Crime of Privilege: A Novel (38 page)

Pick her up, put her over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Peter Martin was big
enough to do that. Or one person could hold her under the arms, another hold her feet.
Peter and who? Not Jamie, they were fighting. Not Ned, he was occupied. Not Cory,
she was gone. Which meant it would have had to be either McFetridge, who spoke to
me, or Jason, who ran from me.

I MET WITH DR. PARDEEP
, the medical examiner. He was reluctant to say anything at first and kept telling
me it was all in his report, but I got him talking about his role as a scientist and
how really what he was doing was solving mysteries, and he got excited and told me
that was what people did not understand about his job. It was all about hunting for
clues. Finding them, assessing them, putting them together to come up with answers
as to what had happened. He examined bodies to find clues and, yes, that was what
he had done in this case.

As for the conclusion that it was a golf club that killed Heidi Telford, he pointed
out that he had said only it was most likely a golf club. The reason? Well, the entry
was obtunded, which meant it had not been made by anything sharp, like an ax. Also,
it was clean. No dirt, no bark, no foreign organisms, as might be seen if it were
made by a rock or anything organic. Could I, he wanted to know, think of any other
object that would cause such a wound? He was more than willing to consider any proposal
I had. I offered the possibility of a fireplace poker, and he grew animated and told
me he had considered that, but that the geometry of the entry wound, deeper toward
the top of the skull than the bottom, did not comport with a completely straight object.

He was lecturing me on the dynamics of blows inflicted by pokers, but my mind had
gone back to the idea of a golf club being clean. The only times the heads of my clubs
were ever clean were when I was a guest at a private course and the caddies wiped
them down before loading them into my car.

I wondered if that ruled out a transient. Not likely to find one of those driving
around Osterville late at night with a bag of clean clubs in his car, looking to pick
up young girls walking home. Young girls leaving the Gregory compound. Having been
pushed out the side gate. As the Gregory boys were wont to do. A family tradition.

I MET WITH DETECTIVE IACUPUCCI
. He was more than happy to come to my office. He stopped and talked to three different
female staffers between the front desk and my door. Pooch was about six-feet-three,
devilishly handsome and dumb as a box of rocks. He could tell me nothing that he had
learned since taking over the case from Detective Landry. But he was delighted to
talk about the Barnstable High Red Raiders football team, for which he was the defensive
line coach. They were starting their workouts now. I looked like I might have been
a player at one time. Maybe I’d like to come out and give the DBs a hand.

I gave him a list of the people known to be at the Gregorys’ on the night Heidi was
there and told him no, I wasn’t available to lend the boys a hand.

He held the list and asked why not.

I told him I wasn’t in shape.

He said he heard I had just ridden a hundred-mile race, and my first instinct was
to tell him that it was one hundred and ten miles. Instead I told him it wasn’t a
race. I pointed to the list and asked who he had interviewed. He studied the names
for a longer time than should have been necessary for a man with fluency in English.
Then he said no one. Although he wouldn’t mind interviewing Cory Gregory if I wanted.

I
HAD A VISITOR AT HOME. IT HAPPENED RATHER LATE AT NIGHT
.

I walked into the kitchen, shut the light in the ceiling of the carport, shut the
kitchen lights, and started along the hallway to my bedroom when there was a tapping
on the carport door.

It was an insistent tapping, as though the tapper had waited until I shut the lights,
was sure I was going to respond and that I would share his or her interest in discretion.
Given the fact that my last visitor had been Barbara on the day I had stayed in bed,
I could not imagine who would be hitting my door like that.

I walked back, flicked on the carport light again, and opened the door. It was deep
summer on Cape Cod. It was somewhere after 10:00 p.m. The crickets were chirping,
the bullfrogs were croaking, and a man dressed entirely in black bolted past me and
into my house.

He looked around, his eyes sweeping the room, then sat down at the kitchen table.

It did not register with me that the man dressed like Johnny Cash was actually Roland
Andrews until he was seated in my kitchen. I made a silent promise to be more careful
about how I opened doors in the future.

