Crime of Privilege: A Novel (27 page)

He elected to keep glaring at me.

I made an effort to change the subject, see if I could temper him a bit. “Sounds like
there are things you miss back there,” I said.

“I miss the fucking Red Sox, that’s what I miss.” And with that, Howard Landry got
up and left me.

I
DROVE ALL THE WAY BACK TO PRINCEVILLE ASKING MYSELF IF I
had posed the right questions, if I could have handled things better than I did,
what I was going to do next. I drove past my hotel and continued to the end of the
highway, where the pavement stopped and a dirt track began. Cars were parked under
the trees, and I could see a smooth golden beach and water that was a much clearer
blue than it had been on Howard Landry’s side of the island. I got out and found a
seat on a log in the shade at the edge of the open sand.

I had made a copy of the file and brought it with me, hoping I could get Howard to
go over some of the details. But I had been too direct, too confrontational, and I
had learned nothing. So now I sat by myself, hugging my knees, weighing my options:
try again, go home, call Barbara Belbonnet.

I looked up and down the beach and wondered if everyone there was as content as they
appeared. The local families tended to keep to the shade. The mainlanders lay out
in the sun and baked. Everyone went in and out of the water. Some just splashed about.
Some rode waves. A few actually swam. I wondered if this was what life was supposed
to be all about: a day at the beach. You lay on the sand until you got too hot to
lie there anymore and then you went in the water and cooled off. Then you did it all
over again. The people who were doing it seemed happy. Why wasn’t I? Lie on the beach,
go in the water, go
back to my room and drink beer until I passed out. Go back to work and sit in the
dungeon. Hope Barbara wore those long, tight jeans again.

I stared at the water. I opened the file.

The first thing that should have been there was a crime scene log to document the
arrivals and departures of personnel. There was none. By the time Landry arrived at
6:42 a.m. it was impossible to tell how many people had been there and who had done
what to alter or preserve the evidence. That, I supposed, was a point he could argue.
Except he could have asked; he could have tried to do a reconstruction.

I looked at his description of the body. Heidi Telford was partially hidden under
low-lying branches when he first saw her, lying on her stomach, her arms pulled up,
her hands clenched. There was no mention of whether she was rigid or cold, so I gathered
he had not touched her. He described her dress as bunched beneath her buttocks. He
described her hair as soaked with blood so thick it was like jelly.

No other blood around the body. Just in the hair. And on the back of her dress.

I flipped pages, looking for some other description. Rinaldo DaSilva said he had moved
her hair, but he did not say what the wound looked like. I had to look at the pictures
to see for myself how the skull had been sliced open, wider at the surface, narrower
as the slice went deeper through the bone and all the way into the dura.

Sitting where I was, on a beach half a world away, more than nine years after the
fact, it was easy for me to agree that the girl had been killed because she was struck
with some metal object from behind. Why it had to be a golf club, I couldn’t say,
but I had to presume it had something to do with the entry wound.

Hit with a golf club, found on a golf course. Except she was wearing a dress. And
she had not left home to go golfing. She had left home in the evening and been found
just after dawn. Whoever had killed her may have been thinking, but was not thinking
too clearly.

Where is someone going to come up with a golf club as a murder weapon? If not on a
course then it would have to be at home. Or at a clubhouse, maybe. Possibly the trunk
of a car. But a killer wouldn’t be likely to go stalking with a golf club. No, more
likely it was the weapon
that was available when the killer got angry, went into a rage, lost control and picked
up what was handy. What was lying around.

Heidi’s eyes were closed; her hands were clenched. Was she running away? There was
no mention of any defensive injuries, no indication she had fought back. She had not
tried to scratch or punch, had not even put up her hands or arms to protect herself.
Someone was coming after her and she had tried to flee and that someone had crushed
her to the ground. Peter Martin could do that. He was a big boy. And he played golf.
And he had insisted McFetridge go out to the golf course with him at 7:00 the next
morning.

