Harriet Fritter handed me the newspaper as I walked toward my office. “Front page,” she said. “You’ll find it interesting.”
I took the paper and sat down at my desk. “Bellows Falls Police Officer Suspended on Drug Charge,” read the headline. In smaller type underneath it continued, “Chief promises thorough investigation.”
I sighed deeply. It hadn’t taken long for the carnival to begin. The only good news was that since I was hearing of it just now, apparently no one had given the paper my name. I began to read carefully, hoping I was correct.
For most of its length, the article toed the line, outlining how police, acting on a tip given them through the Reformer, had secured a search warrant for the home of Officer Brian Padget, of the BFPD, and had discovered “several” grams of what was believed to be cocaine. Padget, who had earlier tested positive for drugs in a urine analysis, was unavailable for comment and was said to be on paid suspension while awaiting arraignment. That much was pretty mundane, although I wondered at the speed with which the paper had secured its information. The answer to that was supplied on the last page, where the article concluded, “Holding a brief press conference with Town Manager Eric Shippee, Bellows Falls Police Chief Emile Latour told reporters last night, ‘We will nip this thing in the bud. There will be no dirty cops tolerated on the force. The public can expect a full and speedy accounting for this whole sorry affair.’”
I reached for the phone and called Greg Davis at his home, knowing his shift didn’t start until the afternoon.
“Davis,” he answered on the first ring.
“It’s Joe Gunther. How’re the troops holding up?”
He didn’t hesitate, which I hoped was a sign of trust. “Considering our fearless leader has just tried and convicted one of our own without a jury, I guess they’re doing okay.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Can you blame them?” he asked. “You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”
“The press conference? No way. You know I led the search, though.”
“Yeah. I can’t believe this.”
“How’s Emily Doyle taking it?” I asked.
There was a cautious silence at the other end.
“I know she likes him,” I added as explanation. “She was madder than hell at me for doing the internal.”
“She’s taking it hard,” he said simply. “But she’s not alone. You might’ve seen Brian as Latour’s pet, but everybody liked him. He was one of the guys. The double whammy of his maybe being dirty and the Old Man throwing him to the wolves so fast has everyone pretty confused.”
“And angry?”
“Yeah,” Davis admitted. “And beginning to split into pro-Brians and anti-Brians, with the antis winning. That’s the dark side to Brian’s good standing with the chief-if Latour throws him out, the troops will too. You better know there’s a lot of anti-Joe Gunther in there, too.”
That came as no surprise. “What was Shippee’s role in calling the press conference?”
“I don’t know-he couldn’t’ve found out about the dope that quick unless Latour made a beeline to his office. I don’t much care about that part, to be honest. I’m standing between Captain Bligh and a seriously pissed-off crew all of a sudden. So I just wish to hell they’d both kept their mouths shut.”
We chatted a few minutes longer, mostly to allow him to vent some more steam. I sympathized with his position. A police organization is heavily hierarchical and leans on the conservative notion that rank begets fealty-Davis’s constant reference to Latour as the Old Man was an example of that. To have a father figure turn his back at the slightest show of adversity was serious cause for the jitters. Cops were isolated enough in society without being sabotaged from within.
It was that very isolation, however, that brought me back to something I’d sensed lurking in the background. “I hate to ask, Greg, but was there ever anything between Emily and Brian?”
“Yeah,” he conceded reluctantly. “They had a thing early on. Puppy love in uniform was how I described it to my wife. It’s pretty common, especially with more women joining up-you think you have so much in common just because you’re both throwing drunks into jail. It didn’t last long and she took it pretty hard.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh, hell. Six months, more or less. She hadn’t been with us for long. I suppose you’re going to be asking a lot of questions like that, aren’t you?”
“If I end up in charge of the case. I’ll try to wear kid gloves, but if I’m going to start with the presumption of innocence, it means I’ll be looking to pin the tail on some other donkey. With all your boys and girls wondering what flag to rally around, they better keep that in mind.”
“I hear you,” he said. “I’ll try to prepare them for the rough spots.”
Chapter 11
I MET WITH MOLLY BREMMER at the Howard Johnson’s in Greenfield, Massachusetts, partway between Brattleboro and Lawrence. That arrangement was at her suggestion, and I appreciated the gesture. Before I left town, I’d received a call from Jack Derby, telling me he was meeting with the attorney general’s office early that afternoon, and that if I wanted my ambitions turned into reality, I’d better show up to make the best presentation of my life. I was keeping my fingers crossed that Bremmer might supply me with a little extra ammunition.
Marchese had told her some of what I was up to, and on the phone I’d answered several questions she’d formulated as a result. She’d said she would make a few calls and check some files but wanted to tell me what she found in person. Her enthusiasm, I sensed, had been stoked by Marchese’s own, which had less to do with me than with his fondness for Sammie Martens. It was a refreshingly human insight on how police work often gets done, or even why in some cases.
Molly Bremmer was middle-aged, stocky, and appeared faintly doddering until I saw her eyes. They, like her hair, were iron gray and spoke of a woman who was used to standing her own ground. We greeted one another in the parking lot and entered together to find a small table, far from anyone else, near a window looking out onto the traffic.
After ordering coffee from the waitress, Bremmer placed a pair of reading glasses low on her nose, and extracted a yellow legal pad from her briefcase. “Norman Bouch, the gentleman-thief,” she said with a smile, and looked over her glasses at me. “What did you want to know?”
“Charmed you, did he?”
The smile only widened. “He tried. I merely observed. I think he’s more successful further down the food chain. I interacted with him over a long enough period that he finally stowed the bullshit and opened up a little, although not enough to spill any beans. He was a man with a plan, and a do-gooder like me was purely a bureaucratic necessity he had to deal with before moving on.”
“So he didn’t divulge the plan?”
“No, he’s arrogant and a showoff, but he’s far from stupid. There are elements of the chess player in him, minus the patience. Still, I’d say it probably involved kids and abused or vulnerable women. Those are his specialties. That’s not necessarily a sexual scenario, by the way-he just needs to dominate those around him. The charm is part of that, practiced on those he can’t actually control. If you can’t win ’em, woo ’em.”
That sounded right, from what I’d seen. “What did you mean by a ‘sexual scenario?’ ”
“Personality disorders of this type often have a sexual basis, but I don’t think there’s any of that here-not with the children at least. Women are another matter. But I never picked up on a single pedophiliac marker. Norm just needs the dependency. It’s one of those paradoxical signs of insecurity. In a weird kind of way, you could describe him as a typical co-dependent.”
“Did you always meet Norm in your office?” I asked.
“No. The point of the program was to send us out into the subject’s habitat. It was supposed to make them feel more at home, and allow us to see them functioning among their peers. On that level, it worked quite well. After some initial discomfort-shared by both sides-” she added with a smile, “they loosened up enough that we collected some peripheral data. Nothing of much value, however, which is why the whole thing collapsed. No one figured out that the only people who’d agree to participate would be self-servers like Norm. Maybe they thought a bank robber would invite a shrink along on a heist, purely as an observer… Still, the money was good and the experience personally valuable.”