Crime of Privilege

“All alone, are you?” He posed the question as if being alone was an exciting thing to be.

I told him I was.

“Would you happen to have a passport?” he asked, getting out a hardcover register book and opening it to a page that contained the day’s date and handwritten column markers that read nom, adresse, and nombre de passeport. The way he asked, I had the impression that not everybody who stayed there did have one. Or perhaps he was just being friendly. In any event, I handed mine over. He noted where it had been issued. “San Francisco!” he said with genuine enthusiasm. “I have had some adventures there, mon ami, I can tell you that.”

“Yes,” I said, not wanting to know. “Actually, I’m from Boston.”

“Boston.” He was busy writing things down.

“Cape Cod, really.”

“You don’t say. Could I have the address, please?”

I gave it to him. He transcribed and then handed back the passport along with a key attached to a heavy brass fob that would no doubt rip a hole in my pants pocket if I tried walking the streets of Monflanquin with it. “Number four, just at the top of the stairs behind you, two flights up. Need help with your luggage?”

“No, no. I’ve just one bag, and I can handle it.”

“D’accord, as the locals say.” He smiled.

I glanced around the shop. Knickknacks, mostly. Some framed vintage photographs and some paintings that had probably hung on walls for years without being noticed until their owners died and the estates were liquidated. But there was some fun stuff, too. Carafes and wineglasses and boards with comical renderings of various aspects of life in wine country. Posters and coasters and little figures made from pewter or blown glass. Chess sets with medieval warriors carrying French and English flags. Postcards, games, scarves, a display of tour books, and a rack of flamboyant sunglasses.

He saw me looking at the sunglasses. “Very Posh Spice, don’t you think?” And I had to go through various mental synapses to realize he was referring to Victoria Beckham, formerly of the Spice Girls. “Oh, yes, very much so,” I said, as if I knew what I was talking about.

I turned to go to the door, to go out to the car for my bag.

“You know,” he said as my hand went to the handle, “my partner spent some time in the Boston area. Back in the halcyon days of his youth. You’ll have to talk.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “I would like that very much.”

THE PARTNERS LIVED TOGETHER on the second floor. The door to their apartment was open when I walked past with my suitcase. A short hallway led from that open door to a darkened sitting room, where a soccer game was on television. I could not see who was watching it, but I assumed someone was. I put down the suitcase and knocked.

“Hello,” I called.

There was movement. A figure appeared at the end of the hallway. A lean man, a little less than six feet tall in bare feet, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. A man whose hair, if not wavy, was at least still on his head.

“Yes?” he said. Like the man on the first floor, he did not bother with French.

“Are you the fellow from New England?” I asked.

He came forward, out of the darkness. It was the boy in the prep school yearbook, two decades along. I felt a surge of elation and held out my hand even before he finished telling me he was from Co

“Massachusetts,” I said.

He took my hand. I remember thinking it was not the shake of a sailor. “I went to school in Massachusetts,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” I did not release my grip.

“Oh, did Toby tell you?” The inquiry was friendly enough. There was no subterfuge to it. He did not even try to pull his hand away.

I said, “No. I know because I’ve come all the way here looking for you.”

“Me?” He smiled, as though I might be a talent scout.

“I’m George Becket, from the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office.”

The handshake, minimal before, now went as soft as pudding.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and the words came out partly in dejection, partly in alarm. He tried to step back, but I would not let go of his hand. I wondered if he would call for Toby. If the big man would come charging up the stairs. If I would end up grappling with both of them, tumbling around the second floor. Georgie Becket, punching his way across the Western Hemisphere. You see this scar? Tamarindo, Costa Rica. This one? Monflanquin, France.

But Jason did not call for Toby and he did not keep up the struggle. He left his hand, his arm, hanging in my grip as if I were a doctor taking his pulse. “What did I do?” he said.

“If you want me to guess,” I told him, “I’d say you really didn’t do anything. But there are those who would like me to think you did.”

He did not respond. He just looked at me with eyes that contained none of the confidence of the youth in the yearbook photo.

“You are Jason Stockover, aren’t you?”

There was an instant when I did not know what he was going to say or what I was going to do if he denied it, but then he nodded and I was so relieved I almost hugged him. I opted for dropping his hand, which immediately went into his front pocket. Both his hands went into both his front pockets. Because he was wearing jeans, and because they were fairly tight, he got only his fingers in.

“What do you want?”

“To talk. To ask you some questions. To get some answers.”

He looked wistfully back into his apartment, no doubt wishing he had never come out. “About?”

“You know what it’s about, Jason. It’s about the night a young girl named Heidi Telford went to the Gregorys’ compound on Cape Cod to visit Peter Martin and ended up dead.”

I spoke brutally on purpose, letting Jason know there was no escape.

He made an attempt anyway. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Let me help you, then. You sailed the Figawi race. You partied in Hya

He glanced quickly down the stairs. From below came a deep voice. “I know all about your sordid past, Jason. Don’t hold anything back on my account.”

Jason looked at me as if it was really my opinion that concerned him. I tried to make sure my expression did not change one iota.

“You want to come in and have a glass of wine?” he asked.

3

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SANCERRE. A PECULIAR CHOICE FOR A MAN LIVING IN BORDEAUX, since it was my understanding that it came from the Loire Valley, but it was chilled and it tasted good and so I was grateful.

“Ned and I were just friends,” he began. “We had been in Saint Anthony’s Hall at Trinity together, and of course everyone knew who he was. Thing that was so amazing about Ned was that he never put on airs. I mean, certainly Saint A’s was the elite fraternity at school, had its own part of the campus and everything, but Ned was friends with everyone. In the spring, just before exams every year, he’d have the whole frat up to his house for a party, and we had the run of the place. That’s where he learned I’d been sailing all my life on Long Island Sound, and so he invited me to join in the Figawi race. After we graduated, I became sort of a regular. I was single, living in New York, it was a fun thing to do.” He shrugged. He couldn’t help it. Being single, living in New York. Fun things happened. They followed him around.

Jason sat on the very edge of the couch, bent forward at the waist, giving himself quick access to his glass whenever he put it down on the marble table that separated us.

“I got to know the family pretty well, even the Senator, who was incredibly nice. Thing was, nobody ever asked what you were doing there or acted like you didn’t belong. Sometimes they didn’t even ask who you were. And the Senator’s house, the main house, it was like this seaside mansion where you could do whatever you want. The chairs, the couches, the dining room table, there wasn’t anyplace where you felt you couldn’t sit down in a bathing suit. And I don’t want to say it was chaos or anything, but there were always people ru