Crime of Privilege: A Novel (11 page)

The dazed guy lurched forward in a relatively straight line, dropped down onto one
knee, gently turned Marion’s head, and then used his thumb and forefinger to apply
pressure to the sides of her mouth to force it open. I was lying right next to him.
I didn’t see anything but teeth. “There’s signs of vomitus,” he announced gravely.
“She’s got to get to a hospital.”

“That’s where I was taking her,” I called out in a sudden wash of inspiration.

“Oh, gosh,” said the third-year, and everyone was quiet for a moment as if contemplating
the dangerous possibilities of this traffic stop.

“She still has a pulse,” shouted the erstwhile medic as if he had done something miraculous
to discover it.

“Cyrus,” ordered the cop in charge, “see if there’s vomit.”

Cyrus, who had made it back to the patrol car, returned to Marion, reconnoitered a
position where he could get down on his hands and knees and move his head between
hers and mine, got down so low his head was on the grass and his hat fell off, and
tried to peer into her mouth. His picture got taken in that posture, too.

“Oh, God, Cyrus,” said the other cop, “sit her up, would you?”

Cyrus and the student each took Marion under the shoulder and twisted her and rolled
her until they could hold her torso in some semblance of a right angle to her legs.
There was no sign of vomit on her lips, her chin, her sweater, at least none that
I could detect. There was, nevertheless, a round of murmurs from the gathering of
students. It grew stronger until the cop, perhaps thinking that none of this was going
to be worth the effort of filling out forms and making court appearances, not to mention
responding to media and department inquiries, gave up. “All right,” he said without
bothering to look himself, “I’ll accept what you’re saying. Go. Take her to the hospital.
But,” he added, straightening up and kicking me with the side of his foot, “this one’s
not driving.”

“No problem,” said the intrepid third-year, and within seconds I was bundled, pushed,
and folded into the backseat of the Audi, my legs behind the driver’s seat, my hips
behind the passenger’s seat. The cop leaned in the car then and looked directly into
my face as if intent on remembering it. “I understand you got some powerful friends,
boy.” He waited a beat. “I just want you to know you got some powell-ful enemies,
too.”

Did he say “Powell-ful”? Did I really hear him say that? I could not be sure, but
before I could formulate the question he was gone and the other students were loading
Marion into the front seat like a large sack of cement, and then the third-year himself
got behind the wheel, strapped himself in, made sure Marion was strapped in, called
“Thank you” to the cops and “Bye” to his friends, and wheeled onto the street.

We went a block and a half to Washington and turned right, heading for the Parkway.
I was too stunned to say anything, and then I
noticed our driver trying to catch my eye in the rearview mirror. “How did I do?”
he asked.

“Fantastic,” I said. I was about to express admiration, gratitude, wonder at what
had just taken place, when he derailed me with a laugh and a quick glance into the
seat next to him.

I knew it was coming the instant before it happened. There was a movement, then a
tumble of dark hair, then one dancing eye peering around the curve of the seat back.
“And how did
I
do?” said Marion.

I
LEFT GEORGE WASHINGTON IN MAY AND NEVER RETURNED. I TRANSFERRED
to a school in Boston. I had hoped to get into Boston College, but even with a strong
letter of recommendation from the Senator, I wasn’t able to overcome the D I had gotten
in civil procedure.

The school to which I went was fine, and while it may not have had the same prestige
as GW, it allowed me the freedom not to fret quite so much about who was watching
me, grading me, pulling me over in the middle of the night. Two years later, I graduated,
sat for the bar, hung around my mother’s house in New Jersey awaiting the results,
and when I was sworn in as an attorney I got a call from Chuck, Chuck Larson, telling
me to apply to the Cape & Islands district attorney for a job.

CAPE COD, April 2008

“
A
NYTHING NEW
?”

“You know, Mr. Telford,” I said as I watched him climb onto the long-legged chair
next to mine, “if you don’t stop coming here, I’m going to have to.”

I wanted him to know I was not joking. “I like this restaurant, I like sitting at
the bar, I like having John mix me a Manhattan. I like, most of all, that I’m not
working when I’m here.”