I asked if he wanted a drink. He laughed, as if men like him didn’t drink. At least
not with men like me. They probably drank only like the Martin Sheen character in
the beginning of
Apocalypse Now
, by
themselves in hotel rooms, drank till they got totally wasted, then stripped off all
their clothes and karate-chopped the stranger they saw in the mirror.

“There’s been a change of plans, Georgie,” he said.

I went to turn on the overhead kitchen light. He told me not to. He glanced out the
sliding doors to the backyard and gestured that I should draw the drapes closer together.

I sat down in the gloom with him. There was enough light from the hallway behind me
to make out his features. I said I wasn’t aware of any plans.

“We’re not going with Buzzy anymore. Too many complications.”

I nodded, giving him time to tell me what they were.

“Now that they’ve renewed the investigation,” he said, waving his hand as an indicator
of how obvious it should be, “put you in charge. Brilliant move on their part.” He
was leaning in my direction. He wasn’t whispering, but he might as well have been.

“On whose part?”

“The Gregorys’, who else? I mean, you don’t think Mitch White makes decisions like
this on his own, do you?” Roland Andrews inched his chair closer to me. “Look, we
go ahead and put Buzzy up, what’s he going to say now that the office has you working
full-time on the Telford case? That you’re not investigating it? His buddy? The one
he’s been cuckolding? You see? See what I mean?”

I thought, not for the first time, how much I would like to punch Roland in the face.

“I know how the Gregorys operate. I should, I’ve been watching them all these years.
They let Buzzy announce his candidacy. If he says you’re not investigating, they immediately
call in their journalist friends and tell them about the animosity between you two
because you caught him hosing your wife. That’s the brilliant part. They dirty up
both of you. He’s a cad and you’re an unmanly guy, bitter at everyone who seems to
have a better life than you.”

He sat back. He smiled as if he expected me to share in his appreciation of the diabolism
at work.

I played it out. I would swing, hit him directly under the chin, lift him out of his
seat. If he didn’t get knocked cold he would be back at
me in an instant. He would no doubt beat the hell out of me. But so what?

I would wear my wounds proudly. Use my face as a platform to talk about how I had
been attacked by Josh David Powell’s henchman because of something that happened a
long time ago in Palm Beach. Something involving an attractive young woman who had
gone to a party at the Gregorys’ house to have a good time and who had ended up dead.
Just like Heidi Telford. Two girls, used, abused, and cast aside. One figuratively,
the other literally. I liked the idea. I didn’t take the time to think it all the
way through; I just went with it.

I started down low because I was sitting, because my hand was already at my thigh.
I shifted my weight onto my left buttock, dropped my left shoulder, and fired with
my right fist.

Roland Andrews caught it in midair.

He twisted my wrist back, bent it until my fingers almost touched my forearm. I swung
with my left. The two of us were still sitting in chairs and I couldn’t get much leverage.

“Oh, ho!” Roland cried as I made contact with his cheekbone and then he laughed and
bent my wrist farther. He kept bending until I dropped to my knees on the linoleum.

I was screaming in pain and he cuffed me on the ear. The sound inside my head was
as if a cannon had gone off. I went over. He let go of my wrist and I found myself
lying on my own kitchen floor in a near-fetal curve. It struck me that no man should
be in that position and I tried to do something about it. I could hear nothing, but
I spun as best I could and made a dive for his legs. He kicked me away and then rabbit-punched
me on the back of my neck. This time when I hit the floor I couldn’t spin, no matter
how foolish I felt I looked. I was paralyzed.

“You done now, Georgie?” he asked, looking down. And I was surprised because I could
actually hear him over the roaring in my head. I could hear, but I couldn’t feel.
I was numb from fingers to toes and couldn’t answer.

Then, before I could get panicky, my wrist began to throb and for the first time in
my life I felt joy at being in pain. I tried moving my feet and they did as I asked.
I wanted to cry out in happiness.

“All right,” Roland seemed to be saying, “I went too far. I admit it, and I don’t
blame you for attacking me.” He touched his cheekbone where I had hit him. “Surprised,
maybe, but you showed more balls than I thought you had.”

