The Imposter: A Mike Bowditch Short Mystery Read online

  He paused so long it seemed he’d forgotten the question. “Maybe.”

  “Would Tommy have had an opportunity to talk with Mr. LeBlanc or overhear one of his conversations?”

  “I suppose. Tommy worked the register for me a couple of times. And he was always eavesdropping on other people’s private discussions. What’s this about?”

  “Your son stole a significant stash of drugs from an Airstream trailer belonging to a man named Alvin Payne.”

  Winters laughed. “Tommy didn’t have the balls to do something like that!”

  Rhine flared her nostrils. “Do you mind my asking you a personal question?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”

  “Would you like to continue this later after you’ve had a chance to process what happened to your son? It’s not uncommon for people to feel shame when there’s a suicide in the family.”

  “You can stop trying to get in my head, lady.”

  “Sheriff,” I corrected him.

  But Winters chose not to acknowledge me. “Yeah, I was ashamed of the kid. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “But he was your son,” I said, unable to hold back.

  Winters responded with a harsh laugh that shocked us all into silence.

  “How is that funny?” Rhine asked.

  “Because he wasn’t my son! Biologically, I mean. Karen couldn’t have kids so she convinced me to adopt him. Worst mistake of my life. You adopt a baby, they should tell you whether he’s defective. You should be able to return him. Not that Karen would’ve done it. She made me swear never to tell Tommy he wasn’t really ours.”

  “But you did tell him,” I said. “After she died.”

  Winters gazed at me, his expression searching, his pupils overlarge in the unlit room. “How the hell did you know that?”

  Because my own father had also been a cruel man, I thought.

  * * *

  The sheriff and I waited for Winters to finish closing up the shooting range, but Rivard had to leave for a meeting with the Warden Service colonel in Augusta. Marc clearly relished the excuse to sneak off. By leaving, he could forestall an awkward conversation with Rhine about how Tommy Winters had never entered his head as a suspect when we were hunting for the imposter.

  The sheriff and I stood in the blistering parking lot. Dog-day cicadas whined in the treetops. The air smelled of pine bark drying to tinder in the sun.

  “No wonder the kid killed himself,” she said. “With a father like that.”

  “You’re thinking now it was suicide?”

  “I didn’t before we came here. Now though—?”

  Winters emerged from the door with a trash bag full of discarded bullet casings he’d brushed up from the range. He dumped the shells into a steel bin and then padlocked it shut. I wondered how much money the club made from recycling the thousands of cartridges left behind by shooters. The last I’d seen spent casings were going for a dollar fifty a pound.

  The Mustang belonged to Winters. We followed it out to the main road. We had to wait for Winters to close the heavy gate behind our vehicles. The elaborate process involved a bolt, a chain, and a padlock.

  It took us half an hour to drive to the village of Aurora where Winters lived.

  I could easily identify the Winters residence by the state police and sheriffs cruisers waiting for us. It was a big clapboard farmhouse with a yawning barn that no longer sheltered livestock. I recognized a K9 team from the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. The German shepherd had been trained to sniff out narcotics.

  Winters pulled the Mustang into the shadows of the barn and came out to meet us, still wearing the .45 on his hip.

  Rhine said, “We appreciate your opening your home to us, Mr. Winters.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “All of us want an answer to what happened to Tommy.”

  “Like I said.”

  Without Rivard to keep tabs on me, I took the liberty of following the others inside the moldering, old house. The curtains were drawn, and the darkened rooms stank of cigars and uncleaned dishes. Winters led us down to the basement, which smelled even muskier.

  Tommy’s bed was unmade, the sheets ripe with body odor. There were empty pizza boxes and soda bottles, magazines that weren’t pornographic per se but featured female bodybuilders on their covers or babes in leather chaps straddling Harley-Davidsons.

  The only noteworthy aspect of the room was the abundance of personal photographs. There were framed pictures on the walls. Others in stands on shelves. All the photos were of the same person: a middle-aged woman with a blond perm, a prominent underbite, and the sunken eyes of someone who rarely enjoyed a full night’s rest.

  “That’s Karen,” Winters explained. “My late wife.”

  Rhine rested her hands on her gun belt. “Would you mind waiting upstairs for us, Mr. Winters? It’s difficult to work when there are people crowded around. Why don’t you keep him company, Mike?”

  I expected Winters to put up a fight. Even though he had expressed a willingness to cooperate, few homeowners are comfortable letting cops poke around their residences. If anything, the man seemed too compliant.

  I followed him into the kitchen, where he grabbed a can of Coors from the refrigerator, and out onto a porch overlooking the second-growth woods that had sprung up where the farm fields had once been. He cracked his beer and removed a cigar stub from an ashtray on a table and lit it.

  “Did Tommy know anyone who drove a yellow sports car?” I asked.

  His reaction was to cough out some smoke. “What kind of question is that?”

  “A yellow car seemed to be following him the night he pulled over those girls on Route 9. Did your son have a friend who—”

  “Tommy didn’t have any friends.” He narrowed his eyes. “You sure this yellow car was following him?”

  “According to witnesses, it was.”

  “What witnesses?”

