Crime Of Privilege: A Novel Part 31

WE TURNED ONTO a shaded lane in a rural town. There had been people all along the route cheering us on, sometimes offering water, clanging bells, blowing air horns. But this street was different. Cherry Street. Families were gathered out in front of their homes, displaying poster-size pictures of cancer-stricken kids. Big-eyed kids, hairless kids in nightgowns, kids who had terrible things happen to them that never should have happened to anyone.

The families clapped as we went by. They called out encouragement. They yelled, "Thank you, riders!" They made us feel like heroes.

If only they knew.

I WOULD RIDE. I would ride until I fell off. Until I blacked out. I would never give up. I would never surrender. I will push the investigation. I will go wherever it takes me. I will ask all the right questions. All the right questions. Of anyone and everyone. Even if I have to go back to Costa Rica. Back to California. I will go wherever I have to go. Do whatever I have to do.

IT WAS ABOUT 3:30 by the time I arrived at the Ma.s.sachusetts Maritime Academy on the west bank of the Cape Cod Ca.n.a.l, the end of the first day's leg. The end of the ride for me.

A huge tent had been pitched, and inside was all the free food a person could possibly want. I went right for the beer. Harpoon Lager. Poured by people who thanked me for what I had done.

I sat down at a long picnic table that happened to have an open s.p.a.ce and listened to the others at the table talk. Some were eating burgers, some clam chowder, some ice cream. Some, like me, were just drinking beer. Those guys, the beer drinkers, wanted me in the conversation. We all agreed that nothing in the world could possibly taste better than a fresh, cold beer after one hundred and ten miles of riding in the midsummer heat.

Where was I from?

What did I do?

"George?"

Somebody had heard me identify myself. I turned. It was Sean Murphy, a large cookie in one hand, a beer in the other, staring at me as if I were an apparition.

"Hey."

He looked at the rest of my table, searching for a familiar face. He didn't find one. "You rode?"

"I did."

"I didn't know you even- Hey, can I talk to you?"

The Murph-Dog, with a cookie and a beer, in tight Lycra shorts, a colorful Pan-Ma.s.s riding s.h.i.+rt, and click-clackety bicycle shoes, wanted to talk to me in private.

WE FOUND A TABLE off by ourselves. Sean sat without using his hands. He was looking at me in a way he never had before. I a.s.sumed it was because he was impressed at my performance, my accomplishment, the mere fact that I was here in the beer tent at the finish line.

He said, "Pretty good gig you got there on the Telford investigation."

I drank because it gave me a chance to lower my eyes to my plastic cup.

"Office next to Reid Cunningham's, huh?"

He knew it was. I just nodded.

"I saw all those uniformed officers delivering files, so obviously something big is going on."

"It's been going on for a while, Sean."

"Cold case suddenly heats up, something new has happened."

Sean was leaning forward, his wrists resting on the edge of the table, his hands still holding his beer and his cookie.

"You taking it before the grand jury?"

"Taking what, Sean?"

He smiled as if he recognized that a certain code had to be used, certain protocol had to be followed. "Rumors are going around that there's new evidence the Gregorys might have been involved."

I did not respond. This did not bother Sean in the slightest.

"Is the Senator going to testify?"

"Sean, tell me exactly what it is you're hearing."

He looked left and right. He lowered his voice. "I'm hearing there might have been an orgy going on at the Gregorys' that night the girl was killed. I'm hearing she might have been there and seen too much."

There was something childish about the way Sean was addressing me. Maybe it was the cookie.

"You believe that?" I asked.

"What I believe," he said, his eyes sparkling, "is that Anything New Telford has been making the rounds for years telling people the Gregorys had something to do with the death of his daughter. What I hear is that he's got your ear now. What I see is you've suddenly got prime office s.p.a.ce and stacks of files. And I want in."

"Want in how?"

"To a.s.sist you. To co-counsel with you. Whatever you'll give me. I heard you turned down Barbara."

He took a big bite out of the cookie, what I thought was a rather vicious bite. Crumbs shot all over the place.

"Guys are talking," he went on, his mouth full. "They're saying, 'Why would he do that?' People are saying, 'Well, she doesn't have enough experience.' But me, I looked at it, I figured something else out altogether."

He washed the cookie down with beer, dropped his voice even lower, and said, "I figure, Barbara, she's from around here. She's tied in with those people. You can't have her going after them like you and I could."

"By 'those people,' you mean the Gregorys?"

"d.a.m.n right."

"And you wouldn't care which Gregory might be involved, as long as it's one of them. Is that what you're saying?"

Sean Murphy looked at me as if I had just spoken a profound truth, one that was going to make us great friends now that we shared this understanding. "You got it," he said. "Case like this, f.u.c.king career maker, I'd go after the Senator's mother. Fry her a.s.s, if I had to."

SEAN WASN'T THE ONLY ONE WHO WAS EXCITED.

