"Stark, evocative, and compelling. I could not put it down."
Reviewed by Jennifer Barnhart
Posted June 15, 2013
Fiction Family Life
George Becket is a young Assistant District Attorney when
he's approached by Bill 'Anything New' Telford. Nine years
ago, Bill's daughter Heidi was brutally murdered and
abandoned on an exclusive golf course in Cape Cod. The
murderer was never found and Bill has become a sad running
joke as he continues to plague the police department and
the District Attorney's office for anything new on Heidi's
case. George can't explain why leads in Heidi's murder were
never explored except that they're all tied to the Gregory
family, a very wealthy and influential family who George
owes his job to.
CRIME OF PRIVILEGE by Walter Walker takes the reader
through the world of an exclusive Cape Cod society then
races off to Idaho, Hawaii, Costa Rica, France and New York
City. Fast-paced, tense, and filled with unexpected twists,
this is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that exposes the
corruption of wealth and power in the American legal
system.
From the first page, Walker snares the reader with his
stark and evocative prose. There were certainly times when
George Becket wasn't likable, but there wasn't a moment
when I didn't want to read his story. He is a compelling
character, and his voice drives the narrative as it weaves
events from George's past and his present together to
create a devastating climax.
I love the varying shades of morality throughout CRIME OF
PRIVILEGE. Every character has an ambiguity to their nature
that creates layers of a complex and real personality. The
intricacies of the case are wonderfully pieced together,
but for me the characters are what tip this novel into the
excellent.
CRIME OF PRIVILEGE is a compelling suspense novel from
Walter Walker that grabbed my attention from the beginning
and didn't let go until the shattering climax. I highly
recommend this book and can't wait to see what Mr. Walker
has in store for the future.
SUMMARY
In the tradition of Scott Turow, William Landay, and Nelson
DeMille, Crime of Privilege is a stunning thriller about
power, corruption, and the law in America—and the dangerous
ways they come together.
A murder on Cape Cod. A rape in Palm Beach.
All they have in common is the presence of one of America’s
most beloved and influential families. But nobody is asking
questions. Not the police. Not the prosecutors. And
certainly not George Becket, a young lawyer toiling away in
the basement of the Cape & Islands district attorney’s
office. George has always lived at the edge of power. He
wasn’t born to privilege, but he understands how it works
and has benefitted from it in ways he doesn’t like to admit.
Now, an investigation brings him deep inside the world of
the truly wealthy—and shows him what a perilous place it is.
Years have passed since a young woman was found brutally
slain at an exclusive Cape Cod golf club, and no one has
ever been charged. Cornered by the victim’s father, George
can’t explain why certain leads were never explored—leads
that point in the direction of a single family—and he agrees
to look into it.
What begins as a search through the highly stratified layers
of Cape Cod society, soon has George racing from Idaho to
Hawaii, Costa Rica to France to New York City. But
everywhere he goes he discovers people like himself: people
with more secrets than answers, people haunted by a decision
years past to trade silence for protection from life’s sharp
edges. George finds his friends are not necessarily still
friends and a spouse can be unfaithful in more ways than
one. And despite threats at every turn, he is driven to
reconstruct the victim’s last hours while searching not only
for a killer but for his own redemption.
ExcerptI went into Pogo's for dinner. Bad name. I'm not even sure
how good the food is, but for years I went there three or
four times a week. I could eat at the bar, a lovely slice of
veneered log in which the natural contours provided cutouts
that allowed a man to sit comfort– ably in whichever
of the twelve long–legged, spindle–back chairs
happened to be available. I liked that veneered log. I liked
the television behind the bar. I liked the
post–middle–aged people who worked there and
knew just enough about me to ask how things were going
without inquiring too deeply.
I suppose certain aspects of my life were obvious. I
wasn't married and I didn't live with anyone, or I wouldn't
have been in there eating dinner as often as I did. I
usually wore a suit, particularly if I stopped off on my way
home from work, so I had to be a professional. I never
dined with clients—or, for that matter, anyone
else—so I was unlikely to be involved in business. I
didn't have an accent, or at least not a Boston or Cape Cod
accent, so I was not originally from the area. I liked to
watch whatever sporting event was on TV and I made
appropriate noises in support or condemnation of the Red
Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots, so I had to have been
around for a while. And I liked to have a Manhattan, or a
couple of beers, or a glass or two of wine, or even an
occasional martini, so I was a man of party potential
without being an alcoholic.
