Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  We went to the Berkshires, stayed at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, which was fun but not particularly romantic. We saw the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, saw the Alvin Ailey dance troupe at Jacob’s Pillow, saw an obscure Tennessee Williams play at Williamstown. I talked her into renting bicycles with me, but her idea of riding was to stop at every art gallery and antiques shop, and so that did not work out particularly well.

  We returned home and she did not leave her job. She was supposed to leave, but she had not yet secured anything on the Cape and there was a big project her firm had going, a class action, and they needed her. We moved into the house in Centerville, but she kept her apartment in Boston. It would just be for a little while, she said. A month or two. Three at the most.

  Three grew into six, and six into a year. They gave her a big raise, she said. They promised she wouldn’t have to work weekends.

  Okay, I said, and a year grew into two before she told me she wasn’t coming down anymore.

  6.

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN 6:00 WHEN I GOT TO THE HOT SPRING. IT definitely was closer to seven when I heard McFetridge, walking in river sandals, step down the path. He was carrying something over his shoulder that looked like a small canvas mailbag. He looked at me, looked at the creek, and placed the bag carefully on the ground. Something inside it clinked metallically as though two heavy objects had bumped against each other. He took off his T-shirt and sandals and stepped into the box in his rafting shorts.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “How those people doing?”

  “They’re going to stay.”

  “Good. You handled them well.”

  He cut me a quick look to see if I was serious. Then he glanced around as if he had never been in this place before. “Pretty nice, huh?”

  “Awesome.”

  He laughed. “Wicked awesome. You’re beginning to talk like a Cape Codder.”

  “I’ve been there awhile now.”

  Of course, I had also been here awhile. Forty-five minutes is a long time to sit in a box of hot water, even if the setting was as superb as this one. My skin was beginning to pucker. The water was no longer as warming as it had been.

  McFetridge swirled his arms, leaned back, closed his eyes. “You said you called my mother,” he said. “What was that all about?”

  “Just wanted to know how you were doing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on the river.

  “Look,” he said, “my name’s not on any letterhead, in any brochures, on any website. You’d have to go to a fuck of a lot of trouble to find me. But here you are, not even pretending it’s a coincidence. So what’s going on? That’s what I’m asking.”

  “You remember a girl named Heidi Telford?”

  I would wonder later if it was good to have come right out with it like I did. I had planned subterfuge, sneaking up on the subject, working around from college days to the Gregorys to the Cape, to the race, to the party, and then to the missing girl. Hey, how about that girl with the golf club in her head? Remember her? Somehow, sitting in a pool of water in the middle of the wilderness with a guy with whom I had shared houses, rooms, vacations, parties, countless bottles of beer, I ended up skipping all the preliminaries.

  When McFetridge didn’t answer I turned my head to look at him. He, too, was staring at the river and what I saw was a rather grizzled profile, causing me to wonder what had happened to the handsome preppie, the sophisticated master of country-club sports, the young man who at one time had known all the right people, all the right places in New York, Palm Beach, Cape Cod. As I watched, he sank beneath the water.

  Perhaps he thought he could stay down forever. But I was still there when he surfaced. He spit water, gasped, blinked. “She’s dead,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Why you asking me about her?”

  “I’ve got the case.” It wasn’t quite true, but it was close enough.

  “You told me you were a lawyer. Didn’t tell me you were a D.A.”

  “Assistant.”

  “Senator get you the job?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  He nodded, putting something together, not sharing it with me.

  “What’s that guy’s name? Marshall? Marshall Black? White?”

  “Mitchell White.”

  “Yeah, that’s him. I always thought he was a nerd.”

  “Still is.”

  “Yeah. Used to be a staff member on the Senate Judiciary Committee in D.C. Figured he must have had something on somebody. What did you have, Georgie? Was it that girl down in Florida?”

  I wondered if sitting in the water all that time had made my testicles shrink into nothing.

  McFetridge waited for an answer.

  “I guess.”

  “And now what? Senator sends you to check on me?” There was a sneer in his voice, the kind he might have used if we were brothers and he was talking about Mom.

  “He didn’t send me. Fact is, outside of meeting him that one time you introduced us at the party in Palm Beach, I’ve never even talked to the Senator.”

  McFetridge thought. He apparently had a lot to think about because it took him a long time. Then he said, “It was Chuck-Chuck, then, wasn’t it?”

  “Chuck Larson? Why do you say that?”

  “You’re in the circle now, Georgie. They obviously want to know if I’m still in it. Who better than you to find out?”

  McFetridge went under the water again. He did not stay down so long this time, but he did come up wiping his eyes. “Senator gets you a job in the D.A.’s office. D.A. puts you to work on the Heidi Telford case, and Chuck-Chuck tells you to come talk to me.” His mouth was set somewhere between a smile and a smirk. “Well, you can tell them I’m good, Georgie. Tell ’em all I’m good, just living out west, river-guiding in the summer, ski-patrolling in the winter. La dolce fucking vita, baby.” He went under the water again.

  This time when he resurfaced I said, “Your name is on a list, along with Peter Martin, three of his cousins, and a guy named Jason.”

