Crime of Privilege: A Novel (35 page)

“And so we should protect them?”

“And so we shouldn’t turn this into something more than it is, all right? Gregorys
act bad sometimes, but they don’t go around killing people.”

She dipped her knees then, managing to do it without coming into contact with me and
without ever taking her eyes off mine. She came up holding the canvas bag. “There
are things my husband will do, George. You can say it’s for the greater good. You
can say it’s for his own self-interest. But they’re no different than what any of
the rest of us are doing. Understand?”

Her hand went onto my chest one more time and pushed. I staggered back, not because
I had to but to give us both some room. She twirled her finger. “Now turn around,”
she said. “I have to get dressed.”

M
Y EYES POPPED OPEN. I STARED THROUGH THE WINDOW THAT
faced the backyard. Something was out there. Something was moving. A critter bigger
than my friend the squirrel. But it was not the noise that woke me. It was the thought
of Stephanie White. The suddenly sexual, suddenly direct, suddenly forceful Stephanie,
who seemed to know so much about me and what I had done.

Who was informing her? Mitch could have told her about Hawaii, about Detective Landry,
but if Mitch knew about Marion he did not need to send his wife to talk to me about
her affair with Buzzy. And if Mitch knew about Palm Beach and Josh David Powell, why
had it never come up before?

And those thoughts led to a question that would keep me up the rest of the night.
I looked out the window, I looked at the ceiling, I buried my head in the pillow,
and I asked myself over and over who she was really protecting.

B
ARBARA LOOKED SURPRISED. THEN SHE SMILED. SHE LIT UP
the room with her smile. She came over to me, took both my hands in hers, and said,
“You’re back.”

I was, of course, back. I acknowledged as much with a squeeze of her hands and then
let go.

“Did it all work out? Did you get everything you were looking for?”

“I’d say so. Pretty much, anyhow.”

“You saw Jason?”

“Oh, sure. He says hi.”

“He did?”

“Absolutely. Asked about Tyler, too.”

Barbara Belbonnet stood in front of me looking puzzled.

We didn’t get any further because one of the secretaries came in and said Mitch wanted
to see me right away. I was being called to the principal’s office.

MITCH WHITE SAT
looking lost in his big leather swivel chair. Reid Cunningham sat in one wing chair
at the side of his desk; Dick O’Connor sat in another on the other side. It occurred
to me that something had changed since I last appeared in this office; that maybe
I was about to get fired, after all.

“How was the trip?” Dick asked. He was a heavyset man, fat really, thinner in the
chest than around the waist. He wore black-framed glasses and a black-and-white checked
sport coat. He smiled. Dick was a man who had perfected the art of smiling without
meaning it.

“Very productive,” I said. I was hoping to throw them off guard.

Mitch fiddled with the arm of his chair. Since the arm was covered with smooth leather,
he had very little with which to fiddle. So his fingers just splayed and twitched.
Dick continued smiling. Reid stared. I was not part of Reid’s team and he and I had
almost no relationship at all.

“Tell us what you learned,” Dick said. He raised and lowered a hand, like he was inviting
a third-grader to describe his summer vacation.

“I learned that on the night Heidi Telford died, Ned Gregory, then married and the
father of three kids, was in bed with his eighteen-year-old au pair.”

No reaction.

“I learned that Howard Landry found out about this and informed, at the very least,
Chief DiMasi. I learned that he was told not to record that anywhere, not to tell
anyone.”

“Except he told you,” Reid Cunningham said. He was a man with a military haircut and
a military bearing. As far as I knew, he had never been in the military. He liked
to swim long distances in the ocean.

“It’s been, what? Nine years? And Howard Landry is a broken man.”

“Broken in what way?” It was Reid again. He appeared to be assuming control of the
interview. Or interrogation. Whatever it was.

“He ran off with one of the people he was investigating in connection with the Telford
murder, one of the people who was at the Gregorys’ that night, a young woman named
Leanne Sullivan. That’s who got him to take early retirement, move to Hawaii.”

I was standing in front of Mitch’s desk. Nobody had asked me to sit. Now nobody asked
me anything at all. I stuck a hand in my pocket and continued.

