Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  I reminded myself that the catcallers were unlikely to be out first thing in the morning and left the dankness of the room to begin my trek. I had walked for no more than thirty seconds when a black vehicle that looked like a giant Jeep began blinking its lights. The clouds were at ground level and all around me. I could hear foghorns out on the water, and I could not see one hundred feet in any direction, but I could see those flashing headlights. I stopped, thinking it might be police or a national park ranger, somebody warning me it was dangerous to be trying to navigate on foot when visibility was this poor. Maybe warning me it was dangerous to walk through town dressed the way I was.

  But this was P’town. People could wear anything they wanted.

  The vehicle’s door opened, and I realized it was not a Jeep but a Hummer, the smaller model, the one they called the Hummer 3. “Hey, Georgie!” a voice called. A male voice.

  I squinted, trying to get a better look.

  The man was holding something in his hand, something like a bag. I remembered the hood in Tamarindo and it occurred to me that I should run. Except there was nothing behind me but the motel and the long rock jetty. I stood my ground while the man approached. A big man, wearing shorts. Red shorts. Nantucket Reds, knee-length, salmon-colored, popular among the summer crowd on the islands. The object in the man’s hand was a piece of dangling cloth, a blanket maybe, or a jacket. Below the shorts he was wearing Top-Siders; above them he had on a sweater and a polo shirt with the collar popped. The man was grinning. He was grinning because he knew me and he had not seen me in twelve and a half years.

  He stopped when he got an arm’s length away from me. He did not try to embrace. He did not even offer his hand. What he offered was the cloth, which turned out to be a sweatshirt. A crimson sweatshirt.

  “Penn guy like you probably doesn’t want this, but it’s better than freezing your ass off.” He tossed it to me.

  I caught the sweatshirt in one hand, looked down at it, saw the word “Harvard” emblazoned with white letters and continued holding it, dumbstruck.

  “Want some coffee?” He slung a thumb over his shoulder. “I got a whole Thermos. Got some Dunkin’ Donuts, too, if you’re hungry.”

  I was hungry. I did want some coffee. I said, “No, thank you, Peter.”

  He nodded. He looked as if he was going to try some other friendly acts, suggestions, gestures, and then he wiped the condensation from his brow and said, “I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

  “We’re talking now, aren’t we?” I still had not put on the sweatshirt.

  “I guess you don’t want to get in the car, huh?” Then he answered himself. “Yeah. I don’t blame you. You’ve been through a lot because of us, and that’s what I wanted to talk about. To apologize, really. Listen, can we go for a walk at least? You mind? How about out on that jetty?”

  Go out on the jetty. In the fog. With Peter Gregory Martin.

  “How about we go into town?” I said.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “We could. Except you can never tell who’s around.” He looked around. “Always seems to be somebody with a camera when you least expect it.” He inclined his head toward the jetty as if it were the only possible place for two men to walk if they wanted a little privacy.

  “Which begs the question: What are you doing here, Peter? Outside my motel at eight in the morning? You follow me here?”

  “Not really.” He grinned some more, harder this time. It was still a friendly grin, not a sick one like Jamie’s, but not a charming one like the Senator’s, either.

  I tried to think. Nobody had followed me. At least I had not seen anybody follow me. “Peter, I didn’t know I was coming here. It’s just where I ended up.”

  He waved his hand in the direction of Route 6, as if that was where somebody had seen me. Of course, it was also the direction of everything else in the country, everything except the motel itself. I looked at the motel office. He saw me looking.

  “Nah,” he said, interpreting. “What, do you think we have some big network of informers or something? You check in someplace and the desk clerk immediately calls us up?”

  He acted like it was a joke, but that was exactly what I was thinking. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but neither did the idea that someone could have been with me on a trail that did not allow motor vehicles and then tailed me all along Route 6, where I had not seen a single other cyclist. And then it came to me.

  “You put a tracking device on my bike, didn’t you?”

  “C’mon, Georgie.” Peter Martin swatted me playfully on the shoulder.

  I recoiled. “Where is it? Under the seat?”

  Peter stopped grinning. He looked away. There was not much he could look at. “I don’t do these things myself, George.”

