Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  “You shoot at me, Roland?” It was the first time I had ever used his Christian name. It was meant to reduce him to my level. To show that he was every bit as venal as I was.

  “Do you really think I’d miss if I shot at you?”

  No, I didn’t think that. But maybe his henchmen would. The couple that had been blown off the raft, the ones who had declined to go to the hot springs.

  Except why would they want to shoot me? Josh David Powell wanted me to do something for him, and that wasn’t going to be accomplished if I lay dead on a trail in the Idaho wilderness. “You would,” I said, “if you wanted me to think it was McFetridge.”

  “Yeah? And why would I want you to think that?”

  Why, indeed. It was something more complicated. More complicated and yet more obvious. The Powell faction was watching me; they knew where I was going, what I was doing. Perhaps they knew it was Chuck Larson who had sent me to Idaho, directed me at least.

  I threw it out there. “The Gregorys send me into the wilderness, you make it look like they’re trying to kill me because I’m getting too close to the truth about Heidi Telford. Is that it? Do I have it right, Roland?”

  He said nothing. He didn’t move.

  “Then what? Then I’m supposed to hate them, give you whatever you want?”

  Roland Andrews appeared more than willing to let me work this out.

  “I mean, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Everything you’re doing? Using me to get to the Gregorys? You pay Marion, that doesn’t get you anywhere, so you start digging around, discover old Mr. Telford and his idea about the Gregorys killing his daughter. You put him onto me, then you follow me around, see what I come up with, hope it’s enough for you to give to some muttonhead like Buzzy to use in a campaign against Mitch White. ‘Senator’s Protégée Covers Up Murder Investigation,’ is that it? And of course you don’t care about Mr. Telford or even about defeating Mitch, no matter what you may have said to the Macs. All you care about is hurting the Gregorys.”

  I was getting somewhere. That much was clear from Andrews’s continued silence, from his failure to scoff at me—to put out his hand and make me stop.

  “Couldn’t you just get somebody to write a book? Murder on Old Cape Cod, how about that? Get some police detective or one of those guys who likes to do exposés on the rich and famous. Let him write up Telford’s theory, speculate on who did what and why.”

  “Then we wouldn’t be able to have so much fun with you, would we?”

  “Fun? That’s what this is all about, fucking with me because I got manipulated by some paid-off prosecutor when I was a kid?”

  “No. The fact is we’re on a mission here, Georgie. Fucking with you is just a side benefit.”

  “Well, fuck all you want, Roland.” I practically spit out his name. “But I don’t know shit. I haven’t learned shit. And I’m not going to do shit. Not anymore.”

  “What did Patty Margolis tell you?”

  “Nothing. She wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “At least you found her,” he said calmly, using his voice to emphasize how out of control I was. “Tell you the truth, we hadn’t been able to do that.”

  “So what? She’s not talking.”

  “Let me tell you what we’ve learned in the few days since you uncovered her. Patty Margolis, born Patricia Afantakis in Roslindale. Age thirty-three. Earned an accounting degree at Babson two years before Heidi Telford was killed. At the time of the murder, she was working for a Big Eight accounting firm as assistant to Nick Margolis, a CPA who she was screwing after hours. Mr. Margolis was looking to get out, start up a firm of his own. Three months after the Telford murder, he did just that. Opened his own shop with Patty as his office manager. Within a year they were married. Now have two kids. Homely little suckers, but I’m sure their parents love them.”

  Andrews sat forward, the better to hold me in his sight, the better to keep me from thrashing around and looking away from him. “Most interesting thing we’ve learned is that the office lease is in Patty’s name. Patty pays the extraordinary low rent of three hundred dollars a month to a company called Arrangement Property that is located in the Cayman Islands and seems to have no other property anywhere that we can find. We’re still tracing Arrangement Property’s ownership, but we have every confidence that it will lead, sooner or later, to the Gregorys. Now, why would the Gregorys do such a nice thing for a hunk of blubber like Patty? Could it have anything to do with where she was on Memorial Day night 1999?”