“Then she dumped him,” I said. “Went off to Costa Rica to join up
with another one of the people who was at the Gregorys’ when Heidi Telford died. Howard
took to the bottle after that.”

The ruling triumvirate of the Cape & Islands district attorney’s office did not seem
pleased by what I was telling them. Even Dick stopped smiling, although he looked
as though he might take up the effort again if given even the slightest reason to
do so.

“Who was this other person, the one in Costa Rica?” Reid wanted to know.

“Jason Stockover.”

“Do you think he had something to do with Heidi Telford’s death?”

“I think everyone who was at the Gregorys’ place that night had something to do with
Heidi’s death.”

Now the senior staff all looked at one another. It began with Mitch cutting a glance
Reid’s way. Dick looked at Mitch, saw where he was looking, and looked that way, too.
Reid, who had gray eyeglasses to match his iron-gray hair, stayed stoic as long as
he could and then slid his eyes to Mitch without moving his lenses.

“You mentioned nine years,” Reid said, speaking to me. “People have been working on
this case all that time and you’ve been messing around with it for how long? Three
months? Most of it without authority. And now, what, you’re ready to solve it?”

“Didn’t say that.”

Reid didn’t like the way I spoke back. His mouth locked up. Then Dick asked kindly,
“What did you say, George?”

“I said there have been a lot of people doing strange things since Heidi Telford’s
death.”

It was hard to tell who was making the little growling noises. Maybe it was me.

“What I have discovered in my four months, Reid,” I said, correcting him, “is that
not only was Heidi Telford at the Senator’s home that night, but so were Jason Stockover;
Leanne Sullivan; a guy named Paul McFetridge; a girl named Patty Afantakis, who was
a friend of Leanne Sullivan’s; and three of the Gregory kids, Ned, Jamie, and Peter
Martin.”

Mitch spoke up for the first time. “You know some of those people, don’t you, George?”

I turned my attention back to him, looking at him directly, seeing how far he wanted
to go in front of his colleagues. “I know Peter. Jamie a little bit. McFetridge was
my college roommate.”

What I was admitting was not lost on the deputies.

“And you think,” Dick said, leaning toward me as far as his stomach would allow, trying
to divert me from Mitch, “that all these people were involved in Heidi’s murder?”

“No.”

Relief showed on Dick’s porcine face. He thought we were ready now to end the discussion,
get on to something more pleasant.

“But I do think, one way or another, they were all involved in hiding the fact that
she was there.”

The smile faded. Dick sat back, defeated.

“Landry, too?” Reid asked.

“Don’t know,” I answered. “The information I’ve gotten so far is that Ned headed him
off, told him the big secret they were hiding had to do with the au pair. Asked him,
in that very Gregory way, if he couldn’t keep it quiet unless he absolutely had to
let it out.” I stopped then. I cut myself off before I related the fact that Mitch
had been part of the decision to keep it quiet. Mr. Fuckhead, as Landry had called
him.

Maybe Reid didn’t know about Mr. Fuckhead, because he went right ahead and asked,
“So Landry agreed? Is that what you’re telling us?”

I nodded. “And he was rewarded with retirement in paradise with the luscious Leanne.”

Dick tried to sum it up. He did it by moving his hand around in the air. “You’re saying
that the people who were at the Senator’s house that night know how Heidi Telford
died, but they threw Detective Landry off the track, and that somehow this Leanne
Sullivan was, what, the bait they used?”

“You got it, Dick.”

What Dick got was a lot of jiggles in his jowls as he mulled that one over. “But,”
he said, and then he said the word a few more times, “you’re not claiming that they
killed her? The Gregorys, I mean.”

I gathered a line was being drawn, at least in Dick’s mind.

Mitch spoke before I could respond. “The Gregory compound is
within walking distance of where Heidi Telford was found,” he said. “Not advisable
to walk there in the dark, and it’s probably especially not advisable if you’re an
attractive girl in a sexy dress.”

I was about to argue that it wasn’t all that sexy a dress when I remembered that Heidi
had not been wearing a bra. Just like Mitch’s wife had not been wearing a bra. The
thought distracted me, made me miss something Mitch was saying. I had to ask him to
repeat it.

