Crime of Privilege: A Novel (8 page)

Like Clancy, I looked at the chief. Unlike with Clancy, the chief did not look back
at me. He was still seething over whatever insult he thought I had dealt him. I was
in the process of replaying our conversation in my head when Clancy let out a cry
of relief and hauled two cardboard boxes from the back of a shelf, where they had
been obscured by a whole series of other files. The boxes had the name
Telford
written on them in black Magic Marker, and the old man dropped them onto the floor
in triumph.

The chief looked down, poked them with the rounded toe of his shiny black shoe, and
said, “Lemme know if you find anything us dumb cops overlooked.” Then he spun around
and left me to do my own digging.

Once the chief was gone, Clancy began fawning over me. He had a nice desk and chair
for me, he said. He could bring the boxes to me. He offered me coffee, claimed he
had just made a fresh pot. I picked up one of the boxes, nodded to him to pick up
the other, and told him all I needed was his desk and chair.

I HAD COME TO
the police station with the idea that it was going to take me hours to go through
the evidence. It took forty minutes. Then
I went back and went through it again, sure that I had missed something.

The contents of one box consisted almost entirely of photographs, pictures of a blonde
girl in a sleeveless summer dress sprawled on her stomach under a maple tree just
to the side of a meticulously groomed fairway; close-ups of the back of her head,
looking not so much crushed as carved open like a melon; close-ups of her face after
she had been rolled onto her back, her eyes closed, her features expressionless, somehow
unreal, as if she were not a person at all but a model of one. There were scores of
shots from the autopsy, including about a dozen of her naked body lying on a metal
table, but I chose not to look at them. I was interested mostly in the way she appeared
on the golf course.

The dress was of no particular quality that I could discern. It was blue, patterned
with what appeared to be little red roselike figures. She wore no shoes and of course
no stockings. The photos at the scene did not show whether she was wearing underwear,
but in the second box there was a sealed clear plastic bag with a pair of pink-and-white
striped bikini briefs. The autopsy report, also in the other box, said she was wearing
the briefs but no bra. I went back and looked at the pictures of her lying supine
on the coroner’s table. It was hard to tell from that position, but she did not appear
to be a woman who could regularly go braless without attracting considerable attention.

I did not need to speculate about her legs. Her knees, just below the kneecaps, showed
grass stains.

A good-looking girl, twenty years old, had either been on her knees voluntarily or
had been dragged across a lawn. I studied the pictures yet again. There were none
of the golf course itself. It was depicted only as the location of the body. One shot
was taken from the road, looking through one set of trees, across the fairway to a
thicker copse where Heidi’s body lay. Another was taken from just beyond the first
set of trees, on the fairway side, showing about one hundred feet of grass. Another
was taken at fifty feet from the body, yet another at twenty-five, and then several
at ten feet. I could not tell from any of them if there was a drag path.

I had to assume there wasn’t. Surely, if there was evidence that she had been dragged,
the police would have recorded it.

What the photos did show was that there had been plenty of foot traffic in the dew-laden
grass. I pulled out the police report and read that at 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26,
1999, a groundskeeper named Rinaldo DaSilva had discovered the body on the sixteenth
fairway. He had been driving a golf cart pulling a fantail rake behind it when he
had first noticed what he described as “a pile of blue.” He had thought, for some
reason, that it was a pool cover that had blown onto the course from somebody’s home
and so he had not gone to it right away. When he did realize what it was, he panicked.
He got out of his cart and ran to her side but did not touch her, thinking that it
would be wrong, inappropriate, something he shouldn’t do. Instead, he stood over,
shouting down to her, “Lady! Lady, are you all right? Lady, wake up!” Then he ran
to the street, thinking he might see somebody, some friend of hers, somebody who could
help him. He admitted he was not thinking very clearly.

He ran back to her, forced himself to kneel down, to part her hair. He had seen that
her hair and neck and back of her dress were bloody, but he hadn’t seen where the
blood had come from until he separated the tangle of hair and saw what he thought
was her brain. Then, he said, he fell over, fell backward onto his hands and did a
crab-walk to try to get away from her. He thought he went about fifteen feet before
he collapsed. Then he got to his feet and ran to the street again, shouting for help
as loud as he could.

