Текст книги "Crime of Privilege"

Автор книги: Walter Walker

Соавторы: Walter Walker
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

2

.

I CALLED BARBARA’S CELL PHONE.

“I’m in New York.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to need some help.”

“What kind of help?” Barbara had not hesitated before. Why now?

“An address, to start with.”

“If I can, I will.” Barbara, my collaborator, coming through again.

“And I’ll need one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You to go there, to the address I want you to give me.”

“Depends on where it is, doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve got the kids—”

“It’s here. In New York.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Tomorrow night. When can you do it?”

“Oh, God. I don’t know, George. I’ve only been back to work a few days.”

“Please, Barbara.” I took a deep breath. I forced myself to say it. “I need you.”

3

.

THE TOWNHOUSE AT THE END OF MORTON STREET WAS MADE OF red brick. Smooth red brick, neatly mortared. A brief walkway led in from the sidewalk to half a dozen concrete steps that rose to a small landing at the base of the front door, which was painted a glossy black and had brass fixtures. The face of the house was protected by a tiny yard filled with ivy plants and fenced off by curling wrought iron that matched the door in color and gloss.

It was dark when I rang the bell. It grew darker while I waited.

Out on the sidewalk, at the base of the railing, a figure in a soiled and ripped synthetic fur coat and a crushed felt hat sat down, hunched over, contemplated the gutter.

I rang again. And waited some more. I knew someone was inside. I could see the lights on the second and third floors. I could hear music.

I once again was wearing the Zegna suit and the red tie because it was all I had brought to New York. I had stayed at The Benjamin in Midtown, and the hotel had done a good job of getting my white shirt laundered, my socks and underwear cleaned—and for pretty much the same price I would have paid to buy them new.

I was about to ring a third time when the door was flung open.

The man who stood there had the long, straight hair that so many of those in his bloodline had, but he was short, like his sister Cory. Lexi Trotter had an army of men in uniform protecting her door; Jamie Gregory not only opened his door himself, but he had come down two or three flights to do it. Come in his blue button-down shirt, his cream-colored slacks, his Gucci shoes with no socks. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

He recognized me.

And that empowered me.

“Heh, heh,” I said. An expression of power.

“It’s not a good day for me,” he said, as if maybe I could come back another time to accuse him of murder.

“You got that right,” I told him.

In Jamie Gregory’s hand was a cocktail glass with a gold rim around its top. The liquor in the glass was floating several solid ice cubes. He dropped his eyes to the cubes and shook them a bit as if they, like me, were not doing what he wanted. “Maybe we could take this up later,” he said.

Something about this encounter was wrong. I asked him why he thought I was there.

“You’re the guy running for D.A., aren’t you?”

I recognized the music that was playing. Aerosmith. “Dream On.” Any guy my age would recognize it. There was an energy to it, a sense of frenzy that suited the moment.

“No,” I said. “I’m the guy from Palm Beach.”

“Of course you are. From the party at my family’s home.”

Of course you are. The sonofabitch. I thought of hitting him right then. How many people had I thought of hitting lately? How many times had I thought of hitting him, Jamie Gregory, in particular? All my adult life, it seemed.

“The party with Kendrick Powell,” I said between clenched teeth.

“Yes.” He sighed. He drank. He said, “And you want me to keep quiet about it.”

Keep quiet? Did I say that, or did the question just bulge from my face?

Down the stairs came Steven Tyler’s squealing, commanding voice: “Sing with me, Sing for the years.”

“The party,” I choked out, “where I watched you and your cousin molest her when she was too drunk to know what she was doing.” Why couldn’t I make it sound as bad as it was? Make it sound as bad out loud as it did in my head?

The ice cubes in Jamie Gregory’s glass swirled again. The drink sloshed over his fingers. “Is that the story you’re expecting to tell?”

“It’s the story that’s the fucking truth,” I said. But it wasn’t even the story I wanted to talk about. I had come to tell him I knew he had killed Heidi Telford. Barbara was supposed to be here. She was supposed to hear his confession, his admission. Maybe come down the staircase right now. A slender foot, a long leg, a hand on the railing. I looked and there was nothing. All that was coming down the stairs was the music. “Dream on, Dream on, Dream until your dreams come true.”

“You know, my friend,” he said, as if I needed a lesson and he was resigned to giving it to me, “sometimes things happen. They might seem all right at the time, and then, years later, you’re doing something else, you want to do something else, and all of a sudden you realize you have to explain this thing you did way back when.” The glass went to his mouth. He spoke over the gold rim. “I understand that.”

