Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  “Look, Mr. Telford, I’m sorry for your loss. I really am. But that doesn’t give you the right to track me down, try to make me do what you want by insulting me.”

  “Why do you suppose none of the tips I been giving Mitch are in the police file? Why do you suppose they never followed up on any of ’em?”

  “Maybe it’s because the stuff you’re giving them isn’t really helpful.”

  “The stuff I’m giving them is about the Gregorys.”

  That was the moment when I could have left. Should have left. John had emerged from the kitchen and was at the cash register at the end of the bar, totaling me up. I could have gotten off my chair and walked down to where he was, given him my money, gotten out of the restaurant without another word passing between Mr. Telford and me. But that is not what I did. Instead, I looked around.

  There was an overweight couple a few seats down the bar in the opposite direction from the cash register. Behind us, there was a table occupied by a family and the parents were making a fair amount of noise telling their two kids to sit, be still, stop kicking, eat their french fries.

  I looked back at Mr. Telford. His head may have been hanging low, but his eyes were piercing right through me, almost daring me to leave. Go ahead, George, get up and go. Go join Mitch White and Cello DiMasi in whatever circle of hell is reserved for those who choose not to do the right thing, who cover up for people who really don’t give a damn about them.

  John appeared in front of me, a slip of paper in his hand. I ordered another Manhattan. John got a funny look on his face, but he took the paper back and went to do what I asked.

  “All right, Mr. Telford, tell me what it is you think you’ve discovered.”

  “Let me start by asking you something,” he said.

  He made me look at him. The blue-gray eyes, I saw now, had dark rings around the irises.

  “You’re a lifeguard,” he said, “working Dowses Beach here in Osterville, and you want to grab something on your way home to Hyannis, a snack or whatever. Where you likely to stop?”

  How would I know? I wasn’t a lifeguard. Except there was really only one way to go from Dowses to Hyannis. Leave the beach parking lot, take East Bay Road to Main. Turn east.

  He pointed in that direction. “It’s just down the street.” We were on Main. “Next corner, really.”

  I made him tell me.

  “The Bon Faire Market.”

  I knew it, of course. An upscale grocery that had once been a house. Either that or it was so old that it had been built in a day when markets were made to look like houses. If you wanted French cheeses, sculpted cuts of meat, jams that cost nine bucks a jar, fruits and vegetables that looked like works of art, Bon Faire was the place to go.

  “Owned by the Ross family,” Mr. Telford said. “Nice people, but they know their clientele. You can’t blame ’em. They’re not going to push the most famous family on the Cape out their doors by talking about them.”

  My drink came, and with it my revised check. It felt like a secret message: Get out of here, George. Drink up and go before the crazy old man ties you to his car and drags you bump, bump, bump through all the torturous streets and potholed lanes of our precious little seaside community.

  “They got fresh-baked cookies, those flavored waters, little energy bars, you name it. So the police check and, sure enough, one of the Ross family girls—Rachel, her name is—had a memory of Heidi going in there on her last day. Thing is, she can’t remember anything else.” Bill Telford raised his mug to his lips and took a sip. He made a face, which I assumed was because the coffee was not to his liking. But then he said, “You probably want to know why that’s important, Heidi being in there. Well, it’s one of those things that only her mother and me would know about, and it took us a long time to put it together.”

  “You think she met one of the Gregorys in the store.”

  “Well, by God, it didn’t take you long.”

  He seemed more put out than appreciative.

  “Look,” he said, “the Gregorys come down here in the summer, come down from their fancy schools, and they get any girl they want. My daughter and all her friends knew that. Still, it was kind of a thing for them. Good that one of the Gregory boys hit on you—bad if you went along with it. Because, you know, the locals knew these kids weren’t interested in them in the long run. So we just had a little restriction in our house, same as a lot of other families around here. You can go out, you can date, you don’t allow yourself to get picked up by a Gregory.” He wanted me to tell him I understood.

