Crime Of Privilege: A Novel Part 19

"This Telford thing isn't going away," I told him. "In case you don't know it, there's a movement afoot to get someone to run against you. And the main platform of your opponent is going to be that you've been covering up for the Gregorys."

Mitch came even farther across the desk. His next move would have to involve putting his knees on it. Then he would crouch like a porcelain cat. "Who?" he demanded. "Who is it?"

I did not give him an answer. I had something I wanted from him and that was my only bargaining chip.

"You?" His voice soared to the point of cracking.

"Not me, Mitch. I'm the Gregorys' friend, remember?"

Mitch did not know what to say to that. Little gurgling noises came out of his mouth and spit rolled down his chin. After a while, he sat back. I have never felt so hated in my life. Not when Roland Andrews confronted me in my apartment in D.C. Not even when I was being shot at. I gestured to my own chin, pointing with my index finger. That made him even angrier, but at least he wiped the spit away. He did it with his bare forearm.

I told him that Bill Telford had raised enough questions about whether his daughter was at Senator Gregory's house that night that people were out there now, combing the country for information.

He gurgled again, but held his saliva.

"One of the questions being asked is why you and Cello DiMasi didn't follow up on the leads you had. I talked with Cello and he told me the police investigation was conducted by a certain Detective Landry, a guy who took early retirement and moved to Hawaii shortly after he didn't find any connection to the Gregorys. You see where this is leading, Mitch?"

He didn't tell me. He was too busy trying to reduce me to cinders with his eyes.

"We have no reason to want the Senator besmirched, do we, Mitch? He's had enough problems over the course of his life. And he's been good to us, to the people of this state, good to the entire nation. But you know as well as I do that there are folks out there who will seize any opportunity to tear him down. So I see us, you and me, as being in a position where we can do something about this whole mess. A unique position. Wouldn't you agree?"

Mitch was not agreeing to anything. It is possible that the movements I saw his head make were simply the result of his body shaking.

"So what I propose is that you send me to visit former Detective Landry and see if we can't come up with an explanation as to why certain things were or were not done. Why there are things that don't seem to be in the police investigation file. That way, if he's questioned by reporters or one of those pseudo-journalists on TV, or even, G.o.d forbid, the U.S. Justice Department, we can have a little more control over the situation."

"You want me to send you to Hawaii."

"I do."

"So you can talk to Landry about the Heidi Telford investigation."

"So I can straighten out the Heidi Telford investigation. Before the whole world gets the wrong impression."

"Before some guy can use it against me in next year's campaign."

"Yes."

"And you still haven't told me who that guy is."

I told him.

"You've got to be kidding," said Mitch White. But he knew I wasn't, and he seemed to be just as worried as he had been before.

SEAN MURPHY.

I didn't know Sean all that well. He was younger than I was, had been in the office only two or three years, but he was already doing felonies. He had gone to law school at Northeastern and interned at the Suffolk County D.A.'s office in Boston. That was a big deal to our guys. Reid Cunningham, in particular, loved him. He called him Murph-Dog and treated him like a hound, to be loosed on the most deserving of criminals-the home invaders, child molesters, wife beaters.

"George, old buddy," Sean said. He had something under his arm. A clipboard and some papers. He was smiling at me. He appeared to have been waiting for me to come out of Mitch's office.

"Sean," I said. I was prepared to walk past him, but he put out a hand.

"You're the only one I haven't got yet," he said.

"For what?"

He untucked the clipboard and held it in front of him as if it was self-explanatory. He had now smiled at me for longer than he had done so in all the time we had been in the office together. "The Pan-Ma.s.s Challenge. It's a bike race across the state. Well, not a race, exactly. One hundred and ten miles one day, ninety the next. Sturbridge to P'town, and I'm doing the whole thing. Got to get four grand in sponsors. You in?"

"You want me to sponsor your bike ride?"

All I had to say was that I was doing the ride myself, but I didn't. I looked down the hallway instead, hoping someone else would come along and demand my attention.

