Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  I get lost sometimes, conjuring up things I do not know, or that I know only in part. And then I can’t get to sleep at all. I lie there until the sun comes up, not sure if I am remembering things as they actually happened or if I am just remembering what I imagined on other nights that I have lain here like this.

  And now Bill “Anything New” Telford tells me what a straight shooter I am, how I am not obligated to anyone or anything but the truth, how I see a crime and go after it. Stand right up to the people in power.

  Poor Bill Telford.

  3.

  LIKE ME, MITCH WHITE WAS NOT FROM THE AREA. THAT SHOULD have been a point to bond us, outsiders in a provincial legal setting in which many of the regular players could trace their local roots back for generations. In fact, it only made District Attorney White highly suspicious of me. He knew how I had gotten my job.

  The same way he had.

  In the ten or so years Mitch had been D.A., he had tried hard to adapt to the culture. He had the requisite sports memorabilia around his office, but one had the sense he could not withstand a grilling about Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski, or maybe even Larry Bird. He bought a table for the Boston Pops concert that was held on the town green every summer, but people who were forced to sit with him reported he never seemed interested in the music and spent most of the time scanning the other tables for celebrities, officials, and people to whom he could wave. He did not have a boat, did not golf or fish, did not seem to care about the beach.

  Among the things Mitch had clearly never mastered was the art of dressing like a native. He was prone to short-sleeved dress shirts, even when he wore a tie. In the summer he liked to wear seersucker suits that could not have cost him $200 and tended to show both wrinkles and the damp spots of perspiration that came from sitting in a leather chair. He had a mustache that no doubt was meant to distract viewers from his underslung chin and wore dark-framed glasses in which the lenses were fitted into frames shaped liked oxbows. His arms, sticking out of his short sleeves, were remarkably thin. On his left hand he wore a very prominent gold wedding ring. I might have been overly critical, but to me everything about him screamed Not From Here!

  Nevertheless, each time Mitch was up for reelection he ran virtually unopposed. I had no involvement in the process, but it seemed to me that the decision was made as to who would be district attorney before the matter went to the voters, and as long as Mitch didn’t piss off the wrong people, the job was his.

  That did not make Mitch a secure man, however. And among his insecurities was me.

  There were twenty-three prosecuting attorneys in our office. A couple of them were stationed in Falmouth, a couple more in Orleans, and then there were a few on the islands, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The rest of us were located at the main office in the “new” building at the courthouse complex just off Route 6A, on the bay side of the Cape in the town of Barnstable. I was relegated to the basement, down the hall from the jail cells. I had been there by myself for years and had come to think of it as my private domain. For a period of several months before my meeting with Bill Telford I had been sharing my office with a woman named Barbara Belbonnet, whom I would have thought quite attractive if her primary interest in life had been something other than making arrangements to have her children picked up after school. Barbara was neither a bad person nor a bad attorney. It was just that her husband had left her with two kids and moved off-Cape, and she had gotten the job with the D.A.’s office because her father was an Etheridge and somebody owed him a favor and told Mitch he had to hire her.

  So there she was one day, following behind a couple of staffers pushing a desk and carrying a computer, telling me she was sorry, but she was a new hire and this was where she was told to go. I was not given the option of complaining. “Welcome to the dungeon,” I said.

  It turned out to be no different for Barbara than it was for me. In general nobody other than an occasional secretary or messenger ever came to see either one of us. If we were wanted, someone would call over the intercom and direct us upstairs, usually to one of the first assistant D.A.’s, Reid Cunningham or Dick O’Connor.

  It was not that Mitch himself openly avoided me. He would greet me with a “Hello” and use my name on those occasions when he happened to see me in the hallways or at an office birthday, Christmas, or farewell party. “Hello, George, how’s it going?” he might say, although he would not wait for an answer. He would respond to my questions if asked, but mostly he steered clear of situations where I would have the chance to ask. He knew my connection but wasn’t sure how deep it ran. His own, apparently, wasn’t deep enough for him to find out.

