Crime of Privilege

“And you’re thinking perhaps I might like to take Mitch’s place, be district attorney for the Cape and Islands.”

“Somebody’s got to. If the door’s thrown open at the last minute, whoever is the best organized, has the best backing, is going to get it.”

“Suppose somebody else is already out there getting ready? Somebody independent of the Gregory family?”

“That can be taken care of.” Peter shifted his feet, moved in a little closer as if to make sure that nobody lurking in the fog would hear him. “You want the support of the Macs, all you have to do is come out in favor of the Mashpee Indian casino and they’re yours.”

“It’s all arranged?”

“It could be.”

“I just have to keep my mouth shut about Jamie.”

“Look, George.” Peter kept his eyes focused on mine. “I don’t blame you for what happened there, in New York. Nobody does. You did what you thought should be done.” He reached out to touch my shoulder.

Once again I twisted out of the way and he lowered his hand.

“Jamie was a difficult person,” he said, a touch of sadness in his voice. “Brilliant, but he was missing a—I don’t know, a moral compass, I guess you’d call it.”

“Unlike you.”

“Yeah, well, I know what you’re talking about, George. I’ve got a lot of guilt built up in me about that.”

“About Kendrick Powell, you mean.” I wanted him to say it.

“I was drunk. I was young. None of that is an excuse, but it’s true. And you pulled me off her, George, and for that I’ll forever be grateful. I mean it.” He once again started to reach out to me and then drew back his hand before I could move.

I said, “You guys raped her, Peter. And then you lied and insisted it never happened.”

His face warped with confusion, as if he had misheard. “We tried to make it up to her,” he said. “We really did. Offered her a great deal of money, in fact. Her father would have none of it. So that’s when we had to ask ourselves—”

He hesitated, gauging what he should say, how he should say it. Small drops of water were making their way down his forehead.

“—what good was it going to do to confess? What, we maybe go to prison? At the least, the whole world was going to know. The family’s name gets dragged through the mud. My uncle once again is kept from doing all the good things he could do for the country. Jamie and I are kept from doing all the good things that we, as Gregorys, could do.”

“Like sell worthless mortgages to friends who are trusting you with their life savings?”

This was not going the way Peter Martin had envisioned. He shifted his weight, stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts, moved his eyes from mine to the tarmac at our feet. “Yeah, well, that was Jamie.”

“The one whose honor we’re trying to preserve.”

“Not just his, George. I mean, I tried, I really tried to dedicate myself to the betterment of humanity.” His head lifted sharply, as if appalled at his own words. “I don’t want that to sound pretentious, George. It’s just … there were lots of things I could have done, but I chose to go to med school and to specialize in infectious diseases, and then I chose to go to San Francisco and work with AIDS victims. I didn’t have to do any of that.”

“You also didn’t have to help Jamie dispose of Heidi Telford’s body and pretend he didn’t kill her.”

Noises were coming out of Peter Martin. Noises that made me think of a steam engine. They were, I realized, rapid breaths of air. He was acting as if I had just punched him in the gut. Peter, the big bear, whose arm had been soft when I squeezed it in Palm Beach, who looked even softer now, did not know what to do. I could see him searching for words. I could see words starting to form in his mouth and then disappear.

“When you’re in my family,” he said at last, “and so many tragic things have happened, you learn from the time you’re able to walk that you have to stick together. That’s all we have—”

“That and money and co

Peter started to defend himself and I cut him off. “You and Jamie treated Heidi Telford the same way you treated Kendrick Powell. She didn’t count. Not when it came to your pleasure, not when it came to your well-being. Justify it in your own mind all you want, you fat fuck. You molested and raped a young woman, then watched her life go down the drain because you didn’t want people to know what you had done and because as far as you were concerned she wasn’t worth what a Gregory was worth. Then three years later you let your cousin bash in the head of another young woman and you treated her like she wasn’t worth anything, either.”

I took the sweatshirt off my shoulders and threw it in his face. “You didn’t care about Kendrick, you didn’t care about Heidi, you didn’t care about what you did to their parents. All you cared about was how you looked and when you tell me now about what a great humanitarian you are, I know the truth.” I jammed my thumb into my chest. “Me, Peter. I know the truth.”

The sweatshirt had slid the length of his body until he caught it somewhere around his stomach. Now he held it there while he stared at me in disbelief. His was the face of a man looking at the unknown; as if, standing here at the end of the continent, he had just discovered that the world really was flat, that the waters were rushing off the edge and taking him with them.

Very slowly, he began to back away.

5

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IT TOOK ME ALL DAY TO RIDE HOME. IT WAS WET ONLY THROUGH Truro. It was cold the entire way.

When I arrived, there was a message on my answering machine. Dick O’Co

The message said he wanted me to come into the office that night. Any time after 6:00. He would be waiting. He would wait until midnight if he had to.

I GOT THERE JUST before 8:00, and as far as I could tell we were the only ones in the building except the jailers and the jailed, down in the basement, near where I used to be stationed.

Dick had the remains of a submarine sandwich in front of him. He glanced up at me, wrapped what was left of the food, and jammed it into a paper bag. He did not have the usual jovial Dick look.

“Hey,” I said.

“Sit down,” he said. Then he changed his mind. “Don’t sit down, this won’t take long.”

I sat anyway.

The chief assistant grimaced. “We’re not going to bring you back on,” he said, speaking as if he had to rush in order to make sure the words all came out together. Dick was not good at this, being harsh, being direct. Dick would prefer to look at a jury in astonishment that some criminal could have acted the way he did.

After a moment of me regarding him in silence, he added, “Too much baggage.”

“What kind of baggage are we talking about?”

“I could tell you it’s the kind of baggage you accumulate when you’re scheming to run against your boss, only I’m not going to say that.”

“I’m not scheming to run against anyone, Dick.”

“The Macs told us all about it, how you been talking with them, lining up their support.”

He looked pained, hurt.

“That’s bullshit, Dick.”

He tossed his shoulders. He either didn’t care or didn’t believe me. “Peter Martin called you today, didn’t he?”

“All that time you kept quiet about the rape thing, George.” He moved his eyes away from mine. It could have been out of disgust with either one of us. “Probably wouldn’t look so good if it comes out that just before you were going to make your a