"Well, not you by yourself. I've got every prosecutor in the office to put up a hundred bucks."

"Everyone?"

"Everyone except Mitch. Got Cunningham and O'Connor, though. I just haven't seen you around for a few days. That's why I'm getting to you last."

"You got Barbara Belbonnet?"

"Sure. It's for a good cause, George. Children's cancer fund." He was beginning to falter in his bonhomie, as if he had known all along that I wasn't going to do what everyone else had done.

I signed the form he held out to me. Pledged $100. I was now into the ride for $2,600.

KAUAI, July 2008.

FLYING FROM BOSTON TO HAWAII CAN BE A VERY LONG JOURNEY if you don't like the person you are with. Especially if that person is you.

Things did not improve once I arrived. Perhaps I thought it would be like Bermuda: hop on a motor scooter and cruise the entire island in an hour.

The airport was small, one story, and there seemed to be a dearth of walls, but there were plenty of people, and while most were in tropical clothing, virtually everyone was too intent on finding someone or someplace to help out a stranger who apparently thought he had landed in some Polynesian Mayberry.

It took me more than an hour to rent a car because I had not thought to reserve one, being under the illusion that I was going to take a taxi into town. "Which town?" the first cabdriver asked in response to my question, and I knew I was in trouble.

I told him I was staying in Princeville.

He shook his head as if there was something wrong with me. "Long way, man. Cheaper to rent da car than take da cab."

So I did.

At least the hotel was nice, and it had a concierge named Ki'anna, a dark-hued, zaftig young woman with waist-length black hair, who a.s.sured me she knew everything that was worth knowing about the island. One thing she didn't know was the whereabouts of a man named Howard Landry. She did the logical thing and looked him up in the phone book. No Howard Landry was listed. She went to her computer and found no reference to Howard Landry there. I would have despaired except I was beyond that point. I just stood in the open-air lobby and wondered what I was going to do next.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon. I had the option of walking a quarter-mile down to the beach, which, from where the hotel was, perched on top of a cliff, did not look as nice as a Hawaiian beach was supposed to look, or going to the pool and having a waiter bring me drinks.

I went to my room, changed into a bathing suit, and walked back to the pool, which had various arms and inlets and vaguely Asian-style pedestrian bridges and which dominated the grounds. I dove in, swam a half-dozen laps without disturbing the water for the wild children and pa.s.sive adults who were using the pool for everything but swimming, then climbed out and dropped onto a lounge chair. I was in Hawaii and someone else was paying for it. I should relax, take my time. I didn't have to do everything in an afternoon.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of Barbara Belbonnet in those long-legged, incredibly tight jeans. It did not work. My eyes would not stay closed. And the noise around me was cacophonous. Kids, swarms of them, were trying to climb on inflatable floats, an activity that seemed to require shrill yelling that cut out only when their heads went underwater. I heard parents laughing as they hung on to the edge of the pool, holding exotic drinks with straws and umbrellas and chunks of fruit impaled on little plastic swords. Everyone seemed happy but me.

I ordered a mai tai, hoping it would make me feel better. The gla.s.s came filled with ice and the drink disappeared in a matter of seconds. I ordered a Primo beer because I figured the bartender couldn't water that, and I kept right on ordering them. I was on my fourth and thinking about Barbara without employing half as much effort as before when Ki'anna the concierge appeared at my side with a lovely smile.

"I found your guy," she said, the smile growing even lovelier. "Whyn't you tell me you looking for Cap'n Howie?"

THE PROBLEM WITH LOCATING CAPTAIN HOWIE WAS THAT HE was no longer where Ki'anna had known him to be. Not to worry, she a.s.sured me. She had gone to school with some of the island's policemen and she would make some calls.

It took more than a day to find him in Poipu Beach, on the opposite side of the island, about as far away from Princeville as he could be. He had been a boat captain once. Now he ran a small condominium complex that provided units as vacation rentals.

