Crime of Privilege: A Novel (47 page)

I spun and raised my arm to protect my own head from whatever was coming.

T
HE POLICE WERE THERE WITHIN MINUTES. TWO MINUTES, MAYBE
. Time was a blur. Everything was a blur except what was directly in front of me,
which was Jamie’s body, crumpled at the base of the foyer wall. He had a hole in his
chest, right about where his heart should be, and blood was gushing out of it. I had
both my hands over the hole, trying to keep the blood in, pushing down on his chest
because I did not know what else to do; hampered in everything I tried by Darra Lane,
who had come running down the stairs as soon as Jamie collapsed. She had dived on
top of him, shaking his shoulders, beseeching him to wake up.

There had been a shot. A single loud, unnatural noise that had come from the street,
overwhelming all other sounds for an instant and then swallowed up by accelerating
engines and whirring tires and screeching brakes.

A car had appeared out of nowhere, right behind the figure in the old coat and battered
hat. Right behind him because he was facing me. The hat did not quite hide the cold,
narrow features beneath its brim. The loose sleeve of the coat most definitely did
not cover the pistol held in the right hand.

It had happened so fast. I tensed, thinking I was hit, thinking that on the other
side of me something had been punctured and was letting out air. There was a crash.
Then a scream. All the noises started separately,
then blended together, and Jamie Gregory, his arms flung over his head, dropped to
the floor.

My head whipped back toward the street, toward the figure in the battered coat and
hat. With an underhand toss, he flipped the gun into the ivy between the house and
the wrought-iron fence. He looked at me. Our eyes held for a moment: He wanted me
to know who he was. Then Roland Andrews jumped into the backseat of the car and was
gone.

T
HE FIRST COP TO ARRIVE WAS A BULKY FELLOW, OR LOOKED THAT
way in his flak vest and his blue jacket. He recognized Darra immediately and believed
everything she said, which, to the extent it was coherent, was that I had shot her
boyfriend.

The cop pushed me back from the body and left Darra to flop around on top of it and
do even less than I had to try to save Jamie’s life. He was holding me against a wall,
an arm across my neck, when reinforcements arrived. Two cops in uniform, two without.
The guys without were detectives and they were not wearing suits, but they had plenty
of comments about mine. While their colleagues tended to Jamie, they braced me, demanding
to know why I was there, dressed like I was, on Mr. Gregory’s doorstep. They fingered
my lapels, told each other the suit must have cost a grand, must have come from Barneys,
wasn’t ever going to be any good again now that it had blood all over it. They wanted
to know if Mr. Gregory had cost me a lot of money, if that was why I was at his house.

“Was it because of what happened in the market today?” said one.

“He lose you a shitload?” said the other.

An ambulance with lights rocketing in every direction arrived, and paramedics raced
up the steps and into the house, pushing past us to get to what was now, clearly,
a dead body on the floor. I told the detectives I didn’t know what they were talking
about, that I was an assistant
district attorney investigating a murder on Cape Cod. We were being jostled this way
and that and Darra had gone from screaming to wailing and I was half shoved, half
guided into the adjoining room. It was sort of a den, sort of a breakfast room, with
a fireplace at one end and a wooden table in the middle, and the detectives backed
me into the table and demanded my identification.

They did a lot of smirking when I could not produce it. They got my Bar card out of
my wallet, passed it back and forth, and decided I was an unhappy investor after all.

“Lost your ID but not your wallet, is that it?”

“What, were you trying to pick up girls by flashing it around?”

“Don’t work for me when I show ’em my badge.”

“Nah, they wanna see your baton instead.”

They were really getting into it, throwing remarks back and forth, when one of the
uniforms came rushing into the room shouting that he had found the gun.

The two detectives looked at each other, looked at me, and began shaking their heads.

“Bad enough you shoot a Gregory,” said one.

“But doin’ it in front of a movie star,” said the other.

“Then throwing the weapon in the bushes. What do ya think, we’re stupid?”

“Think you can get away with it because you got a fuckin’ suit on?”

“Fuckin’ Barneys suit?”