Bill Telford kept his eyes on the television as he completed his personal seating
arrangement. The Bruins were on, game seven of the first round of the playoffs, and
while Mr. Telford dutifully watched, he didn’t say anything pithy or knowledgeable,
the way a real hockey fan might.

John asked him what he wanted, and he said he would like a nice cup of coffee. This
got barely a grunt out of John.

I turned back to my meal, steak tips over rice.

“I didn’t hear anything from you,” he said.

“I didn’t have anything to report.”

“I heard you went to see the chief.”

I dropped my fork, let it clang against the crockery. The two of us sat there staring
at ten men slapping a disk up and down the ice, pausing
in their pursuit only long enough to slam one another into the boards and occasionally
grab one another by the sweater.

“None of my stuff was there, was it?”

“Mr. Telford, you obviously don’t need me. You know everything already.”

He got his coffee, turned the mug so that the handle was to the right, and poured
in a fair amount of sugar. “Just wanted to confirm it.”

“So I was, what, an experiment? A mine canary? If you’ve got friends in the police
department, why don’t you just ask one of them if anything’s going into the files?”

Mr. Telford stirred his sugar into his coffee, being careful not to let his spoon
crack against the sides of his mug. “I wanted you to see for yourself.”

“Why?” But I knew I was asking a question to which I probably did not want the answer.

“Because, Mr. Becket, you’re a decent guy and my last hope.”

He fixed me with his blue-gray eyes and let them linger, even when I looked away.
Perhaps he realized a commercial was on the television screen and there was nothing
else to capture my attention. I tried focusing on my food, which did not seem as appetizing
as it had a few minutes earlier. I decided I was, indeed, going to find a new place
for dinner. Maybe I would even start cooking at home. Get microwave meals, sit by
myself in front of the television, eat off a tray table.

“Mr. Telford, I’m just someone doing a job, that’s all. I’ve got no pull in the office,
no say. I sit in a little dungeon in the basement and I do what I’m told, okay? So
if you think I’m your best hope, you might as well forget it.”

“You talked Mitch White into letting you look at the file.”

“Honest to God, Mr. Telford, you’re so much more on top of things than I am, why don’t
you just use all these other resources you have, go about your business, and leave
me alone?”

Did I say that too loud? Is that why John looked up at me from down the bar?

But Mr. Telford was unperturbed. “My resources,” he said, “as you call ’em, are mostly
people like me, support people who lived here all
their lives doing the jobs that allow other folks to come down and have a good time
for a few weeks every year. I want to get a plumber to my place seven o’clock in the
morning, I can do that. I want to plant a cactus in my yard, I got no doubt I can
get somebody to look the other way. But that only gets me so far. It doesn’t get me
into the files.”

“Both the district attorney and the chief of police know who you are. They know the
case isn’t solved and the file is still open.”

“Sure. They see me coming, they smile and say, ‘Hi, Bill,’ ‘Sure thing, Bill,’ ‘Get
right on it, Bill.’ Then they never do anything.” He sipped from his mug, put it back
on the bar. “Which you just proved.”

I tried to go back to watching the game, but he stayed where he was, his head hanging
slightly, holding on to the mug handle like a tired swimmer. I finished my drink,
pushed my plate forward, signaled to John that I was ready to go.

“I don’t know what’s been Goin’ on in your life, Mr. Becket,” he said suddenly. “But
I’m willing to bet something has.”

“Yeah, the Bruins are getting the crap kicked out of them, the Celtics lost last night,
and I’m glad baseball is under way so the Red Sox can prove that winning last year’s
championship was a total fluke.”

“Guy like you,” he said, “young, good-looking, talented, you clearly could be doing
something more than sitting in the basement of some backwater prosecutor’s office.”

I thanked him for his observation and he nodded as though my thanks were genuine.

John sidled over. “You done with that meal, Counselor? You want a doggy bag or anything?”
I shook my head and made a little check mark in the air. He cut his eyes to Mr. Telford,
indicating he knew exactly why I wasn’t eating, why I couldn’t enjoy my drink and
the game in solitude. Guy comes in, orders a coffee, ruins everything for everyone.
All that was expressed in one side glance.