On Monday I got a call from the Cape Cod Times, then one from The Boston Globe, then The Wall Street Journal, and finally the dreaded Fox News. I referred them all to Reid, who repeatedly denied that there had been any developments. He said the matter had never been closed, and praised Bill Telford for his diligence in never letting them forget that the killer was still at large.

There was other news in the office, too-news that was not worthy of journalists' attention, but that was of some significance to me. Barbara Belbonnet had unexpectedly announced she was taking a leave of absence. This threw operations into a tizzy because n.o.body wanted to cover her caseload. "Domestic relations?" a woman said to me as she was trying to talk her way onto my project, "yuck."

THERE WAS PRECIOUS little in the police files that I had not seen already. I read them and reread them. I interviewed the officers who had responded to the crime scene and who either were still with the force or lived in the area. I explored the possibility that Heidi had been chased across the golf course and tried to get someone, anyone, to give me information about a drag path. There wasn't any. Not even the last few feet, as Reid Cunningham had implied. Which meant that she had to have been killed somewhere else and someone had to have carried a hundred-and-fifteen-pound dead girl at least from West Street across a fairway to where she was found in the trees. Someone. Or some two.

Pick her up, put her over your shoulder in a fireman's carry. Peter Martin was big enough to do that. Or one person could hold her under the arms, another hold her feet. Peter and who? Not Jamie, they were fighting. Not Ned, he was occupied. Not Cory, she was gone. Which meant it would have had to be either McFetridge, who spoke to me, or Jason, who ran from me.

I MET WITH DR. PARDEEP, the medical examiner. He was reluctant to say anything at first and kept telling me it was all in his report, but I got him talking about his role as a scientist and how really what he was doing was solving mysteries, and he got excited and told me that was what people did not understand about his job. It was all about hunting for clues. Finding them, a.s.sessing them, putting them together to come up with answers as to what had happened. He examined bodies to find clues and, yes, that was what he had done in this case.

As for the conclusion that it was a golf club that killed Heidi Telford, he pointed out that he had said only it was most likely a golf club. The reason? Well, the entry was obtunded, which meant it had not been made by anything sharp, like an ax. Also, it was clean. No dirt, no bark, no foreign organisms, as might be seen if it were made by a rock or anything organic. Could I, he wanted to know, think of any other object that would cause such a wound? He was more than willing to consider any proposal I had. I offered the possibility of a fireplace poker, and he grew animated and told me he had considered that, but that the geometry of the entry wound, deeper toward the top of the skull than the bottom, did not comport with a completely straight object.

He was lecturing me on the dynamics of blows inflicted by pokers, but my mind had gone back to the idea of a golf club being clean. The only times the heads of my clubs were ever clean were when I was a guest at a private course and the caddies wiped them down before loading them into my car.

I wondered if that ruled out a transient. Not likely to find one of those driving around Osterville late at night with a bag of clean clubs in his car, looking to pick up young girls walking home. Young girls leaving the Gregory compound. Having been pushed out the side gate. As the Gregory boys were wont to do. A family tradition.

I MET WITH DETECTIVE IACUPUCCI. He was more than happy to come to my office. He stopped and talked to three different female staffers between the front desk and my door. Pooch was about six-feet-three, devilishly handsome and dumb as a box of rocks. He could tell me nothing that he had learned since taking over the case from Detective Landry. But he was delighted to talk about the Barnstable High Red Raiders football team, for which he was the defensive line coach. They were starting their workouts now. I looked like I might have been a player at one time. Maybe I'd like to come out and give the DBs a hand.

I gave him a list of the people known to be at the Gregorys' on the night Heidi was there and told him no, I wasn't available to lend the boys a hand.

He held the list and asked why not.

I told him I wasn't in shape.

He said he heard I had just ridden a hundred-mile race, and my first instinct was to tell him that it was one hundred and ten miles. Instead I told him it wasn't a race. I pointed to the list and asked who he had interviewed. He studied the names for a longer time than should have been necessary for a man with fluency in English. Then he said no one. Although he wouldn't mind interviewing Cory Gregory if I wanted.

I HAD A VISITOR AT HOME. IT HAPPENED RATHER LATE AT NIGHT.

I walked into the kitchen, shut the light in the ceiling of the carport, shut the kitchen lights, and started along the hallway to my bedroom when there was a tapping on the carport door.

It was an insistent tapping, as though the tapper had waited until I shut the lights, was sure I was going to respond and that I would share his or her interest in discretion. Given the fact that my last visitor had been Barbara on the day I had stayed in bed, I could not imagine who would be hitting my door like that.

I walked back, flicked on the carport light again, and opened the door. It was deep summer on Cape Cod. It was somewhere after 10:00 p.m. The crickets were chirping, the bullfrogs were croaking, and a man dressed entirely in black bolted past me and into my house.

He looked around, his eyes sweeping the room, then sat down at the kitchen table.

