Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  “My father,” she said, and didn’t finish the rest of the sentence. Then she added the words “My son,” and I was supposed to understand.

  1.

  CAPE COD, October 2008

  BUZZY HELD A PRESS CONFERENCE THAT WAS SURPRISINGLY WELL attended, proving that all you had to do to get the attention of the news media, at least in the northeast, was mention the Gregorys. A notice had been blasted by email to more than one hundred newspapers, television and radio stations, networks, and news outlets. The notice said an important announcement was going to be made regarding the Cape & Islands district attorney and his investigation into the Gregory family’s involvement in the 1999 murder of Heidi Telford.

  Mitch White, when he got wind of it, immediately issued a denial that there was any new development in the investigation, which, he said, was not only ongoing but now spanned three continents. Mitch did not identify the three continents, but I gathered he was counting Costa Rica as being in South America.

  His denial managed to make it onto the 6:00 p.m. news on all the major television stations in Boston and Providence. I was biased, but to me he did not sound convincing when he said he knew of no involvement of the Gregory family. And he looked worried.

  2.

  BUZZY DELIVERED HIS ANNOUNCEMENT ON THE STEPS OF THE rear entrance to Town Hall, facing a broad expanse of lawn that extended all the way to Main Street, where anybody who happened to be walking could inquire why scores of people with cameras and recorders were bunching behind the old red-brick building.

  Chief Cello DiMasi was there, standing to one side with half a dozen of his officers. But Buzzy had obtained a permit to hold a rally to announce his candidacy, and so the primary thing that seemed to have Cello fiddling with his thick black belt was whether Buzzy’s email had created an event that exceeded the bounds of the permit. Clearly, he wasn’t sure.

  And because this had originally been billed as Buzzy’s declaration of intent to run as a write-in candidate for district attorney, the incumbent could not very well line up with Cello, nor send him and his troops wading onto the lawn to disperse the crowd. There were too many cameras, too many of Buzzy’s buddies from high school ready to start shouting about the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

  So Mitch himself did not even go. He sent Reid and Dick instead. They stood next to Cello. And next to them stood Sean Murphy, holding a legal notepad and a pen.

  At exactly the time he said the event would begin, the double doors at the top of the stairs opened and Buzzy somberly walked out of the building with a very conspicuous sheaf of papers under his left arm. Friends offered good-effort cheers from scattered spots on the lawn. Buzzy acknowledged them with a wave of his right hand. He strode to a portable lectern that had been set up for him. He tapped the microphone to make sure it was working. He said, “Hello.”

  Those who knew him expected a joke, some lighthearted remark. But the closest Buzzy got to that was a half-smile as he announced, “I’m Frederick Daizell, known to my friends and family as Buzzy, and I am running for district attorney as a write-in candidate.”

  Friends and family put up another cheer and got a second wave of acknowledgment. But then Buzzy stopped even half-smiling.

  “And the reason I am doing this very unusual thing, coming in at the last moment with no party backing and no official status as anything other than a citizen who happens to be an attorney, is that I have uncovered some very disturbing information about the incumbent, Mitchell White, his relationship with the Gregory family, and the effect of that relationship on his office’s investigation of the 1999 murder of twenty-year-old Heidi Telford of Hyannis.”

  Some of the media people, the well-dressed men and women who were standing around with their cameramen, put down their coffees and bottled waters and started pointing fingers and issuing orders.

  “To help me explain this,” Buzzy went on, “I have asked Heidi’s father, Bill Telford, to join me.”

  With tufts of white hair blowing in the breeze, Mr. Telford laboriously mounted the stairs and took his place next to Buzzy, who put his arm around him.

  “I’m Bill Telford,” the guest of honor said, squinting at the audience. “Most of you who live around here know me. The way I go around asking questions, some no doubt wish you didn’t.”

  There were titters from those who understood what he meant, but they were short because nobody wanted to be disrespectful to a man who had lost his daughter.

