Crime of Privilege: A Novel (5 page)

CAPE COD, March 2008

I
WENT INTO FOGO
’
S FOR DINNER. BAD NAME. I
’
M NOT EVEN SURE
how good the food is, but for years I went there three or four times a week. I could
eat at the bar, a lovely slice of veneered log in which the natural contours provided
cutouts that allowed a man to sit comfortably in whichever of the twelve long-legged,
spindle-back chairs happened to be available. I liked that veneered log. I liked the
television behind the bar. I liked the post-middle-aged people who worked there and
knew just enough about me to ask how things were going without inquiring too deeply.

I suppose certain aspects of my life were obvious. I wasn’t married and I didn’t live
with anyone, or I wouldn’t have been in there eating dinner as often as I did. I usually
wore a suit, particularly if I stopped off on my way home from work, so I had to be
a professional. I never dined with clients—or, for that matter, anyone else—so I was
unlikely to be involved in business. I didn’t have an accent, or at least not a Boston
or Cape Cod accent, so I was not originally from the area. I liked to watch whatever
sporting event was on TV and I made appropriate noises in support or condemnation
of the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots, so I had to have been around for a
while. And I liked to have a Manhattan, or a couple of beers, or a glass or two of
wine, or
even an occasional martini, so I was a man of party potential without being an alcoholic.

Of course, the Cape is a small place between October and May, and sooner or later
a person in my position was bound to come into contact with one of the employees outside
the restaurant. Jury duty, a domestic dispute, an unlawful detainer action, a kid
in trouble, even a moving violation, was going to get one of them into the courthouse
at some time or other; and I tended to be in one of the county courthouse buildings
eight to ten hours a day. So at some point somebody was going to run into me.

The first time I recognized anyone from the restaurant was when a waitress named Meg
appeared on one of my jury panels. Judge Wilkerson dutifully introduced me as the
deputy district attorney representing the people of the Commonwealth and asked the
courtroom full of citizens if any of them knew me or the defense counsel or the defendant
in the case. Several people raised their hands, but none of them identified me and
none of them was Meg. I had merely turned to the audience, let them see me, not searched
their faces. It was only when Meg was called to the jury box that I realized she was
there. I looked right at her, she looked right back at me, not a sign of recognition
was passed.

The case, as I recall, was a break-in, the defendant a Brazilian. It was not a big
deal to anyone but the victim and the accused. When it was my turn to question the
prospective jurors, I addressed Meg. “Ms. O’Brien, do I look familiar to you?”

“I’m not sure. Should you?”

“You mentioned you work at Pogo’s restaurant in Osterville. I happen to eat there
sometimes. I wonder if you recall ever waiting on me?”

Meg was a hard-faced woman with dun-colored hair, who wore her restaurant uniform
with the hem of her skirt an inch or two higher than the other waitresses did. If
I had to guess, I would have said she was about fifty, divorced, had raised or was
raising two kids on her own, lived in a rented house, and depended on her unreported
tips to survive. She was also none too bright, as evidenced by her answer to my question.
“Not really. You usually eat at the bar, don’t you?”

The defense counsel exercised one of his challenges to take her off the jury, and
later, when I ran into her at the restaurant, she asked me why I had brought up the
fact that she knew who I was. “I wasn’t gonna say nothin’,” she said.

I told her I appreciated it, but it could have jeopardized the prosecution if anyone
found out she really knew me.

She shrugged. “I figured the guy was guilty as sin anyway, or you wouldn’ta been chargin’
him. And if he wasn’t”—she shrugged again—“then I would have given you a raft of shit
next time I seen you. So I figured the pressure was really on you.”

Somehow, in her mind, that all made sense. I tried to follow it through, but got only
so far. In any event, she was off the jury, the Brazilian got convicted, and from
that point on whenever I sat down at the bar I was addressed by John the bartender
as Counselor.

In March, the main dining room was closed. There were about twenty patrons scattered
in booths and at tables throughout the pub, which had logs burning in the brick fireplace
and was where I always ate anyhow. I was alone at the bar, sipping a Manhattan and
reading through the printed list of daily specials that was tucked into the menu,
when a man came in and sat down next to me. There were three seats to my left, eight
to my right. There wasn’t any need for him to do that.

