Crime of Privilege: A Novel (44 page)

Jason continued to hold the wine bottle almost but not quite parallel to the floor.
He looked stricken.

“So now that everything’s set up, what’s going to prevent them from making you the
scapegoat?” I asked. “Leanne? When was the last time you had any contact with her?
McFetridge? He’s known the Gregorys since birth. He’s the next thing to family, and
you, Jason, who are you to them? A now distant college friend of Ned’s, and at this
point nobody even cares that he was boning the babysitter a decade ago.”

“She cares.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘She cares.’ Her family cares. Her husband cares.”

I was missing something. I struggled to sit up while I replayed that last exchange
in my mind. “The au pair? You know her?”

“I know her husband. I went to Eaglebrook with him.”

Eaglebrook, a pre-prep school. A boarding school you went to in order to get into
a good boarding school. An institution for the country’s elite. A place from which
someone might grow up to be sensitive about his wife having once had an affair with
a married Gregory.

“Who is she?”

Jason glanced at Toby. Words were not spoken, but there was plenty of message in the
glance.

I was struggling to unravel that message when Toby’s booming voice brought my thoughts
to a halt. “I think, Mr. Becket,” he said, “you will concede that you have no jurisdiction
in this country.”

“Yes, but—”

“And that it is highly unlikely you or anyone else would be able to obtain extradition
from this country for Jason, because nothing gives the French more pleasure than to
fuck with the American legal system.”

I didn’t need extradition. I needed information. And cooperation. I started to say
that and was cut off.

“Those things being true, or at least unrefuted by you, I think you will agree that
there is little reason for Jason to continue speaking to you on this subject.”

But there was. I was almost there, within an arm’s length of nailing Peter Gregory
Martin for the murder of Heidi Telford. I needed only to reach a little bit farther.

But I was not going to get the chance, because Toby the protector was not done protecting.

“Which means, sir,” he said, “your time as a guest in our home is at an end.”

It is possible my mouth hung open.

“
Chambre Quatre
is at the top of the stairs. I suggest you find it now or you may discover that your
time as a guest in any capacity in our establishment has ended as well.”

“Then you—”

“Au revoir, Monsieur Becket.”

CAPE COD, September 2008

R
OUTE 6A FROM SANDWICH TO BREWSTER HAS TO BE ONE OF
the most beautiful roads in America. It runs along the north side of the peninsula,
past cranberry bogs and blueberry patches and small farms, and in early fall the small
farms still have honor racks filled with corn and squash and tomatoes. It passes antiques
shops, country stores, esoteric museums, cemeteries with flat, vertical gravestones
that might date back to the 1600s, and tiny town centers with parks and gazebos. And
all along the way are large eighteenth-century homes with huge lawns and stone walls
and great, leafy trees. Some of those homes have been made into inns and restaurants.
Like The Captain Yarnell House.

Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Brewster—each town has a slightly different
look, a slightly different personality, far more obvious to the locals than the occasional
or first-time visitor. Get to Brewster and the woods grow thicker and the spacing
between homes and businesses becomes greater. Brewster, being at the end of the road,
has a slight air of being pleased with itself simply because it is where not everyone
can or will go. Pass Nickerson State Park, turn north on a small country lane and
head toward the bay, where the water can recede a mile or more during low tide and
people can go clamming with buckets and rakes or let their vizslas or Labs scamper
across the flats in pursuit of seagulls. The Captain Yarnell House is set back behind
a
sickle-moon driveway filled with pebbles that splatter against the underside of your
car if you drive in a little too fast. Which you might do if you’re in a hurry, or
nervous, or anxious because you have come a long way to get here and you know you
are getting close to your goal.

At 3:00 on a post–Labor Day afternoon, I did not need to be in a hurry. Many restaurants
on the Cape close for the season in September. The higher-end ones may stay open until
November or even December, but you never know. The folks at Captain Yarnell could
have packed it in and moved on to Florida or New Hampshire or Vermont, so I was glad
to see a pair of vehicles in the parking lot: a small black BMW and a rather beat-up
Ford pickup truck. I parked next to them and made my way around the back of the building
to the entrance to the kitchen.

