Of course, the Cape is a small place between October and May, and sooner or later a person in my position was bound to come into contact with one of the employees outside the restaurant. Jury duty, a domestic dispute, an unlawful detainer action, a kid in trouble, even a moving violation, was going to get one of them into the courthouse at some time or other; and I tended to be in one of the county courthouse buildings eight to ten hours a day. So at some point somebody was going to run into me.
The first time I recognized anyone from the restaurant was when a waitress named Meg appeared on one of my jury panels. Judge Wilkerson dutifully introduced me as the deputy district attorney representing the people of the Commonwealth and asked the courtroom full of citizens if any of them knew me or the defense counsel or the defendant in the case. Several people raised their hands, but none of them identified me and none of them was Meg. I had merely turned to the audience, let them see me, not searched their faces. It was only when Meg was called to the jury box that I realized she was there. I looked right at her, she looked right back at me, not a sign of recognition was passed.
The case, as I recall, was a break-in, the defendant a Brazilian. It was not a big deal to anyone but the victim and the accused. When it was my turn to question the prospective jurors, I addressed Meg. “Ms. O’Brien, do I look familiar to you?”
“I’m not sure. Should you?”
“You mentioned you work at Pogo’s restaurant in Osterville. I happen to eat there sometimes. I wonder if you recall ever waiting on me?”
Meg was a hard-faced woman with dun-colored hair, who wore her restaurant uniform with the hem of her skirt an inch or two higher than the other waitresses did. If I had to guess, I would have said she was about fifty, divorced, had raised or was raising two kids on her own, lived in a rented house, and depended on her unreported tips to survive. She was also none too bright, as evidenced by her answer to my question. “Not really. You usually eat at the bar, don’t you?”
The defense counsel exercised one of his challenges to take her off the jury, and later, when I ran into her at the restaurant, she asked me why I had brought up the fact that she knew who I was. “I wasn’t gonna say nothin’,” she said.
I told her I appreciated it, but it could have jeopardized the prosecution if anyone found out she really knew me.
She shrugged. “I figured the guy was guilty as sin anyway, or you wouldn’ta been chargin’ him. And if he wasn’t”—she shrugged again—“then I would have given you a raft of shit next time I seen you. So I figured the pressure was really on you.”
Somehow, in her mind, that all made sense. I tried to follow it through, but got only so far. In any event, she was off the jury, the Brazilian got convicted, and from that point on whenever I sat down at the bar I was addressed by John the bartender as Counselor.
In March, the main dining room was closed. There were about twenty patrons scattered in booths and at tables throughout the pub, which had logs burning in the brick fireplace and was where I always ate anyhow. I was alone at the bar, sipping a Manhattan and reading through the printed list of daily specials that was tucked into the menu, when a man came in and sat down next to me. There were three seats to my left, eight to my right. There wasn’t any need for him to do that.
“How’s it goin’?” he asked John.
“Goin’ good,” John said, as if it was none of his business, and slid him a menu, a black paper place mat, a set of silverware wrapped in a white napkin.
I turned my shoulder. I wanted to eat alone, watch the Celts. They were playing Phoenix, as I recall. “I’ll have the clams, John,” I said.
The bartender hesitated. I wasn’t sure if he cut his eyes to my neighbor, but it took him a few seconds to murmur, “I wouldn’t. Not many bellies, from what I could see.”
“What do you like?”
“Scallops look fat. Swordfish is good.”
“Fine. Give me the scallops.”
“Plate or roll?”
“Plate.”
“Squash, french fries, chowder okay?”
“Whatever you say.”
John took my order back through the swinging saloon door to the kitchen without writing anything down. The man next to me, a man with sparse white hair that tufted on the crown of his head and could have used a good clipping at the back of his neck, said, “He obviously likes you.”
“It’s just because I come in here all the time.”
“Sure. They only cheat tourists and drunks.” He was smiling. He had made a joke. He wanted me to know he didn’t really think they cheated anybody.
