“And sent to a diversionary program.”

I shrugged.

“When the chief wanted them sent to prison as felons.”

“The chief can be aggressive sometimes.”

“About teenagers with no connections stealing bicycles.”

He was not far off the mark. But he was also just a guy sitting next to me in a restaurant. I was glad when John came out and put my plate in front of me. I was even more glad when Mr. Telford picked up the check John had put in front of him and took out his wallet.

“All I’m asking,” he said, as he got to his feet, “is if maybe you could do some checking yourself. See if these little things I’m givin’ District Attorney White are going anywhere other than the circular file.” He put a five-dollar bill down on the bar, then looked at the check again, then selected two more dollars to put on top of it.

“You see, sometimes”—he hesitated, his hand covering the money as though he were holding his place until he got the phrasing just right—“sometimes I’m afraid Mitchell may not want the information I’m giving him. Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell isn’t a little too close to some of our better-known residents.”

“Meaning anybody in particular?”

“Meaning the Gregory family, Mr. Becket. Very much in particular.”

2

.

EVEN NOW THERE ARE TIMES I LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT, UNABLE to sleep, playing and replaying the events of that distant night in Palm Beach, thinking about how the lives of so many people were ruined by what took place in a period of no more than one hour, imagining what might have occurred if only I had acted differently. What would have happened if I had pulled Peter off her? Knocked Jamie away? Tried to raise Kendrick to her feet, shake her out of her stupor?

Was she in a stupor? She had not said anything. She had made noises. They had sounded like … moans. Is that what they were? And if they were moans, were they indications of pleasure or the fact that she could not formulate words?

She had formulated words later. “Fuck you,” she had said. “Fuck off,” she had told me. And she had driven that car. Without her shoes. Without a purse. When young women go to a cocktail party at a place like the Gregorys’, don’t they bring purses? If she had left it there, wouldn’t the Gregorys have found it? Somebody in the Gregory family had to have known who she was. Somebody had invited her.

I get lost sometimes, conjuring up things I do not know, or that I know only in part. And then I can’t get to sleep at all. I lie there until the sun comes up, not sure if I am remembering things as they actually happened or if I am just remembering what I imagined on other nights that I have lain here like this.

And now Bill “Anything New” Telford tells me what a straight shooter I am, how I am not obligated to anyone or anything but the truth, how I see a crime and go after it. Stand right up to the people in power.

Poor Bill Telford.

3

.

LIKE ME, MITCH WHITE WAS NOT FROM THE AREA. THAT SHOULD have been a point to bond us, outsiders in a provincial legal setting in which many of the regular players could trace their local roots back for generations. In fact, it only made District Attorney White highly suspicious of me. He knew how I had gotten my job.

The same way he had.

In the ten or so years Mitch had been D.A., he had tried hard to adapt to the culture. He had the requisite sports memorabilia around his office, but one had the sense he could not withstand a grilling about Bobby Orr, Carl Yastrzemski, or maybe even Larry Bird. He bought a table for the Boston Pops concert that was held on the town green every summer, but people who were forced to sit with him reported he never seemed interested in the music and spent most of the time scanning the other tables for celebrities, officials, and people to whom he could wave. He did not have a boat, did not golf or fish, did not seem to care about the beach.

Among the things Mitch had clearly never mastered was the art of dressing like a native. He was prone to short-sleeved dress shirts, even when he wore a tie. In the summer he liked to wear seersucker suits that could not have cost him $200 and tended to show both wrinkles and the damp spots of perspiration that came from sitting in a leather chair. He had a mustache that no doubt was meant to distract viewers from his underslung chin and wore dark-framed glasses in which the lenses were fitted into frames shaped liked oxbows. His arms, sticking out of his short sleeves, were remarkably thin. On his left hand he wore a very prominent gold wedding ring. I might have been overly critical, but to me everything about him screamed Not From Here!

Nevertheless, each time Mitch was up for reelection he ran virtually unopposed. I had no involvement in the process, but it seemed to me that the decision was made as to who would be district attorney before the matter went to the voters, and as long as Mitch didn’t piss off the wrong people, the job was his.

That did not make Mitch a secure man, however. And among his insecurities was me.

There were twenty-three prosecuting attorneys in our office. A couple of them were stationed in Falmouth, a couple more in Orleans, and then there were a few on the islands, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The rest of us were located at the main office in the “new” building at the courthouse complex just off Route 6A, on the bay side of the Cape in the town of Barnstable. I was relegated to the basement, down the hall from the jail cells. I had been there by myself for years and had come to think of it as my private domain. For a period of several months before my meeting with Bill Telford I had been sharing my office with a woman named Barbara Belbonnet, whom I would have thought quite attractive if her primary interest in life had been something other than making arrangements to have her children picked up after school. Barbara was neither a bad person nor a bad attorney. It was just that her husband had left her with two kids and moved off-Cape, and she had gotten the job with the D.A.’s office because her father was an Etheridge and somebody owed him a favor and told Mitch he had to hire her.

So there she was one day, following behind a couple of staffers pushing a desk and carrying a computer, telling me she was sorry, but she was a new hire and this was where she was told to go. I was not given the option of complaining. “Welcome to the dungeon,” I said.

It turned out to be no different for Barbara than it was for me. In general nobody other than an occasional secretary or messenger ever came to see either one of us. If we were wanted, someone would call over the intercom and direct us upstairs, usually to one of the first assistant D.A.’s, Reid Cunningham or Dick O’Connor.

It was not that Mitch himself openly avoided me. He would greet me with a “Hello” and use my name on those occasions when he happened to see me in the hallways or at an office birthday, Christmas, or farewell party. “Hello, George, how’s it going?” he might say, although he would not wait for an answer. He would respond to my questions if asked, but mostly he steered clear of situations where I would have the chance to ask. He knew my connection but wasn’t sure how deep it ran. His own, apparently, wasn’t deep enough for him to find out.

By sequestering me in the basement, Mitch was able to limit my exposure to whatever was occurring in the office. He couldn’t keep me from talking with the other lawyers or going on coffee breaks with them, but he kept my workload restricted to matters that generally did not require interaction. Here, George, here’s twenty-seven drunk drivings for you. You be the OUI specialist. As for Barbara, she was given the domestic disturbances. The small ones. The pushings and shovings and throwing of plates. The ones nobody else in the office wanted to go near. Here, Barbara, you take these. You have a problem, we’ll be right upstairs. Better yet, ask George. That way, you won’t even have to come upstairs.