Текст книги "Crime of Privilege"

Автор книги: Walter Walker

Соавторы: Walter Walker
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

2

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I GOT IN MY CAR TO DRIVE HOME. IT WAS A STIFLING HOT DAY, THE first really hot day of the year. I was parked at a meter on Charles Street and there was a great deal of activity going on around me. The merchants and restaurateurs were getting ready for the big Fourth of July fireworks celebration at the Hatch Shell on the mall next to the river, just a few blocks away. Tens of thousands of people would be coming. They would line the riverbank waiting to hear the Boston Pops and whatever celebrity singer was going to join them this year. They would sit wherever they could, on lawn chairs and blankets, arrive early in the morning to get the best possible spots and then wait all day for the music and the colorful explosions. They would be there with family and friends, and the only people by themselves would be losers and perverts and weirdos, wandering around staring at everyone else having a good time.

I didn’t love Marion and I never had. I just felt so foolish.

3

.

MY PHONE RANG, BUT I DIDN’T ANSWER IT. THE MESSAGE MACHINE picked up and Barbara Belbonnet’s voice came on. “George, hope everything’s okay. You missed a court call today and one of the other guys had to cover for you. He apparently reported it because Dick O’Connor’s been looking for you. I didn’t know what to say, George. So, anyhow, if you could give me a call back I’d really appreciate it. Just tell me what to tell him. Okay. You’ve got the number.”

I stared at the ceiling and wondered why I should get up, why I should go in to work, go to court, risk running into all the people who knew what Buzzy and Marion had been doing behind my back. The Macs knew. If they knew, then Cello DiMasi knew. Cello, who didn’t like me in the first place. Or maybe that was why he didn’t like me. A guy like Cello wouldn’t have put up with his wife cheating on him with his friend. A guy like Cello wouldn’t have had that happen to him. And once he knew about me, he would tell everyone else, all his cops, all the assistant D.A.s. Maybe even Barbara.

I didn’t return the call.

An hour later she called again.

“Now I’m really worried,” she said. “Dick has actually come down here himself. He wants to know if I’ve heard from you, when was the last time I saw you, if you left early for the holiday. All that stuff. Please call me back, George. Even if you’re too hung over to talk. Just let me know you’re all right.”

She showed up at my house at 5:30. It was about a fifteen-minute drive from the office and she had somehow managed to get herself squeezed into a pair of jeans that would have impressed me if I had been in any condition to appreciate them. Barbara had never been at my house before, but she knew enough to park in the carport and go to the kitchen rather than walk around to the front, where the door was always locked. She knocked; I didn’t answer. She opened the door from the carport, called my name, came inside. She passed through the kitchen and came down the hallway to my bedroom. I knew she was coming and pulled the covers to my chin.

“Jeez, George!” she gasped, as though I had scared her, as though she had not really expected to find me there. “What is going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You’ve been lying in bed all day, not going to work, not answering your phone, and nothing’s going on?”

“That’s right.”

The jeans made her legs look startlingly long. She was taller even than she usually was and I saw she had some kind of sandals with spike heels. White heels to match the white peasant blouse she was wearing. Her nearly blond hair seemed longer than it ever had been. Women and their hair: How can they make it disappear and reappear like they do?

She looked around. She walked to a window and forced it up. “You need some air in here.”

Her eyes went to the clothes I had thrown on the chaise longue. Then they went to the open closet, where a week’s worth of dress shirts lay in a pile on the floor. What passed across her face was more a look of exasperation than disgust. She came and sat on my bed. For one brief instant she had to turn those incredibly tight jeans in my direction. I had not realized Barbara Belbonnet was in such good shape.

She reached out and took my left hand away from its grip on the sheet and held it and didn’t speak for a long time.

Neither did I.

“Do you like cigars?” Of all the things she could have said to break the silence, that was not in the top thousand.

“I guess,” I told her.

“You want to go smoke one?”

Smoke a cigar. I was lying in bed. I hadn’t gotten up all day. I hadn’t gone to work or even called in to say I wasn’t coming, and she was asking if I wanted to go smoke a cigar. “Okay,” I said.

“I picked up a couple of Gurkhas at The Magic Dragon.”

I knew the place, a cigar bar at the east end of Main Street in Hyannis. I knew Gurkhas. I was surprised she did.

“We can sit out in the backyard,” she said, “keep your house from getting all stinky.”

Stinky. A woman’s word. I hadn’t heard a woman’s word in my house for a long time. “Okay,” I said.

“But you’re going to have to move,” she told me.

“I don’t have anything on but a pair of boxers.”

She looked bemused for a moment. “Then,” she said, giving my hand a squeeze, “I’ll go outside and wait for you.” She stood. She did it slowly. She let me look at her while she did. “But you have to get up.”

