Smugglers Notch Page 14

  St. Germain hung his coat on the door and put his hat up after it, stepped deliberately into the light.

  “What happened to your forehead?” She tried to keep cool, dropping her voice a notch with every word. Still under control, she reached into a pocket for a tissue to brush away the dried blood, and when she looked at him again she lost it. “Oh, no,” she blurted, “your shirt. I worked so hard. …”

  St. Germain went to the couch, fell back on its thin cushion. “Sorry, Ann.”

  She sat beside him and went to work on his face. “You just got out of a sickbed. John didn’t put you on something dangerous right away, did he?”

  “Dangerous enough. He let me come back. The men hate my guts because of what happened to Wally.” He tore off the Band-Aid himself. “And I don’t blame them.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” she said, dabbing at the wound. “How can they think like that after what you went through? How many would have done as well in the same situation?” She tried to measure the effect of her argument, but he hardly seemed to be listening. “What did John say you should do?”

  “He despises me as much as any of them.”

  “John does? Now I know you’re imagining things.”

  “He doesn’t want me around. He’d ask for my badge if he didn’t need me in uniform for my testimony against Conklin. Soon everyone’ll know.”

  “If he’s undercut your authority, how can he expect you to win back the men’s respect?”

  “He doesn’t. I’m a kiddie cop now, breaking in rookies.” St. Germain stripped off his shirt. “Any way you can salvage this?”

  She spread the shredded cloth under the light and then dropped it. “Use it for a rag. Well, what are you going to do?” she asked impatiently.

  St. Germain picked the shirt up off the floor. He wadded it into a ball and tossed it in the fireplace, watched the orange flames come alive as they started to eat at the patched sleeve.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I never looked good in brown anyhow.”

  In his tailored robes and silver-blue hair Chittenden District Judge Burton L. Leeds reminded St. Germain of nothing so much as a TV evangelist offering eternal salvation on easy terms. These seemed to include quiet in his court, and when it was slow in coming he banged his gavel a dozen times. He rustled his papers and poured ice water from a copper pitcher, slipped on eyeglasses with unstylish black frames from the long years he had spent clerking before a new administration swept him onto the bench. “Pursuant to Chapter 26,” he intoned in a rumbling lament, a preacher whose ratings would never be high, “sections ten through fourteen of the Vermont General Laws …”

  St. Germain looked anxiously around, as though he were expecting someone to take his ticket. The only other courtroom he had seen the inside of was the one in Tremont Center with its club chairs, scuffed linoleum, and incandescent lighting from the demolished Coolidge Street School. The Burlington court had hardwood balustrades and was as vast and imposing as “The People’s Court.” Across the aisle, dressed in slacks and a sports coat that his attorney must have picked for him, picked out of the children’s department, Paul Conklin was doodling on a yellow legal pad. With his ears protruding from a brand-new haircut and his wrists from sleeves too short for his arms, he looked about fifteen years old. From time to time he glanced back at his brother in the first row of seats, winking and making faces when he thought no one was looking. Jess Whitehead sat confidently beside him, a seventy-year-old country lawyer in an $800 Armani suit.

  “The purpose of this hearing is not to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, but to find out if enough evidence exists to bind him over to the grand jury whose function it is to decide if he should stand trial. The defense will call no witnesses, but may question the state’s witnesses if it desires.” Leeds addressed the table in front of St. Germain’s side of the courtroom. “Mr. Corcoran, are you ready to proceed?”

  Thomas Corcoran, the assistant state’s attorney for Chittenden County, popped out of his chair like a groundhog scurrying to check the weather and relaxing only when he didn’t spot his shadow. “Yes, I am, your honor.”

  “Mr. Whitehead?”

  “Ready, your honor.”

  The way Leeds looked from one attorney to the other, he could have been explaining the mandatory eight-count rule in the event of a knockdown and the necessity of defending oneself at all times. Then he nodded toward a bailiff who stood before the bench and called Gordon Hall, the Malletts Bay man who had discovered Jeffcoat’s body.

