The one who really paid was Kendrick, and all she did was get drunk.

Kendrick. Her father. Her mother. And, oh yes, George Becket, living by himself on the Cape, working out of the basement office of a political hack, lying awake at night thinking about how different things might have been.

5

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CELLO DIMASI WAS SAID TO HAVE BEEN A FINE BASEBALL PLAYER. He went to an obscure college in Connecticut but made it onto the Hyannis Mets in the Cape Cod League, which bills itself with good reason as the premier summer collegiate league in the country. He played two years for the Mets as a catcher who couldn’t hit, had a bad arm, but handled the pitchers well and excelled at blocking the plate. There is a picture on the wall in Muggsy’s showing him upending a guy who stood six-feet-four and went on to play five years for the Baltimore Orioles. The guy is literally flying through the air, and Cello, his head down, his squat body hunched and tilted forward, has both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Cello never fulfilled his dream of signing with the pros, but he made a lot of friends in the area. After college, he ended up on the Barnstable police force, and after twenty years on the job had worked his way through the ranks to the position of chief.

Like Mitch White, Cello had a cadre of supporters, but they were most definitely not the same cadre. Cello’s group were people like “the Macs,” McBeth and McQuaid, people who ran the building trades, put on fishing and golf tournaments, coached youth sports, went to Muggsy’s for breakfast and took their cocktails at Baxter’s on the waterfront during the off-season when the tourists weren’t around.

I knew the chief only in terms of discussing cases. There had been the bicycle-theft incident over which we had been at odds, but for the most part we were able to work things out to our mutual interest. The Kirby Gregory matter might not have had such a positive outcome for her if the Breathalyzer results had not been made questionable by a failure to locate the calibration records of the device. On the other hand, Michael McBeth’s nephew was able to walk with a reckless even though he had spent the night puking his guts out in a Yarmouth jail cell.

The chief greeted me as though I had come to cut another deal.

“Georgie!” he said, calling to me through the bullet-proof window of the utilitarian reception area of police headquarters off Phinney’s Lane. “C’mon back. Maddy, buzz the good counselor through.”

Maddy buzzed, I pushed open a metal-plated door, the chief stuck out his hand, and we shook with the force of a couple of pile-drivers. I had been the victim of Cello’s crushing handshakes in the past, and I knew from my years playing football that you got hurt less when you met force with force. “C’mon back. Take a load off your feet,” he said, for Maddy’s benefit. Maddy, if I was not mistaken, was married to one of the guys who did building inspections for the coastal commission, guys who made sure new construction was not too close to the water or didn’t have too many bathrooms or nonnative plants in the landscaping, guys who could make life miserable for a lot of people if they felt so inclined.

The chief’s office had fake wood paneling and bookshelves that were filled with trophies from youth sports: soccer, swimming, baseball, basketball. I couldn’t imagine the chief or his kids having much to do with basketball, given the fact that the chief was about five-feet-seven and two hundred forty pounds, but you can’t argue with trophies.

He went behind his desk, which was strewn with various objects—a coffee mug, a wrist brace, a woman’s shoe, an aerosol can, a flywheel—but he did not sit down. He was wearing the dark blue uniform of his force, looking like a man ready to spring at the sound of an alarm.

“What do you got?” he asked. He did not do it in an unfriendly way, just a businesslike way. He and I were neither friends nor enemies, although the rules of our engagements required us to appear to others to have a certain camaraderie.

“You still working on the Heidi Telford matter?”

“Heidi Telford,” he repeated. “Anything New? It would be a closed case if it weren’t for that poor bastard. What do you got?”

“Just the poor bastard. He’s kind of glommed on to me now. I told him I’d look into it.”

“What’s to look into?” The chief still hadn’t sat. Neither had I. We were talking across his desk as if it were a stream that could not be forded. “Girl got her head bashed in and then got dumped on the golf course. Thing about that course is, you got a fairway runs right along West Street. You go down that street two, three o’clock in the morning, you’re gonna be the only one there. Stop alongside the road, pull the body out of the backseat, run it out to the fairway. You’re gonna be gone less than a minute and that body’s not gonna be found till dawn.”

“Less than a minute? How much did she weigh?”

The chief squinted at my impertinence. Then he regrouped. He still was not sure why I was there, what I was trying to do. “She wasn’t a big girl. Hundred and ten, hundred fifteen pounds at the most. Maybe less, I don’t remember. And maybe it would have taken a couple of minutes, get her out of the car, across the fairway, into the trees where we found her.” He slung his hand from one side of him to the other. “Point is, other than us guys patrolling the place, you’re just not gonna find any traffic out there at night. Only people live on West Street are rich ones who are so old they fall asleep at nine o’clock at night. What do you got?”

“And what did she get hit with?” I asked.

“Probably a golf club. That’s what the medical examiner figured, anyway.”

“Okay, so correct me if I’m wrong, Chief. The girl’s found on a swanky golf course, her head crushed by a golf club. That doesn’t sound like she got picked up by a transient.”

“Who said she was?”

“Well, what do you think happened?”

Perhaps it was the tone of my question. Perhaps I should have shown more deference to the chief of police. In any event, Cello DiMasi exploded. “How the fuck do I know? If I knew, I’d arrest somebody, don’t you think, Counselor?”

I smiled. I said I was sure he would.

He grumped, like maybe it would be best if I just got my overeducated ass out of his office, out of his police station, took my bleeding heart out to save the colored kids who steal honest people’s bikes.

My smile did not seem to be working. I used to have a good one. Now I get the feeling people regard it as something I just drop over my face, like a page on a flip chart. Still, what do you do when you’re trying to placate someone like the chief? I tried words. “Mitch White thought it might be a good idea if I took a look through the file.”

“Mitch White, huh?” The message was clear: Mitch White, another Ivy League prick like me.

I slowly lifted my hands, palms up, as if there was nothing I could do, Mitch was my boss. Smile, speak, roll over like a dog with my paws in the air.

The chief hitched his belt, made the leather creak. He was not wearing any weapons, but the belt was black and three inches thick, the kind that could hold a gun, a truncheon, a foot-long flashlight. Somehow hitching it, making it creak, passed for a sign of dominance.

“C’mon,” he said, and led me out of the office and down a corridor in which the walls were made of cinder blocks painted light green. We had to walk a good hundred feet and every time we encountered someone, the person would squeeze his back to the wall and say, “Chief,” as we passed. The chief did not acknowledge anyone by name, just nodded as he steamrollered toward our destination, a green door with a wired window at the far end of the corridor.