  “Stockover.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That isn’t news, Georgie. We were the crew on The Paradox that weekend. Cops wanted to know if we saw Heidi Telford.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Never did. I was out here by the time they got around to asking. But I heard they talked to Peter, Jamie … Ned.”

  “If they had talked to you, what would you have said?”

  Paul McFetridge put both his hands to his head and pulled his hair back. I was struck, once again, by how different he appeared now, how foreign he seemed to be from the guy I once knew. “Who’s asking?” he said, and his question conveyed very much the same displacement I was feeling.

  Somehow, in whatever half-assed planning I had undertaken for this journey, I had not prepared for this moment. And now two men who had been possibly best friends in a different place at a different time sat in a makeshift hot tub in the middle of the wilderness, miles from any other human being, trying to figure out who each other had become.

  I looked at the Loon as it bubbled and frothed and raged past me. “I talked to Cory Gregory,” I said. I wanted to let him know he wasn’t the only one being singled out.

  “What did she say?”

  “Said there was some kind of party after you got back from Nantucket.”

  “She wasn’t even there. She took off for school.”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “So that’s it, then. She doesn’t know anything, none of the rest of us know anything.”

  Except he did. He knew that Heidi Telford was dead.

  The silence became palpable. I wondered if it was possible for the two of us just to stay in that little pool and never move on, never exchange another bit of information about the Gregorys and Heidi Telford and what the two of us were doing in Idaho twelve years after we had last spoken, hugged our g
oodbyes. I wondered if we could start talking about Quaker basketball, Fiji Island parties, whether Ellis had ever gotten into medical school.

  “Do you know something different, Georgie?” he said at last. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Apparently Peter’s been linked up with Heidi that day.”

  “Linked up how?”

  “Linked up like maybe inviting her to a party at the Gregory house.” I was surprised by my courage in saying what I didn’t know to be a fact, surprised by my cowardice in using the word “maybe.”

  McFetridge could have been considering the many different possibilities for using that word. He was trying to get me to look at him, trying to read my eyes. “So you’re what, just doing your job, Georgie? Going around talking to possible leaks?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “That sucks, Georgie.”

  “I know it does,” said George Becket, who was not just doing his job, who didn’t even have an assignment, who had come across the country to exploit a friendship, quiz his old roommate about his possible involvement in a murder.

  The silence grew oppressive again. I wanted one of us to say something reassuring to the other. It didn’t happen. I wondered if I could just get up, tell McFetridge it was good seeing him, slap hands, ask what the rafting was going to be like tomorrow.

  “Look,” he said after about three very long minutes had passed, “I think I’m gonna stay here a little longer. Why don’t you go back now, catch your dinner, let those guys clean up.”

  The message was clear: Fraternity brothers or not, my company was no longer desired.

  At this point, I didn’t even desire it myself.

  7.

  I PUT ON MY SHIRT AND SHOES AND WENT UP THE HILL TO THE trail, hiked the trail along the creek, past the bridge that led to the fishermen’s camp and the airstrip, and was so occupied with my thoughts that I barely even noticed the ground under my feet. I tried to remember what Paul McFetridge could ever have possibly liked about me. He was the guy who made things happen; I was the guy who tagged along. And now I had used everything he had ever given me, done for me, shown me, to put myself in a position where I was making him hate every moment he had ever been nice to me. And why was I doing it?

  Nobody wanted me to investigate the murder of Heidi Telford, nobody except her father. I could have done as everyone else had. Told Bill Telford there was nothing new, told him I had other things to do. Do you know how many drunk drivers there are out there endangering our streets and highways, Mr. Telford? I was sorry his daughter was dead. Everybody was. But it wasn’t up to me to investigate my friends just because they happened to be in the area at the time the girl was killed. Just because they happened to like girls and girls liked them and things came easily to them and people protected them.

  I thought about the grin on the Senator’s face as he looked back over his shoulder at us when he was dancing with his sister. So different from Jamie’s grin, and yet so much the same. Each was the grin of a man who could do anything he wanted and be praised for it. The Senator, at least, had earned his pass, but what had Jamie ever done to deserve a grin like that? Was that what I hated most? Was that why I was doing what I was doing? You have broken my heart … please go a-way!

  I reached the bend in the trail, the turn where it angled away from the Loon and headed upstream on the Salmon. There was a hill on my left, but I paid no attention to it. I was only aware of it because I had to circumnavigate it. Go around the hill and enter that field of small blue spruces that had reminded me of a Christmas tree lot. There was water on the path ahead of me, the runoff from a trickle of a stream coming down from the hill. The trees to the left of the trail seemed slightly smaller, the ground slightly more sloped than to the right, where the field of spruces went all the way to a ridge and then dropped precipitously to the river. I was vaguely aware of all these things simply because there was water ahead of me on the trail and a part of my brain was wondering where it came from and why it seemed to gather where it did, and while I was wondering about the water and thinking about the Senator’s grin there was an enormous bite taken out of the ground near my foot and an almost simultaneous cracking sound.

  How does one’s body know it’s being shot at before it even registers in the mind? All of a sudden I was diving into the spruces.

