Crime of Privilege

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 wa

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 go

“You wa

6

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IWAS 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 Belbo

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 di

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 Pe

1

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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 institutions, 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.