Crime of Privilege: A Novel (36 page)

“There’s nothing in the autopsy report about sand on her feet, Dick.”

The office’s brain trust went silent. At least a quarter of a minute passed before
Reid shook his head and said, “It’s one of the things … no, it’s
the
thing that’s made this case so damned difficult. We just don’t know anything other
than where she ended up.”

“Hey, guys, she was hit with a golf club. A guy driving around looking for pickups
isn’t likely to have a golf club in his car, is he?”

“Why not?” asked Mitch.

“Could have had it in his trunk,” Reid said.

“Or maybe,” I said, taking my hand out of my pocket, stepping a half-step forward
and bringing it down so the tip of my index finger hit the surface of the desk, “she
was visiting a house famous for its sporting family, a house that was in all likelihood
filled with golf clubs, and maybe she angered someone in that house who picked up
the first weapon available and hit her with it and then said, ‘My golly, she’s dead,
whatever am I going to do with her now?’ And maybe his cousin said, ‘Well, she was
hit with a golf club, let’s leave her on a golf course.’ ” I thumped the desk again.
“By fucking golly.”

There was silence again, and again it was Reid who broke it. “We don’t know she was
hit with a golf club.”

The three men were staring at me and I wondered if this was the
end of the interview. The interrogation. Whatever it was. And since I was now certain
I was about to be fired, I pushed. “Tell me, Reid, Mitch, anybody who has an answer,
was there ever a subpoena issued to search the Gregory houses? Even one of their houses?
Ever any attempt to check their golf clubs, see if there was any blood or tissue on
any of them? See if any was even missing?”

People in my position were not supposed to talk to people in their positions that
way. The moment sizzled, then faded.

“You done?” Reid asked.

I nodded. I didn’t put much effort into it.

“Like we said earlier, the Gregorys have been very candid. They’ve also been very
cooperative. Let Detective Landry in their home without a search warrant. Let him
look at anything he wanted. You say he got thrown off the track and maybe he did.
But after he was off the case, someone else was on it—”

“Pooch,” Dick interrupted.

“Detective Iacupucci, that’s right,” Reid agreed. “They gave him free rein, too. Talk
to any family member he wants. Look at whatever he wants. The only thing they asked
him, the only thing they’ve ever asked any of us, is not to report anything that just
gratuitously embarrasses them. If it’s important in the murder investigation, fine.
But otherwise, please don’t just say something that’s going to end up on Fox News,
being blabbed about endlessly by Rush Limbaugh. And we’ve tried to hold up our end
of the bargain, George.”

“Until I came along, is that what you’re saying?”

“We’re not saying you’ve done anything wrong, George,” Dick told me. His expression
was very sincere.

“Like Mitch said, the Gregory family feels terrible about this.” Reid tried to sit
up even straighter than he had been, which was probably not possible. “They’ve offered
to do what they could for the family, offered a scholarship to the other daughter—what’s
her name?”

“Stacey,” said Mitch.

“Arranged for her to get into UMass, even though she didn’t have the grades.”

“That’s our alma mater,” said Dick, sliding his hand back and forth between himself
and Reid.

“It was all done as a civic gesture,” said Reid. “She didn’t want to go. But I’m telling
you this to show how the Gregorys have let it be known that anything they can do to
help the family, they will.”

“As a civic gesture,” Dick repeated.

“Concerned members of the community,” Mitch elaborated.

“Puts us in a difficult position,” Reid said. “I mean, if we have something on them,
they have to face the law the same as anyone else. But if we don’t have any direct
evidence, if we have only a suspicion, or a rumor, or a funny feeling, well then we
need to be careful, don’t we?”

“More careful with them than others,” I said, goading him.

“I don’t have to tell you that, George.” And then Reid went on just as if he had not
waved a personal flag of any sort at me. “Take Ned. Why, Ned’s running that nonprofit
that provides heating oil for free to seniors and indigents. Peter’s treating, what’s
he treating, AIDS patients out in San Francisco. Jamie’s handling a lot of serious
money for a lot of important people whose philanthropy keeps Cape Cod going. We don’t
want to be unmindful of all that.”

