Smugglers Notch

by Joseph Koenig

  A Jeep Wagoneer with a plow blade mounted on a winch blocked the drive of a bungalow painted a runny redwood color. Parked head to head was a blue van with wide tires boasting Michelin in raised lettering on the sidewalls. A grimy smudge hung over the redwood’s roof and another, paler, seeped from under the van. St. Germain prodded the cruiser to twenty and followed the snowy track around the cove.

  He emptied his ashtray in the slush and began filling it again without taking his eyes off the house. In time, a teenager wearing a checked jacket came out and poured a quart of oil under the hood, while a youth a few years older dragged a heavy sack out of the rear and left it with some others in the yard. The boy in the jacket sniffed the air like an animal sensing a predator on the wind, looked through the trees toward the far shore of the cove. But if he noticed the Cabot County car, it made no impression on him. His companion backed the Jeep out of the way and together they drove off in the van.

  St. Germain waited for the crunch of tires on wet pebbles before he put the cruiser in gear. Keeping two hundred feet behind, he stalked the boys back to the highway. As he turned south toward Burlington, he pulled down the visor and maneuvered it over the side window, blotting the low sun. When he could see without squinting again, the van was disappearing on I-89. He nudged the needle to eighty and began to reel it in.

  An eighteen-wheeler with ST. JOHNSBURY in serifed capitals along the side kept pace as he came off the ramp, and he had to fight the urge to curb it. He swerved around the cab and settled into traffic as the interstate skirted Burlington across new suburbs feeding on the dairyland to the east. The highway broadened to three lanes climbing the shallow valley of the Winooski River. St. Germain held steady at seventy, biding his time, never far from the van. Beyond the Central Vermont Railway trestle the interstate insinuated itself between old Route 2 and the water, the roads running so close together that St. Germain caught smiles from weathered men cruising the pitted asphalt on plodding farm implements. The state road went to concrete at the Cabot County line, and he watched his speedometer till he clocked the van less than three miles under the speed limit, then moved up on it beneath flashing domes.

  When the driver failed to pull over, St. Germain touched his siren. Brake lights fluttered and then glowed as the van sliced across traffic and beached itself on the shoulder. St. Germain rolled to a halt fifty feet behind. He stepped out cautiously, alert for truckers unable to pass up the easy chance to dust a county cop, studying the van as though hieroglyphs told a story in the white grit dulling the buffed finish.

  “What’d we do?” the driver called out to him. “Why’d you flag us?”

  St. Germain scowled. He walked toward the front and looked in. Up close the driver was younger than Tucker had described him, younger even than in the two-year-old photo in the yearbook. In the passenger’s seat the older boy had knitted his companion’s irritation into a hard mask. To whichever one cared to answer, St. Germain said, “You in some kind of hurry?”

  The driver met his gaze and held it. “We weren’t speeding. I had one eye on the dash the whole time you were behind us.”

  St. Germain poked his head inside the van, showing off his scowl. “Have your speedometer calibrated,” he growled. “And try keeping both eyes on the road.” He glanced behind the youngsters, but a heavy cloth suspended from the ceiling blocked his view of the rear. “Let me have your license and registration.”

  “I don’t see why you’re stopping us when I didn’t—”

  “Let him have it, Paulie,” his passenger said. “Maybe then we can get the hell on our way.”

  “No,” the driver said. “It’s a matter of principle. I wasn’t speeding.”

  “Fuck principle. We want to be moving.”

  “What was that?” St. Germain snapped, as if the profanity had been meant for him. He was addressing the boy in the passenger’s seat, but looking at the driver, at the scabs like crusted seams on the back of his hands and his cheeks.

  “No offense, Officer. I was telling my brother to use his head for once in his life and give you his license. If you’ve already made up your mind, there’s nothing he can do about it by being a hardass, is there?”

  “Shut up, Mel,” the driver said. “I never went over fifty. If he wants to write a ticket, he can run me in first. I’m not gonna stand for this.”

