Текст книги "Crime of Privilege"

Автор книги: Walter Walker

Соавторы: Walter Walker
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

3

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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 hell 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 shifted my weight onto my left buttock, 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 balls 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 Mitchell White with the bad news.”

“Which is what?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

“I don’t have anything.”

Andrews laughed. He thought that was great fun to hear me say that. “You’ve just come back from Hawaii by way of California and Costa Rica, my friend. You’ve got something.”

More evidence that I had been followed. Or somebody had talked. And I had a pretty good idea who it was. I already had seen Roland Andrews’s ability to plant women in my life. I finished off my water. “Who you thinking of putting up?”

“You’ve got two other buddies. I want to ask you about them.”

I pressed my back against the refrigerator and let my feet slide out in front of me. “Who?”

“Jimmy Shelley, Alphonse Carbona. I need to know which one’s better.”

My chest ached. Everything about me ached. “Jimmy’s a screwup, like Buzzy. Al, well, I don’t see him as being political material.”

“Jimmy kept his mouth shut about seeing Buzzy and Marion together, didn’t he?”

“Al keeps his mouth shut about everything.”

“Still, Jimmy, having seen what he did, never made jokes about it in front of you, did he? Never told anyone else, as far as you know?”

“You’re right. What’s your slogan going to be? ‘He Won’t Tell’?”

“You like Alphonse better, huh? As a candidate, I mean.”

“Al’s married, got a nice wife. Does a good job in court. Talks to juries fine. Just doesn’t say much in social situations. Far as I know, he’s never been in trouble.”

“I see.” But it was not clear he did. He seemed to have his heart set on Jimmy.

I shrugged, not really caring. “What do the Macs say?”

“The Macs will do what I tell them. As long as it doesn’t interfere with their agenda.”

“Which involves building a casino for the Indians in Mashpee.”

Roland’s head came up rather quickly. “Smart boy,” he said. “Who told you that?”

I didn’t answer.

“Seriously,” he said, “who was it let his mouth flap?”

I said, “McCoppin,” for no other reason than he was the one who had turned away from me when I went into Muggsy’s that time I was trying to talk to the chief. And that reminded me of something else.

“What’s in this for Cello DiMasi?”

“Who says there’s anything in it for him?”

“Well, he’s a friend of the Macs. If they’re plotting to overthrow the D.A., he’s got to be aware of it—yet the thing they’re going to have the candidate say, that Mitch White protected the Gregorys, couldn’t the exact same charge be leveled against the chief?”

“Let me tell you what I’ve learned about the chief. Except for the fact he’s not a native, Cello DiMasi is your quintessential local guy. That’s who he identifies with, the blue-collar people who’ve been here all their lives and all their parents’ lives and who took him in when he was a kid playing ball in the summer. Like them, like the people who work on the summer residents’ septic tanks and sell them lobsters, he’ll do whatever the job requires, then go home and smirk about it with his buddies. But first he does the job that the powers that be want him to do. And if they don’t want him going after something, he won’t do it.”

“But,” I insisted, not sure if I was getting an answer, “if Mitch is thrown out, doesn’t Cello have to go, too?”

“If we put up a candidate against the sitting D.A. and our candidate wins, the chief will no doubt keep his position by telling everyone Mitch White held him back. Made him put a clown like Iacupucci on the case.”

“You said ‘if.’ ”

“What?”

“You said, ‘If we put up a candidate.’ ”

“Well, we may not need to, depending on what it is you’ve come up with.”

“I told you, I haven’t come up with anything.”

Andrews’s chin lifted. He dropped his eyes, wanting mine to follow them, wanting me to look at the floor. To remember I could be there again.

I said, “The whole reason they’ve promoted me, moved me upstairs next to them, is so they can monitor me, stifle whatever it is I might learn.”

“Which is why we probably will need a candidate.”

When I didn’t speak, he added, “And that’s why we want you to feel comfortable with whoever we put up to run against Mitch.”

And then I understood. “Because when Mitch doesn’t use what I give him, you want me to give it to his opponent, is that it?”

Roland Andrews clapped his hands in reward of my perspicacity.

“And the moment I give it to his opponent, Mitch’ll fire my ass.”

“I think you’ll find that’s not going to happen, Georgie.”

“Why not? He’d know I was working against him.”

