Crime of Privilege: A Novel (50 page)

“For nine and a half years I been going around asking these questions, trying to find
out who saw Heidi last, where she went after she left our house on Memorial Day, 1999.
I’m not senile. I’m not crazy. I
been getting some answers, and I been steadily passing them along to District Attorney
White, only to find out what I been giving him has gone straight from his hands to
the wastepaper basket.”

Bill’s voice cranked up with indignation.

“I tell him, the very day she died Heidi met Peter Gregory Martin at the Bon Faire
Market over there in Osterville. I tell him she went to a party down the street here,
in the harbor, where the Gregory kids were after the Figawi race. I tell him the Gregorys
had another party back at their house on Sea View Avenue that a bunch of people went
to, and I give him names.”

He paused just long enough to put on a pair of glasses, pull a list from his pocket,
and begin reading. “Patty Afantakis, formerly of Roslindale, now Patty Margolis of
West Roxbury; Leanne Sullivan of Roslindale, who I understand is now in Las Vegas;
Paul McFetridge of New York City, out in Idaho now; Jason Stockover of Cos Cob, Connecticut,
New York City, and now some town in France that I can’t pronounce, but I got right
here.” He waved the list over his head but barely broke cadence. “And there were four
Gregory kids: Ned, Cory, Jamie, and Peter Gregory Martin.”

He turned the list over, as if there should have been more names. He leaned into the
microphone and said, “There was also an au pair named Lexi Sommers, who is now married
and living in New York City, and there was a young man on the gate who’s now the chef
at the Captain Yarnell House down there in Brewster—and every one of those people
knows my daughter was alive at the Gregory compound that night.”

There was a stirring in the crowd, a murmur that became almost a clamor. Someone shouted
out a question. Bill didn’t hear it.

“District Attorney White has all that information, he’s had most of it for years,
and he not only hasn’t questioned the Gregorys, he hasn’t hardly talked to any of
the people who were there.”

“Mr. Telford!” a woman journalist shouted.

“The question is why?” Bill said, and now he was shouting because everyone else was.

The woman’s voice was the most persistent. I recognized her. She was from WBZ-TV in
Boston, the CBS channel. “Mr. Telford! Mr.
Telford! Are you saying the Gregorys had something to do with the murder of your daughter?”

“Damn right I am. It was Jamie Gregory, hit her with a golf club. Then he and his
cousin Peter dragged her body out to the golf course and left her there. And Mitchell
White’s been covering up for them ever since.”

And with that, Buzzy totally lost control of the proceedings. The crowd was in an
uproar, and he never got to talk about the Indian casino or the local drug problem
or the illegal immigrant problem or any of the other points in the outline I had prepared
for him to use in his campaign announcement.

I
HAD BEEN WATCHING FROM INSIDE THE BUILDING, LOOKING THROUGH
a tall, eight-paned window on the first floor, with a good view of the backs of Buzzy
and Bill. I did not want to present myself because I was supposed to be away, out
of state, carrying on Mitch’s investigation. Anyone, however, could have seen me enter
Town Hall from the South Street side or, for that matter, seen me over the past several
days going in and out of Buzzy’s office in Bass River or in and out of Alphonse and
Caroline Carbona’s house over in Sandwich, where I was staying in their spare bedroom.

So it was not a complete surprise when a hand slid under my arm and seized me by the
wrist. It could have been Chuck-Chuck, Pierre, any one of the Gregorys; it could also
have been Roland Andrews or someone else in Josh David Powell’s employ. It could have
been Josh David himself. The hand was very strong, the fingers long, but the touch
was more comforting than threatening.

I took a chance. I didn’t try to pull away. I didn’t even turn. I just said, “Hello,
Barbara. I’m glad you’re here.”

The hand squeezed.

“All right,” a voice whispered in my ear, “I’ll go along with you. I don’t want to
work for those bastards anyway.”

CAPE COD, November 2008

B
UZZY GOT TROUNCED. BUT NOT BY MITCH
.