I turned away again.
“My name’s Bill Telford.” He was holding out his hand. He wanted me to shake.
The man had come in and seated himself next to me, told me a joke, and now he wanted me to be his friend. I wanted only to watch the game, eat dinner, go home. I shook his hand and did not give him my name.
“They need a real center,” he said, looking at the screen, not seeming perturbed in the slightest by my lack of manners. “Way back when, they had the second-worst record in the league. Got screwed in the lottery and the best center in basketball went to San Antonio. ’Magine what it would be like if we had gotten him?”
“Tim Duncan.” I shouldn’t have said anything.
“That’s the fella. What did we get? A bag of mulch.”
“Chauncey Billups. He’s a good player.”
“Yeah? Then why didn’t he do anything for us?”
“They traded him away after a couple of months.”
“Maybe that’s where we got the bag of mulch.”
He was right, but I felt no need to say so.
John returned with my cup of chowder and looked at Bill, who nodded at what I had and said he’d like a bowl of the same. And a glass of water. This was not going to pay John’s greens fees come May and he said nothing. He just plunked ice cubes in a glass, squirted in some water, plopped it on the bar, and stomped back to the kitchen.
“Don’t come in here much,” Bill said, looking around as though this restaurant, which could have been most anywhere on the Cape, was a very foreign venue.
The man was probably in his seventies. He wore a zippered fleece jacket and appeared to have a sweater and a collared shirt under that. His voice was not unpleasant and there did not appear to be anything wrong with him. He just wanted to talk. “Live over in Hyannis. Off Ocean Street.”
I watched Paul Pierce heave in a twenty-five-footer for the Celts. Nothing but net. Hyannis was all of five miles away. Buffered only by Centerville, where I lived.
“Don’t know if you recognize my name, but I’ve got a case with you fellas.”
I froze. This was one of the reasons I did not go out of my way to tell people what I did.
“Perhaps you’ve heard talk about it around the office. Heidi Telford? My daughter. Murdered nine years ago.” He was not looking at me. He was looking at the screen. But he was concentrating on me. “Wianno Club, just down the street from here. That’s where they found her, anyway.” I could sense him shrugging, telling me he didn’t think that was where the murder had taken place.
I knew who Bill Telford was now. Anything New Telford. He was something of a legend, periodically calling, occasionally showing up, always asking the same question: “Anything new on the Telford case?” Everyone tried to avoid him, pass him on to the next-lowest person down the line, let him get told by secretaries, paralegals, summer interns, that no, there was nothing new about the case of the pretty young girl who had her skull crushed and was found on the sixteenth fairway of an ultra-exclusive private golf course.
From what I understood, it wasn’t that anyone had anything against Mr. Telford. He was unfailingly polite, never pushy, just persistent. If anything, the people in the office felt sorry for him. But there was nothing to report.
“I like to check in,” he said, reading my mind, “just to make sure Heidi’s not forgotten.”
“I know, Mr. Telford.”
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“Do you?” He seemed to brighten at that. I still wasn’t looking at him. I was still looking at the television screen, but what I was seeing wasn’t registering.
“So somebody’s still working on it?”
All I knew was that people talked about Anything New Telford. That didn’t mean anyone was working on it.
He seemed to consider my silence. “Whenever I come up with anything, I pass it along, you know. The police, well, they didn’t seem equipped for an investigation like this one, if you know what I mean.”
I did not. After a moment or two, I told him so. “Police here deal with murders just like any other police department. We probably have two to four every year. One year we had nine.”
“You’re talking about the County of Barnstable, not the town. Town of Barnstable has maybe one per year.”
He was right. I didn’t argue. In my job we dealt with the whole county. And I didn’t get the murder cases, anyway.