  “For nine and a half years I been going around asking these questions, trying to find out who saw Heidi last, where she went after she left our house on Memorial Day, 1999. I’m not senile. I’m not crazy. I been getting some answers, and I been steadily passing them along to District Attorney White, only to find out what I been giving him has gone straight from his hands to the wastepaper basket.”

  Bill’s voice cranked up with indignation.

  “I tell him, the very day she died Heidi met Peter Gregory Martin at the Bon Faire Market over there in Osterville. I tell him she went to a party down the street here, in the harbor, where the Gregory kids were after the Figawi race. I tell him the Gregorys had another party back at their house on Sea View Avenue that a bunch of people went to, and I give him names.”

  He paused just long enough to put on a pair of glasses, pull a list from his pocket, and begin reading. “Patty Afantakis, formerly of Roslindale, now Patty Margolis of West Roxbury; Leanne Sullivan of Roslindale, who I understand is now in Las Vegas; Paul McFetridge of New York City, out in Idaho now; Jason Stockover of Cos Cob, Connecticut, New York City, and now some town in France that I can’t pronounce, but I got right here.” He waved the list over his head but barely broke cadence. “And there were four Gregory kids: Ned, Cory, Jamie, and Peter Gregory Martin.”

  He turned the list over, as if there should have been more names. He leaned into the microphone and said, “There was also an au pair named Lexi Sommers, who is now married and living in New York City, and there was a young man on the gate who’s now the chef at the Captain Yarnell House down there in Brewster—and every one of those people knows my daughter was alive at the Gregory compound that night.”

  There was a stirring in the crowd, a murmur that became almost a clamor. Someone shouted out a question. Bill didn’t hear it.

  “District Attorney White has all that information, he’s had most of it for years, and he not only hasn’t questioned the Gregorys, he hasn’t hardly talked to any of the people who were there.”

  “Mr. Telford!” a woman journalist shouted.

  “The question is why?” Bill said, and now he was shouting because everyone else was.

  The woman’s voice was the most persistent. I recognized her. She was from WBZ-TV in Boston, the CBS channel. “Mr. Telford! Mr. Telford! Are you saying the Gregorys had something to do with the murder of your daughter?”

  “Damn right I am. It was Jamie Gregory, hit her with a golf club. Then he and his cousin Peter dragged her body out to the golf course and left her there. And Mitchell White’s been covering up for them ever since.”

  And with that, Buzzy totally lost control of the proceedings. The crowd was in an uproar, and he never got to talk about the Indian casino or the local drug problem or the illegal immigrant problem or any of the other points in the outline I had prepared for him to use in his campaign announcement.

  3.

  I HAD BEEN WATCHING FROM INSIDE THE BUILDING, LOOKING THROUGH a tall, eight-paned window on the first floor, with a good view of the backs of Buzzy and Bill. I did not want to present myself because I was supposed to be away, out of state, carrying on Mitch’s investigation. Anyone, however, could have seen me enter Town Hall from the South Street side or, for that matter, seen me over the past several days going in and out of Buzzy’s office in Bass River or in and out of Alphonse and Caroline Carbona’s house over in Sandwich, where I was staying in their spare bedroom.

  So it was not a complete surprise when a hand slid under my arm
and seized me by the wrist. It could have been Chuck-Chuck, Pierre, any one of the Gregorys; it could also have been Roland Andrews or someone else in Josh David Powell’s employ. It could have been Josh David himself. The hand was very strong, the fingers long, but the touch was more comforting than threatening.

  I took a chance. I didn’t try to pull away. I didn’t even turn. I just said, “Hello, Barbara. I’m glad you’re here.”

  The hand squeezed.

  “All right,” a voice whispered in my ear, “I’ll go along with you. I don’t want to work for those bastards anyway.”

  CAPE COD, November 2008

  BUZZY GOT TROUNCED. BUT NOT BY MITCH.

