The knife was pulled back enough to give me room to square up with her again. “Well, I was there,” she said. “And I never saw her.”
I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut. I couldn’t just nod and agree. I saw her backing off and I went after her. “Which explains why you’re here now, hiding out with Jason Stockover.”
She slapped me hard across the face. I didn’t see it coming. I had been conscious only of her right hand, the hand holding the knife, and the slap came from her left. My head rocketed to my shoulder and I left it there, my cheek stinging, making it harder if she wanted to hit me again. Leanne Sullivan was a strong woman, and she hit like she had done it before.
“We’re not hiding out,” she said, spit flying through the little gap in her teeth. “We’re just living.”
“Living pretty well, too, it seems.”
“Jason’s got family money.”
“And what have you got?” I tried to rub off the spit by dragging my face over my shirt, first one side, then the other.
“I’ve got the satisfaction of doing something good, of helping people who can do a hell of a lot for our country if everybody just leaves them alone and stops trying to screw them over.”
The surprise must have shown on my face because her expression turned both righteous and contemptuous.
“You think the Gregorys have been set up?” I asked.
“I know they have.”
“By whom?”
“There’s a guy who thinks Peter Martin did something to somebody in his family. He can’t get him on that, so he’s trying to get him on something else.”
“Josh David Powell?”
“I don’t know who the fuck it is. I just know it’s happening. That girl you’re talking about, she was followed to the Gregorys’, and somebody picked her up on the street when she left. The whole thing was arranged to make it look like Peter Martin did it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that. The girl wasn’t sexually molested, was she?”
I was trying to put this together. I seemed to be missing giant pieces.
“Oh, people like you,” she said, as if she had known people like me all her life, been abused by people like me, wanted to inflict pain and humiliation on people like me. Her brown eyes drilled into mine. “You don’t have any idea what it’s like to be in the Senator’s shoes.”
“Jesus, Leanne, I owe my job to the Senator.”
“Then why are you doing this?” The knife flicked, carving the air in front of my nose.
“This?” I said, backing my head away as much as I could. “Investigating a murder? It’s what my job is.”
“But everybody knows it wasn’t any of the Gregorys. So why aren’t you doing what you’re supposed to be doing?”
I waited for her to tell me what that was. She didn’t. She stayed bent, with the knife poised. I was thinking she was a big girl. With a long reach.
“Look, Leanne, I’m going to give you a name, okay?”
There may have been a slight nod of her head.
“Chuck Larson.”
This time I did not even get the slight nod.
“He works for the Senator,” I said, encouraging her to remember. “He’s the one who got me my job. He knows what I’m doing. And I have to think that having me go around talking to everybody is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. What the Senator wants me to be doing.”
“I’ve never heard of any Chuck Larson.”
Oh, God.
“No?” I tried to make my face convey that there must be some mistake. “Well, someone sent you to Maui and then gave you money to buy a fishing boat to get Howard Landry over to Kauai. I mean, you didn’t just get Howard over there on your own, unless—”
I cut myself off, but I had said one word too many. It was not lost on Leanne Sullivan.
“Unless what?”
But it didn’t make sense.
Leanne advanced the knife again until its point was pricking the skin of my neck. I raised my chin as much as I could. It was instinctive. It also gave her more access to my throat. She could cut my carotid and I would be dead in minutes. “Unless I was in on the killing myself, you mean?”
I had not even thought about that.
She pushed the knife into my neck nonetheless, making my skin fold around it, silently threatening to slice all the way through to my artery, my larynx, my trachea, my spinal cord.
She needed to understand what would happen if she kept pushing.
“There’s a lot of pressure on the D.A.…” I said. It was difficult to get out the words, but I was trying. “Political pressure … and I’m the guy he sent to ease … that pressure.”
The knife went through. I could feel the tissue give way. I could feel the blood start to gush down my neck.
