She shook her head. "Well, if that"s true, you"re not getting it out of me."
She was still standing close, closer than a stranger would, closer than a boss"s wife should. A sudden breeze came up and blew back her hat. She threw her hand to her head to hold it on and her back arched and there was no longer any doubt about what was and was not under her yellow tank top.
I had a moment, or maybe she gave me a moment, and then she took off the hat and spent some time straightening her hair before she put it back on. Hair that I always thought was mousy was now glimmering in the sun. "You"re a strange man, Mr. Becket," she said.
Not half as strange as you, I thought.
She went from straightening her hair and her hat to straightening her skirt. "I have a question for you," she said. She positioned herself directly in front of me again. She did it deliberately. Everything she was doing was deliberate. "What do you think is going to happen to my husband if he loses his job?"
"Get another one."
"Here? On the Cape? He"s not from here, you know."
"Former D.A. He"ll have criminal clients flocking to him."
"Let"s not kid ourselves, George. Mitch is not a courtroom lawyer. And he doesn"t exactly have a lot of friends in this area."
"Except the Senator."
"That"s right. And the Senator wants Mitch to stay in his job. So why is it that you, as the Senator"s other friend, are trying to keep him from doing that?"
"I"m not. I"m trying to find out who killed Heidi Telford."
"That"s not quite what you told Mitch was your reason for going to Hawaii, was it?"
I was telling so many half-truths these days it was hard to remember what I had said to whom.
"Your reason for talking to Howard Landry wasn"t so you could help Mitch and it wasn"t so you could put to rest the rumors that he covered up for the Gregorys, was it, cowboy?" Her finger thumped my chest. It left a mark. First yellow, then red. "Don"t think," she said, her finger lingering, "we don"t know what"s going on."
We? Who was we? She and Mitch?
Stephanie"s hand came up and I flinched, remembering what had happened with Leanne in Costa Rica. But this time the touch against the side of my face was gentle. "So what I want to know is," she said softly, "what you"ve found out."
I let her hand stay. I looked directly into her sungla.s.ses again and said, "I"ve found out that Heidi was at the Gregory compound that night."
Nothing changed. The hand did not move.
"That she was probably there with Peter Martin. That in all likelihood Jamie Gregory and Jason Stockover and maybe Paul McFetridge and possibly Ned Gregory know exactly what happened to her and how she ended up on a golf course with her head stove in."
Was there a change now? Did her fingers curl so that her nails were digging into my cheek ever so slightly?
"And I"ve found out that Howard Landry was just about to put this all together when he was whisked away to Hawaii with promises that his every fantasy would come true. Just, Mrs. White"-I took her hand away, let it drop-"like you are trying to do to me."
"You flatter me, George."
I couldn"t see behind the dark lenses, but I imagined her eyelids fluttering. There was a hint of that in her voice. She laughed suddenly, and there was a hint of flutter there, too.
"I have a proposition for you, Georgie."
"No." I said it quickly.
She laughed again. "That wasn"t what I meant. What I meant was, what if I could get you promoted within the office? What if I could get you promoted to felonies?"
"You?"
"Well, Mitch isn"t going to come right out and tell you. It would look too much like what you think he"s been doing already. But if you believe Buzzy Daizell has a better position waiting for you, maybe we could head that off. Get you the same thing without changing ad"-she touched my chest-"mini"-she touched me again-"strations."
"You"re making me an offer?"
"It can be made to happen." She turned her shoulder slightly, moved her chin so that it was aligned with her shoulder. All edges and angles.
"In exchange for what?"
"In exchange for reporting to whoever you"re reporting to just what you"ve found. Which is nothing."
I leaned down until my face was so close to hers that her lips opened in expectation, and then I said, "She was just a young girl, Stephanie."
There was a moment of complete stillness. And then Stephanie White spoke as if we were two adults trying to solve a problem, two adults who just happened to be inches apart from each other. "It was a horrible thing and n.o.body is trying to say it wasn"t. But trying to pin it on the Gregorys is wrong."
"And is that because none of them did it?"
She heard the taunt and she understood it. "It"s because all you"re doing is playing into the hands of some right-wing extremist who"s trying to get revenge on the Senator."
"You know who this extremist is?"
She hesitated. "You know who it is."
"Who?" I demanded.
"Josh David Powell. Isn"t that who"s behind Buzzy"s campaign?"
I wondered how so many people seemed to know so much. I wondered, for a moment, what I was doing trying to be involved at any level. But my head was still tilted forward, my face was still nearly against hers, so close that I had only to whisper. "What do you know about Josh David Powell?"
"I know you"re his stooge, George. You and all that guilt you"ve stored up over what happened in Florida. He"s playing you, and I"m just telling you, if you allow this to keep going, everybody"s going to get burned-you, Mitch, the Senator, the Gregory kids, your meat-head friend Buzzy. And none of it is going to result in the real killer getting caught."
"She was at the house, Stephanie. She was there the night she was killed."
"And then she was gone. Pushed out the side gate because she wouldn"t put out, okay? It"s not very nice, it"s not very pretty, it doesn"t look good for the Gregorys, but that"s what happened. So yes, one or two of them have some responsibility because they put her in a position where she got picked up by someone on her way home. But they weren"t the ones who killed her."
"And so we should protect them?"
"And so we shouldn"t turn this into something more than it is, all right? Gregorys act bad sometimes, but they don"t go around killing people."
She dipped her knees then, managing to do it without coming into contact with me and without ever taking her eyes off mine. She came up holding the canvas bag. "There are things my husband will do, George. You can say it"s for the greater good. You can say it"s for his own self-interest. But they"re no different than what any of the rest of us are doing. Understand?"
