Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  “That’s it. Keep going, guy. Keep it up.” McFetridge’s voice had dropped to an encouraging whisper. “You’re almost there.”

  The idea was to spin my body, get my head uphill from my feet.

  I inched around until I could see him. He was hanging off a bush himself, hanging with his right arm, reaching down toward me with his left. If that bush pulled out of the hillside, he was gone. All of his weight would propel him like a missile into the boulders below.

  Was McFetridge risking his life to save me? But he wasn’t saving me, was he? He was there and I was here, and at least ten feet of sloped earth was between us.

  I had to let go of the root if I was going to get to him. Did I want to do that? He wanted me to. Why? Because he knew I couldn’t.

  I tore into the dirt with my fingers. I balanced one foot on a rock that I had to trust would stay in place. I pushed the side of my face into the hill and tried to dig it in as though somehow my skin would create some adhesion, and I spun slowly and deliberately, and all the time McFetridge kept calling to me, telling me I was almost there, that I was going to make it.

  He reached, I reached. I touched his fingers. Our hands crept over each other and I grabbed his wrist.

  9.

  THE TWO OF US LAY ON OUR BACKS. STARING STRAIGHT UP AT THE sky. What we could see of it. In between the branches there were swabs of gray growing ever darker. Night had not completely fallen, but it was close. We could not stay here any longer, but we could not move, either. At least I couldn’t.

  “Why did you jump, George?”

  “Because you were shooting at me.”

  “Me? Shoot at you? With what?”

  “What did you have in that bag you brought? I heard metal clunking around.”

  “What did you think it was, a gun? I brought fucking beers, you asshole. Then you pissed me off so much I forgot all about them.”

  “So where are they now?”

  “Where? I imagine they’re where I dropped them when I heard the shots.”

  “You heard the shots? All the way back in the hot tub?” I meant to sound cynical. I was probably too spent to pull it off.

  “I was on the trail, coming after you. Because I was sitting there after you left, thinking why the fuck would you do this to me? Be the family’s little errand boy, run out here to check on me, see if I’m still being loyal? And I’m saying to myself, hey, you’re loyal to anyone, it should be to me, for fuck sake.”

  Loyal to him. Guy who hadn’t so much as called me since the day we graduated from college.

  “And then I keep thinking about it and I realize, wait, you’re not really accusing me, so why am I acting the way I am? I mean, it wasn’t as though you lied to me or anything about what you’re doing here. And suddenly it all started making sense.”

  It didn’t to me, whatever he was saying, and I didn’t have the energy to piece it together. I was thinking about the beers, how much I would like to have one.

  “I mean,” he said, apparently wanting some reassurance, “it’s like that Florida thing, right?”

  What was? Did I get that question out? I must have, because he was answering it.

  “Somebody makes a claim against them, it’s not as though the family’s going to hire a hit man or anything. That’s not the way they do things. They got a problem, they put someone in the right place to take care of it.”

  He meant me. Being put in the right place.

  “It’s just that this one, you know, I thought this one had been taken care of a long time ago. And then I’m thinking, okay, so something must have happened besides that stupid list of crew members the girl’s father was waving around a few years back. Something’s come up and Mitchell White has got to act like he’s doing something about it. So he sends you. I mean, that’s the reason the family’s got you working where you are, in case a problem like this came up.”

  I lay even stiller than before. A man in the dirt in a faraway place, having just been told his function in life.

  “Which means I shouldn’t be treating you like you’re the fucking enemy or something.”

  I’m not the enemy. I’m the Gregorys’ errand boy. I’m one of the beagles they keep in their kennel.

  “So that’s what got me out of the tub, running after you.” He shifted his position, lifting himself up onto his forearm.

  “I was just trying to apologize for getting defensive like I did. Because all you’re doing is what you’re supposed to be doing. Talk to Cory, talk to the boys, to Jason, to me. Check things off. Everything’s fine, everybody goes on about their business. I didn’t have to get all pissed off like I did. That’s what I was coming to tell you.”