  “I … don’t … know.”

  “Sure you do.” He slapped my knee. “And it’s the very reason why she wouldn’t tell you anything.”

  “Well, I’m done now. I led you to her. You can take it from there.”

  “We want to know who she was with that night, Georgie.”

  “She was with McFetridge.”

  “I’m talking about girlfriends. A girl like Patty wasn’t going to be McFetridge’s date, and she didn’t go off to the Gregorys’ all by herself.” He paused long enough for me to catch up with him. “We’ve narrowed down the people she could have been with to about ten in number. Girls from high school, college, work. What I need from you now is a name.”

  “She didn’t give me one.”

  Andrews put on his hard eyes.

  “Suppose she did. What do I get for telling you?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Tell me why Marion did what she did.”

  Andrews actually looked away for a moment, a rather un-Andrews-like action. “I think,” he said when he looked back, “she was very unhappy, Georgie.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means she had a job she hated, working sixty hours a week, and you weren’t making it any better, like she thought you would.”

  “She was supposed to quit.”

  “And she didn’t, did she?” For a moment the man almost looked sad.

  Roland Andrews, who hated me, whose job was to make my life miserable, felt sorry for me. What a poor, pathetic creature I was to have my enemy look at me the way he was.

  “She was … rather a free spirit, wasn’t she?” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was speaking in solace or not.

  “So.” I cleared my throat because the word did not come out clearly. “What are you saying, you asked her to cheat on me?”

  “No, didn’t ask her to do that. Like I said before, we knew who she was. We saw what was happening, saw she was getting ready to leave you, and approached her. Told her she didn’t have to do any more than what she’d been doing. Just keep her eyes and ears open for anything that had to do with the Gregorys.”

  “And she agreed?” I was skeptical. Marion was a good liberal, and good liberals didn’t do things to hurt the Gregorys.

  “I think she liked the idea of being a mole, a spy.” Andrews flicked his fingers. “And of course we made it worth her while.”

  “How?”

  The finger flick became something more, a sweep of the room in which we were sitting. “This apartment, for one thing. We took over the lease, paid her a salary on top of what she was making at the law firm. She actually did quite well for herself. Too well, probably, because as soon as she had enough to buy a house in Chevy Chase we couldn’t hold her anymore.”

  Once again, I felt sapped of breath. A man thinks he’s one person, he finds out he’s somebody else altogether.

  “And the …” I struggled with the words. “Buzzy thing?”

  “All I can tell you about that is once we came up with the idea of using the Telford case to take on the district attorney we needed a candidate. Mike McBeth suggested Buzzy, and since we were paying Marion anyhow we asked her to find out a little about him, make sure he was worth our investment.”

  He spread his hands as if I should understand what happened next.

  I stared back, making him say it.

  “That was all we expected, that she would do a little reconnoitering for us. I gu
ess she liked what she saw.” Andrews gave a twitch of his shoulders. “Actually, I can’t even tell you that. We didn’t tell her to start an affair with him. It just happened and we let it go. No telling when we might need something on Mr. Daizell.”

  I wanted out of the room, out from under the humiliation his every word was inflicting on me. But Roland Andrews had inched even farther forward on his chair.

  “You see where your actions have gotten you, buddy?” He was still looking sympathetic. “You think you’re in control of your life? You’re not.”

  The look wasn’t sympathetic after all. It was mean and conniving, like everything else about Roland Andrews. “Mr. Powell can make every aspect of your life miserable,” he said, “make you suspicious of every good thing that happens to you, make you so afraid that you won’t want to commit to anything, anywhere, anytime. You understand?”

  I wanted to look out the window at the river, the boats, the cars going by on Storrow Drive, the people whose lives were their own to do with as they wished.

  “This Marion thing is just an example, Georgie. He’s rolling over you. Just like he’s going to do to the Gregorys.” Andrews tapped my knee. In Philadelphia he had made my leg go numb. But this was just a tap.

