Crime Of Privilege: A Novel Part 20

"I stopped because I wasn't getting nowhere."

I gave him a number of nods, each one meant to be a strand of false hope. I said, "It's unusual, though, to see that much diligence up to a point, and then almost nothing after that. Wouldn't you agree, detective?"

He obviously had not been called detective in a long time. It brought him up short. Made him blink. "You wanna tell me what in particular you're complaining about?"

"What I just said. Looking through the file, it was almost as if something happened somewhere along the line and you decided to close down the investigation."

"I didn't close it. I handed it off to Pooch."

"Detective Iacupucci."

"That's right. Pooch."

"Did he do anything with it?"

"Don't know. I left."

"And no one ever got in touch with you after you left?"

"That's right."

"That strike you as curious?"

"I don't know. I never been retired before."

I smiled, as if he had made a good joke. He did not smile back. He was looking at me warily. It was probably the look he had developed when he was about to arrest somebody and was thinking that a weapon might get pulled. I stopped smiling. It wasn't doing me any good.

"File lists every friend, friend of friend, waiter, shopkeeper you talked to, but you never so much as mentioned the Gregorys. Why was that, detective?"

"Case as serious as that one," he said, "you wanna be careful what you put down. Never know who's gonna read it."

"You thought the wrong people might read the police file?"

"I think, counselor," he said, dragging out the last word, paying me back for calling him detective, "things work in funny ways back in the Bay State. The Cape, in particular."

"So you were doing a little preventive maintenance, is that it? Deciding what should go in the file and what shouldn't."

"Something like that."

"And the chief, did you tell the chief what you didn't put in the file?"

"Depends. After a while you don't keep reporting that you got nothing to report."

I tried to keep the questions coming. Hit him with another as soon as he was done answering the one before. It was a basic courtroom technique. "You tell him what the people at the Gregory compound said?"

"Don't recall."

"He told me you couldn't find everyone who was there that night."

"So?"

"So you couldn't find everyone; you must have found someone."

Landry drank his beer, staring along the barrel of his bottle while he followed the logic.

"Who did you find?" I pressed.

"Gimme some names and I'll tell you."

"Peter Martin; Ned, Jamie, and Cory Gregory; Paul McFetridge; Jason Stockover."

"That it?"

"A girl named Patty Afantakis."

He didn't ask who she was. He asked if I had talked to her. I said I had.

"What did she tell you?"

"Nothing. She wouldn't tell me anything, except it was clear she was there."

He nodded. "Anybody else?"

"Patty said she was with a girl named Leanne."

"You talk to her?"

"Nope. Haven't found her yet."

Landry finished off the bottle and threw it on the lawn. His own lawn. I looked at mine and saw I had barely gotten beyond the first sip.

"All right, counselor," he said, his voice suddenly very taut, "you want to know what was going on? Fine, I'll tell you. Ned Gregory was f.u.c.king his babysitter, that's what. His whachucallit, his au pair. Eighteen-year-old beauty who happened to be the daughter of a guy who owns a nationwide chain of movie theaters and contributes a zillion bucks a year to all the Gregory campaigns. And Ned's got a wife and three kids and being groomed to run for some office himself and there he is, layin' pipe with the girl who's supposed to be watching his children while his wife's away. You get the picture now, pal?"

"So you were covering up."

"You wanna call it that. It didn't have nothin' to do with the investigation. So you put something down in writing, all it does is embarra.s.s the people who pay for the Little League fields and the skating rink and underwrite the summer Pops concerts, what's it gonna get you?"

"You don't put it down, maybe it gets you retirement in Hawaii."

We were dangerously close to a physical confrontation. I was pointed toward the ocean, but out of the corner of my eye I could see his fist balled. I tensed. If the fist came flying, I was going to hit him over the head with the bottle I was still holding. Until then, I was going to keep looking at the water.

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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sed 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 doc.u.ment 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 b.u.t.tocks. 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, a.s.signed 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.

KI'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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.e.x with the au pair. Letting their friends screw s.k.a.n.ks on their beach.

s.k.a.n.ks. That was McFetridge's term. That was what he had called them.

McFetridge had probably played wingman that night because, h.o.r.n.y 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."