Crime of Privilege: A Novel (7 page)

The wheels on his chair made scuttling noises as the D.A. pushed himself back from
the edge of his desk. He used his hands to position himself at exactly arm’s-length
distance.
George from the basement is telling me this?

I nodded, confirming the question he had not actually vocalized. “He feels we’re not
paying attention to a very serious matter.”

Now I wasn’t just from the basement, I was George with friends in high places, conveying
a criticism of his operation. He gripped the edge of the desk until his fingers blanched.
“Who we talking about?”

“Bill Telford.”

“Anything new.” It was hard to tell if he was making a statement or asking a question,
but the color returned to his fingers. Anything New Telford wasn’t quite as much of
a threat as, perhaps, others were.

“He says he’s been handing in stuff on his daughter’s murder for some time and nobody
is following up on it.”

“There’s no case, George. No suspect, no file, nothing for this office to do except
pass along what we get to the police.” He lifted his hands about six inches, dropped
them quickly to the security afforded by the edge of the desk. Having done that, he
waited.

“If I read him correctly, he seems to be of the mind that we’re not doing anything
because the Gregorys might be involved.”

The name. The magic word. Mitch White’s muddy brown eyes popped from their sockets,
his pupils magnified by his ugly oxbow glasses. And then, within the space of a second,
his expression changed.
But wait
, it seemed to say,
the Gregorys are your ticket, too, George
. Now he saw me sitting before him not as a threat but as an ally. I had come not
to attack him but to warn him. And to work with him. We had done it before, right?
The time that young Kirby Gregory had gotten arrested for driving with a .20, we had
made it go away—he and I.

“That’s a lot of horse manure,” he said, raising one eyebrow tentatively, making sure
I agreed.

“I was wondering if I might take a look.”

Now both eyebrows went up, and then they softened. Of course. George Becket, friend
of the Gregorys, checking on the Gregorys, what better solution?

“This goes back,” he said, sitting up straight, pulling himself into the desk, “almost
ten years, you know. Bill and his wife, Edna, are fine people, and the murder has
devastated them. They still keep Heidi’s room just as it was, you know that? Kind
of creepy, I know, but that’s how much they were affected.”

He peered through his lenses. Did I see how difficult this was?

“Bill quit his job. I don’t know, he may have lost it, but this search for the killer
became an obsession with him. Always coming up with some theory or other.”

Mitch stopped talking for a moment. His fingers began to beat on the desk. A rhythmless
sound like typewriter keys clacking.

“After a while they all seemed to revolve around the Gregorys. There was a party that
didn’t really happen. A pickup at the general store that nobody is quite sure actually
took place. You know the kinds of things I’m saying. A horrible thing happens in the
Gregorys’ neighborhood and all of a sudden conspiracists are everywhere, feeding the
grieving parents information that doesn’t really have any factual basis. All that
does is make us have to be extra-careful on our end. Pressure like the kind Bill puts
on almost makes you push back harder than you otherwise would. You listen, sure, but
after a while you grow pretty skeptical and you just say, okay, show me what you’ve
got, but I’m not carrying the water for you just because some right-wing nut who has
it in for the Gregorys says one of them was seen talking to a pretty blonde girl on
the night Heidi died. Heck, that’s what the Gregorys do. Probably isn’t a pretty blonde
girl on Cape Cod who hasn’t been talked to by at least one of the Gregorys.”

He gave a modified laugh. It sounded like a steam heater. His mouth laughed, his chest
laughed, his eyebrows stayed put, elevated above his glasses. Like his mustache, they
were too dark for his pale skin. The image they presented distracted from his message.

Still, I smiled, because that is what he wanted me to do. Eight years we had barely
spoken to each other and now, in a matter of minutes, we were so inextricably intertwined
that we could make little in-jokes about our mentors. If things kept improving like
this, I might soon get out of the basement. Maybe even get invited to the Pops concert.
Sit at a round table and help Mitch look for celebrities.

Hey, there’s Regis Philbin.

“
D
ON
’
T WE PAY FOR ALL THE THINGS WE DO, THOUGH
?”