  What I was tempted to say was that I knew full well what the Gregorys did with pretty girls. What I actually said was, “Because you felt they were only interested in one thing and you didn’t want your daughter to be known as one of the girls who gave them that thing.”

  “It’s true,” he said indignantly, as if I was arguing with him.

  But I wasn’t arguing. I was thinking of Kendrick Powell lying on her back, her leg on top of the couch back, while Peter leered over her, his cock in his hand. Except I hadn’t seen his cock, had I? I had seen the red candle, I had seen his fingers, I had seen Jamie’s finger disappearing inside her. I shivered and drank quickly to try to hide it.

  “This is how we put it together, my wife and me.” Mr. Telford wiped his mouth as if smoothing the path for what he was about to say. “That dress Heidi was wearing, it was an Ann Taylor dress. Paid more for it than she ever did for any of her other clothes. It was probably a style she picked up at school, quality without looking too sexy, you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t know if I did or not. I had not looked at the dress that closely, not thought about it that deeply, didn’t know too much about dresses in the first place. My wife, when we were married, kept most of her dresses at her apartment in Boston.

  “Thing is,” Mr. Telford went on, “what was she doing wearing that dress? Like I told you, it wasn’t what she was wearing when she left the house. Second thing, okay, we found some pictures of her when she had worn it before. It had a red belt. Or at least she wore it with a red belt. And red sandals. Accessories, my wife calls them. Both the sandals and the belt are missing. They weren’t in the house and the cops never found them. So it makes sense they were in that bag she was carrying when we last saw her. All of it: the dress folded up, the red belt, the red sandals. And she obviously changed someplace outside the house. Question is, why would she?”

  It was his turn to look around, look at the fat couple, at the rambunctious kids behind us, at a new group of post-middle-aged, none-too-fit folks who had just come in and taken a table in front of the fireplace. Then he leaned in closer. “This is the part I’m not real comfortable talking about, Mr. Becket. But my daughter was what you call ‘well endowed.’ You know what I’m saying?”

  It was important to him that I understand there was nothing salacious about what he was telling me. It was just a fact to be recognized. Recognized and reckoned with.

  I nodded.

  “When they found her, she didn’t seem to have been sexually molested, but she wasn’t wearing a bra. Okay, we look at the pictures, the pictures of when she was wearing the dress before, and she was definitely wearing a bra then. The other thing is, the cloth of the dress, it’s good, sturdy cloth. It’s not like you’re going to be able to see all the way through it.”

  “Just enough to see that she’s well endowed and not wearing a bra.”

  He sat back, embarrassed. But this, apparently, was his point.

  “Maybe whoever killed her took off the bra.”

  Mr. Telford shook his head. “The way that dress was, it didn’t make sense. We’re back to the part that’s hard for me to talk about, Mr. Becket, but it was like, you’d have to peel the dress down from the top, take off the bra, and then pull the dress back up, you know, to get it the way it was when they found her.”

  I flashed back to Kendrick, to what I had tried to do when I was dressing her.

  When I focused a
gain on Mr. Telford, he had both hands on the bar, his fingers folded tightly together. “Look, maybe this is just something that only a parent can feel. But that dress is the clue. The dress and the bra.”

  “You’re saying she put on a dress because she was going someplace she didn’t want you to know about. It was a conservative dress, which tells you she thought she was going someplace nice. And she took off her bra because she didn’t want whoever she was going to see to think she was too conservative.”

  “She was twenty years old, Mr. Becket. I see my other daughter, she thinks she’s gettin’ dressed up when she puts on a denim skirt.”

  “I’m just trying to make sure I understand the clue you’re talking about, Mr. Telford.”

  “Yeah, you’re understanding, all right. More than Mitch White. I give him the photo, tell him the same thing I’m telling you. Ask, ‘Who would she do all that for, Mr. White?’ He just stares at me.”

  “And you were trying to tell him she’d do that for the Gregorys.”