It did not register with me that the man dressed like Johnny Cash was actually Roland Andrews until he was seated in my kitchen. I made a silent promise to be more careful about how I opened doors in the future.

I asked if he wanted a drink. He laughed, as if men like him didn't drink. At least not with men like me. They probably drank only like the Martin Sheen character in the beginning of Apocalypse Now, by themselves in hotel rooms, drank till they got totally wasted, then stripped off all their clothes and karate-chopped the stranger they saw in the mirror.

"There's been a change of plans, Georgie," he said.

I went to turn on the overhead kitchen light. He told me not to. He glanced out the sliding doors to the backyard and gestured that I should draw the drapes closer together.

I sat down in the gloom with him. There was enough light from the hallway behind me to make out his features. I said I wasn't aware of any plans.

"We're not going with Buzzy anymore. Too many complications."

I nodded, giving him time to tell me what they were.

"Now that they've renewed the investigation," he said, waving his hand as an indicator of how obvious it should be, "put you in charge. Brilliant move on their part." He was leaning in my direction. He wasn't whispering, but he might as well have been.

"On whose part?"

"The Gregorys', who else? I mean, you don't think Mitch White makes decisions like this on his own, do you?" Roland Andrews inched his chair closer to me. "Look, we go ahead and put Buzzy up, what's he going to say now that the office has you working full-time on the Telford case? That you're not investigating it? His buddy? The one he's been cuckolding? You see? See what I mean?"

I thought, not for the first time, how much I would like to punch Roland in the face.

"I know how the Gregorys operate. I should, I've been watching them all these years. They let Buzzy announce his candidacy. If he says you're not investigating, they immediately call in their journalist friends and tell them about the animosity between you two because you caught him hosing your wife. That's the brilliant part. They dirty up both of you. He's a cad and you're an unmanly guy, bitter at everyone who seems to have a better life than you."

He sat back. He smiled as if he expected me to share in his appreciation of the diabolism at work.

I played it out. I would swing, hit him directly under the chin, lift him out of his seat. If he didn't get knocked cold he would be back at me in an instant. He would no doubt beat the h.e.l.l out of me. But so what?

I would wear my wounds proudly. Use my face as a platform to talk about how I had been attacked by Josh David Powell's henchman because of something that happened a long time ago in Palm Beach. Something involving an attractive young woman who had gone to a party at the Gregorys' house to have a good time and who had ended up dead. Just like Heidi Telford. Two girls, used, abused, and cast aside. One figuratively, the other literally. I liked the idea. I didn't take the time to think it all the way through; I just went with it.

I started down low because I was sitting, because my hand was already at my thigh. I s.h.i.+fted my weight onto my left b.u.t.tock, dropped my left shoulder, and fired with my right fist.

Roland Andrews caught it in midair.

He twisted my wrist back, bent it until my fingers almost touched my forearm. I swung with my left. The two of us were still sitting in chairs and I couldn't get much leverage.

"Oh, ho!" Roland cried as I made contact with his cheekbone and then he laughed and bent my wrist farther. He kept bending until I dropped to my knees on the linoleum.

I was screaming in pain and he cuffed me on the ear. The sound inside my head was as if a cannon had gone off. I went over. He let go of my wrist and I found myself lying on my own kitchen floor in a near-fetal curve. It struck me that no man should be in that position and I tried to do something about it. I could hear nothing, but I spun as best I could and made a dive for his legs. He kicked me away and then rabbit-punched me on the back of my neck. This time when I hit the floor I couldn't spin, no matter how foolish I felt I looked. I was paralyzed.

"You done now, Georgie?" he asked, looking down. And I was surprised because I could actually hear him over the roaring in my head. I could hear, but I couldn't feel. I was numb from fingers to toes and couldn't answer.

Then, before I could get panicky, my wrist began to throb and for the first time in my life I felt joy at being in pain. I tried moving my feet and they did as I asked. I wanted to cry out in happiness.

"All right," Roland seemed to be saying, "I went too far. I admit it, and I don't blame you for attacking me." He touched his cheekbone where I had hit him. "Surprised, maybe, but you showed more b.a.l.l.s than I thought you had."

He extended his hand to help me up, warrior to warrior, but I shook him off, figuring it might be a trick. I rolled onto my noninjured wrist and pushed down until I could kneel. Then I pushed again and staggered to my feet. I took a step or two to the refrigerator, leaned my forehead against it for a moment, then opened the door. "Want some water?" I asked.

"Nah. I'm good."

I got out a small bottle, took the cap off with my teeth, spit the cap, and drank about halfway down. "You don't have much time," I said when I had enough breath. "Find another candidate."

"Kind of campaign we have in mind, less time the better. It's a nonpartisan election for D.A. All we have to do is go in at the last moment, blitz Mitch.e.l.l White with the bad news."

"Which is what?"

"Whatever you've got."