Her hand went onto my chest one more time and pushed. I staggered back, not because I had to but to give us both some room. She twirled her finger. "Now turn around," she said. "I have to get dressed."
MY EYES POPPED OPEN. I STARED THROUGH THE WINDOW THAT faced the backyard. Something was out there. Something was moving. A critter bigger than my friend the squirrel. But it was not the noise that woke me. It was the thought of Stephanie White. The suddenly s.e.xual, suddenly direct, suddenly forceful Stephanie, who seemed to know so much about me and what I had done.
Who was informing her? Mitch could have told her about Hawaii, about Detective Landry, but if Mitch knew about Marion he did not need to send his wife to talk to me about her affair with Buzzy. And if Mitch knew about Palm Beach and Josh David Powell, why had it never come up before?
And those thoughts led to a question that would keep me up the rest of the night. I looked out the window, I looked at the ceiling, I buried my head in the pillow, and I asked myself over and over who she was really protecting.
BARBARA LOOKED SURPRISED. THEN SHE SMILED. SHE LIT UP the room with her smile. She came over to me, took both my hands in hers, and said, "You"re back."
I was, of course, back. I acknowledged as much with a squeeze of her hands and then let go.
"Did it all work out? Did you get everything you were looking for?"
"I"d say so. Pretty much, anyhow."
"You saw Jason?"
"Oh, sure. He says hi."
"He did?"
"Absolutely. Asked about Tyler, too."
Barbara Belbonnet stood in front of me looking puzzled.
We didn"t get any further because one of the secretaries came in and said Mitch wanted to see me right away. I was being called to the princ.i.p.al"s office.
MITCH WHITE SAT looking lost in his big leather swivel chair. Reid Cunningham sat in one wing chair at the side of his desk; d.i.c.k O"Connor sat in another on the other side. It occurred to me that something had changed since I last appeared in this office; that maybe I was about to get fired, after all.
"How was the trip?" d.i.c.k asked. He was a heavyset man, fat really, thinner in the chest than around the waist. He wore black-framed gla.s.ses and a black-and-white checked sport coat. He smiled. d.i.c.k was a man who had perfected the art of smiling without meaning it.
"Very productive," I said. I was hoping to throw them off guard.
Mitch fiddled with the arm of his chair. Since the arm was covered with smooth leather, he had very little with which to fiddle. So his fingers just splayed and twitched. d.i.c.k continued smiling. Reid stared. I was not part of Reid"s team and he and I had almost no relationship at all.
"Tell us what you learned," d.i.c.k said. He raised and lowered a hand, like he was inviting a third-grader to describe his summer vacation.
"I learned that on the night Heidi Telford died, Ned Gregory, then married and the father of three kids, was in bed with his eighteen-year-old au pair."
No reaction.
"I learned that Howard Landry found out about this and informed, at the very least, Chief DiMasi. I learned that he was told not to record that anywhere, not to tell anyone."
"Except he told you," Reid Cunningham said. He was a man with a military haircut and a military bearing. As far as I knew, he had never been in the military. He liked to swim long distances in the ocean.
"It"s been, what? Nine years? And Howard Landry is a broken man."
"Broken in what way?" It was Reid again. He appeared to be a.s.suming control of the interview. Or interrogation. Whatever it was.
"He ran off with one of the people he was investigating in connection with the Telford murder, one of the people who was at the Gregorys" that night, a young woman named Leanne Sullivan. That"s who got him to take early retirement, move to Hawaii."
I was standing in front of Mitch"s desk. n.o.body had asked me to sit. Now n.o.body asked me anything at all. I stuck a hand in my pocket and continued.
"Then she dumped him," I said. "Went off to Costa Rica to join up with another one of the people who was at the Gregorys" when Heidi Telford died. Howard took to the bottle after that."
The ruling triumvirate of the Cape & Islands district attorney"s office did not seem pleased by what I was telling them. Even d.i.c.k stopped smiling, although he looked as though he might take up the effort again if given even the slightest reason to do so.
"Who was this other person, the one in Costa Rica?" Reid wanted to know.
"Jason Stockover."
"Do you think he had something to do with Heidi Telford"s death?"
"I think everyone who was at the Gregorys" place that night had something to do with Heidi"s death."
Now the senior staff all looked at one another. It began with Mitch cutting a glance Reid"s way. d.i.c.k looked at Mitch, saw where he was looking, and looked that way, too. Reid, who had gray eyegla.s.ses to match his iron-gray hair, stayed stoic as long as he could and then slid his eyes to Mitch without moving his lenses.
"You mentioned nine years," Reid said, speaking to me. "People have been working on this case all that time and you"ve been messing around with it for how long? Three months? Most of it without authority. And now, what, you"re ready to solve it?"
"Didn"t say that."
Reid didn"t like the way I spoke back. His mouth locked up. Then d.i.c.k asked kindly, "What did you say, George?"
"I said there have been a lot of people doing strange things since Heidi Telford"s death."
It was hard to tell who was making the little growling noises. Maybe it was me.
"What I have discovered in my four months, Reid," I said, correcting him, "is that not only was Heidi Telford at the Senator"s home that night, but so were Jason Stockover; Leanne Sullivan; a guy named Paul McFetridge; a girl named Patty Afantakis, who was a friend of Leanne Sullivan"s; and three of the Gregory kids, Ned, Jamie, and Peter Martin."
Mitch spoke up for the first time. "You know some of those people, don"t you, George?"
I turned my attention back to him, looking at him directly, seeing how far he wanted to go in front of his colleagues. "I know Peter. Jamie a little bit. McFetridge was my college roommate."
What I was admitting was not lost on the deputies.
"And you think," d.i.c.k said, leaning toward me as far as his stomach would allow, trying to divert me from Mitch, "that all these people were involved in Heidi"s murder?"