Smugglers Notch

by Joseph Koenig

  Marlow walked off to stand closer to Jeffcoat. “Shot in the back,” he said mostly to himself, “his gun and half his uniform gone, not a trace of Larry or his car. How could something like this—”

  Shadows flickering in the trees turned the officers toward the road. A car with noisy lifters pulled onto the shoulder, spinning its wheels over the frozen ditch.

  “I’d better turn my flasher on before somebody runs into me,” the tow truck driver said.

  Three men passed him coming into the woods. They were dressed in brown uniforms identical to Marlow’s save for Chittenden County insignias on the sleeves.

  “Dave Aubuchon, Chittenden sheriff’s,” said the officer in front. He was a stocky man with a prizefighter’s zippered eyebrows, wearing captain’s bars in need of polishing. “Hear one of your men’s hurt bad here.”

  “Real bad,” Marlow said. “He’s dead.”

  “Heard that, too, but didn’t want to believe it. What went down? We were never told you had officers in the county.”

  “I sent two. They were going to touch base with your office, then come out to make an arrest in a murder case.”

  “First I learn of it,” Aubuchon said. “That wouldn’t be the Beausoleil killing?”

  Marlow looked at him sharply. “Why, what do you know about it?”

  “Nothing you don’t, nothing I didn’t read in the papers. And we were never contacted by your men.”

  “Damn your soul, Larry,” Marlow said under his breath.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said I don’t understand how this could’ve happened.”

  Aubuchon inched away until he was close to Jeffcoat’s body. He played a flashlight into the weeds and centered it on the deputy’s face. The tow truck’s flashers went on suddenly, casting his own features alternately sallow and ruddy. “Same suspect do both killings?” he asked.

  “It’d seem that way.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A Malletts Bay man,” Marlow said. “Paul Conklin.”

  “That one,” another Chittenden officer said, and thumbed his nose. A metal plaque on his chest read NICHOLS.

  Marlow didn’t acknowledge him right away. He stood between Aubuchon and Jeffcoat’s body until the captain flicked off his light. Then he asked, “Know him?”

  “Who doesn’t?” Nichols said. “The little prick’s been making trouble for women since his arms were long enough to reach his fly. He’s got a juvenile sheet long as your arm, and ours have been tied because of his age. You say you want him for murder. What I can’t figure is what took him so long.”

  “Can you show us where he lives, lend us a couple of men?” Brighter lights swept away the yellow. Marlow spoke faster, heading off an interruption. “My chief deputy’s still out here somewhere.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Aubuchon said. “Nichols, you too. Bob,” he told the third officer, “stay with the body till the state police show.”

  He switched on the flashlight again and picked his way back to his car. “The Conklin place is a mile off,” he said to Marlow. “We’ve been there often enough to know.”

  A Fanny Allen Hospital ambulance was waiting next to the tow truck. Aubuchon whispered something to a man holding a doctor’s black bag and Marlow saw both of them point into the brush. The man nodded, drawing on a cigarette, and opened the rear doors. When he came out again a moment later, he had traded the bag for a collapsible litter.

  Vann and Gray slid into the sheriff’s car beside their boss. “Shit,” Marlow said softly. “I told Larry over and over how important it was for him to contact the Chittenden deputies before he moved on Conklin. I don’t see how he could have disobeyed a simple order like that.”

  Aubuchon revved his engine and then swung around the ambulance with the Cabot car in his exhaust.

  “If we don’t find Larry at Conklin’s,” Marlow told his deputies, “I want you to come back here and scour the woods, if you have to light matches to keep from bumping into the trees.” A hail of gravel swept the windshield, putting a crack in the glass that lengthened with every jolt. Marlow came off the gas and dropped back ten feet. “And be glad that’s all you have to do. I’ve got to go looking for a priest who still makes house calls.”

  The sheriff’s car regained the lost ground on its own, and Marlow hit his brakes again. “Dick … Art, it’s been three years,” he said, “but either of you have a smoke?” Then Aubuchon stopped so suddenly that Marlow had to swerve into the brush to avoid rear-ending the Chittenden cruiser.

