Smugglers Notch

by Joseph Koenig

  Quietly, as though trying not to disturb the dead, St. Germain arranged his massive silhouette among the others. “What’ve we got here?”

  “The Beausoleil girl, most likely,” Marlow said. The stark light brought out new lines in his crinkly forehead. “None of us have seen her since she was little. If this is her, she didn’t look a thing like her old man.”

  The body lay on a sodden cloth secured around the hips by two flat stones. Other than a curious half-smile the features were as composed as if she had shut her eyes expecting a wake-up call that never was to be delivered. St. Germain knelt beside her to brush away some slush that had accumulated between the parted lips. “She kill herself?” he asked.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I can’t see any indication of foul play.” When Marlow offered no opinion except to shrug his shoulders, which had become a code between them to keep talking, St. Germain said, “Her boyfriend told us they’d had an argument, a real humdinger. Becky wouldn’t be the first gal to make a man sorry for what he said by taking a walk in the woods on a snowy night.”

  “A long walk,” Marlow said. “We didn’t find a car.”

  The coroner, who wore a white turban and a bristly black beard, stepped into the light. In his hand was a leather bag like those physicians carried, but Sajit Singh was one medical man who viewed the living with disdain, holding it against them that they were unqualified to receive his skills. St. Germain turned his back. That he despised the dark-skinned man, making himself something of a bigot in his own eyes, troubled him as greatly as did the coroner’s contempt for healthy people. More than once Marlow had tried to tell him that his real problem with Singh was that the Indian had not lived in Vermont for five generations, like everyone else St. Germain respected. But whatever the reason, St. Germain couldn’t stand the sight of him, and made no more apologies for it.

  “It is to your misfortune, not to mention my own, that in a good year this state is lucky to see a dozen homicides,” Singh said in a high singsong. “Neither of us has nearly enough experience with violent death.”

  St. Germain came near tilting his head as though he hadn’t heard right. If Marlow had not been standing there, he would have decked the Sikh ghoul. He calmed himself by studying the blunt tips of his shoes in the snow. In a way, he had to admit, Singh was right; in seven years with the department this was only his second murder—if that’s what it was—the other being a knifing that had been less a case for sheriff’s investigators than for a porter with a damp mop and strong stomach.

  “Do you see the marks in the girl’s neck?” Singh asked as if he were conducting a high school biology class and Becky Beausoleil was of no greater significance than a dissected frog.

  St. Germain turned to the body. “No, I don’t.”

  “They are there,” the Indian said confidently, and moved one of the arc lights so that it shone into the bloodless face—indecently, St. Germain thought. “Look again.”

  St. Germain shielded the corner of his eyes with his palm. Close up, Becky was prettier than any girlfriend of Benjamin Lederer’s had a right to be. More innocent-looking, too, without a speck of makeup, and as Marlow had said, with none of the cramped features of her sourpuss father. What was hardest to take, she seemed younger than eighteen years, much too young to end up a frozen corpse on her birthday.

  “There,” Singh was saying, “just below the left side of the jaw, you should be able to see them now.”

  On a line with her ear St. Germain noticed a thin red stripe across the throat. More redness was visible below the point of her cleft chin where the skin appeared to have been abraded. “Yes, I see.”

  Singh made no effort to hide his glee. “That,” he said, “is irrefutable evidence of strangulation by ligature. The girl was murdered.”

  St. Germain’s eyes shifted to the blue cloth fluttering over well-formed breasts that seemed to have lost none of their sensuality in death. He shuddered then and zipped his parka. “Was she raped?”

  “That will have to wait for the laboratory tests. And those cannot begin before I have completed my postmortem. Until that time, you see how she is dressed … draw your conclusions from that.”

  St. Germain took the blue cloth between his fingers. “It’s some kind of blanket,” he said to Marlow.

  “Bedspread. Makes a hell of a snowsuit.”

  “She deserved better than this,” St. Germain said. “Anyone would.”