GURKHA ASSASSINS. Pretty good cigars. We sat in the Florentine chairs that were part of the Brown Jordan patio set Marion had bought once upon a time. The patio set made me sad. Barbara noticed that. She patted me on the knee. I had put on a pair of shorts, and her hand seemed cool on my skin, palliative. I tried to smile.

“What did you do all day?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t go out? Didn’t see anyone?”

“No.”

We smoked and watched a gray squirrel scamper across the lawn, leap, hit a tree a couple of feet off the ground, and scoot up the bark to the branches. So many important things for a squirrel to do.

“Yesterday? After work, I mean.”

“Boston.”

“See Marion?”

Pretty good guess, Barbara. “She wasn’t there. She’s moved back to D.C.”

Pause. Smoke. Think about it. “And that’s what has you upset?”

Think about it. Think about it. Think about it. “She was having an affair with one of my friends.”

“Which one?”

“Buzzy Daizell.”

“That asshole.”

I raised my eyebrow, looked over the burning Gurkha. “I didn’t realize you knew him so well.”

“Buzzy Daizell has hit on every woman on the Cape. There’s a reason he’s never been married, George.”

Yeah, I thought. He’s not a fool. Or a sucker.

“I went to school with him until eighth grade,” she said. “He was the kind of kid who used to set off firecrackers in the boys’ room.”

The conversation died out. I didn’t mind hearing Barbara talk. I had opened the door about the affair and I didn’t mind hearing what she had to say about the man who had been with my wife. The man I thought I knew. “Then what?” I asked.

“Then I went off to Tabor Academy and he went to Barnstable High.”

“Tabor, huh?”

“I liked to sail. Thought I was good at it. Turned out a lot of people were better.”

A picture of Barbara Belbonnet sailing came into my mind. The perspective was all wrong. She was sitting straight up in the cockpit of a Laser. Half as tall as the mast. “Ever sail with the Gregorys?” In my vision they were little people. Lilliputians. But there were hundreds of them. Scattered all over the deck of the Laser.

“I’ve done it, sure. We were all members of the yacht club.”

“Sail with Ned?”

“I have.”

“Peter Martin?”

“I know Peter. I don’t think I’ve ever sailed with him.”

“Done the Figawi race?”

“Every sailor in these parts has, sooner or later. But I haven’t done it with the Gregorys.”

“But you’ve partied with them. Figawi parties, I mean.”

“I have.” She inspected the ash, tapped it, made sure the tobacco was still burning. “Tyler, my almost ex, used to work on their boats. The Senator would sail someplace like the Caribbean and then he’d fly home or to D.C. or wherever, and Ty would sail the boat back for him.”

Barbara’s almost ex was all things nautical. That, she told me one time, was the problem with him. He loved the sea more than her. More than the kids. I thought about my ex and what she loved more than me. Apparently everything.

I heard a voice in the neighborhood, a mother shouting at her son. I heard a car door slam shut. An engine gunned to life. The car took off. Barbara and I exchanged looks, but said nothing.

“How did you find out about the affair?” she asked, after we had smoked in silence for a while.

“Buzzy.”

“He told you? Why would he do that?”

“There are people who want him to run for D.A. against Mitch. He’s afraid the affair will be exposed.” I had not expected to come right out and tell her. I heard the words and wondered why I had. I wondered if it had anything to do with her being friends with the Gregorys. Run home and tell them, Barbara. Let them squish Buzzy like a bug.

But “Huh” was all she said. She put the cigar in her mouth, did it expertly, and squinted her eyes against the smoke. And then she added, “Why would somebody pick him to run?”

“From what I understand, it has to do with his family connections.”

She took out the cigar, waved it around, and said, “Then why not come to me? My family is as established as his. My background is probably a lot cleaner.”

Probably, I thought, because your family is established a little differently than Buzzy’s.

“Maybe they’re sexists,” she said. The idea seemed to get her worked up, made her suck hard on the cigar. “Who are ‘they’?”

“McBeth, McQuaid. Those guys.”

“Get out!”

“No. Why?”

“McBeth and McQuaid want to take Mitch down? What on earth for? So they can build stuff without permits? Wait, wait, wait, wait.” She held up one hand, the non-smoking hand. Her eyes brightened. “This have anything to do with the Indians over in Mashpee? The ones who are trying to get a casino?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Barbara turned in her seat. She had lost interest in her cigar.

“There are people out there,” I said, not looking at her, “who are convinced the Gregorys were involved in the murder of Heidi Telford.” Take that back to the compound, Barbara.

I tapped my cigar ash, watched it fall. “They think that Mitch is protecting the family rather than investigating them.”