  Too fast for St. Germain to follow the motion, Mel backhanded his brother. Then he plucked a tattered billfold from Paul’s back pocket and offered it to the lieutenant.

  “Take out the license and registration and hand them to me,” St. Germain said.

  Paul snatched the wallet away and slid some papers from the plastic sleeves. St. Germain carried them back to the cruiser. He raised headquarters on the radio and asked if Marlow was in his office.

  “I’ll see,” the dispatcher said, and nearly three minutes went by before St. Germain heard his boss’s gruff, “Yeah?” crackling out of the speaker.

  “John,” he bellowed, not trying to contain his excitement. “Wait’ll you hear who—”

  “Where are you, damn it? There’s an active murder investigation you’re supposed to be heading, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” Subdued, but letting Marlow know he hadn’t spoiled his good time. “What would you say if I told you I’ve got Paul Conklin on ice ten miles from Tremont Center?”

  “Probably I’d ask you to turn in your gun so we could work up a case against you. How many bullets did you put in him?”

  “Very funny,” St. Germain said. “I just pulled him over in that van of his on I-89. Anything special you’d like me to ask him?”

  “There’s something I want to ask you. I want to hear how you got him away from Malletts Bay. What did you do, kidnap him over the line?”

  St. Germain swallowed back a wisecrack. “It doesn’t matter. What does is that he’s here.”

  “It matters plenty,” Marlow said. “We don’t have a warrant for his arrest. Christ, we haven’t even applied for one yet. If you blow this case for procedure, I’ll have you proofreading Jeffcoat’s accident reports till you go blind.”

  “Relax, John, everything’s on the up and up.” As though it were his final argument to sway a holdout juror, he paused for effect and then added, “I swear.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Marlow said reluctantly. “I have to.”

  “What do we want out of him?”

  “You have no cause for interrogation, so be careful. Bust his chops, put him in a thoughtful frame of mind, and let him go. What’ve you got him for, traffic violation?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t cite him. We don’t need a written record of this. And, Larry, in the future, don’t be so damn eager.”

  When he went back to the van, moving slowly and deliberately to let the boys know they were not going anywhere for a while, St. Germain found Paul Conklin glaring at his brother. Mel had his thumb pressed against his upper lip, bunching it under his nose. “Get out, you two,” St. Germain ordered. “I’m taking a look inside.”

  “What for?” Paul said.

  Mel pulled his hand away from his mouth and St. Germain saw a puffed lip, dark flecks of blood. “Where do you come off searching us? We didn’t do nothing.”

  “We’ll see,” St. Germain opened the door. “Out.”

  “You better be ready to drag us,” Paul said.

  “My pleasure,” St. Germain said, calling his own bluff. As he leaned inside, he noticed white powder on the patterned floor mats like sand in a toddler’s beach toy. “I’ve got reason to believe you two are transporting drugs.”

  Paul Conklin forced a hollow laugh. “You’re the one that’s blowing smoke.”

  “We don’t even do dope,” Mel said. “Right, Paulie? You’ve got no business accusing us of moving it.”

  “What’s that on the floor?”

  “Huh?” The boys gaped at the mats and then Mel looked up and said, “It’s gypsum. My brother and me,
we renovate old houses. We’re doing a job in Shady Rill. That’s where we’re going. We must’ve spilled some. It happens all the time.”

  “I’ll bet it does,” St. Germain said. “Now get out.”

  Paul shook his head and both boys stayed where they were. St. Germain stared without blinking until Mel averted his eyes, kneading his swollen mouth. St. Germain walked to the passenger’s side and Mel pushed open his door and dropped onto the shoulder. His brother sat motionless as the bravado went out of him, and then he swung his legs over and stood beside the van.

  “Turn around,” St. Germain ordered. “I want you with your backs to traffic while I search your vehicle.”

  He climbed in through the driver’s door and poked at the mats with his toe. For all he knew the white powder was dope, but how was he supposed to tell when he had never made an arrest for anything stronger than marijuana. Funny thing, but he wouldn’t recognize hard drugs if he was caught in an avalanche of them. He rolled the powder in his fingers. Feeling gypsum’s coarseness, he scooped some into a glassine bag anyway and slid over to the passenger’s seat.

