Crime of Privilege: A Novel (34 page)

Was Jason like Paul McFetridge, the Paul I used to know? Not so much Mr. La-de-da
as Mr. I’ve Got Everything? Mr. Of Course You’ll Do This For Me. Here, love, go off
to Hawaii and live with Howard for a while. Then come back. I’ve got this nice little
place in Central America, and I’ll be waiting for you.

Hard to figure.

How do you get someone like Leanne to live with a man like Howard? For years. Was
it possible she really did love him? Jason and then Howard and then Jason again. Maybe
Bob the Exterminator in between.

Maybe she didn’t love any of them. In which case, who was she doing all this for?
The Senator? Was that possible? The Senator was rumored to have a ravenous appetite
when it came to women, but I had never witnessed that myself. When would I have? I
had seen him only the one time in Florida. And then I had spent the rest of my life
doing his bidding.

Living in a nice place.

Sort of like Tamarindo. Or Kauai. Or Stanley, Idaho.

All nice places where the people involved never expected to live. People not guilty
themselves. People guarding someone else’s secret.

A leg appeared next to me. A very shapely leg attached to a small, very shapely foot.
The owner of the leg had not approached from the beach, but from the dunes and trees
behind me. It was possible. There was a path that led from the street, went through
a thicket of pines and then forked, one way to the estuary, one way to the ocean.
I saw the leg, I thought of the condom, I looked up.

Squinting into the sun, I did not make her out right away. A woman with a short white
skirt, a yellow halter top, a broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses with sharp edges. The
sharp edges gave her away. I leaped to my feet.

“Thought you were in Hawaii,” she said.

I glanced around to see if her husband was with her, to see if anybody was with her.

“Just got back.”

Why was she looking at me that way? And how did she get so short? Was her body always
that compact? I tried to remember if I had ever stood next to her before. I certainly
had never seen her when she wasn’t wearing something frumpish, something designed
to make her look like wallpaper.

It was possible, just possible, that she was not wearing a bra under that halter top.
No, that wasn’t possible. Not Mitch White’s wife. I didn’t know where to look. I tried
the sand.

“He said you went to talk to Detective Landry.”

Where had she come from? She lived in Dennis, to the east. They had their own beaches
in Dennis.

“Hello?” She had a canvas bag over her shoulder. It dropped to the sand, exactly where
my eyes were focused. Apparently she was going to stay.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, it’s because of that guy Bill Telford.”

“Anything New.”

“Yes.” I tried looking at the sea. There were a couple of groups of people down at
the water’s edge. Maybe she had come with one of them. Except she had come up to me
from behind.

“What did you learn?”

What did I learn? What did she know? What was I supposed to tell my boss’s wife? “Not
much.”

She pushed me. She put her open hand on my bare chest and gave me a slight shove.
“C’mon, George. There’s some reason why you stayed as long as you did. By the looks
of you, you must have been mauled by tiger sharks.”

She was talking about my bruises, my splinter marks, my black-and-blues, and the cut
on my neck.

Her hand went to my elbow and stayed there. It was a cool hand, and it was making
me sweat. I went from looking at the sea to looking at the sky to looking at her.
She was having no trouble looking at me. Jesus, Stephanie White was doing a woman
thing on me. “You know,” she said, her hand staying where it was, “you have Mitch
quite worried.”

“About what?” I wiped my mouth. I kept not looking at her yellow top. I wanted to
sit down.

“He says your friend is going to run against him. Mitch is afraid you’re not quite
as loyal as he would like a member of his office to be.”

“Mrs. White—” Her hand squeezed my elbow tighter and I stopped. Perspiration was beginning
to bead along my hairline.

“Oh, it’s Mrs. White now, is it? I’m not so much older than you that you have to call
me that, am I?”

If she had enough confidence to play men like she was playing me, what in God’s name
was she doing with a dweeb like Mitch? “Stephanie—”

“That’s better.” She may have moved an inch or two closer to me. It was getting harder
and harder not to look directly into her face.

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but your husband and I aren’t exactly friends.
He’s stuck with me because someone called in a favor—”

“The Senator.”

