Crime of Privilege: A Novel (26 page)

“You want me to sponsor your bike ride?”

All I had to say was that I was doing the ride myself, but I didn’t. I looked down
the hallway instead, hoping someone else would come along and demand my attention.

“Well, not you by yourself. I’ve got every prosecutor in the office to put up a hundred
bucks.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone except Mitch. Got Cunningham and O’Connor, though. I just haven’t seen you
around for a few days. That’s why I’m getting to you last.”

“You got Barbara Belbonnet?”

“Sure. It’s for a good cause, George. Children’s cancer fund.” He was beginning to
falter in his bonhomie, as if he had known all along that I wasn’t going to do what
everyone else had done.

I signed the form he held out to me. Pledged $100. I was now into the ride for $2,600.

KAUAI, July 2008

F
LYING FROM BOSTON TO HAWAII CAN BE A VERY LONG JOURNEY
if you don’t like the person you are with. Especially if that person is you.

Things did not improve once I arrived. Perhaps I thought it would be like Bermuda:
hop on a motor scooter and cruise the entire island in an hour.

The airport was small, one story, and there seemed to be a dearth of walls, but there
were plenty of people, and while most were in tropical clothing, virtually everyone
was too intent on finding someone or someplace to help out a stranger who apparently
thought he had landed in some Polynesian Mayberry.

It took me more than an hour to rent a car because I had not thought to reserve one,
being under the illusion that I was going to take a taxi into town. “Which town?”
the first cabdriver asked in response to my question, and I knew I was in trouble.

I told him I was staying in Princeville.

He shook his head as if there was something wrong with me. “Long way, man. Cheaper
to rent da car than take da cab.”

So I did.

At least the hotel was nice, and it had a concierge named Ki’anna, a dark-hued, zaftig
young woman with waist-length black hair, who assured me she knew everything that
was worth knowing about the island. One thing she didn’t know was the whereabouts
of a man named Howard Landry. She did the logical thing and looked him up in the phone
book. No Howard Landry was listed. She went to her computer and found no reference
to Howard Landry there. I would have despaired except I was beyond that point. I just
stood in the open-air lobby and wondered what I was going to do next.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. I had the option of walking a quarter-mile
down to the beach, which, from where the hotel was, perched on top of a cliff, did
not look as nice as a Hawaiian beach was supposed to look, or going to the pool and
having a waiter bring me drinks.

I went to my room, changed into a bathing suit, and walked back to the pool, which
had various arms and inlets and vaguely Asian-style pedestrian bridges and which dominated
the grounds. I dove in, swam a half-dozen laps without disturbing the water for the
wild children and passive adults who were using the pool for everything but swimming,
then climbed out and dropped onto a lounge chair. I was in Hawaii and someone else
was paying for it. I should relax, take my time. I didn’t have to do everything in
an afternoon.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of Barbara Belbonnet in those long-legged, incredibly
tight jeans. It did not work. My eyes would not stay closed. And the noise around
me was cacophonous. Kids, swarms of them, were trying to climb on inflatable floats,
an activity that seemed to require shrill yelling that cut out only when their heads
went underwater. I heard parents laughing as they hung on to the edge of the pool,
holding exotic drinks with straws and umbrellas and chunks of fruit impaled on little
plastic swords. Everyone seemed happy but me.

I ordered a mai tai, hoping it would make me feel better. The glass came filled with
ice and the drink disappeared in a matter of seconds. I ordered a Primo beer because
I figured the bartender couldn’t water that, and I kept right on ordering them. I
was on my fourth and
thinking about Barbara without employing half as much effort as before when Ki’anna
the concierge appeared at my side with a lovely smile.

“I found your guy,” she said, the smile growing even lovelier. “Whyn’t you tell me
you looking for Cap’n Howie?”

T
HE PROBLEM WITH LOCATING CAPTAIN HOWIE WAS THAT HE
was no longer where Ki’anna had known him to be. Not to worry, she assured me. She
had gone to school with some of the island’s policemen and she would make some calls.

