Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  Minutes passed before the Latino noticed me. “Hey!” he said, and his eyes grew wide.

  The chef looked over. He did not stop stirring. He returned his eyes to his task. “Help you?” he called out.

  “Chris Warburton?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m George Becket from the D.A.’s office. I need to talk to you.”

  The job title works better some places than others. The smaller man stopped peeling and stood very, very still. Chris Warburton slowed his stirring, peered at his creation, lowered the flame beneath the pot and mumbled something to his assistant, who used a sidestep to take his boss’s place at the stove without removing his eyes from me. Then Chris came toward me, wiping his palms against each other in quick, noisy slaps.

  He was a handsome man with a confident smile. He gave me that smile because he, Chris Warburton, chef of The Captain Yarnell House, had nothing to fear from the district attorney’s office, except perhaps the immigration status of his assistant.

  I moved aside as he opened the screen door and came out of the kitchen. He looked up at the blue sky with its bright gray and white clouds rising from the horizon and said, “Nice day.”

  From the kitchen came a series of muffled noises. The assistant no doubt scooting off. I wondered if he would try to make it to the pickup truck or just hide in the main part of the restaurant. The cellar or the attic, perhaps. Maybe dash away on foot, head for the marshlands.

  “I need to ask you about a job you used to have, Chris.”

  “Sure.” Ask away. Look at my smile. Don’t pay attention to what’s going on behind me.

  “With the Gregorys.”

  “The Gregorys?” Chris Warburton’s smile got even bigger. “I was a kid then.”

  It was nine years ago. The man was not yet thirty.

  “You used to, what, be a gatekeeper for them?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. I mean, mostly I sat in a Jeep Wrangler and checked who came in, kept the gate closed to those who weren’t supposed to be there. A lot of tourists would show up, try to peer through the bars.” He showed me, holding his hands to the sides of his face, making his job seem both glamorous and boring at the same time. I had the feeling he could do that about anything, tell you how mundane his life was and make you wish you were doing it with him.

  “When you were there, were there other people working at the compound? People who weren’t just friends or family?”

  “Oh, sure. Lots of ’em. Housekeepers, yard guys; they had care-givers for old Mrs. Gregory, the Senator’s mom. And then she died, of course, so they weren’t around after that. It was a group of Irish la—”

  “You remember,” I said, cutting him off, “an au pair that Ned Gregory and his wife used for their kids?”

  The smile stayed. The eyes roamed. I wondered if I had gone too far. Chris may have been a beneficiary of the Gregorys’ largesse, but he had gone out and made it on his own. Barbara had told me that. I was counting on that. Chris Warburton, chef, beholden to no one. Except, looking at him, it didn’t seem like such a sure thing anymore. The Gregorys, Barbara said, had sent him to culinary school, got him his first jobs, put him on the path to success. How can you not be beholden to someone like that?

  He was stroking his chin, thinking about how he could best answer. Au pairs? he could say. There were so many of them. They would come and go. Ned would give them a poke or two and they’d be on their way.

  “This one came from a wealthy family,” I said. “Her father owned movie theaters.”

  I heard an engine starting. It was a rough sound, not the kind a BMW would make.

  “Lexi,” Chris said, rather more loudly than he needed.

  From the other side of the building I could hear pebbles being splattered.

  “Lexi what?”

  “Lexi Sommers,” he almost shouted.

  There were very tiny beads of sweat on Chris’s broad forehead. I deliberately turned my own head in the direction of the engine and the flying pebbles.

  “I heard she got married.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You know what her name is now?”

  The pebble sound was over now. The engine sound was fading. Chris moved just enough to intercept my long-distance gaze. “Why, Lexi done something wrong?”

  “Just give me her name and tell me where she is,” I said softly, “and I’ll be on my way.”

  Chris heard the change in my voice. But with each passing second his task became less difficult. Stall, stall, say nothing.

  “You were both about the same age, both working for the family. With them but not part of them. You must have at least gotten to know her, Chris.”

  “I did.”

  “So I’m expecting you stayed in touch.”

  The engine sound had completely disappeared. The fleeing Latino helper could be on 6A now. I looked at my watch. It was just a show. I didn’t even note the time.

  And Chris, for his part, simply let the time go by.

  “Letters, pictures of the kids. Things like that.” I was thinking about what Barbara had done at Jason Stockover’s prep school.

  When he still did not respond, I got out my cell phone. “You get invited to the wedding?” I asked.

  He snorted. “We weren’t that kind of friends.”

  He could have been saying any number of things. I didn’t bother to work them out. I hit a button and put the phone to my ear.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing if I need to stop that pickup truck, Chris.”

  “He’s a good guy, just trying to support his family.”

  “Helpless guy, too, I imagine. Not like Lexi. She’ll have all kinds of support. I talk with her, she’ll probably have a lawyer sitting right there with her. Not that she did anything wrong or that she’s going to be in trouble, but just to protect her against the things that all the rest of us have to deal with.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like me. That’s right, Chris.”

  He shook his head. The drops I had seen at his hairline flew off. “I can’t do anything to hurt the Gregorys.”