“Aren’t you listening to me? I’m a Gregory appointee.” The fucking thing was inside my neck and staying there. And I was gasping. “The D.A. is a Gregory appointee. I don’t have to go back with a right answer. Just an answer.”
The knife was moving. I could feel it sawing through flesh.
“Nobody knows anything. That’s all I have to report. So the D.A. can say he investigated, okay?”
The knife came out.
I tilted my head one way and then the other, trying to stanch the flow, but I was breathing hard and it wouldn’t stop.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Who knew what this woman thought? She had run away to Hawaii, seduced a cop old enough to be her father, pretended to leave him for an exterminator. Cut off her hair. Stuck a knife in my throat. “What I’m telling you, Leanne, is either you deal with me or someone else is going to come along who’s not a member of the team.”
“ ‘The team’?” She said it mockingly. The knife bounced up and down, a ripple effect from the chuckle that went through her body. Drops of my blood fell to the floor.
I stared my answer as best I could: Sure, the team, Leanne. People like you and me. People who allow the Gregorys to do what they do.
The chuckle ended with a quick exhale through her nose. “Okay, teammate, so now you’ve talked to me and now you’re done. You can go home now.”
I could go home.
Which meant she wasn’t going to kill me.
She was waiting for me to acknowledge that, waiting for me to agree, to do what I had been rehearsing in my mind ever since I had been thrown onto the floor of the cabin. But now that I knew she wasn’t going to kill me, I didn’t have to agree. I didn’t have to go. Not at this moment.
I said, “I need to speak to Jason, too. The D.A.’s got to be able to stand in front of the microphones and say he did everything he could, interviewed everybody there was, and there’s no basis for any claim.”
“Fine. Tell him you talked to Jason and he doesn’t know anything.”
“I can’t do that, Leanne, because I don’t know if Jason’s the one feeding the information to the Senator’s enemies, to this guy who thinks Peter did something to him, to whoever it is who’s causing all the political pressure that’s on my boss.”
She hesitated. I could see her replaying what I just said.
“Where is he, Leanne?”
“He’s not around.”
“Where is he?” I repeated, brave man that I was, sitting in the middle of the jungle with my hands tied behind my back, knowing that I wasn’t going to die, wasn’t even going to be left to rot, because I was supposed to be carrying a message home.
“Gone,” she said. “The Osa Peninsula.”
I knew the Osa Peninsula from guidebooks. It was down in the southwest corner of the country, a relatively undeveloped thumb of land made up of rivers and jungle. I wasn’t even sure you could drive there.
“When’s he coming back?”
Leanne shook her head. “He’s not,” she said, proving herself to be every bit as big a prevaricator as I was.
9.
LEANNE SULLIVAN DROVE ME DIRE
CTLY TO THE AIRPORT, WHICH, it turned out, did not mean driving several hours to San José. There was an international airport in Liberia, which did not take more than an hour to reach, even in the dark. She had the big guy—Pablocito, she called him—ride on the backseat of her SUV with me. The smaller guy, Israel, drove the van with no shocks.
I asked if we could go by the Captain Suizo so I could get my suitcase, my clothes, my toiletries, and she told me those things would be taken care of. Marika would pack everything up and send it to the address I used when registering.
I had a rental car, I told Leanne. That, too, was being taken care of, she assured me. The boys would get it, return it for me.
Everything, she said, would be taken care of.
I WAS TO BE on a plane bound for Houston at 7:00 a.m. The airport in Liberia was about the size of a bus terminal, and Leanne left Pablocito and me sitting in the SUV. She took my passport and credit card, and was back in a quarter of an hour with a one-way ticket. Then the two of them walked me to security. They could see me as I entered the waiting area, and I could see them, standing with their arms folded, not leaving their positions, watching me until I boarded the plane.
Something wasn’t right. I show up to see Jason and he’s not there but Leanne is. I tell her why I have to see him; she tells me I can’t. And then she lets me go.