  He stood under a yellow pine searching for his cigarettes and the Zippo lighter that his father had carried onto the beaches of Normandy and that later made up the bulk of his estate. In the woods behind him he heard the splat of leather soles against the soupy snow. “Who’re we waiting for?” he asked Marlow. “State police?”

  A man emerged from the trees, wearing a camel’s hair topcoat that was soaked through across the shoulders. Without a word to anyone he went into the circle of blinding light and looked down at the body in the bedspread. St. Germain watched for tears but didn’t see any. Ray Beausoleil stood silently over the girl for five full minutes, his concession to emotion the unconscious working of his jaw. Then he backed into the darkness. “You’ll arrest him now,” he told St. Germain.

  “Beg your pardon, sir.”

  “Lederer, you ass. The man who did this to my daughter.”

  “There’s nothing I’d like more,” St. Germain said. “But we have no evidence against him. He says she left his place in the afternoon, and there isn’t anything to contradict—”

  “Let me worry about the evidence. When we need it, it will be there. You worry about bringing him in.”

  St. Germain’s head snapped back, as if he had caught a whiff of a bad odor, and Marlow moved quickly between them. A long time ago, he had found that stepping between his lieutenant and the people his lieutenant did not like was becoming an increasingly larger part of his job. Because he shared St. Germain’s prejudices, he would just as soon have minded his own business as a rule and let nature take its course. He was looking forward to nothing about his retirement with greater anticipation than to the missed opportunities to intercede.

  “I’ll run out myself, Ray,” he said. “If there’s any reason at all, we’ll have him behind bars by—”

  Beausoleil walked away from the uniformed men to stand closer to his daughter. “I want him locked up tonight.”

  St. Germain took a drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out against the wet pine bark, listening to the faint hissing sound. “John, it would be a waste of your time going to the Lederer place.”

  “The least I can do for Beausoleil is to talk to the man.”

  St. Germain shook his head. “Lederer had nothing to do with this. Take it from me.”

  “You said yourself that he was a dope dealer, a bully. How in Heaven’s name can you be so sure he didn’t hurt Becky?”

  “Because that son of a bitch in the camel’s hair coat says he did.”

  The high ground, the loading dock near the back entrance, went as it always did to the cameramen, Minicams from the Burlington and Plattsburgh stations jockeying for position with still photographers from the newspapers. The radio crews and print journalists were waiting inside. When Marlow saw the cars with the call letters splashed along the sides, he cursed under his breath and braked his Ford. “I hate to have to do this to you,” he said to the man beside him on the seat. “But those piranhas’ll eat me up alive if they see you like this. Put your arms behind your back. I’m going to cuff you till we get in, for their benefit only, I want you to know.”

  Benjamin Lederer dug his fingers into his scalp and rubbed vigorously, making up in advance for lost opportunity. Then he held his wrists together at the base of his spine, and twisted toward the window. “You’ve treated me square. I can’t complain.”

  “It’s the least I can do,” Marlow said as he snapped on the bracelets and sped the rest of the way into the lot, “after that cowboy took down half your place with one of my cruisers.
”

  Marlow came out first, ducking away from the cameras. He opened the passenger’s door and brought Lederer into headquarters, jostling him once or twice for effect, but ignoring the pleas for, “Look this way, Sheriff,” and, “Just one of you and him together.”

  In the quiet of the bullpen he found St. Germain at Jeffcoat’s usual place, behind an ashtray heaped with two-inch butts. “You don’t look well, John,” St. Germain said. “Where’d you pick up that rash?”

  For the only time since he had taken him into custody two hours earlier, Marlow saw Lederer tense. His feet dragged against the linoleum as if he were digging in his heels. “Easy, you’re almost there now,” the sheriff whispered, glaring at St. Germain behind his prisoner’s back. “Don’t louse things up for both of us.” Then he unlocked the handcuffs and Lederer went inside the cell and tested the thin bunk mattress. “Anything you want, just ask.”

  “How about a blonde?” Lederer said. “The lieutenant have a sister?”

