Crime of Privilege: A Novel (20 page)

“Which means I shouldn’t be treating you like you’re the fucking enemy or something.”

I’m not the enemy. I’m the Gregorys’ errand boy. I’m one of the beagles they keep
in their kennel.

“So that’s what got me out of the tub, running after you.” He shifted his position,
lifting himself up onto his forearm.

“I was just trying to apologize for getting defensive like I did. Because all you’re
doing is what you’re supposed to be doing. Talk to Cory, talk to the boys, to Jason,
to me. Check things off. Everything’s
fine, everybody goes on about their business. I didn’t have to get all pissed off
like I did. That’s what I was coming to tell you.”

He was telling me something else, as well, although he didn’t seem to realize it.
He knew something; he assumed I knew it, too. If I asked him what it was, it would
show I didn’t really know it, and then he wouldn’t tell me. It was all very complicated,
staring up at the sky, still feeling blessed just to be alive.

“You know where Jason is?” I asked.

“No. Doesn’t Chuck-Chuck?”

“He seems to have disappeared.” I felt that was a safe thing to say, given how long
it would take for McFetridge to prove me wrong. Assuming I was wrong.

“I haven’t seen him since that weekend. I went back to New York. He went, I don’t
know, wherever he came from. Connecticut, maybe. I didn’t really know him that well.
He was Ned’s friend, and Ned was, you know, tied up that night with his au pair. The
only reason Jason and I ended up together was that we were the ones who met those
girls.”

Girls. The boys on the boat met girls on the night Heidi died. I tried to formulate
a question that wouldn’t get me a question back. “You ever hear from them again? Those
girls?”

McFetridge snorted. “We never even got their last names. Candy was the one I was with.
Candy, Taffy, Cindy. Something like that. All they cared about was they got to go
to the Gregory compound. I don’t think we had any in-depth discussions.”

“Yeah,” I said. I tried to snort, too. Dirt came out of my nose. It landed somewhere
on my shirt.

“It was like, ‘Okay, here’s the Senator’s house. There’s his brother’s house. His
sister’s house. Wanna take a walk down the beach?’ ” McFetridge was quiet for a moment.
“He got the better-looking one, I remember that. She was all over him, so I just took
the other one, the one with the big tits. Kind of a squishy ass, I think, but she
was great doing it in the sand. Cynthia, I’m pretty sure her name was.”

Age and responsibility, I saw, had not completely changed Paul McFetridge.

Out loud, I said, “You don’t think she could be the one who’s talking, do you?”

“Oh, man. She didn’t know anything. Jason and I screwed her and her friend on the
beach and then I was hoping we were gonna switch, but Jason kind of liked his, so
that didn’t happen. In the end we just brought them back to the house and when we
got there nobody was around. We knew where Ned was, of course, but the rest were just
gone. So we said, ‘Whoops, party’s over. Gotta go.’ ”

“And they left?”

“They had their own car, so it wasn’t hard getting rid of them. They were going back
to Boston anyhow, I think. Roslindale, does that sound right? I really don’t remember.
That might have been somebody else. I mean, these were just a couple of skanks down
for the weekend to party. They ran into us and extended the partying a little longer.
That’s all.”

“But, you know, Heidi’s picture was in the paper, wasn’t it?” This was pure guesswork
on my part. I had never checked.

“Was it? I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t even know there was a problem until we weren’t
able to get on the golf course the next morning. But I didn’t want to play anyhow.
That was just something Peter was insisting on, fuckin’ seven o’clock tee time. So
we didn’t get on, and I just said, ‘Screw it, I’m outta here,’ and I left. And as
for those girls, they had such stars in their eyes, you’d think they were in Hollywood
or something. I don’t know what they saw, who they saw, I just know they never came
forward.”

McFetridge was silent for a moment. “Unless, like you say, they’re doing it now.”

“I didn’t say that. I was just asking.”

McFetridge thought about it. “You know, Chuck-Chuck’s gotta know who they are.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the guard, every car that goes in the compound, he’s got to write down the
license number. So if he thinks that’s who’s doing the talking … though I can’t imagine
after all this time …” He stopped. “You don’t know anything about that, huh?”