  “Look by that house,” Art Gray said, pointing to a reddish bungalow on the lake. “There’s the turbocharger, in the yard.”

  The Cabot officers were standing around St. Germain’s cruiser by the time Aubuchon’s men stepped into the drive. Marlow stuck his head in the open window and pulled away, looking pale and drawn. “Nothing,” he said. His eye caught the blue van. “This the Conklin place?”

  “Uh-huh.” Aubuchon moved on the bungalow ahead of the others, hesitating at the porch steps to stare up at the windows. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s home,” he whispered, “but you never know who likes to sit in the dark, keeping an eye out for company.” He drew his revolver and rubbed the barrel as though he were warming it up. “Nichols, you go around back and drop anyone who comes out that’s not in brown. Sheriff Marlow, you and your men come with me.”

  Marlow, his hand against Aubuchon’s back, had reached the porch when the stillness was spoiled by a vehicle moving in the slush. Everyone looked across the yard and then went back down the stairs. Squeezing between the Chittenden car and the trees was a four-wheel-drive Wrangler with red flake paint and silver mud flaps. A white-haired man in a wool cap was fine-tuning the heater impatiently. A woman in bib ski pants, trying hard to look fifty again, shared the passenger seat with a boy young enough to be her grandson.

  “But this was where you told us you live,” she said loud enough for the men in the yard to hear. “Now you say you don’t?”

  “Keep going,” the boy told the man in the wool cap. “Just keep on go—”

  “Looks like you’ve got visitors, Paul,” the man said.

  Art Gray was first to reach the Wrangler. Ignoring the woman’s startled cry, he jabbed the muzzle of his gun against Paul Conklin’s forehead. A reddening circle was visible between the eyebrows as the boy recoiled from the cold metal.

  “You don’t want your brains, such as they are, all over these nice people,” Gray said, “you’ll come out quietly with your hands on top of your head.”

  Conklin turned to the elderly couple. “Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, I do want to thank you for the lift,” he said before the deputy hauled him out by the shirtfront and flung him into the snow, held him there with a foot against the back of the neck until Vann had cuffed him and taken away his guns.

  “What did you do with the other officer?” Marlow asked when Conklin had been dragged to his feet. “Where’s Lieutenant St. Germain?”

  “Don’t know who you’re talking about,” Conklin said.

  Gray kneed the boy in the groin. Conklin fell across his feet, and the deputy pulled away as if he had stepped in something smelly and kicked him in the ribs. “Where is he?”

  “Big fellow?” Conklin gasped. “Blond, with muscles he doesn’t know what to do with, thinks he’s hot shit?”

  Gray drew back his foot again.

  “I took him down a few notches,” the boy said, “and when I saw he wasn’t a keeper anymore, I had to let him go.”

  A camera crew from Boston had the choice spot on the loading dock while radio and the newspapers staked out their turf in the lot. Marlow drove slowly, nudging reporters out of the way like a pilgrim passing through a herd of sacred cows. He slid out of the car with Conklin manacled to his wrist and prodded him up the steps. An ash blonde from the Boston station got to them first in gray Reeboks her viewers never would see. Harsh lights that were her own worst enemy seemed fascinated with a facial tuck in need of freshening
. She shoved a microphone under Marlow’s nose and he brushed it aside with a mechanical “No comment,” yanked at the chain and pulled the boy inside.

  They waited in the corridor until the deputies had filtered through the mob. Vann stayed at the door to keep the news hounds at bay, while Gray brought Conklin to a bullpen cell. With an unlit Marlboro between his lips, Marlow hurried to the communications room and pressed the dispatcher’s shoulders. “Any word on St. Germain?” he asked.

  Ed took off his earphones and swiveled around in his seat. “Damn, but you gave me a start,” he said. “… What’s that you asked?”

  “Have you heard anything new on Larry?”

  The dispatcher nodded. “Not ten minutes ago Chittenden sheriff’s called to say he’d been admitted to Tragg Memorial Hospital in Burlington. Fellow driving home from a poker game found him sort of wandering by the side of the road in Malletts Bay and brought him.”