And here was Howard Landry, a decent cop if not a great one, but at least good enough
to get the heavy cases in Barnstable County, assigned a murder in which there was
no evidence of the killer at the scene. At least none as of the time he arrived. Okay,
Howie, what do you do? You try to retrace her path from the moment she left home.
You talk to every possible bartender, waitress, shopkeeper. You go all through Hyannis
and then as soon as you get outside Hyannis you give up. At least, the file seems
to indicate you gave up.

Except he did talk to people in Osterville. Five miles from Hyannis. Six miles, at
most. Chuck Larson told me so. Howie had gotten that far. And it wasn’t reflected
in the file.

Howard Landry, age forty-eight, maybe burned out, two years from possible retirement,
with a dream of going off to the South Seas. There were things you could do for a
man like that once he got a little too close to the truth.

No wonder he wanted to punch me.

K
I
’
ANNA WANTED TO KNOW IF EVERYTHING HAD GONE ALL
right.

The question startled me. I was eating papaya with lime squeezed on it and drinking
Kona coffee, and I had been lost in thought.

Now I told her she had done a great job and I had indeed found him where she said
I would.

“You know,” she told me, resting a hand on my table, a hand with a coral ring but
no wedding band, “it really bother me. I
know
he was Cap’n Howie because sometime I book fishing charters for the guest on his
boat.”

I told her all he seemed to be doing now was renting out condos.

She shook her head and looked regretful. “He musta lost his boat. Bad economy, you
know.” And then Ki’anna wandered off, leaving me to reflect on what she had just said.

I HAD LITTLE MORE
than one day left to make something happen, about thirty hours before my flight back
to the mainland. I had to make another go at Landry. I had to do it without expecting
him just to confess.
Oh, yeah, I tanked the Telford investigation when I saw the Gregorys were involved.
That’s what got me this lovely place here in the islands
.

Except it wasn’t exactly a lovely place. It was a rectangular box in
need of repairs. And I had not seen a single guest while I was there. This man, this
early-retired police detective, had come to Hawaii to run a charter boat service,
spend the rest of his days fishing for sword-fish or marlin or whatever they caught
in these waters, and here he was renting out other people’s condos by the week and
apparently not doing a very good job of it. What had gone wrong? Ki’anna said it was
the economy, but we had had a bad economy ever since George Bush had tried to run
two wars without raising taxes. And that was, what, five years?

If, in fact, the Gregorys had financed his getaway, why hadn’t they come to his rescue?
Their crisis wasn’t over. Their crisis wasn’t ever going to be over because there
was no statute of limitations on murder. An unhappy police detective who knew too
much was a threat to them and would stay a threat.

Unless, of course, he didn’t really know too much. Or anything at all. Except what
he had put in the file. Which didn’t include anything to do with the Gregorys because
that would just distract everyone’s attention. Some people get their mitts on the
file, all they’re going to see is something to shame the Gregorys. What are the Gregorys
up to now? Sailing boats, getting drunk, having sex with the au pair. Letting their
friends screw skanks on their beach.

Skanks
. That was McFetridge’s term. That was what he had called them.

McFetridge had probably played wingman that night because, horny a guy as he was,
he just wasn’t likely to go after a girl like Patty Afantakis.

A hand closed on my shoulder. Ki’anna had come up behind me. “You sad man, you,” she
said.

I told her I wasn’t really. She didn’t believe me.

“You not s’pose to be sad in Kauai.”

Which was pretty close to what I was thinking about Howard Landry.

She stuck her finger in my cup. “Your coffee cold.”

“I’m all right.” I forced a smile.

“I wish I could do something for you.”

My smile got more genuine. “Would you? Do something, I mean.”

She sucked the coffee off her finger and put her hand back on my shoulder. “Oh, can’t
date guests. But you like to snorkel? I can show you secret place. Can’t be unhappy
with all the fish and coral, you. Too pretty.”

I stumbled a bit, trying to tell her that a date wasn’t what I meant. “What I would
like you to do, if you could, is put in a call to one of your connections and see
if you can find out what happened to Captain Howie. Why he went bust. Why he lost
his boat.” I closed my hand on hers. “Could you do that for me?”

“I try.” She squeezed my shoulder in a way that she could not possibly do to all the
guests. “But only if you snorkel while I doin’ it.”