The word
hypocrisy
was just being rolled into a sentence in my mind when Mitch shocked me with a word
of his own, one that changed the whole tenor of the meeting.

“Except—”

My mouth was open, but I gave him the chance to finish.

“None of us wants to be involved in the cover-up of a murder.”

My mouth stayed open. Only my eyes moved.

“You’ve done a good job, George,” said Reid. “We’re all very impressed.”

“Shown a lot of initiative,” said Dick.

“We’d like to reward that,” said Reid.

I remained on guard. But I at least closed my mouth.

“If you really think,” he continued, “that one of the Gregory boys … Peter, Jamie,
Ned … killed that girl, then we want you to pursue it. We’ve told you all the reasons
we don’t think it’s one of them, but, Lord knows, we haven’t solved the murder doing
it our way. So this is what we propose.” He looked to his left. “Mitch, want to tell
him?”

“We’re going to put you in charge of the case. We’ve already told Chief DiMasi, told
him to give you complete cooperation. We’ve also decided tentatively to budget one
hundred thousand dollars for the investigation. Whether you use it to go to Costa
Rica, find these people you’re talking about—who was it?”

I made no attempt to help him out. I left that to Dick. “Leanne Sullivan and Jason
Stockover.”

“Whatever,” said Mitch. “It’s entirely up to you, but we’re giving you a chance to
run your theory to ground.”

“You want me to go to Costa Rica?”

“If you think it will provide us some answers.”

“Because you don’t want anybody to say you’re not following up on my leads, is that
it?”

Mitch went a little whiter than he usually was. Which put him about the color of snow.

“Try not to be nasty, son,” cautioned Reid Cunningham.

“We thought you’d be grateful,” Dick O’Connor said, his head slowly rotating in disbelief.

It took a while for anyone to speak again.

“We’re moving you up to an office next to mine,” Reid said. There was reluctance in
his voice, as though, now that I had spoken, he, for one, might change his mind. “You’ll
be under my direct supervision, but I don’t plan to stand in your way. The only governor
on this whole thing, and this is something you have to accept—”

He waited, letting me absorb the importance of this provision, perhaps trying to decide
if he should even bother going through with it. “… is that there’s to be no publicity.
Not until you’ve really got something, and not until you’ve cleared it with me. Understand?”

I don’t recall agreeing. I just recall standing with my hand still on Mitch’s desk.

“One more thing,” Dick added. “You’ll need an assistant. We assume you’d like Barbara
Belbonnet.”

This time I was the one who shocked them.

“
W
HAT DO YOU MEAN YOU
’
RE MOVING UPSTAIRS
?”
BARBARA
was not even pretending to be happy for me.

“They’ve got a project they want me to work on.”

“Let me get this straight.” She rose from her chair and stared at me over her computer
screen. She did not look particularly alluring. Of course, she had not known I was
coming back today. “Ten days ago you went off to Hawaii because some people planted
an idea in your head that Mitch tried to cover up the Telford murder in order to protect
the Gregorys.”

I dumped all the contents of one of my desk drawers into a cardboard box without trying
to sort things out.

“And you didn’t want to see the Gregorys get away with that kind of thing anymore,
wasn’t that it?”

I was surprised to see how many pennies came out of that drawer. Pennies mixed with
business cards, pencils, rulers, receipts, unused tax forms, explanations by insurance
companies as to why they were denying benefits.

She was standing stalk still.

I poured the contents of another drawer into the same box, covering the detritus that
was already there. The stuff in this drawer looked more promising. Some brochures
from places I once thought I would like to visit, records of my pension plan. Bizarrely,
a picture of Marion
floated out and landed faceup. In it she was posed, with one knee raised, her elbow
on the knee, her fingers pointing down. She was smiling broadly, almost laughing,
as if thinking of a big joke.

“Hey, George, I’m trying to talk to you.”

“And I’ve got nothing to say to you, Barbara.”

“George, why are you doing this?” Her shoulders curled, her hands clenched. “Have
you sold out, George?”

“You, of course, wouldn’t have to sell out, would you, Barbara?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Why don’t you ask your husband?”