  “And I’m not asking you to do anything other than give me a name and address.”

  Chris Warburton cranked his neck back and looked up at the sky, which probably did not look as bright as it had when he came out of the kitchen.

  “Hello, Sergeant?” I said into the phone. “It’s Assistant D.A. Becket—”

  “I might know where there’s a Christmas card you could look at,” the chef said, putting his hand out. And when I didn’t lower the phone, he added, “Might still have the envelope.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” I said to the phone.

  1.

  NEW YORK CITY, September 2008

  I CARRIED MY SUIT JACKET IN A GARMENT BAG. CARRIED IT ONTO the airplane. Carried it in the taxi on my way into Manhattan from LaGuardia. It was a light gray Zegna suit, purchased at a post-Christmas sale at Saks, tailored by a taciturn, chain-smoking Russian in the South End of Boston. My tie was a $150 red silk item from Louis Boston, a Christmas gift from Marion. At the time she bought it, I thought it was special because it was something I never would have bought for myself. This was the first I had worn it since she left.

  I primped by marking my reflection in the passenger window of a Lincoln Town Car parked on the corner of 87th and Park Avenue. Then I walked a block north to an apartment building and presented myself to the doorman. Doormen. An army of them.

  “I’m here to see Lexi Trotter,” I announced.

  “Yoor name, sir,” said the doorman sitting at the desk in pretty much the middle of the lobby. Behind him stood two others, both in doorman’s uniforms with hats and epaulets. The guy seated didn’t have the bandleader jacket, just a white shirt and tie.

  “George Becket.” I handed him my business card.

  The man looked at it, fingered its edges, turned it over, looked at the front again.

  Beyond him, behind his two buddi
es, there was a large atrium with a garden on the ground floor. The apartments rose up in two high-rise buildings on either side of the atrium. I resisted the urge to show the doormen what a regular, friendly guy I was by commenting on the attractiveness of the plants and the water features among them.

  “I don’t got you in the computah,” said the man at the desk. “Was she expecting you?”

  “No. I was just hoping she’d see me.”

  He looked at the card again. “Is this a legal mattah?”

  “Personal.”

  The uniformed boys shifted their feet. One of them looked at a fourth doorman, who was sitting in an anteroom off the lobby watching a bank of television screens, perhaps getting ready to rush out and spray me with Mace.

  “Do you have Ms. Trotta’s phone numbah, sir?”

  “Don’t you?”

  The seated man stuck out his hand. In it was my card. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said with just a trace of menace in his voice, “you don’t got an appointment, you can’t see none of the guests. You wanna see Ms. Trotta, you got to call her beforehand, get her to call down to us or leave your name wit us.”

  I wanted to point out the quality of my suit, my tie, even my Bally shoes, but it was not going to get me anywhere. I thanked the man at the desk and said I would be back.

  He didn’t seem to care. Neither did the guys in the bandleaders’ garb.

  I HAD A PHOTOGRAPH. It was on the Christmas card. It was the Christmas card. A family shot of a mom and dad and what appeared to be twin girls, all of them lying on their stomachs facing the camera, all of them laughing, all of them quite handsome. From what the black-and-white picture showed, Lexi had dark hair, a dark brow, and a slightly rounded face. Only her face, shoulders, and one arm were shown in the picture, and it was not possible to tell how tall she was, but she appeared to be well proportioned. It would, I realized, be best if she came out of the building lying down, the way she was in the picture. Barring that, I would have to watch for a dark-haired, dark-browed, well-built woman in her mid-twenties.

  Fair enough, except I had no place to stand at 88th and Park with my Christmas card picture in my hand. The apartment building was on the southwest corner of the intersection, and I particularly did not want to loiter there because one of the doormen had come to the entrance to hold his hands in front of his crotch while he stared at me. I went through a quarter of an hour pretending to make cell phone calls while I waited for something to happen. Nothing did.

  I crossed 88th and looked back. I crossed Park and looked back. I had no place to sit on that side of the street, either. There was not even a shop I could go in. I went south across 88th and west across Park, and this time I had a little bit of luck because the doorman was no longer at the entrance. I did the circuit again. My feet were beginning to hurt. There are many things about detective work that should not be taken for granted.

  AT 3:00 in the afternoon she emerged from the building. At least I had reason to believe it was her. A dark-haired woman wearing a dark blue sweat suit, white trainers, and a Yankees hat, pushing a double baby stroller. She came out the door, turned left, went to the corner of 88th and turned left again in the direction of Central Park. I caught up with her when she stopped at the traffic light at Madison.

  “Hello, Lexi.”

  I got no hello in return. She stared at me, tightened her grip on the handle of her carriage, and looked impatiently at the light.

  “My name’s George Becket. I’m from the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office in Massachusetts. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  The light turned and she flat-out ran across the intersection. On the other side of Madison she pushed the stroller up onto the sidewalk, looked over her shoulder at me walking after her, and kept on running.