I
N THE MORNING, KI
’
ANNA LAUGHED AND PUSHED ME PLAYFULLY
in the chest. “What the matter? You didn’t like snorkel?”

“It was the best snorkling I’ve ever done.” In truth, I had not gone. I had spent
the day in the town of Hanalei at a bar called the Tahiti Nui, drinking beer and worrying.

She raised her eyebrows, but let the lie pass. “I got something good for you,” she
said, and handed me a piece of lined paper with handwritten notes on it.

I read: “Princess Lea, Bertram 38 Twin Diesel bot January 2001 by L. Sullivan title
trans. H. Landry June 01 taken by bank September 2005. Sold auction February ’06.”

“See,” she said, pointing with her finger, “Princess Lea. Like the lady in
Star Wars
.”

“That was Leia, with an
i
in there somewhere.”

“Boddah you? L. Sullivan.
L
for Lea. Thing is, he bought wrong time.” She moved her finger to the purchase date.
“Summer’s pau here. Then Nine-Eleven, you know. Not so many people come after that.
See, I been knowing him maybe five years.” She counted off her fingers. “Two t’ousand
t’ree. And the reason I know him is when we couldn’t get nobody else, I would call
him and he always there for me. You know?”

“Wasn’t he a very good captain?”

“Fishing boats. Not hard. They all have sonar, go same place. T’row the lines in the
water and fish jump on board. Tourists go home happy.”

She pulled my face down close to hers and kissed me loudly on the cheek. “Now you
go home happy, my friend.”

P
RINCESS LEA
.
LIKE
STAR WARS
.
ONLY HOWARD LANDRY DID
not strike me as a
Star Wars
kind of guy.

And as it turned out
strike
was the operative word when he saw me at his door. He looked like he was going to
attack me, put his head and shoulder down and bull-rush right through the screen.
He also looked like he had already had his daily ration of beer, even though it was
barely 10:00 in the morning.

“Get the fuck outta here, you moron,” he bellowed.

“I want to know what really happened, Howie.”

“What happened is I’m gonna punch your teeth down your throat.”

I didn’t laugh, although I could have. If he tried to carry out his threat, the only
thing the American Dental Association could look forward to was Howard falling over,
hitting his mouth on the floor. “Shouldn’t say such a thing to a district attorney,
Howie. Not when he’s on official duty. You know that.”

“You’re not on jack-shit duty, pal.”

“You obviously didn’t call my boss.”

“Fuck your boss.”

“Did you call Chuck Larson?”

His rage stalled. His expression clouded. “Who?”

And then I knew. He had not been sent into exile by the Gregorys.
Or at least not directly. I had an initial clue of somebody who bought a boat for
him. Somebody named L. Sullivan, and the
L
was probably for Lea. It all came together almost without me thinking about it. “What
happened to Leanne, Howie?”

He did not ask me who Leanne was. Instead, he waved his arm. He was still a good ten
feet and a screen door away from me and he had not gotten his body focused enough
to mount the charge he had been intending. “Gone.”

“She left you?”

The former detective was swaying. He had to grab the counter to make his next pronouncement.
“It’s not just she left me.” He held on tighter. “It’s how she left me.” His voice
rose a couple of decibels. “It’s who she left me with.” And then his eyes opened wide
in surprise at what he had just said. “Or for.”

I guessed again. “She leave you for Jason Stockover?”

“Yeah, right,” he howled. He put his hand under his chin and began flapping it up
and down. “That twit,” he said, and I realized he was simulating an ascot. “Mr. La-de-da.”

“Who was it, Howie, that she left you for?”

“That’s my point. Who? A fuckin’ exterminator, that’s who.” He thumbed his chest.
Unlike the last time I saw him, he was wearing a shirt, but it was made of burlap,
like an old flour bag, and his thumb got tangled in the cloth. “My exterminator,”
he said as he struggled to extract it. “That I hired. Coming to my house all the time
while I’m out on the water. Supposed to kill the bugs. What’s he doin’, really?” His
eyes grew even wider than before. “Killin’ bedbugs?”