She sighed so deeply her entire body shuddered. “He likes you a lot.”
I laughed. “Christ. Let’s hope I don’t have enemies.” I hugged her once and then turned the heat off under the boiling water. “I like him, too, God knows why. Way down, he’s got things to offer, I don’t mind carrying some of his load in the meantime.”
I looked her straight in the eyes. “But only as long as he shows signs of making an effort, and only as long as you think it’s worth your time. Okay?”
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Yeah. Thanks, boss.”
Chapter 13
A VISITOR’S FIRST IMPRESSION OF WEST DOVER, VERMONT, is what its residents struggle with most—it looks like a commercial strip, lining both sides of Route 100, that caters solely to the tourist trade and functions only as an extension of the Mount Snow ski area. It’s neither fair nor accurate. West Dover’s true identity extends far beyond that narrow corridor and predates all the commerce with a heritage as traditional and sturdy as any other more picturesque Vermont community. But the town’s focal point is in fact an unattractive asphalt ribbon jammed with bars, eateries, shops, and gas stations. To make matters worse, on a fun-filled Saturday night, many of the more action-oriented tourist attractions keep the diminutive police department both busy and proficient. If ever I were to recommend a good police cadet training site for processing drunks, the Dover PD would definitely make the list.
Unfortunately, this mirrors a dilemma faced by many towns across the state—what to do when forced to choose between a sense of identity in a marginal economy, and caving in to the lure of the dollar. And it can be a struggle. To choose the former in Vermont is often to be relegated to a pinprick on a map, a quaint and historical relic groping for some way to keep alive. The legislature fiddles with controversial methods of spreading the wealth more evenly, but to have a Mount Snow within reach of the local tax assessors can often mean lifeblood.
If at a cost.
Richie Lane had taken advantage of West Dover’s contradictory self-image to disappear amid its many low-cost, low-profile, no-questions-asked housing opportunities, to resurface—if just barely—as Marc Roberts. The Dover PD’s chief had been good to his word to me on the phone. He’d discovered through discreet inquiry that Mr. Roberts, while not seen of late, was still paying the rent at the address I’d been given by my friend at Mount Snow. So it was there that I, two local officers, and Sammie Martens all showed up well before dawn one morning, warrant in hand.
It was a ramshackle, two-story apartment house, designed for its present use but built long ago and on the cheap. Its walls were bare, stained wood, the roof threadbare and swaybacked, the windows small, dirty, and made of non-insulated aluminum. It fronted a dirt road and a barely plowed, frozen-mud parking lot littered with several vehicles of questionable reliability. Lane’s was not among them.
Not surprisingly, the senior Dover patrolman, a sergeant, knew the layout well. “Each unit has only one door, facing front. The bathroom windows are along the back and face the hillside, but they’re too small to get out of—I’ve seen people try. Plus, your guy’s upstairs, so even if he made it, he’d hit the rocks and make a mess.”
We split up, approaching the apartment in armored vests from both ends of the second-floor balcony, two of us armed with shotguns. Then, positioned to either side of the door, we used the manager’s key to quietly turn the lock and poured into the place like marines taking a beach.
It was done by the book, even though we were virtually positive that we wouldn’t find anyone home. And we didn’t.
Turning on the lights after making sure we were alone, Sammie looked around, her distaste of Richie Lane enhanced by what she saw. “Jesus, what a shit hole.”
It wasn’t destined for any hygiene awards. Dark, smelling of mildew, dirty clothes, and rotting organic matter of vague and possibly threatening origins, the apartment reminded me of a human-size hamster cage. The donning of latex gloves was as much to keep our hands from touching anything disgusting as it was to spare the scene our own latent prints.
Not that fingerprints were an issue on most of what we found. An acknowledged clotheshorse, Richie had festooned the place with piles of shirts, slacks, jackets, quasi-pornographic underwear, and an inordinate number of socks. He was also big on prepackaged food, the apparent advantage being less the ease of preparation and more the fact that once eaten, it could be dropped, container and all, wherever he happened to be at the moment.
There was also an ample supply of hard-core videos, many of them stolen rentals, presumably withdrawn under one of his pseudonyms, and a correspondingly wide collection of triple-X-rated magazines. I hoped this wasn’t where Richie brought his dates.
It was clear, however, that he’d been here within the month. Thirty minutes into our archaeological dig, Sammie found a newspaper dated two weeks earlier.
She pointed at a phone near the rumpled bed. “You think he conducted business from here?”
“We can only hope. Get the number and we’ll run it by the phone company.”
“If he did,” she suggested. “Maybe we’ll find some records or files or something.”
We both instinctively paused to study the room from a different perspective. The sergeant, having sent the other officer away, looked from Sammie to me and back again. I could tell he’d stayed behind in large part to keep her within sight. “What’s up?”
Sammie tilted her head, her eyes going from wall to wall, as if reading a map. “We’ve been here long enough to have found a desk or a filing cabinet or a briefcase. If he did do business here, given his past criminal history, he probably figured this place would get tossed sooner or later.”
“Meaning he hid it,” he concluded for her.
“If we’re lucky.”
