Crime of Privilege: A Novel (49 page)

“Suppose somebody else is already out there getting ready? Somebody independent of
the Gregory family?”

“That can be taken care of.” Peter shifted his feet, moved in a little closer as if
to make sure that nobody lurking in the fog would hear him. “You want the support
of the Macs, all you have to do is come out in favor of the Mashpee Indian casino
and they’re yours.”

“It’s all arranged?”

“It could be.”

“I just have to keep my mouth shut about Jamie.”

“Look, George.” Peter kept his eyes focused on mine. “I don’t blame you for what happened
there, in New York. Nobody does. You did what you thought should be done.” He reached
out to touch my shoulder.

Once again I twisted out of the way and he lowered his hand.

“Jamie was a difficult person,” he said, a touch of sadness in his voice. “Brilliant,
but he was missing a—I don’t know, a moral compass, I guess you’d call it.”

“Unlike you.”

“Yeah, well, I know what you’re talking about, George. I’ve got a lot of guilt built
up in me about that.”

“About Kendrick Powell, you mean.” I wanted him to say it.

“I was drunk. I was young. None of that is an excuse, but it’s true. And you pulled
me off her, George, and for that I’ll forever be grateful. I mean it.” He once again
started to reach out to me and then drew back his hand before I could move.

I said, “You guys raped her, Peter. And then you lied and insisted it never happened.”

His face warped with confusion, as if he had misheard. “We tried to make it up to
her,” he said. “We really did. Offered her a great deal of money, in fact. Her father
would have none of it. So that’s when we had to ask ourselves—”

He hesitated, gauging what he should say, how he should say it. Small drops of water
were making their way down his forehead.

“—what good was it going to do to confess? What, we maybe go to prison? At the least,
the whole world was going to know. The family’s name gets dragged through the mud.
My uncle once again is kept from doing all the good things he could do for the country.
Jamie and I are kept from doing all the good things that we, as Gregorys, could do.”

“Like sell worthless mortgages to friends who are trusting you with their life savings?”

This was not going the way Peter Martin had envisioned. He shifted his weight, stuck
his hands in the pockets of his shorts, moved his eyes from mine to the tarmac at
our feet. “Yeah, well, that was Jamie.”

“The one whose honor we’re trying to preserve.”

“Not just his, George. I mean, I tried, I really tried to dedicate myself to the betterment
of humanity.” His head lifted sharply, as if appalled at his own words. “I don’t want
that to sound pretentious, George. It’s just … there were lots of things I could have
done, but I chose to go to med school and to specialize in infectious diseases, and
then I chose to go to San Francisco and work with AIDS victims. I didn’t have to do
any of that.”

“You also didn’t have to help Jamie dispose of Heidi Telford’s body and pretend he
didn’t kill her.”

Noises were coming out of Peter Martin. Noises that made me think of a steam engine.
They were, I realized, rapid breaths of air. He was acting as if I had just punched
him in the gut. Peter, the big bear, whose arm had been soft when I squeezed it in
Palm Beach, who looked even softer now, did not know what to do. I could see him searching
for words. I could see words starting to form in his mouth and then disappear.

“When you’re in my family,” he said at last, “and so many tragic things have happened,
you learn from the time you’re able to walk that you have to stick together. That’s
all we have—”

“That and money and connections and opportunity and rules that apply to everyone else
except you.”

Peter started to defend himself and I cut him off. “You and Jamie treated Heidi Telford
the same way you treated Kendrick Powell. She didn’t count. Not when it came to your
pleasure, not when it came to your well-being. Justify it in your own mind all you
want, you fat fuck. You molested and raped a young woman, then watched her life go
down the drain because you didn’t want people to know what you had done and because
as far as you were concerned she wasn’t worth what a Gregory was worth. Then three
years later you let your cousin bash in the head of another young woman and you treated
her like she wasn’t worth anything, either.”