  “I’m not allowed to say.”

  “So he was pretending to be you, huh?”

  “It seems that way.”

  “You ex-military?”

  “No.”

  “I served in Desert Storm. You have the look of a vet.”

  I’d heard the comment before and had come to the conclusion that killing people in the line of duty had left me with scars visible to those who had themselves taken the lives of other human beings.

  “My father was a Ranger in Vietnam,” I said.

  He studied me with pupils that had constricted down to mere pinpoints. “And you didn’t want to follow in his footsteps?”

  “That was the last thing I wanted. But you know how it is, I never asked to be his son.”

  Winters, I was fairly sure, recognized the jab for what it was. He took a long pull from his beer can. His gaze drifted to the tree line.

  “The man your son ripped off,” I said. “He’s going to want his drugs back. Or he’ll want the money Tommy might have made selling them.”

  “And?”

  “He might come out here. Now that he knows your son’s real identity. He might expect you to make good on what Tommy stole.”

  Winters patted the holstered firearm. “Let him come.”

  “Dylan LeBlanc put his own cousin in the hospital because of the stunt your son pulled.”

  A trooper appeared on the porch. “Mr. Winters, the sheriff would like to see you.”

  Back inside we went.

  Rhine stood waiting at the top of the stairs. She held a sheet of paper pinched between her gloved fingers. “Is this your son’s handwriting?”

  The letters were large, blocky, and scrawled in pencil. Even from a distance I could read the words of the suicide note:

  BURY ME NEXT TO MOM.

  Standing behind him, I couldn’t see Winters’s face. But I heard his voice crack when he spoke.

  “I need to use the facilities.”

  * * *

  There was still the open question of what Tommy Winters had do
ne with the opiates he had stolen, but the drug-sniffing dog detected nothing in its search of the house and the property.

  I roamed around a bit, made small talk with some of the troopers, tried to stay out of the sun. I peeked in the barn and saw that Winters was in the process of restoring a Trans Am that was scarcely more than a steel shell. The concrete floor was dappled with red paint.

  I crossed paths with Rhine again in the driveway. She was watching the afternoon breeze ruffle the leaves of an ancient elm standing sentinel on the property: the sole survivor of a scourge that had wiped out nearly all of its species.

  “So now what happens?” I asked.

  “I go back to Machias to type up my report in air-conditioned comfort. And I presume the Warden Service would appreciate you returning to your official duties. On a scorcher like today you could probably write up a dozen drunk-boaters on Gardner Lake—not that I’m telling you what to do.”

  Instead of following her advice, I made my way back down to Mopang Plantation and drove in on the Jeep trail to see if luckless Alvin Payne had returned to live in his Airstream.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the trailer gone. Payne had been squatting on the land. Following the home invasion, the sheriff’s office would have informed the property owner who, in turn, would have evicted his unwanted tenant and dragged the silvery camper off to an impound lot. The cinnamon ferns and bracken had sprung back so quickly that the impression left by the heavy Airstream was scarcely visible.

  I stooped to collect a discarded beer bottle and that was when I noticed something gold glinting from between the grass blades. The mystery object hadn’t been there the night of the home invasion or the searchers would have found it. Someone must have just dropped it in the days since.

  It was a pin-on badge. Not even made of metal. Just a cheap piece of plastic I myself had given away on school visits. Imprinted on the front were the words JUNIOR MAINE GAME WARDEN.

  * * *

  The next morning, just after sunup, I drove out to the Call of the Wild Guide Service and Game Ranch.

  Brogan’s guides all used the same white monster trucks, but the vehicles owned by the lodge guests tended toward expensive SUVs that had never been driven off-road, plus a handful of sedans representing the pinnacle of Teutonic engineering.

  I made my way up the board stairs to the porch and inside. The lobby was “decorated” with the heads of trophies taken at the ranch. There was a red deer, a bison, and a perplexed-looking zebra that should never have been transported to the woods of Maine.

  I could hear loud conversation and plates rattling in the adjacent dining room, but there was no receptionist behind the check-in desk. My hand hovered above a bell guests and visitors were expected to ring if they found the lobby empty. I brought my palm down three times in quick secession.

  A teenage girl appeared from an adjoining room. She had thick, brown hair that grew low on her forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a mouth that was disconcertingly sensuous in a person so young. She wore a camouflage-print shirt and the annoyed, slightly bored expression that is the default among so many adolescents.

  I flashed my best smile. “You must be Reese. I’m Mike Bowditch. I’d like to talk with you about that incident with the fake game warden.”

  “Everyone’s saying he’s dead.”

  “We’re still trying to answer some questions about why he did what he did.”

  “How do I know you’re really a game warden?”

  “I can show you my badge.”

  “The freak who stopped us had a badge.”

  “Mine’s not made of plastic.” I smiled again and this time she smiled back. “I just want to ask you a few questions. There are still a few loose ends we need to wrap up.”

  “I heard you haven’t found those drugs he stole.”

  “You seem to hear a lot.”

  “I’ve got ears.” She glanced toward the dining room, then back. “You’re the one he was impersonating.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t look like him at all!”

  My God, she’s flirting with me now.