  “The only difference is,” he said, “you can still get out.”

  “Leanne,” I said. “She didn’t give me a last name.”

  2.

  I GOT IN MY CAR TO DRIVE HOME. IT WAS A STIFLING HOT DAY, THE first really hot day of the year. I was parked at a meter on Charles Street and there was a great deal of activity going on around me. The merchants and restaurateurs were getting ready for the big Fourth of July fireworks celebration at the Hatch Shell on the mall next to the river, just a few blocks away. Tens of thousands of people would be coming. They would line the riverbank waiting to hear the Boston Pops and whatever celebrity singer was going to join them this year. They would sit wherever they could, on lawn chairs and blankets, arrive early in the morning to get the best possible spots and then wait all day for the music and the colorful explosions. They would be there with family and friends, and the only people by themselves would be losers and perverts and weirdos, wandering around staring at everyone else having a good time.

  I didn’t love Marion and I never had. I just felt so foolish.

  3.

  MY PHONE RANG, BUT I DIDN’T ANSWER IT. THE MESSAGE MACHINE picked up and Barbara Belbonnet’s voice came on. “George, hope everything’s okay. You missed a court call today and one of the other guys had to cover for you. He apparently reported it because Dick O’Connor’s been looking for you. I didn’t know what to say, George. So, anyhow, if you could give me a call back I’d really appreciate it. Just tell me what to tell him. Okay. You’ve got the number.”

  I stared at the ceiling and wondered why I should get up, why I should go in to work, go to court, risk running into all the people who knew what Buzzy and Marion had been doing behind my back. The Macs knew. If they knew, then Cello DiMasi knew. Cello, who didn’t like me in the first place. Or maybe that was why he didn’t like me. A guy like Cello wouldn’t have put up with his wife cheating on him with his friend. A guy like Cello wouldn’t have had that happen to him. And once he knew about me, he would tell everyone else, all his cops, all the assistant D.A.s. Maybe even Barbara.

  I didn’t return the call.

  An hour later she called again.

  “Now I’m really worried,” she said. “Dick has actually come down here himself. He wants to know if I’ve heard from you, when was the last time I saw you, if you left early for the holiday. All that stuff. Please call me back, George. Even if you’re too hung over to talk. Just let me know you’re all right.”

  She showed up at my house at 5:30. It was about a fifteen-minute drive from the office and she had somehow managed to get herself squeezed into a pair of jeans that would have impressed me if I had been in any condition to appreciate them. Barbara had never been at my house before, but she knew enough to park in the carport and go to the kitchen rather than walk around to the front, where the door was always locked. She knocked; I didn’t answer. She opened the door from the carport, called my name, came inside. She passed through the kitchen and came down the hallway to my bedroom. I knew she was coming and pulled the covers to my chin.

  “Jeez, George!” she gasped, as though I had scared her, as though she had not really expected to find me there. “What is going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You’ve been lying in bed all day, not going to work, not answering your phone, and nothing’s going on?”

  “That’s right.”

  The jeans made her legs look startlingly long. She was taller even than she usually was and I saw she had some kind of sandals with spike heels. White heels to match the white peasant blouse she was wearing. Her nearly blond hair seemed longer than it ever had been. Women and their hair: How can they make it disappear and reappear like they do?

  She looked around. She walked to a window and forced it up. “You need some air in here.”

  Her eyes went to the clothes I had thrown on the chaise longue. Then they went to the open closet, where a week’s worth of dress shirts lay in a pile on the floor. What passed across her face was more a look of exasperation than disgust. She came and sat on my bed. For one brief instant she had to turn those incredibly tight jeans in my direction. I had not realized Barbara Belbonnet was in such good shape.

  She reached out and took my left hand away from its grip on the sheet and held it and didn’t speak for a long time.

  Neither did I.