“Oh, he’ll head you off if he can. But if you turn around and give information to us, I can virtually guarantee you he won’t do anything about it. He doesn’t want any more spotlight on his relationship with the Gregorys than he absolutely has to have, and he knows that if he fights back the next step is for us to make this personal.”

“Personal in what way?”

Andrews laughed. It was not the kind of laugh most human beings use to express mirth. It was more like a puff of air escaping from his lungs. “Ever seen his kid?”

I was not sure I had heard right.

“Look at the kid next time you’re wondering how a simple staff attorney on the Senate Judiciary Committee got to be district attorney in the Senator’s home district. And if that picture doesn’t do it for you, I’ll show you a few of Stephanie White when she used to dance at the Gaslight Club in Washington, D.C., where the Senator has been known to take a lunch or two over the years.”

4

.

IT WAS ALL SET. I WAS TO DO WHAT JOSH DAVID POWELL HAD WANTED me to do all along. I was to do what I had wanted to do ever since I hadn’t done it. Absolution from Mr. Powell, redemption for me. Sort of.

We would expose Peter, the Saint of San Francisco, because he deserved to be exposed, because no matter how many lives he was saving now, he had to pay the price for the one he had ruined a dozen years ago, the one he had taken three years after that. He deserved it. He deserved to be punished. Mr. Powell was entitled to closure. I was entitled to closure. I would get it, I would move on, leaving heads bobbing in my wake. Peter’s. The Senator’s. Mitch’s.

I thought I might leave Barbara’s, too, until she appeared in my office ten days after she had abruptly disappeared. She had her hair brushed long again, the way she’d had it the day she had come to my house. She was more tanned than she was when I had seen her last, but not so tanned as to indicate she had been lying on a beach somewhere.

“Got a minute?” she asked.

I rose to my feet. “Of course.”

She came in and shut the door behind her. She was wearing a pale blue blouse over a black silk sleeveless top. You could see through the blouse and I had the feeling she had just put it on for propriety, because she was coming to the workplace and wearing a sleeveless top would not be appropriate, not even a silk one. Her pants were white and clung to her legs and purposely did not reach her ankles. The pants had little zippers at the bottoms. Then there was bare skin. Then black woven sandals that matched her belt. I watched as she walked to a chair in front of my desk.

“May I?” she said, putting her hand on the back of the chair.

I nodded and she sat. She arranged herself gracefully, one leg over the other, and then inclined slightly forward. “We didn’t part on such good terms. I’m wondering if you’re still mad at me.”

I took my own chair. It wasn’t as big as Mitch’s, but it was leather and it swiveled. “I wasn’t mad at you, Barbara.”

“Suspicious, then. You doubted me.”

I admitted as much by flexing my fingers. Then I shrank into my chair, put my elbows on the arms, and clasped my hands in front of my stomach. I was acting like Mitch did sometimes. I wished I wasn’t.

“I was hurt by the things you said. By what you were thinking. That night, the next day, I wanted to come see you, try to make you understand how wrong you were about me. Then I had to ask myself why you should believe me. And so I decided to prove myself to you.”

“I heard you went on leave.”

“They wouldn’t give me a vacation. Not on short notice. So I just said I had a family emergency and I had to go out.”

“But you didn’t. Have a family emergency, I mean.”

She shrugged. “My daughter, Molly, is on a tour of Canada with her soccer team, and my parents, for once, agreed to take Malcolm. So, no, I didn’t.”

She might as well have thrown boiling water on me. “Malcolm is your son?”

“Whose son did you think he was?”

“I didn’t think.”

“Why do you suppose I had to take the job I did? Why do you suppose I have to spend so much time dealing with kid problems?”

I probably stammered. If I didn’t, I might as well have. Barbara tilted her head and held my eyes while she talked. “I used up a lot of favors this time, George. I told my parents I was going to San Francisco to have it out with Tyler once and for all. To tell him I wanted a divorce. It was the one thing I could say that would get them to help me.”

I nodded, because it was what she wanted.

“I got on a plane and flew out there. I found that guy Billy, the one you said knew me. It wasn’t hard. He was living on my husband’s boat. And”—she hesitated before she brought up an old wound—“of course, I had those explicit directions I had given to you.”

I nodded again. It was a conciliatory nod this time.