I took the sweatshirt off my shoulders and threw it in his face. “You didn’t care
about Kendrick, you didn’t care about Heidi, you didn’t care about what you did to
their parents. All you cared about was how you looked and when you tell me now about
what a great humanitarian you are, I know the truth.” I jammed my thumb into my chest.
“Me, Peter. I know the truth.”

The sweatshirt had slid the length of his body until he caught it somewhere around
his stomach. Now he held it there while he stared at me in disbelief. His was the
face of a man looking at the unknown; as if, standing here at the end of the continent,
he had just discovered that the world really was flat, that the waters were rushing
off the edge and taking him with them.

Very slowly, he began to back away.

I
T TOOK ME ALL DAY TO RIDE HOME. IT WAS WET ONLY THROUGH
Truro. It was cold the entire way.

When I arrived, there was a message on my answering machine. Dick O’Connor. Good old
Dick, who still used hardcover books to do his legal research instead of the Internet.
Dick, who called me on my home phone and not my cell. Dick, who probably did not have
my cell-phone number. Who might not have a cell of his own.

The message said he wanted me to come into the office that night. Any time after 6:00.
He would be waiting. He would wait until midnight if he had to.

I GOT THERE JUST
before 8:00, and as far as I could tell we were the only ones in the building except
the jailers and the jailed, down in the basement, near where I used to be stationed.

Dick had the remains of a submarine sandwich in front of him. He glanced up at me,
wrapped what was left of the food, and jammed it into a paper bag. He did not have
the usual jovial Dick look.

“Hey,” I said.

“Sit down,” he said. Then he changed his mind. “Don’t sit down, this won’t take long.”

I sat anyway.

The chief assistant grimaced. “We’re not going to bring you back on,” he said, speaking
as if he had to rush in order to make sure the words all came out together. Dick was
not good at this, being harsh, being direct. Dick would prefer to look at a jury in
astonishment that some criminal could have acted the way he did.

After a moment of me regarding him in silence, he added, “Too much baggage.”

“What kind of baggage are we talking about?”

“I could tell you it’s the kind of baggage you accumulate when you’re scheming to
run against your boss, only I’m not going to say that.”

“I’m not scheming to run against anyone, Dick.”

“The Macs told us all about it, how you been talking with them, lining up their support.”

He looked pained, hurt.

“That’s bullshit, Dick.”

He tossed his shoulders. He either didn’t care or didn’t believe me. “Peter Martin
called you today, didn’t he?”

“All that time you kept quiet about the rape thing, George.” He moved his eyes away
from mine. It could have been out of disgust with either one of us. “Probably wouldn’t
look so good if it comes out that just before you were going to make your announcement
you were present at the murder of the only guy in the world who knew the facts about
that rape.”

“He wasn’t the only guy in the world. Peter Martin was there. What Peter did was worse
than what Jamie did.”

“And what Dr. Martin says, George, is that what you did was the worst of all.”

T
HE OFFER WAS FULL PAY UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAR. I WAS SIMPLY
to leave. I could go to Hawaii, Costa Rica, France, anywhere that it looked like
I was continuing my investigation.

Nobody would mention my involvement in Jamie’s shooting or the Palm Beach rape. Six
weeks from now, with Mitch safely reelected, he would prepare an excellent letter
of recommendation, and by January I should have landed myself a new job, preferably
quite far away.

There was no contract, nothing in writing. I was simply to tell Dick okay.

I told him.

It was hard to determine if he was disappointed.

I know we did not shake hands.

I
CALLED BARBARA AND EXPLAINED WHAT WAS GOING ON. ONCE
again, I asked for help.

This time, she said she couldn’t do anything for me.

I reminded her what she had said that day on my patio about doing the right thing,
and she agreed everybody should, but she had two kids and one of them had special
needs. She had to put them first. I brought up what she had done already, going to
Costa Rica, directing me to France, and she said yes, she had done all that, but that
had been behind the scenes. Her position was different than mine. Her life was different.
She couldn’t afford to lose her job, she couldn’t just leave the Cape, and she couldn’t
stay and be a pariah.

