Page 26 of Old Money
“Good morning!”
She’s young—maybe twenty-four—with a smile that makes her look even younger. She stands at a computer desk behind the tall wooden barrier separating the waiting room from the rest of the station. Her reddish hair is pulled into a tight French braid. She is not what I’m used to seeing in this police station. Or any police station.
“How can I help?” she chirps, still smiling (genuinely, I think). I roll with it.
“Nothing major.” I shrug, crossing the room and swinging my bag forward. “Just a Freedom of Information request.”
The phrase sounds ridiculous in my casual tone, but Jessie doesn’t seem to notice.
“Ooh, a FOIL, okay!” she answers. “Looks like you came prepared.”
I thunk down my file of forms on her desk—one for each record I’m requesting: forensics reports, evidence inventories, medical exam notes and all police interviews, including my own. Thanks to New York’s Freedom of Information Law, I have the right to request such records—but the law says nothing about making it easy. In other jurisdictions I could do this on my phone. In Briar’s Green, you have to bring your printed,signed and notarized papers in person, between the hours of noon and 2:30 p.m.
“Look at you,” says the officer, eyeing my file. “ID?”
I hand her my license and she takes it with another proud-of-you grin.
“I’m Jessie, by the way,” she says, then taps the nameplate on her chest. “Officer Applebaum, if anyone else is around, but—”
She shrugs at the empty room with a goofy face, and I laugh because she laughs. Then she looks down at my license.
“And you’re Alice...” Her mouth drops slack. “Oh.”
She looks up, checking my face.
“Oh. Okay.”
My heart starts bouncing as I watch her open the file and look at the first sheet of paper—the names written on it.
“Right,” she says to herself—and then to me, more firmly. “Right. This might take a few minutes.”
“I’ve got a few minutes,” I tell her.
***
It’s almost refreshing—someone acknowledging that they know me and my whole horrifying story. No one else in the village would be so direct; that’s not how gossip works here. People don’t address things directly. They just find a way to let you know what they know. Your wife leaves you for her lover in the city, and next month you get a Christmas card addressed to you alone, rather than “Mr. and Mrs.” You return from a month of bulimia treatment, and whenever you go to a dinner party now, the host pulls you aside, whispering with performative discretion, “Feeling all right?” And if you do—or evensee—something really bad, then everyone simply looks away. You don’t exist, and that ugly business never happened. Why on earth would you say such dreadful things?
The truth is everyone knows who killed Caitlin—everyone knew back then too. It was a massive crime in a tiny village, and about two hundred of the most powerful residents were standingabout ten yards away when it happened. The police interviewed eight of them.
The investigation was quick and dirty—though to be fair, the scene was chaotic before they arrived. The fireworks were still going when I came running up the hill, screaming and bloodstained. The crowd on the terrace turned to me and froze for several seconds before slowly reanimating. One of the members ran into the clubhouse to call 911, and another one—a surgeon—sprinted past me toward the pool, barking for others to come help. A handful of men pulled Caitlin’s body from the pool and tried to resuscitate her, which only served to pump blood and pool water (both potentially useful evidence) out from her insides. Uncle Greg was stumbling toward the pool like a zombie, trying to push through the group surrounding him. Aunt Barbara was somewhere, screaming.
The pandemonium went on for twenty-five minutes before the police arrived. It was July Fourth, the busiest night of the year for them—perhaps theironlybusy night. As we say in the village, you can’t get a speeding ticket on Independence Day. From afternoon on, the village cops are patrolling for private (and illegal) fireworks, bonfires and sparklers. It’s a whole other kind of pandemonium, with half the village ratting out the other, and cop cars zooming up and down Route 9, sirens blaring. If there’s one thing our police force knows how to do it’s bust up a lawn party.
A violent crime scene, not so much. When the officers finally arrived that night, they quickly scrambled to section off the pool, and in doing so, only muddled things further: clearing away lounge chairs, stepping in bodily fluids and tracking them across the cement. Meanwhile, the clubhouse was left unattended, and the party quickly cleared out. By the time they came up to take statements, half the guests were already gone, and the rest were reaching for their purses and jackets,terriblysorry they couldn’t help more. The officers did get a few on-site interviews, all brief and seemingly random: a handful of members,Mr. Brody, some servers and Theo (but only because he’d insisted on giving one). I was still in shock—parked between him and Mom in a corner of the pink ballroom, wrapped in a crinkly emergency blanket—and even I remember thinking something seemed off. What about the others? Were they all going to the station? Would the police talk to them there?
Even for inexperienced cops, it was a meager pantomime of effort. It was as if they already knew that Patrick’s parents would intervene—and perhaps they already had. Whatever deal they made was clearly done before Patrick went in for his own interview the next day. The rest of the investigation (all seven days of it) was even less convincing. They never returned to the club to see the grounds during daylight. They let them drain the pool to be cleaned and reopened, no need to wait. They did conduct some further interviews, but the only people they called to the station—where the press remained camped out—were those the press already knew about: Liv and Whitney Yates, Aunt Barbara, Uncle Gregory and Alex Chapman—Patrick’s alibi.
Alex is the only one I’d like to speak to myself. He was Patrick’s best friend, and the one who vouched for his whereabouts during the murder. I know for a fact they’re still close—Alex was even there for Patrick’s proposal. According to Susannah’s Instagram post, “Chappy” is the one who took the picture. He’s a long-shot to say the least, but he’s worth the effort.
My aunt and uncle—no. Not worth it. I haven’t seen or spoken to them in twenty years, and I don’t need to. I already know what they have to say.
Patrick’s parents I’ll steer clear of. They were never potential sources, of course, but I did consider them targets at first. They’re the ones who scuttled the investigation—that part’s not even an open secret so much as a generally accepted fact. Whit Yates was the youngest of an old-school generation of politicians—the kind who thought greasing palms was only polite and that Marilyn Monroe had it coming to her. And with a son like Patrick, he was used to throwing money at the problem,be it a stolen speedboat, a bottle of someone else’s pain medication or a party prank involving said opioids, which landed two other teenagers in the ER.
That incident had raised a few eyebrows, and gotten a little more than the usual finger-wagging coverage in the tabloids. Whit Yates was confronted while leaving a fundraiser at the Met one night—stopped cold in his tux by a handful of reporters asking for comment on his son’s alleged use of a drug that some doctors now claimed was more lethal than morphine. Where had he gotten the pills? Was it true one of the kids he’d dosed had needed to be resuscitated? And why was Patrick, son of Senator Whitney Yates—a self-proclaimed admiral in the war on drugs—facing no criminal charges whatsoever? In response, Whit Yates had offered a polite half smile and a shake of the head:
“Boys will be boys.”
Then he’d literally waved them off and walked away. He hadn’t even noticed one of them had a cameraman with them. It was the kind of moment that would’ve gone viral today—the tux, the blithe smile—and even in the late ’90s, it left a good scuff on Yates’s burnished reputation. But it didn’t amount to any actual consequences. It just underscored the fact that families like the Yateses didn’t face the same sort of consequences as everyone else. People tutted, shook their heads and changed the channel.