  Two days after the debacle on the lawn outside Town Hall, Buzzy made the announcement that if Mitchell White did not drop out of the race, he was going to issue a press release detailing the full extent of Mitch’s “personal and historical” relationship with Senator Gregory.

  Mitch and the Gregorys released their hounds to bay in the newspapers and on the local radio about the impropriety of making personal threats in a campaign. The most prominent bayer of all was the very same talk-show host who had been playing the piano at the Senator’s Palm Beach house on the night of the rape of Kendrick Powell.

  Jimmy Shelley responded to one of the host’s most vitriolic diatribes about Buzzy’s intention by phoning in and asking the host if it was true that he was there on the night of the rape. The host went wild. He could barely contain himself, shouting over the airwaves that the caller, “Jim from Hyannis,” was nothing more than a provocateur and reminding listeners that there had never been a conviction, a prosecution, even a finding of probability that there was a rape.

  “It’s easy to attack the Gregorys,” he screamed. “Easy to blame them for anything and everything if you’re some extremist reactionary who doesn’t like the idea of universal healthcare, after-school programs for our children, and equal tax burdens for all. Oh, sure, blame the Gregorys because they’re always out there in the public eye. They don’t run, they don’t hide. And if you need a boogeyman, someone to fault because your own relationship is falling apart, you’ve lost your job, or your kid doesn’t make the soccer team, there they are—the folks who seemingly have everything and are the antithesis of losers like you, Jim from Hyannis, and anybody else who spreads these vicious, unfounded rumors.

  “Because let me tell you, Jim, you sanctimonious, supercilious sultan of slop, I was there, as were scores of other people like me. And I heard nothing, saw nothing, and the first I knew that anybody was even alleging anything was days later, when a girl, a young woman, who maybe had way too much to drink, apparently told her very rich daddy that something had happened. And the local prosecutor investigated and found nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. You hear that, Jim? So how about you just stuff your nasty rumors and get on to something important? We’re taking a break.”

  But Buzzy’s promised revelation had its effect. Mitch, no doubt cognizant of what Buzzy meant by “personal and historical,” or maybe Stephanie, or maybe even the Senator himself, made the decision not to run the risk that Buzzy would expose the full extent of the relationship between the Senator and the Whites. Mitch held a press conference in which he announced there was nothing to Mr. Daizell’s reckless accusation, but it was the very fact that such accusations could be made that had soured him on the whole political process. Yes, he could win in the upcoming election, but why would he want to subject himself and his family to such personal attacks? He was sick of this kind of damning by innuendo, and he had other ways of serving the public. He had been offered and was accepting the post of deputy general counsel to the Health Resources and Services Administration in Washington, D.C.

  Mitch did not depart without a final act, however. He urged all citizens, all voters, all right-thinking people, to get together and support his chief assistant, Reid Cunningham, a dedicated public servant with impeccable credentials and unblemished character. And to show the public what Reid could do, Mitch was appointing Reid acting district attorney while Mitch himself was going to use his accrued vacation time to take immediate leave.

  Reid accepted the reins and promptly denounced Buzzy as a one-note candidate. “That young fellow may be running against the Gregorys,” Reid declared, “but I’m no Gregory. I’m a career prosecutor, and I’m here to do a job, not stir up tabloid publicity.”

  Shortly thereafter, Reid came out with a program that included increasing prosecution of drug dealers, working with the federal government on rounding up illegal immigrants, and endorsing the Mashpee Indians’ plan for a casino.

  WITH THE CANDIDATES now fully squared off, both campaigning for write-in votes, I gave an interview to the Cape Cod Times in which I identified myself as the deputy district attorney whom Mitch and Reid had put in charge of the Telford investigation. I explained I had started with Bill Telford’s list and tracked down anyone and everyone I could until I had come to the ineluctable conclusions that the murder had been committed by Jamie Gregory and the disposal of the body had been carried out by Jamie and his cousin Peter. I admitted that I was in the process of confronting Jamie when he himself had been shot. The shooter had been a man, I said, dressed as a homeless person, firing from the sidewalk and fleeing in a car that had pulled up behind him.