“My father,” she said, and didn’t finish the rest of the sentence. Then she added
the words “My son,” and I was supposed to understand.

CAPE COD, October 2008

B
UZZY HELD A PRESS CONFERENCE THAT WAS SURPRISINGLY WELL
attended, proving that all you had to do to get the attention of the news media,
at least in the northeast, was mention the Gregorys. A notice had been blasted by
email to more than one hundred newspapers, television and radio stations, networks,
and news outlets. The notice said an important announcement was going to be made regarding
the Cape & Islands district attorney and his investigation into the Gregory family’s
involvement in the 1999 murder of Heidi Telford.

Mitch White, when he got wind of it, immediately issued a denial that there was any
new development in the investigation, which, he said, was not only ongoing but now
spanned three continents. Mitch did not identify the three continents, but I gathered
he was counting Costa Rica as being in South America.

His denial managed to make it onto the 6:00 p.m. news on all the major television
stations in Boston and Providence. I was biased, but to me he did not sound convincing
when he said he knew of no involvement of the Gregory family. And he looked worried.

B
UZZY DELIVERED HIS ANNOUNCEMENT ON THE STEPS OF THE
rear entrance to Town Hall, facing a broad expanse of lawn that extended all the
way to Main Street, where anybody who happened to be walking could inquire why scores
of people with cameras and recorders were bunching behind the old red-brick building.

Chief Cello DiMasi was there, standing to one side with half a dozen of his officers.
But Buzzy had obtained a permit to hold a rally to announce his candidacy, and so
the primary thing that seemed to have Cello fiddling with his thick black belt was
whether Buzzy’s email had created an event that exceeded the bounds of the permit.
Clearly, he wasn’t sure.

And because this had originally been billed as Buzzy’s declaration of intent to run
as a write-in candidate for district attorney, the incumbent could not very well line
up with Cello, nor send him and his troops wading onto the lawn to disperse the crowd.
There were too many cameras, too many of Buzzy’s buddies from high school ready to
start shouting about the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

So Mitch himself did not even go. He sent Reid and Dick instead. They stood next to
Cello. And next to them stood Sean Murphy, holding a legal notepad and a pen.

At exactly the time he said the event would begin, the double doors
at the top of the stairs opened and Buzzy somberly walked out of the building with
a very conspicuous sheaf of papers under his left arm. Friends offered good-effort
cheers from scattered spots on the lawn. Buzzy acknowledged them with a wave of his
right hand. He strode to a portable lectern that had been set up for him. He tapped
the microphone to make sure it was working. He said, “Hello.”

Those who knew him expected a joke, some lighthearted remark. But the closest Buzzy
got to that was a half-smile as he announced, “I’m Frederick Daizell, known to my
friends and family as Buzzy, and I am running for district attorney as a write-in
candidate.”

Friends and family put up another cheer and got a second wave of acknowledgment. But
then Buzzy stopped even half-smiling.

“And the reason I am doing this very unusual thing, coming in at the last moment with
no party backing and no official status as anything other than a citizen who happens
to be an attorney, is that I have uncovered some very disturbing information about
the incumbent, Mitchell White, his relationship with the Gregory family, and the effect
of that relationship on his office’s investigation of the 1999 murder of twenty-year-old
Heidi Telford of Hyannis.”

Some of the media people, the well-dressed men and women who were standing around
with their cameramen, put down their coffees and bottled waters and started pointing
fingers and issuing orders.

“To help me explain this,” Buzzy went on, “I have asked Heidi’s father, Bill Telford,
to join me.”

With tufts of white hair blowing in the breeze, Mr. Telford laboriously mounted the
stairs and took his place next to Buzzy, who put his arm around him.

“I’m Bill Telford,” the guest of honor said, squinting at the audience. “Most of you
who live around here know me. The way I go around asking questions, some no doubt
wish you didn’t.”

There were titters from those who understood what he meant, but they were short because
nobody wanted to be disrespectful to a man who had lost his daughter.