  By sequestering me in the basement, Mitch was able to limit my exposure to whatever was occurring in the office. He couldn’t keep me from talking with the other lawyers or going on coffee breaks with them, but he kept my workload restricted to matters that generally did not require interaction. Here, George, here’s twenty-seven drunk drivings for you. You be the OUI specialist. As for Barbara, she was given the domestic disturbances. The small ones. The pushings and shovings and throwing of plates. The ones nobody else in the office wanted to go near. Here, Barbara, you take these. You have a problem, we’ll be right upstairs. Better yet, ask George. That way, you won’t even have to come upstairs.

  I wondered sometimes if anyone would even say anything if I didn’t show up. But I did show up and I worked hard, in large part because I had nothing else to do. My fellow prosecutors did not, as far as I knew, have anything against me personally, but they recognized my lowly status in the office, my office in exile, and understood that friendship with me was not going to advance their careers. Besides, most of them were married and I no longer was, which limited opportunities for social interaction outside the office.

  Strangely—to me, anyhow—some of my better friends were the defense counsel I opposed in court on a regular basis. Guys like Jimmy Shelley, Alphonse Carbona, Buzzy Daizell; guys with senses of humor about their place on the legal food chain, guys who took their victories where they found them: getting a felony reduced to a misdemeanor, getting a not-guilty on five counts even if it meant being hit on another ten; securing a Colombian client.

  “Colombians are near and dear to my heart,” said Buzzy one time. “They pay in cash.” That was defense-counsel humor.

  Sometimes these guys would invite me out for a beer, or to attend a cookout, or even to a Red Sox game. But I had to be careful. It would not look good if I appeared to be too close to any of them, and while I was relatively sure that there was almost no offense that would cause Mitch White to fire me, I did not want to be ostracized any more than I already was.

  In my eight years as his employee, I could remember being in Mitch White’s commodious corner office only three times. Once was on the day he hired me. Once was on the day he found out my wife was divorcing me. And I cannot remember the third occasion. Maybe it was when he told me I would be getting all my assignments directly from Dick O’Connor, but mostly I was going to be the office’s “Operating Under the Influence” guy.

  My visit after my conversation with Bill Telford was, therefore, my fourth to Mitch’s inner sanctum. It took just two calls to his secretary.

  MITCH GREETED ME WITHOUT getting up from his desk. Like every other male in the office, he worked without his suit jacket when he was not in public. Unlike every other male, Mitch kept his tie in a knot pulled tightly to his neck. Even though I had put on my suit jacket for this visit, he made me feel I was a little more casual than the situation required.

  “Yes, George.” Yes, George, I’m a busy man. See all these papers on my desk?

  “Last night I talked to a guy who indicated he was having a problem with our office.”

  The wheels on his chair made scuttling noises as the D.A. pushed himself back from the edge of his desk. He used his hands to position himself at exactly arm’s-length distance. George from the basement is telling me this?

  I nodded, confirming t
he question he had not actually vocalized. “He feels we’re not paying attention to a very serious matter.”

  Now I wasn’t just from the basement, I was George with friends in high places, conveying a criticism of his operation. He gripped the edge of the desk until his fingers blanched. “Who we talking about?”

  “Bill Telford.”

  “Anything new.” It was hard to tell if he was making a statement or asking a question, but the color returned to his fingers. Anything New Telford wasn’t quite as much of a threat as, perhaps, others were.

  “He says he’s been handing in stuff on his daughter’s murder for some time and nobody is following up on it.”

  “There’s no case, George. No suspect, no file, nothing for this office to do except pass along what we get to the police.” He lifted his hands about six inches, dropped them quickly to the security afforded by the edge of the desk. Having done that, he waited.

  “If I read him correctly, he seems to be of the mind that we’re not doing anything because the Gregorys might be involved.”

