Archer Mayor - Bellows Falls

Also, for the moment, he was the department’s sole sergeant, standing alone between the chief’s office and the rank and file. It was for this reason, along with my general respect for the man, that I sought him out following my reconnaissance. Organizationally, he and I occupied middle rungs on the ladder, a connection I hoped would stand me in good stead.

Since Davis was on duty, he’d told me he’d swing by the police department parking lot to pick me up. It seemed like driving around Bellows Falls was going to be my first day’s primary activity.

“Sorry we’re meeting again under these circumstances,” he said after I’d settled into his passenger seat and exchanged greetings.

“What do you make of all this?” I asked him.

His answer was understandably guarded. “Suppose anything’s possible.”

I looked out the side window at the parade of passing houses, and rephrased something I’d asked Tony Brandt. “Back home, we get a sexual harassment charge, we check it out first ourselves. It’s only after we think it’s real that we bring in an outsider.”

There was a long pause. Davis pulled into one of the side streets and headed west. “What did the chief say?”

The question brought back Latour’s defensive reaction when I’d asked him about Padget’s culpability. “He made hopeful noises that it was smoke with no fire.”

Davis snorted. “Don’t I wish.”

“He also said a few uncomplimentary things about Norman Bouch.”

This time, the other man laughed. “Doesn’t he wish. Latour’s been grinding his teeth about Bouch for years. But he’s never been able to lay a finger on him.”

“He made it sound more personal than that.”

“Now that his fair-haired boy’s in a jam? You bet.”

I chose from several questions triggered by that response. “Was it Bouch’s drug dealing that had him so worked up before, or something else?”

Davis continued negotiating the back streets of the village, his eyes taking in alleys, parked cars, pedestrians, the doors and windows of residences and businesses. With the warm weather, the car’s air conditioning was on, but both windows were rolled down. Veteran cops did that sometimes-it allowed them to be comfortable, but without cutting off the sounds and smells from outside, two extra vital signs a good patrolman learns to appreciate.

“Everybody likes Bouch,” Greg Davis answered. “He makes sure of it. That drives Latour nuts, plus the fact that Bouch goes out of his way to irritate the Old Man. He’ll have some of his teenage rat pack commit minor offenses, knowing we can only slap them on the wrist. Or he’ll slug his wife and get away with it ’cause she refuses to squeal on him. It’s not all calculated-he is a bad guy. But it is a way of gaining him prestige with the people he wants to control.”

“Tell me about the rat pack,” I asked.

“I shouldn’t have made it sound that organized. They hang around his house a lot, though, and I know goddamn well they run errands for him… It’s just another thing we haven’t been able to prove.”

Davis slowed the car to a crawl, watching a group of kids huddled together under a basketball hoop, with no ball visible. The kids looked up as we drew near and sullenly dispersed.

“I guess it’s like a basic morality issue. Latour was brought up on the straight and narrow, and people like Bouch piss him off. The Pied Piper angle gets to him, too. These kids have a slim enough chance as it is.”

“You said Padget was Latour’s fair-haired boy.”

Davis hesitated, but only momentarily. “Padget’s a rising star-everything Bouch isn’t, and probably everything the Old Man wished he’d been. He’s smart, ambitious, good-looking, idealistic, nice to be around. And not too goody-two-shoes, either, although he won’t drink even when he’s off duty. A lot of rookies have to strut their stuff, you know? Bust bad guys, put on an attitude, wear those short black leather driving gloves, supposedly so their hands won’t get messed up when they start pounding the shit out of people.”

I laughed at the sadly familiar image.

Davis joined me briefly. “Right. Well, Padget’s not quite a rookie by now, but he’s not too far from it, especially to an old fart like me. But he never pulled that crap. He can be high-strung, and he’s always on the gallop to bring law to the streets, but there’s nothing juvenile about it. He’s one of the true believers.”

“So maybe he’s a little hard to take?”

The sergeant allowed a rueful smile. “He can wear you down, but that’s probably more my fault than his. I get tired, depressed sometimes. Brian just keeps charging ahead.”

“Even now?”

Greg Davis had been wearing dark glasses. At that, he pulled to the side of the road and pushed them up on his forehead so he could look me straight in the eyes.

“No. He definitely felt this one. He’s not talking about it, but he’s been stunned.”

Which brought me to the one question everyone seemed to be skirting. “So the charges against him aren’t just smoke?”

Davis looked at me a moment longer, and then gave me another non-answer, dropping his glasses back into place. “I guess that’s why you’re here.”

I wondered if I’d presumed too much from my friendly acquaintance with this man, or if he was merely stalling while he decided whether to trust me. We left the neighborhood west of Atkinson and slowly drove to the top of Cherry Hill, where the Episcopal church and its small, pretty cemetery crowned the village. From the narrow road among the headstones, the view of Fall Mountain was pastoral and beautiful-the one looking down on the square precipitous.

“How did this first come to the PD?” I asked.

“Jan Bouch called me at work. Said Brian’d been bothering her-watching her house, following her when she went shopping, talking to her when she wanted to be left alone.”

“Sounds like stalking.”

“No, no-‘He’s been sexually harassing me,’ were her exact words, like they’d been rehearsed.” He paused, and then, as if suddenly relieved of a burden, he added, “To be honest, the harassment angle was a surprise, but not his hanging around her. Word had already leaked out about that. This town has a grade-A grapevine, and they’d been seen together, though not the way she was saying-I’d heard it was consensual.”

“I thought her husband filed the complaint.”

Davis looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah. I dropped the ball there. Knowing what I did about Brian and the girl, I let things slide a couple of days, thinking they’d probably just had a spat and she was getting back at him. That’s when Norm Bouch called the chief. Latour chewed me out about it-Bouch whined about how he was worried that, since he’d been in trouble with the law before, Padget and his cronies might frame him for something. Get him sent to jail so Brian could have a free hand with his wife. My inaction supported that scenario. It was a total crock, of course, but Norm played it well and got the chief nervous enough to order an outside internal right off the bat.”

“Did he know about the rumors?”

Davis hesitated. “I asked him. It just made him madder. But he never really answered, so I think he did. Probably didn’t want to admit his chosen boy had clay feet.”

That assessment mirrored some of my own misgivings about Latour. “Tell me about the chief.”

“I think he’s burned out and can’t let go,” Davis said bluntly. “He’s a good guy-don’t get me wrong. I like him. But he’s sort of gotten buried behind that desk, like an old mole backing more and more into his hole.”

We’d reached the square east of Cherry Hill, and were proceeding along Rockingham Street toward one of the bridges heading out to the Island. Davis waved his hand at the buildings around us. “Which in my book says as much about Bellows Falls as about the chief. This town can get to you if you don’t watch out. People who were born and brought up here bad-mouth this town like it was the birthplace of root canal, and then they give you shit if you join in, saying it’s talk like that’ll doom the place forever. It’s a textbook love-hate thing-like being Polish and telling all the worst Polack jokes.