“You’re up shit creek, pal.”

“Suit’s not gonna do ya much good at Rikers Island.”

“You wanna tell us the truth now?”

I
WAS NEVER TAKEN TO RIKERS ISLAND. I SPENT THE NIGHT OF JAMIE
’
S
shooting in a precinct, explaining how I happened to be where I was. I started with
the rape of Kendrick Powell in Palm Beach, then talked of Josh David Powell’s twelve-year
quest for revenge.

The two detectives kept interrupting me. “Peter Martin, the doctor?” one of them said.

“Guy’s devoted his life to helping other people, and you claim he’s a rapist?” the
other one mocked.

“And you, what, you sitting in some easy chair jerking off while all this was going
on?” the first one demanded.

I reminded them I was now an assistant district attorney investigating a murder.

“Yeah, right,” said the second detective. “In some piss-off fish-town famous for saltwater
taffy.”

“And for the Gregorys,” said the first. “That just a coincidence? You bein’ there,
in their hometown?”

My failure to answer that only encouraged them.

“So,” said detective number one, “you see the Gregorys rape a girl, you take a job
in their hometown, then you’re told to find a murderer, and lo and behold, it turns
out to be one of them. That your story?”

It was my story. All it got me was eye rolls and guttural noises.

I tried to tell them about Bill Telford, about his theory of Heidi going to the Gregorys’
house. They cut me off.

“Those Gregorys must be real bad people,” detective number one said, “Goin’ around
raping and killing.”

“Especially Peter Martin,” said the other. “Devotes his life to saving people, except
when he’s fucking ’em up.”

“Dr. Jerk-Off and Mr. Hyde,” said the first, who seemed to have a bit of a fixation.

“Sounds to me like you got it in for these guys, George.”

“Something goes wrong, blame it on the Gregorys.”

“Except now you’re taking it one step further.”

“Shoot one of ’em, blame it on someone they done wrong.”

“Plenty people like that out there.”

“Sure. Gotta be a million of ’em.”

“There’s a million Gregorys, aren’t there?”

“Million times a million.”

It was easy for them to keep up their witty banter because they knew I had killed
Jamie.

Darra Lane had told them so.

EVENTUALLY THE DETECTIVES
left me alone and I sat for a long time with nothing to do but stare at the table,
the walls, the mirror through which I assumed someone was watching me. When they came
back there was an entirely different cast to their faces. They looked like they had
been taken to the woodshed.

They also were not alone. With them was another man, a captain, who appeared to have
showered and shaved and dressed for the meeting. It was 1:00 in the morning.

I told the captain everything I had told the detectives. He didn’t laugh, he didn’t
joke. He wanted to know Roland Andrews’s phone number, where he lived, some way to
track him down. I told him Andrews only contacted me. I had no way to get in touch
with him, nothing to give but the address of Marion’s apartment in Boston.

After that I was never even put in a cell. I was not fingerprinted, I
was not photographed, the police did not so much as swab my hands to see if they could
find any gunpowder residue. I was just left alone in the interrogation room. A few
hours passed and one of the detectives stuck his head in and asked if I wanted to
call anyone. I said I wanted to call Mitch White and he told me they already had.
He said Mitch was sending somebody down. He asked if there was anyone else, a wife,
a girlfriend, a buddy. I said there was no one.

THE SOMEBODY MITCH
sent turned out to be Barbara Belbonnet. I did not know whether I was grateful or
furious to see her. I probably showed no emotion at all. For her part, she was distraught.
She had tried calling me, she insisted. Seven, eight, nine times, and I had never
answered the cell phone.

The fact of the matter was, I had not come down to New York intending to spend the
night. I had not brought my cell-phone charger, had not bought another, had not asked
the hotel for assistance, and the phone had died in the afternoon without me even
realizing it. If it had been on I would have known that Barbara had not been able
to get a babysitter. Her parents were going to a dinner at the Wianno Club. She had
no one else to watch Malcolm, not overnight.