It was warm, somewhere between seventy and seventy-five degrees, and the screen door
was still in place. By putting my two hands around my eyes I could lean my face against
the screen and look inside. Two men were working. A short Latino was in a T-shirt
and full apron, peeling vegetables. A tall, dark-skinned man wearing a white double-breasted
chef’s jacket was working over a gargantuan stove that must have had twenty burners.
He was furiously stirring something in a heavy metal pot, and I thought it best not
to disturb him until the fury subsided.

Minutes passed before the Latino noticed me. “Hey!” he said, and his eyes grew wide.

The chef looked over. He did not stop stirring. He returned his eyes to his task.
“Help you?” he called out.

“Chris Warburton?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m George Becket from the D.A.’s office. I need to talk to you.”

The job title works better some places than others. The smaller man stopped peeling
and stood very, very still. Chris Warburton slowed his stirring, peered at his creation,
lowered the flame beneath the pot and mumbled something to his assistant, who used
a sidestep to take his boss’s place at the stove without removing his eyes from me.
Then Chris came toward me, wiping his palms against each other in quick, noisy slaps.

He was a handsome man with a confident smile. He gave me that smile because he, Chris
Warburton, chef of The Captain Yarnell House, had nothing to fear from the district
attorney’s office, except perhaps the immigration status of his assistant.

I moved aside as he opened the screen door and came out of the kitchen. He looked
up at the blue sky with its bright gray and white clouds rising from the horizon and
said, “Nice day.”

From the kitchen came a series of muffled noises. The assistant no doubt scooting
off. I wondered if he would try to make it to the pickup truck or just hide in the
main part of the restaurant. The cellar or the attic, perhaps. Maybe dash away on
foot, head for the marshlands.

“I need to ask you about a job you used to have, Chris.”

“Sure.” Ask away. Look at my smile. Don’t pay attention to what’s going on behind
me.

“With the Gregorys.”

“The Gregorys?” Chris Warburton’s smile got even bigger. “I was a kid then.”

It was nine years ago. The man was not yet thirty.

“You used to, what, be a gatekeeper for them?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, mostly I sat in a Jeep Wrangler and checked who came in,
kept the gate closed to those who weren’t supposed to be there. A lot of tourists
would show up, try to peer through the bars.” He showed me, holding his hands to the
sides of his face, making his job seem both glamorous and boring at the same time.
I had the feeling he could do that about anything, tell you how mundane his life was
and make you wish you were doing it with him.

“When you were there, were there other people working at the compound? People who
weren’t just friends or family?”

“Oh, sure. Lots of ’em. Housekeepers, yard guys; they had care-givers for old Mrs.
Gregory, the Senator’s mom. And then she died, of course, so they weren’t around after
that. It was a group of Irish la—”

“You remember,” I said, cutting him off, “an au pair that Ned Gregory and his wife
used for their kids?”

The smile stayed. The eyes roamed. I wondered if I had gone too far. Chris may have
been a beneficiary of the Gregorys’ largesse, but he had gone out and made it on his
own. Barbara had told me that. I was
counting on that. Chris Warburton, chef, beholden to no one. Except, looking at him,
it didn’t seem like such a sure thing anymore. The Gregorys, Barbara said, had sent
him to culinary school, got him his first jobs, put him on the path to success. How
can you not be beholden to someone like that?

He was stroking his chin, thinking about how he could best answer. Au pairs? he could
say. There were so many of them. They would come and go. Ned would give them a poke
or two and they’d be on their way.

“This one came from a wealthy family,” I said. “Her father owned movie theaters.”

I heard an engine starting. It was a rough sound, not the kind a BMW would make.

“Lexi,” Chris said, rather more loudly than he needed.

From the other side of the building I could hear pebbles being splattered.

“Lexi what?”

“Lexi Sommers,” he almost shouted.

There were very tiny beads of sweat on Chris’s broad forehead. I deliberately turned
my own head in the direction of the engine and the flying pebbles.