  He was telling me something else, as well, although he didn’t seem to realize it. He knew something; he assumed I knew it, too. If I asked him what it was, it would show I didn’t really know it, and then he wouldn’t tell me. It was all very complicated, staring up at the sky, still feeling blessed just to be alive.

  “You know where Jason is?” I asked.

  “No. Doesn’t Chuck-Chuck?”

  “He seems to have disappeared.” I felt that was a safe thing to say, given how long it would take for McFetridge to prove me wrong. Assuming I was wrong.

  “I haven’t seen him since that weekend. I went back to New York. He went, I don’t know, wherever he came from. Connecticut, maybe. I didn’t really know him that well. He was Ned’s friend, and Ned was, you know, tied up that night with his au pair. The only reason Jason and I ended up together was that we were the ones who met those girls.”

  Girls. The boys on the boat met girls on the night Heidi died. I tried to formulate a question that wouldn’t get me a question back. “You ever hear from them again? Those girls?”

  McFetridge snorted. “We never even got their last names. Candy was the one I was with. Candy, Taffy, Cindy. Something like that. All they cared about was they got to go to the Gregory compound. I don’t think we had any in-depth discussions.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I tried to snort, too. Dirt came out of my nose. It landed somewhere on my shirt.

  “It was like, ‘Okay, here’s the Senator’s house. There’s his brother’s house. His sister’s house. Wanna take a walk down the beach?’ ” McFetridge was quiet for a moment. “He got the better-looking one, I remember that. She was all over him, so I just took the other one, the one with the big tits. Kind of a squishy ass, I think, but she was great doing it in the sand. Cynthia, I’m pretty sure her name was.”

  Age and responsibility, I saw, had not completely changed Paul McFetridge.

  Out loud, I said, “You don’t think she could be the one who’s talking, do you?”

  “Oh, man. She didn’t know anything. Jason and I screwed her and her friend on the beach and then I was hoping we were gonna switch, but Jason kind of liked his, so that didn’t happen. In the end we just brought them back to the house and when we got there nobody was around. We knew where Ned was, of course, but the rest were just gone. So we said, ‘Whoops, party’s over. Gotta go.’ ”

  “And they left?”

  “They had their own car, so it wasn’t hard getting rid of them. They were going back to Boston anyhow, I think. Roslindale, does that sound right? I really don’t remember. That might have been somebody else. I mean, these were just a couple of skanks down for the weekend to party. They ran into us and extended the partying a little longer. That’s all.”

  “But, you know, Heidi’s picture was in the paper, wasn’t it?” This was pure guesswork on my part. I had never checked.

  “Was it? I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t even know there was a problem until we weren’t able to get on the golf course the next morning. But I didn’t want to play anyhow. That was just something Peter was insisting on, fuckin’ seven o’clock tee time. So we didn’t get on, and I just said, ‘Screw it, I’m outta here,’ and I left. And as for those girls, they had such stars in their eyes, you’d think they were in Hollywood or something. I don’t know w
hat they saw, who they saw, I just know they never came forward.”

  McFetridge was silent for a moment. “Unless, like you say, they’re doing it now.”

  “I didn’t say that. I was just asking.”

  McFetridge thought about it. “You know, Chuck-Chuck’s gotta know who they are.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the guard, every car that goes in the compound, he’s got to write down the license number. So if he thinks that’s who’s doing the talking … though I can’t imagine after all this time …” He stopped. “You don’t know anything about that, huh?”

  “No.”

  He said “Huh” again.

  I lay very still and abandoned plans to ask anything else. I could hear McFetridge moving, getting up on his side. I sensed him looking at me. “What do you know, George?” he said.

  “I know somebody was just trying to kill me, Paul. That’s what I fucking know. Who do you suppose that was?”

  “This is Idaho, man. It’s filled with wackos, isolationists, crazies living out in the woods.”