He extended his hand to help me up, warrior to warrior, but I shook him off, figuring
it might be a trick. I rolled onto my noninjured wrist and pushed down until I could
kneel. Then I pushed again and staggered to my feet. I took a step or two to the refrigerator,
leaned my forehead against it for a moment, then opened the door. “Want some water?”
I asked.

“Nah. I’m good.”

I got out a small bottle, took the cap off with my teeth, spit the cap, and drank
about halfway down. “You don’t have much time,” I said when I had enough breath. “Find
another candidate.”

“Kind of campaign we have in mind, less time the better. It’s a nonpartisan election
for D.A. All we have to do is go in at the last moment, blitz Mitchell White with
the bad news.”

“Which is what?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

“I don’t have anything.”

Andrews laughed. He thought that was great fun to hear me say that. “You’ve just come
back from Hawaii by way of California and Costa Rica, my friend. You’ve got something.”

More evidence that I had been followed. Or somebody had talked. And I had a pretty
good idea who it was. I already had seen Roland Andrews’s ability to plant women in
my life. I finished off my water. “Who you thinking of putting up?”

“You’ve got two other buddies. I want to ask you about them.”

I pressed my back against the refrigerator and let my feet slide out in front of me.
“Who?”

“Jimmy Shelley, Alphonse Carbona. I need to know which one’s better.”

My chest ached. Everything about me ached. “Jimmy’s a screwup, like Buzzy. Al, well,
I don’t see him as being political material.”

“Jimmy kept his mouth shut about seeing Buzzy and Marion together, didn’t he?”

“Al keeps his mouth shut about everything.”

“Still, Jimmy, having seen what he did, never made jokes about it in front of you,
did he? Never told anyone else, as far as you know?”

“You’re right. What’s your slogan going to be? ‘He Won’t Tell’?”

“You like Alphonse better, huh? As a candidate, I mean.”

“Al’s married, got a nice wife. Does a good job in court. Talks to juries fine. Just
doesn’t say much in social situations. Far as I know, he’s never been in trouble.”

“I see.” But it was not clear he did. He seemed to have his heart set on Jimmy.

I shrugged, not really caring. “What do the Macs say?”

“The Macs will do what I tell them. As long as it doesn’t interfere with their agenda.”

“Which involves building a casino for the Indians in Mashpee.”

Roland’s head came up rather quickly. “Smart boy,” he said. “Who told you that?”

I didn’t answer.

“Seriously,” he said, “who was it let his mouth flap?”

I said, “McCoppin,” for no other reason than he was the one who had turned away from
me when I went into Muggsy’s that time I was trying to talk to the chief. And that
reminded me of something else.

“What’s in this for Cello DiMasi?”

“Who says there’s anything in it for him?”

“Well, he’s a friend of the Macs. If they’re plotting to overthrow the D.A., he’s
got to be aware of it—yet the thing they’re going to have the candidate say, that
Mitch White protected the Gregorys, couldn’t the exact same charge be leveled against
the chief?”

“Let me tell you what I’ve learned about the chief. Except for the fact he’s not a
native, Cello DiMasi is your quintessential local guy. That’s who he identifies with,
the blue-collar people who’ve been here all their lives and all their parents’ lives
and who took him in when he was a kid playing ball in the summer. Like them, like
the people who work on the summer residents’ septic tanks and sell them lobsters,
he’ll do whatever the job requires, then go home and smirk about it with his buddies.
But first he does the job that the powers that be want him to do. And if they don’t
want him going after something, he won’t do it.”

“But,” I insisted, not sure if I was getting an answer, “if Mitch is thrown out, doesn’t
Cello have to go, too?”

“If we put up a candidate against the sitting D.A. and our candidate wins, the chief
will no doubt keep his position by telling everyone Mitch White held him back. Made
him put a clown like Iacupucci on the case.”

“You said ‘if.’ ”

“What?”

“You said, ‘If we put up a candidate.’ ”

“Well, we may not need to, depending on what it is you’ve come up with.”

“I told you, I haven’t come up with anything.”