“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 seeme
d 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.”
I could, in fact, since my own wife had met a similar fate even longer ago than that, a distance in time that had in no way dulled my memories of her and the happiness we’d shared. It wasn’t something Gail and I often discussed, but she knew about Ellen and now cast me a sympathetic look.
“Norman dealt with the loss the same way Joan of Arc seems to have taken to those famous voices she heard.” Betts continued, “He became absolutely driven, even obsessed. All his energies were given to environmental protection. When I’d known him first, I’d wondered about his apparent inability to break off from a task and relax a little. Lord knows, the rest of us knew the value of a vacation. But there were others enough like him that what might have been identified as a form of mental imbalance was merely dismissed as zealotry.”
He paused and sighed gently. “And then he met Abigail—a wonderful girl, light-hearted, broad-minded, and generous. She was like a magical elixir, cleansing his soul of the dark clouds within it. It wasn’t quite like a Hollywood movie, of course. In fact, it was quite rough going to begin with. He was very resistant to a much younger woman trying to reintroduce him to life. It was almost comical at times to see her loosening him up, making him laugh despite himself. But the transformation succeeded; he began to melt like an iceberg in the sun, and finally, after much hemming and hawing, they announced they were to be married.”
He smiled sadly. “Looking back, I wouldn’t doubt a part of Norman now hates that day, when he sacrificed his own twisted logic and committed himself to another human being. He probably feels that had he stayed the course, his and Abigail’s world wouldn’t now be so haunted and crippled by misery and debt. He’s just the type to take responsibility for the simple vagaries of fate.”
“I’m losing you here,” I told him quietly. “What happened?”
He laid his hand on mine. “I’m sorry. I ramble, given half a chance. Going against all his earlier instincts, Norman agreed to have a child with Abigail. That child, in the cruelest of ironies, has developed leukemia. It has driven Norman and Abigail apart and perhaps pushed Norman over the edge.”
Roger Betts turned and fixed his tired, pale-blue eyes on mine, and added, “I have no idea if he is the man you are after. I do know that suddenly, he’s been able to pay for medical treatments that were previously beyond his means. I only know this because Abigail told me about it in confidence. I have never asked him outright to what he owes this good fortune, but the rumor is a rich relative left it to him in a will.”
“And you don’t believe that.”
He sighed again. “I’m ashamed to say, no.”
“Implying there’s something you’re leaving out.”
He nodded without speaking, seemingly at odds again about being here.
“Is it something he’s done?” I tried.
That got him going again. Again, he patted my hand. “No. I mean, not actually. I’m not accusing Norman of anything. But he’s been erratic lately—moody, forgetful, quick to judge—but most of all, inconsistent, which he’s never been in the past. He’s as driven as ever, but not by our mutual interest. It’s as if his concentration is elsewhere… ”
“With his sick child, perhaps,” Gail suggested.
But Betts disagreed. “It’s different. Now you can understand why I was so loath to bring this to you
. Something is eating this man up from within, beyond the guilt of his family situation. And given his almost maniacal sense of purpose, it frightens me. I truly no longer know of what he may be capable.”
The wash of noisy, clashing conversations swelled around us in the silence following Roger Betts’s last words. I looked up and around in mild surprise and saw that the after-work, pre-dinner crowd was at its max, laughing, drinking, making deals, and eyeing one another with a variety of intentions.
“Roger,” I finally asked, “given the timing of the various accidents and Norman’s schedule, do you think he might have been involved in any of them—specifically?”
Betts looked at me helplessly. “I wish I knew. It’s not the kind of organization where we use a time clock. People show up at odd hours, work for however long they can. It’s terribly fluid, and to be honest, I haven’t pried into it.”
“Not to worry,” I tried easing his discomfort. “We’ll do that, and we’ll try to be subtle about it, although we will act on what we find.”
“I understand,” he said simply.
“I will do my best,” I added, “to keep you out of it, though.”
A small look of distaste crossed his worn face. “I deserve that because of the surreptitious way I approached you. But don’t worry about it. I am not an informant—I acted on my conscience. If it comes out, it comes out—it might even be for the better.”
I noticed how Gail was looking at her old friend and figured the best way for me to end this conversation was by leaving the two of them together to commiserate. I’d catch up with her later.
I did, however, have one last question, “Would you say Norman was mechanically inclined?”
Betts’s face momentarily cleared. “Oh, good lord, I should say so. He trained as an engineer in college and was always the one we called on to fix things. He built his own house—he’s very handy. Why?”
I rose to my feet and squeezed Gail’s shoulder in farewell. “Just curious.”
· · ·
Outside, after sunset, the wind had kicked up and was blowing down the street in ferocious, snow-dusted gusts. The headlights of passing cars glittered off the airborne ice crystals, making me feel all the more like I was walking inside a huge freezer.
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