“How’s it goin’?” he asked John.

“Goin’ good,” John said, as if it was none of his business, and slid him a menu, a
black paper place mat, a set of silverware wrapped in a white napkin.

I turned my shoulder. I wanted to eat alone, watch the Celts. They were playing Phoenix,
as I recall. “I’ll have the clams, John,” I said.

The bartender hesitated. I wasn’t sure if he cut his eyes to my neighbor, but it took
him a few seconds to murmur, “I wouldn’t. Not many bellies, from what I could see.”

“What do you like?”

“Scallops look fat. Swordfish is good.”

“Fine. Give me the scallops.”

“Plate or roll?”

“Plate.”

“Squash, french fries, chowder okay?”

“Whatever you say.”

John took my order back through the swinging saloon door to the kitchen without writing
anything down. The man next to me, a man with sparse white hair that tufted on the
crown of his head and could have used a good clipping at the back of his neck, said,
“He obviously likes you.”

“It’s just because I come in here all the time.”

“Sure. They only cheat tourists and drunks.” He was smiling. He had made a joke. He
wanted me to know he didn’t really think they cheated anybody.

I turned away again.

“My name’s Bill Telford.” He was holding out his hand. He wanted me to shake.

The man had come in and seated himself next to me, told me a joke, and now he wanted
me to be his friend. I wanted only to watch the game, eat dinner, go home. I shook
his hand and did not give him my name.

“They need a real center,” he said, looking at the screen, not seeming perturbed in
the slightest by my lack of manners. “Way back when, they had the second-worst record
in the league. Got screwed in the lottery and the best center in basketball went to
San Antonio. ’Magine what it would be like if we had gotten him?”

“Tim Duncan.” I shouldn’t have said anything.

“That’s the fella. What did we get? A bag of mulch.”

“Chauncey Billups. He’s a good player.”

“Yeah? Then why didn’t he do anything for us?”

“They traded him away after a couple of months.”

“Maybe that’s where we got the bag of mulch.”

He was right, but I felt no need to say so.

John returned with my cup of chowder and looked at Bill, who nodded at what I had
and said he’d like a bowl of the same. And a glass of water. This was not going to
pay John’s greens fees come May and he said nothing. He just plunked ice cubes in
a glass, squirted in some water, plopped it on the bar, and stomped back to the kitchen.

“Don’t come in here much,” Bill said, looking around as though
this restaurant, which could have been most anywhere on the Cape, was a very foreign
venue.

The man was probably in his seventies. He wore a zippered fleece jacket and appeared
to have a sweater and a collared shirt under that. His voice was not unpleasant and
there did not appear to be anything wrong with him. He just wanted to talk. “Live
over in Hyannis. Off Ocean Street.”

I watched Paul Pierce heave in a twenty-five-footer for the Celts. Nothing but net.
Hyannis was all of five miles away. Buffered only by Centerville, where I lived.

“Don’t know if you recognize my name, but I’ve got a case with you fellas.”

I froze. This was one of the reasons I did not go out of my way to tell people what
I did.

“Perhaps you’ve heard talk about it around the office. Heidi Telford? My daughter.
Murdered nine years ago.” He was not looking at me. He was looking at the screen.
But he was concentrating on me. “Wianno Club, just down the street from here. That’s
where they found her, anyway.” I could sense him shrugging, telling me he didn’t think
that was where the murder had taken place.

I knew who Bill Telford was now.
Anything New
Telford. He was something of a legend, periodically calling, occasionally showing
up, always asking the same question: “Anything new on the Telford case?” Everyone
tried to avoid him, pass him on to the next-lowest person down the line, let him get
told by secretaries, paralegals, summer interns, that no, there was nothing new about
the case of the pretty young girl who had her skull crushed and was found on the sixteenth
fairway of an ultra-exclusive private golf course.

From what I understood, it wasn’t that anyone had anything against Mr. Telford. He
was unfailingly polite, never pushy, just persistent. If anything, the people in the
office felt sorry for him. But there was nothing to report.