Something wasn’t right with a woman whom Howard Landry had called the best-looking girl he had ever seen, but whose most salient feature was a gap between her teeth that he had never mentioned.
I had one last look at Leanne Sullivan before I walked out to the tarmac. She dropped her hand in front of her, back of the hand toward me, and then extended her fingers forward. Shoo, she was saying. Be gone. Run home to the D.A., Mr. Becket. Explain how Jason Stockover has disappeared. Left his girlfriend, his restaurant, his fancy house. Tell the D.A. to stand in front of the microphones and tell people that. And think about what can happen whenever you look at that scar that’s going to form on your neck.
HOUSTON, July 2008
A U.S. CUSTOMS OFFICER NAMED MELINDEZ WANTED TO KNOW why I didn’t have any luggage. I pointed to my neck, showed him the blood on my collar. The shirt was black, but he could still see it. “Girlfriend,” I said.
He looked closely. Got halfway up from his seat. His eyes grew wide, then narrowed.
“I told her, ‘That’s it. You pulled that psycho stuff on me for the last time. I’m outta here.’ ”
“And you just took off?”
“Went right to the airport.”
“Left all your things?”
“Wasn’t worth it, man.”
“Local girl?”
“Hell, no. Boston Irish.”
Officer Melindez was unmoved.
“I figured, that’s the way you want to be, you can just vacation by yourself.”
“Oh,” he said, as if everything suddenly made sense, and handed me back my passport.
1.
CAPE COD, July 2008
WAS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE BEACHES OF CAPE COD COULD be more beautiful than those of Hawaii or Costa Rica? Maybe some. Maybe for two or three months of the year. Certainly this one seemed to be.
I parked in the public lot at Craigville Beach. I had to pay because I had not gotten around to getting my resident’s beach sticker. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but it was a Saturday, and already it was getting crowded. People had driven down from Boston—families, mostly. In the old days there would have been primarily Irish and Italian families. Now there were people from all sorts of places: Indian families, wearing their street clothes, the women going into the water with full skirts and dresses, a man sitting on the sand in a white shirt and pin-striped pants, dark socks, black shoes; Russians in teeny-tiny bathing suits, even the old men with big bellies; Brazilians, already in a party mood, already playing their music too loud.
I walked west, past The Beach Club, where rich people paid big money to sit with their own kind, have good-looking teenagers arrange their beach chairs and umbrellas. Then I walked past the private homes of even richer people, who had the advantage of Commonwealth laws dating back to colonial days when the government did not have enough money to fund docks and so encouraged people to build privately by allowing them to own the beach all the way down to the median low-tide mark.
The rich people were kind enough to let the rest of us walk across their property, twenty-six houses with at least half a mile of prime real estate that we had to cross until we got to the area on the point that the town owned. The town beach, with virtually no parking but clean white sand and clear blue water for those savvy enough to find it and energetic enough to get there.
I had a long towel over my shoulder, I was carrying a small cooler with green seedless grapes and a couple of beers, and I had a radio in my pocket in case I stayed long enough to listen to the Red Sox game. It was a precaution, really. I was not going to the beach to enjoy myself; I was going to think.
I had thought on the plane from Costa Rica to Houston and again from Houston to Boston and I had not liked my thoughts. Now I was hoping to sort them out.
After the last house there was a clear strand of sand extending all the way to a natural rock jetty. Behind the strand were long, waving sea grass and an occasional scrub pine covering rolling dunes, and on the far side of the dunes was the Centerville River, an estuary, really, seawater flowing in and out from the bay. If I went to the point there would be a hundred-yard channel and on the other side would be Dowses Beach in the village of Osterville. Land of the rich and famous. Home of the Gregorys.
I would not be able to see the Gregorys’ compound from the point, it would be another mile along the coast, but I would be able to sense it, to feel it looming there, just beyond the trees, just around the bend of the shoreline on the other side of the channel. And I would be able to feel their presence: the Senator and his kids and his sisters and their kids and his late brothers’ kids. All of them, leading the lives to which the rest of us aspired.
