The Imposter: A Mike Bowditch Short Mystery Read online

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  Twelve-gauge Gaynor had been rowing his skiff from the town landing out to his lobster boat, the Dragon Lady, when he’d spotted a metallic glimmer coming through the blue-green water. Gaynor had been fishing out of Roque Harbor for fifty years and this wasn’t the first vehicle he’d seen take a bath. On most but not all occasions, the driver had managed to escape from the drowning machine and swim to shore. Gaynor told the dispatcher he had a spooky feeling there was at least one dead person at the bottom of the harbor.

  I’d heard the report come over the radio and had decided to drive down in my patrol truck to watch the recovery efforts. Most of the town seemed to be present. Anticipation hung in the air as unmistakably as the smell of the sea. Everyone was waiting to see whose body the divers would find. In a community as tightly woven as Roque Harbor, the deceased was sure to be related to someone or other.

  “Bet it’s Merrill’s boy,” Gaynor said to the lobsterman beside him.

  “Luke or John?”

  “They’re both wild as tomcats. Hell, it might be both of them.”

  Cigarette smoke wafted from the crowd behind me. Gulls, drawn by the prospect of thrown food, chattered overhead. It was a beautiful midsummer morning.

  I stood on the dock beside Gaynor who was glorifying in his central role in the day’s drama. His first name was Thomas, but everyone called him Twelve-gauge for reasons no one had yet explained to me. I was the new game warden in Down East Maine, and the locals—who tended to be suspicious and closemouthed even with each other—hadn’t decided whether they approved of me or not.

  The sheriff had come out to oversee the recovery. Her name was Roberta Rhine. Because of her black braids and fondness for turquoise jewelry, some people thought she was part Indian. She wasn’t, though; she just had a flair for the theatrical. Her deputies had cleared the landing and set up a cordon so the divers could go about their bone-chilling work. It might have been the middle of July, but the temperature in the Gulf of Maine was still in the low fifties.

  After a while, the state police divers emerged from the deep with what looked, from a distance, like a department store mannequin. The sheriff and two of her deputies leaned over the edge and, with gloved hands, pulled the corpse onto the dock.

  Murmurs started behind me. The same question over and over.

  “Who is it?” Gaynor’s friend asked. “Do you recognize him?”

  The lobsterman grunted, “No.”

  Rhine and her officers stooped over the body. Then they all glanced in my direction. The sheriff beckoned me forward.

  “Hey, Bowditch!”

  The dead man lay exposed to the sun. He looked like he was wearing a mask of wet papier-mâché that might slough off if handled roughly. He was dressed in army fatigues, but one of his combat boots had come off, along with his sock. His toenails badly needed cutting.

  The sheriff held out a wet wallet flipped open to the driver’s license. I couldn’t read the name, but the picture showed a young guy with a buzz cut and a lazy eye. I looked from the photograph to the thing at my feet, then back again.

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s you,” she said.

  I peered closer. The name on the license was Mike Bowditch.

  * * *

  Two months earlier, I’d gotten a disturbing phone call from my supervisor.

  “What are you doing?” Sergeant Marc Rivard had asked.

  “Just rolling and patrolling.”

  “I have a question for you.” Rivard had a faint French accent, common among older Mainers, but almost unheard of among people under forty. “Did you stop a station wagon full of teenagers out on Route 9 on Saturday night?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You’re sure you didn’t?”

  “I think I’d know if I did! What’s this about?”

  “The lieutenant got a call from a guy who says his teenage daughter and her friends were stopped for speeding by a game warden. She says he was driving a green truck with a flashing blue light. They thought he was a police officer so they pulled over. There were four girls in the station wagon. They’d just come from a party at a gravel pit.”

  “What happened?”

  “So this ‘warden’ comes up to the driver’s window, and evidently there’s something strange about him. He asks for all of their licenses, not just the driver’s, and sorts through them, looking at the photos. The prettiest girl is in the backseat, and she’s the one he tells to step out of the vehicle.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “He orders her to open her mouth and stick out her tongue so he can smell her breath. Then he asks if she knows how serious the punishment is for underage drinking. He says he’s going to have to pat her down before he gives her a field sobriety test. The other girls are all freaking out now, and the driver—she’s the bold one—jumps out of the vehicle. The warden pulls his handgun and yells at her to get back inside.”

  “What happened next?”

  “They were lucky another car drove up,” he said. “It came to a stop behind the warden’s truck and just idled there. The guy turned white and told the girls that they were free to leave with just a warning. The last they saw of him he was screaming west on Route 9 with this bright yellow sports car in pursuit.”

  Somehow a black fly had found its way inside the patrol truck. I could feel it creeping into the notch behind one of my ears. “You honestly thought that was me, Marc?”

  “I had to ask.”

  Like hell he did. “Did the girls give you a description of the guy?”