Who said that? Hemingway. Lady Brett to Jake Barnes, the protagonist in
The Sun Also Rises
.

What had she ever done to compare with what I had?

Better yet, is what she said even true? Or is it true for some but not for others?
Was Peter Martin paying now that he was a doctor in San Francisco, living in Pacific
Heights, attending opening night at the opera in black tie? What about Jamie Gregory,
now a Wall Street banker, living in a landmark four-story townhouse in the Village?

The one who really paid was Kendrick, and all she did was get drunk.

Kendrick. Her father. Her mother. And, oh yes, George Becket, living by himself on
the Cape, working out of the basement office of a political hack, lying awake at night
thinking about how different things might have been.

C
ELLO DIMASI WAS SAID TO HAVE BEEN A FINE BASEBALL PLAYER
. He went to an obscure college in Connecticut but made it onto the Hyannis Mets in
the Cape Cod League, which bills itself with good reason as the premier summer collegiate
league in the country. He played two years for the Mets as a catcher who couldn’t
hit, had a bad arm, but handled the pitchers well and excelled at blocking the plate.
There is a picture on the wall in Muggsy’s showing him upending a guy who stood six-feet-four
and went on to play five years for the Baltimore Orioles. The guy is literally flying
through the air, and Cello, his head down, his squat body hunched and tilted forward,
has both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Cello never fulfilled his dream of signing with the pros, but he made a lot of friends
in the area. After college, he ended up on the Barnstable police force, and after
twenty years on the job had worked his way through the ranks to the position of chief.

Like Mitch White, Cello had a cadre of supporters, but they were most definitely not
the same cadre. Cello’s group were people like “the Macs,” McBeth and McQuaid, people
who ran the building trades, put on fishing and golf tournaments, coached youth sports,
went to Muggsy’s for breakfast and took their cocktails at Baxter’s on the waterfront
during the off-season when the tourists weren’t around.

I knew the chief only in terms of discussing cases. There had been the bicycle-theft
incident over which we had been at odds, but for the most part we were able to work
things out to our mutual interest. The Kirby Gregory matter might not have had such
a positive outcome for her if the Breathalyzer results had not been made questionable
by a failure to locate the calibration records of the device. On the other hand, Michael
McBeth’s nephew was able to walk with a reckless even though he had spent the night
puking his guts out in a Yarmouth jail cell.

The chief greeted me as though I had come to cut another deal.

“Georgie!” he said, calling to me through the bullet-proof window of the utilitarian
reception area of police headquarters off Phinney’s Lane. “C’mon back. Maddy, buzz
the good counselor through.”

Maddy buzzed, I pushed open a metal-plated door, the chief stuck out his hand, and
we shook with the force of a couple of pile-drivers. I had been the victim of Cello’s
crushing handshakes in the past, and I knew from my years playing football that you
got hurt less when you met force with force. “C’mon back. Take a load off your feet,”
he said, for Maddy’s benefit. Maddy, if I was not mistaken, was married to one of
the guys who did building inspections for the coastal commission, guys who made sure
new construction was not too close to the water or didn’t have too many bathrooms
or nonnative plants in the landscaping, guys who could make life miserable for a lot
of people if they felt so inclined.

The chief’s office had fake wood paneling and bookshelves that were filled with trophies
from youth sports: soccer, swimming, baseball, basketball. I couldn’t imagine the
chief or his kids having much to do with basketball, given the fact that the chief
was about five-feet-seven and two hundred forty pounds, but you can’t argue with trophies.

He went behind his desk, which was strewn with various objects—a coffee mug, a wrist
brace, a woman’s shoe, an aerosol can, a flywheel—but he did not sit down. He was
wearing the dark blue uniform of his force, looking like a man ready to spring at
the sound of an alarm.

“What do you got?” he asked. He did not do it in an unfriendly
way, just a businesslike way. He and I were neither friends nor enemies, although
the rules of our engagements required us to appear to others to have a certain camaraderie.

“You still working on the Heidi Telford matter?”

“Heidi Telford,” he repeated. “Anything New? It would be a closed case if it weren’t
for that poor bastard. What do you got?”

“Just the poor bastard. He’s kind of glommed on to me now. I told him I’d look into
it.”