“I like to check in,” he said, reading my mind, “just to make sure Heidi’s not forgotten.”

“I know, Mr. Telford.”

“Do you?” He seemed to brighten at that. I still wasn’t looking at him. I was still
looking at the television screen, but what I was seeing wasn’t registering.

“So somebody’s still working on it?”

All I knew was that people talked about Anything New Telford. That didn’t mean anyone
was working on it.

He seemed to consider my silence. “Whenever I come up with anything, I pass it along,
you know. The police, well, they didn’t seem equipped for an investigation like this
one, if you know what I mean.”

I did not. After a moment or two, I told him so. “Police here deal with murders just
like any other police department. We probably have two to four every year. One year
we had nine.”

“You’re talking about the County of Barnstable, not the town. Town of Barnstable has
maybe one per year.”

He was right. I didn’t argue. In my job we dealt with the whole county. And I didn’t
get the murder cases, anyway.

“We have almost a quarter-million people in the county,” he said, “if you count all
the way to Provincetown. Got a fairly high welfare population. A lot of people unemployed,
especially in winter. Frustrated fishermen, construction workers. Not a lot to do.
People get to drinking, shacking up with women who aren’t their wives or men who aren’t
their husbands. Feelings get bruised. Secret of the Cape is that it’s not always as
nice as it looks to people who only come here in the summer.”

He got his chowder. He was silent for a while and I glanced over. His eyes were closed,
his lips were moving. He was, I saw, praying. I looked away.

“In the off-season,” he said, as if sprung back into the real world, “you got people
here that maybe shouldn’t be here, maybe don’t want to be here, and plenty of bars
and package stores to fuel their frustrations. Mix in the drug smugglers that come
in off the ocean, the drug dealers and drug users living in converted cottages or
winter rentals, you’re bound to get some violent crime. That’s what you see mostly,
isn’t it?”

Yeah. Sure. It wasn’t worth arguing over.

“Of course, you see some of that in some of the villages of the
town of Barnstable—Hyannis, Marstons Mills, maybe. But what you don’t see very often
is that kind of crime in the hoity-toity places: Hyannisport, you know, or here in
Osterville, for that matter. Places where the big-money people have their summer homes.”

He spooned up his chowder. He spooned it away from him, the way you are supposed to
do it, the way nobody does. “So,” he said, taking his napkin from his lap and dabbing
his mouth, “a college girl’s body is found on a golf course in Osterville, the local
police are programmed to think, well, she must have been murdered by somebody from
Mashpee, Yarmouth, Truro, anyplace but here.”

“And you don’t believe that’s what happened to your daughter?”

“No, Mr. Becket, I don’t.” He ate some more, sparing me any slurping sounds. I found
myself liking Bill Telford just for the way he approached his chowder.

“My daughter was an exceptionally pretty girl. A bright girl. Size you up in a jiffy.
She was going to Wheaton College. Do you know it? Didn’t know anything about it myself
until they came and got her. But it’s a wonderful institution, and they recruited
her right out of Barnstable High on her guidance counselor’s recommendation. Didn’t
give her quite a full scholarship, but made it possible on my salary. I was an insurance
adjuster, Mr. Becket. My job was to go out and assess damage, mostly on homeowners’
claims. I’d go into some of these multimillion-dollar properties here in Osterville,
do my work, then I’d say to the homeowners, these people who had done so well in life,
what can you tell me about Wheaton College? To a person they said good things. They
were all familiar with it, all had somebody in the family or knew somebody who had
gone there, so I said, that’s it. Whatever it takes, my daughter’s gonna go there.”

All I had done was ask him whether he believed his daughter had been killed by someone
from outside Osterville. I wasn’t going to ask anything more for fear he would start
telling me where he bought his clothes, gassed his car, went to the grocery store.

“Point is,” he continued, not caring that I wasn’t asking, “Heidi was meeting her
share of rich and successful people at Wheaton. Maybe not famous people, I don’t know,
but she had learned how to handle some of these kids who had a lot more than she did.
Went to mixers at
Brown, dated boys from Harvard. So I don’t see her as being overly impressed by somebody
just because he came from a famous family.”