It took more than a day to find him in Poipu Beach, on the opposite side of the island,
about as far away from Princeville as he could be. He had been a boat captain once.
Now he ran a small condominium complex that provided units as vacation rentals.

The Hana Palms was three stories high, built of nondescript stucco and situated directly
above a rocky beach. It had a parking lot in front and a small fenced-in swimming
pool with a concrete deck between the lot and the building. Although there were a
few cars in the lot, there did not appear to be any people around at all.

A breezeway led to the ocean side, where a green lawn looked nicer than it felt on
bare feet. I retraced my steps and saw what I had missed on my first pass, a living
quarters off the breezeway that doubled as an office. I opened a screen door in which
part of the screen was separated from the frame. A bell tinkled above my head and
a minute later a shirtless man appeared at a counter set up in the front room.

“Aloha,” he said, as if he was challenging me to a fight.

I figured I had my man. I asked if he was Cap’n Howie, just to make sure.

“Some call me that.”

“You also known as Detective Landry?”

The man’s eyebrows rose as slowly as an elevator.

I went right to the point. “Chief DiMasi told me I could find you here.”

I showed him my card. He inspected it and said, “You wanna rent a condo?” There was
just a bit of hope in the question.

“No. I need to talk to you about a case you worked on years ago.”

The man put his hands on the counter and tilted back like a water skier. He had a
long, lean torso, with white hairs sprouting from his chest and a few from his shoulders.
He was clean-shaven, but the hair on his head was sparse and blown about at various
angles. He could have been seventy. He could also have been no more than sixty. “Got
telephone service. Got email. Even got teleconference things these days. No need to
fly all the way here just to talk to me.”

“This is a special case.”

Howard Landry could have done a lot of things at that moment. My own options were
limited. If he had told me to get lost I probably would have had to go back to Princeville
and drink whatever Primos were still available at the bar. But he spared me that.
He asked if I wanted a beer right there.

WE SAT ON LOUNGE
chairs facing the ocean. The lawn chairs had plastic cross-straps, some of which
were broken. Ahead of us, the water was rough and sapphire blue. I wasn’t used to
the color. On the Cape the water tends to be green when it isn’t gray. And if it ever
is blue, it is only from a distance and more cobalt than sapphire.

Landry didn’t give me a Primo, he gave me a Sam Adams. “Taste of home,” he said, as
if Sam Adams was a treat for me, and we clinked bottle necks because I was still being
polite.

“How long you been here?” I asked, settling in.

“Seven years,” he said without looking at me.

“Like it?”

“It’s fuckin’ paradise, isn’t it?” He didn’t sound like it was paradise.

I took a diversionary approach with my next question, trying to
make nice with a statement that clearly wasn’t true. “You look pretty young for a
man who’s been retired seven years.”

“Took it early. When I was fifty. I’d put in twenty-five years. Figured that was enough.”

“Your last big case was the Heidi Telford murder, huh?”

“That what you’re here about?” He still hadn’t looked at me, not since we’d touched
bottles.

“Remember her father?”

“Anything New.”

“That’s right. He’s still looking.”

“Must be a nutcase by now.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You dwell that much, let it take over your life, wipes out everything else. I know.
Believe me, I seen it happen.” He took a long pull on his beer. “What’s he come up
with now?”

“A girl who was at the Gregory compound on the night Heidi died.”

Landry held the bottle to his lips. Without lowering it, he said, “You talkin’ about
the babysitter?”

“I’m talking about one of the girls who went to the Gregorys’ to party after the race.”

The bottle stayed. Landry talked around it. “There wasn’t no party.”

“But you checked it out, didn’t you? I was told, I was told by the Gregorys themselves,
that you were asking them questions.”

That threw him. Like McFetridge, he had to figure out if I was friend or foe. “I asked
questions of everybody I could find.”

“Thing was, I looked in the file. Didn’t mention the Gregorys. Didn’t say anything
one way or the other about a party.”

Landry lowered the bottle. He had his answer now. He turned his head and leveled his
eyes on me. They were more or less a washed-out blue, and I doubted they were ever
used to show merriment. “I didn’t put down every false lead I had.”