Two days after the debacle on the lawn outside Town Hall, Buzzy made the announcement
that if Mitchell White did not drop out of the race, he was going to issue a press
release detailing the full extent of Mitch’s “personal and historical” relationship
with Senator Gregory.

Mitch and the Gregorys released their hounds to bay in the newspapers and on the local
radio about the impropriety of making personal threats in a campaign. The most prominent
bayer of all was the very same talk-show host who had been playing the piano at the
Senator’s Palm Beach house on the night of the rape of Kendrick Powell.

Jimmy Shelley responded to one of the host’s most vitriolic diatribes about Buzzy’s
intention by phoning in and asking the host if it was true that he was there on the
night of the rape. The host went wild. He could barely contain himself, shouting over
the airwaves that the caller, “Jim from Hyannis,” was nothing more than a provocateur
and reminding listeners that there had never been a conviction, a prosecution, even
a finding of probability that there was a rape.

“It’s easy to attack the Gregorys,” he screamed. “Easy to blame them for anything
and everything if you’re some extremist reactionary who doesn’t like the idea of universal
healthcare, after-school programs for our children, and equal tax burdens for all.
Oh, sure, blame the
Gregorys because they’re always out there in the public eye. They don’t run, they
don’t hide. And if you need a boogeyman, someone to fault because your own relationship
is falling apart, you’ve lost your job, or your kid doesn’t make the soccer team,
there they are—the folks who seemingly have everything and are the antithesis of losers
like you, Jim from Hyannis, and anybody else who spreads these vicious, unfounded
rumors.

“Because let me tell you,
Jim
, you sanctimonious, supercilious sultan of slop, I
was
there, as were scores of other people like me. And I heard nothing, saw nothing,
and the first I knew that anybody was even alleging anything was days later, when
a girl, a young woman, who maybe had way too much to drink, apparently told her very
rich daddy that something had happened. And the local prosecutor investigated and
found nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. You hear that, Jim? So how about you just stuff your
nasty rumors and get on to something important? We’re taking a break.”

But Buzzy’s promised revelation had its effect. Mitch, no doubt cognizant of what
Buzzy meant by “personal and historical,” or maybe Stephanie, or maybe even the Senator
himself, made the decision not to run the risk that Buzzy would expose the full extent
of the relationship between the Senator and the Whites. Mitch held a press conference
in which he announced there was nothing to Mr. Daizell’s reckless accusation, but
it was the very fact that such accusations could be made that had soured him on the
whole political process. Yes, he could win in the upcoming election, but why would
he want to subject himself and his family to such personal attacks? He was sick of
this kind of damning by innuendo, and he had other ways of serving the public. He
had been offered and was accepting the post of deputy general counsel to the Health
Resources and Services Administration in Washington, D.C.

Mitch did not depart without a final act, however. He urged all citizens, all voters,
all right-thinking people, to get together and support his chief assistant, Reid Cunningham,
a dedicated public servant with impeccable credentials and unblemished character.
And to show the public what Reid could do, Mitch was appointing Reid acting district
attorney while Mitch himself was going to use his accrued vacation time to take immediate
leave.

Reid accepted the reins and promptly denounced Buzzy as a one-note candidate. “That
young fellow may be running against the Gregorys,” Reid declared, “but I’m no Gregory.
I’m a career prosecutor, and I’m here to do a job, not stir up tabloid publicity.”

Shortly thereafter, Reid came out with a program that included increasing prosecution
of drug dealers, working with the federal government on rounding up illegal immigrants,
and endorsing the Mashpee Indians’ plan for a casino.

WITH THE CANDIDATES
now fully squared off, both campaigning for write-in votes, I gave an interview to
the
Cape Cod Times
in which I identified myself as the deputy district attorney whom Mitch and Reid
had put in charge of the Telford investigation. I explained I had started with Bill
Telford’s list and tracked down anyone and everyone I could until I had come to the
ineluctable conclusions that the murder had been committed by Jamie Gregory and the
disposal of the body had been carried out by Jamie and his cousin Peter. I admitted
that I was in the process of confronting Jamie when he himself had been shot. The
shooter had been a man, I said, dressed as a homeless person, firing from the sidewalk
and fleeing in a car that had pulled up behind him.

