I tried to look back as innocently as I could.
After maybe thirty seconds Mitch began speaking in measured terms. “Look, I’m sorry for Bill Telford and his family, I really am. I’m sorry for all the victims and their families on the Cape and Islands. I hope I can bring the perpetrators of their misery to justice. I hope I can do that every time. But I can’t go off on every wild-goose chase every one of them wants me to go on. Bill, he didn’t have much for us in the beginning. Didn’t understand how his daughter could be dressed like she was. Didn’t understand how she could have ended up in Osterville when she was walking into Hyannis. Gave us names and phone numbers of everyone she knew, told us all the places she might have liked to have gone. Even dug out old credit card receipts to show where she’d gone in the past. Police did the best they could and they came up with nothing. They searched for her bag, the clothes she was wearing when she left home, the weapon that was used. Nothing. Unfortunately, crime on the Cape didn’t stop with this murder and we’ve had to deal with other things, too. So, simple fact of the matter is, it became time to move on.”
It was unclear whether Mitch was trying to convince me or was rehearsing for someone else. Either way, I was listening dutifully. Seeing that, he opened his hands and flared them, an indication of hopelessness.
“We didn’t close the case, but we’re tapped out. Something comes up that’s viable, fine, we’ll look into it. We don’t like having a citizen’s murder go unsolved. It doesn’t look good for us; it doesn’t look good for the Cape in general.”
Mitch sat up straight, pulled his chair back to the desk so he could make sure that all our attention was focused on each other, that it was just him and me, talking in our private tunnel. “Bill wants to do his own investigation; we’re not going to stop him, as long as he doesn’t break the law himself. Okay, Bill, let us know if you come up with anything. Years go by. He’s out there. He’s in here. He’s over at the police station. He’s got nothing. At some point he comes up with this Gregory theory. Well, I’ll be damned! Good God Gertie! The Gregorys—what a concept! I mean, you know every bit as well as I do, George—”
Here, he paused.
“—the Gregorys are fair game wherever they go. It’s the downside of being who they are. So now we’ve got this poor old guy, can’t come up with anything else, so he fastens on them? Gets some poor clerk in a grocery store, nine years ago thought the world was going to be at her feet, now here she is, fifty pounds of brownies later, realizes she’s not going anywhere, least of all to a Gregory wedding, and suddenly she remembers something? You know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t tell him.
“Okay, well, let’s assume that her sudden restoration of memory is one hundred percent accurate. What have we got? Heidi Telford, young, beautiful, and maybe just becoming aware of her own sensuality, talks to a kid from a famous family, then a couple of hours later sneaks out of the house. Mr. Telford puts it all together and decides she had to be going to a party at the famous family compound. Teases the boys with her boobies hanging out—he’s not saying that, but you know that’s what he means, all that bra talk and stuff. They want the boobies, she doesn’t give them up, they hit her over the head with a golf club and kill her. You like that story, George? Like it in terms of buying it? Think anybody would? The Gregory boys can get any titties they want. They don’t have to go hitting people over the head. They’re done with some girl for whatever reason, they just call a cab, send her packing. Hell, the worst of them would just open the side gate, tell her to walk home.”
He laughed. A little heh, heh. It was a typical Mitch White laugh, with no real humor behind it. He thought this was the kind of thing guys thought was funny. When I didn’t laugh, he stopped.
“So you see, George,” he said, wiping his mouth uneasily, “I wasn’t going to inflict an investigation on them. Certainly not on the basis of what Telford came up with.”
I wondered if looking at Mitch White was like looking in a mirror. If that was what made me hate him as much as I did.
4.
I WENT FOR A RIDE. I GOT MY BIKE OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT spring, pumped up the tires, oiled the brakes and the Derailleur, and loaded it onto the rack on the back of my old Saab. I drove east on the Mid-Cape Highway to Exit 9A and turned south. In half a mile I was at the Rail Trail.