“What’s to look into?” The chief still hadn’t sat. Neither had I. We were talking
across his desk as if it were a stream that could not be forded. “Girl got her head
bashed in and then got dumped on the golf course. Thing about that course is, you
got a fairway runs right along West Street. You go down that street two, three o’clock
in the morning, you’re gonna be the only one there. Stop alongside the road, pull
the body out of the backseat, run it out to the fairway. You’re gonna be gone less
than a minute and that body’s not gonna be found till dawn.”

“Less than a minute? How much did she weigh?”

The chief squinted at my impertinence. Then he regrouped. He still was not sure why
I was there, what I was trying to do. “She wasn’t a big girl. Hundred and ten, hundred
fifteen pounds at the most. Maybe less, I don’t remember. And maybe it would have
taken a couple of minutes, get her out of the car, across the fairway, into the trees
where we found her.” He slung his hand from one side of him to the other. “Point is,
other than us guys patrolling the place, you’re just not gonna find any traffic out
there at night. Only people live on West Street are rich ones who are so old they
fall asleep at nine o’clock at night. What do you got?”

“And what did she get hit with?” I asked.

“Probably a golf club. That’s what the medical examiner figured, anyway.”

“Okay, so correct me if I’m wrong, Chief. The girl’s found on a swanky golf course,
her head crushed by a golf club. That doesn’t sound like she got picked up by a transient.”

“Who said she was?”

“Well, what do you think happened?”

Perhaps it was the tone of my question. Perhaps I should have shown more deference
to the chief of police. In any event, Cello DiMasi exploded. “How the fuck do I know?
If I knew, I’d arrest somebody, don’t you think, Counselor?”

I smiled. I said I was sure he would.

He grumped, like maybe it would be best if I just got my overeducated ass out of his
office, out of his police station, took my bleeding heart out to save the colored
kids who steal honest people’s bikes.

My smile did not seem to be working. I used to have a good one. Now I get the feeling
people regard it as something I just drop over my face, like a page on a flip chart.
Still, what do you do when you’re trying to placate someone like the chief? I tried
words. “Mitch White thought it might be a good idea if I took a look through the file.”

“Mitch White, huh?” The message was clear: Mitch White, another Ivy League prick like
me.

I slowly lifted my hands, palms up, as if there was nothing I could do, Mitch was
my boss. Smile, speak, roll over like a dog with my paws in the air.

The chief hitched his belt, made the leather creak. He was not wearing any weapons,
but the belt was black and three inches thick, the kind that could hold a gun, a truncheon,
a foot-long flashlight. Somehow hitching it, making it creak, passed for a sign of
dominance.

“C’mon,” he said, and led me out of the office and down a corridor in which the walls
were made of cinder blocks painted light green. We had to walk a good hundred feet
and every time we encountered someone, the person would squeeze his back to the wall
and say, “Chief,” as we passed. The chief did not acknowledge anyone by name, just
nodded as he steamrollered toward our destination, a green door with a wired window
at the far end of the corridor.

He grabbed the brass handle, shouted, “Door,” and somebody in an adjoining room buzzed
it open. He did not look back, just flung the door wide and let me catch it on my
forearm before it slammed shut again.

The department’s file room was virtually a warehouse, with rows of adjustable shelves
that looked as if they had been built from an erector
set. There was a little desk just inside the door, but nobody was at it. “Clancy!”
the chief bellowed, and an ancient cop in a faded uniform that looked nearly as old
as he scuttled out from the stacks.

“Right here, Chief.”

Cello DiMasi flung a thumb in my direction, again without looking at me. “This here’s
Assistant D.A. Becket. He wants to look at what we got on the Telford case.”

The old man turned to me with an expression of concern. Worry, maybe. Possibly fear.
“The Telford case, sure. Right this way.” He made another turn and hurried down one
aisle with his shoulders curled forward and his hands splayed in front of him as if
he were sweeping for mines. We followed, me first and then the chief, and Clancy took
us all the way to the end of the aisle, where he began scanning the shelves, looking
over once or twice at the chief as if to tell him not to get excited, the files were
right here somewhere.