“Yes.”

“And you know, of course, that Mitch owes his own job to the Senator.”

“I’d say that’s the common belief here on the Cape.”

“Mitch was a staff attorney on the Senate Judiciary Committee down in D.C., did you
know that?”

“I’ve been told that, yes.”

“Were you also told he got the Senator out of a jam?”

“I figured it was something like that.”

“Sort of like you did.”

It was time for me to look away again. The wind, I saw, was beginning to pick up on
the water. Tiny waves were being formed. I knew the pattern. They would get bigger.

“Which means”—her fingers moved, encircling my arm a little higher than the elbow
and then pulling me toward her—“the two of you ought to be working in common interest,
don’t you think?”

“Stephanie, do you know what I do for your husband? Do you know how long I’ve been
doing it?”

“What I know is that Buzzy Daizell used to sleep with your wife.”

The touch on my arm was no longer cool. Now it was like the handcuffs that had been
put on me in Costa Rica. “Maybe that’s why we’re no longer married,” I said.

“Is it? Because I saw you and her go into the bathroom of my house that time. I thought,
man, what kind of couple is this? They go screw in someone else’s bathroom? They couldn’t
even wait till they got home?”

Screw
. Stephanie White, my boss’s wife, said “screw.” I didn’t know where she had come
from, why she was dressed this way, why she was addressing me the way she was. I didn’t
know what to say.

“She had issues.” I spoke over the top of her head. Over her hat. “She liked bathrooms.”

“I started thinking about you differently then. I started wondering what you were
really like, George.”

I apparently gave something away because Stephanie’s mouth twisted. Did her hand squeeze
me again? I pulled my arm away, just in case. “You thought I liked my wife having
sex with other guys?”

“I thought maybe you had an open marriage.” From the way she tilted her head, I gathered
I was to understand she was casting no judgments.

Stephanie, the sharp-featured ice queen, was open-minded about
open marriages. Stephanie, who was married to a guy with a preposterous mustache and
a wardrobe full of short-sleeved white shirts. What was she doing? What was she offering
the swinger in her husband’s basement? The perspiration rolled down my sides.

“And then it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe you didn’t know
what was really going on.”

I felt a strange relief when she said that. My body temperature seemed to drop two
or three degrees in an instant. “So you’re telling me now in case I’m supporting Buzzy
against your husband.”

“Because if you are, George, his affair with your wife is going to come out. And I
suspect it won’t just be him who’s embarrassed.”

“Are you threatening me, Mrs. White?”

“I’m just saying, George, there are reasons why we should work together.”

“You’ve got my secret. Tell me yours.”

It was her turn to be surprised. Or at least to act it. “What makes you think I have
one?”

“I think Mitch does.”

She shook her head. “Well, if that’s true, you’re not getting it out of me.”

She was still standing close, closer than a stranger would, closer than a boss’s wife
should. A sudden breeze came up and blew back her hat. She threw her hand to her head
to hold it on and her back arched and there was no longer any doubt about what was
and was not under her yellow tank top.

I had a moment, or maybe she gave me a moment, and then she took off the hat and spent
some time straightening her hair before she put it back on. Hair that I always thought
was mousy was now glimmering in the sun. “You’re a strange man, Mr. Becket,” she said.

Not half as strange as you, I thought.

She went from straightening her hair and her hat to straightening her skirt. “I have
a question for you,” she said. She positioned herself directly in front of me again.
She did it deliberately. Everything she was doing was deliberate. “What do you think
is going to happen to my husband if he loses his job?”

“Get another one.”

“Here? On the Cape? He’s not from here, you know.”

“Former D.A. He’ll have criminal clients flocking to him.”

“Let’s not kid ourselves, George. Mitch is not a courtroom lawyer. And he doesn’t
exactly have a lot of friends in this area.”

“Except the Senator.”

“That’s right. And the Senator wants Mitch to stay in his job. So why is it that you,
as the Senator’s other friend, are trying to keep him from doing that?”

“I’m not. I’m trying to find out who killed Heidi Telford.”