This time of year there were hardly any vehicles in the parking lot, and within minutes I had the bike off the rack, my helmet secured, my shoes locked into the pedals, and I was cruising the smooth pavement that covered what had once been a railroad corridor. This was not a hard ride. In fact, it would be difficult to find an easier one, but I could go twenty-two miles to Wellfleet, turn around and ride back, and feel I had a pretty good workout.
I cruised past river swamps, cranberry bogs, an abandoned lumber mill, ponds that would soon be teeming with swimmers and small sailboats. I rode faster and faster because there was virtually nobody else on the trail: an inline skater, a woman with a dog, a man with some sort of baby carriage affixed behind his bike.
It was good, I told myself, to be doing something other than thinking. And then I realized that was exactly what I was doing. But I wasn’t brooding. No. I was doing something positive. Yes. That’s what I was doing. I was preparing myself for something in the future. The Pan-Mass Challenge, 110 miles from Sturbridge to the Cape Cod Canal the first Saturday in August. Preparing meant going forward, and that was good. Go forward, George. That’s good. That’s good. Keep pumping. Get in shape. Raise money. Children’s cancer fund. The Jimmy Fund. Pump your legs, raise money. Forget old man Telford and the Gregorys and Mitch White and your lost wife and anybody else you can think of forgetting.
Except I wasn’t really raising money, was I? I was contributing it. I had pledged $2,500 back in January, the minimum for the one-day ride that I was planning to do. Riders were supposed to get sponsors, send out solicitation letters, hit up friends and relatives, but I hadn’t done that. I didn’t have anybody I thought I could ask. Try my colleagues at work, maybe; make things awkward for everyone, those who gave and those who didn’t. The guy in the basement wants me to give him a hundred bucks. Look out for George, he’s asking people for money.
How much would I raise? Whatever. It wasn’t worth it. If I was going to pay $2,000 of my own money, I might as well pay $2,500. Pump, George, pump.
I was beginning to tire as I reached Nickerson State Park. Drop down. Pass through the tunnel beneath Route 6A, go back uphill and head toward Orleans Center. It wasn’t much of a hill. I pushed myself harder. Go faster, George. What are you saving yourself for?
Guy my age ought to have friends he could call on. I had dozens of friends in college. A whole fraternity full of friends.
And I hadn’t seen a single one of them in twelve years.
5.
I STILL HAD THE TELEPHONE NUMBER OF THE APARTMENT IN New York City.
When I called, a woman made the word “hello” last about three seconds.
I told her who I was and she made the silence last even longer.
I told her that I was Paul’s roommate at Penn.
“Oh, yes.” She still did not know. She was only pretending. Being polite. Mrs. McFetridge was always polite.
At the graduation party, I had seen her talking to my mother. Or, rather, I had seen my mother talking to her. Talking and talking and talking. I had drifted over to perform some kind of rescue operation, but when I got close enough I realized my mother was telling her all about my friends the Gregorys, who had been kind enough to have me to their house in Palm Beach. Mrs. McFetridge had grown up with the Gregorys. She had known some of the Gregory sisters and wives at least since Miss Porter’s School. And here my mother was, name-dropping, no doubt making up a few disparaging comments in her effort to be en famille. I hesitated now to bring up anything that would remind Mrs. McFetridge of that painful moment. I told her instead that I had been a guest at her place on a few occasions when Paul and I spent the
weekend in New York.
She responded by saying, “How nice of you to call.” Perhaps she thought I was soliciting for the alumni fund.
“I was wondering if you could tell me how I could get in touch with Paul.”
“He doesn’t live here anymore.”
Of course he didn’t. He was thirty-four years old. But I just murmured as though that was my bad luck.
“He lives in Idaho. He’s sort of an adventurist.”
I did not know what an adventurist was. She did not know who I was. Two people heaving information into the dark.
“Um, can you tell me where I can get hold of him in Idaho?”
“Well, I don’t really know. You fly to Boise and then you wander off in the woods somewhere until you get to a river. I believe he’s what is known as a river guide.” She said the last two words going uphill with “river,” resting at the peak, then going downhill with “guide.”
