Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  “And what did she get hit with?” I asked.

  “Probably a golf club. That’s what the medical examiner figured, anyway.”

  “Okay, so correct me if I’m wrong, Chief. The girl’s found on a swanky golf course, her head crushed by a golf club. That doesn’t sound like she got picked up by a transient.”

  “Who said she was?”

  “Well, what do you think happened?”

  Perhaps it was the tone of my question. Perhaps I should have shown more deference to the chief of police. In any event, Cello DiMasi exploded. “How the fuck do I know? If I knew, I’d arrest somebody, don’t you think, Counselor?”

  I smiled. I said I was sure he would.

  He grumped, like maybe it would be best if I just got my overeducated ass out of his office, out of his police station, took my bleeding heart out to save the colored kids who steal honest people’s bikes.

  My smile did not seem to be working. I used to have a good one. Now I get the feeling people regard it as something I just drop over my face, like a page on a flip chart. Still, what do you do when you’re trying to placate someone like the chief? I tried words. “Mitch White thought it might be a good idea if I took a look through the file.”

  “Mitch White, huh?” The message was clear: Mitch White, another Ivy League prick like me.

  I slowly lifted my hands, palms up, as if there was nothing I could do, Mitch was my boss. Smile, speak, roll over like a dog with my paws in the air.

  The chief hitched his belt, made the leather creak. He was not wearing any weapons, but the belt was black and three inches thick, the kind that could hold a gun, a truncheon, a foot-long flashlight. Somehow hitching it, making it creak, passed for a sign of dominance.

  “C’mon,” he said, and led me out of the office and down a corridor in which the walls were made of cinder blocks painted light green. We had to walk a good hundred feet and every time we encountered someone, the person would squeeze his back to the wall and say, “Chief,” as we passed. The chief did not acknowledge anyone by name, just nodded as he steamrollered toward our destination, a green door with a wired window at the far end of the corridor.

  He grabbed the brass handle, shouted, “Door,” and somebody in an adjoining room buzzed it open. He did not look back, just flung the door wide and let me catch it on my forearm before it slammed shut again.

  The department’s file room was virtually a warehouse, with rows of adjustable shelves that looked as if they had been built from an erector set. There was a little desk just inside the door, but nobody was at it. “Clancy!” the chief bellowed, and an ancient cop in a faded uniform that looked nearly as old as he scuttled out from the stacks.

  “Right here, Chief.”

  Cello DiMasi flung a thumb in my direction, again without looking at me. “This here’s Assistant D.A. Becket. He wants to look at what we got on the Telford case.”

  The old man turned to me with an expression of concern. Worry, maybe. Possibly fear. “The Telford case, sure. Right this way.” He made another turn and hurried down one aisle with his shoulders curled forward and his hands splayed in front of him as if he were sweeping for mines. We followed, me first and then the chief, and Clancy took us all the way to the end of the aisle, where he began scanning the shelves, looking over once or twice at the chief as if to tell him not to get excited, the files were right here somewhere.

  Like Clancy, I looked at the chief. Unlike with Clancy, the chief did not look back at me. He was still seething over whatever insult he thought I had dealt him. I was in the process of replaying our conversation in my head when Clancy let out a cry of relief and hauled two cardboard boxes from the back of a shelf, where they had been obscured by a whole series of other files. The boxes had the name Telford written on them in black Magic Marker, and the old man dropped them onto the floor in triumph.

  The chief looked down, poked them with the rounded toe of his shiny black shoe, and said, “Lemme know if you find anything us dumb cops overlooked.” Then he spun around and left me to do my own digging.

  Once the chief was gone, Clancy began fawning over me. He had a nice desk and chair for me, he said. He could bring the boxes to me. He offered me coffee, claimed he had just made a fresh pot. I picked up one of the boxes, nodded to him to pick up the other, and told him all I needed was his desk and chair.

  I HAD COME TO the police station with the idea that it was going to take me hours to go through the evidence. It took forty minutes. Then I went back and went through it again, sure that I had missed something.

  The contents of one box consisted almost entirely of photographs, pictures of a blonde girl in a sleeveless summer dress sprawled on her stomach under a maple tree just to the side of a meticulously groomed fairway; close-ups of the back of her head, looking not so much crushed as carved open like a melon; close-ups of her face after she had been rolled onto her back, her eyes closed, her features expressionless, somehow unreal, as if she were not a person at all but a model of one. There were scores of shots from the autopsy, including about a dozen of her naked body lying on a metal table, but I chose not to look at them. I was interested mostly in the way she appeared on the golf course.

  The dress was of no particular quality that I could discern. It was blue, patterned with what appeared to be little red roselike figures. She wore no shoes and of course no stockings. The photos at the scene did not show whether she was wearing underwear, but in the second box there was a sealed clear plastic bag with a pair of pink-and-white striped bikini briefs. The autopsy report, also in the other box, said she was wearing the briefs but no bra. I went back and looked at the pictures of her lying supine on the coroner’s table. It was hard to tell from that position, but she did not appear to be a woman who could regularly go braless without attracting considerable attention.

  I did not need to speculate about her legs. Her knees, just below the kneecaps, showed grass stains.

