Crime of Privilege

“So, she’s going to sue him?” I said, because I had to say something, because I wanted to know if this girl who was so humiliated was going to exchange her humiliation for money.

“Sue? No, George, she’s not going to sue.” He spoke as if only an avaricious weakling like me would think of such a thing. “Like I told you, the Powells have every bit as much if not more money than the Gregorys. No, what Josh David wants is to bring them in line, once and for all.” He waited for me to lift my head again. He wanted to make sure I was listening to every word. “The Gregorys have been getting away with this sort of outrageous behavior for a long time, and Mr. Powell’s determined to put an end to it. Expose them for what they are. Let the world see they have to play by the same rules as everybody else.”

“And I gather you need me to do that.”

He waved the envelope.

I looked down at it, looked up and saw McFetridge come walking along the street. Mr. Andrews saw that, too, and the envelope disappeared.

McFetridge wasn’t just walking, he was sauntering. He had spent the night with one of the girls from Tri Delt, and he had his socks sticking out of the pockets of his jacket to prove it.

The sauntering slowed as he saw the stranger next to me. His eyes darted between us. McFetridge was six-feet-four, a te

“Hey,” I said, and did not otherwise move.

“Hey,” said Mr. Andrews. He did not move, either.

McFetridge stopped. “What’s going on?”

“This is Mr. Andrews. He used to be in Special Forces.”

Fu

“Yeah?” said McFetridge, staring down at the older man. No doubt McFetridge was feeling full of himself, having just gotten laid, this being his front porch, it being spring semester of his senior year.

“Kendrick Powell’s father sent him to talk to me.” Craven, that’s what I was. Looking for help.

“Who’s Kendrick Powell?” McFetridge said.

“She was at the party at the Gregorys, down in Palm Beach.”

McFetridge nodded. He had heard the story. “You want to talk to me?” he said, addressing Mr. Andrews like he was issuing a challenge. “I was there.”

“Were you?” said Mr. Andrews. His tone was every bit as challenging as McFetridge’s. It was, in a way, like watching two Thoroughbreds about to start a race, each one leaning forward, waiting for the gun to go off.

“Were you in the library with Kendrick and Peter Martin and Jamie Gregory?”

“Yeah,” said McFetridge, moving his feet apart, squaring up his stance. I remember looking at the socks sticking out of his jacket pockets. I remember thinking they looked like little bu

“Nothing happened,” he said.

“Is that right?” Mr. Andrews’s eyes narrowed. “You were all just standing around? Admiring the Winslow Homer?”

There. She couldn’t have been that drunk if she recognized the Winslow Homer. Unless she had been there before. Or unless Mr. Andrews had.

McFetridge’s eyes clouded just enough to make me think he either didn’t know about the painting or didn’t know who Winslow Homer was. But he recovered nicely. “Hard to say what we were admiring, we were all so drunk.”

There, see, Mr. Andrews? Just like I said. You can go home now. Leave the two of us alone.

But Mr. Andrews didn’t go home. He pretended to think through what McFetridge had just told him. “So then you don’t remember if nothing happened,” he said.

“No,” McFetridge said, knowing he had just been played and not liking it. His head dropped lower, bull-like. He had not had a haircut all year. It had been the subject of much discussion among the older set down in Palm Beach, and now his hair was dangling down in long, looping spirals as he tried to press his point on the ex-soldier. “I do remember. Nothing happened.”

Mr. Andrews gazed up at him as if in all his life he had never met such a clueless moron. I have tried many times since then to piece all those elements of his expression together to form some semblance of the overwhelmingly unflinching look of contempt that Mr. Andrews bestowed on McFetridge, and I have been unable to do it.

McFetridge faltered. His movements were all slight: a shift of his weight, a lift of his head, a baring of his lip; but none of them was quite complete before Mr. Andrews popped into a standing position in front of him. The stairs were a help. They put the shorter man on direct eye level with the taller, they allowed Mr. Andrews to smirk right in his face, promising without saying anything that if McFetridge so much as hinted at another act of aggression he would slit him from hip to shoulder, pull out his guts, stomp them into the planks of the porch.

“Well, I guess there isn’t anything more you can tell me,” Mr. Andrews said, and the two men continued staring at each other until finally McFetridge was reduced to blinking, to glancing down at me, to saying, “Well, unless you need me for anything, Georgie, I’m going inside. Shower up.”

He had to step past Mr. Andrews to get to the door. He did it by going around me. He tapped me on the shoulder as he went. A slight tap. It could have meant many things. It could have meant farewell.

Our visitor turned his upper body without moving his feet and watched McFetridge enter the house. McFetridge looked back and Mr. Andrews nodded mockingly, as if paying respects that they both knew were not due. Then Mr. Andrews looked down at me.

I was sipping my coffee again, trying to appear as though nothing strange had just taken place, as though my reinforcements had not just fled the field.

The envelope appeared again. Directly in front of me. Held as steady as if it were resting on a table. “All you have to do is tell the truth, son,” said Mr. Andrews. “That’s what makes it so bloody easy.”

4

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HOW DRUNK COULD SHE HAVE BEEN IF SHE MANAGED TO drive away? That Alfa had to have had at least five gears. She had to have been able to coordinate the clutch and the stick shift, maneuver it out of the driveway, turn in the right direction on Ocean Boulevard, find her way home.

Peter and Jamie had left after I stopped Peter from using the candlestick. He had looked at me and then down at the girl. I had a sense that he couldn’t believe what he almost had done. Or maybe he couldn’t believe what I had done.

Kendrick lay sprawled on the couch, her black hair splayed out in three different directions. Her left arm was over the back of the couch; her left knee was tilted against the cushions. Her dress was pulled up so high that she was fully exposed. I could see every inch of her tan mark from hip to hip. I knew exactly how small the bottom was to her two-piece bathing suit. I knew precisely the color of her skin before the sun touched it.

“I gotta take a piss,” said Peter, and then he pushed his way into me, making me back up, as he took a circuitous path out of the room.

His cousin looked at the girl, reached down between her legs and rolled his finger slowly across the arch. She did not react. He rolled his finger back and forth and then thrust it inside. Kendrick bounced a little, but that was all.

“Hey!” I said.

Was I moving in slow motion? I know I stepped forward, regained the ground I had lost from Peter’s push, but I know also that Jamie slid his hand from side to side and then pulled out his finger, jammed it into his mouth and was gone before I reached him, scampering out of the room, the door closing behind him, leaving me standing over a nearly naked girl whose green eyes seemed to be staring at absolutely nothing.