“I heard she got married.”

“That’s right.”

“You know what her name is now?”

The pebble sound was over now. The engine sound was fading. Chris moved just enough
to intercept my long-distance gaze. “Why, Lexi done something wrong?”

“Just give me her name and tell me where she is,” I said softly, “and I’ll be on my
way.”

Chris heard the change in my voice. But with each passing second his task became less
difficult. Stall, stall, say nothing.

“You were both about the same age, both working for the family. With them but not
part of them. You must have at least gotten to know her, Chris.”

“I did.”

“So I’m expecting you stayed in touch.”

The engine sound had completely disappeared. The fleeing Latino helper could be on
6A now. I looked at my watch. It was just a show. I didn’t even note the time.

And Chris, for his part, simply let the time go by.

“Letters, pictures of the kids. Things like that.” I was thinking about what Barbara
had done at Jason Stockover’s prep school.

When he still did not respond, I got out my cell phone. “You get invited to the wedding?”
I asked.

He snorted. “We weren’t that kind of friends.”

He could have been saying any number of things. I didn’t bother to work them out.
I hit a button and put the phone to my ear.

“What are you doing?”

“Seeing if I need to stop that pickup truck, Chris.”

“He’s a good guy, just trying to support his family.”

“Helpless guy, too, I imagine. Not like Lexi. She’ll have all kinds of support. I
talk with her, she’ll probably have a lawyer sitting right there with her. Not that
she did anything wrong or that she’s going to be in trouble, but just to protect her
against the things that all the rest of us have to deal with.”

“Like you.”

“Like me. That’s right, Chris.”

He shook his head. The drops I had seen at his hairline flew off. “I can’t do anything
to hurt the Gregorys.”

“And I’m not asking you to do anything other than give me a name and address.”

Chris Warburton cranked his neck back and looked up at the sky, which probably did
not look as bright as it had when he came out of the kitchen.

“Hello, Sergeant?” I said into the phone. “It’s Assistant D.A. Becket—”

“I might know where there’s a Christmas card you could look at,” the chef said, putting
his hand out. And when I didn’t lower the phone, he added, “Might still have the envelope.”

“I’ll get back to you,” I said to the phone.

NEW YORK CITY, September 2008

I
CARRIED MY SUIT JACKET IN A GARMENT BAG. CARRIED IT ONTO
the airplane. Carried it in the taxi on my way into Manhattan from LaGuardia. It
was a light gray Zegna suit, purchased at a post-Christmas sale at Saks, tailored
by a taciturn, chain-smoking Russian in the South End of Boston. My tie was a $150
red silk item from Louis Boston, a Christmas gift from Marion. At the time she bought
it, I thought it was special because it was something I never would have bought for
myself. This was the first I had worn it since she left.

I primped by marking my reflection in the passenger window of a Lincoln Town Car parked
on the corner of 87th and Park Avenue. Then I walked a block north to an apartment
building and presented myself to the doorman. Door
men
. An army of them.

“I’m here to see Lexi Trotter,” I announced.

“Yoor name, sir,” said the doorman sitting at the desk in pretty much the middle of
the lobby. Behind him stood two others, both in doorman’s uniforms with hats and epaulets.
The guy seated didn’t have the bandleader jacket, just a white shirt and tie.

“George Becket.” I handed him my business card.

The man looked at it, fingered its edges, turned it over, looked at the front again.

Beyond him, behind his two buddies, there was a large atrium with a garden on the
ground floor. The apartments rose up in two high-rise buildings on either side of
the atrium. I resisted the urge to show the doormen what a regular, friendly guy I
was by commenting on the attractiveness of the plants and the water features among
them.

“I don’t got you in the computah,” said the man at the desk. “Was she expecting you?”

“No. I was just hoping she’d see me.”

He looked at the card again. “Is this a legal mattah?”

“Personal.”

The uniformed boys shifted their feet. One of them looked at a fourth doorman, who
was sitting in an anteroom off the lobby watching a bank of television screens, perhaps
getting ready to rush out and spray me with Mace.