  “What was that, you bastard?” St. Germain yelled, knocking over his chair in his hurry to get out of it.

  Marlow intercepted him near the barred door and bulled him away. “Get out of here,” he said. “He’s just trying to get your goat, same as you’re doing to him.”

  “I’ll give him my goat. I’ll give it to him up his—”

  “I want to talk to you.” When St. Germain pressed closer, Marlow said, “That’s an order, damn it.”

  St. Germain lingered in front of the cell, staring the broad man down. Lederer stood over the toilet and unzipped his fly without averting his eyes, and St. Germain moved off toward a neutral corner.

  “That welcome party,” Marlow asked, “did you arrange it?”

  St. Germain, distracted for the moment, relaxed. “Just because I’m some kind of egomaniac doesn’t mean you should be deprived of good ink for a job well done. Hell, you wrapped up a major murder investigation in—what?—less than twenty-four hours.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know why I even keep you on,” Marlow said disgustedly. “You’ve just made a clown out of me in front of the whole northern half of the state. Lederer no more could have killed that girl than you or I. When I told him how she’d been found, he bawled so bad it was all I could do to keep from joining in.”

  “He did what? Those were crocodile tears.”

  “It may be hard for you to believe someone like him’s got feelings, but he was in love with her. No way he harmed her either. Ask me how I know, and—”

  “Yes, John, I’m asking.”

  “Don’t be impertinent … how I know, and thirty years as a cop tells me you don’t jump to conclusions about a man because of the way he looks. Those tears were real.”

  “I still think you’re wrong. But I’ll take your word for it,” St. Germain said. “I have to. Ray Beausoleil doesn’t. Which means Lederer’s already good as tried, convicted, sentenced, and appeal denied. If he didn’t kill Becky, that’s too bad … and, then again, maybe not. He’s hardly a solid citizen; seems to me there’s the matter of some time he should be paying the state for drug charges never brought.”

  “Drug time’s not the same thing as murder time. And Ray Beausoleil can go and screw himself.”

  “Yeah, but once Ray sets the hook, he doesn’t let go.” St. Germain glanced toward the cells and added, “Unfortunately,” as though it were expected of him. “It’s out of our hands.”

  Marlow circled around, pinning him in the corner. “Not until the legislature says it’s okay to strap a man in the hot seat and dim the lights. Till then,” he said, jabbing a hard finger at St. Germain’s chest, “your job’s convincing Ray that Lederer couldn’t’ve killed his daughter.”

  St. Germain showed his palms at arm’s length, like a traffic cop bringing a heavy truck to a stop. “I’m not beating my head against that wall. I’ve got two weeks’ vacation that’ve got to be used up by New Year’s, and Annie’ll have my scalp if we don’t spend ’em with her people in Key West.”

  Marlow cuffed the hands out of the way. “Or you can build the man a new greenhouse. Your choice, but you owe him.”

  A big voice from the cells said, “Listen to him, St. Germain,” and then laughed till the flushing toilet drowned it out.

  Lederer’s arrest had come too late to make the morning papers, and next day the worst November blizzard in Vermont history relegated the story to the second section. Nearly three feet of wet snow blanketed the Champlain Valley and Green Mountains from southern Quebec to the Berkshire Hills. Large sections of Burlington and Montpelier had been blacked out when power lines toppled, and forty thousand rural and farm residents were still without electricity as the storm was entering its second day. St. Germain, snowed in at headquarters, huddled in a tattered county blanket dreaming of sunstroke in the Florida Keys, waking to the realization that if getting the chill out of his bones depended upon springing Benjamin Lederer rather than finding new grounds to keep him locked away, it was time to stock up on thermal underwear. At the arraignment a District Court judge had set cash bond of $250,000 on a count of first-degree murder and ordered Lederer to submit to sixty days of psychiatric evaluation at Waterbury State Hospital, which would determine if he was capable of understanding the charges against him and assisting in the preparation of his defense. The preliminary hearing was slated for the second week of December. If probable cause was found, and St. Germain couldn’t remember the last time that it was not in a major case, the evidence would go before the Cabot County grand jury by the end of the year.