“I didn’t know him, George. In fact, I think, when he found out who I was, I rather scared him.”

I could see that happening. I couldn’t imagine Billy ran into many women like her at Smitty’s bar.

“It took me all of about twenty minutes to get the truth out of him.”

The truth. I felt a tingle go up my spine. It made me bristle. She was going to tell me the truth. Something I didn’t know. Something I hadn’t been able to find out on my own.

“Did you have to buy him a couple of beers?” I asked. I was only partially joking. I was still chagrined by my misreading of the Malcolm situation. And I was uncomfortable because of the intensity with which she was looking at me.

“Sushi,” she said. “Over a hundred bucks’ worth. We went to a place on Caledonia Street with outdoor tables. Found out later it had a Michelin star. My mistake, I let him order whatever he wanted. By the end of his first tiger roll he had told me that Peter Martin had known you were coming all along.”

All along? Since I had questioned Howard in Hawaii? Or since Barbara had suggested it? But all I asked her was, “How?”

“I don’t think Billy was in a position to know that, but I can pretty much tell you from everything else I’ve learned that someone you talked to earlier was in touch with Peter.”

She waited while I counted off the possibilities in my mind: Cory, McFetridge, Patty, Howard. Her.

“Only thing was,” she said, “nobody knew when you might be coming, and Peter was sailing in the TransPac, and when I called Tyler to tell him about you, well, I guess Ty saw it as a way to get on the boat. To get into the race itself.”

“And you know this because …?”

“I just know Ty, that’s all. He would have done anything to get in a race like that.”

“Including lie to you?”

“Oh, like he’s never done that before.”

Barbara smiled at her own failings, inviting me to smile with her. Barbara Belbonnet. It was hard to see her as a victim.

“Don’t ask,” she said.

“You want me to believe you.”

“What I want is for you to understand what happened.” Her voice had suddenly grown taut. Just like that. As though I, somehow, was making things more difficult than they had to be.

I gestured, indicating she should go ahead, that I wasn’t going to interfere anymore.

“When I told Ty you were coming, he must have gone to Peter and claimed he was the one you were coming to see.”

“Had you told Ty that I wanted to talk to Peter about Heidi Telford’s death?”

“Yes, probably. Yes, I did. Yes, and I’m sorry.” Barbara Belbonnet wasn’t looking so intense anymore. Her eyes were wavering, blurring, and suddenly she was in tears.

It was so unexpected I did not know what to do. For a moment, I fought the urge to get up, go around the desk, take her in my arms. Tell her I was sorry. For everything. I could not hold off beyond a moment.

“No,” she said, sticking her hand out, making me stop, sending me back into my chair. “I want to tell you why.” The one hand stayed up. The other went to the back of her head so that her elbow was aimed at me and her face was hidden. “I wanted to help you. I wanted to do something for you, George, something only I could do. When Ty asked why I wanted him to set up a meeting between you and Peter I should have made something up, but I didn’t. He knew about Heidi. Everyone on the Cape knew about her, and I thought … I thought … I don’t know what I thought. I thought it would help you get what you want. That’s what I’m sorry about, George.”

“So Peter got him out of there. Took him on the boat.”

The hand stayed behind her head, the elbow stayed pointed. Her hair seemed to be going out in every direction. “Billy told me that when Ty asked him to boat-sit he also told him you would be looking for him. And he said when you got there he was to call a certain number, find out what to do next.”

I looked at the hair. Looked at the elbow. Looked at the person who had set this in motion.

“That story Billy had about running into Jason in the restaurant in Ensenada, it wasn’t true?”

“I don’t know. I just know that if you asked about Jason Stockover, he was to tell you he was in Tamarindo.”

Six people have a party of sorts. Four of them Gregorys. Something goes terribly wrong. First bury it, then deny it, then, if somebody has to be thrown under the bus, pick one of the non-Gregorys. Send me to Tamarindo. Where Jason is.

Except Jason’s not there. Jason has been tipped off. Run, Jason. Run, and he’ll think it’s you. Except we won’t tell you that part. Because you’re not one of us and you’re not even a friend from childhood. Like McFetridge. You’re only a friend from college. Which puts you in an outer circle, Jason.

First the family. Then lifelong friends. Then other friends. Then all those who want to be friends. Like George.