  The Gregory forces struck back immediately. A spokesman named Larry O’Donald, a lawyer in New York, declared that the family was saddened to hear such unfounded accusations. The dead cannot defend themselves, he reminded everyone, and perhaps that was why Jamie was being singled out as a target by those who might be attempting to further their own careers.

  Mr. O’Donald agreed with me about the shooter, however. All evidence pointed to a disgruntled, perhaps even deranged, investor, he said, and the family felt that should be the focus of law enforcement’s attention. As for Dr. Martin, there simply is and never has been any reason to involve him, a good man, a private man, who has not tried to capitalize on his family name but who has devoted his adult life to the betterment of others. He read a statement allegedly written by Peter in which he expressed sorrow for the Telford family and compared it to the sorrow his own family felt at the loss of Jamie. He asked the public to extend the Gregorys, all the Gregorys, the courtesy of allowing them to grieve; and as for him, he was going to continue to focus his energies on his practice and his attention on creating brighter days ahead for everyone.

  Meanwhile, Sean Murphy, who had been appointed by Reid to take his former position as first assistant district attorney, informed the press that yes, indeed, George Becket was present when Jamie was shot, and that, in fact, George Becket remained very much a suspect in the shooting. He described me as a run-amok, a man who had been banned from the office while the investigation was taking place.

  It was then that Barbara came through for me. She spoke to the same reporter I had, and explained that she had been the assistant D.A. sent to New York to conduct the investigation to which Sean was referring, and she did not know what Sean was talking about, since she could confirm that I had been cleared by both the New York Police Department and her own office of any involvement. She pointed out that the actress Darra Lane had seen and heard me confronting Jamie Gregory from only two to three feet away, and the New York City coroner had unequivocally determined Jamie to have been shot from at least twenty-five feet away. “George Becket was not only nearly killed himself,” she said, “but he tried desperately to save Jamie Gregory’s life until the paramedics got there. My findings, as reported to and accepted by the office, were that George was a hero.”

  The office waited until two days after the election before it suspended Barbara for insubordination and me for misuse of funds.

  CAPE COD, February 2009

  BUZZY MAY NOT HAVE GOTTEN ALL THE VOTES HE WAS SEEKING, but he got a lot of publicity, and the publicity has produced a fair amount of work. He has taken me on, even calls me his partner, although he continues to own the entire practice. I get paid half of what I bring
in, which is almost nothing, and a third of whatever he gets for the work I do on his cases.

  Mostly what I do is arraignments and preliminary hearings, which means I am in the courthouse a lot with my old colleagues. Protocol seems to be to ignore me, to pretend not to know me, never to use my name. I don’t see Reid, but Sean tends to glare at me, as if we might get into a fistfight at any time. Once I ran into Dick, but he looked away.

  As for Barbara, well, her daddy came through. To an extent. He gave her the funds to open her own office in a little complex down by the harbor, where she has hung out her shingle among those displaying the services of insurance agents, realtors, and accountants. She is specializing in family law matters: divorces and custody proceedings. But like me, she gets little work. The people her parents know tend not to have those problems.

  Little work gives us lots of time to lie around in bed on cold winter mornings, pulling the covers to our chins and talking about whether it is time for us to go off-Cape.

  “Rome, Paris, London” are places she has thrown out when feeling particularly giddy and impractical.

  “New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin,” I say.

  “Florida, California,” she counters.

  “Buckthumb, Maine,” I suggest.

  Her choices are fueled by romantic visions; mine by the desire for security and anonymity. Still, it is exciting to lie naked next to her, to be able to reach out and touch her anytime I wish, to know that she is here next to me because she wants to be. And so I encourage the thought that all things are possible.

  “Maybe way up in Northern California,” I offer. “Eureka, someplace like that.”

  When she doesn’t respond, I improve the offer. “It’s beautiful at Lake Tahoe,” I say. “Truckee, Tahoe City, they’re good places to live.”