A man named Lowell Prentice came out of his house in his bathrobe, demanding to know
what was going on. Rinaldo DaSilva pointed to the trees. Prentice followed Rinaldo
back to the body, apparently hobbling with considerable difficulty because of some
knee condition that required him practically to drag one foot behind him. Once there,
he didn’t know what to do, either. The two of them seemed to accomplish little more
than trampling whatever evidence might have existed.

According to the medical examiner, Dr. Rajit Pardeep, Heidi had died from intracraneal
and intercerebral bleeding after having been struck on the back of the skull by a
narrow, dull-bladed metal object. Given the fact that she had been found on a golf
course, Dr. Pardeep surmised she had been struck by a golf club. He found no semen
in her body cavities, no evidence of sexual molestation. Her stomach contents
were thirty-three percent liquid, which he attributed to alcohol, and her blood alcohol
level was .12, enough to be intoxicated but not falling-down drunk.

The investigation report was prepared by Detective Howard Landry. I knew him only
by name. He worked serious crimes and I didn’t. His presence on the case meant that,
at least initially, nobody was trying to sweep this under the rug.

May 26, 1999, he had been called at home at 6:10 a.m. and arrived at the scene at
6:42. Other officers as well as EMTs from the fire department were present, and Heidi
Telford had already been pronounced dead. Barnstable police had put up yellow tape
to seal off the area, but Landry confirmed my suspicion that irreparable damage had
been done in terms of failing to preserve evidence of footsteps or drag paths. He
could find no blood spatters on or around the maple tree beneath which the body was
found.

He made a preliminary determination that the body had been brought to its resting
place from the scene of the killing, and so he checked the roadside for tire marks
in the dirt. Whatever was there had been obscured by what he called “first responder”
vehicles. Since he did not otherwise identify them, I assumed he meant police patrol
cars responding to Mr. Prentice’s 911 call.

In sum, neither Detective Landry nor anyone working with him found any clues on or
near the sixteenth fairway of the Wianno Club golf course except the body itself.

Landry’s report traced the events of Heidi’s last day. It was Memorial Day, and she
had had her first weekend of work in her summer job as a lifeguard at Dowses Beach
in Osterville. She had gotten off work at five, driven home to Hyannis in her Jeep
Wrangler, and arrived in particularly good spirits. Her parents attributed that to
her really liking her job.

She had spent about an hour and a half doing “the usual things,” according to her
parents: ate, showered, changed. At around 7:30 she had gone out, telling her mother
she was going to walk down to Main Street, which was only a quarter-mile away. On
a summer night, Main Street, Hyannis, is probably the most active stretch of road
anyplace on Cape Cod, with the possible exception of Commercial Street in Provincetown.
Stores, bars, and restaurants are open, and tourists flood them all, along with the
sidewalks and the vehicle travel lanes. Locals tend to stay away from Main Street
at such times, but this was the very end of the holiday weekend and most visitors
would have gone home.

What the Telfords thought was peculiar—disturbing, even—was that Heidi had not been
wearing the blue dress with the red rosettes when she went out. She had been wearing
white shorts, white sandals, and a yellow Izod shirt, which, her mother insisted,
she never would have worn without a bra. She was a D-cup, her mother said. She wasn’t
the kind of girl to show off.

Her mother remembered that she was carrying a rather large purse, a rope or hemp purse
with two brown leather handles that you could sling over your shoulder and let ride
on your hip. She had not thought anything about it at the time. Afterward, she wondered
if her daughter had been carrying the dress inside the purse. But, she said, she couldn’t
think why she would do that. She had just finished her sophomore year at Wheaton.
All she had to do was tell them if she was going out on a date.

