Crime Of Privilege: A Novel Part 40

"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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.

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 gus.h.i.+ng out of it. I had both my hands over the hole, trying to keep the blood in, pus.h.i.+ng 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. .h.i.t, 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.

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 s.h.i.+tload?" said the other.

An ambulance with lights rocketing in every direction arrived, and paramedics raced up the steps and into the house, pus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sistant 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, pa.s.sed 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 f.u.c.kin' suit on?"

"f.u.c.kin' Barneys suit?"

"You're up s.h.i.+t 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 a.s.sistant district attorney investigating a murder.

"Yeah, right," said the second detective. "In some p.i.s.s-off fish-town famous for salt.w.a.ter 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 f.u.c.king 'em up."

"Dr. j.e.r.k.-.o.f.f. 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sistance, 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 ident.i.ty. "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.

IT 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 s.h.i.+rt, d.i.c.k with his belly hanging over his belt, Reid with his steel-gray eyegla.s.ses. 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. d.i.c.k showed shock. Mitch looked uncomfortable. Reid was impa.s.sive.

"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 d.i.c.k 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.

IT 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 ident.i.ty 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, d.i.c.k O'Connor shook his head until his jowls s.h.i.+mmied. "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, n.o.body hears him confess."

He shrugged helplessly. "Which means, all we've got is you."

"And," added Reid, "you're tainted."

I WENT HOME AND I WAITED. I WASN'T SURE FOR WHAT.

Every day I listened to the radio: the local Cape stations, WBZ in Boston, NPR. The airwaves were filled with talk about the economic crisis. Every day I read The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Cape Cod Times. There were articles about Jamie's death, about the funeral, about his family. There continued to be speculation about the connection between his killer and the money that Jamie had lost for investors. Both the police and the FBI claimed to be investigating. "But," explained one NYPD spokesman, "there were just so many people who were wiped out, it may take years."

Every day I got out my bike and rode as far as I could, for as long as I could.

I HAD A CALL from Barbara. She wanted to know how I was doing.

She also wanted to tell me that with my office door closed and locked, there were rumors flying around the office about where I was and what was happening to me. Sean Murphy, she said, was telling people it was not just a coincidence that I had disappeared on the very day Jamie Gregory was shot.

I hung up with Barbara and immediately called d.i.c.k O'Connor. He told me I needed to lie low, let the process take its course. I repeated what I had heard about the rumors and d.i.c.k agreed that it was unfortunate. He said he would speak to Sean and urged me to be patient. "Things are being taken care of, Georgie," he insisted.

THE RESULTS OF the autopsy were released. It turned out Darra Lane had done me an enormous favor. In her press conference, in her stories to the police, on television and in magazines, she had insisted that a man in a suit had shot Jamie Gregory from just a couple of feet away. The autopsy confirmed that Jamie had been shot from a distance, at least twenty-five feet, said the coroner, who commented that it was a rather remarkable feat of marksmans.h.i.+p for a nine-millimeter pistol. The shooter must have been well trained, he said.