When we spoke at the festival, I asked you about drug enforcement. And you said—”
“I said we arrested three people last year for possession with intent to sell.”
I flipped back a bunch of pages in my notebook. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what you said.”
“And you said, ‘Three out of how many?’ ”
“Right.” He didn’t say anything, just sat back in his chair and inspected me so thoroughly I was wondering if a stray bit of hay was sticking out of my ear. “So I wanted to ask you…how is it that all these drugs are floating around Melting Rock, but almost nobody gets arrested?”
“Miss Bernier, you might not have noticed this, but I’m a policeman.”
It seemed like there had to be a trap in there somewhere, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. “Er…yeah?”
“And as such, I’m a pretty good judge of people.”
“Um…okay.”
“And right now, I’m judging that you already have a theory about this particular situation.”
“You mean about Melting Rock?”
“Unless you’ve shifted your attention to the Dairy Princess pageant in the past few minutes.”
There it was again—that tone that managed to be mocking without exactly insulting you. As demeanors go, it wasn’t necessarily appealing, but it wasn’t totally alienating, either. Something about it made you feel like even though you were the butt of the joke, at least you were in on it.
Yet again, Chief Stilwell was reminding me of Cody.
“Okay, you’re right,” I said. “Everybody knows that Jaspersburg makes a ton of money off the festival. And if lots of people got busted there, maybe hardly anyone would show up anymore. So, yes, it has occurred to me that maybe your office is under a certain amount of pressure to…you know, live and let live. Is that an accurate way of putting it?”
He looked me straight in the eye. “I’d say it’s dead-on.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “You would?”
“Absolutely.”
“Um…Are you telling me straight out that you’ve been discouraged from policing the festival for drug use?”
“I’m telling you that in the past I’ve been told that it would be best for everyone if my men and I simply looked the other way.”
“And you…uh, you realize we’re talking on the record right now?”
“Miss Bernier, is Chief Hill over in Gabriel what you’d call a fool?”
“No, of course he’s—”
“Then I can’t imagine why you’d come into my town and treat me like I’m one.”
“Look, Chief, I’m sorry. I’m just kind of taken aback here, okay? I didn’t expect you to—”
“To be honest with you? Would you prefer that I lie?”
“No, I—”
“You asked me a question; I answered it. Go ahead and write it down.”
I did. “Um…Who told you this?”
“Who told me what?”
“Who told you to, uh…to ignore all the drug taking that was going on?”
“I don’t think that’s important. Let’s just say folks around here know what Melting Rock means to the village.”
“And so you did it? You just looked the other way?”
He shrugged. “I’d rather say that we just didn’t look too hard. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not proud of it.”
“So why did you do it?”
He clasped his hands church-style and laid his arms across the desk. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”
“How so?”
“You have to keep in mind how much the festival means to the town in terms of finances. Jaspersburg doesn’t have a great deal of revenue, you know. Melting Rock means a new floor in the school gym, repairs that keep the village fire truck running, money to keep the senior center open. And the feeling was that if Melting Rock was ever considered, let’s say…a hostile environment for certain things, that revenue would go away and all those important projects would have to be scrapped.” He shook his head. “As I said, I’m not proud of it. What I’m telling you is that we didn’t do our job.”
“Do you mean to say that you feel responsible for what happened to those boys? And to that girl in Baltimore?”
He looked away from me and toward the left-hand corner of his desk. When I followed his eyes, I landed on a framed picture of Trish—much younger, significantly chubbier, and cuddled up to a smiling, open-faced lady.
Chief Stilwell stared at the picture for a while, then looked back up at me like he’d momentarily forgotten I was there. “Of course I do,” he said.
“Of course you feel responsible for their deaths?”
He leaned forward, feet on the floor and elbows on the desk. “Those boys were my daughter’s friends. And I always thought, before this happened …I assumed they were good kids.”
“Well, from what I’ve heard about them, and from what I could tell… for the most part, they were good kids. They just were stupid enough to take drugs.” He barked out a laugh. “You think those things are mutually exclusive?”
His lips formed a tight smile, which contained exactly zero in the way of mirth. “Obviously, you don’t have children.”
“No. Why?”
“If you did, you’d understand. Nobody who put your daughter in harm’s way could be what you’d call a good kid.”