  A collection of road maps accordioned like a jack-in-the-box as he opened the glove compartment. He swept out some rags and a screwdriver and two flat tablets that said TUMS in raised letters. The breeze from a passing truck whisked the heavy cloth against the back of his head and he swiped it aside and saw an unmade bed and, stacked in a corner, four large paper sacks like the one Mel Conklin had lugged out of the van at Malletts Bay. Around a caricature of New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain was the inscription, GRANITE STATE GYPSUM.

  Speakers were mounted in the walls and exposed wires ran up front and under the dash. On an Oriental rug a rocking chair with an amputated runner lay on its side. St. Germain squeezed between the seats. He kicked the crippled chair and a toolbox out of the way and got down on his hands and knees and reached for a dark tangle of cloth wedged under the bed. He unraveled an extra-large pea coat knotted in dungarees with a twenty-three-inch waist that were too new to have been washed, a torn sweater, bra and panties.

  He balled the garments together and brought them into the front. “Come here, you two,” he called outside. When neither boy was in a hurry to move, he dropped his voice and said, “Now,” and the Conklins came sullenly to his door.

  “What’s this stuff?” St. Germain asked.

  “What does it look like?” Paul Conklin said.

  “You tell me.”

  Mel affected an exaggerated simper. “Those are mi-ine,” he lisped.

  Paul elbowed his brother away from the van. “They belong to my girlfriend.”

  “Don’t believe him, Officer. Where’d he ever get a girl?” Mel licked the tip of his pinkie and smoothed a bushy eyebrow. “He just loves playing with my undies.”

  “You don’t want to be breathing through your mouth permanently, you’ll shut up,” Paul said.

  Mel shut up.

  Paul snorted, as if to show the advantage in staying on his good side. “What’s this got to do with dope?” he asked St. Germain.

  St. Germain had no answer for that. He pinched some more of the powder, licked his fingers as he’d seen television detectives do, and spit. He glared at the brothers as though the taste had confirmed his suspicions, and when he could think of nothing else said, “I don’t want to see you in my county again.”

  Paul took back his license and registration. “Considering as how you didn’t find any drugs,” he said, “you might have to.”

  St. Germain walked to his cruiser and followed the van off the shoulder. He tailed the brothers to the next exit, clocking them at seventy-seven miles an hour when he turned off for Tremont Center. Back at headquarters he found Marlow at his desk, looking over Jeffcoat’s paperwork with a pained expression. When Marlow saw him, the pain seemed to become unbearable.

  “How’d you make out?”

  “I gave ’em a hard time and sent ’em packing,” St. Germain said. “Like you wanted.”

  “That all?”

  St. Germain nodded. “Why? You sound surprised.”

  “Any time you don’t make more trouble than the situation calls for, it surprises me.” Marlow focused bloodshot eyes over tortoiseshell half-glasses. “You never did tell me how you happened to spot him in the county.”

  “I guess not.” St. Germain hesitated and, when Marlow didn’t press him, said, “Conklin’s clawed pretty bad. I don’t think it’s a cat that did it either. I had a look inside the van and there was a pile of girl’s clothes something tells me fit Becky Beausoleil fine. I’m ready to make the arrest.”

  “No, you’re not. We can’t use that information to get a judge to sign a warrant, not the way you obtained it. As far as the law’s concerned, we haven’t questioned Conklin. Far as you’re concerned, he isn’t even a suspect.”

  “How do we make him one?”

  “That’s the problem,” Marlow said. “Intuition doesn’t stand up in court anymore. Any novice two weeks out of law school knows to deflect the issue away from the evidence to how we came to get it. We’re the ones on trial. We’ve got to show that Tucker was on the money all along when he said Conklin was the boy he saw in St. Jay.”

  “I doubt he’d impress a jury. He couldn’t convince you the world’s flat if he fell off of it.”