But she had come mid-morning to take me back, keep me away from the press. I wasn’t
being charged, even though Darra Lane’s agent had already arranged a press conference
in which she told the world that a well-dressed man had come to Jamie’s door and shot
him dead right in front of her. There were a dozen television trucks outside the police
station and a hundred reporters waiting to see who that well-dressed man was, who
the police had taken into custody. The police weren’t saying, were admitting only
that they had a witness, and for security’s sake they were withholding his identity.
“When a Gregory gets shot,” the chief of the NYPD declared at his own press conference
that morning, “there could be all kinds of ramifications.”

Meanwhile, I was being told by Barbara that Mitch had arranged things. If I was willing,
the police would let me have a uniform to wear walking out of the rear of the building.
They would put the two of us
in a squad car and take us to LaGuardia. That was a problem, I told her, since I no
longer had my ID and could not get through airport security. There were more negotiations.
It was decided I would take the train from Penn Station. She couldn’t, however. She
was going to have to fly back. She had to pick up the kids.

CAPE COD, September 2008

I
T WAS AFTER 8:00 ON THE NIGHT FOLLOWING JAMIE GREGORY
’
S
death when I got to South Station in Boston. The shooting was one of two major stories
in the newspapers. The other had to do with the collapse of a pair of financial institutions,
including the very one that had employed Jamie. It seemed something had gone terribly
wrong with sub-prime mortgages. The newspapers thought the two stories were related.

There was a car and driver waiting for me when I got off the train. I did not know
the driver, and he did not ask me any questions. If he knew what I had been through,
he did not acknowledge it. We rode in silence for the hour and fifteen minutes it
took to get from Boston to Barnstable.

The triumvirate were still in the office when I arrived: Mitch in his short-sleeved
shirt, Dick with his belly hanging over his belt, Reid with his steel-gray eyeglasses.
None of them was concerned with my physical or mental well-being. But they very much
wanted to hear what I had to say. I did what I had tried and failed to do in New York,
laid out the entire case against Jamie, laid it out painstakingly, starting in Palm
Beach. Dick showed shock. Mitch looked uncomfortable. Reid was impassive.

“According to New York,” Reid said when I was done, “they contacted Mr. Powell in
Delaware and he claims not only to have never employed a Roland Andrews but never
to have heard of him. NYPD says they have searched databases for the entire country
and can come up with no one by that name who fits your description.” He picked up
a piece of paper, what appeared to be a faxed letter. “They tell me,” he said, holding
it by its corner, letting it swing back and forth between us, “there is no record
of a Roland Andrews ever serving in the Special Forces.”

“Check the fingerprints on the gun,” I urged. “Andrews had to have served in some
branch of the armed forces. There ought to be a match somewhere.”

“There were no prints on the gun,” Reid said. He did not act surprised or even disappointed.

“We think,” said Dick O’Connor, his round face filled with innocent goodwill, “you
might be best off going with the story that the shooter was a disgruntled investor.”

When I didn’t say anything, he went further. “Big collapse on Wall Street yesterday.
A lot of angry people out there. People who lost everything.”

I looked at the others. Reid appeared to be nodding, although with such economy of
movement it was hard to tell. Mitch was neither speaking nor moving. He was just staring.

I
T WAS DECIDED I WOULD TAKE A LEAVE OF ABSENCE, WITH PAY
. There would be no explanation and, I was told, if I was smart I wouldn’t offer one
myself. “Let the New York cops continue their investigation,” said Reid. “They haven’t
disclosed your identity in any way. Leave it at that. The alternative, you know, the
alternative is they parade you in front of the bimbo, let her identify you.”

When I pointed out that it had been my job to find the killer of Heidi Telford and
that I had done just that, Dick O’Connor shook his head until his jowls shimmied.
“What you got is not enough to meet our burden of proof,” he said. “You know how it
is: We’ve got to show beyond a reasonable doubt. But here, what do you have, really?
Some gal in New York says it wasn’t Peter; you figure that means it was Jamie. You
go to Jamie, try to beat a confession out of him. Only he doesn’t confess. ’Least,
nobody hears him confess.”