Barbara bounced. Her cigar apparently was in her way because she threw it onto the pavers. “You’re talking about old Bill Tel—”

“No, I’m not, Barbara. If anything, Bill’s become a pawn for these people.”

Her chin tucked into her neck. “Is this, like, a political thing?”

I said no, it was more of a personal thing.

“How do you know them? These people?”

At almost any other time I probably would not have told her. But I had been lying in bed for about twenty hours, feeling miserable about myself and my life and the world and everything in it; and now this woman, this gorgeous woman, had come to see me and brought me a cigar and was sitting on my back patio acting as if what I had to say really mattered to her.

“Barbara, did you ever wonder how I got my job?”

“No. Yes. Well, I sort of figured it was like me. You had someone who pulled a few strings—”

“Yeah. The Senator. Because I had once done him a favor. Well, not him so much, but one of his nephews. Him, too, I guess, if you really get right down to it.”

“Which nephew?”

“You already mentioned him. Or one of us did, anyhow.”

“Ned? Peter?”

I motioned with my head, probably tried to raise my eyebrows in affirmation. “Peter.”

“Oh, my God … you’re talking about the thing down in Florida?”

“I helped cover it up.”

“He really did it? Peter the doctor? Peter, who works with AIDS patients out in San Francisco?”

“He did some nasty stuff, Barbara, and I was there, and a few months later the girl was dead.”

“Oh, God.”

I wanted her to understand the depth of my depravity. Of the Gregorys’. Maybe even of her own for being friends with them.

For a long time we just sat there, me smoking, Barbara staring off into the yard. Then, very softly, she said, “Why did you ask about the Figawi race?”

“Heidi Telford was killed the night the race ended in 1999. Bill Telford thinks she was at the Gregorys’ that night. I think he’s right.”

There, Barbara, what are you going to do with that information? Perhaps you could pass it along to Cory, or Jamie, or whoever else comes over to your father’s house for big hunks of meat grilled by hired help. Then they could send Chuck-Chuck by to have a talk with me. Better yet, Pierre Mumford. He could squeeze my head between his fingers. Make it pop like a blister.

“You think it was Peter?” she said, jerking my thoughts back to the moment.

“I think Peter is a sick, twisted misogynist. I’ve seen what he can do.”

“So … like … are you helping these people? The ones who want to get the Gregorys?”

Yes, you would like to know that, wouldn’t you, Barbara? Let your hair down, pull on a pair of tight jeans, give me a cigar, and I’ll tell you anything and everything. Because that’s the kind of guy I am, the kind who can be bought for a cigar and a glimpse of paradise.

“I’m not sure what I’m doing,” I told her. “I’d like to help Mr. Telford, I know that. And these people, as you call them, they’re using me just like they’re using him and even poor dumbass Buzzy to get what they want.”

“And is that so bad? If it’s going to lead to the truth, I mean.”

Wait. That wasn’t what she was supposed to say.

I had a sudden, terribly cold feeling. The idea came into my head that Barbara Belbonnet, my office-mate with a world of problems of her own, had shown up at my house without her kids and her cell phone not because the Gregorys had sent her, but because Roland Andrews had. My breath caught in my chest and I turned my head slowly to look at her.

Barbara’s eyes were on me. Big yellowish-brown eyes. She didn’t look devious, nefarious, manipulative. She didn’t look anything other than beautiful. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?” she asked. “As prosecutors? Go after the truth?”

“I’m not prosecuting this case,” I answered. “As Mitch has taken pains to remind me.”

“Mitch, who has his own interests to guard.”

“So what are you saying, Barbara?” I spoke carefully, deliberately. “You think I ought to do what these people want?”

“I think”—and then she took her time telling me what she thought. She did it by watching me intently, making sure I really was listening. “I think you ought to decide what’s right and then go ahead and do it. No matter what.”

No matter if I lost my job and never worked again. No matter if I was vilified throughout the country, the world, for betraying the Gregorys. “Yeah?” I said harshly. “Well, these people we’re talking about want me to track down everyone who could have been at the Gregorys’ that night.”

“Hasn’t anyone done that yet?”

If she was with Andrews, she would know they hadn’t. If she was with the Gregorys, she would know they had … sort of. Chuck Larson had said a detective had talked to Cory Gregory’s brother and cousins. A detective who had put nothing about the Gregorys in his file.

I lofted a cloud of cigar smoke straight above my head. “That’s one of the great unresolved questions,” I said.

“Nobody’s investigated Peter?”

“It doesn’t appear they have.”

She thought about it. “Tyler still sees him, you know.”

Tyler, the ex. The almost ex.