  “Well, they fit the bill perfectly, don’t they? And here’s one more bit of information for you. That was Memorial Day weekend when it happened. What goes on around here on Memorial Day weekend? That race over to Nantucket. The one they call the Figawi. Who sails in the race? Well, the Gregorys do. Some of ’em, anyhow. And what happens at the end of the race? Parties. Parties on Nantucket, parties here. You’re an attractive girl like my daughter, you run into a Gregory, he invites you to a party, you’re gonna be sorely tempted, don’t you think? Even if your parents wouldn’t approve?”

  I stared at my drink, wondering if I should finish it off or ask the next question, the one that could get me in a whole lot of trouble. I did both. “I don’t suppose you found out which Gregorys were in town that weekend?”

  “Their boat’s called The Paradox. I found out who was registered as the crew. Six people. Five of ’em guys.”

  There was no exit now. “You want to tell me who?”

  “Ned Gregory was the captain. It was his boat. Crew was Jamie Gregory, girl was Cory Gregory, there was a boy named Jason Stockover, another one named Paul McFetridge, and then there was Peter Gregory Martin.”

  My Manhattan surged back up from my stomach, got caught in my throat, didn’t seem to want to go back down again.

  “You know him? Peter Martin? He was the one who was accused of rape down in Florida that time. They never proved anything, but people said the only reason he wasn’t prosecuted was because he was a Gregory.”

  My skin was burning, my chest was constricted, and yet my whole body was so cold I began to shake. I gripped my empty glass around the stem and held it tight just so the old man could not see my hand rattling.

  “I took the names, I give them to Mitch White, give them to Detective Landry. What happens? They go, ‘Hmm, hmm. We’ll look into it, Mr. Telford.’ Never hear anything more. So I do my own work. Start going to Bon Faire on a regular basis. Get to know the Ross girls; they get to know me. They know about Heidi, of course. They ask me what’s going on. They’re interested, and I can tell they’re concerned because, like I said, they’re good people. And finally one day I’m in the store alone with Rachel and I ask her, that last day she remembers Heidi being in there, was Peter Martin there, too? And she tells me the truth. She tells me he was.”

  “Same time?” I surprise myself by getting the words out. They seemed to have escaped through a corner of my mouth.

  “Well, she’s a little evasive there, but I can tell they were. See, what you gotta understand is that Rachel knows Peter. She probably knows the whole family, but, well, she’s a little chunky, so she’s probably not on their radar. Anyhow, she’s already told the police she can’t remember anything else, but now here she is admitting Peter was in the store. And what she’s really doing, Mr. Becket, is she’s being honest with me while still being loyal to them.”

  “You told all this to—”

  “Yep.” Bill Telford drew a five-dollar bill from his wallet. “And now I’m telling you.” He slid the bill under his coffee cup, inclined his head in the direction of John the bartender, and said, “That ought to smooth his feathers a little bit.” Then he got to his feet, looked up at the television screen, where the Bruins were getting shut out, and said, “Those three guys they got in the trade for Thornton are about as worthless as hazelnuts.”

  2.

  THAT THIRD-YEAR STUDENT WHO HAD SAVED US FROM BEING busted was named Tiel. I never saw his name spelled out, but I assumed it was T-i-e-l. His father did not live in Old Town and was not deputy attorney general of the United States. There was no Baldwin case, either—at least none that held what Tiel had claimed.

  He and Marion had wanted to celebrate what they had managed to pull off. I just wanted to go home. After much protesting, they dropped me at my apartment and continued on to Marion’s place, where Tiel proceeded to spend the night with my date.

  Marion liked the fact that I wasn’t bothered about Tiel sleeping with her. She thought it meant I was kinky. And I thought that was why she called me when she moved to Boston.

  She was working for a well-known firm and hating every minute of it. She had heard I was on the Cape and wanted to know if she could come down for the weekend.

  Sure, I said. Come on down.

  Within a year we were married.

  3.

  “YES, GEORGE?”

  Mitch White seemed put out that I was coming to see him a second time.