  I stayed back a block and watched her run all the way to the sidewalk on the far side of Fifth Avenue, turn north, and keep going. I crossed 88th, mingled with the crowd in front of the Guggenheim Museum and kept my eye on her as she ran to 90th, turned left, and entered Central Park. Then I ran, too: a guy in a suit sprinting along Fifth Avenue.

  Enter Central Park at 90th and you come to a road, and on the other side of the road is the reservoir surrounded by a fence and a running path. I wondered if she could have gone there, thought it unlikely with her baby carriage, and looked to my right and left. There was another path, this one paved and just inside the park wall. Heading south, still running behind the carriage, was Lexi. Between us were at least a dozen people walking dogs. Purebreds, mostly. Airedales seemed to be extremely popular. I used the dog walkers as a cover, stayed back, wished I wasn’t the only guy in the park in a suit and tie. People I passed shot me quick looks as if I must be a strange fellow indeed. I took off my coat and carried it over my arm. She went around a corner and I lost sight of her.

  THERE WAS A CHILDREN’S playground just south of the Metropolitan Museum. She wasn’t there. No one was. I kept following the path until I got to a second playground below 75th Street. That was where I found her, sitting on a park bench in an area where young mothers and older nannies ruled. There were sandboxes and slides and fortresslike mazes with no sharp edges. Her kids, who looked to me to be about two years old, were still in their stroller, craning their necks to see what the older kids were doing while their mother pushed the stroller out and pulled it back, never letting it go more than a couple of feet. Mom was doing this while she talked to a woman dressed much like she and doing the exact same thing with her stroller from the other end of the bench.

  I walked up and stood in front of them, halfway between them.

  “Lexi,” I said, “can I just show you my identification?”

  She was already getting to her feet.

  “Here,” I said quickly, “I’ll hand it to your friend here.”

  Lexi hesitated just enough for me to get my D.A.’s card and my driver’s license into the other woman’s hands. The woman looked startled, as though I had just handed her a melting ice-cream cone.

  “Read them out loud,” I urged.

  The woman held up the license, stared at the photo, and said, “All right. It says you’re George Becket. And this other one says you’re an assistant district attorney.” She glanced at Lexi, as though she might not be the person she had assumed her to be, sitting on a park bench with adorable little twins. Not if an assistant D.A. was trying to talk to her. “You want to see?”

  “I don’t care about his ID,” Lexi said. But she didn’t flee.

  “Look,” I told her. “I’m going to stay back here, behind this crack in the pavement. What is that, about seven or eight feet away? I won’t move in front of it unless you give me permission, okay?”

  The other woman did not want my cards in her hand. She was waving them at me. I saw that with my peripheral vision, saw her put them down on the bench next to her, saw her start to stand.

  “Please,” I said, holding out my hand toward her, “just for a second.”

  Lexi was looking back toward Fifth Avenue, no doubt making escape calculations.

  “I just need to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?” she said, her head still turned.

  “The night of May twenty-fifth, 1999.”

  “Nineteen ninety-nine? I was only eight— Oh, God.” Her eyes sought out mine. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  With that, the woman next to her was gone, racing away with her stroller at arms’ length in front of her.

  “Lexi,” I said gently, “I can subpoena you.”

  “And I,” she snapped, “can make your life miserable. My father happens to be a very rich man, Mr. Becket. You have no idea what he can do to you.”

  “Oh, I think I have an excellent idea what a very rich man can do, Lexi. Especially when his children are involved. I hope this won’t come to that.”

  “You should be afraid, you junior shoeshiner.”

  It was not an insult I had heard before, but I got its meaning. I also understood she coul
d say it because her anger was as great as her fear.

  “I should be afraid. Ned Gregory should be afraid. But most of all, Peter Gregory Martin should be afraid. Don’t you think?”

  At the mention of the Gregory names, Lexi’s chin shot up, as though questioning who I was even to mention them. The stroller began moving in and out twice as rapidly as before. “Seriously, do you have any idea who you’re talking about?”

  “I’m talking about what happened to Heidi Telford, and I’m almost there, Lexi. I am this close.” I held my thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “I have been practically all over the world, and I know who was at the party that night. I know where Ned was and where his wife wasn’t. I know about the fight between Peter and his cousin Jamie. I know what Peter did to her.”

  “Did to who?” she said, her voice dripping with scorn.

  “To Heidi.” I was bending forward at the waist, trying to keep my promise to stay behind the crack in the pavement, trying to speak so just she could hear. “Heidi Telford.”

  “You think Peter did something to her?”

  “I know he did.”

  “Peter, the AIDS doctor? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “It is, Lexi.”

  “Hah.” She laughed a single sharp note, its meaning clear: You, George Becket, are an idiot.

  “I know he saw her at the Bon Faire Market. I know they met up at the post-race party in Hyannis. I know he brought her back to the Gregory compound and things didn’t work out the way he wanted, and I know he hit her over the head with a golf club.”

  “I am so out of here,” she said, and this time she did get to her feet. She was already moving when I said, “She was just a young girl, not much older than you were that night. She was young and pretty, like you, and filled with promise, like you, and she was somebody’s daughter, Lexi.”