Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  Maybe she didn’t love any of them. In which case, who was she doing all this for? The Senator? Was that possible? The Senator was rumored to have a ravenous appetite when it came to women, but I had never witnessed that myself. When would I have? I had seen him only the one time in Florida. And then I had spent the rest of my life doing his bidding.

  Living in a nice place.

  Sort of like Tamarindo. Or Kauai. Or Stanley, Idaho.

  All nice places where the people involved never expected to live. People not guilty themselves. People guarding someone else’s secret.

  A leg appeared next to me. A very shapely leg attached to a small, very shapely foot. The owner of the leg had not approached from the beach, but from the dunes and trees behind me. It was possible. There was a path that led from the street, went through a thicket of pines and then forked, one way to the estuary, one way to the ocean. I saw the leg, I thought of the condom, I looked up.

  Squinting into the sun, I did not make her out right away. A woman with a short white skirt, a yellow halter top, a broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses with sharp edges. The sharp edges gave her away. I leaped to my feet.

  “Thought you were in Hawaii,” she said.

  I glanced around to see if her husband was with her, to see if anybody was with her.

  “Just got back.”

  Why was she looking at me that way? And how did she get so short? Was her body always that compact? I tried to remember if I had ever stood next to her before. I certainly had never seen her when she wasn’t wearing something frumpish, something designed to make her look like wallpaper.

  It was possible, just possible, that she was not wearing a bra under that halter top. No, that wasn’t possible. Not Mitch White’s wife. I didn’t know where to look. I tried the sand.

  “He said you went to talk to Detective Landry.”

  Where had she come from? She lived in Dennis, to the east. They had their own beaches in Dennis.

  “Hello?” She had a canvas bag over her shoulder. It dropped to the sand, exactly where my eyes were focused. Apparently she was going to stay.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, it’s because of that guy Bill Telford.”

  “Anything New.”

  “Yes.” I tried looking at the sea. There were a couple of groups of people down at the water’s edge. Maybe she had come with one of them. Except she had come up to me from behind.

  “What did you learn?”

  What did I learn? What did she know? What was I supposed to tell my boss’s wife? “Not much.”

  She pushed me. She put her open hand on my bare chest and gave me a slight shove. “C’mon, George. There’s some reason why you stayed as long as you did. By the looks of you, you must have been mauled by tiger sharks.”

  She was talking about my bruises, my splinter marks, my black-and-blues, and the cut on my neck.

  Her hand went to my elbow and stayed there. It was a cool hand, and it was making me sweat. I went from looking at the sea to looking at the sky to looking at her. She was having no trouble looking at me. Jesus, Stephanie White was doing a woman thing on me. “You know,” she said, her hand staying where it was, “you have Mitch quite worried.”

  “About what?” I wiped my mouth. I kept not looking at her yellow top. I wanted to sit down.

  “He says your friend is going to run against him. Mitch is afraid you’re not quite as loyal as he would like a member of his office to be.”

  “Mrs. White—” Her hand squeezed my elbow tighter and I stopped. Perspiration was beginning to bead along my hairline.

  “Oh, it’s Mrs. White now, is it? I’m not so much older than you that you have to call me that, am I?”

  If she had enough confidence to play men like she was playing me, what in God’s name was she doing with a dweeb like Mitch? “Stephanie—”

  “That’s better.” She may have moved an inch or two closer to me. It was getting harder and harder not to look directly into her face.

  “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but your husband and I aren’t exactly friends. He’s stuck with me because someone called in a favor—”

  “The Senator.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know, of course, that Mitch owes his own job to the Senator.”

  “I’d say that’s the common belief here on the Cape.”

  “Mitch was a staff attorney on the Senate Judiciary Committee down in D.C., did you know that?”

  “I’ve been told that, yes.”

  “Were you also told he got the Senator out of a jam?”

  “I figured it was something like that.”

  “Sort of like you did.”

  It was time for me to look away again. The wind, I saw, was beginning to pick up on the water. Tiny waves were being formed. I knew the pattern. They would get bigger.

  “Which means”—her fingers moved, encircling my arm a little higher than the elbow and then pulling me toward her—“the two of you ought to be working in common interest, don’t you think?”

  “Stephanie, do you know what I do for your husband? Do you know how long I’ve been doing it?”

  “What I know is that Buzzy Daizell used to sleep with your wife.”

  The touch on my arm was no longer cool. Now it was like the handcuffs that had been put on me in Costa Rica. “Maybe that’s why we’re no longer married,” I said.

  “Is it? Because I saw you and her go into the bathroom of my house that time. I thought, man, what kind of couple is this? They go screw in someone else’s bathroom? They couldn’t even wait till they got home?”

  Screw. Stephanie White, my boss’s wife, said “screw.” I didn’t know where she had come from, why she was dressed this way, why she was addressing me the way she was. I didn’t know what to say.

  “She had issues.” I spoke over the top of her head. Over her hat. “She liked bathrooms.”

  “I started thinking about you differently then. I started wondering what you were really like, George.”