Mrs. McFetridge’s son had gone four years to St. Paul’s before going four years to an Ivy League school. Eight years of very expensive education and now he was a river … guide. I did not have the feeling Mrs. McFetridge was overly pleased to be telling me that.
“He likes to be outdoors,” she added. “Skis all winter, rafts all summer, heaven knows what he does in between.”
“Is there a phone number where I could reach him?”
“Well, I don’t know. Why don’t I take your number and I’ll have him call you if I hear from him? And if you should get in touch with him through another source, perhaps you could have him call me.”
“Ah, yes, of course, Mrs. McFetridge.”
6.
I KNEW CORY GREGORY A LITTLE.
I had met her once. We had been sitting at a big round table in the middle of the floor at the British Beer Company on Main Street in Hyannis—some of the defense guys and me—when she walked in with a couple of her friends. About five-feet-four, with short, somewhat muscular legs that she was showing off in a pair of white shorts that stopped halfway down her smooth brown thighs, she was not what you’d call classically beautiful, but she caught your attention.
She had, in fact, just come off a tennis court, but there was nothing other than her clothes to indicate that. Her shoulder-length brown hair, perfectly highlighted, did not have a strand out of place. She looked cool and smooth and, if anything, probably smelled of talcum powder. Her cheekbones were high and prominent, her jaw was strong, and you knew right away who she was. She might not have been Cory, exactly, but there was no doubt she was a Gregory.
Buzzy Daizell grabbed her wrist as she went by. She went ice cold for an instant and there was a feeling that all kinds of things could happen and then she recognized who it was and said, “Buzzy!” just like any other girl and bent down to give him a hug. I watched as her arm, thin in comparison with her legs but just as tanned, just as smooth, briefly encircled his neck and shoulders, and for one moment the electricity was so strong that I felt almost as though it was wrapping around me.
She straightened up again and looked at the rest of us with an expectant smile on her face. Her lips parted and she flashed teeth that were slightly too long and blindingly white. The woman was a collection of imperfections, put together in one exquisite package. I got to my feet. So did everyone else at the table. We had never done that for any other woman we had whistled down, called over, grabbed, or greeted when she walked past.
I introduced myself, shook her hand, forced myself not to say I knew her cousin Peter, and waited while the introductions went around the table. She waved her hand at her friends, wanting us to meet them, too, and this time we all nodded and immediately forgot their names. It was decided that they would join us, we would all squeeze in together, four women and four men. Cory took a chair between Buzzy and Alphonse, and I ended up with three girls on my right and Jimmy Shelley on my left. Since Buzzy was talking to Cory, Jimmy had no one to talk to but me. Since the three girls with Cory were bunched together, they talked among themselves. Occasionally I got in a few words with the girl immediately next to me. So, where you from? Really? I was there once. Just here visiting? Ah. How did the tennis game go? Aha. Oh, yes. Oh, my. She would answer my questions and then go back to huddling with her friends.
They left after one drink. I could not say I really knew Cory Gregory.
I did know Buzzy, though, so I tried calling him. I was in the dungeon when I made the call and Barbara Belbonnet was sitting at her desk. For once, she was not on the phone herself, which meant she heard everything I said, most of which went along the lines of, “I just want to talk with her.… No, I’m not going to ask her out.… We’ve got a mutual friend, that’s all, and I’m trying to find him.”
It turned out Buzzy, for all his bravado, did not have Cory’s number. He had met her at a charity auction. They had stood in a group drinking champagne and now, whenever he saw her, he said hello and was lucky enough to have her remember who he was. So no, he couldn’t help me other than to tell me where she lived, which everyone knew was on Sea View Avenue in Osterville. But there was a guard at the gate, and don’t even think about trying to get past him just because you claim you want to see Cory.
I hung up and found Barbara watching me. “You want Cory’s number, why didn’t you ask me?”
“You know her?”
“Only all my life.”