I still didn’t get it. “You mean—”
“I mean, my daughter was right there. She was a friend of theirs. If she’d been stupid enough to try that garbage, right now she’d be…” He shook his head as though he couldn’t stand to think about it.
“Is that why you’re telling me this?”
“It can’t go on anymore,” he said. Pretty melodramatic, I know—and believe it or not, he actually squared his shoulders and straightened his spine as he said it. “They can fire me if they want to, but it just can’t go on. It won’t go on. Not in my town.”
“You mean you’re going to crack down on drugs at the festival next year?”
“If there is a festival.”
“You mean there might no
t be?”
Another shrug. “Who knows? I wouldn’t call this year’s much of a success, would you?”
“So what are you planning on doing exactly?”
“All I’m talking about,” he said, “is doing what we should’ve done all along—policing Melting Rock like any other public event. I’m not recommending anything radical. We’re not going to do random searches or infringe on anyone’s civil liberties. But this kind of blatant violation of the law won’t be tolerated. Period.”
“Would you maybe send in plainclothes cops or something? Drug-sniffing dogs?” He laughed—like he thought I was a very silly creature. “I’m just trying to get a picture of what you have in mind.”
“I see.”
“And what kind of reaction do you think you’re going to get?”
“That’s what I’d call a reporter’s question.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
“It’s the kind of question only a reporter would ask. A stupid one with an obvious answer.”
“Look, I was just wondering how you thought this… policy shift was going to be received.”
“And the obvious answer is, some people will be glad, and other people will be furious.”
“Who do you think will be glad?”
“Parents.”
“Okay, and who do you think will be furious?”
“Everyone else.”
“And that would be …?”
“Kids. Drug dealers. People who make a lot of money selling pizza to teenagers when they’re as high as a kite. You name it.”
“What do you think the village council will say?”
“I don’t really give a damn.”
“How do you think Trish will feel about all this?”
It was an out-of-bounds, below-the-belt sort of question, and I’m not quite sure why I asked it. I also have no idea why he answered.
And at first, he didn’t—just spent some more time staring at the photo of his daughter and his dead wife. Finally, he shook his head.
“Trish can be a very confused young lady,” he said.
“She’s a nice kid,” I said. “She’s just at a pretty awful age. I’m sure she’ll turn out just fine.”
A new expression parked on his face all of a sudden. One second he was looking all macho and judgmental, and the next he was, well… desperately hopeful. “You really think so?”
“Look, Chief, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with Trish and her friends over the past couple of weeks. And I’ll be honest with you—they’re not necessarily the kind of kids I would’ve hung out with when I was in high school. But Trish and Cindy and Lauren… their hearts are obviously in the right place. And you’ve got to remember that adolescence is a lot less fun than people make it out to be. Maybe it’s because adults are bummed because they missed out on some great time they think they were supposed to have had. I don’t know. But the way I remember it, being a seventeen-year-old girl is no picnic.” I glanced back at the photograph. “And I’d imagine that—”
I’d been about to say something too intrusive even for me, but I managed to stifle myself. It didn’t get past Stilwell.
“Especially,” he said, “if you don’t have a mother.”
“Um…right.”
“My wife died when Trish was twelve. I know there’s never a good time, but…it’s hard for me to think of a worse age.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. To tell you the truth, Stilwell’s shift from Burt Reynolds to Phil Donahue was starting to freak me out.
He didn’t say anything for a while, and the silence grew until it got downright uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure whether I should just stand up and end the interview, or whether he was expecting me to say something else.
This intermission, while definitely weird, at least gave me a chance to take a long look at Stilwell, who was shaping up to be one strange fellow. In some ways the guy was a study in machismo, but when it came to his daughter, he was starting to look like a big softy. He obviously wanted to be a good cop, but he’d let his bosses strong-arm him into ignoring the law. He was fairly uptight, but he also had a major ironic streak that he pulled out when you least expected it. I knew he’d been to war, but for some reason I couldn’t picture him there—although, truth be told, I could say the same thing about Brian Cody.
In short, I’d spent the past year wondering how a guy like Cody gets to be a guy like Cody; now I was pondering the same question about Steve Stilwell.
Finally, my reporterly survival instincts kicked in, and I opened my mouth and asked the first question that came to mind.
“What happened?”
He blinked, like he needed to drag his mind back from wherever it’d been. “Cancer,” he said.
