Crime of Privilege: A Novel

  “If I tell you, I’ve got to swear you to secrecy.” He didn’t look at me when he said this. Most people, they swear you, they look you right in the eyes.

  “Swear,” I said.

  “It’s the Macs,” he said.

  I watched his face. He still didn’t look at me. His Adam’s apple went up and down. “You want another beer?” he asked, and busied himself in his cooler getting one for each of us.

  “Okay,” I said, taking the cold can so that now I had a beer in each hand, “what’s their deal? Why do they want him out?”

  “They’re not telling me. They just say it’s time for a change and they’d like to get a local guy in there. They’ve got plenty of financial backing, they say.”

  I finished the old beer, cracked the new one, sampled it. “If you’re asking me,” I said, “and I assume you are, I wouldn’t do it. There’s something funny about this, at least the way you describe it. I mean, the Macs are small businessmen. What do they care who the district attorney is?”

  “Don’t know. I just know it’s an opportunity for me.”

  I decided to give him advice. I decided that was what he really wanted from me. “Listen, Buz, running for D.A. is not like running for any other office. For a D.A. to get voted out he has to have really screwed up in some way. Nobody in our office likes Mitch, but they’re not going to come out against him.”

  “I’ve already agreed to do it, George.”

  The batter at the plate got hit by the pitch. He was gesturing at the pitcher and the pitcher was stomping down off the mound, gesturing back. The about-to-be-famous Cotuit catcher got between the batter and the pitcher. The umpire tried to get between the catcher and the batter. Players, coaches, and managers poured from both dugouts, and the crowd loved it.

  “You know,” I said, “my job sucks bad enough already. I really can’t do anything to make it worse. I mean, I’ll give you money, vote for you, obviously. But I’m not going to say anything quotable or let you use my name on your literature. So, great, you’ve got me and the Macs and your high-school buddies showing up at a fund-raiser for you, and Mitch has Senator Gregory showing up at a fund-raiser for him—who do you think’s going to get the short end of the stick on that one?”

  Buzzy shifted in his lawn chair as if to get a better look at the brouhaha on the diamond. But he was not really watching it. “What I wanted to speak to you about, what I asked you to meet me for, was to see if I could get you to not make my campaign any worse.”

  “By what, holding a press conference, telling everyone what a lush you are?” I was making a joke. I didn’t really know anything bad about Buzzy. He drank no more than anyone else, from what I could see.

  Only he drank now. He drained the whole can of beer in one long gurgle.

  Out on the field, the umpire was having a high old time throwing people out of the game. He would point at someone, then turn half a turn away and sling his arm up in the air as if he were casting a fly rod. Each time he did it the crowd cheered or booed.

  “These guys are saying, and it’s mostly McBeth, he’s like the spokesperson, that if there is anything bad in my background … anything unsavory, then Mitch White’s going to come up with it. Maybe not Mitch so much, but the people who want him around, the people who support him.”

  I waited to see if he would say it. When he didn’t, I did. “The Gregorys.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re going to throw in with some anti-Gregory faction. What are they, Republicans?”

  “Fuck no, and that’s not what I said.”

  Buzzy’s anger startled both of us. He dragged his hand across his mouth to calm himself down. The combative baseball players and coaches were still milling around. Cotuit was going to have to get a new pitcher. The game was going to be delayed for a while.

  “Look, George, I want this job. I seriously would like to get my life together and be somebody, get on track for something. And these guys, they came to me. I didn’t go to them. They say they want me because of my family, my roots. They say I’m personable. The other thing they’re saying is that I’m telegenic, although I don’t know what good that does me in this race. They just want to know if there’s any shit in my past, anything that the Gregorys could dig up that would, you know, make me look … less than honorable.”

  “Like representing Colombians?”

  “They don’t have any problem with that. I was just doing my job there.”

  “Getting paid in cash.”

  “Yeah, well, I had enough other people paying by check. I’ve never had any problems with the tax folks.”

  “So that’s not what you’re concerned about.”

  “No.”

  “It’s something personal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Something you think I know about.”

  The Adam’s apple went up and down again. It had now been several minutes since Buzzy looked my way. “Something other people know about. Something I don’t think you do.”

  There was a little fluttering in my heart, a cold bolt that went down my spine. The things that went through my mind were all things that should not have affected Buzzy Daizell in any possible way.

  The words burst out of his mouth as if he could not wait any longer. “I had an affair with Marion,” he said.

  I looked at the top of my beer can and wondered if I should drink some more. “We’ve been divorced for some time,” I said.

  “It was while you were married.”

  “I see.” I could trace my finger all around the top of the beer can, let it follow the inside of the rim, fall into the hole, pop out again.

  “Sometimes I would go up to see her in Boston. Sometimes, toward the end of when you guys were together, when she didn’t come down on weekends, it was because she was seeing me up there.”

  “In her apartment.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When she said she had to work.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” I said, “things were coming apart anyhow.” Except I wanted to crush the beer can.