But I did not go that far. I ducked into a hollow in the dunes and set up my little camp. Others had found this spot before. There were the remnants of a fire, burnt black logs, and while I was clearing them out of the way I came across a used condom. I took a stick and flicked it into the sea grass behind me. A seagull thought it was food and made a dive for it, then rose again, squawking in indignation.
I took off my T-shirt and spread it on the ground next to my towel. I put my watch on top of it, along with my car keys, my wallet, and the little radio. I slathered on some sunscreen in a rather haphazard manner and then tossed the tube onto the shirt. It bounced and went into the sand, and I left it there. This little hollow was mine. I could sit here and look out over a berm of sand at the beach, the water, the boats on the bay, the people walking by, and no one would even know I was here unless they looked closely. George Becket, in a nice sequestered place. He’s there and he’s not there. I cracked a beer and sat on the towel with one arm around my drawn-up knees.
George Becket, watching the world go by. George Becket, filled with information about other people’s lives. Lives lived in exotic places, lives that seemed good until you probed. Lives like mine.
Nine people had been at the Gregory compound that night in May many years ago. Peter, Ned, Jamie, Cory, McFetridge, Jason, Leanne, Patty, and, I had to believe, Heidi.
Cory left that night. Heidi was dead the next day. That left seven. McFetridge and Patty, I had learned what I could from them. I could not say the same for Leanne. I could not say anything about Jason.
I had gone to see Jason and he had fled. Why? Why not just talk to me, the way McFetridge had? And how had he known I was coming? I had gone there only by serendipity. I was supposed to see Peter in San Francisco. Supposed to see Peter through Barbara’s estranged husband, Tyler. Who was supposed to be in Sausalito waiting for me. But who wasn’t there after all. Who had been replaced by slippery Billy, who had sent me off to Tamarindo.
Maybe it wasn’t serendipity after all.
Here, George, as long as you’re looking, why don’t you go to another country? I’m sure you’ll see someone there. Except the guy who isn’t there any longer. But look who you found. Someone else you were searching for. Someone who nearly killed you for asking questions.
Is that what really happened?
Sitting by myself, with nothing but the occasional sound of seagulls and the background noise of waves washing into shore, I tried to figure out Leanne Sullivan. Who, if it wasn’t Chuck Larson, had tapped into her patriotic fervor? Could it be one of the other Gregory henchmen? Pierre Mumford? The monster of the muffin house? He had seemed more a protector than a manipulator. Had it been Jason himself? An assignation on the beach, a phone call—even a weekend together afterward—was that enough to cause her to give up her life in Massachusetts and move to Hawaii?
And what life? I didn’t know. Was she a salesclerk? A Pilates instructor? A bank teller? A phlebotomist? An insurance adjuster?
And what was in it for Jason? Preppie Jason and the rough, tough girl from Roslindale. Leanne Sullivan, said by Howard Landry to be sporting the Eighth Wonder of the World, and I had not even noticed. Of course, she had been wearing baggy cotton white pants the first time I saw her and she had been covered by the tails of a man’s dress shirt the second time. A muscular girl with a flat belly—could she have had hidden what Howard said she had? And what it did for Howard Landry, a small-town police detective whose passions were fishing and beer, would that have been enough for Jason Stockover, Mr. La-de-da?
Was Jason like Paul McFetridge, the Paul I used to know? Not so much Mr. La-de-da as Mr. I’ve Got Everything? Mr. Of Course You’ll Do This For Me. Here, love, go off to Hawaii and live with Howard for a while. Then come back. I’ve got this nice little place in Central America, and I’ll be waiting for you.
Hard to figure.
How do you get someone like Leanne to live with a man like Howard? For years. Was it possible she really did love him? Jason and then Howard and then Jason again. Maybe Bob the Exterminator in between.
Crime of Privilege: A Novel Page 25