“We have almost a quarter-million people in the county,” he said, “if you count all the way to Provincetown. Got a fairly high welfare population. A lot of people unemployed, especially in winter. Frustrated fishermen, construction workers. Not a lot to do. People get to drinking, shacking up with women who aren’t their wives or men who aren’t their husbands. Feelings get bruised. Secret of the Cape is that it’s not always as nice as it looks to people who only come here in the summer.”
He got his chowder. He was silent for a while and I glanced over. His eyes were closed, his lips were moving. He was, I saw, praying. I looked away.
“In the off-season,” he said, as if sprung back into the real world, “you got people here that maybe shouldn’t be here, maybe don’t want to be here, and plenty of bars and package stores to fuel their frustrations. Mix in the drug smugglers that come in off the ocean, the drug dealers and drug users living in converted cottages or winter rentals, you’re bound to get some violent crime. That’s what you see mostly, isn’t it?”
Yeah. Sure. It wasn’t worth arguing over.
“Of course, you see some of that in some of the villages of the town of Barnstable—Hyannis, Marstons Mills, maybe. But what you don’t see very often is that kind of crime in the hoity-toity places: Hyannisport, you know, or here in Osterville, for that matter. Places where the big-money people have their summer homes.”
He spooned up his chowder. He spooned it away from him, the way you are supposed to do it, the way nobody does. “So,” he said, taking his napkin from his lap and dabbing his mouth, “a college girl’s body is found on a golf course in Osterville, the local police are programmed to think, well, she must have been murdered by somebody from Mashpee, Yarmouth, Truro, anyplace but here.”
“And you don’t believe that’s what happened to your daughter?”
“No, Mr. Becket, I don’t.” He ate some more, sparing me any slurping sounds. I found myself liking Bill Telford just for the way he approached his chowder.
“My daughter was an exceptionally pretty girl. A bright girl. Size you up in a jiffy. She was going to Wheaton College. Do you know it? Didn’t know anything about it myself until they came and got her. But it’s a wonderful institution, and they recruited her right out of Barnstable High on her guidance counselor’s recommendation. Didn’t give her quite a full scholarship, but made it possible on my salary. I was an insurance adjuster, Mr. Becket. My job was to go out and assess damage, mostly on homeowners’ claims. I’d go into some of these multimillion-dollar properties here in Osterville, do my work, then I’d say to the homeowners, these people who had done so well in life, what can you tell me about Wheaton College? To a person they said good things. They were all familiar with it, all had somebody in the family or knew somebody who had gone there, so I said, that’s it. Whatever it takes, my daughter’s gonna go there.”
All I had done was ask him whether he believed his daughter had been killed by someone from outside Osterville. I wasn’t going to ask anything more for fear he would start telling me where he bought his clothes, gassed his car, went to the grocery store.
“Point is,” he continued, not caring that I wasn’t asking, “Heidi was meeting her share of rich and successful people at Wheaton. Maybe not famous people, I don’t know, but she had learned how to handle some of these kids who had a lot more than she did. Went to mixers at Brown, dated boys from Harvard. So I don’t see her as being overly impressed by somebody just because he came from a famous family.”
Heidi Telford died when I was still in law school. Her death was old news by the time I started in the Cape & Islands district attorney’s office. All this talk about Heidi and her dates and famous families meant nothing to me. I tried to make that clear by scraping the bottom and sides of my cup for the last bits of chowder. Then I started casting my eyes about for John.
“Being an insurance adjuster gave me the opportunity to do some investigating on my own, Mr. Becket. Or at least gave me some of the skills I needed to do it. And whenever I came up with anything, I’d bring it right to District Attorney White. I expect you know all that.”
Now I had to answer. He was waiting, looking right at me, seeing that I was not watching the game anymore, that until the rest of my food came I didn’t have anything to do except listen. “I really haven’t been involved, Mr. Telford.”
“Nice fella, Mitchell. Takes what I give him, tells me he’ll have someone look into it. I never hear anything more.”