  Order had been restored on the field. The new pitcher was heading to the mound to start his warmup tosses. A pinch runner was trotting out to first base.

  “This is like full disclosure, George. I mean, if this stuff comes out, you’re going to hear about it and, well, I didn’t want that to be the way it was.”

  “You didn’t want the Cape Cod Times calling me up and asking for a comment, huh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, you’re not asking my permission or anything. You’re telling me you’re going to do this and I should be prepared, is that it?”

  “Well, you might say you were separated.”

  “You want me to cover up the fact that you were having sex with my wife by saying we were separated?”

  “She told me things weren’t going particularly well for you guys in that department.”

  I may have stopped breathing for an instant. There was a constriction in my chest and my entire body went very cold and then very hot. I wondered if my friend had just offered me an excuse or issued a quid pro quo.

  “Except we weren’t separated.”

  “Not all the time,” he said. “Except, you know, for her being in Boston—”

  I tried to absorb all this information. Tried to parse it out. I kept coming back to the part where she told him things weren’t going particularly well between us sexually. “Anything happen between you two when I was around?”

  “One time.”

  “When?”

  “You guys had us over for dinner.”

  “ ‘Us?’ ”

  “Me. Jimmy Shelley and his girlfriend. Alphonse and his wife, Caroline.” He took a breath. “You were out in the backyard barbequing and we did something in the bathroom.”

  “Who did?”

  “Marion and me.”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to ask another question. I didn’t know if I wanted to sit there one i
nstant longer. Everything around me was a blur. The only thing I could sense distinctly was the spinning blade churning its way through my stomach.

  “Well, she did something, really.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Buzzy.”

  People hanging over the fence turned to look in our direction.

  Buzzy covered his face. He may have done it because he was ashamed, or maybe because he didn’t want the people to recognize him, remember this blasphemy when he started his campaign.

  “Did they know? Jimmy and Alphonse?”

  “Jimmy, man.” Buzzy spoke from behind his hands. “He saw her follow me in. He opened the door. He saw it.”

  I leaned over. I tipped the lawn chair so it was up on one side, nearly touching his with the other. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to hear how rotten this really was. “You’re telling me Jimmy saw you screwing my wife while I was barbequing?”

  “We weren’t screwing.”

  I waited, hoping I had misunderstood his confession, hoping this was not going to be so bad as I had thought.

  “She was … you know … down on her knees.”

  “Jimmy Shelley saw my wife giving you a blow job?”

  “It wasn’t my idea, Georgie,” he yelped, his face still hidden. “I think she liked the risk, man. I think she liked the possibility she might get caught.”

  I slowly eased my chair back into its former position. I had gone from wanting to hurt Buzzy to wanting to say something in my own defense, something to overcome my inadequacies. “She usually liked doing other things in bathrooms.”

  Sensing a reprieve, Buzzy lowered his hands. “Tell me about it, man. She wanted to do it in the restroom of the fucking Locke-Ober restaurant one time.”

  I sat very still, thinking of Buzzy and Jimmy and probably Alphonse knowing what my wife had done. Not telling me. Just knowing. “Well, thanks for letting me know,” I said softly.

  “I’m sorry, Georgie.”

  I stood up then. Play had resumed on the field, but Buzzy was watching me, his face in total disarray, as if he had no idea what I was going to do, what he should do: stand up with me, beg for forgiveness, ask for another affirmation of loyalty from me, his cuckolded friend.

  “Thank you for the beer,” I said, and left him looking like one of those people who are always at the foot of the cross in Renaissance paintings, gazing up in total mystification, wondering what is to become of them.

  2.

  I COULD NOT BLAME MARION FOR HAVING A MISIMPRESSION. THE first time I had sex with her was in the front seat of her Audi, the front passenger’s seat, while we were parked at a curb on H Street in D.C. She was giving me a ride home even though I lived only a few blocks away because we had been at the library studying late for finals. We were giddy from effort and lack of sleep, and I am a little vague as to how it was that she happened to fall into my lap after I was seated. I know only that we started to kiss, then touch, then move about. I know there was a sense of danger, a need to hurry, and that she got one leg out of her jeans and underwear and straddled me as I partially reclined in the seat. It was dark and I enjoyed it. From the sounds she was making, she enjoyed it every bit as much as I did.

  The second time was on the National Seashore, a public beach, where anybody walking in the dark could have come upon us. After that, she could well have thought I wasn’t just kinky but an exhibitionist.

  I am sure I was an incredible disappointment to her.

  3.

  CHUCK LARSON WAS WEARING A SPORT COAT WITH ENOUGH material to house a family in the Sudan. It would not have been an attractive sport coat even in a smaller size on a much slimmer man. It did, however, project a certain good cheer, with its faint yellow squares imposed on an olive-green background.

  He was sitting on the couch in my living room. I had much nicer furniture than a bachelor should have, at least a bachelor like me. Marion had picked it out. Paid for it herself. Left it behind. Now Chuck was dwarfing it. His huge legs were spread apart, his hands clasped between his knees. He wanted to know how my visit with Paulie went.