  A good-looking girl, twenty years old, had either been on her knees voluntarily or had been dragged across a lawn. I studied the pictures yet again. There were none of the golf course itself. It was depicted only as the location of the body. One shot was taken from the road, looking through one set of trees, across the fairway to a thicker copse where Heidi’s body lay. Another was taken from just beyond the first set of trees, on the fairway side, showing about one hundred feet of grass. Another was taken at fifty feet from the body, yet another at twenty-five, and then several at ten feet. I could not tell from any of them if there was a drag path.

  I had to assume there wasn’t. Surely, if there was evidence that she had been dragged, the police would have recorded it.

  What the photos did show was that there had been plenty of foot traffic in the dew-laden grass. I pulled out the police report and read that at 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, 1999, a groundskeeper named Rinaldo DaSilva had discovered the body on the sixteenth fairway. He had been driving a golf cart pulling a fantail rake behind it when he had first noticed what he described as “a pile of blue.” He had thought, for some reason, that it was a pool cover that had blown onto the course from somebody’s home and so he had not gone to it right away. When he did realize what it was, he panicked. He got out of his cart and ran to her side but did not touch her, thinking that it would be wrong, inappropriate, something he shouldn’t do. Instead, he stood over, shouting down to her, “Lady! Lady, are you all right? Lady, wake up!” Then he ran to the street, thinking he might see somebody, some friend of hers, somebody who could help him. He admitted he was not thinking very clearly.

  He ran back to her, forced himself to kneel down, to part her hair. He had seen that her hair and neck and back of her dress were bloody, but he hadn’t seen where the blood had come from until he separated the tangle of hair and saw what he thought was her brain. Then, he said, he fell over, fell backward onto his hands and did a crab-walk to try to get away from her. He thought he went about fifteen feet before he collapsed. Then he got to his feet and ran to
the street again, shouting for help as loud as he could.

  A man named Lowell Prentice came out of his house in his bathrobe, demanding to know what was going on. Rinaldo DaSilva pointed to the trees. Prentice followed Rinaldo back to the body, apparently hobbling with considerable difficulty because of some knee condition that required him practically to drag one foot behind him. Once there, he didn’t know what to do, either. The two of them seemed to accomplish little more than trampling whatever evidence might have existed.

  According to the medical examiner, Dr. Rajit Pardeep, Heidi had died from intracraneal and intercerebral bleeding after having been struck on the back of the skull by a narrow, dull-bladed metal object. Given the fact that she had been found on a golf course, Dr. Pardeep surmised she had been struck by a golf club. He found no semen in her body cavities, no evidence of sexual molestation. Her stomach contents were thirty-three percent liquid, which he attributed to alcohol, and her blood alcohol level was .12, enough to be intoxicated but not falling-down drunk.

  The investigation report was prepared by Detective Howard Landry. I knew him only by name. He worked serious crimes and I didn’t. His presence on the case meant that, at least initially, nobody was trying to sweep this under the rug.

  May 26, 1999, he had been called at home at 6:10 a.m. and arrived at the scene at 6:42. Other officers as well as EMTs from the fire department were present, and Heidi Telford had already been pronounced dead. Barnstable police had put up yellow tape to seal off the area, but Landry confirmed my suspicion that irreparable damage had been done in terms of failing to preserve evidence of footsteps or drag paths. He could find no blood spatters on or around the maple tree beneath which the body was found.

  He made a preliminary determination that the body had been brought to its resting place from the scene of the killing, and so he checked the roadside for tire marks in the dirt. Whatever was there had been obscured by what he called “first responder” vehicles. Since he did not otherwise identify them, I assumed he meant police patrol cars responding to Mr. Prentice’s 911 call.

  In sum, neither Detective Landry nor anyone working with him found any clues on or near the sixteenth fairway of the Wianno Club golf course except the body itself.

  Landry’s report traced the events of Heidi’s last day. It was Memorial Day, and she had had her first weekend of work in her summer job as a lifeguard at Dowses Beach in Osterville. She had gotten off work at five, driven home to Hyannis in her Jeep Wrangler, and arrived in particularly good spirits. Her parents attributed that to her really liking her job.

  She had spent about an hour and a half doing “the usual things,” according to her parents: ate, showered, changed. At around 7:30 she had gone out, telling her mother she was going to walk down to Main Street, which was only a quarter-mile away. On a summer night, Main Street, Hyannis, is probably the most active stretch of road anyplace on Cape Cod, with the possible exception of Commercial Street in Provincetown. Stores, bars, and restaurants are open, and tourists flood them all, along with the sidewalks and the vehicle travel lanes. Locals tend to stay away from Main Street at such times, but this was the very end of the holiday weekend and most visitors would have gone home.

  What the Telfords thought was peculiar—disturbing, even—was that Heidi had not been wearing the blue dress with the red rosettes when she went out. She had been wearing white shorts, white sandals, and a yellow Izod shirt, which, her mother insisted, she never would have worn without a bra. She was a D-cup, her mother said. She wasn’t the kind of girl to show off.