The Gregory forces struck back immediately. A spokesman named Larry O’Donald, a lawyer
in New York, declared that the family was saddened to hear such unfounded accusations.
The dead cannot defend themselves, he reminded everyone, and perhaps that was why
Jamie was being singled out as a target by those who might be attempting to further
their own careers.

Mr. O’Donald agreed with me about the shooter, however. All evidence pointed to a
disgruntled, perhaps even deranged, investor, he said, and the family felt that should
be the focus of law enforcement’s attention. As for Dr. Martin, there simply is and
never has been any reason to involve him, a good man, a private man, who has not tried
to capitalize on his family name but who has devoted his adult life to the
betterment of others. He read a statement allegedly written by Peter in which he expressed
sorrow for the Telford family and compared it to the sorrow his own family felt at
the loss of Jamie. He asked the public to extend the Gregorys, all the Gregorys, the
courtesy of allowing them to grieve; and as for him, he was going to continue to focus
his energies on his practice and his attention on creating brighter days ahead for
everyone.

Meanwhile, Sean Murphy, who had been appointed by Reid to take his former position
as first assistant district attorney, informed the press that yes, indeed, George
Becket was present when Jamie was shot, and that, in fact, George Becket remained
very much a suspect in the shooting. He described me as a run-amok, a man who had
been banned from the office while the investigation was taking place.

It was then that Barbara came through for me. She spoke to the same reporter I had,
and explained that she had been the assistant D.A. sent to New York to conduct the
investigation to which Sean was referring, and she did not know what Sean was talking
about, since she could confirm that I had been cleared by both the New York Police
Department and her own office of any involvement. She pointed out that the actress
Darra Lane had seen and heard me confronting Jamie Gregory from only two to three
feet away, and the New York City coroner had unequivocally determined Jamie to have
been shot from at least twenty-five feet away. “George Becket was not only nearly
killed himself,” she said, “but he tried desperately to save Jamie Gregory’s life
until the paramedics got there. My findings, as reported to and accepted by the office,
were that George was a hero.”

The office waited until two days after the election before it suspended Barbara for
insubordination and me for misuse of funds.

CAPE COD, February 2009

B
UZZY MAY NOT HAVE GOTTEN ALL THE VOTES HE WAS SEEKING
, but he got a lot of publicity, and the publicity has produced a fair amount of work.
He has taken me on, even calls me his partner, although he continues to own the entire
practice. I get paid half of what I bring in, which is almost nothing, and a third
of whatever he gets for the work I do on his cases
.

Mostly what I do is arraignments and preliminary hearings, which means I am in the
courthouse a lot with my old colleagues. Protocol seems to be to ignore me, to pretend
not to know me, never to use my name. I don’t see Reid, but Sean tends to glare at
me, as if we might get into a fistfight at any time. Once I ran into Dick, but he
looked away
.

As for Barbara, well, her daddy came through. To an extent. He gave her the funds
to open her own office in a little complex down by the harbor, where she has hung
out her shingle among those displaying the services of insurance agents, realtors,
and accountants. She is specializing in family law matters: divorces and custody proceedings.
But like me, she gets little work. The people her parents know tend not to have those
problems
.

Little work gives us lots of time to lie around in bed on cold winter mornings, pulling
the covers to our chins and talking about whether it is time for us to go off-Cape
.

“Rome, Paris, London” are places she has thrown out when feeling particularly giddy
and impractical
.

“New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin,” I say
.

“Florida, California,” she counters
.

“Buckthumb, Maine,” I suggest
.

Her choices are fueled by romantic visions; mine by the desire for security and anonymity.
Still, it is exciting to lie naked next to her, to be able to reach out and touch
her anytime I wish, to know that she is here next to me because she wants to be. And
so I encourage the thought that all things are possible
.