  Hall spoke in a scratchy voice like a soft tire on a gravel road. As he recounted coming upon the wreck of the Brown Bomber, St. Germain looked over again at Conklin. The boy was scribbling enthusiastically on his pad as though he had just the questions Jess Whitehead would need when he went up against the witness. But when he tore off the page he tilted it toward his brother, and St. Germain saw a rough drawing of Judge Leeds with a pointed beard and devil’s horns sprouting from his razor-cut hair.

  After Hall had finished his story, there were no questions from the defense. St. Germain decided that both sides were treating the early testimony as part of a feeling-out process, the first round in a tactical battle that would not be decided with a quick knockout—as Leeds seemed to have warned. Then the bailiff called Dr. Paul Rosenthal, the Chittenden County medical examiner, who approached with one arm held straight down, the hand curled slightly, toting an invisible black bag. It was this hand, the right, that he placed on a worn leather Bible and muttered the few words that gained him entry to the witness stand.

  Without prodding, Dr. Rosenthal told the court that at the time of his death Walter Jeffcoat was a twenty-four-year-old white male in generally good health except for small, premature fatty streaks present in the coronary arteries.

  “The fatal wound was made by a .38-caliber bullet, through and through—”

  “Through and through?” Corcoran seemed delighted at the opportunity to interject himself into the narrative. “Would you explain …?”

  “The bullet passed completely through the decedent’s body,” Rosenthal said without acknowledging the interruption. “It left a clean wound in the upper back and a larger, jagged one where it exited above the left nipple. The angle indicates that Deputy Jeffcoat was erect at the time he was shot, but slightly bent over, perhaps running. The bullet cut the spinal column between the third and fourth thoracic vertebrae and also penetrated the right ventricle of the heart, the intraventricular septum and the left ventricle, blew it apart.”

  “And the cause of death?”

  “The damaged heart, loss of blood. The spinal injury would probably not have proved fatal, but means that Deputy Jeffcoat would not have had much quality to his life had he survived.”

  Corcoran had a few more questions, which seemed to St. Germain to serve no purpose other than to show off his grasp of pathology. Corcoran then excused the witness.

  “Just a minute.” Jess Whitehead rose slowly with knees in need of lubrication, but approached the stand on the balls of his feet. “Dr. Rosenthal, you describe the fatal bullet as being of .38-caliber, yet you say the wound was through and through? How can you be sure what kind of slug …?”

  Rosenthal did not look at the attorney. He gave no indication that he had heard the question until his lips began to move.

  “The Vermont state police recovered a bullet from a mound of detritus beside the stone fence where Deputy Jeffcoat was found. The bullet had flattened on its path through the body and on impact with the soil, but was not so badly marred that it could not be subjected to ballistics comparisons. These indicated it was fired from a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson Chief’s Special belonging to Lieutenant St. Germain.”

  “Objection.” Corcoran jumped to his feet. “The witness has not been shown to be a qualified ballistics expert.”

  Jess Whitehead was already on his way back to the defense table. “No further questions,” he said.

  Paul Conklin scribble
d urgently on both sides of a yellow sheet of paper. St. Germain, watching him, nearly missed hearing the bailiff call his name. He pressed his holster against his thigh as he went to the witness stand. Although he had testified in thousands of court cases (the great majority of times against suspected speeders), he listened to the oath as if he had never considered its implications before and answered hesitantly, wary of a trap, when asked if he would tell only the truth.

  Corcoran was beaming like an old friend who couldn’t have been more pleased to see him. “Your name, sir?”

  “Lawrence St. Germain, Lieutenant, Cabot County sheriff’s department. Badge number—”

  “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant.”

  The questions came one on top of the other, like swells buoying a man in a life vest even as they threatened to pull him under. St. Germain answered mechanically, his eyes sweeping the courtroom. He picked out Marlow sitting with Ray Beausoleil, trading comments as they monitored his testimony, Beausoleil shaking his head unhappily like a theatrical producer at a cattle call.