  The name. The magic word. Mitch White’s muddy brown eyes popped from their sockets, his pupils magnified by his ugly oxbow glasses. And then, within the space of a second, his expression changed. But wait, it seemed to say, the Gregorys are your ticket, too, George. Now he saw me sitting before him not as a threat but as an ally. I had come not to attack him but to warn him. And to work with him. We had done it before, right? The time that young Kirby Gregory had gotten arrested for driving with a .20, we had made it go away—he and I.

  “That’s a lot of horse manure,” he said, raising one eyebrow tentatively, making sure I agreed.

  “I was wondering if I might take a look.”

  Now both eyebrows went up, and then they softened. Of course. George Becket, friend of the Gregorys, checking on the Gregorys, what better solution?

  “This goes back,” he said, sitting up straight, pulling himself into the desk, “almost ten years, you know. Bill and his wife, Edna, are fine people, and the murder has devastated them. They still keep Heidi’s room just as it was, you know that? Kind of creepy, I know, but that’s how much they were affected.”

  He peered through his lenses. Did I see how difficult this was?

  “Bill quit his job. I don’t know, he may have lost it, but this search for the killer became an obsession with him. Always coming up with some theory or other.”

  Mitch stopped talking for a moment. His fingers began to beat on the desk. A rhythmless sound like typewriter keys clacking.

  “After a while they all seemed to revolve around the Gregorys. There was a party that didn’t really happen. A pickup at the general store that nobody is quite sure actually took place. You know the kinds of things I’m saying. A horrible thing happens in the Gregorys’ neighborhood and all of a sudden conspiracists are everywhere, feeding the grieving parents information that doesn’t really have any factual basis. All that does is make us have to be extra-careful on our end. Pressure like the kind Bill puts on almost makes you push back harder than you otherwise would. You listen, sure, but after a while you grow pretty skeptical and you just say, okay, show me what you’ve got, but I’m not carrying the water for you just because some right-wing nut who has it in for the Gregorys says one of them was seen talking to a pretty blonde girl on the night Heidi died. Heck, that’s what the Gregorys do. Probably isn’t a pretty blonde girl on Cape Cod who hasn’t been talked to by at least one of the Gregorys.”

  He gave a modified laugh. It sounded like a steam heater. His mouth laughed, his chest laughed, his eyebrows stayed put, elevated above his glasses. Like his mustache, they were too dark for his pale skin. The image they presented distracted from his message.

  Still, I smiled, because that is what he wanted me to do. Eight years we had barely spoken to each other and now, in a matter of minutes, we were so inextricably intertwined that we could make little in-jokes about our mentors. If things kept improving like this, I might soon get out of the basement. Maybe even get invited to the Pops concert. Sit at a round table and help Mitch look for celebrities.

  Hey, there’s Regis Philbin.

  4.

  “DON’T WE PAY FOR ALL THE THINGS WE DO, THOUGH?”

  Who said that? Hemingway. Lady Brett to Jake Barnes, the protagonist in The Sun Also Rises.

  What had she ever done to compare with what I had?

  Better yet, is what she said even true? Or is it true for some but not for others? Was Peter Martin paying now that he was a doctor in San Francisco, living in Pacific Heights, attending opening night at the opera in black tie? What about Jamie Gregory, now a Wall Street banker, living in a landmark four-story townhouse in the Village?

  The one who really paid was Kendrick, and all she did was get drunk.

  Kendrick. Her father. Her mother. And, oh yes, George Becket, living by himself on the Cape, working out of the basement office of a political hack, lying awake at night thinking about how different things might have been.

  5.

  CELLO DIMASI WAS SAID TO HAVE BEEN A FINE BASEBALL PLAYER. He went to an obscure college in Connecticut but made it onto the Hyannis Mets in the Cape Cod League, which bills itself with good reason as the premier summer collegiate league in the country. He played two years for the Mets as a catcher who couldn’t hit, had a bad arm, but handled the pitchers well and excelled at blocking the plate. There is a picture on the wall in Muggsy’s showing him upending a guy who stood six-feet-four and went on to play five years for the Baltimore Orioles. The guy is literally flying through the air, and Cello, his head down, his squat body hunched and tilted forward, has both feet planted firmly on the ground.

