Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of Barbara Belbonnet in those long-legged, incredibly tight jeans. It did not work. My eyes would not stay closed. And the noise around me was cacophonous. Kids, swarms of them, were trying to climb on inflatable floats, an activity that seemed to require shrill yelling that cut out only when their heads went underwater. I heard parents laughing as they hung on to the edge of the pool, holding exotic drinks with straws and umbrellas and chunks of fruit impaled on little plastic swords. Everyone seemed happy but me.

  I ordered a mai tai, hoping it would make me feel better. The glass came filled with ice and the drink disappeared in a matter of seconds. I ordered a Primo beer because I figured the bartender couldn’t water that, and I kept right on ordering them. I was on my fourth and thinking about Barbara without employing half as much effort as before when Ki’anna the concierge appeared at my side with a lovely smile.

  “I found your guy,” she said, the smile growing even lovelier. “Whyn’t you tell me you looking for Cap’n Howie?”

  2.

  THE PROBLEM WITH LOCATING CAPTAIN HOWIE WAS THAT HE was no longer where Ki’anna had known him to be. Not to worry, she assured me. She had gone to school with some of the island’s policemen and she would make some calls.

  It took more than a day to find him in Poipu Beach, on the opposite side of the island, about as far away from Princeville as he could be. He had been a boat captain once. Now he ran a small condominium complex that provided units as vacation rentals.

  The Hana Palms was three stories high, built of nondescript stucco and situated directly above a rocky beach. It had a parking lot in front and a small fenced-in swimming pool with a concrete deck between the lot and the building. Although there were a few cars in the lot, there did not appear to be any people around at all.

  A breezeway led to the ocean side, where a green lawn looked nicer than it felt on bare feet. I retraced my steps and saw what I had missed on my first pass, a living quarters off the breezeway that doubled as an office. I opened a screen door in which part of the screen was separated from the frame. A bell tinkled above my head and a minute later a shirtless man appeared at a counter set up in the front room.

  “Aloha,” he said, as if he was challenging me to a fight.

  I figured I had my man. I asked if he was Cap’n Howie, just to make sure.

  “Some call me that.”

  “You also known as Detective Landry?”

  The man’s eyebrows rose as slowly as an elevator.

  I went right to the point. “Chief DiMasi told me I could find you here.”

  I showed him my card. He inspected it and said, “You wanna rent a condo?” There was just a bit of hope in the question.

  “No. I need to talk to you about a case you worked on years ago.”

  The man put his hands on the counter and tilted back like a water skier. He had a long, lean torso, with white hairs sprouting from his chest and a few from his shoulders. He was clean-shaven, but the hair on his head was sparse and blown about at various angles. He could have been seventy. He could also have been no more than sixty. “Got telephone service. Got email. Even got teleconference things these days. No need to fly all the way here just to talk to me.”

  “This is a special case.”

  Howard Landry could have done a lot of things at that moment. My own options were limited. If he had told me to get lost I probably would have had to go back to Princeville and drink whatever Primos were still available at the bar. But he spared me that. He asked if I wanted a beer right there.

  WE SAT ON LOUNGE chairs facing the ocean. The lawn chairs had plastic cross-straps, some of which were broken. Ahead of us, the water was rough and sapphire blue. I wasn’t used to the color. On the Cape the water tends to be green when it isn’t gray. And if it ever is blue, it is only from a distance and more cobalt than sapphire.

  Landry didn’t give me a Primo, he gave me a Sam Adams. “Taste of home,” he said, as if Sam Adams was a treat for me, and we clinked bottle necks because I was still being polite.

  “How long you been here?” I asked, settling in.

  “Seven years,” he said without looking at me.

  “Like it?”

  “It’s fuckin’ paradise, isn’t it?” He didn’t sound like it was paradise.

  I took a diversionary approach with my next question, trying to make nice with a statement that clearly wasn’t true. “You look pretty young for a man who’s been retired seven years.”

  “Took it early. When I was fifty. I’d put in twenty-five years. Figured that was enough.”

  “Your last big case was the Heidi Telford murder, huh?”

  “That what you’re here about?” He still hadn’t looked at me, not since we’d touched bottles.

  “Remember her father?”

  “Anything New.”

  “That’s right. He’s still looking.”

  “Must be a nutcase by now.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You dwell that much, let it take over your life, wipes out everything else. I know. Believe me, I seen it happen.” He took a long pull on his beer. “What’s he come up with now?”

  “A girl who was at the Gregory compound on the night Heidi died.”

  Landry held the bottle to his lips. Without lowering it, he said, “You talkin’ about the babysitter?”

  “I’m talking about one of the girls who went to the Gregorys’ to party after the race.”

  The bottle stayed. Landry talked around it. “There wasn’t no party.”

  “But you checked it out, didn’t you? I was told, I was told by the Gregorys themselves, that you were asking them questions.”

  That threw him. Like McFetridge, he had to figure out if I was friend or foe. “I asked questions of everybody I could find.”

  “Thing was, I looked in the file. Didn’t mention the Gregorys. Didn’t say anything one way or the other about a party.”

