5

.

ILEFT GEORGE WASHINGTON IN MAY AND NEVER RETURNED. I TRANSFERRED to a school in Boston. I had hoped to get into Boston College, but even with a strong letter of recommendation from the Senator, I wasn’t able to overcome the D I had gotten in civil procedure.

The school to which I went was fine, and while it may not have had the same prestige as GW, it allowed me the freedom not to fret quite so much about who was watching me, grading me, pulling me over in the middle of the night. Two years later, I graduated, sat for the bar, hung around my mother’s house in New Jersey awaiting the results, and when I was sworn in as an attorney I got a call from Chuck, Chuck Larson, telling me to apply to the Cape & Islands district attorney for a job.

1

.

CAPE COD, April 2008

“ANYTHING NEW?”

“You know, Mr. Telford,” I said as I watched him climb onto the long-legged chair next to mine, “if you don’t stop coming here, I’m going to have to.”

I wanted him to know I was not joking. “I like this restaurant, I like sitting at the bar, I like having John mix me a Manhattan. I like, most of all, that I’m not working when I’m here.”

Bill Telford kept his eyes on the television as he completed his personal seating arrangement. The Bruins were on, game seven of the first round of the playoffs, and while Mr. Telford dutifully watched, he didn’t say anything pithy or knowledgeable, the way a real hockey fan might.

John asked him what he wanted, and he said he would like a nice cup of coffee. This got barely a grunt out of John.

I turned back to my meal, steak tips over rice.

“I didn’t hear anything from you,” he said.

“I didn’t have anything to report.”

“I heard you went to see the chief.”

I dropped my fork, let it clang against the crockery. The two of us sat there staring at ten men slapping a disk up and down the ice, pausing in their pursuit only long enough to slam one another into the boards and occasionally grab one another by the sweater.

“None of my stuff was there, was it?”

“Mr. Telford, you obviously don’t need me. You know everything already.”

He got his coffee, turned the mug so that the handle was to the right, and poured in a fair amount of sugar. “Just wanted to confirm it.”

“So I was, what, an experiment? A mine canary? If you’ve got friends in the police department, why don’t you just ask one of them if anything’s going into the files?”

Mr. Telford stirred his sugar into his coffee, being careful not to let his spoon crack against the sides of his mug. “I wanted you to see for yourself.”

“Why?” But I knew I was asking a question to which I probably did not want the answer.

“Because, Mr. Becket, you’re a decent guy and my last hope.”

He fixed me with his blue-gray eyes and let them linger, even when I looked away. Perhaps he realized a commercial was on the television screen and there was nothing else to capture my attention. I tried focusing on my food, which did not seem as appetizing as it had a few minutes earlier. I decided I was, indeed, going to find a new place for dinner. Maybe I would even start cooking at home. Get microwave meals, sit by myself in front of the television, eat off a tray table.

“Mr. Telford, I’m just someone doing a job, that’s all. I’ve got no pull in the office, no say. I sit in a little dungeon in the basement and I do what I’m told, okay? So if you think I’m your best hope, you might as well forget it.”

“You talked Mitch White into letting you look at the file.”

“Honest to God, Mr. Telford, you’re so much more on top of things than I am, why don’t you just use all these other resources you have, go about your business, and leave me alone?”

Did I say that too loud? Is that why John looked up at me from down the bar?

But Mr. Telford was unperturbed. “My resources,” he said, “as you call ’em, are mostly people like me, support people who lived here all their lives doing the jobs that allow other folks to come down and have a good time for a few weeks every year. I want to get a plumber to my place seven o’clock in the morning, I can do that. I want to plant a cactus in my yard, I got no doubt I can get somebody to look the other way. But that only gets me so far. It doesn’t get me into the files.”

“Both the district attorney and the chief of police know who you are. They know the case isn’t solved and the file is still open.”

“Sure. They see me coming, they smile and say, ‘Hi, Bill,’ ‘Sure thing, Bill,’ ‘Get right on it, Bill.’ Then they never do anything.” He sipped from his mug, put it back on the bar. “Which you just proved.”

I tried to go back to watching the game, but he stayed where he was, his head hanging slightly, holding on to the mug handle like a tired swimmer. I finished my drink, pushed my plate forward, signaled to John that I was ready to go.

“I don’t know what’s been Goin’ on in your life, Mr. Becket,” he said suddenly. “But I’m willing to bet something has.”

“Yeah, the Bruins are getting the crap kicked out of them, the Celtics lost last night, and I’m glad baseball is under way so the Red Sox can prove that winning last year’s championship was a total fluke.”

“Guy like you,” he said, “young, good-looking, talented, you clearly could be doing something more than sitting in the basement of some backwater prosecutor’s office.”

I thanked him for his observation and he nodded as though my thanks were genuine.

John sidled over. “You done with that meal, Counselor? You want a doggy bag or anything?” I shook my head and made a little check mark in the air. He cut his eyes to Mr. Telford, indicating he knew exactly why I wasn’t eating, why I couldn’t enjoy my drink and the game in solitude. Guy comes in, orders a coffee, ruins everything for everyone. All that was expressed in one side glance.

Mr. Telford waited until John went back to the kitchen with my plate before he spoke again. “You know, it’s funny. My Heidi wanted to do so much with her life and didn’t get the chance, and here you are, you got the opportunity to do wonderful things, and what do you do instead? Sit around watching other guys play games on television.”

I grimaced. Kept my mouth shut. The guy had lost his daughter.

“Do that much longer,” he said, “you won’t have any other options. Maybe you could take up fishing. Stand out on the jetty every night with all those guys, got nothing else to do.”

“Look, Mr. Telford, I’m sorry for your loss. I really am. But that doesn’t give you the right to track me down, try to make me do what you want by insulting me.”

“Why do you suppose none of the tips I been giving Mitch are in the police file? Why do you suppose they never followed up on any of ’em?”

“Maybe it’s because the stuff you’re giving them isn’t really helpful.”

“The stuff I’m giving them is about the Gregorys.”

That was the moment when I could have left. Should have left. John had emerged from the kitchen and was at the cash register at the end of the bar, totaling me up. I could have gotten off my chair and walked down to where he was, given him my money, gotten out of the restaurant without another word passing between Mr. Telford and me. But that is not what I did. Instead, I looked around.

There was an overweight couple a few seats down the bar in the opposite direction from the cash register. Behind us, there was a table occupied by a family and the parents were making a fair amount of noise telling their two kids to sit, be still, stop kicking, eat their french fries.