  Cello never fulfilled his dream of signing with the pros, but he made a lot of friends in the area. After college, he ended up on the Barnstable police force, and after twenty years on the job had worked his way through the ranks to the position of chief.

  Like Mitch White, Cello had a cadre of supporters, but they were most definitely not the same cadre. Cello’s group were people like “the Macs,” McBeth and McQuaid, people who ran the building trades, put on fishing and golf tournaments, coached youth sports, went to Muggsy’s for breakfast and took their cocktails at Baxter’s on the waterfront during the off-season when the tourists weren’t around.

  I knew the chief only in terms of discussing cases. There had been the bicycle-theft incident over which we had been at odds, but for the most part we were able to work things out to our mutual interest. The Kirby Gregory matter might not have had such a positive outcome for her if the Breathalyzer results had not been made questionable by a failure to locate the calibration records of the device. On the other hand, Michael McBeth’s nephew was able to walk with a reckless even though he had spent the night puking his guts out in a Yarmouth jail cell.

  The chief greeted me as though I had come to cut another deal.

  “Georgie!” he said, calling to me through the bullet-proof window of the utilitarian reception area of police headquarters off Phinney’s Lane. “C’mon back. Maddy, buzz the good counselor through.”

  Maddy buzzed, I pushed open a metal-plated door, the chief stuck out his hand, and we shook with the force of a couple of pile-drivers. I had been the victim of Cello’s crushing handshakes in the past, and I knew from my years playing football that you got hurt less when you met force with force. “C’mon back. Take a load off your feet,” he said, for Maddy’s benefit. Maddy, if I was not mistaken, was married to one of the guys who did building inspections for the coastal commission, guys who made sure new construction was not too close to the water or didn’t have too many bathrooms or nonnative plants in the landscaping, guys who could make life miserable for a lot of people if they felt so inclined.

  The chief’s office had fake wood paneling and bookshelves that were filled with trophies from youth sports: soccer, swimming, baseball, basketball. I couldn’t imagine the chief or his kids having much to do with basketball, given the fact that the chief was abou
t five-feet-seven and two hundred forty pounds, but you can’t argue with trophies.

  He went behind his desk, which was strewn with various objects—a coffee mug, a wrist brace, a woman’s shoe, an aerosol can, a flywheel—but he did not sit down. He was wearing the dark blue uniform of his force, looking like a man ready to spring at the sound of an alarm.

  “What do you got?” he asked. He did not do it in an unfriendly way, just a businesslike way. He and I were neither friends nor enemies, although the rules of our engagements required us to appear to others to have a certain camaraderie.

  “You still working on the Heidi Telford matter?”

  “Heidi Telford,” he repeated. “Anything New? It would be a closed case if it weren’t for that poor bastard. What do you got?”

  “Just the poor bastard. He’s kind of glommed on to me now. I told him I’d look into it.”

  “What’s to look into?” The chief still hadn’t sat. Neither had I. We were talking across his desk as if it were a stream that could not be forded. “Girl got her head bashed in and then got dumped on the golf course. Thing about that course is, you got a fairway runs right along West Street. You go down that street two, three o’clock in the morning, you’re gonna be the only one there. Stop alongside the road, pull the body out of the backseat, run it out to the fairway. You’re gonna be gone less than a minute and that body’s not gonna be found till dawn.”

  “Less than a minute? How much did she weigh?”

  The chief squinted at my impertinence. Then he regrouped. He still was not sure why I was there, what I was trying to do. “She wasn’t a big girl. Hundred and ten, hundred fifteen pounds at the most. Maybe less, I don’t remember. And maybe it would have taken a couple of minutes, get her out of the car, across the fairway, into the trees where we found her.” He slung his hand from one side of him to the other. “Point is, other than us guys patrolling the place, you’re just not gonna find any traffic out there at night. Only people live on West Street are rich ones who are so old they fall asleep at nine o’clock at night. What do you got?”