Crime of Privilege: A Novel (6 page)

Heidi Telford died when I was still in law school. Her death was old news by the time
I started in the Cape & Islands district attorney’s office. All this talk about Heidi
and her dates and famous families meant nothing to me. I tried to make that clear
by scraping the bottom and sides of my cup for the last bits of chowder. Then I started
casting my eyes about for John.

“Being an insurance adjuster gave me the opportunity to do some investigating on my
own, Mr. Becket. Or at least gave me some of the skills I needed to do it. And whenever
I came up with anything, I’d bring it right to District Attorney White. I expect you
know all that.”

Now I had to answer. He was waiting, looking right at me, seeing that I was not watching
the game anymore, that until the rest of my food came I didn’t have anything to do
except listen. “I really haven’t been involved, Mr. Telford.”

“Nice fella, Mitchell. Takes what I give him, tells me he’ll have someone look into
it. I never hear anything more.”

“Maybe because he doesn’t have anything to tell you.”

“Except I’m telling him things. I talk with Heidi’s friends, with her friends’ friends,
and even friends of those friends, and whenever anybody says anything, no matter how
small, I write it down, pass it along. Then I follow up. Ninety percent of the time
I find that the people whose names I pass along never hear word one from the police
or anybody else.”

“Mr. Telford, why are you telling me all this?”

He put his spoon down. He wiped his lips one more time. He fixed a pair of blue-gray
eyes on me. “Because, Mr. Becket, I been hearing good things about you.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re a straight shooter. Don’t appear to be obligated to anyone or anything
but the truth. You see something that’s not a crime, you stand right up to your boss
or the police chief or whoever says it is and tell ’em so. You see something that
is a crime, you go after it.”

I choked on my Manhattan.

Mr. Telford’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You want some water?”

John never gave me water because I never drank it. I started hacking, trying to clear
an air passage. John came running from somewhere. So did one of the waitresses. Somebody
was pounding me on the back. It took a few seconds to realize it was Mr. Telford.

“I’m okay,” I gasped. “Something just went down the wrong way.”

John and the waitress, whose name was Fiona, both glared at Mr. Telford as if my travail
was his fault. I had to tell everyone all over again that I was all right.

When we were left alone at last, when John had gone back into the kitchen to get my
dinner and Fiona had wandered off to do whatever she had to do, I said to Mr. Telford,
“Look, I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but I’m just an assistant
D.A. I’m not even a first assistant. I’m assigned cases, I work on those, and that’s
all I do.”

“I heard you backed down Chief DiMasi. I heard he wanted to prosecute some colored
boys for running a bicycle-theft ring and you said no.”

“First of all, they were from the Cape Verde Islands, those kids. Second, they were
stealing bikes, but it wasn’t anything so sophisticated as a ring. They were just
stealing them and selling them. And third, I did prosecute them inasmuch as I got
them to plead to misdemeanors.”

“And sent to a diversionary program.”

I shrugged.

“When the chief wanted them sent to prison as felons.”

“The chief can be aggressive sometimes.”

“About teenagers with no connections stealing bicycles.”

He was not far off the mark. But he was also just a guy sitting next to me in a restaurant.
I was glad when John came out and put my plate in front of me. I was even more glad
when Mr. Telford picked up the check John had put in front of him and took out his
wallet.

“All I’m asking,” he said, as he got to his feet, “is if maybe you could do some checking
yourself. See if these little things I’m givin’ District Attorney White are going
anywhere other than the circular file.” He put a five-dollar bill down on the bar,
then looked at the check again, then selected two more dollars to put on top of it.

“You see, sometimes”—he hesitated, his hand covering the money as though he were holding
his place until he got the phrasing just right—“sometimes I’m afraid Mitchell may
not want the information I’m giving him. Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell isn’t a little
too close to some of our better-known residents.”

“Meaning anybody in particular?”

“Meaning the Gregory family, Mr. Becket. Very much in particular.”