  “Early twenties,” he said. “Tall like you. On the thin side. Hair buzzed down to the scalp. They said there was something funny about one of his eyes.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Just funny. What I’m telling you came secondhand through the father of the girl driving the car.”

  “Did this imposter give a name? Or show some kind of identification?”

  “They were just kids. Plus they’d been drinking wine coolers.”

  “What about a license plate?”

  “You don’t seem to be listening.”

  I had been waiting for Rivard to get to the plan of action, but he seemed in no hurry. “So what do we do about this?”

  “Put it out quietly among law enforcement to be on the lookout for some jackass pretending to be a game warden.”

  “Shouldn’t we warn the public?”

  “And give the crazies an excuse not to stop for blue lights?” He pitched his voice high with mockery. “‘But judge, I thought it was that police impersonator behind me. I was afraid he might kill me if I pulled over!’”

  “What about the yellow car?” I asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Shouldn’t we try to locate the driver? Find out who he is and what he saw? How many yellow sports cars are speeding around Washing
ton County?”

  “Bowditch, do you realize how limited my resources are at the moment?”

  “It seems like catching this phony warden should be a priority.”

  “I am making it a priority.”

  Two weeks passed without the warden impersonator making another appearance. Then came the home invasion.

  I remember it being a particularly dark night, overcast, with a new moon afraid to show itself. I was working the smelt run on a skinny little brook that spilled out of the hills above Sixth Machias Lake. I had just issued a summons to a chucklehead who’d netted about ten gallons of smelt, the bag limit being one quart, and made him dump the shimmering fish back into the brook.

  My phone rang as I was marching the smelt poacher to his truck. The dispatcher told me there was a man in the next township claiming he’d been terrorized at gunpoint by a game warden gone rogue. The location of the alleged “home invasion” was a trailer parked illegally at the mushy edge of a beaver bog.

  By the time I arrived, half the law enforcement officers in the county seemed to be on the scene. Among them was Rivard.

  My sergeant had black hair and what people, behind his back, called a “porn ’stache.” He had been married and divorced twice and fancied himself a debonair playboy. By the standards of backwoods Maine, he probably fit the definition.

  He grinned wide enough to expose his bicuspids. “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime!”

  I was baffled by the joke, but it brought smiles to the faces of the assembled deputies and troopers.

  “Is the victim still here?” I asked.

  “The sheriff’s taking his statement. She told me to send you in.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The camper was a suppository-shaped, silver Airstream. The inside smelled of weed. There were, no doubt, other odors, but they were entirely overridden by the marijuana smoke baked into the rugs and upholstery.

  Every drawer had been pulled out and overturned, and every door was ajar. Clothing, canned goods, and assorted crap littered the room. From the damage, you might have thought an extremely localized tornado had passed through.

  Sheriff Rhine, wearing her black polo with an embroidered star on the breast, chinos, and cowboy boots, sat at the kitchen table. Across from her was a gaunt, bearded man with strips of duct tape dangling from his body and a loose pile of discarded adhesive around his bare feet. He looked like he’d just escaped being mummified alive in shiny silver ribbons.

  The sheriff raised her chin as I entered the room. “Is this the warden who tied you up, Alvin?”

  The scrawny man spun around in his chair. He had greasy brown hair tucked behind ears that were almost elfin in their pointedness. His eyes were so heavy-lidded it seemed he might be dozing off.

  “Who? Him?”

  “Is this the game warden who tore up your home and held a gun to your head?”

  “The warden who ripped me off was all bruised and shit—like he’d been stomped pretty good in a fight. And he had one of those crazy eyes.”

  “You mean lazy eyes?”

  “Crazy, lazy—what’s the difference?”

  Rhine took a calming breath. “And what did you say this ‘warden’s’ name was, Alvin?”

  “Bowditch,” he said fiddling with a strip of tape clinging stubbornly to his thigh.

  “This is Warden Bowditch.”

  “Are they related?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You need to find the other one and ask him what he did with my toilet.”

  The sheriff rose to her feet. She was a tall woman. “Stay here, Alvin. I’ll send in Deputy Corbett to help you get the last of that tape off.”

  Neither Rhine nor I spoke until we were clear of the trailer. Flashlights flickered between the trees as the deputies searched the property. The piping of spring peepers in the bog was so shrill it just about pierced my eardrums.

  “The impersonator is using my name now?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Why me?”

  “That’s a good question. Maybe it’s because you’re new around here and not everyone knows what you look like. Or maybe you issued him a citation, and it’s his way of getting back at you.”

  I was certain I would have remembered writing a ticket to a jittery young man with a crazy, lazy eye.

  “What the hell happened here, Sheriff?”

  The man inside the trailer was named Alvin Payne, Rhine said, and he was well known to the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, having been a guest in their hospitality suites on several occasions.