Oh, and by the way, do you need anything while you’re running away? A new sailboat, perhaps?

Barbara was speaking. She was telling me she was sorry she didn’t have every detail right as to what little Billy said and did. “But I didn’t stop there,” she said.

I looked up, shifting my attention to her again.

“I went to Tamarindo myself.”

Another piece that didn’t fit. If she was part of the scheme to get me to go there—Barbara to Ty to Peter to Billy—why would she go after I left?

Barbara was waiting. She clearly had expected a different reaction from me. I did the minimum. I murmured, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

And then she, nearly six feet of long-limbed powerful female with big yellow-brown eyes and just possibly the disposition of a sadist, said she wasn’t.

“You went to California, then continued right on to Costa Rica.” I was thinking that meant she had brought her passport, which meant she had been planning to do that all along.

“I had my mom’s ATM card.”

“Your mom financed this whole trip?”

“My parents,” she corrected. Then she unwound her legs. Then she rewound them, switching the one that had been on top. “Remember, they thought I was going to California to have it out with Tyler once and for all.”

Still, she needed a passport.

“I get to Tamarindo,” she said, her tone telling me I was going to hear this whether I liked it or not, “and it’s a strange little place. It’s kind of like being at the far end of the universe.”

She paused, perhaps to see if I would say no, no, no, it’s perfectly normal. Like Orlando or Las Vegas.

“The other thing is, and I don’t know if this happened to you, but it rained most every day. I mean, what are you supposed to do in a beach town when it rains? I end up going from one bar, one shop, one restaurant, to another, and whenever I see anybody who looks like an American living there, I try to strike up a conversation.”

“Hi. How are you? You know Jason Stockover?”

Her eyes flicked, rolled; her mouth grimaced. “Pretty much. Until I get to this one man, owns a restaurant on the beach.”

“Wouldn’t be the place with coconut pies, would it?”

“You’ve been there, I see.”

“That’s supposed to be the place Jason owns.”

“Well, the real owner’s name is J. T. Bauer. Balding guy, pretty muscular, about forty-five. He comes from Key West.”

“Doesn’t sound like Jason.” I remembered what Howard Landry had said. I had a flash of Howard flapping his hand under his chin.

“Nope. What’s more, he claimed never to have known any Jason in Tamarindo. What he admitted, and this is what I’ve been trying to get to, George, is that he did know Leanne.”

She clearly thought this was going to detonate, bring me flying out of my chair. She was disappointed when it didn’t.

“Leanne couldn’t have been there by herself.”

“J.T. said she came into town, met him, hooked up with him, as the kids say these days. Stayed a couple of weeks, even helped him run the restaurant. Then she moved on.”

It was possible. If someone had told Peter what I was doing enough time before I got to California, he could have called Leanne, gotten her to go down to Tamarindo knowing I would be coming.

I swallowed.

“What is it, George?”

“How do you know it was the real Leanne?”

“Well,” she said, the word coming out slowly, lingering, “that’s kind of hard for me to say, never having met or seen Leanne.”

I had to agree and was about to tell her that when she added, “But this much I do know. The girl moved in with J. T. Bauer. He paid her in cash, never saw anything with her name on it, came home one day and she was gone.”

“No note? No message, no forwarding address?”

“Nothing. And J.T. didn’t seem all that upset about it, tell you the truth. He says that kind of thing happens down there sometimes. He said same thing used to happen in Key West. People come in, shack up, move on.”

Barbara’s legs crossed again. The upper one began to bob up and down expectantly. The woven sandal dangled from her foot. I had the feeling she was remembering something that I didn’t. I tried to think what it could be.

“Key West is kind of a big sailing town, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“This J.T., he didn’t happen to know Peter, did he?”

One eyebrow went up. Barbara looked at me approvingly. “Bingo, George. You win the prize. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t tell me, was whether the Leanne who worked for him, moved in with him, had any connection with Peter.”

“Except they were both from Massachusetts.”

Barbara shrugged. “I’m not even sure about that. J.T. seemed to think the Leanne who was there was from Rhode Island. And that at some point she had been a cop.”

It was making perfect sense. Go to another country, look for a man who isn’t there. Get threatened by a woman who isn’t who you think she is. Heck of an effort, George. Keep up the good work. Want a new office?