“He’s living in Sausalito. Tyler, I mean. Peter still sails out there on San Francisco Bay. He gets Ty to crew for him sometimes. If you want, I could get Tyler to put you in touch. He’s more than happy to do little things like that for me. As long as I don’t try to get him to come home, help me take care of the kids.”

It was time to stop this dance. I tossed my cigar next to hers on the pavers and sat up straight. “You realize you’re telling me I should be going after your old friends.”

“What I’m telling you is what I said before. Decide what’s right and then do it. And as for going after old friends, well, they’re friends because I know them. Because I grew up with them. Not because they’ve ever done anything for me.”

“And if they had? If they had done something great and wonderful for you?”

Barbara threw up her hand. “Look, George, I don’t know what more to tell you, but you’re obviously torn up by this. So what I’m suggesting is maybe you ought to stop worrying so much about other people and what their motivations are and just do something because it’s the right thing to do. That’s all.”

I did not agree or disagree. It was easier just to stare at the tree where I had seen the squirrel go. Try to figure out where he was hiding, when he would come out next.

4

.

MITCH WAS NOT EXACTLY SANGUINE ABOUT MY DAY OFF.

“You think I can’t fire you?” he screamed at me.

“I think it would be awfully awkward if you did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you would have some explaining to do.” I was not being forceful or even cocky. Half of me did not care if I was fired; the other half just wanted to inflict a little damage on Mr. White. “It means it just may be that the card I’m holding is worth more than the one you have.”

Mitch was unnerved. His eyes did the bulging thing behind his glasses. “Are you threatening me?”

“Not at all.”

“Because I’m still the boss here.”

The boss whose butt had come out of his chair, who was now leaning across his desk, his weight on his bare forearms. Once again, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt that severely impaired the authority he was trying to exert.

“You think you’re already at the bottom doing OUIs, Becket?” he bellowed in his little man’s voice. “Well, I can make it even worse for you. I can put you in juvie. I can have you going after deadbeat dads. I can give you nothing whatsoever to do if I feel like it.”

“Or the two of us can work together in what you might call our common interest.”

Mitch’s face had gone blotchy. Like his pipe-cleaner arms, it was not a pleasant sight.

“This Telford thing isn’t going away,” I told him. “In case you don’t know it, there’s a movement afoot to get someone to run against you. And the main platform of your opponent is going to be that you’ve been covering up for the Gregorys.”

Mitch came even farther across the desk. His next move would have to involve putting his knees on it. Then he would crouch like a porcelain cat. “Who?” he demanded. “Who is it?”

I did not give him an answer. I had something I wanted from him and that was my only bargaining chip.

“You?” His voice soared to the point of cracking.

“Not me, Mitch. I’m the Gregorys’ friend, remember?”

Mitch did not know what to say to that. Little gurgling noises came out of his mouth and spit rolled down his chin. After a while, he sat back. I have never felt so hated in my life. Not when Roland Andrews confronted me in my apartment in D.C. Not even when I was being shot at. I gestured to my own chin, pointing with my index finger. That made him even angrier, but at least he wiped the spit away. He did it with his bare forearm.

I told him that Bill Telford had raised enough questions about whether his daughter was at Senator Gregory’s house that night that people were out there now, combing the country for information.

He gurgled again, but held his saliva.

“One of the questions being asked is why you and Cello DiMasi didn’t follow up on the leads you had. I talked with Cello and he told me the police investigation was conducted by a certain Detective Landry, a guy who took early retirement and moved to Hawaii shortly after he didn’t find any connection to the Gregorys. You see where this is leading, Mitch?”

He didn’t tell me. He was too busy trying to reduce me to cinders with his eyes.

“We have no reason to want the Senator besmirched, do we, Mitch? He’s had enough problems over the course of his life. And he’s been good to us, to the people of this state, good to the entire nation. But you know as well as I do that there are folks out there who will seize any opportunity to tear him down. So I see us, you and me, as being in a position where we can do something about this whole mess. A unique position. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Mitch was not agreeing to anything. It is possible that the movements I saw his head make were simply the result of his body shaking.

“So what I propose is that you send me to visit former Detective Landry and see if we can’t come up with an explanation as to why certain things were or were not done. Why there are things that don’t seem to be in the police investigation file. That way, if he’s questioned by reporters or one of those pseudo-journalists on TV, or even, God forbid, the U.S. Justice Department, we can have a little more control over the situation.”

“You want me to send you to Hawaii.”

“I do.”

“So you can talk to Landry about the Heidi Telford investigation.”

“So I can straighten out the Heidi Telford investigation. Before the whole world gets the wrong impression.”

“Before some guy can use it against me in next year’s campaign.”

“Yes.”

“And you still haven’t told me who that guy is.”

I told him.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mitch White. But he knew I wasn’t, and he seemed to be just as worried as he had been before.