Of course. Barbara was an Etheridge. Etheridges knew everybody on the Cape.
“You know, George, there’s lots of things I could tell you if you’d only ask.”
Because Barbara was tall, because she had perfect posture even when she was sitting, she was able to look at me over the top of her computer screen. And I was able to look directly back at her. Her face was so often worked up in emotion that it was hard to remember it was startlingly pretty when, like now, it was in repose.
“Want me call her for you?”
7.
IT WAS ARRANGED THAT I WOULD MEET HER AT BREAK A’DAY, A coffee shop across the street from Pogo’s. The meeting was to be at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. I got there at 9:30 to make sure we got a table. Break A’Day was not a large place. In the summer, Break A’Day had tables with umbrellas outside on the patio, but this time of year the seating was only on the inside and it was crowded with locals and weekenders. There was a counter for twelve and another twelve tables that would seat two to four people, depending on how much you were willing to be jammed together. Nine-thirty on a Saturday morning, it turned out, was too late. All the tables were taken and the waiting list was forty minutes.
The hostess was a small woman with a round face and dark skin, her hair pulled back in a careless ponytail. Her name tag said Di. I gestured for her to move closer. She did not, but she allowed me to lean forward enough to whisper in her ear. “I’m meeting one of the Gregorys here at ten. It’s a business matter, and I really need one of the tables, preferably in the back or one of the corners.”
Di made a noise with her lips, pulled her head, rolled her eyes, all of which was meant to show my request was inappropriate; famous people came in here all the time, and we could wait in line like everybody else.
I leaned in again. “You don’t want there to be all kinds of commotion, people coming up to her, trying to talk to her, clogging things up while we’re standing around waiting. So if it would be at all possible to kind of move us up if something opens—” I tried to slip her five dollars and she reacted as if I were trying to hand her a toad.
A couple got up from a table along the far wall. I looked. Di looked. She lifted a clipboard, called the name of the next people on the list, and directed them to take their place. At this point, I had not even given her my name and was not sure what I should do. She walked off with her clipboard to greet some new arrivals. Two more times she called out names to replace departing customers and then she walked by me and threw her arm toward a newly opened table in the far corner. “Take that one,” she said, and I had what I wanted.
At 9:55 a large black
man entered. There was nothing unusual about that, in and of itself, except this man was ebony black, wore a blue topcoat, had a shaved head and a diamond stud in his ear, and in general was not the kind of fellow one usually saw on Cape Cod, at least in the off-season. He looked around the room, looked at each and every person sitting there, looked no longer at me than anyone else, then turned and left. By bending various ways, I could see him outside on the patio, talking on a cell phone. Then I could see him walk to what looked like a large Jeep, get in behind the wheel, shut the door. But it was not a Jeep. It was a Hummer, and it did not move.
At exactly 10:00, the door opened, the people waiting for their tables parted, and Cory Gregory, smiling and saying, “Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi,” made a beeline straight to my table. “Hi, Georgie,” she said, grabbing my hand and kissing me on the cheek before I was halfway to my feet. I melted back into my chair.
She was dressed rather mannishly, wearing a pair of what we used to call “white ducks” for slacks, a white polo shirt, and a blue pullover windbreaker. On her feet were a pair of two-tone suede shoes that would not have been out of place in a bowling alley.
“I love this café,” she said, picking up her menu, bouncing around in her seat.
And I loved her. I didn’t say that. But I felt it. I also felt the burn on my cheek where she had kissed it. Cory Gregory had kissed me. And now she was sitting directly across from me at this tiny table, where anytime I wanted I could reach out and lay my hand on top of hers, maybe slide it along her forearm, feel that slender but no doubt powerful wrist honed by chip shots and spinnaker raisings.
“This is so exciting,” she said, leaning across that very same tiny table, bathing me in breath that was imbued with honey, locking brown eyes on me that said I was the only other person in the universe despite the fact that everyone in the little café was looking at us, “to hear about Paul. I didn’t know you knew him.”
Crime of Privilege: A Novel Page 10