  I apparently gave something away because Stephanie’s mouth twisted. Did her hand squeeze me again? I pulled my arm away, just in case. “You thought I liked my wife having sex with other guys?”

  “I thought maybe you had an open marriage.” From the way she tilted her head, I gathered I was to understand she was casting no judgments.

  Stephanie, the sharp-featured ice queen, was open-minded about open marriages. Stephanie, who was married to a guy with a preposterous mustache and a wardrobe full of short-sleeved white shirts. What was she doing? What was she offering the swinger in her husband’s basement? The perspiration rolled down my sides.

  “And then it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe you didn’t know what was really going on.”

  I felt a strange relief when she said that. My body temperature seemed to drop two or three degrees in an instant. “So you’re telling me now in case I’m supporting Buzzy against your husband.”

  “Because if you are, George, his affair with your wife is going to come out. And I suspect it won’t just be him who’s embarrassed.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mrs. White?”

  “I’m just saying, George, there are reasons why we should work together.”

  “You’ve got my secret. Tell me yours.”

  It was her turn to be surprised. Or at least to act it. “What makes you think I have one?”

  “I think Mitch does.”

  She shook her head. “Well, if that’s true, you’re not getting it out of me.”

  She was still standing close, closer than a stranger would, closer than a boss’s wife should. A sudden breeze came up and blew back her hat. She threw her hand to her head to hold it on and her back arched and there was no longer any doubt about what was and was not under her yellow tank top.

  I had a moment, or maybe she gave me a moment, and then she took off the hat and spent some time straightening her hair before she put it back on. Hair that I always thought was mousy was now glim
mering in the sun. “You’re a strange man, Mr. Becket,” she said.

  Not half as strange as you, I thought.

  She went from straightening her hair and her hat to straightening her skirt. “I have a question for you,” she said. She positioned herself directly in front of me again. She did it deliberately. Everything she was doing was deliberate. “What do you think is going to happen to my husband if he loses his job?”

  “Get another one.”

  “Here? On the Cape? He’s not from here, you know.”

  “Former D.A. He’ll have criminal clients flocking to him.”

  “Let’s not kid ourselves, George. Mitch is not a courtroom lawyer. And he doesn’t exactly have a lot of friends in this area.”

  “Except the Senator.”

  “That’s right. And the Senator wants Mitch to stay in his job. So why is it that you, as the Senator’s other friend, are trying to keep him from doing that?”

  “I’m not. I’m trying to find out who killed Heidi Telford.”

  “That’s not quite what you told Mitch was your reason for going to Hawaii, was it?”

  I was telling so many half-truths these days it was hard to remember what I had said to whom.

  “Your reason for talking to Howard Landry wasn’t so you could help Mitch and it wasn’t so you could put to rest the rumors that he covered up for the Gregorys, was it, cowboy?” Her finger thumped my chest. It left a mark. First yellow, then red. “Don’t think,” she said, her finger lingering, “we don’t know what’s going on.”

  We? Who was we? She and Mitch?

  Stephanie’s hand came up and I flinched, remembering what had happened with Leanne in Costa Rica. But this time the touch against the side of my face was gentle. “So what I want to know is,” she said softly, “what you’ve found out.”

  I let her hand stay. I looked directly into her sunglasses again and said, “I’ve found out that Heidi was at the Gregory compound that night.”

  Nothing changed. The hand did not move.

  “That she was probably there with Peter Martin. That in all likelihood Jamie Gregory and Jason Stockover and maybe Paul McFetridge and possibly Ned Gregory know exactly what happened to her and how she ended up on a golf course with her head stove in.”

  Was there a change now? Did her fingers curl so that her nails were digging into my cheek ever so slightly?

  “And I’ve found out that Howard Landry was just about to put this all together when he was whisked away to Hawaii with promises that his every fantasy would come true. Just, Mrs. White”—I took her hand away, let it drop—“like you are trying to do to me.”

  “You flatter me, George.”

  I couldn’t see behind the dark lenses, but I imagined her eyelids fluttering. There was a hint of that in her voice. She laughed suddenly, and there was a hint of flutter there, too.

  “I have a proposition for you, Georgie.”

  “No.” I said it quickly.

  She laughed again. “That wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was, what if I could get you promoted within the office? What if I could get you promoted to felonies?”

  “You?”

  “Well, Mitch isn’t going to come right out and tell you. It would look too much like what you think he’s been doing already. But if you believe Buzzy Daizell has a better position waiting for you, maybe we could head that off. Get you the same thing without changing ad”—she touched my chest—“mini”—she touched me again—“strations.”

  “You’re making me an offer?”

  “It can be made to happen.” She turned her shoulder slightly, moved her chin so that it was aligned with her shoulder. All edges and angles.

  “In exchange for what?”

  “In exchange for reporting to whoever you’re reporting to just what you’ve found. Which is nothing.”

  I leaned down until my face was so close to hers that her lips opened in expectation, and then I said, “She was just a young girl, Stephanie.”

  There was a moment of complete stillness. And then Stephanie White spoke as if we were two adults trying to solve a problem, two adults who just happened to be inches apart from each other. “It was a horrible thing and nobody is trying to say it wasn’t. But trying to pin it on the Gregorys is wrong.”