“It seemed to me you started off chasing every possible lead, whether it was false
or not. Then all of a sudden you stopped.”

“I stopped because I wasn’t getting nowhere.”

I gave him a number of nods, each one meant to be a strand of false
hope. I said, “It’s unusual, though, to see that much diligence up to a point, and
then almost nothing after that. Wouldn’t you agree, detective?”

He obviously had not been called detective in a long time. It brought him up short.
Made him blink. “You wanna tell me what in particular you’re complaining about?”

“What I just said. Looking through the file, it was almost as if something happened
somewhere along the line and you decided to close down the investigation.”

“I didn’t close it. I handed it off to Pooch.”

“Detective Iacupucci.”

“That’s right. Pooch.”

“Did he do anything with it?”

“Don’t know. I left.”

“And no one ever got in touch with you after you left?”

“That’s right.”

“That strike you as curious?”

“I don’t know. I never been retired before.”

I smiled, as if he had made a good joke. He did not smile back. He was looking at
me warily. It was probably the look he had developed when he was about to arrest somebody
and was thinking that a weapon might get pulled. I stopped smiling. It wasn’t doing
me any good.

“File lists every friend, friend of friend, waiter, shopkeeper you talked to, but
you never so much as mentioned the Gregorys. Why was that, detective?”

“Case as serious as that one,” he said, “you wanna be careful what you put down. Never
know who’s gonna read it.”

“You thought the wrong people might read the police file?”

“I think, counselor,” he said, dragging out the last word, paying me back for calling
him detective, “things work in funny ways back in the Bay State. The Cape, in particular.”

“So you were doing a little preventive maintenance, is that it? Deciding what should
go in the file and what shouldn’t.”

“Something like that.”

“And the chief, did you tell the chief what you didn’t put in the file?”

“Depends. After a while you don’t keep reporting that you got nothing to report.”

I tried to keep the questions coming. Hit him with another as soon as he was done
answering the one before. It was a basic courtroom technique. “You tell him what the
people at the Gregory compound said?”

“Don’t recall.”

“He told me you couldn’t find everyone who was there that night.”

“So?”

“So you couldn’t find everyone; you must have found someone.”

Landry drank his beer, staring along the barrel of his bottle while he followed the
logic.

“Who did you find?” I pressed.

“Gimme some names and I’ll tell you.”

“Peter Martin; Ned, Jamie, and Cory Gregory; Paul McFetridge; Jason Stockover.”

“That it?”

“A girl named Patty Afantakis.”

He didn’t ask who she was. He asked if I had talked to her. I said I had.

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. She wouldn’t tell me anything, except it was clear she was there.”

He nodded. “Anybody else?”

“Patty said she was with a girl named Leanne.”

“You talk to her?”

“Nope. Haven’t found her yet.”

Landry finished off the bottle and threw it on the lawn. His own lawn. I looked at
mine and saw I had barely gotten beyond the first sip.

“All right, counselor,” he said, his voice suddenly very taut, “you want to know what
was going on? Fine, I’ll tell you. Ned Gregory was fucking his babysitter, that’s
what. His whachucallit, his au pair. Eighteen-year-old beauty who happened to be the
daughter of a guy who owns a nationwide chain of movie theaters and contributes a
zillion bucks a year to all the Gregory campaigns. And Ned’s got a wife and three
kids and being groomed to run for some office himself and
there he is, layin’ pipe with the girl who’s supposed to be watching his children
while his wife’s away. You get the picture now, pal?”

“So you were covering up.”

“You wanna call it that. It didn’t have nothin’ to do with the investigation. So you
put something down in writing, all it does is embarrass the people who pay for the
Little League fields and the skating rink and underwrite the summer Pops concerts,
what’s it gonna get you?”

“You don’t put it down, maybe it gets you retirement in Hawaii.”

We were dangerously close to a physical confrontation. I was pointed toward the ocean,
but out of the corner of my eye I could see his fist balled. I tensed. If the fist
came flying, I was going to hit him over the head with the bottle I was still holding.
Until then, I was going to keep looking at the water.