“No.”

He said “Huh” again.

I lay very still and abandoned plans to ask anything else. I could hear McFetridge
moving, getting up on his side. I sensed him looking at me. “What
do
you know, George?” he said.

“I know somebody was just trying to kill me, Paul. That’s what I fucking know. Who
do you suppose that was?”

“This is Idaho, man. It’s filled with wackos, isolationists, crazies living out in
the woods.”

“You guys run a commercial rafting operation. You send people to walk miles up that
trail. Up and back. And you’ve got crazies shooting guns at them?”

“It’s never happened before.”

“So why me, Paul? Why’s someone trying to kill me?” It felt good to be aggressive.
It gave me a use for the leftover adrenaline.

“I doubt he was trying to kill you. More likely just trying to scare you. Scare all
of us. I don’t know. Maybe he’s got a pot farm or something he doesn’t want us to
find. But I’m guessing, the way rifles are these days and the way some of these gun
nuts are, that if he really wanted to hit you, he could have … especially if he was
on that hill and you being in an open field and all.”

Was I in an open field? I was in the spruces, the five-foot spruces, and the hill
was behind me, where McFetridge was. McFetridge who had had the bag that clinked.

“What I’d like,” I said, “is to get one of those beers you dropped.”

“Go back there after you know somebody’s been shooting at you? I don’t think so.”

“You said yourself he wasn’t trying to kill me. If he was, he would have followed
us here. Don’t you think?”

McFetridge certainly acted as though he was thinking. “You’re right. Let’s get the
hell out of here. Get back to camp. We can get beer there.” He pushed himself to his
feet.

I did the same. “You going to tell the others?”

It was now dark enough that I could barely see his features, but I was pretty sure
he was biting his lip. “I’m going to tell the crew because I don’t think we’re going
to be coming up here anymore. But I’d
appreciate it if you didn’t tell the other rafters, Georgie. I mean, all it’s gonna
do is scare them.”

“Like
Deliverance
.”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Anything else you don’t want me to tell people?”

“Yeah, don’t tell ’em anything that’s going to make them think it’s not wonderful
living out here in the fuckin’ woods.”

CAPE COD, June 2008

B
ARBARA BELBONNET SAID I LOOKED TANNED, RELAXED
. “
MELLOW
,” she said.

I had nearly drowned, nearly been shot, nearly fallen to my death, and she thought
I looked mellow. I dropped my head, said nothing.

“Was it wonderful?” she asked.

She was wearing a copper-colored silk blouse that showed a little décolletage, and
form-fitting tan slacks, the likes of which I had never before seen her wear in the
office. She was standing at my desk, which she almost never did. She had no pockets
and her cell phone was not in her hands, which made me wonder what was going on, why
she was not fretting about her kids.

“Yeah,” I said, “it was great.”

She waited for details. She was smiling at me. She seemed to have done something to
her hair, highlighted it, made it even more blond; and to her eyes, made her lashes
longer, made the whites stand out and the color of her irises more vibrant. Maybe
that was why she was standing so close, so I could see what she had done.

“That is something I would love to try,” she said. “I’d like to go down the Colorado.”

I gave her a half-smile that left her free to imagine eagles flying overhead, happy
prospectors waving from the shore.

“There’s whitewater rafting up in New Hampshire, you know. We should organize something,
get some of the people from the office to go.”

Barbara, as far as I knew, had no more friends in the office than I did. But I nodded
and said we should look into that.

“Or maybe get some of your crazy buddies there on the defense side. They’d probably
be more fun.”

I wondered what she knew about my crazy buddies. I never talked about those guys,
never saw Barbara when I was out drinking with them. Before I could ask what she meant,
she said, “One of them called while you were gone. Buzzy Daizell.” She put an extra
twist in her voice when she said his name. “He said he hadn’t been able to reach you
on your cell, so I told him where you were. I hope that’s all right.”

Her face scrunched a little, her eyes narrowing, as though she really was worried
she might have done the wrong thing. It was, surprisingly, a rather becoming look;
it made the imposing, intimidating Barbara Belbonnet girlish and almost vulnerable.
“He wanted you to call him as soon as you got back.”