She began walking the floor perimeter, where the kick-board met the wall, moving clothing, trash, and debris as she went. I took her cue and studied the framing over each door. I got lucky first, noticing how a board over the bathroom entrance was slightly soiled at both ends, as if from repeated handling.
I reached overhead and tugged at it gently. “He’s a tall guy,” I reasoned out loud. “Be more natural for him to work high than to get on his knees.”
The board came straight out along two long wooden dowels fitting a pair of holes in the header behind. The narrow gap between the top of the header and where the sheetrock ended served as a perfect clandestine shelf.
I reached into the gap and withdrew a thin, curled-up accordion folder made of lightweight cardboard. This I handed to Sammie, to mollify her obvious disappointment at not having made the discovery.
She placed the folder on the kitchenette counter and slipped the rubber band from around it with a snap.
“What’ve you got?” the sergeant asked, his expression overly keen, as he stood close enough to her to be almost touching.
She poured the contents out, ignoring him, too used to law enforcement’s gender imbalance to take much notice of its occasional juvenile excesses. “Looks like some notes, letters, a list of names and schedules.” She opened a small envelope. “And—damn, this is handy—photographs of houses looking suspiciously like Tucker Peak.” She held one up by its corners. “Including the William Manning residence.”
I forced the sergeant to step back so I could examine the list. “All the burglaries are here, plus a few.”
She glanced over from studying the photographs. “They had more planned?”
I read more carefully. “They were either going to knock off more than they did, or they’ve already hit a few no one told us about. Look at the dates in the schedule.”
Sam compared them to the electronic dates stamped on the front of each photograph. “Richie quizzed his girlfriends about their calendars while they were rolling in the hay and then gave Marty the heads up. Wonder who took these pictures?”
I was now staring at the wall before me, thinking back.
“What’s up?”
She riffled her thumb through the notes in her hand. “I guess we better figure out who we’re missing.”
I pointed to the small pile of letters. “And check out his pen pals.”
· · ·
For the next three days, the four of us did a collective autopsy on Richie Lane’s private archives, interviewing the owners of those houses listed but not known to have been robbed, and chasing down the names of those people, mostly women, who’d written him.
It was not easy going. Most of the condo owners were only occasional residents and some only owned their property in order to rent it for a fortune through the resort’s booking service, leaving us to interview baffled renters who had no idea what we were talking about. We did meet an owner who had noticed a few items missing—and a broken window—but who still hadn’t thought that he’d been robbed. Our visit turned on a light bulb over his head and caused Willy to restate that most people are morons.
We also met two residents who admitted that around the time we knew their homes had been targeted, they’d had sudden changes of schedule, which we assumed was why Gagnon and Lane had passed on the opportunity. On a tangential sociological point, I also discovered that not every house had been scrutinized through Richie’s bedroom antics alone. In many of the houses we studied, there was either no woman inhabitant, or she was too old or incapacitated to frequent the Tuckaway or take ski lessons, or hadn’t been at the resort at the right times, meaning Richie had probably gained his knowledge from a male. With each and every mark, however, the common denominators of either regular attendance at the nightclub or slope-side lessons from Richie reinforced our hypothesis that he’d been Marty’s spotter.
Tracing the writers of Richie’s letters also turned out to be tricky. Several of them were married, prompting the same discretion I’d used with Mrs. Manning. Others were located far away, usually back in their urban homes near or in New York, Boston, Hartford, and elsewhere, which forced us to conduct the interviews by phone. Others were simply impossible to locate. Richie hadn’t kept all the envelopes, and some of them didn’t have return addresses anyway. Usually, by cross-referencing the signatory with our list of homeowners, we could figure it out, but in one case specifically we hit a dead end. Unfortunately, she also looked very promising.
She’d signed her name Shayla and made mention of Steepway, a road which—according to the 911 database we consulted—was located in Newfane, about twelve miles northwest of Brattleboro. There were others, too, Steepway being about as unique a designation as River Road, but this one was the most proximate to Tucker Peak, in next-door Windham County, and seemed as good a place to start as any.
Also, the tone of Shayla’s letter implied that she and Richie, whom she called Bobby—his real name—were friends of long-standing acquaintance. Unlike most of the other correspondents, who ran the gamut from the pleading to the pornographic, she maintained a familiar, joking tone, almost like that of an intimate sister.
After checking all available databases and finding nothing on Shayla, I picked up the phone and called the Windham County sheriff and asked if his department could shed any light. He was no help there but recommended I speak with the town constable, Eric Blaushild.
Constables are a curious Vermont institution, dating back to before the state joined the Union. The root of local law enforcement, and once listed along with the sheriffs as the primary police agents in the state’s Constitution, they had not weathered the march of time well. Dropped from the Constitution during a rewrite in the seventies, they’d assumed a second-class status in a world increasingly interested in better police training, uniform standards for all departments, and more legally defensible policies and procedures.
Constables—at best part-time certified by the state in a one-week training course, and often elected by a public who had no idea what or who they were—frequently were seen as dinosaurs, useless appendages, or even dangerous, gung-ho, gun-wielding wannabes who hadn’t made the grade into “legitimate” police work. There was some truth to all this, of course, and examples could be trotted out on demand. But by and large, the town constable remained, while a bastard child of the legal establishment, a good tool for local ordinance enforcement, especially involving dogs and occasionally quarrelsome residents. They could also be good sources of neighborhood information.