  “You guys run a commercial rafting operation. You send people to walk miles up that trail. Up and back. And you’ve got crazies shooting guns at them?”

  “It’s never happened before.”

  “So why me, Paul? Why’s someone trying to kill me?” It felt good to be aggressive. It gave me a use for the leftover adrenaline.

  “I doubt he was trying to kill you. More likely just trying to scare you. Scare all of us. I don’t know. Maybe he’s got a pot farm or something he doesn’t want us to find. But I’m guessing, the way rifles are these days and the way some of these gun nuts are, that if he really wanted to hit you, he could have … especially if he was on that hill and you being in an open field and all.”

  Was I in an open field? I was in the spruces, the five-foot spruces, and the hill was behind me, where McFetridge was. McFetridge who had had the bag that clinked.

  “What I’d like,” I said, “is to get one of those beers you dropped.”

  “Go back there after you know somebody’s been shooting at you? I don’t think so.”

  “You said yourself he wasn’t trying to kill me. If he was, he would have followed us here. Don’t you think?”

  McFetridge certainly acted as though he was thinking. “You’re right. Let’s get the hell out of here. Get back to camp. We can get beer there.” He pushed himself to his feet.

  I did the same. “You going to tell the others?”

  It was now dark enough that I could barely see his features, but I was pretty sure he was biting his lip. “I’m going to tell the crew because I don’t think we’re going to be coming up here anymore. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the other rafters, Georgie. I mean, all it’s gonna do is scare them.”

  “Like Deliverance.”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Anything else you don’t want me to tell people?”

  “Yeah, don’t tell ’em anything that’s going to make them think it’s not wonderful living out here in the fuckin’ woods.”

  1.

  CAPE COD, June 2008

  BARBARA BELBONNET SAID I LOOKED TANNED, RELAXED. “MELLOW,” she said.

  I had nearly drowned, nearly been shot, nearly fallen to my death, and she thought I looked mellow. I dropped my head, said nothing.

  “Was it wonderful?” she asked.

  She was wearing a copper-colored silk blouse that showed a little décolletage, and form-fitting tan slacks, the likes of which I had never before seen her wear in the office. She was standing at my desk, which she almost never did. She had no pockets and her cell phone was not in her hands, which made me wonder what was going on, why she was not fretting about her kids.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it was great.”

  She waited for details. She was smiling at me. She seemed to have done something to her hair, highlighted it, made it even more blond; and to her eyes, made her lashes longer, made the whites stand out and the color of her irises more vibrant. Maybe that was why she was standing so close, so I could see what she had done.

  “That is something I would love to try,” she said. “I’d like to go down the Colorado.”

  I gave her a half-smile that left her free to imagine eagles flying overhead, happy prospectors waving from the shore.

  “There’s whitewater rafting up in New Hampshire, you know. We should organize something, get some of the people from the office to go.”

  Barbara, as far as I knew, had no more friends in the office than I did. But I nodded and said we should look into that.

  “Or maybe get some of your crazy buddies there on the defense side. They’d probably be more fun.”

  I wondered what she knew about my crazy buddies. I never talked about those guys, never saw Barbara when I was out drinking with them. Before I could ask what she meant, she said, “One of them called while you were gone. Buzzy Daizell.” She put an extra twist in her voice when she said his name. “He said he hadn’t been able to reach you on your cell, so I told him where you were. I hope that’s all right.”

  Her face scrunched a little, her eyes narrowing, as though she really was worried she might have done the wrong thing. It was, surprisingly, a rather becoming look; it made the imposing, intimidating Barbara Belbonnet girlish and almost vulnerable. “He wanted you to call him as soon as you got back.”

  I thanked her and told her I would get to Buzzy later. I had a calendar call at 9:00 and a half-dozen files that I had to review before then.

  IN FACT, I FORGOT. Buzzy had to track me down, call me again at the end of the day. He said he needed to see me. He sounded anxious.