  Her mother remembered that she was carrying a rather large purse, a rope or hemp purse with two brown leather handles that you could sling over your shoulder and let ride on your hip. She had not thought anything about it at the time. Afterward, she wondered if her daughter had been carrying the dress inside the purse. But, she said, she couldn’t think why she would do that. She had just finished her sophomore year at Wheaton. All she had to do was tell them if she was going out on a date.

  Landry appeared to have done a good job canvassing Main Street. Within two days he had presented her picture at every bar and restaurant. While she was known to some of the waiters, waitresses, hostesses, and even a few of the bartenders, nobody had seen her that night. Landry expressed a lack of surprise. He noted she was twenty years old and not old enough to drink legally, and she had eaten before she went out.

  He thought he might have better luck with sales staff and shopkeepers, but his interviews with them had also failed to produce anyone who had seen her at any time after she left her parents’ home.

  He met with friends, co-workers, high school classmates, college classmates, former boyfriends, and came up with no one who had any idea why someone would kill Heidi Telford or even want to. The most common response, repeated several times by different people, was that she “was not that kind of girl.” With no clues, no weapon, and not even any rumors to follow, Landry essentially gave up. His report was still labeled “Preliminary,” the file was still labeled “Open,” but the last thing I saw with a date on it read 2000, and there was no sign that anything had been added to it since then.

  Whatever the things were that Heidi’s father had been giving to District Attorney White, they had never even made it into the police department’s boxes.

  1.

  WASHINGTON, D.C., October 1996

  I ENJOYED MY FIRST MONTH OF LAW SCHOOL. I PLAYED PICKUP basketball in the gym three afternoons a week, met some guys who asked me to join a flag football team that played on Saturday mornings, drank with classmates at the 21st Amendment on Friday afternoons, and tried never to miss a lecture or homework assignment. And then Mr. Andrews found me.

  I was living in an apartment a few streets from the National Law Center at George Washington University. I had not been there long, had not given anyone my new address, but there was Mr. Andrews, looking taut and wired in jeans and running shoes and that same gray jacket he had worn in Philadelphia six months before.

  “George,” he said, and stood there, silently demanding that I invite him in.

  My place was on the third floor of a building that sacrificed comfort for character. I had a small living room that led to a smaller dining room, off of which was a kitchen that was just big enough for one person at a time. The living room converted to a bedroom at night. The dining room was used full-time as a study. I had yet to have anybody there as a guest, and so my computer, my books, and my desk lamp were all positioned on the dining room table. When I ate, I simply moved to a different part of the table. I had two chairs.

  I looked at the chairs, looked at the couch that had been left by the previous tenant, and wondered where I would put Mr. Andrews. I wondered why I had to put him anywhere at all. I said, “What do you want?”

  The man stared at me long enough and hard enough that I somehow knew what he was going to say before he said it. My lower lip began to tremble. I bit down on it to make it stop. He didn’t even blink. I put my hand on the door frame and gripped it tightly so that I could lean forward and not use all my willpower just to stand up straight. And still Mr. Andrews did not say anything more. I had to ask him.

  “What happened?”

  “Drug overdose.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s dead, George. Is that all right enough for you?”

  I stepped away from the door. Fell away, ended up on the couch. I lost a small segment of time, but then Mr. Andrews was standing over me and I was leaning forward, my forearms on my knees, my hands dangling. “I’m sorry,” I said. I may have said it multiple times. I wondered why I was saying sorry to him—he was just a messenger, an employee, a hired hand—but I had to say it to someone, and he was there.

  “They got to you, didn’t they?”

  “I went to see him. I did what you asked.”

  “Oh, you went to see him, we know that. I doubt very much you did what I asked.”

  “I answered his questions.”

  �
�So what are you saying, George, the fucking state attorney for Palm Beach County didn’t ask the right questions?”

  “He asked what happened that night. I told him there was a party at the Gregorys’ and a bunch of us had gotten completely drunk—”

  “Very bold of you. Went way out on a limb, did you?”

  “It was true. I had, Kendrick had, some of the cousins had. What he kept asking about was the Senator. Whether the Senator had gotten drunk. Whether I had seen him with Kendrick. Whether the Senator had done anything inappropriate.”

  “He didn’t ask about Peter and you didn’t tell him.”

  “It was the Senator he wanted to know about.” I sounded as if I was whining. I didn’t mean to whine. I wasn’t going to whine. If he was here to punish me, then I was going to take it. Go ahead, Mr. Andrews. Smack me. Beat the shit out of me, if that’s what you’ve come here to do.

  But Mr. Andrews did not do that. He didn’t slap me, he didn’t kick me, he didn’t grab me by the shirtfront and throw me through the dining room window to the sidewalk fifty feet below. He just stood over me and waited for me to explain.

  I had time to gather my thoughts. Gather them up, have them split apart again. “Look, Ralph Mars, the state attorney down there, told me it was a very sensitive matter because of who was involved. He said he had to be careful the claims weren’t just politically motivated. That was all he seemed to be interested in.”

  It was not good enough. Mr. Andrews twisted my words in his mouth and spit them back at me. “Politically motivated? A girl gets violently raped and you claim that all the prosecutor cares about is whether her complaint is politically motivated?”