  “And is that because none of them did it?”

  She heard the taunt and she understood it. “It’s because all you’re doing is playing into the hands of some right-wing extremist who’s trying to get revenge on the Senator.”

  “You know who this extremist is?”

  She hesitated. “You know who it is.”

  “Who?” I demanded.

  “Josh David Powell. Isn’t that who’s behind Buzzy’s campaign?”

  I wondered how so many people seemed to know so much. I wondered, for a moment, what I was doing trying to be involved at any level. But my head was still tilted forward, my face was still nearly against hers, so close that I had only to whisper. “What do you know about Josh David Powell?”

  “I know you’re his stooge, George. You and all that guilt you’ve stored up over what happened in Florida. He’s playing you, and I’m just telling you, if you allow this to keep going, everybody’s going to get burned—you, Mitch, the Senator, the Gregory kids, your meat-head friend Buzzy. And none of it is going to result in the real killer getting caught.”

  “She was at the house, Stephanie. She was there the night she was killed.”

  “And then she was gone. Pushed out the side gate because she wouldn’t put out, okay? It’s not very nice, it’s not very pretty, it doesn’t look good for the Gregorys, but that’s what happened. So yes, one or two of them have some responsibility because they put her in a position where she got picked up by someone on her way home. But they weren’t the ones who killed her.”

  “And so we should protect them?”

  “And so we shouldn’t turn this into something more than it is, all right? Gregorys act bad sometimes, but they don’t go around killing people.”

  She dipped her knees then, managing to do it without coming into contact with me and without ever taking her eyes off mine. She came up holding the canvas bag. “There are things my husband will do, George. You can say it’s for the greater good. You can say it’s for his own self-interest. But they’re no different than what any of the rest of us are doing. Understand?”

  Her hand went onto my chest one more time and pushed. I staggered back, not because I had to but to give us both some room. She twirled her finger. “Now turn around,” she said. “I have to get dressed.”

  2.

  MY EYES POPPED OPEN. I STARED THROUGH THE WINDOW THAT faced the backyard. Something was out there. Something was moving. A critter bigger than my friend the squirrel. But it was not the noise that woke me. It was the thought of Stephanie White. The suddenly sexual, suddenly direct, suddenly forceful Stephanie, who seemed to know so much about me and what I had done.

  Who was informing her? Mitch could have told her about Hawaii, about Detective Landry, but if Mitch knew about Marion he did not need to send his wife to talk to me about her affair with Buzzy. And if Mitch knew about Palm Beach and Josh David Powell, why had it never come up before?

  And those thoughts led to a question that would keep me up the rest of the night. I looked out the window, I looked at the ceiling, I buried my head in the pillow, and I asked myself over and over who she was really protecting.

  3.

  BARBARA LOOKED SURPRISED. THEN SHE SMILED. SHE LIT UP the room with her smile. She came over to me, took both my hands in hers, and said, “You’re back.”

  I was, of course, back. I acknowledged as much with a squeeze of her hands and then let go.

  “Did it all work out? Did you get everything you were looking for?”

  “I’d say so. Pretty much, anyhow.”

  “You saw Jason?”

  “Oh, sure. He says hi.”

  “He did?”

  “Absolutely. Asked about Tyler, too.”
/>
  Barbara Belbonnet stood in front of me looking puzzled.

  We didn’t get any further because one of the secretaries came in and said Mitch wanted to see me right away. I was being called to the principal’s office.

  MITCH WHITE SAT looking lost in his big leather swivel chair. Reid Cunningham sat in one wing chair at the side of his desk; Dick O’Connor sat in another on the other side. It occurred to me that something had changed since I last appeared in this office; that maybe I was about to get fired, after all.

  “How was the trip?” Dick asked. He was a heavyset man, fat really, thinner in the chest than around the waist. He wore black-framed glasses and a black-and-white checked sport coat. He smiled. Dick was a man who had perfected the art of smiling without meaning it.

  “Very productive,” I said. I was hoping to throw them off guard.

  Mitch fiddled with the arm of his chair. Since the arm was covered with smooth leather, he had very little with which to fiddle. So his fingers just splayed and twitched. Dick continued smiling. Reid stared. I was not part of Reid’s team and he and I had almost no relationship at all.

  “Tell us what you learned,” Dick said. He raised and lowered a hand, like he was inviting a third-grader to describe his summer vacation.

  “I learned that on the night Heidi Telford died, Ned Gregory, then married and the father of three kids, was in bed with his eighteen-year-old au pair.”

  No reaction.

  “I learned that Howard Landry found out about this and informed, at the very least, Chief DiMasi. I learned that he was told not to record that anywhere, not to tell anyone.”

  “Except he told you,” Reid Cunningham said. He was a man with a military haircut and a military bearing. As far as I knew, he had never been in the military. He liked to swim long distances in the ocean.

  “It’s been, what? Nine years? And Howard Landry is a broken man.”

  “Broken in what way?” It was Reid again. He appeared to be assuming control of the interview. Or interrogation. Whatever it was.