“Maybe because he doesn’t have anything to tell you.”
“Except I’m telling him things. I talk with Heidi’s friends, with her friends’ friends, and even friends of those friends, and whenever anybody says anything, no matter how small, I write it down, pass it along. Then I follow up. Ninety percent of the time I find that the people whose names I pass along never hear word one from the police or anybody else.”
“Mr. Telford, why are you telling me all this?”
He put his spoon down. He wiped his lips one more time. He fixed a pair of blue-gray eyes on me. “Because, Mr. Becket, I been hearing good things about you.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re a straight shooter. Don’t appear to be obligated to anyone or anything but the truth. You see something that’s not a crime, you stand right up to your boss or the police chief or whoever says it is and tell ’em so. You see something that is a crime, you go after it.”
I choked on my Manhattan.
Mr. Telford’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You want some water?”
John never gave me water because I never drank it. I started hacking, trying to clear an air passage. John came running from somewhere. So did one of the waitresses. Somebody was pounding me on the back. It took a few seconds to realize it was Mr. Telford.
“I’m okay,” I gasped. “Something just went down the wrong way.”
John and the waitress, whose name was Fiona, both glared at Mr. Telford as if my travail was his fault. I had to tell everyone all over again that I was all right.
When we were left alone at last, when John had gone back into the kitchen to get my dinner and Fiona had wandered off to do whatever she had to do, I said to Mr. Telford, “Look, I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but I’m just an assistant D.A. I’m not even a first assistant. I’m assigned cases, I work on those, and that’s all I do.”
“I heard you backed down Chief DiMasi. I heard he wanted to prosecute some colored boys for running a bicycle-theft ring and you said no.”
“First of all, they were from the Cape Verde Islands, those kids. Second, they were stealing bikes, but it wasn’t anything so sophisticated as a ring. They were just stealing them and selling them. And third, I did prosecute them inasmuch as I got them to plead to misdemeanors.”
“And sent to a diversionary program.”
I shrugged.
“When the chief wanted them sent to prison as felons.”
“The chief can be aggressive sometimes.”
“About teenagers w
ith no connections stealing bicycles.”
He was not far off the mark. But he was also just a guy sitting next to me in a restaurant. I was glad when John came out and put my plate in front of me. I was even more glad when Mr. Telford picked up the check John had put in front of him and took out his wallet.
“All I’m asking,” he said, as he got to his feet, “is if maybe you could do some checking yourself. See if these little things I’m givin’ District Attorney White are going anywhere other than the circular file.” He put a five-dollar bill down on the bar, then looked at the check again, then selected two more dollars to put on top of it.
“You see, sometimes”—he hesitated, his hand covering the money as though he were holding his place until he got the phrasing just right—“sometimes I’m afraid Mitchell may not want the information I’m giving him. Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell isn’t a little too close to some of our better-known residents.”
“Meaning anybody in particular?”
“Meaning the Gregory family, Mr. Becket. Very much in particular.”
2.
EVEN NOW THERE ARE TIMES I LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT, UNABLE to sleep, playing and replaying the events of that distant night in Palm Beach, thinking about how the lives of so many people were ruined by what took place in a period of no more than one hour, imagining what might have occurred if only I had acted differently. What would have happened if I had pulled Peter off her? Knocked Jamie away? Tried to raise Kendrick to her feet, shake her out of her stupor?
Was she in a stupor? She had not said anything. She had made noises. They had sounded like … moans. Is that what they were? And if they were moans, were they indications of pleasure or the fact that she could not formulate words?
She had formulated words later. “Fuck you,” she had said. “Fuck off,” she had told me. And she had driven that car. Without her shoes. Without a purse. When young women go to a cocktail party at a place like the Gregorys’, don’t they bring purses? If she had left it there, wouldn’t the Gregorys have found it? Somebody in the Gregory family had to have known who she was. Somebody had invited her.
Crime of Privilege: A Novel Page 4