Crime of Privilege

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.”