  I told him I was shot at.

  Chuck’s massive face crumpled. “By who?”

  I shrugged. There was a certain amount of spite in that shrug.

  “Paulie wouldn’t have had anything to do with shooting anyone. Least of all you. You told me you used to be best buds.”

  “I didn’t say it was McFetridge, Chuck.” I let the silence build just to see if he would get uncomfortable. Chuck Larson was, after all, the one who had sent me to Idaho, directed me there, at least, and I still had no idea who had shot at me.

  But the big man outplayed me. His expression stayed mournful for so long that I could not stand it anymore. “All I know is that it happened.”

  “Where?”

  “On a path, when I was walking through the woods on my way back from a hot spring.”

  “And were there, like, other people around?”

  “Only Paul. He came running up right after.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Said he couldn’t believe it. It had never happened before.”

  “Oh.” Chuck tilted his head back to give himself a full range of ceiling to survey. “Could you have, like, been somewhere you shouldn’t have?” The marijuana-farm theory again. I wondered if they had talked, if Chuck Larson already knew what had taken place.

  I could see only the underside of his chin, which was about the size of a dinner plate. I spoke to that. “I was just doing what McFetridge told all the rafters to do. Only I was alone and it was late and he was behind me and that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Oh,” Chuck said again. He continued to search the ceiling.

  I was sitting in a recliner chair. High leg, country style, it was called. It did not match the couch. But the two items of furniture went together. The chair was “taupe”; the couch was “smoke.”

  Chuck’s eyes came down with an idea. “You don’t think he’s gone crazy, living out in the woods and all?”

  It was an interesting question, not because there was any possibility of truth to it, but because it indicated that Chuck was thinking McFetridge might actually have fired the shots.

  “Chuck, I don’t think he’s gone crazy.”

  “All right, I’ll drop it. It’s just, you know, nobody in the family’s heard from him in years.”

  “Not since he was here for the Figawi race.”

  Chuck spent a moment deciding how to react. He went for innocence. “Yeah. Did he say, like, why?”

  “No.”

  Chuck was in a quandary. He needed information, but he also did not want it to appear that he was concerned about anything that had happened that last night McFetridge was at the Gregory compound. I wondered if he would examine the ceiling again.

  “Did you get the feeling he was mad at the family?” That was his first foray.

  “No.”

  “Well, to just disappear like that, never be in touch again, something must have happened.” That was his second.

  “I asked him what they did when they got back from Nantucket. And he told me he and Jason Stockover picked up a couple of girls and brought them over to the Gregorys’.”

  If a stranger came into the room he might have thought Chuck was in agony, that, at the very least, he had hemorrhoids. “Is this the party old Mr. Telford’s been talking about?”

  “He said they went down the beach behind the Senator’s home. He and Jason and the two girls.”

  “One of life’s two most overrated pleasures,” Chuck declared. “Making love on the beach and reading in the bathtub.” Immediately, he looked apologetic. “ ’Course, could be me. A guy my size doesn’t always experience things the same way as other people.” He pressed his hands down on his thighs as if he was going to stand up. “So, that was it? That was all he said? About a party, I mean.”

  I didn’t tell him about the golf. I just nodded.

  Now Chuck smiled in that way he had of making his wh
ole face crinkle. The hemorrhoids were gone. The stranger who thought he had them might now have guessed he had just been given a new pickup truck, one with comfortable cushions. “Okay, then. You ready to report back to Mr. Telford that he’s got to start focusing somewhere else?”

  “I’d like to find those girls, talk to them.”

  Agony, happiness, apology, helpfulness, confusion. Chuck Larson had an expression for each of them. “Paulie give you their names?”

  “He said you had them.”

  “Me?”

  “Said they drove their own car and the Gregorys’ security guy writes down the license-plate number of every car that enters the grounds. Said it’s your job to know things like who is visiting. So, I’m thinking, why don’t I go talk to them, see what they know?”

  Chuck gave that suggestion a good deal of contemplation. “How about if I have somebody do that?”

  “Well, Chuck, it’s like this. You’ve got a couple of women who’ve never said anything for nine years because in all likelihood they don’t realize they know anything. A private person shows up, an investigator, a friend of the family, whatever, starts asking questions about being at the Gregorys’ house on a particular night when something bad happened in the area. You don’t think that’s running a risk as to who they’re going to tell about this visit from the mysterious visitor? I mean, chances are they’re married now, right? They’re going to tell their husbands, husbands tell the boys at the bar, next thing you know it’s in the tabloids.”

  Chuck’s face was a portrait of worry.

  “But me, I go up, show them my credential as an assistant district attorney for Cape and the Islands, tell them we are still looking into an unsolved event in our jurisdiction and it has just come to our attention that they were in Hyannis that night. Just want to know if they can tell me where they were, what they were doing, who they saw. I won’t have to get into specifics. I’d just be speaking with the voice of authority.”