  “Admitted with what?”

  Ed shrugged. “With a whole lot of things is the way it sounded. He’s been shot in the arm and beat up pretty bad, his jaw broke and a handful of teeth hammered loose. Maybe some internal damages, too. But the docs told Chittenden sheriff’s he wasn’t in any danger.”

  Marlow took the Marlboro in his fingers and glowered at it before lighting it from a butt in the dispatcher’s ashtray. “I’m heading back there now,” he said. “You learn anything else, I want to hear about it right off.”

  A trail of blood showed the way into a tiled emergency room where a man with a hatchet on a belt loop held two extra fingers in his left hand. A doctor and three nurses were trying to get him to sit down as they worked feverishly over him. “I brung ’em so you could sew ’em back on for me,” the man said, “but I forgot the needle and thread.” More than a minute went by before one of the nurses turned away and saw Marlow staring down the cigarette machine beside the admissions desk.

  “You must be here to visit the officer they brought in earlier,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  “He’s up in … 302. If you hurry, you might be able to get in a few words with him before.”

  “Before what?” Marlow asked.

  But the nurse had gone back to the man with seven fingers in his hand and didn’t seem to hear.

  He came off the elevator into a corridor with burnished rails against the walls. Red arrows in the linoleum pointed him toward a nurses’ station where a girl too young to drink was dropping colored capsules into paper cups he thought would make handy shot glasses.

  “Room 302?” he asked.

  “Keep going around the L,” she said, pouring another, “and it’s on your left.”

  An old man with no teeth or legs lay plugged into an IV unit close to the door. Marlow tiptoed past him toward a bed cloaked in stained curtains. “Larry,” he whispered. “Larry, you in there?” The old man rolled over in his sleep, licking his lips lasciviously. Marlow felt for the opening in the cloth and stuck his head in.

  St. Germain, wearing a hospital gown three sizes too small, was propped up in bed with a blue sling immobilizing his arm. His face was discolored, swollen so badly that the shock of blond hair was Marlow’s only point of reference. Marlow wondered how his own face looked. “How you doing?” he asked.

  St. Germain turned toward him as if he had never seen him before.

  “That’s okay,” Marlow said. “Don’t try to say anything, we’ll have plenty of time to talk later.” He pulled the curtains behind him and stood beside the bed. “Looks like you went up against a meat grinder.”

  St. Germain touched a gray panel hanging from the bed railing and the mattress flattened, lowering him gently. Marlow squeezed his arm and said, “You might feel better knowing Conklin’s cooling his heels in a cell. The arraignment’s tomorrow morning.”

  St. Germain’s jaw tightened. “What about Wally?” he whispered.

  Marlow studied a picture on the wall, a covered bridge over the Connecticut River at the peak of autumn. Where he expected to find an artist’s signature it read, Fujicolor. “The doctors tell me you’ll be your old self in no time,” he said. “That overgrown carcass of yours must still be under warranty.”

  “Wally,” St. Germain said hoarsely.

  Marlow shook his head, and St. Germain pulled his arm away and let himself all the way down.

  “My God, Larry,” Marlow said, “what the hell happened out there?”

  Then light washed over Marlow’s shoulder and a man on the short side of thirty came inside the curtain wearing a green scrub suit and a smile of professional disdain. “Mr. St. Germain isn’t supposed to see any visitors yet,” he said.

  “Doctor, I’m Sheriff John Marlow of Cabot County. The patient is my chief deputy. I know it’s past visiting hours, but—”

  “I’m going to ask you to leave,” the man in the scrub suit said, “so we can wire Mr. St. Germain’s jaw.”

  “I’d like a few more minutes with him. There are things I need to know.”

  “Come back in the morning and take all the time you want. I’ve got to do this now.”

  “Same here,” Marlow said and turned away. “Larry, if you can just tell me where—”

  Marlow’s back seemed to agitate the doctor. “I must insist that you go. If you don’t, I’ll have to ask the guard to escort you out. You’re not in Cabot County now.”