  Landry lowered the bottle. He had his answer now. He turned his head and leveled his eyes on me. They were more or less a washed-out blue, and I doubted they were ever used to show merriment. “I didn’t put down every false lead I had.”

  “It seemed to me you started off chasing every possible lead, whether it was false or not. Then all of a sudden you stopped.”

  “I stopped because I wasn’t getting nowhere.”

  I gave him a number of nods, each one meant to be a strand of false hope. I said, “It’s unusual, though, to see that much diligence up to a point, and then almost nothing after that. Wouldn’t you agree, detective?”

  He obviously had not been called detective in a long time. It brought him up short. Made him blink. “You wanna tell me what in particular you’re complaining about?”

  “What I just said. Looking through the file, it was almost as if something happened somewhere along the line and you decided to close down the investigation.”

  “I didn’t close it. I handed it off to Pooch.”

  “Detective Iacupucci.”

  “That’s right. Pooch.”

  “Did he do anything with it?”

  “Don’t know. I left.”

  “And no one ever got in touch with you after you left?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That strike you as curious?”

  “I don’t know. I never been retired before.”

  I smiled, as if he had made a good joke. He did not smile back. He was looking at me warily. It was probably the look he had developed when he was about to arrest somebody and was thinking that a weapon might get pulled. I stopped smiling. It wasn’t doing me any good.

  “File lists every friend, friend of friend, waiter, shopkeeper you talked to, but you never so much as mentioned the Gregorys. Why was that, detective?”

  “Case as serious as that one,” he said, “you wanna be careful what you put down. Never know who’s gonna read it.”

  “You thought the wrong people might read the police file?”


  “I think, counselor,” he said, dragging out the last word, paying me back for calling him detective, “things work in funny ways back in the Bay State. The Cape, in particular.”

  “So you were doing a little preventive maintenance, is that it? Deciding what should go in the file and what shouldn’t.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And the chief, did you tell the chief what you didn’t put in the file?”

  “Depends. After a while you don’t keep reporting that you got nothing to report.”

  I tried to keep the questions coming. Hit him with another as soon as he was done answering the one before. It was a basic courtroom technique. “You tell him what the people at the Gregory compound said?”

  “Don’t recall.”

  “He told me you couldn’t find everyone who was there that night.”

  “So?”

  “So you couldn’t find everyone; you must have found someone.”

  Landry drank his beer, staring along the barrel of his bottle while he followed the logic.

  “Who did you find?” I pressed.

  “Gimme some names and I’ll tell you.”

  “Peter Martin; Ned, Jamie, and Cory Gregory; Paul McFetridge; Jason Stockover.”

  “That it?”

  “A girl named Patty Afantakis.”

  He didn’t ask who she was. He asked if I had talked to her. I said I had.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing. She wouldn’t tell me anything, except it was clear she was there.”

  He nodded. “Anybody else?”

  “Patty said she was with a girl named Leanne.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “Nope. Haven’t found her yet.”

  Landry finished off the bottle and threw it on the lawn. His own lawn. I looked at mine and saw I had barely gotten beyond the first sip.

  “All right, counselor,” he said, his voice suddenly very taut, “you want to know what was going on? Fine, I’ll tell you. Ned Gregory was fucking his babysitter, that’s what. His whachucallit, his au pair. Eighteen-year-old beauty who happened to be the daughter of a guy who owns a nationwide chain of movie theaters and contributes a zillion bucks a year to all the Gregory campaigns. And Ned’s got a wife and three kids and being groomed to run for some office himself and there he is, layin’ pipe with the girl who’s supposed to be watching his children while his wife’s away. You get the picture now, pal?”

  “So you were covering up.”

  “You wanna call it that. It didn’t have nothin’ to do with the investigation. So you put something down in writing, all it does is embarrass the people who pay for the Little League fields and the skating rink and underwrite the summer Pops concerts, what’s it gonna get you?”

  “You don’t put it down, maybe it gets you retirement in Hawaii.”

  We were dangerously close to a physical confrontation. I was pointed toward the ocean, but out of the corner of my eye I could see his fist balled. I tensed. If the fist came flying, I was going to hit him over the head with the bottle I was still holding. Until then, I was going to keep looking at the water.

  He elected to keep glaring at me.

  I made an effort to change the subject, see if I could temper him a bit. “Sounds like there are things you miss back there,” I said.

  “I miss the fucking Red Sox, that’s what I miss.” And with that, Howard Landry got up and left me.

  3.

  I DROVE ALL THE WAY BACK TO PRINCEVILLE ASKING MYSELF IF I had posed the right questions, if I could have handled things better than I did, what I was going to do next. I drove past my hotel and continued to the end of the highway, where the pavement stopped and a dirt track began. Cars were parked under the trees, and I could see a smooth golden beach and water that was a much clearer blue than it had been on Howard Landry’s side of the island. I got out and found a seat on a log in the shade at the edge of the open sand.

  I had made a copy of the file and brought it with me, hoping I could get Howard to go over some of the details. But I had been too direct, too confrontational, and I had learned nothing. So now I sat by myself, hugging my knees, weighing my options: try again, go home, call Barbara Belbonnet.