Landry appeared to have done a good job canvassing Main Street. Within two days he
had presented her picture at every bar and restaurant. While she was known to some
of the waiters, waitresses, hostesses, and even a few of the bartenders, nobody had
seen her that night. Landry expressed a lack of surprise. He noted she was twenty
years old and not old enough to drink legally, and she had eaten before she went out.

He thought he might have better luck with sales staff and shopkeepers, but his interviews
with them had also failed to produce anyone who had seen her at any time after she
left her parents’ home.

He met with friends, co-workers, high school classmates, college classmates, former
boyfriends, and came up with no one who had any idea why someone would kill Heidi
Telford or even want to. The most common response, repeated several times by different
people, was that she “was not that kind of girl.” With no clues, no weapon, and not
even any rumors to follow, Landry essentially gave up. His report was still labeled
“Preliminary,” the file was still labeled “Open,” but the
last thing I saw with a date on it read 2000, and there was no sign that anything
had been added to it since then.

Whatever the things were that Heidi’s father had been giving to District Attorney
White, they had never even made it into the police department’s boxes.

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 1996

I
ENJOYED MY FIRST MONTH OF LAW SCHOOL. I PLAYED PICKUP
basketball in the gym three afternoons a week, met some guys who asked me to join
a flag football team that played on Saturday mornings, drank with classmates at the
21st Amendment on Friday afternoons, and tried never to miss a lecture or homework
assignment. And then Mr. Andrews found me.

I was living in an apartment a few streets from the National Law Center at George
Washington University. I had not been there long, had not given anyone my new address,
but there was Mr. Andrews, looking taut and wired in jeans and running shoes and that
same gray jacket he had worn in Philadelphia six months before.

“George,” he said, and stood there, silently demanding that I invite him in.

My place was on the third floor of a building that sacrificed comfort for character.
I had a small living room that led to a smaller dining room, off of which was a kitchen
that was just big enough for one person at a time. The living room converted to a
bedroom at night. The dining room was used full-time as a study. I had yet to have
anybody there as a guest, and so my computer, my books, and my desk
lamp were all positioned on the dining room table. When I ate, I simply moved to a
different part of the table. I had two chairs.

I looked at the chairs, looked at the couch that had been left by the previous tenant,
and wondered where I would put Mr. Andrews. I wondered why I had to put him anywhere
at all. I said, “What do you want?”

The man stared at me long enough and hard enough that I somehow knew what he was going
to say before he said it. My lower lip began to tremble. I bit down on it to make
it stop. He didn’t even blink. I put my hand on the door frame and gripped it tightly
so that I could lean forward and not use all my willpower just to stand up straight.
And still Mr. Andrews did not say anything more. I had to ask him.

“What happened?”

“Drug overdose.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s dead, George. Is that all right enough for you?”

I stepped away from the door. Fell away, ended up on the couch. I lost a small segment
of time, but then Mr. Andrews was standing over me and I was leaning forward, my forearms
on my knees, my hands dangling. “I’m sorry,” I said. I may have said it multiple times.
I wondered why I was saying sorry to him—he was just a messenger, an employee, a hired
hand—but I had to say it to someone, and he was there.

“They got to you, didn’t they?”

“I went to see him. I did what you asked.”

“Oh, you went to see him, we know that. I doubt very much you did what I asked.”

“I answered his questions.”

“So what are you saying, George, the fucking state attorney for Palm Beach County
didn’t ask the right questions?”

“He asked what happened that night. I told him there was a party at the Gregorys’
and a bunch of us had gotten completely drunk—”

“Very bold of you. Went way out on a limb, did you?”

“It was true. I had, Kendrick had, some of the cousins had. What he
kept asking about was the Senator. Whether the Senator had gotten drunk. Whether I
had seen him with Kendrick. Whether the Senator had done anything inappropriate.”

“He didn’t ask about Peter and you didn’t tell him.”

“It was the Senator he wanted to know about.” I sounded as if I was whining. I didn’t
mean to whine. I wasn’t going to whine. If he was here to punish me, then I was going
to take it.
Go ahead, Mr. Andrews. Smack me. Beat the shit out of me, if that’s what you’ve come
here to do
.