  “The first question I have is about the yellow car you saw the night he stopped you and your friends. Was it your sense that the impersonator—his real name was Tommy Winters—recognized the driver?”

  “All I can say he was scared shitless.”

  A voice boomed from staircase leading to the second-floor rooms. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Joe Brogan was not a big man, but he was burly with the callused hands of a former logger. He had a heavy, brown beard and hair so thick it reminded me of a beaver pelt. He smelled heavily of bug repellent.

  “I was just talking to your daughter about Tommy Winters, the man we found dead in Roque Harbor yesterday.”

  He lowered his bushy eyebrows over his dark eyes. “Does Rivard know you’re here? I told him I didn’t want to see you around my place.”

  “I apologize if I’ve caught you at a bad time,” I said.

  “There’s no good time where you’re concerned,” Brogan said, closing the distance between us. “Honey, get Sergeant Rivard on the phone.”

  “Do I have to?” Reese Brogan said. “That guy creeps me out.”

  Brogan’s face turned a deeper shade of red. “What’s that?”

  “He’s always looking at my tits.”

  “You never told me that!” Joe glared at me as if I were to blame for my sergeant’s lewd behavior. “You game wardens. You call that guy an imposter, but in my book, you’re all a bunch of fake cops.”

  “Just answer me something, Brogan, and then I’ll leave you in peace. What would you have done if you’d found out it was Tommy Winters who terrorized Reese?”

  “I would’ve gone over to his house with a baseball bat. Next question?”

  * * *

  The phone rang before I had driven a mile clear of the game ranch. It was Rivard.

  “The autopsy came back,” he said. “Tommy Winters had seawater in his lungs. He also had scratches on his abdomen and blood under his nails where he tried to get the lap belt off. He must have had second thoughts at the end.”

  “Survival is an animal impulse,” I said.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have an odd way of putting things?”

  I’d set the toy badge on my center console. Was that why Tommy had chosen to impersonate a game warden and not a deputy or some other kind of cop? That silly piece of plastic?

  “Have you told Tim Winters yet?”

  “Rhine tried but couldn’t get him on his landline or cell. He’s probably still sleeping off a drunk. Not that I blame the SOB.”

  I cruised along. “Marc, there’s been something bothering me. I’m still puzzled why Tommy Winters chose me of all people to impersonate when we had no connection. You wouldn’t have happened to mention my name when you were at the Narraguagus Sporting Club?”

  “Why would I have mentioned your name?” he said at last.

  “I have no idea.”

  In fact, I could easily imagine Marc Rivard bitching about the troublesome new warden he’d been assigned.

  “It’s a mistake trying to get in the minds of nutcases. Listen, I’ve got another call coming in.” He paused to check the number. “Christ, it’s Joe Brogan. What does he want?”

  I could only imagine.

  Without really making a decision, I started west toward Aurora. I made a pass by the Winters house, but the Mustang wasn’t in the driveway or parked inside the shadow-webbed barn. Maybe Tim had run off to the corner store for another case of Coors and another box of Montecristo cigars.

  My phone rang again as I was driving home to Washington County. I feared it was Rivard calling to lambaste me for visiting the Call of the Wild. Instead it was Reese Brogan.

  “I wasn’t completely honest about everything before,” she said. “I kind of know who the driver of the yellow car was. I didn’t recognize him, but later I found out it was this guy named Luk
e Merrill.”

  “From Roque Harbor?”

  “I don’t know where he lives. I heard he was passing by and saw there was something fishy going on. I heard he chased the fake warden and forced his truck off the road and beat the shit out of him.”

  “What about the yellow car?”

  “He was just test-driving it. He was gonna buy it off some dude selling it on craigslist, I heard. If you talk to Luke Merrill, please don’t tell him it was me who gave you his name. My friends say he’s got a wicked temper.”

  I promised her I wouldn’t. “What made you decide to call me, Reese?”

  “I was wondering if you had a girlfriend.”

  * * *

  My next stop was Roque Harbor. I had a few questions about Luke Merrill.

  As I passed the boat launch, I saw a trio of kayakers floating in the approximate area where Tommy Winters’s truck had settled. The paddlers were peering into the turquoise water, trying to catch a glimpse of the still submerged vehicle.

  I pulled up outside the low, weathered building where the lobstermen bought their diesel fuel and hung out before and after their long days on the water. I parked beside a line of rust-pitted pickups and entered through the bay doors of the fishermen’s co-op.

  The room was unlit except for the sun shining in at the edges, and it smelled of salt water and the seaweed used to pack live lobsters into crates for shipment to exotic destinations.

  From the dark a voice exclaimed: “Well, if it isn’t the dead man!”

  I squinted and saw Twelve-gauge Gaynor sitting at a card table with several other men.

  “Hello again,” I said.

  “Heard you identified the Great Pretender?”

  “Word travels fast,” I said.

  Gaynor smiled, showing off coffee-stained teeth. “We’ve got our sources. Also heard it was a suicide.”

  I pretended not to hear the last part. “Is Luke Merrill around?”

  “He’s still out hauling. Should be back before dark. Whatcha looking for him for?”

  “Which boat is his?” I said.