Of course, the Cape is a small place between October and
May, and sooner or later a person in my position was bound
to come into contact with one of the employees outside the
restaurant. Jury duty, a domestic dispute, an unlawful
detainer action, a kid in trouble, even a moving violation,
was going to get one of them into the courthouse at some
time or other; and I tended to be in one of the county
courthouse buildings eight to ten hours a day. So at some
point somebody was going to run into me.
The ?rst time I recognized anyone from the restaurant
was when a waitress named Meg appeared on one of my jury
panels. Judge Wilkerson dutifully introduced me as the
deputy district attorney representing the people of the
Commonwealth and asked the courtroom full of citizens if
any of them knew me or the defense counsel or the defendant
in the case. Several people raised their hands, but none of
them identi?ed me and none of them was Meg. I had merely
turned to the audience, let them see me, not searched their
faces. It was only when Meg was called to the jury box that
I realized she was there. I looked right at her, she looked
right back at me, not a sign of recognition was passed.
The case, as I recall, was a break–in, the
defendant a Brazilian. It was not a big deal to anyone but
the victim and the accused. When it was my turn to question
the prospective jurors, I addressed Meg. "Ms. O'Brien, do
I look familiar to you?"
"I'm not sure. Should you?"
"You mentioned you work at Pogo's restaurant in
Osterville. I happen to eat there sometimes. I wonder if
you recall ever waiting on me?"
Meg was a hard–faced woman with dun–colored
hair, who wore her restaurant uniform with the hem of her
skirt an inch or two higher than the other waitresses did.
If I had to guess, I would have said she was about ?fty,
divorced, had raised or was raising two kids on her own,
lived in a rented house, and depended on her unreported tips
to survive. She was also none too bright, as evidenced by
her answer to my question. "Not really. You usually eat at
the bar, don't you?"
The defense counsel exercised one of his challenges to
take her off the jury, and later, when I ran into her at the
restaurant, she asked me why I had brought up the fact that
she knew who I was. "I wasn't gonna say nothin'," she said.
I told her I appreciated it, but it could have
jeopardized the prosecution if anyone found out she really
knew me.
She shrugged. "I ?gured the guy was guilty as sin anyway,
or you wouldn'ta been chargin' him. And if he
wasn't"—she shrugged again— "then I would have
given you a raft of shit next time I seen you. So I ?gured
the pressure was really on you."
Somehow, in her mind, that all made sense. I tried to
follow it through, but got only so far. In any event, she
was off the jury, the Brazilian got convicted, and from that
point on whenever I sat down at the bar I was addressed by
John the bartender as Counselor.
In March, the main dining room was closed. There were
about twenty patrons scattered in booths and at tables
throughout the pub, which had logs burning in the brick
?replace and was where I always ate anyhow. I was alone at
the bar, sipping a Manhattan and reading through the printed
list of daily specials that was tucked into the menu, when a
man came in and sat down next to me. There were three seats
to my left, eight to my right. There wasn't any need for him
to do that.
"How's it goin'?" he asked John.
"Goin' good," John said, as if it was none of his
business, and slid him a menu, a black paper place mat, a
set of silverware wrapped in a white napkin.
I turned my shoulder. I wanted to eat alone, watch the
Celts. They were playing Phoenix, as I recall. "I'll have
the clams, John," I said.
The bartender hesitated. I wasn't sure if he cut his eyes
to my neighbor, but it took him a few seconds to murmur, "I
wouldn't. Not many bellies, from what I could see."
"What do you like?"
"Scallops look fat. Sword?sh is good." "Fine. Give me the
scallops."
"Plate or roll?" "Plate."
"Squash, french fries, chowder okay?"
"Whatever you say."
John took my order back through the swinging saloon door
to the kitchen without writing anything down. The man next
to me, a man with sparse white hair that tufted on the
crown of his head and could have used a good clipping at
the back of his neck, said, "He obviously likes you."