  When I told him I had just gotten back from vacation he suggested we catch a Cape League baseball game. “Hyannis is playing Cotuit at home tonight and the Kettleers supposedly have this great catcher. Next sure thing for the majors.”

  I had not been to a Cape League game in years, didn’t care about Cotuit’s catcher or Cotuit or even the local team, but I agreed to go simply because he seemed so intent on getting me to do so.

  “I’ll bring a couple of lawn chairs and a couple of beers,” he said. “We’ll sit on the grass down the left-field line.”

  Away from the crowd in the stands, in other words. Buzzy clearly had something to tell me.

  BUZZY DAIZELL WAS a multigeneration Cape Codder. He was an offshoot of the ubiquitous Bangs family and could trace his lineage all the way back to Edward Banges, who arrived in Plymouth from England on the ship Anne in 1623 and moved onto the Cape in 1645. This was generally the source of much humor to Buzzy, who got to refer to virtually everyone else as a “wash-ashore.”

  He had graduated from Barnstable High School, gone off to Bates College, where he had not done particularly well, gone to the same law school as I did in Boston, and then ended up back on the Cape because he was not in high demand by the big-city firms after not doing particularly well in law school, either. Because his family knew so many people, he was able to open his own practice and make a go of it. Because of the nature of the natives, particularly those with whom he had tended to socialize, he specialized in criminal law.

  I had tried three drunk-driving cases against him and he had lost them all. That did not make him a bad trial lawyer. I was supposed to win those cases. What set Buzzy apart was his willingness to try most anything that came along. He thought it was fun.

  He was not, however, having fun with me at the Hyannis Mets baseball game. He wanted me to drink the beer that he gave me. Then he wanted me to drink another. He put away three to my two before he said, “I gotta talk to you about something.”

  “I figured that.”

  “It’s really kind of hush-hush. Confidential.”

  “Does it have anything to do with work?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Then maybe you better not tell me.”

  “It has to do with Mitchell White.”

  I gave that some thought. I rather liked
hearing stories about Mitchell White, although there generally were not many to tell. Mostly people just made fun of him.

  “All right,” I said, “tell me.”

  The crowd roared off to our right. One of the Hyannis players had just stroked a double into the gap between center and right. The game was scoreless and the double was the first exciting thing that had happened since I arrived.

  Buzzy waited till the noise died down. “I’ve been asked to run against him.”

  I had been about to sip the last of my second beer. Instead I lowered the can. “Nobody runs against a sitting D.A.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it’s not as though Mitch has a real constituency.”

  What Mitch had was the Gregorys. What the Gregorys had was anybody and everybody. I asked Buzzy what was in it for him.

  “A real job,” he said, “with a real paycheck. A chance to maybe put my life together. I’m pushing forty, you know.”

  He was, I was pretty sure, thirty-eight. Buzzy was a good-looking guy with what might be called joie de vivre. It made him a great person to share a night on the town. I wasn’t sure that qualified him for being a district attorney.

  “What about some of the cases you’ve handled, some of the clients you’ve represented?” I asked.

  “The people who want me to run, they think I can use that as a positive. I know the way the other side works.”

  “Fox in the henhouse and all that stuff,” I said back.

  “Well, it’s not as though I have a political agenda about getting the man or freeing the people or anything like that. It’s just the business that comes to me. And I do know criminal law.”

  A long fly ball to left caused the guy on second to tag up and sprint to third. The left fielder had a strong arm and made a perfect throw, nailing the runner just before his foot reached the bag. The third-base coach didn’t like the call and began arguing with the ump. A lot of people came running down to the fence to support the coach, tell the umpire how blind he was. Buzzy and I had to wait until the fans finished expressing their opinions and moved away.

  “Look, Buzzy, Mitch is one of those guys that just kind of goes along, and most people in the community couldn’t even tell you who he is. If he’s pissed somebody off, I don’t know who that could be. So I’m just kind of wondering who’s come to you, who has decided it’s time to take on and kick out a sitting D.A.? And more important, why?”