My boss looked annoyed. “I said, I understand you may have learned something else
the Gregory boys had to hide. Something about how she may have gotten out of the house.”

Yes, of course, Mitch. You mean what your wife told me about them pushing Heidi through
the side gate because she wouldn’t put out for them?

“It seems,” I said, looking directly at the district attorney so that he would know
I was at least partially answering him, “that most of the people who were at the Senator’s
house that night paired up: Jason and Leanne, McFetridge and Patty, Ned and the au
pair. That left Heidi, Peter, and Jamie.”

Mitch White waited for me to get to what he wanted.

“The autopsy showed Heidi had not been sexually molested.” That was Dick, still trying
to ride to everyone’s rescue.

“And maybe,” I said, “that’s the key. Two guys, one girl.”

No one picked up on it.

“Peter Martin, that guy’s a doctor now,” Dick said, no doubt giving me one more sign
of where this conversation should go.

“And the other one, Jamie, he’s some big-time Wall Street guy now, isn’t he?” This
was Reid’s line. Then his brow clouded. “Bundles up people’s debts or something, then
sells them to other investors, something like that.”

“I heard he’s making a fortune,” said Dick.

And still nobody responded directly to the prospect I had put in front of them. Finally,
however, Mitch sat forward. He actually wheeled his chair to his desk and dropped
his forearms on the big ink blotter, a signal that he was about to take a new approach.
“Look, George,” he said, “you’ve done good work. But most of what you’re telling us,
we knew all along. Not the part about how Landry ended up
in Hawaii, but, yes, we had information about Heidi being at the house. The Gregorys
have been candid with us. And you’re right, they behaved badly.”

I didn’t say they behaved badly, you craven piece of shit. That was something Stephanie
had said.

“The kids were drunk and they were feeling their oats and this townie girl willingly
came to their house looking for a good time—”

Townie
, that’s a good one, Mitch.

“And then she wouldn’t play their little game, hide the salami or whatever—”

Oooh, another good one, Mitch. You must have been listening to a book-on-tape of colloquial
expressions.

“So, yes, they did something they shouldn’t have done. Kicked her out in the middle
of the night. Told her to get home any way she could.” Mitch brought his hands together
and then opened them until they were shoulder-width apart, the universal sign of resignation,
of what-can-you-do? “She was never seen again. They put her in a position of danger,
and they feel terrible.”

Who, I wondered, was talking now? The words were coming out of the district attorney’s
mouth, but who had put them there?

“Let me get this straight, Mitch. You knew Heidi was at the Gregorys’ and you never
told her parents?”

Mitch did the hand movement again, closing them and opening them, although he did
not spread them so wide this time. “Who knows what Bill would do with it?”

Like go to the newspapers? I did not say it out loud.

“Thing was, it wasn’t leading us anywhere,” Reid said. “All right, you make the Gregorys
look bad, but it doesn’t get us any closer to the killer. Takes us further away, in
fact. There was a whole mile along Sea View Ave. that the killer had to pick her up.
Another quarter-mile along that pitch-dark street runs next to the golf course.”

“West Street, which is really dark,” agreed Dick.

“Which meant she probably would not have gone down it on her own,” I said.

“No,” said Reid, “she was probably picked up on Sea View and taken there. We figure
once she saw where he was going, she”—he
paused long enough to make his own little hand gesture—“jumped out of the car and
tried to run away. The killer chased her, hit her with what he had.”

“Reid, there was no blood on the ground, remember?”

He was ready for that. “We know she wasn’t killed where they found her. She had grass
stains on her knees and clearly had been dragged under the trees, hide her a little
bit.”

“If she was killed somewhere else on the golf course, don’t you think somebody would
have found the blood?”

“Didn’t have to be the golf course,” Dick piped up. “There’s plenty of shoreline along
there. Take her to the parking lot at Dowses Beach. It’s just down the road, around
the corner. She sees what’s happening, jumps out. He chases her to the water.” Now
he demonstrated, clasping his hands and raising both arms over his right shoulder.
“Hits her there, it all gets washed away.”