“Fuck you.”

He looked disappointed at my argument. “I assume that’s what’s going on with you,” he said, shaking the ice. “I mean, I know what you did. My uncle knows. He doesn’t condone it, but he did the best he could to get you out of it because you were a guest in his house. In truth, he feels quite guilty about whatever little participation we had.”

Participation? They were the ones who took her into the library. I just followed. I just stood there with a drink in my hand and a stupid half-smile on my face.

“He thinks, well, Peter and I should have watched you closer. Things happen in our house, anywhere near our house, anything to do with anyone who was at our house, and the whole family gets held responsible. It’s the way it is, we realize that. We’re supposed to realize that. And so we were responsible for you, and what happened is embarrassing all around. Especially embarrassing when someone tries to make a criminal case out of it.”

What was he talking about? It was a criminal case. It was only because the Florida state attorney quashed the investigation that it wasn’t.

Jamie was drinking again. It was not a matter of giving me time to say something so much as it was simply time for him to drink.

When he was done he put his cocktail glass down on what must have been a shelf or a table just inside the door. He let his hand stay there where I couldn’t see it. He returned his eyes to mine. It had been time to take a drink, and now it was time to pay attention to me. Except his hand stayed out of sight. “Fortunately,” he said, “that’s all behind us now.”

What was? The rape?

“I mean, you got out of it all right, didn’t you?” he asked, as if he was inquiring about a sunburn. “All these years, you’ve been able to fly beneath the radar and everything’s been fine.”

Was he asking or was he telling me? No, I wanted to say. I’ve been in retreat, hiding, wasting my life while you went on to do whatever you wanted, wherever you wanted.

“And then one day you took a look at your boss and decided you should have his job.” Jamie shook his head. His hair fell over his brow and he had to use his free hand to brush it out of his eyes. “So now you come here because you want to make sure I’ve still got your back. Do I have that right?”

Where had he come up with this? And who was he saying it for? Someone had to be behind the door or just up the stairs. Someone who was doing for him what Barbara was supposed to have done for me.

Unless it was Barbara.

Maybe he wouldn’t know she was there for me. There to hear his confession. To be my proof.

“On Memorial Day of 1999 you hit Heidi Telford over the head with a golf club and killed her,” I blurted out.

Jamie Gregory recoiled. “Hey, guy,” he said, “you don’t have to do this.” Then, when I did not blubber anything else, he began to speak soothingly, the way people do to horses that are spooked. “You want to talk about how to handle the Palm Beach matter, that’s fine. You don’t have to go around tossing out wild accusations.” His eyes left mine, traveled over my shoulder to the street, and seemed to get stuck there. “You want to come inside?”

Sure, go inside. And if Barbara was not there, what was I supposed to do then? Grab him in a headlock with one arm while I used the other to call the police?

Of course, chances were it wasn’t Barbara I would find in there. It could be someone like Pierre Mumford, ready to snap my neck, say I fell down the stairs. The Gregorys probably had family boot camp, where they learned how to deal with adversaries, people who came after them, threatened them, wanted something from them. Never admit anything. Always have someone to back you up.

Jamie continued to look out to the street. I gathered his attention was on the guy in the soiled coat and crushed hat at the base of his wrought-iron fence, and then his hand suddenly came out from wherever it had been, came out with an ice cube and threw it. I turned in time to see the ice hit the person in the middle of the back. “Hey, you!” he yelled. But the figure took his abuse and did not so much as move.

Jamie shrugged at me, as though we had just done this together, thrown an ice cube at a homeless man. Then he stepped back, inclined his body slightly forward and did a mock sweep of his arm. “You coming in?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Well then,” he said, pointing upward with his index finger, “I’ve got company.”

He did not grin the way I had seen him in Palm Beach, but that grin was what entered my mind. Here I had just accused the man of murder and he was excusing himself because he had a date. I knew what that meant, having a date with Jamie Gregory, and I stomped my foot onto his threshold before he could close the door. “I’ve spoken to Lexi Sommers,” I said.

For the first time, I got the reaction I was expecting. Jamie looked at my face, looked at my foot, then stepped back. “I told you,” he said, moving away from the door, backing toward the wall of his foyer, creating space between us, “you don’t have to do any of this. You want the D.A.’s job, there’s plenty of ways we can help. But it doesn’t serve anybody’s best interest to go around threatening people. Someone hears you … they might even think you’re engaged in blackmail.”