It was for this last resource that I’d been steered toward Eric Blaushild. A lifelong Newfane resident, a jack-of-all-trades who plowed driveways and serviced cars in the winter, and did anything he could think of to make a living the rest of the year, he was a man I’d known about but had never met, and was reputed to be a walking who’s who.
I found him in a makeshift garage, behind a battered 1940s tract house, similar to what had made Levittown synonymous with suburbia. It didn’t look out of place in Vermont, however, despite the calendar shots of Greek Revival farmhouses that the Department of Tourism cranked out in great volume. In fact, although I doubted anyone had actually done a count, I guessed that Blaushild’s kind of home—inexpensive, non-picturesque, a little threadbare, and eminently practical—outnumbered the other by a considerable margin.
The garage was wood-floored, dark, and none too warm, despite the fiery glow leaking through the gaps of an ancient makeshift wood furnace in one corner. Following the instructions of the woman who’d come out to meet me when I drove up, I shut the rickety door behind me and called out, “Eric Blaushild?”
A voice answered from under the pickup beside me. “That’s me.”
“Joe Gunther. Vermont Bureau of Investigation. I was wondering if I could ask you about someone.”
With a chorus of squeals, a man slowly rumbled out from under the truck on a creeper, his hands resting on his stomach and his head supported by a small, very dirty pillow. He didn’t bother getting up. “I heard about you—and the VBI. Never thought I’d meet both at the same time. Who do you want to know about?”
I liked his no-nonsense manner—no jokes about VBI, no kowtowing either—just the facts. I perched gingerly on a dubiously constructed sawhorse. “All I’ve got is a first name: Shayla.”
“Rossi. Lives on Steepway. Owns a Rottweiler named Ben,” he said without hesitation.
That caught me by surprise, which he obviously enjoyed. But it also made me wonder what else I should know.
“You friends with her?”
He shook his head. “Barely know her, and didn’t like what I met. Had to give her a warning a few months back—dog was on the loose. That’s why she’s fresh in my mind. What’s she done?”
“Nothing I know of,” I answered truthfully. “Her name came up in a case, and I just want to talk to her.”
Blaushild finally rolled off the creeper, got onto his knees, and stood up, pulling a rag from his pocket and wiping his hands. “Good luck there. Attractive woman, till she opens her mouth.”
“Violent?”
He shook his head. “She just sounds off, is all—got an opinion about everything and everybody and isn’t shy about sharing it. I got an earful about the dog ordinances, the selectmen, the road crew, the sheriff, her neighbors, the governor, and the president of the United States, all in the time it took me to fill out that warning.”
“She live with anyone?”
“Nope, and I can see why.”
“What about the dog?”
“He’s fine. Potentially lethal but trained to a gnat’s eyelash. When I rounded him up, all he did was try to lick my face off.”
I asked him for directions and for any other information he might have on Shayla Rossi. He escorted me outside to his vehicle, where he retrieved a metal clipboard from the front seat. Sitting on the car’s fender, he leafed through its contents until he reached a copy of the warning he’d written her months ago. It had her birth date, social security number, and mailing address.
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br /> I copied it all down, commenting that this was a lot more information than I’d ever put on a warning back when I was in uniform.
Blaushild smiled ruefully. “Saves time later, when I give ’em a ticket, which usually happens pretty soon after. Always has to cost money before they pay attention.”
I thanked him for his time, drove back to the village and the parking lot in front of the Newfane Market, and called my office on the cell phone.
Judy, the secretary, put me through to Lester Spinney.
“Goofing off?” I asked him.
“Going nuts is more like it. Chasing all these people down is gettin’ to be a royal pain in the butt.”
“Good. I got another one for you.” I gave him Shayla’s name and statistics and waited while he entered her into the computer.
“Nothing,” he finally reported. “She’s got an old Toyota wagon she’s driven too fast a few times, including once under the influence, but that’s it. She one of the letter writers?”
“Yeah. Got her name from the constable up here. I’m in Newfane.”
“You going to see her? Want some company?”
I mulled that over. It was good procedure to team up, and Newfane was only fifteen minutes north of Brattleboro, but we’d been conducting interviews nonstop for days and had gotten nowhere fast. There was no indication this encounter would be any different.
But there was the dog, and Lester was sounding stir-crazy.
“What the hell,” I told him. “I’m at the market.”
· · ·
It turned out the aptly named Steepway was closed during the winter. Being a challenge to climb in summer and an impossibility with snow on the ground, it was ignored by the town’s snowplows. For all intents and purposes, it was a dead-end street unless traveled with a snowmobile. Lester and I approached it from the bottom, following Blaushild’s instructions, and discovered, just shy of where the plows gave up, a brown house so modest it looked plucked from a toy box. It was tucked under the trees and clung to the edge of a truly abrupt, overgrown incline—dark and claustrophobic even in the middle of the day. A thin plume of smoke drifted out of the metal chimney.
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