Crime of Privilege

“I like to check in,” he said, reading my mind, “just to make sure Heidi’s not forgotten.”

“I know, Mr. Telford.”

“Do you?” He seemed to brighten at that. I still wasn’t looking at him. I was still looking at the television screen, but what I was seeing wasn’t registering.

“So somebody’s still working on it?”

All I knew was that people talked about Anything New Telford. That didn’t mean anyone was working on it.

He seemed to consider my silence. “Whenever I come up with anything, I pass it along, you know. The police, well, they didn’t seem equipped for an investigation like this one, if you know what I mean.”

I did not. After a moment or two, I told him so. “Police here deal with murders just like any other police department. We probably have two to four every year. One year we had nine.”

“You’re talking about the County of Barnstable, not the town. Town of Barnstable has maybe one per year.”

He was right. I didn’t argue. In my job we dealt with the whole county. And I didn’t get the murder cases, anyway.

“We have almost a quarter-million people in the county,” he said, “if you count all the way to Provincetown. Got a fairly high welfare population. A lot of people unemployed, especially in winter. Frustrated fishermen, construction workers. Not a lot to do. People get to drinking, shacking up with women who aren’t their wives or men who aren’t their husbands. Feelings get bruised. Secret of the Cape is that it’s not always as nice as it looks to people who only come here in the summer.”

He got his chowder. He was silent for a while and I glanced over. His eyes were closed, his lips were moving. He was, I saw, praying. I looked away.

“In the off-season,” he said, as if sprung back into the real world, “you got people here that maybe shouldn’t be here, maybe don’t want to be here, and plenty of bars and package stores to fuel their frustrations. Mix in the drug smugglers that come in off the ocean, the drug dealers and drug users living in converted cottages or winter rentals, you’re bound to get some violent crime. That’s what you see mostly, isn’t it?”

Yeah. Sure. It wasn’t worth arguing over.

“Of course, you see some of that in some of the villages of the town of Barnstable—Hya

He spooned up his chowder. He spooned it away from him, the way you are supposed to do it, the way nobody does. “So,” he said, taking his napkin from his lap and dabbing his mouth, “a college girl’s body is found on a golf course in Osterville, the local police are programmed to think, well, she must have been murdered by somebody from Mashpee, Yarmouth, Truro, anyplace but here.”

“And you don’t believe that’s what happened to your daughter?”

“No, Mr. Becket, I don’t.” He ate some more, sparing me any slurping sounds. I found myself liking Bill Telford just for the way he approached his chowder.

“My daughter was an exceptionally pretty girl. A bright girl. Size you up in a jiffy. She was going to Wheaton College. Do you know it? Didn’t know anything about it myself until they came and got her. But it’s a wonderful institution, and they recruited her right out of Barnstable High on her guidance counselor’s recommendation. Didn’t give her quite a full scholarship, but made it possible on my salary. I was an insurance adjuster, Mr. Becket. My job was to go out and assess damage, mostly on homeowners’ claims. I’d go into some of these multimillion-dollar properties here in Osterville, do my work, then I’d say to the homeowners, these people who had done so well in life, what can you tell me about Wheaton College? To a person they said good things. They were all familiar with it, all had somebody in the family or knew somebody who had gone there, so I said, that’s it. Whatever it takes, my daughter’s go

All I had done was ask him whether he believed his daughter had been killed by someone from outside Osterville. I wasn’t going to ask anything more for fear he would start telling me where he bought his clothes, gassed his car, went to the grocery store.

“Point is,” he continued, not caring that I wasn’t asking, “Heidi was meeting her share of rich and successful people at Wheaton. Maybe not famous people, I don’t know, but she had learned how to handle some of these kids who had a lot more than she did. Went to mixers at Brown, dated boys from Harvard. So I don’t see her as being overly impressed by somebody just because he came from a famous family.”

Heidi Telford died when I was still in law school. Her death was old news by the time I started in the Cape & Islands district attorney’s office. All this talk about Heidi and her dates and famous families meant nothing to me. I tried to make that clear by scraping the bottom and sides of my cup for the last bits of chowder. Then I started casting my eyes about for John.

“Being an insurance adjuster gave me the opportunity to do some investigating on my own, Mr. Becket. Or at least gave me some of the skills I needed to do it. And whenever I came up with anything, I’d bring it right to District Attorney White. I expect you know all that.”

Now I had to answer. He was waiting, looking right at me, seeing that I was not watching the game anymore, that until the rest of my food came I didn’t have anything to do except listen. “I really haven’t been involved, Mr. Telford.”

“Nice fella, Mitchell. Takes what I give him, tells me he’ll have someone look into it. I never hear anything more.”

“Maybe because he doesn’t have anything to tell you.”

“Except I’m telling him things. I talk with Heidi’s friends, with her friends’ friends, and even friends of those friends, and whenever anybody says anything, no matter how small, I write it down, pass it along. Then I follow up. Ninety percent of the time I find that the people whose names I pass along never hear word one from the police or anybody else.”

“Mr. Telford, why are you telling me all this?”

He put his spoon down. He wiped his lips one more time. He fixed a pair of blue-gray eyes on me. “Because, Mr. Becket, I been hearing good things about you.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re a straight shooter. Don’t appear to be obligated to anyone or anything but the truth. You see something that’s not a crime, you stand right up to your boss or the police chief or whoever says it is and tell ’em so. You see something that is a crime, you go after it.”

I choked on my Manhattan.

Mr. Telford’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You want some water?”

John never gave me water because I never drank it. I started hacking, trying to clear an air passage. John came ru

“I’m okay,” I gasped. “Something just went down the wrong way.”

John and the waitress, whose name was Fiona, both glared at Mr. Telford as if my travail was his fault. I had to tell everyone all over again that I was all right.

When we were left alone at last, when John had gone back into the kitchen to get my di

“I heard you backed down Chief DiMasi. I heard he wanted to prosecute some colored boys for ru

“First of all, they were from the Cape Verde Islands, those kids. Second, they were stealing bikes, but it wasn’t anything so sophisticated as a ring. They were just stealing them and selling them. And third, I did prosecute them inasmuch as I got them to plead to misdemeanors.”