  Earlier that evening, Mr. Payne was treating a herniated cervical disc with medical marijuana and listening to some Zeppelin when a man claiming to be a Maine game warden started pounding on the door. Alvin, being a good citizen with nothing to hide, had let him in.

  The warden said he had proof that there was a cache of illegal deer meat inside Payne’s freezer and commanded him to take a seat. The next thing Alvin knew, his hands were being bound behind him with duct tape.

  Even more puzzling: the officer didn’t bother looking inside the freezer at all. Instead he ransacked the closets and kitchen cupboards. The first thing he confiscated was Alvin’s supply of prescription cannabis.

  It was dawning on Payne that the situation might not be what it seemed.

  “What’s your name and badge number!” he demanded.

  “My name is Mike Bowditch,” the warden answered in a tough-guy voice. “And my badge number is zero-zero-fuck-you.”

  He then applied a strip of tape across Alvin’s mouth to curtail further conversation.

  Payne claimed he had nearly suffocated watching his trailer be turned inside out and upside down. It was obvious this Warden Bowditch was growing agitated that he couldn’t find whatever he’d been looking for. Finally he returned to his prisoner and ripped the tape from his lips.

  “Where’s the pills?”

  “What pills?”

  “The pills your cousin gave you.” Then he pressed the barrel of his gun to Payne’s temple.

  Alvin just about wet himself. “All he gave me was a honey bucket because my toilet don’t work.”

  I held up my hand to interrupt Rhine. “What’s a honey bucket?”

  It was a primitive commode, she explained, made from a prefab toilet seat that attached to a five-gallon plastic pail. The generic name was bucket latrine.

  While I had never heard of a honey bucket, the name had meant something significant to the guy pretending to be me. As soon as he heard it, he disappeared out the door leaving Alvin Payne bound to the chair.

  I followed the sheriff behind a flowering shadbush that functioned, more or less, as a privacy screen. A roll of tissue still hung from a nearby branch, but there was no sign of the portable shitter itself.

  “Wasn’t it risky hiding pills in the bottom of a toilet?” I said, trying not to inhale. “What if Payne dumped them out?”

  “Maybe they were attached to the bottom somehow. Or buried in the ground underneath. It was actually a clever place to hide pharmaceuticals from any drug-sniffing dogs that might have searched the property.”

  “I assume the pills were oxycodone.”

  “Probably, but it could’ve been a mix of prescription painkillers. Codeine, hydrocodone, etcetera.”

  “Who is Payne’s cousin?”

  “A Canadian smuggler by the name of Dylan LeBlanc. The DEA and ICE have no clue how he’s been getting his drugs across the border from New Brunswick.”

  “So LeBlanc gives cousin Alvin a honey bucket as some kind of secret drug stash. But if he’s such a wily smuggler, how did our warden impersonator know he was caching his drugs out here?”

  “That’s another good question. Alvin claims to be ignorant of his cousin’s profession, and I believe him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because after he gnawed himself free, he called 911 to report the home invasion.”
r />   The sheriff’s phone rang. It was the Drug Enforcement Agency.

  I stood alone in the darkness, listening to the earsplitting frogs, and feeling myself growing angrier and angrier at the thought of a two-bit robber using my name to commit his crimes.

  Maybe pulling over those girls had just been a trial run to see if he could fool people into believing he was a warden. Maybe this heist had been his master plan all along. The pretender simply hadn’t reckoned with the extent of Alvin Payne’s potheaded stupidity.

  I made my way through the trees to Rivard who was still holding court to a slightly smaller audience of cops. “So what did you do with the honey bucket, Mike?” he said. “Come on, tell the truth.”

  “I don’t find this situation particularly amusing.”

  “A stoner gets duct-taped to a chair by a fake warden who then runs off with a portable toilet full of narcotics. Yeah, you’re right. There’s nothing funny about this at all.”

  Blood warmed my cheeks. “It’s a crime to impersonate a law enforcement officer.”

  “You take yourself too seriously, Bowditch.”

  Several nights later, an unidentified vehicle dumped Alvin Payne in the parking lot outside the hospital in Calais, a five-minute drive from the international bridge that crosses the river into New Brunswick. Multiple bones in his arms and legs had been broken, most likely with a two-by-four. When he emerged from hours of surgery and finally awoke from anesthesia, the luckless stoner told Sheriff Rhine he’d injured himself falling from the roof of his trailer.

  The next time I saw Marc Rivard, he refused to meet my eyes.

  * * *

  Now it was summer and a man was dead.

  The driver’s license was fake, of course. I stood on the wet planks with my doppelgänger at my feet while the sheriff circulated the plastic card among her officers first and then, when no one recognized him, among the good people of Roque Harbor.

  Who was he?

  Not a single person could say.

  The man who’d discovered the submerged truck decided he could remain the center of attention by turning to comedy. “How does it feel to be dead, Warden?” Twelve-gauge Gaynor asked in a loud voice. “Did you see a white light before you swallowed the sea?”