Did his eyes flick to one side when he paused, or was it just my imagination?

“Lexi told me she was sleeping with your cousin Ned when it happened.”

“Then she wouldn’t be able to tell you anything, would she?” he said softly.

“She says they got woken up because something had to be done.”

“And what was that?”

“Something had to be done about the dead girl downstairs.”

It was unclear if I had guessed right, but his lips spread. It was still not the Palm Beach grin, just one that said I was nuts, didn’t know what I was talking about, was profoundly mistaken. It was a grin that did not require his eyes to do anything at all.

Was I panting? Hyperventilating? Something was affecting my voice, making it tight and low. “She said it was Peter who woke them, Jamie. Because you were downstairs, trying to clean up the mess you had made.”

“That’s bullshit,” he said. He didn’t sound angry. I was certain now that there was someone in the room next to him, someone just beyond my vision.

“Something bad happens,” I said, trying to speak louder, “no matter how mad you Gregorys are at each other, you stick together. That’s the family code, right?”

“We do stick together,” he agreed. “We stuck with you down in Florida, didn’t we?”

“Peter was going to get the last girl that night and you were going to be the loser, weren’t you, Jamie? Couldn’t entice her to go off with you, so you decided to make sure he didn’t get her, either. That’s the way all you hypercompetitive Gregorys are, isn’t it?”

“What we are is loyal to our friends and to those who are loyal to us. You took advantage of that girl down there; you wanted help. We gave it to you. Now you’re afraid it’s going to come back and bite you in the butt.”

“Heidi Telford never left by the side gate, as you guys tried to make it seem. There was no motorist who picked her up while she was walking home. It was just you, Jamie, who screwed everything up that night.”

“What I apparently screwed up was not turning you over to the police after catching you violating Kendrick Powell.”

“You and Peter actually got into a fight over Heidi, and when Paul McFetridge broke it up, you ran off and got the first weapon you could find.”

“So what you’re thinking is that you can keep me from talking when you announce your candidacy by pretending you’ve got something on me. I talk about the rape and you’ll tell everyone I’m a murderer, is that it?”

“Came back with a golf club. But you weren’t going to beat in your cousin’s skull, were you? That would tear the family apart if you killed your cousin. And your family doesn’t tear apart. You’re against each other only until it’s time to be against everyone else.”

Jamie Gregory looked into my face as if he were searching for something.

“So you snuck up on Heidi and hit her from behind.”

“Fact is,” he said, “a girl like Kendrick would never have had anything to do with a guy like you.”

“How do you like your date now, Peter, huh? Like her with her skull split open?”

“And there she was, practically passed out on the couch, unable to stop you from doing anything you wanted.” He moved to one side. Toward what? Toward a room that I couldn’t see, toward whatever was going to get me if I actually went inside the house?

I stayed where I was. “Heidi Telford wasn’t just passed out,” I said, my voice pursuing him. “She was dead. And you and Peter were scared. You had to do something before the guests woke up in the morning and found the body, the blood, the little bits of brain and bone you had left scattered around.”

“You must have thought you were in heaven. Seeing her lying on the couch like that.”

“So Peter went to get Ned, get some help, while you started the clean up.”

“She couldn’t even resist.”

“One of you, one of the three, came up with the idea of taking her to the golf course, putting her out there in the trees along the fairway. It was dark, it was accessible, it kept to some kind of theme in terms of how she had gotten killed.”

“What did you do with her underwear, anyhow?”

“It wasn’t a good idea, but all three of you participated, and then the family machine started putting its spin on things, planting rumors, stories, buying off witnesses, just like you did down in Florida. Just like you always do.”

“Put it in your pocket, was that it? Running off with a drunk girl’s underwear in your pocket.” He formed his fingers into a circle and made a pumping motion. And there it was, on his face, the same grin I had seen in Palm Beach, the one that had been in my mind for a dozen years.

The hand was pumping, the music was pouring down the stairs, the bastard was grinning at me, and I went after him. I took one lunging step, and Jamie Gregory’s eyes went wide. Only they weren’t looking at me. They were looking past me, behind me, and the hand, the one that had been pumping, went up in front of his face.

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

4

.

THE 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.

5

.

THE 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?”

6

.

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.