  “On the night in question,” Corcoran was saying, “what brought you and Deputy Jeffcoat to Sturgeon Cove?”

  “We’d gone there regarding an investigation in which we had reason to believe Mr. Conklin might be involved.” St. Germain answered as he had been coached, avoiding specific mention of Becky Beausoleil’s killing which a judge in Cabot County was due to take up in two weeks. “It was decided that I would go to the Conklin house and that Deputy Jeffcoat would back me up.”

  “And what happened when you arrived?”

  “I parked in the drive and got out and looked around, and at first it didn’t seem anyone was home. But as I came back in the yard Conklin must’ve sneaked up from behind and pulled …” St. Germain shifted his gaze to the last row, to a figure in black that he recognized as Lenore Jeffcoat. “And … and he disarmed me, and when I … when Deputy Jeffcoat followed me, Conklin took his weapon away, too, and ordered both of us into his—that’s Deputy Jeffcoat’s cruiser …”

  Corcoran glanced over his shoulder and moved closer to the stand to block St. Germain’s view. “Where were you in relation to the others in the car?” he asked.

  “I was in the passenger’s seat, in front, and Wall—and Deputy Jeffcoat had the wheel. Conklin was in back. He was holding our guns.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Conklin?”

  Corcoran was still searching for the best place to park himself. “That’s right.”

  “He told Wally to start driving to Smugglers Notch.” St. Germain stopped trying to look around him and focused on the state’s attorney’s vest buttons. “He said he wanted to shoot us where our bodies wouldn’t be found till spring.”

  “Did you make it there?”

  “No.” Corcoran had positioned himself slightly to the left of the witness stand, and St. Germain got another look at Marlow and Ray Beausoleil. They had stopped talking and were watching him as if this were the performance they had come to see.

  “Why not?”

  “As we were riding out of Malletts Bay,” St. Germain said, “Deputy Jeffcoat swung the car off the road and we crashed.”

  “He deliberately—”

  “Yes, and I jumped out my side and ran off and I thought Wally was behind me, but then I heard a shot and I knew …” He brushed some dampness from his lip and sought out Corcoran’s vest buttons again. “And I was pretty sure Conklin was firing at him. And then he was shooting at me, chasing me, and we ran for a long, long time before I finally … before he gave up.”

  The rest of it was painless, Corcoran inquiring into the nature of his injuries and the length of his hospital stay and rehabilitation and the current state of his health. Asked about his arm, St. Germain started to roll up his sleeve until Jess Whitehead offered an objection and Leeds ruled it wasn’t necessary for the court to view the wound. Then the jurist announced that they would break for lunch. Almost as an afterthought Corcoran said that when they returned he would have no more questions.

  St. Germain remained seated until Leeds leaned over as he might have for a lost child. “The witness is excused until one-thirty,” he said. “Have yourself a nice meal. It’s on the county, you know.” He looked at St. Germain over the top of his glasses. “A good stiff drink or two might also serve the interests of justice.”

  St. Germain stepped down from the stand, searching for Lenore Jeffcoat. The woman was already gone from the courtroom, however, and Corcoran ushered him up the aisle where Marlow was in conference again with Ray Beausoleil.

  “Well,” Corcoran asked, “how do you rate his testimony?”

  Beausoleil held out his hand, tilting it from side to side. “You look like you’re in a trance up there, Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s one thing to let the judge know how strongly you were affected by what happened to you and your partner, but you also have to tell your story firmly, with conviction.”

  “I … I’ll try to do better this afternoon.”

  “You’ll have to,” Corcoran said. “Jess is like a barricuda when he senses an unsure witness. He doesn’t come in for a quick kill, just keeps tearing pieces out till he’s down to bare bone. I don’t imagine it’s a lot of fun to have that happen to you.”

  “Any advice for him?” Marlow asked.