“Oh.” More uneasy silence.
“Listen, Chief,” I said finally, “I kind of had a talk with Trish recently, and it seemed to me that …maybe she’s on the mend.”
That please-God-let-it-be-true expression moved across his face again and parked there. “Do you really think so?”
“She told me how she’d gone into treatment, and how she wasn’t doing any drugs or anything. Those seem like good things, right?”
He chewed on that for a while. The next thing that came out of his mouth totally took me by surprise.
“She likes you,” he said.
“What?”
“Trish told me that. She said you were one of the only adults she’d ever met who really listened to her.”
“I’m flattered.”
“She also told me that I shouldn’t give you a hard time.” He cracked a hint of a smile. “She said I give everyone a hard time, and I should cut you some slack.”
“Is that why you said you’d see me today?”
The smile got ever so slightly bigger. “Could be. Partly.”
“The other part being a desire to get the word out about Melting Rock?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Listen, Chief, you’re being straight with me, so I’ll be straight with you. If there was an overt decision to allow drugs at Melting Rock, it’s a pretty huge story.”
He raised a hand. “I never said that there—”
“Okay, maybe not overt. But what you’re telling me is that at the very least the powers that be in this town were willing to look the other way, to maybe put kids at risk for the sake of making money. People are gonna be furious. And one of the people they’re gonna be furious at is you.”
“I guess maybe they have a right to be.”
“What about Rosemary Hamill?”
“What about her?”
“Is she one of the people who wanted you to—”
“I told you, who wanted what isn’t important.”
“I can guarantee you, most people aren’t going to feel that way.”
He shrugged yet again. “That’s not my problem.”
“Chief, I’m not trying to be rude. But this stuff you just told me’s going to be in the paper tomorrow. Once it hits the streets, your phone is going to be ringing off the hook.”
“A person does something wrong, it seems to me he ought to face the consequences. That’s what I’ve tried to teach Trish, anyway.”
I started to get up. “Fair enough.”
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you know what they say is the single biggest influence on a kid?”
“Um… their parents?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s not. And it’s not their teachers, either. It’s their friends—the people they hang around with every day. That’s what makes all the difference. You gravitate toward the A students, you’re probably going to be an A student. You fall in with the wrong crowd…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Not that it really needed finishing.
“Peer pressure,” he said. “That’s what it all comes down to.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“And you know what?” h
e said. “It damn well doesn’t stop when you turn twenty-one.”
CHAPTER19
When it came to the reaction to my story about drugs and Melting Rock, “furious” proved to be one mother of an understatement. But as it turned out, said fury kicked in long before the paper was even printed. When I called Rosemary Hamill for commentary about what Chief Stilwell had said, she went so ballistic I was fairly sure that if she could’ve reached through the phone line and throttled me, she would’ve done it. As it was, I had to hold the handset a foot from my head to avoid popping an eardrum.
Predictably, she categorically denied that anyone would even suggest ignoring drug use at the festival; what was a tad surprising, though, was that she’d have the chutzpah to argue that there were hardly any drugs there in the first place. I’d barely gotten off the line with her when I heard the phone ring in the managing editor’s office. Sure enough, it was Mrs. Hamill threatening all manner of doom if we printed the story.
Predictably, Marilyn told her to go to hell. Then, just as predictably, Mrs. Hamill promptly called downstairs to the publisher’s office. But, it being a whole two minutes after five P.M., he’d already flown the coop.
The story ran the next day.
The good news was, with the Melting Rock sidebar metastasized into a giant story of its own, I appeared to be off the hook for the ever-vexing mainbar, at least for the moment.
The bad news was, people were, well… furious.
Now, this didn’t really impact negatively on yours truly, controversial stories generally being the most fun to cover. But it did have the good people of Jaspersburg beating their bosoms and rending their garments—though why it was so traumatic to have the facts about drugs at Melting Rock go from blatantly obvious to merely confirmed was beyond me.
Such a hot potato of a story, naturally, demanded a whole slew of follow-ups. I ran around interviewing irate parents and embarrassed officials. Meanwhile, the editorial-page editor cranked out a column condemning what he called “an ends-justify-the-means mentality.” The letters on the Op-Ed page were running three-to-one in favor of Chief Stilwell, who (to my surprise) got more praise for blowing the whistle than condemnation for turning a blind eye to the drugs in the first place.
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