Mr. Telford waited until John went back to the kitchen with my plate before he spoke
again. “You know, it’s funny. My Heidi wanted to do so much with her life and didn’t
get the chance, and here you are, you got the opportunity to do wonderful things,
and what do you do instead? Sit around watching other guys play games on television.”

I grimaced. Kept my mouth shut. The guy had lost his daughter.

“Do that much longer,” he said, “you won’t have any other options. Maybe you could
take up fishing. Stand out on the jetty every night with all those guys, got nothing
else to do.”

“Look, Mr. Telford, I’m sorry for your loss. I really am. But that doesn’t give you
the right to track me down, try to make me do what you want by insulting me.”

“Why do you suppose none of the tips I been giving Mitch are in the police file? Why
do you suppose they never followed up on any of ’em?”

“Maybe it’s because the stuff you’re giving them isn’t really helpful.”

“The stuff I’m giving them is about the Gregorys.”

That was the moment when I could have left. Should have left. John had emerged from
the kitchen and was at the cash register at the end of the bar, totaling me up. I
could have gotten off my chair and walked down to where he was, given him my money,
gotten out of the restaurant without another word passing between Mr. Telford and
me. But that is not what I did. Instead, I looked around.

There was an overweight couple a few seats down the bar in the opposite direction
from the cash register. Behind us, there was a table occupied by a family and the
parents were making a fair amount of noise telling their two kids to sit, be still,
stop kicking, eat their french fries.

I looked back at Mr. Telford. His head may have been hanging low, but his eyes were
piercing right through me, almost daring me to leave. Go ahead, George, get up and
go. Go join Mitch White and Cello DiMasi in whatever circle of hell is reserved for
those who choose not to do the right thing, who cover up for people who really don’t
give a damn about them.

John appeared in front of me, a slip of paper in his hand. I ordered another Manhattan.
John got a funny look on his face, but he took the paper back and went to do what
I asked.

“All right, Mr. Telford, tell me what it is you think you’ve discovered.”

“Let me start by asking you something,” he said.

He made me look at him. The blue-gray eyes, I saw now, had dark rings around the irises.

“You’re a lifeguard,” he said, “working Dowses Beach here in Osterville, and you want
to grab something on your way home to Hyannis, a snack or whatever. Where you likely
to stop?”

How would I know? I wasn’t a lifeguard. Except there was really only one way to go
from Dowses to Hyannis. Leave the beach parking lot, take East Bay Road to Main. Turn
east.

He pointed in that direction. “It’s just down the street.” We were on Main. “Next
corner, really.”

I made him tell me.

“The Bon Faire Market.”

I knew it, of course. An upscale grocery that had once been a house. Either that or
it was so old that it had been built in a day when markets were made to look like
houses. If you wanted French cheeses, sculpted cuts of meat, jams that cost nine bucks
a jar, fruits and vegetables that looked like works of art, Bon Faire was the place
to go.

“Owned by the Ross family,” Mr. Telford said. “Nice people, but they know their clientele.
You can’t blame ’em. They’re not going to push the most famous family on the Cape
out their doors by talking about them.”

My drink came, and with it my revised check. It felt like a secret message: Get out
of here, George. Drink up and go before the crazy old man ties you to his car and
drags you bump, bump, bump through all the torturous streets and potholed lanes of
our precious little seaside community.

“They got fresh-baked cookies, those flavored waters, little energy bars, you name
it. So the police check and, sure enough, one of the Ross family girls—Rachel, her
name is—had a memory of Heidi going in there on her last day. Thing is, she can’t
remember anything else.” Bill Telford raised his mug to his lips and took a sip. He
made a face, which I assumed was because the coffee was not to his liking. But then
he said, “You probably want to know why that’s important, Heidi being in there. Well,
it’s one of those things that only her mother and me would know about, and it took
us a long time to put it together.”

“You think she met one of the Gregorys in the store.”

“Well, by God, it didn’t take you long.”