E
VEN NOW THERE ARE TIMES I LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT, UNABLE
to sleep, playing and replaying the events of that distant night in Palm Beach, thinking
about how the lives of so many people were ruined by what took place in a period of
no more than one hour, imagining what might have occurred if only I had acted differently.
What would have happened if I had pulled Peter off her? Knocked Jamie away? Tried
to raise Kendrick to her feet, shake her out of her stupor?

Was she in a stupor? She had not said anything. She had made noises. They had sounded
like … moans. Is that what they were? And if they were moans, were they indications
of pleasure or the fact that she could not formulate words?

She had formulated words later. “Fuck you,” she had said. “Fuck off,” she had told
me. And she had driven that car. Without her shoes. Without a purse. When young women
go to a cocktail party at a place like the Gregorys’, don’t they bring purses? If
she had left it there, wouldn’t the Gregorys have found it? Somebody in the Gregory
family had to have known who she was. Somebody had invited her.

I get lost sometimes, conjuring up things I do not know, or that I know only in part.
And then I can’t get to sleep at all. I lie there until the sun comes up, not sure
if I am remembering things as they actually happened or if I am just remembering what
I imagined on other nights that I have lain here like this.

And now Bill “Anything New” Telford tells me what a straight shooter I am, how I am
not obligated to anyone or anything but the truth, how I see a crime and go after
it. Stand right up to the people in power.

Poor Bill Telford.

L
IKE ME, MITCH WHITE WAS NOT FROM THE AREA. THAT SHOULD
have been a point to bond us, outsiders in a provincial legal setting in which many
of the regular players could trace their local roots back for generations. In fact,
it only made District Attorney White highly suspicious of me. He knew how I had gotten
my job.

The same way he had.

In the ten or so years Mitch had been D.A., he had tried hard to adapt to the culture.
He had the requisite sports memorabilia around his office, but one had the sense he
could not withstand a grilling about Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski, or maybe even Larry
Bird. He bought a table for the Boston Pops concert that was held on the town green
every summer, but people who were forced to sit with him reported he never seemed
interested in the music and spent most of the time scanning the other tables for celebrities,
officials, and people to whom he could wave. He did not have a boat, did not golf
or fish, did not seem to care about the beach.

Among the things Mitch had clearly never mastered was the art of dressing like a native.
He was prone to short-sleeved dress shirts, even when he wore a tie. In the summer
he liked to wear seersucker suits that could not have cost him $200 and tended to
show both wrinkles and the damp spots of perspiration that came from sitting in a
leather chair. He had a mustache that no doubt was meant to distract viewers
from his underslung chin and wore dark-framed glasses in which the lenses were fitted
into frames shaped liked oxbows. His arms, sticking out of his short sleeves, were
remarkably thin. On his left hand he wore a very prominent gold wedding ring. I might
have been overly critical, but to me everything about him screamed Not From Here!

Nevertheless, each time Mitch was up for reelection he ran virtually unopposed. I
had no involvement in the process, but it seemed to me that the decision was made
as to who would be district attorney before the matter went to the voters, and as
long as Mitch didn’t piss off the wrong people, the job was his.

That did not make Mitch a secure man, however. And among his insecurities was me.

There were twenty-three prosecuting attorneys in our office. A couple of them were
stationed in Falmouth, a couple more in Orleans, and then there were a few on the
islands, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The rest of us were located at the main
office in the “new” building at the courthouse complex just off Route 6A, on the bay
side of the Cape in the town of Barnstable. I was relegated to the basement, down
the hall from the jail cells. I had been there by myself for years and had come to
think of it as my private domain. For a period of several months before my meeting
with Bill Telford I had been sharing my office with a woman named Barbara Belbonnet,
whom I would have thought quite attractive if her primary interest in life had been
something other than making arrangements to have her children picked up after school.
Barbara was neither a bad person nor a bad attorney. It was just that her husband
had left her with two kids and moved off-Cape, and she had gotten the job with the
D.A.’s office because her father was an Etheridge and somebody owed him a favor and
told Mitch he had to hire her.

