Crime of Privilege

“Which part don’t you remember, son?”

I wondered if I could say I didn’t remember any of it. But Kendrick had told him I had been there. She had told him, told someone, enough to track me down. Had I given her my last name? I must have told her where I went to school. She said Bryn Mawr, I said Pe

Had she been sober enough to remember any of it? She had been sober enough to drive. She had had a little sports car. A red one. An Alfa Romeo drop-top. With a stick shift. And I had let her get in it, get behind the steering wheel, go off down the gravel driveway and out the gate to Ocean Boulevard. But so had the valet. A smiling young black man, to whom I had given five bucks.

He should have said something.

“I was just there in the room when she was fooling around with those guys.”

The man’s breathing became more shallow, as if somehow I had just insulted him, the man who had brought me coffee, the man who had called me “son.” “Fooling around?” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Is that what you call it?”

I didn’t answer. There was nothing I could say that was going to bring this conversation to a pleasant end.

“Do you know who Mr. Powell is, George?”

“No.”

“You ever hear of CPA Properties?”

“No.”

“CPA stands for Coltrane Powell Associates, out of Delaware. It’s the largest developer of commercial properties in the Mid-Atlantic region.”

I didn’t know CPA. I didn’t know the first thing about developers.

“Delaware, Maryland, eastern Pe

I said nothing, tasted my coffee, which tasted like nothing. My bare feet began to rattle on the stairs. I told myself it was just because I was cold and tried to hold them steady, press them down into the old wooden planks.

“Mr. Coltrane is dead.”

Mr. Coltrane. Who was Mr. Coltrane, and why was that of any interest to me?

“Which makes Mr. Powell virtually the sole owner of CPA and a very wealthy man. A very. Wealthy. Man.”

Did he just jab my knee with his finger? Was that what that sudden weight was? Was that why my leg went numb? I tried to kick it out. It wouldn’t move.

“More wealthy, I would venture to say, than even your friends the Gregorys. The difference is …”

I waited for him to tell me, waited for the numbness in my leg to clear. Both happened at the same time.

“… his money was earned during his lifetime.”

Yes, of course. The Gregorys had to go back two generations for theirs. Back to Peter’s and Jamie’s grandfather. I wondered what he had done to get my leg to spasm like that.

“Not so many people know about Mr. Powell’s money, which makes it a little easier for him to operate. Doesn’t get in all the right clubs as easily as the Gregorys, but he’s under a lot less scrutiny, if you know what I mean.”

Did I? A lot less scrutiny for what?

“Mr. Powell wants something done, he’s in a position to get people to do it.”

“People like you, you mean?”

It was a childish swipe and Mr. Andrews easily deflected it. “Know what I did before I went to work for Mr. Powell?” He did not expect me to answer. He paused just long enough to build suspense. “I was Special Forces.”

My leg almost spasmed on its own, without him even touching me.

“There were things I learned there that make me a valuable person to a man like Mr. Powell.”

“Learned how to go around intimidating college kids, did you?”

Mr. Andrews took a long time to respond. He spent that time searing me with his eyes. It was impossible for me to look back at him. I glanced, looked away, glanced back, and looked away again. “I learned,” he said, his words coming out slowly, each seemingly hanging in the few inches of air between us, “a lot more than that, pal.”

I had little doubt that he did. My hand was now shaking in counterpoint to my feet and I chose not to even try to raise my coffee to my lips. “What is it you want, Mr. Andrews?”

Very slowly, he reached inside his gray jacket. I thought about throwing the coffee at him. I would throw it directly into his face and then roll away. Throw, roll, run. In fact, I could not even move.

“I want you to talk to the Palm Beach County state attorney.” Mr. Andrews was now holding an envelope that he extended into that very small gap between us. “Round-trip airline tickets, five hundred dollars expense money.” He nodded at the envelope. “Instructions on whom to call and where to go.” He pushed it closer, so that it was touching my chin, then he traced it up my jawline. “I want you to fly down there and tell the state attorney the truth about what happened at the Gregory home week before last.”

There were cars going by in the street, one after another, a steady stream heading west. Drive off in that direction, you could just keep on going, get on Highway 80, take it all the way to California, where nobody would have heard of Josh David Powell and CPA Properties, and where they might not even care so much about the Gregory family.

The envelope came to rest against the side of my face. “Georgie? You still with me?”

I pulled my head away. The envelope followed. My ear was practically against my shoulder when I said, “Look, Mr. Andrews, the truth is, I didn’t really see what went on. Kendrick was really drunk. They all were. We all were.” Suddenly my words were flowing and I seemed to have no more control of them than I did the cars in front of me. I didn’t know where they came from or where they were going, they just appeared, one after another. “She’s a beautiful girl, that much I remember, but I hardly know her. Okay? I hardly knew anybody at the party and so I was just kind of wandering around by myself. I was talking to her, talking to some of the Gregorys, looking at all the stuff on the walls, and then I ended up in the library and there she was on the couch, fooling around.”

“You keep saying that, don’t you, kid?” The corner of the envelope carved into a spot beneath my ear. It pi

Jesus, I wanted to say, it was only one foreign object. I stopped the second one. But I didn’t say anything at all. For a moment or two I may not have been breathing at all.

Mr. Andrews swung around so that one of his legs was below mine, his foot on the stair below where my feet were. He was practically surrounding me, so close I should have been able to smell the coffee on his breath as he hissed, “That girl’s in therapy now. Probably will be for a long time.”

I thought of telling him the things I had been telling myself. Kendrick knew what she was doing when she went to the party in her fancy little sports car and her tight little dress. She knew what she was doing when she got drunk, when she went into the library with those guys. Who would go into a closed room with Peter and Jamie, for God’s sake?

I said none of that and yet Mr. Andrews seemed to have heard it all. “You really are an arrogant little shit, aren’t you?”

The last guy who had said something like that to me had gotten a fist in the face. But I wasn’t doing that now. I was just trying to move my head to keep Mr. Andrews away, keep his teeth away, keep them from ripping the skin from my skull.

And then suddenly he pulled back, as though he couldn’t stand being near me any longer. “I don’t know how you justify it,” he said, “but what Peter Martin did to Kendrick Powell was something you wouldn’t accept from an animal. And he’s going to pay for it.”

Rich girl, tight dress. If she was so drunk that she allowed what happened to happen, then she couldn’t really be psychologically scarred, could she?