  Something whizzed by my shoulder, whizzed through tree branches. Did it come at the same time as the second crack? It made no difference. I was already facedown. I was on my chest, crawling on my elbows, trying to get as deep into the little spruces as I could, cursing them for being so far apart, for having so much space between them. Spruce needles, rocks, sharp leaves, all dug into my skin as I sprint-crawled over the ground. None of it mattered because there was a third crack and I was absolutely certain I was never going to be able to get away. I was the only thing moving in a field the size of a football stadium, trying to get protection from skinny tree trunks and even skinnier branches. I needed to get back to my feet, I needed to run, I needed to zigzag, to get all the way to the ridge and then jump as far out as I possibly could.

  I pushed to my hands and knees and took off with my legs driving and my upper body parallel to the ground. I made it to the first tree to my right, cut sharply to one on my left, cut back to the right, and then dove into the dirt and rolled. I was on my feet again, trying to outsmart the shooter as I went from side to side, using no pattern but what appeared in front of me as I ran, my heart pounding, my breath searing my lungs. I was yelling my name as I dove, tumbled, got up again. Except I wasn’t yelling. That wasn’t me. Somebody else was yelling. And coming after me. Coming hard and fast in my direction.

  I looked toward the river. It was still thirty yards before I could get to the ridge, before I could jump, and I saw now how high that jump was going to be. I looked back. There was a flash of color, a ball of hair, and I realized it was McFetridge. Coming to kill me. He couldn’t run and shoot at the same time. Not accurately. So I made the dash. I didn’t bother going from tree to tree anymore, I just bolted to the ridge and launched myself off it in full stride.

  I was probably less than a second in the air before I realized the mistake I had made.

  8.

  “I GOTCHA, MAN. I GOTCHA.”

  The voice was McFetridge’s. It was straining, but it was comforting, too. It kept saying the same thing over and over.

  I opened my eyes. The trees above me were at a funny angle. They were growing out of my feet. It took me a moment to realize I was looking at their tops, from the bottoms up. Blood was in my head. But it wasn’t loose blood. Not wet blood. I blinked and listened to McFetridge cooing to me. I listened to him grunt, curse, reassure me all over again, and I realized I was upside down. I was on a steep slope and my head was lower than my feet. But where were my arms? Where were my hands? What was holding me?

  I remembered now. I remembered jumping, seeing I wasn’t going to reach the water, trying to find a place to land. I had hit feetfirst and then pitched forward, head over heels. I had gone back into the air, seen the boulders below me as I flipped, and grabbed for whatever I could. And now I was lying upside down, not feeling anything in my limbs. Except I could feel my feet. I just didn’t want to move them because they were caught on something, holding me in place.

  “Hang on there, buddy. I gotcha. I gotcha. I’m almost there.”

  I could sense McFetridge more than I could see him. He seemed to be swinging from one handhold to another. I concentrated very hard on moving my left arm. It moved and I had a rush of exultation. I tried my right arm and it moved as well.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I meant it only in terms of how bad I might have been, but it was enough.

  McFetridge stopped his descent. I could hear him breathing hard. I could hear despair. Why despair? Because he hadn’t killed me right away? Or because I was broken?

  How broken could I be? I could feel my arms. I could feel my feet. If I could feel my feet and I couldn’t move them, what d
id that mean? I began to hyperventilate. Noises were coming out of my chest. They weren’t noises I had ever made before. They weren’t noises I had ever heard any human being make before.

  “It’s okay, buddy, I’m gonna get you.”

  He was going to get me.

  “You sonofabitch,” I said, because I was scared, because I did not want him to see how scared I was. “Come near me and I’ll fucking kill you.” I did not explain how I was going to do that and McFetridge wasn’t listening anyway.

  “Wait, wait, wait, buddy, don’t move!”

  But I wasn’t moving, was I? If I couldn’t move my legs that meant I couldn’t dig them into anything. Which meant I would slide. Plummet. Go headfirst into the boulders, ricochet into the water and get carried downstream. I lay very still for a moment, trying to get my thoughts under control.

  “Look,” I said, “if I sit up, am I going to dislodge anything?”

  “I got nothing to haul you up with,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer.

  I tried again. “If I swing my legs around, am I going to be all right?”

  “Do it slowly. Move them one at a time, just a little to your right. You’re on about a forty-five-degree pitch, Georgie.”

  Except I couldn’t move my legs. Unless, possibly, I swung them from my hips. I pictured it in my mind. A right angle—forty-five degrees was half a right angle. I could swing my legs as a unit.

  I groped with my left hand and found something long and thin and secure—a shoot off a tree root, in all likelihood—and I held it as hard as I could. I dug my right hand into the dirt and it gave way, sending a mini-avalanche of stones tumbling down toward the water, scaring me all over again, making me think the whole hillside was going to collapse beneath me.

  “Move it up higher, Georgie. Move your hand a little higher. Reach, buddy. Reach!”

  My fingers closed around a branch of some kind, something that bit into my palm but was anchored to the ground. I started the swing. My legs moved, but not together.

  Slowly I worked each one around like the hands on a clock.