  “Try not to respond too specifically to anything you’re asked,” Beausoleil said. “Tell your story over again the way we discussed it, letting Jess break up the recitation with his questions. No matter what, don’t react to Jess’s sarcasm or invective, and never, for Heaven’s sake, let him lead you around like a bull with a ring in his nose.”

  “And if I do all that …?”

  “Maybe the Cabot sheriff’s office won’t come out of this smelling any worse than it did going in.”

  Neither Jess Whitehead’s knees nor the rest of him appeared in need of lubricating for the start of the afternoon session. As the elderly lawyer approached the stand, St. Germain couldn’t miss the three-martini lunch on his breath. Whitehead kept his chin tucked against his chest, as if the bright lights of the courtroom were too much for him. But when he posed his first serious question, St. Germain saw that his eyes were clear and alert, an almost translucent blue.

  “Lieutenant, you stated that as you moved through the yard Mr. Conklin took away your service revolver. Yet there’s been no mention of a weapon of his own initially in Mr. Conklin’s possession. What I’m having trouble with is how he was able to get your gun away when he was unarmed himself.”

  “He … uh, came up on me and placed an object against my back which … he said was a shotgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, and relieved me of my gun belt.”

  “Did, in fact, Mr. Conklin have a shotgun?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What was it that he was holding to your back?”

  “It was, I believe, a metal rod, the heavy kind used in const—”

  “Not a shotgun?”

  “No.” St. Germain looked toward the prosecution table and, as Corcoran had that morning, Jess Whitehead moved to block his view.

  “Is it common procedure for members of the Cabot County sheriff’s department to surrender their weapons so easily?”

  Corcoran was quickly on his feet. “Objection.”

  “Let me couch the question in different terms,” Whitehead said. “Are you under instruction always to give up your weapon in such a situation?”

  “I don’t know that there are strict guidelines. It’s something I guess each officer has to decide for himself.”

  “So you’re saying it was your choice to hand over your service revolver before determining what it was Mr. Conklin allegedly held in his hands.”

  St. Germain nodded.

  “I didn’t catch your answer, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes,” St. Germain said.

  “Now, if I may again refer back to your testimony of this morning …” Whitehead scarcely looked at him, as though his admission had made him unworthy. “Y
ou stated that Officer Jeffcoat had accompanied you to Malletts Bay in a back-up role. Which, I presume, means he was there to pull you out of trouble if trouble came up. Yet after your gun was taken away from you, he went openly into the yard and was disarmed himself. Why would he do something like that?”

  St. Germain paused. So did Jess Whitehead, waiting him out, outlasting him.

  “I signaled to him.”

  Whitehead pounced on it. “You signaled him into the yard after your gun was gone, knowing he would be placed in the same unenviable situation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that also common practice in Cabot County?”

  “Object—”

  “Was that part of the strategy you had worked out with Officer Jeffcoat before you came to Malletts Bay?”

  “No.”

  “In point of fact, Lieutenant, didn’t the original plan call for you to meet with Chittenden deputies so there would be sufficient manpower available in the event anything went wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then where were they?”

  St. Germain stared in Marlow’s direction and, as he had hoped, Whitehead moved between them. “I changed the plan,” he said softly, as if it were their secret. “I didn’t think they’d be needed.”

  “And that was a decision you had the authority to make on your own?”

  “I … it was my decision. Yes.”

  “Just as it was your decision to signal Officer Jeffcoat to drive up when you had been disarmed and there was a gun pointed at you?”

  Again St. Germain didn’t answer right away. He looked to Corcoran, but got no help.

  “Lieutenant?”

  So it wasn’t Conklin’s actions that were at issue, but only his own. “You weren’t there,” he said.

  “The question, Lieutenant St. Germain, is—”

  “You could never understand the situation I was in. Conklin was out of his mind, dying to pull the trigger, hoping I’d give him reason to. He’d hurt me bad, had everything on his side. I needed time, a chance to figure out what to do. I don’t remember waving to Wally, just him pulling up in his car, so I must’ve—But whatever I did, I thought I had to. Damn it, you would’ve done the same.”