  I looked up and down the beach and wondered if everyone there was as content as they appeared. The local families tended to keep to the shade. The mainlanders lay out in the sun and baked. Everyone went in and out of the water. Some just splashed about. Some rode waves. A few actually swam. I wondered if this was what life was supposed to be all about: a day at the beach. You lay on the sand until you got too hot to lie there anymore and then you went in the water and cooled off. Then you did it all over again. The people who were doing it seemed happy. Why wasn’t I? Lie on the beach, go in the water, go back to my room and drink beer until I passed out. Go back to work and sit in the dungeon. Hope Barbara wore those long, tight jeans again.

  I stared at the water. I opened the file.

  The first thing that should have been there was a crime scene log to document the arrivals and departures of personnel. There was none. By the time Landry arrived at 6:42 a.m. it was impossible to tell how many people had been there and who had done what to alter or preserve the evidence. That, I supposed, was a point he could argue. Except he could have asked; he could have tried to do a reconstruction.

  I looked at his description of the body. Heidi Telford was partially hidden under low-lying branches when he first saw her, lying on her stomach, her arms pulled up, her hands clenched. There was no mention of whether she was rigid or cold, so I gathered he had not touched her. He described her dress as bunched beneath her buttocks. He described her hair as soaked with blood so thick it was like jelly.

  No other blood around the body. Just in the hair. And on the back of her dress.

  I flipped pages, looking for some other description. Rinaldo DaSilva said he had moved her hair, but he did not say what the wound looked like. I had to look at the pictures to see for myself how the skull had been sliced open, wider at the surface, narrower as the slice went deeper through the bone and all the way into the dura.

  Sitting where I was, on a beach half a world away, more than nine years after the fact, it was easy for me to agree that the girl had been killed because she was struck with some metal object from behind. Why it had to be a golf club, I couldn’t say, but I had to presume it had something to do with the entry wound.

  Hit with a golf club, found on a golf course. Except she was wearing a dress. And she had not left home to go golfing. She had left home in the evening and been found just after dawn. Whoever had killed her may have been thinking, but was not thinking too clearly.

  Where is someone going to come up with a golf club as a murder weapon? If not on a course then it would have to be at home. Or at a clubhouse, maybe. Possibly the trunk of a car. But a killer wouldn’t be likely to go stalking with a golf club. No, more likely it was the weapon that was available when the killer got angry, went into a rage, lost control and picked up what was handy. What was lying around.

  Heidi’s eyes were closed; her hands were clenched. Was she running away? There was no mention of any defensive injuries, no indication she had fought back. She had not tried to scratch or punch, had not even put up her hands or arms to protect herself. Someone was coming after her and she had tried to flee and that someone had crushed her to the ground. Peter Martin could do that. He was a big boy. And he played golf. And he had insisted McFetridge go out to the golf course with him at 7:00 the next morning.

  And here was Howard Landry, a decent cop if not a great one, but at least good enough to get the heavy cases in Barnstable County, assigned a murder in which there was no evidence of the killer at the scene. At least none as of the time he arrived. Okay, Howie, what do you do? You try to retrace her path from the moment she left home. You talk to every possible bartender, waitress, shopkeeper. You go all through Hyannis and then as soon as you get outside Hyannis you give up. At least, the file seems to i
ndicate you gave up.

  Except he did talk to people in Osterville. Five miles from Hyannis. Six miles, at most. Chuck Larson told me so. Howie had gotten that far. And it wasn’t reflected in the file.

  Howard Landry, age forty-eight, maybe burned out, two years from possible retirement, with a dream of going off to the South Seas. There were things you could do for a man like that once he got a little too close to the truth.

  No wonder he wanted to punch me.

  4.

  KI’ANNA WANTED TO KNOW IF EVERYTHING HAD GONE ALL right.

  The question startled me. I was eating papaya with lime squeezed on it and drinking Kona coffee, and I had been lost in thought.

  Now I told her she had done a great job and I had indeed found him where she said I would.

  “You know,” she told me, resting a hand on my table, a hand with a coral ring but no wedding band, “it really bother me. I know he was Cap’n Howie because sometime I book fishing charters for the guest on his boat.”

  I told her all he seemed to be doing now was renting out condos.

  She shook her head and looked regretful. “He musta lost his boat. Bad economy, you know.” And then Ki’anna wandered off, leaving me to reflect on what she had just said.

  I HAD LITTLE MORE than one day left to make something happen, about thirty hours before my flight back to the mainland. I had to make another go at Landry. I had to do it without expecting him just to confess. Oh, yeah, I tanked the Telford investigation when I saw the Gregorys were involved. That’s what got me this lovely place here in the islands.

  Except it wasn’t exactly a lovely place. It was a rectangular box in need of repairs. And I had not seen a single guest while I was there. This man, this early-retired police detective, had come to Hawaii to run a charter boat service, spend the rest of his days fishing for sword-fish or marlin or whatever they caught in these waters, and here he was renting out other people’s condos by the week and apparently not doing a very good job of it. What had gone wrong? Ki’anna said it was the economy, but we had had a bad economy ever since George Bush had tried to run two wars without raising taxes. And that was, what, five years?