  I took the seat I wasn’t offered and told him that I had looked through the Telford files.

  “Make any great discoveries?”

  The district attorney almost smiled. At least that is what I think was going on beneath his twitching mustache.

  “Only that none of the stuff was there that Bill Telford claims to have turned over.”

  “What stuff? A picture of his daughter in the dress? Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “He said he gave it to you.”

  “Which is why I took it. But Detective Landry and those guys, they already had pictures.”

  “So what did you do with it?”

  “Hey—why are you talking to me like that?” Mitch White’s eyes flashed behind his glasses in a way that was meant to remind me of who he was.

  “Just … the picture was part of a point Mr. Telford was trying to prove.”

  “What point?” He put his hands under his pectorals and cupped them there. Then he stared.

  I looked around Mitch White’s office rather than look at the spectacle he was making of himself. I wondered how a man like him could make me feel like such a loser.

  The district attorney’s hands flew up in the air, extending over his head, compelling me to look back at him. “C’mon, George,” he said. “After nine years, that’s all he’s got? And you think that’s good enough for me to what? Convene a grand jury? I’d be the laughingstock of the community.”

  I didn’t tell him he already was. I just said, “Well, I got the impression Mr. Telford had to build up a lot of good faith with the girl in the store, the one who finally told him about Peter Martin being there.”

  “What, did the girl get jilted by the Gregorys? Is that what’s behind this? She couldn’t remember before, but now she does?”

  “I don’t know, Mitch. I’m only asking because Mr. Telford says he’s supplied various items to the investigation, and from what I can tell, the files haven’t even been opened in years.”

  “You know what the first thing he wanted us to do was? See who bought golf clubs. Medical examiner says the girl must have gotten hit by a golf club. Okay, nobody has any reason to argue with that. So Bill Telford thinks it’s a good idea for us to canvass the Cape, get a list of everyone who bought a single club in the thirty days after Heidi’s death.” Mitch White flung himself around in his chair in agitation. “What, we go to every golf course, Sears, Walmart?”

  “We don’t have a Walmart.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what I’m saying. I t
ell him we can’t do it, don’t have the manpower. So he comes up with these lists. Says if you’re gonna use a club to make the wound Heidi had, it can only be one of these clubs. I forget … three, four, five irons, I think he figures. Flat heads. Then he says okay, if the person knows about the Wianno course, it’s only going to be a nice club, a Ping or something. Then he says, and he’s not going to be buying it at a Sears or a Kmart. That’s the other place I was trying to think of. So all right, we indulge him. Detective Landry goes to the shops at all the golf courses, private and public, in about a ten-mile radius. And that’s a lot, believe me. We come up with a couple of doctors, some university chancellor, the travel editor of The New York Times—”

  “Any Gregorys?”

  Mitch White stopped talking and went back to staring. After about ten seconds, he seemed to have a revelation. His forehead tilted back, his chin, what there was of it, lifted up. “No,” he said. “No, George. There was no evidence of any Gregory buying any golf club that we were able to find.”

  His expression had lost the agitation, the sense of annoyance, he had shown before.

  “So when Bill Telford goes around saying he’s handed in all this stuff, the only thing he’s really talking about is a picture of his daughter in a blue dress with a red belt, red sandals?”

  “That’s right, George.” It was clear now: Mitch White thought I was putting him through some kind of exercise.

  “What about a list of the people on the Gregorys’ boat in the Figawi race that year—did he give you that?”

  “Oh, yes. He gave us the list.” He pumped his head in a show of assurance.

  “What did you do with it?”

  “It’s around somewhere.”

  “Did you contact any of them? The people on the list, I mean?”

  And just that quickly Mitch wasn’t sure about the rules of the exercise anymore. If I was asking these questions on behalf of his friends and mine, why didn’t I already know whether he had contacted them? He rolled his chair back from his desk, extended his legs out in front of him, put his elbows on the arms of the chair, and folded his hands about chest high as he stared that question at me.