So there she was one day, following behind a couple of staffers pushing a desk and
carrying a computer, telling me she was sorry, but she was a new hire and this was
where she was told to go. I was not given the option of complaining. “Welcome to the
dungeon,” I said.

It turned out to be no different for Barbara than it was for me. In general nobody
other than an occasional secretary or messenger ever came to see either one of us.
If we were wanted, someone would call
over the intercom and direct us upstairs, usually to one of the first assistant D.A.’s,
Reid Cunningham or Dick O’Connor.

It was not that Mitch himself openly avoided me. He would greet me with a “Hello”
and use my name on those occasions when he happened to see me in the hallways or at
an office birthday, Christmas, or farewell party. “Hello, George, how’s it going?”
he might say, although he would not wait for an answer. He would respond to my questions
if asked, but mostly he steered clear of situations where I would have the chance
to ask. He knew my connection but wasn’t sure how deep it ran. His own, apparently,
wasn’t deep enough for him to find out.

By sequestering me in the basement, Mitch was able to limit my exposure to whatever
was occurring in the office. He couldn’t keep me from talking with the other lawyers
or going on coffee breaks with them, but he kept my workload restricted to matters
that generally did not require interaction. Here, George, here’s twenty-seven drunk
drivings for you. You be the OUI specialist. As for Barbara, she was given the domestic
disturbances. The small ones. The pushings and shovings and throwing of plates. The
ones nobody else in the office wanted to go near. Here, Barbara, you take these. You
have a problem, we’ll be right upstairs. Better yet, ask George. That way, you won’t
even have to come upstairs.

I wondered sometimes if anyone would even say anything if I didn’t show up. But I
did show up and I worked hard, in large part because I had nothing else to do. My
fellow prosecutors did not, as far as I knew, have anything against me personally,
but they recognized my lowly status in the office, my office in exile, and understood
that friendship with me was not going to advance their careers. Besides, most of them
were married and I no longer was, which limited opportunities for social interaction
outside the office.

Strangely—to me, anyhow—some of my better friends were the defense counsel I opposed
in court on a regular basis. Guys like Jimmy Shelley, Alphonse Carbona, Buzzy Daizell;
guys with senses of humor about their place on the legal food chain, guys who took
their victories where they found them: getting a felony reduced to a misdemeanor,
getting a not-guilty on five counts even if it meant being hit on another ten; securing
a Colombian client.

“Colombians are near and dear to my heart,” said Buzzy one time. “They pay in cash.”
That was defense-counsel humor.

Sometimes these guys would invite me out for a beer, or to attend a cookout, or even
to a Red Sox game. But I had to be careful. It would not look good if I appeared to
be too close to any of them, and while I was relatively sure that there was almost
no offense that would cause Mitch White to fire me, I did not want to be ostracized
any more than I already was.

In my eight years as his employee, I could remember being in Mitch White’s commodious
corner office only three times. Once was on the day he hired me. Once was on the day
he found out my wife was divorcing me. And I cannot remember the third occasion. Maybe
it was when he told me I would be getting all my assignments directly from Dick O’Connor,
but mostly I was going to be the office’s “Operating Under the Influence” guy.

My visit after my conversation with Bill Telford was, therefore, my fourth to Mitch’s
inner sanctum. It took just two calls to his secretary.

MITCH GREETED ME WITHOUT
getting up from his desk. Like every other male in the office, he worked without
his suit jacket when he was not in public. Unlike every other male, Mitch kept his
tie in a knot pulled tightly to his neck. Even though I had put on my suit jacket
for this visit, he made me feel I was a little more casual than the situation required.

“Yes, George.”
Yes, George, I’m a busy man. See all these papers on my desk?

“Last night I talked to a guy who indicated he was having a problem with our office.”