“Hey,” she said sharply, “is that what this is all about?”

I was getting out a third drawer, jerking it from the desk. “Is that what
what
is all about?”

“You coming in here like you have this morning, acting like I’m the enemy or something.
I don’t know what anybody said to you, but there’s only one reason Tyler and I are
not divorced, and that’s because he won’t sign the damn papers.”

“I guess you haven’t talked to him lately,” I said to Barbara while looking at the
face of Marion.

“Of course I haven’t. He’s still out on the ocean somewhere.”

“Yes, he is, isn’t he? Sailing in one of the biggest races in America. One that takes
six months to prepare for. Sailing with Peter Martin, as a matter of fact.”

“So?”

“So it was going to be awful hard for Tyler to hook me up with Peter when he was going
to be hundreds of miles out to sea.”

“I didn’t know that—”

“But he would have. Tyler would have said Peter wouldn’t be there if you actually
told him I was coming to meet him.”

I dumped the third drawer into the cardboard box. One of the staff had gotten me a
two-level push cart and I shoved the box onto the lower level.

“Remember all those arrangements you made for me, Barbara? All those directions and
everything that were supposed to lead to Tyler, but actually led right to his pal
Billy?”

She grabbed my arm. She had made it all the way across the room
while I was busy not looking at her. “I didn’t know anything about Peter being in
any race,” she said. “Ty told me he would be there. And who the hell is Billy?”

“Billy knew you, Barbara. Why, his cute little elfin face lit up like a Christmas
tree when I said I had a message from you. Almost like it was code. Oh, yeah, Tyler
was gone, Peter was gone, but wouldn’t I really like to go to Costa Rica, see Jason
Stockover? Only, guess what? When I get there, a woman named Leanne Sullivan, who
just so happened to be Jason’s date on the night Heidi Telford was killed, had me
kidnapped and handcuffed and stuck a fucking knife in my throat.”

I grabbed Barbara’s hand and jerked it to my neck. “See this? Feel this? I was about
one half-second away from being dead.”

She fought me at first, tried to hold her fingers back, then let them touch the ridge
that had formed. “Oh, my God, George.”

“Yeah, ‘my God, George’ is right.” I pulled away from her and went back to jamming
books and files onto the cart.

She watched me until I could no longer think what to gather up.

“You believe I planned to send you to Costa Rica to get you killed?”

Her voice, I noticed, had gotten very soft. Her legal training was coming through,
asking me a question I could not answer without either backing down from what I had
said before or making something up to justify it.

“No, I don’t believe that’s the way the Gregorys work. They don’t kill people, they
control them with their wealth, power, influence. Only, things are spinning out of
control on this particular nine-year effort because they never really did control
a key guy, the Barnstable police detective who was in charge of the case. They relied
on Leanne Sullivan to do that and Leanne has turned out to be a loose cannon.”

“The Leanne who stabbed you?” Barbara looked like she was gamely trying to follow
me.

“The Leanne who, like I said, was at the Gregorys’ that night as Jason’s pickup date.
The Leanne they got to move to Hawaii and the Leanne that got Detective Landry off
the case by convincing him to move to Hawaii with her. And finally, Barbara, the Leanne
who left Landry a broken-down old drunk in Kauai and returned to Jason Stockover in
Tamarindo, Costa Rica.”

“And?” She took a stand. “So what’s my connection in all of this?”

“Your connection, Barbara, is that there are only two people on the planet who knew
I was going to Costa Rica, you and that little boat rat, Billy, who seemed to be waiting
for me to show up in Sausalito and mention your name. Your connection is that your
family and the Gregorys have been intertwined since birth. And so when the Gregorys
found out that Chief DiMasi had told me about Landry living in Kauai, they realized
there wasn’t anything they could do to keep me from talking to him.”

I looked directly into her eyes for the first time. “So, Barbara, that’s when you
came into the picture. Showing up at my house, telling me to right the wrongs, do
whatever is noble, go to Hawaii and talk to Landry—the very thing the Gregorys knew
I was going to do anyhow. But your role, Barbara, was to make sure I stopped off in
California on my way home so I could be directed down to where Jason and Leanne were.”