  “Do you like cigars?” Of all the things she could have said to break the silence, that was not in the top thousand.

  “I guess,” I told her.

  “You want to go smoke one?”

  Smoke a cigar. I was lying in bed. I hadn’t gotten up all day. I hadn’t gone to work or even called in to say I wasn’t coming, and she was asking if I wanted to go smoke a cigar. “Okay,” I said.

  “I picked up a couple of Gurkhas at The Magic Dragon.”

  I knew the place, a cigar bar at the east end of Main Street in Hyannis. I knew Gurkhas. I was surprised she did.

  “We can sit out in the backyard,” she said, “keep your house from getting all stinky.”

  Stinky. A woman’s word. I hadn’t heard a woman’s word in my house for a long time. “Okay,” I said.

  “But you’re going to have to move,” she told me.

  “I don’t have anything on but a pair of boxers.”

  She looked bemused for a moment. “Then,” she said, giving my hand a squeeze, “I’ll go outside and wait for you.” She stood. She did it slowly. She let me look at her while she did. “But you have to get up.”

  GURKHA ASSASSINS. Pretty good cigars. We sat in the Florentine chairs that were part of the Brown Jordan patio set Marion had bought once upon a time. The patio set made me sad. Barbara noticed that. She patted me on the knee. I had put on a pair of shorts, and her hand seemed cool on my skin, palliative. I tried to smile.

  “What did you do all day?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Didn’t go out? Didn’t see anyone?”

  “No.”

  We smoked and watched a gray squirrel scamper across the lawn, leap, hit a tree a couple of feet off the ground, and scoot up the bark to the branches. So many important things for a squirrel to do.

  “Yesterday? After work, I mean.”

  “Boston.”

  “See Marion?”

  Pretty good guess, Barbara. “She wasn’t there. She’s moved back to D.C.”

  Pause. Smoke. Think about it. “And that’s what has you upset?”

  Think about it. Think about it. Think about it. “She was having an affair with one of my friends.”

  “Which one?”

  “Buzzy Daizell.”

  “That asshole.”

  I raised my eyebrow, looked over the burning Gurkha. “I didn’t realize you knew him so well.
”

  “Buzzy Daizell has hit on every woman on the Cape. There’s a reason he’s never been married, George.”

  Yeah, I thought. He’s not a fool. Or a sucker.

  “I went to school with him until eighth grade,” she said. “He was the kind of kid who used to set off firecrackers in the boys’ room.”

  The conversation died out. I didn’t mind hearing Barbara talk. I had opened the door about the affair and I didn’t mind hearing what she had to say about the man who had been with my wife. The man I thought I knew. “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then I went off to Tabor Academy and he went to Barnstable High.”

  “Tabor, huh?”

  “I liked to sail. Thought I was good at it. Turned out a lot of people were better.”

  A picture of Barbara Belbonnet sailing came into my mind. The perspective was all wrong. She was sitting straight up in the cockpit of a Laser. Half as tall as the mast. “Ever sail with the Gregorys?” In my vision they were little people. Lilliputians. But there were hundreds of them. Scattered all over the deck of the Laser.

  “I’ve done it, sure. We were all members of the yacht club.”

  “Sail with Ned?”

  “I have.”

  “Peter Martin?”

  “I know Peter. I don’t think I’ve ever sailed with him.”

  “Done the Figawi race?”

  “Every sailor in these parts has, sooner or later. But I haven’t done it with the Gregorys.”

  “But you’ve partied with them. Figawi parties, I mean.”

  “I have.” She inspected the ash, tapped it, made sure the tobacco was still burning. “Tyler, my almost ex, used to work on their boats. The Senator would sail someplace like the Caribbean and then he’d fly home or to D.C. or wherever, and Ty would sail the boat back for him.”

  Barbara’s almost ex was all things nautical. That, she told me one time, was the problem with him. He loved the sea more than her. More than the kids. I thought about my ex and what she loved more than me. Apparently everything.