  A woman’s voice brittle with worry was calling from somewhere in the corridor. “John, John, is that you? I came as soon as I heard. Is Larry—”

  The voice grew louder until the opening in the curtains framed Annie St. Germain trying on a brave smile like an understudy about to go onstage before she had learned her lines.

  “Who’s next?” the doctor sniffed. “His cousins from Detroit?”

  “Good to see you, Ann,” Marlow said. “He’s in here and looking reasonably healthy, considering.” He moved aside to let the woman have the place closest to the bed.

  “I really must insist …”

  Marlow stepped on the doctor’s toe as he backed him against the wall. “Let her have him for now,” he said. “Once you’re done, you know damn well he won’t be able to make an intelligible sound for weeks.”

  The doctor adjusted a stethoscope around his neck, groping for his dignity. Marlow stifled the urge to ask if he was searching for his heart. “Tell me,” Marlow said, “how is he?”

  “I might find out if you’d let me at him. I still haven’t had a decent look—”

  Marlow put a finger to his lips and craned his neck toward the curtain. Inside, Annie was nearly finished with her protestations of love and concern.

  “How do you feel?” he heard her ask.

  “Wally’s dead.”

  “That can’t be. I’m sure he’s in another room somewhere.”

  St. Germain whispered something that Marlow didn’t catch.

  “You came all the way out here with Wally Jeffcoat?” Annie said. “Why?”

  “The Beausoleil murder … make the arrest.”

  “But what went wrong?”

  “… My fault.”

  “I really can’t allow this to go on any longer,” the doctor said.

  “Why was it your f—”

  “I’m going for the guard, to have you both removed right now.”

  “… Coward,” was all Marlow heard over the clatter of indignant footfalls.

  The doctor came out stuffing rubber gloves inside his scrub suit. He went into the solarium and circled behind Marlow, who was chatting amiably with an overweight man in a rent-a-cop’s blue tunic. “You can go in,” he said, “but only for a few minutes. He really must get some rest.”

  Annie looked away from a blackened window. “How is he?”

  “Strong as an ox or two. You’ll have to take my word for it, though. He doesn’t seem that way now and won’t for some time.”

  As Annie and Marlow walked past the elevators, a bell sounded and a green arrow lit up above the doors. Ray Beausoleil stepped out, loo
king rumpled and drained. “I came as soon as I heard. I had to see him.”

  “He’s down the hall,” Marlow said. “But don’t expect a lot of conversation. His jaw’s just been wired.”

  Beausoleil squeezed ahead and marched inside 302. He tore back the nearest curtain, stared at the legless old man as if his worst nightmare had been realized, and went quickly to the bed at the window. “Lieutenant St. Germain,” he said, offering his hand, “I want to express my profound appreciation to the man who brought in my daughter’s killer at no little cost to himself.”

  St. Germain rubbed his jaw. He looked at the outstretched hand, but didn’t reach for it.

  Beausoleil stood closer to the bed. “I understand how you feel. I suppose I was a bit out of line at the sheriff’s office. But you can’t … you should never have to know what I was going through. Losing Becky that way, it was like someone had twisted a screwdriver in my heart. I hope …”

  “Hey, can’t you let a fellow catch some sleep in here?” The words were sloppy, sibilant, muffled by the curtain nearest the door.

  Beausoleil paid no attention. “I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forget what I said that day.”

  St. Germain rubbed his jaw some more.

  “Be reasonable,” Beausoleil said. “I’m offering to apologize. What more do you—”

  Annie stepped through the curtain. “His partner was killed making the arrest and …” She brought him away from the bed speaking softly into his ear. “He doesn’t believe he’s entitled to any praise. He blames himself for what happened.”

  “Who are you?” Beausoleil asked.

  “The lieutenant’s … Mrs. St. Germain.”

  Beausoleil’s voice rose, filling a vacuum. “That’s preposterous. The man’s a hero. He tracked down my daughter’s killer when no one else was even looking in the right place and made the arrest disregarding his own safety. I want everyone to know how he handled this. There’ll be a news conference in Montpelier. I’ll put the word out all over.”