  From time to time St. Germain interrupted his idyll in the Keys to rack his brain for a fresh avenue of investigation. Because he was up against a circumstantial case backed up by Ray Beausoleil’s legal muscle, he could develop no point of attack. Witnesses would be required to prove Lederer’s innocence—for despite Constitutional guarantees suspects in all felony prosecutions were presumed guilty until proven otherwise. St. Germain had no idea where to begin. Any juror with two eyes would vote to convict without the benefit of testimony. About the best he could do was to advise Lederer to get a haircut and a shave.

  St. Germain was splashing cold water against his face when Wally Jeffcoat, looking like his ball had gone through the lieutenant’s window, came into the bullpen to tell him that he was wanted on the phone.

  “Annie?”

  “Not unless she’s started whistling through her teeth when she talks,” the deputy said in a rare attempt at humor that he wished at once he had kept to himself. “It’s someone from out around Hunger Mountain, says there’s something you don’t know about Ben Lederer.”

  “All I need,” St. Germain said. “He’s probably got what Beausoleil wants to soup up old sparky.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s hard to understand, but it seems like he’s saying he can clear him.”

  St. Germain hustled the deputy into Marlow’s office, where the phone was off the hook. As he pressed it to his ear, Jeffcoat lingered at the doorway, casually eavesdropping.

  “Hello … Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Shit, I think he hung up. What’s his name?”

  “Martin,” Jeffcoat said.

  “Mr. Martin, are you there?”

  “Who?” The voice sounded used up, barely awake, as if its owner had been dozing. “Who’s that you want?”

  “Mr. Martin?”

  “My name’s Martin,” the voice said, more alert this time. “But it ain’t mister. It’s Martin Tucker. This Marlow?”

  “The sheriff’s not in. I’m Lieutenant St. Germain.”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “I said he isn’t—What is this in reference to?”

  “Hello, Marlow?”

  St. Germain’s lips tightened and he slapped his hand over the mouthpiece. “If this guy doesn’t start making sense quick,” he said to Jeffcoat, “I’m going up to Hunger Mountain and wring his neck for him.” He moved his hand away. “The sheriff is out,” he said slowly and d
istinctly, as if there were a problem with Tucker’s hearing. “Can I help?”

  “Yeah. These Nip cars, they stink.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Ain’t I speaking loud enough?”

  “Yes, sir,” St. Germain said, debating whether to drive out and throttle him right away, or to listen some more and do it later.

  “Every last one of ’em’s no good. Get in an accident, you can kiss your ass good-bye. They reach sixty thousand on the speedometer, the darn things fall apart like the one-horse shay. There’s two inches of snow on the ground, they’re worse’n useless.”

  “Sir.” St. Germain forced himself to say the word. “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “Goddamn Toyota kept me locked up in my own house two days. Like solitary confinement—no heat, no electric, no hot water, no food except Friskies and what little I had in the fridge and that got spoiled. No TV or radio neither. Bad enough I near froze to death and starved, I was climbing the walls doing it. That’s how come you didn’t hear from me before.”

  “Sir,” St. Germain tried again. “Is there some information you have—”

  Tucker brushed the interruption aside. “Wasn’t till a couple hours ago the power come back on and I could take off my sweaters, and then the plows come by and dug me out and I had to get in ’em again to run down to the store for something to eat and a Free Press, and that’s when I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” St. Germain asked.

  “You sure Marlow ain’t there?”

  “Saw—”

  “The picture of that fella they got for murdering the girl in the woods by Lake Mansfield.”

  St. Germain held his breath, waiting for more.

  “You still there?” Martin Tucker said.

  “What about the picture?”

  “What about it? You got the wrong fella, that’s what about it.”

  “Why do you say that, sir?”

  “’Cause I was in St. Jay when that little gal got picked up thumbing, and that fella with all the hair wasn’t who took her.”