“That’s not quite what you told Mitch was your reason for going to Hawaii, was it?”

I was telling so many half-truths these days it was hard to remember what I had said
to whom.

“Your reason for talking to Howard Landry wasn’t so you could help Mitch and it wasn’t
so you could put to rest the rumors that he covered up for the Gregorys, was it, cowboy?”
Her finger thumped my chest. It left a mark. First yellow, then red. “Don’t think,”
she said, her finger lingering, “we don’t know what’s going on.”

We?
Who was we? She and Mitch?

Stephanie’s hand came up and I flinched, remembering what had happened with Leanne
in Costa Rica. But this time the touch against the side of my face was gentle. “So
what I want to know is,” she said softly, “what you’ve found out.”

I let her hand stay. I looked directly into her sunglasses again and said, “I’ve found
out that Heidi was at the Gregory compound that night.”

Nothing changed. The hand did not move.

“That she was probably there with Peter Martin. That in all likelihood Jamie Gregory
and Jason Stockover and maybe Paul McFetridge and possibly Ned Gregory know exactly
what happened to her and how she ended up on a golf course with her head stove in.”

Was there a change now? Did her fingers curl so that her nails were digging into my
cheek ever so slightly?

“And I’ve found out that Howard Landry was just about to put this all together when
he was whisked away to Hawaii with promises that
his every fantasy would come true. Just, Mrs. White”—I took her hand away, let it
drop—“like you are trying to do to me.”

“You flatter me, George.”

I couldn’t see behind the dark lenses, but I imagined her eyelids fluttering. There
was a hint of that in her voice. She laughed suddenly, and there was a hint of flutter
there, too.

“I have a proposition for you, Georgie.”

“No.” I said it quickly.

She laughed again. “That wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was, what if I could get
you promoted within the office? What if I could get you promoted to felonies?”

“You?”

“Well, Mitch isn’t going to come right out and tell you. It would look too much like
what you think he’s been doing already. But if you believe Buzzy Daizell has a better
position waiting for you, maybe we could head that off. Get you the same thing without
changing ad”—she touched my chest—“mini”—she touched me again—“strations.”

“You’re making me an offer?”

“It can be made to happen.” She turned her shoulder slightly, moved her chin so that
it was aligned with her shoulder. All edges and angles.

“In exchange for what?”

“In exchange for reporting to whoever you’re reporting to just what you’ve found.
Which is nothing.”

I leaned down until my face was so close to hers that her lips opened in expectation,
and then I said, “She was just a young girl, Stephanie.”

There was a moment of complete stillness. And then Stephanie White spoke as if we
were two adults trying to solve a problem, two adults who just happened to be inches
apart from each other. “It was a horrible thing and nobody is trying to say it wasn’t.
But trying to pin it on the Gregorys is wrong.”

“And is that because none of them did it?”

She heard the taunt and she understood it. “It’s because all you’re doing is playing
into the hands of some right-wing extremist who’s trying to get revenge on the Senator.”

“You know who this extremist is?”

She hesitated. “You know who it is.”

“Who?” I demanded.

“Josh David Powell. Isn’t that who’s behind Buzzy’s campaign?”

I wondered how so many people seemed to know so much. I wondered, for a moment, what
I was doing trying to be involved at any level. But my head was still tilted forward,
my face was still nearly against hers, so close that I had only to whisper. “What
do you know about Josh David Powell?”

“I know you’re his stooge, George. You and all that guilt you’ve stored up over what
happened in Florida. He’s playing you, and I’m just telling you, if you allow this
to keep going, everybody’s going to get burned—you, Mitch, the Senator, the Gregory
kids, your meat-head friend Buzzy. And none of it is going to result in the real killer
getting caught.”

“She was at the house, Stephanie. She was there the night she was killed.”

“And then she was gone. Pushed out the side gate because she wouldn’t put out, okay?
It’s not very nice, it’s not very pretty, it doesn’t look good for the Gregorys, but
that’s what happened. So yes, one or two of them have some responsibility because
they put her in a position where she got picked up by someone on her way home. But
they weren’t the ones who killed her.”