"It's just because I come in here all the time."
"Sure. They only cheat tourists and drunks." He was
smiling. He had made a joke. He wanted me to know he didn't
really think they cheated anybody.
I turned away again.
"My name's Bill Telford." He was holding out his hand. He
wanted me to shake.
The man had come in and seated himself next to me, told
me a joke, and now he wanted me to be his friend. I wanted
only to watch the game, eat dinner, go home. I shook his
hand and did not give him my name.
"They need a real center," he said, looking at the
screen, not seeming perturbed in the slightest by my lack of
manners. "Way back when, they had the second–worst
record in the league. Got screwed in the lottery and the
best center in basketball went to San Antonio. 'Magine what
it would be like if we had gotten him?"
"Tim Duncan." I shouldn't have said anything. "That's the
fella. What did we get? A bag of mulch." "Chauncey Billups.
He's a good player."
"Yeah? Then why didn't he do anything for us?" "They
traded him away after a couple of months." "Maybe that's
where we got the bag of mulch."
He was right, but I felt no need to say so.
John returned with my cup of chowder and looked at
Bill, who nodded at what I had and said he'd like a bowl of
the same. And a glass of water. This was not going to pay
John's greens fees come May and he said nothing. He just
plunked ice cubes in a glass, squirted in some water,
plopped it on the bar, and stomped back to the kitchen.
"Don't come in here much," Bill said, looking around as
though this restaurant, which could have been most anywhere
on the Cape, was a very foreign venue.
The man was probably in his seventies. He wore a zippered
?eece jacket and appeared to have a sweater and a collared
shirt under that. His voice was not unpleasant and there did
not appear to be anything wrong with him. He just wanted to
talk. "Live over in Hyannis. Off Ocean Street."
I watched Paul Pierce heave in a
twenty–?ve–footer for the Celts. Nothing but
net. Hyannis was all of ?ve miles away. Buffered only by
Centerville, where I lived.
"Don't know if you recognize my name, but I've got a case
with you fellas."
I froze. This was one of the reasons I did not go out of
my way to tell people what I did.
"Perhaps you've heard talk about it around the of?ce.
Heidi Tel– ford? My daughter. Murdered nine years
ago." He was not looking at me. He was looking at the
screen. But he was concentrating on me. "Wianno Club, just
down the street from here. That's where they found her,
anyway." I could sense him shrugging, telling me he didn't
think that was where the murder had taken place.
I knew who Bill Telford was now. Anything New Telford.
He was something of a legend, periodically calling,
occasionally showing up, always asking the same question:
"Anything new on the Telford case?" Everyone tried to avoid
him, pass him on to the next–lowest person down the
line, let him get told by secretaries, paralegals, summer
in– terns, that no, there was nothing new about the
case of the pretty young girl who had her skull crushed and
was found on the sixteenth fairway of an
ultra–exclusive private golf course.
From what I understood, it wasn't that anyone had
anything against Mr. Telford. He was unfailingly polite,
never pushy, just persistent. If anything, the people in the
of?ce felt sorry for him. But there was nothing to report.
"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 any– thing, 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 ?shermen,
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—Hyannis, Marstons
Mills, maybe. But what you don't see very often is that kind
of crime in the hoity–toity places: Hy–
annisport, you know, or here in Osterville, for that
matter. Places where the big–money people have their
summer homes."
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
Mash– pee, 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 gonna go there."
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 of?ce. 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 any– body says anything,
no matter how small, I write it down, pass it along. Then I
follow up. Ninety percent of the time I ?nd 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 ?xed 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 hack– ing, trying to clear an air passage.
John came running from somewhere. So did one of the
waitresses. Somebody was pounding me on the back. It took a
few seconds to realize it was Mr. Telford.
"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 dinner and Fiona had wandered off
to do whatever she had to do, I said to Mr. Telford, "Look,
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but
I'm just an assistant D.A. I'm not even a ?rst assistant.
I'm assigned cases, I work on those, and that's all I do."
"I heard you backed down Chief DiMasi. I heard he wanted
to prosecute some colored boys for running a
bicycle–theft ring and you said no."
"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."
"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 ?le." He put a
?ve–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."
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