I thanked her and told her I would get to Buzzy later. I had a calendar call at 9:00
and a half-dozen files that I had to review before then.

IN FACT, I FORGOT
. Buzzy had to track me down, call me again at the end of the day. He said he needed
to see me. He sounded anxious.

When I told him I had just gotten back from vacation he suggested we catch a Cape
League baseball game. “Hyannis is playing Cotuit at home tonight and the Kettleers
supposedly have this great catcher. Next sure thing for the majors.”

I had not been to a Cape League game in years, didn’t care about Cotuit’s catcher
or Cotuit or even the local team, but I agreed to go simply because he seemed so intent
on getting me to do so.

“I’ll bring a couple of lawn chairs and a couple of beers,” he said. “We’ll sit on
the grass down the left-field line.”

Away from the crowd in the stands, in other words. Buzzy clearly had something to
tell me.

BUZZY DAIZELL WAS
a multigeneration Cape Codder. He was an offshoot of the ubiquitous Bangs family
and could trace his lineage all the way back to Edward Banges, who arrived in Plymouth
from England on the ship
Anne
in 1623 and moved onto the Cape in 1645. This was generally the source of much humor
to Buzzy, who got to refer to virtually everyone else as a “wash-ashore.”

He had graduated from Barnstable High School, gone off to Bates College, where he
had not done particularly well, gone to the same law school as I did in Boston, and
then ended up back on the Cape because he was not in high demand by the big-city firms
after not doing particularly well in law school, either. Because his family knew so
many people, he was able to open his own practice and make a go of it. Because of
the nature of the natives, particularly those with whom he had tended to socialize,
he specialized in criminal law.

I had tried three drunk-driving cases against him and he had lost them all. That did
not make him a bad trial lawyer. I was supposed to win those cases. What set Buzzy
apart was his willingness to try most anything that came along. He thought it was
fun.

He was not, however, having fun with me at the Hyannis Mets baseball game. He wanted
me to drink the beer that he gave me. Then he wanted me to drink another. He put away
three to my two before he said, “I gotta talk to you about something.”

“I figured that.”

“It’s really kind of hush-hush. Confidential.”

“Does it have anything to do with work?”

“Sort of.”

“Then maybe you better not tell me.”

“It has to do with Mitchell White.”

I gave that some thought. I rather liked hearing stories about Mitchell White, although
there generally were not many to tell. Mostly people just made fun of him.

“All right,” I said, “tell me.”

The crowd roared off to our right. One of the Hyannis players had just stroked a double
into the gap between center and right. The game was scoreless and the double was the
first exciting thing that had happened since I arrived.

Buzzy waited till the noise died down. “I’ve been asked to run against him.”

I had been about to sip the last of my second beer. Instead I lowered the can. “Nobody
runs against a sitting D.A.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s not as though Mitch has a real constituency.”

What Mitch had was the Gregorys. What the Gregorys had was anybody and everybody.
I asked Buzzy what was in it for him.

“A real job,” he said, “with a real paycheck. A chance to maybe put my life together.
I’m pushing forty, you know.”

He was, I was pretty sure, thirty-eight. Buzzy was a good-looking guy with what might
be called
joie de vivre
. It made him a great person to share a night on the town. I wasn’t sure that qualified
him for being a district attorney.

“What about some of the cases you’ve handled, some of the clients you’ve represented?”
I asked.

“The people who want me to run, they think I can use that as a positive. I know the
way the other side works.”

“Fox in the henhouse and all that stuff,” I said back.

“Well, it’s not as though I have a political agenda about getting
the man
or freeing the people or anything like that. It’s just the business that comes to
me. And I do know criminal law.”

A long fly ball to left caused the guy on second to tag up and sprint to third. The
left fielder had a strong arm and made a perfect throw, nailing the runner just before
his foot reached the bag. The third-base coach didn’t like the call and began arguing
with the ump. A lot of people came running down to the fence to support the coach,
tell the umpire how blind he was. Buzzy and I had to wait until the fans finished
expressing their opinions and moved away.