  Marlow gazed through his lenses at an accident report and scribbled something in the margin. “It won’t hurt his credibility if he can pick Conklin out of a show-up. How about letting him try?”

  “I’ll go to Shady Rill right now.”

  “Where?”

  “The brothers are fixing up an old home there.”

  “Why don’t you let them put in an honest day’s work, then?” Marlow said. “Conklin must have figured out you have more than a passing interest in him, so I wouldn’t count on his being agreeable next time he sees you. Better wait till tonight, when you can be reasonably sure he’s back at Malletts Bay, and then run out with Vann and Gray and a Chittenden County officer or two so no one’s feelings get ruffled, and when everybody’s in place and knows what he has to do, when the potential for trouble’s been minimized, then ask nicely if it would be inconveniencing him to accompany you to headquarters, and you can haul him in by his ears if you like.”

  “All that for a punk kid?”

  “The punk kid choked the life out of Becky Beausoleil, looks like. It wouldn’t put him out giving you a hard time.”

  St. Germain leaned so close that Marlow had to tilt his head to see him clearly. “He goes a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, and his pleasure’s hurting people with his hands. I can take him with one of mine tied behind my back. Why bother anyone else on this?”

  Marlow was waiting for St. Germain to be reasonable, knowing he was wasting his time. “If it makes you feel better, Larry, I’ll tell the photographers to come in tight when you bring him in.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” St. Germain said, wondering if, in fact, it wasn’t. “I just don’t like playing to the notion he’s some sort of celebrity. He’d think it was worth twenty-five years out of his life if I showed up like General MacArthur dictating the terms of surrender to the Japs. Why give him the satisfaction?”

  “Give me some satisfaction. Take Vann and Gray.”

  St. Germain shook his head stubbornly. “I still can’t see where it’s necessary.”

  “… And the Chittenden officers. It’s procedure.”

  “Okay, but keep your detectives. I’ll take Wally. A little excitement, and I do mean little, ought to do him good.”

  Marlow started to nix the idea when he glanced at the accident report again. “If you think he can handle it …” He took off his glasses and folded them in a pocket. “I don’t suppose it could hurt his handwriting.”

  Papers were spread around the bullpen, but Jeffcoat was not at his usual place. St. Germain heard one of the new toilets sucking hard enough to pull a man in and looked inside the cells. Jeffcoat grinned back self-consci
ously, then turned his back as he adjusted his zipper. With his personal bar of soap he washed his hands in cold water and patted them dry in the fluffy towel that he brought from home each day and kept with his civilian clothes in his locker in the basement.

  “Got something you’ll want to hear,” St. Germain said.

  Jeffcoat’s eyes lit up. “Sheriff Marlow’s decided to order portable breathalyzers after all? I’ve been lobbying for them since I saw them in the catalogue. They’re a swell idea, a real improvement over the—”

  St. Germain tried not to groan out loud. “Better than that. I’m going after a suspect in the Beausoleil case and I want … I need you to help me.”

  Jeffcoat’s smile froze and then cracked, and his hand slid gingerly to his gun and nudged the barrel as if it had been pointed at a vital organ. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why me?” Jeffcoat asked cautiously. “No one else seems to think I’m equipped to deal with anything riskier than sorting out bodies after a head-on.”

  “I do,” St. Germain said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

  Jeffcoat drew himself erect. To St. Germain it appeared that he had made himself larger, like a blowfish.

  “I won’t let you down, Lieutenant.”

  “It never crossed my mind. I’m … the department’s counting on you.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You can begin by treating yourself to a big lunch. Late afternoon we’re running out to Malletts Bay. I don’t know that we’ll be back for supper.”

  “Where’s Malletts Bay?”

  “On Lake Champlain. Chittenden deputies’ll meet us, and then we’ll drive to the cove where this boy lives. Name’s Paul Conklin. He’s only about nineteen—and while I don’t expect he’ll make trouble, like John says, you never know. I’ll go in with one of the local officers while you lay back in case something comes up we didn’t plan on. Is that exciting enough for you?”