The Hana Palms was three stories high, built of nondescript stucco and situated directly above a rocky beach. It had a parking lot in front and a small fenced-in swimming pool with a concrete deck between the lot and the building. Although there were a few cars in the lot, there did not appear to be any people around at all.

A breezeway led to the ocean side, where a green lawn looked nicer than it felt on bare feet. I retraced my steps and saw what I had missed on my first pa.s.s, a living quarters off the breezeway that doubled as an office. I opened a screen door in which part of the screen was separated from the frame. A bell tinkled above my head and a minute later a s.h.i.+rtless man appeared at a counter set up in the front room.

"Aloha," he said, as if he was challenging me to a fight.

I figured I had my man. I asked if he was Cap'n Howie, just to make sure.

"Some call me that."

"You also known as Detective Landry?"

The man's eyebrows rose as slowly as an elevator.

I went right to the point. "Chief DiMasi told me I could find you here."

I showed him my card. He inspected it and said, "You wanna rent a condo?" There was just a bit of hope in the question.

"No. I need to talk to you about a case you worked on years ago."

The man put his hands on the counter and tilted back like a water skier. He had a long, lean torso, with white hairs sprouting from his chest and a few from his shoulders. He was clean-shaven, but the hair on his head was spa.r.s.e and blown about at various angles. He could have been seventy. He could also have been no more than sixty. "Got telephone service. Got email. Even got teleconference things these days. No need to fly all the way here just to talk to me."

"This is a special case."

Howard Landry could have done a lot of things at that moment. My own options were limited. If he had told me to get lost I probably would have had to go back to Princeville and drink whatever Primos were still available at the bar. But he spared me that. He asked if I wanted a beer right there.

WE SAT ON LOUNGE chairs facing the ocean. The lawn chairs had plastic cross-straps, some of which were broken. Ahead of us, the water was rough and sapphire blue. I wasn't used to the color. On the Cape the water tends to be green when it isn't gray. And if it ever is blue, it is only from a distance and more cobalt than sapphire.

Landry didn't give me a Primo, he gave me a Sam Adams. "Taste of home," he said, as if Sam Adams was a treat for me, and we clinked bottle necks because I was still being polite.

"How long you been here?" I asked, settling in.

"Seven years," he said without looking at me.

"Like it?"

"It's f.u.c.kin' paradise, isn't it?" He didn't sound like it was paradise.

I took a diversionary approach with my next question, trying to make nice with a statement that clearly wasn't true. "You look pretty young for a man who's been retired seven years."

"Took it early. When I was fifty. I'd put in twenty-five years. Figured that was enough."

"Your last big case was the Heidi Telford murder, huh?"

"That what you're here about?" He still hadn't looked at me, not since we'd touched bottles.

"Remember her father?"

"Anything New."

"That's right. He's still looking."

"Must be a nutcase by now."

"Why do you say that?"

"You dwell that much, let it take over your life, wipes out everything else. I know. Believe me, I seen it happen." He took a long pull on his beer. "What's he come up with now?"

"A girl who was at the Gregory compound on the night Heidi died."

Landry held the bottle to his lips. Without lowering it, he said, "You talkin' about the babysitter?"

"I'm talking about one of the girls who went to the Gregorys' to party after the race."

The bottle stayed. Landry talked around it. "There wasn't no party."

"But you checked it out, didn't you? I was told, I was told by the Gregorys themselves, that you were asking them questions."

That threw him. Like McFetridge, he had to figure out if I was friend or foe. "I asked questions of everybody I could find."

"Thing was, I looked in the file. Didn't mention the Gregorys. Didn't say anything one way or the other about a party."

Landry lowered the bottle. He had his answer now. He turned his head and leveled his eyes on me. They were more or less a washed-out blue, and I doubted they were ever used to show merriment. "I didn't put down every false lead I had."

"It seemed to me you started off chasing every possible lead, whether it was false or not. Then all of a sudden you stopped."