  “You wanted to talk to me, you could have come to my house. Called me on the phone.”

  “I wanted to see you in person. That’s why I came across country. Didn’t think it was going to be fucking winter.” He wiped his brow a second time. The fog was so wet it was matting our hair into strands that plastered our skulls and created little follicular runways for drops of water. “I didn’t want to come to your house because, like I said before, you never know who’s around.”

  Peter Martin did not want to be seen with me. Peter Martin was standing with me in a fog so thick there could have been a troop of soldiers arrayed fifty yards from us and I would not have known.

  “Could be anyone,” I said.

  He agreed.

  “Could even be Josh David Powell.”

  “His people, yeah.”

  “All kinds of folks following me, aren’t there, Peter?”

  “It’s part of what I want to apologize about. Look, can we please walk? Just in case Powell does have somebody around, can we not stand here like this?”

  He wanted to go on that jetty. I looked and couldn’t see anything. Just the first few gray-black boulders that made up the riprap that curved its way into the ocean. A foghorn sounded again, warning me away.

  Prosecutor found dead floating off Provincetown jetty. He must have slipped on the rocks and hit his head. He was wearing bicycle shoes with metal plates on the soles.

  “No,” I said. “This is as good a place as any.”

  Prosecutor found dead in parking lot. Strangled, garroted, beaten to a pulp. I would take Peter down with me. I would make him pay. Hit me, motherfucker, and I will carve you up. With what, I didn’t know. My fingers, if that was all I had.

  Peter sighed. He shrugged. “At least put on that sweatshirt if we’re going to stand here. You don’t need to freeze to death.”

  Prosecutors don’t freeze to death in September on Cape Cod. Nevertheless, I draped the sweatshirt over my shoulders, crossed my arms, and waited.

  “I know,” Peter said, starting slowly, “that you were there when Jamie was murdered.” He threw up his palm quickly to stop me from responding. “I even know what you said to him. I’m not here to argue about it. What I am thinking, however, what the family’s thinking, is, okay, Jamie’s dead, what good does it do to drag all this out?”

  Now? Did he want me to answer now? No.

  “Powell and his thug there,” he went on, “they’re not going to admit what they did, and we’re asking ourselves if we really want to go after them.”

  Yeah, right. And bring into the open why Powell’s man would want to shoot Jamie. I might have been sneering as I stood in the street at the end of the world.

  “So,” he said, “the next thing we have to consider is you, and how you feel about it. And we’re thinking, you know, we’ve always been able to count on Georgie, count on his discretion. So what about now?”

  “I’ve already talked, Peter.”

  “Yes. But you’ve talked to the police, to the folks in the D.A.’s office. That can all be taken care of. The question is, what do you really want to do?”

  Peter, his neck extended, his head pointing toward me, seemed really to want to know. It took me a moment
to understand he was not just asking my opinion, my preference, he was offering me something.

  “What do you have in mind?” I said.

  “You know,” he answered, his eyes on mine, keeping contact, “Mitch White would like nothing better than to get out of here, go back to D.C. He’s up for reelection in a couple of weeks and everybody figures he’s a shoo-in, but the right job came along, he’d leave the Cape in a minute.”

  “Senate Judiciary Committee, perhaps?”

  “Maybe even better than that. Democrat gets elected to the White House, a number of favors can be called in.” Peter shrugged. That’s the way things work, he was saying.

  “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 connections and opportunity and rules that apply to everyone else except you.”

  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.

  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’Connor. Good old Dick, who still used hardcover books to do his legal research instead of the Internet. Dick, who called me on my home phone and not my cell. Dick, who probably did not have my cell-phone number. Who might not have a cell of his own.

  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 announcement you were present at the murder of the only guy in the world who knew the facts about that rape.”

  “He wasn’t the only guy in the world. Peter Martin was there. What Peter did was worse than what Jamie did.”

  “And what Dr. Martin says, George, is that what you did was the worst of all.”

  6.

  THE OFFER WAS FULL PAY UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAR. I WAS SIMPLY to leave. I could go to Hawaii, Costa Rica, France, anywhere that it looked like I was continuing my investigation.

  Nobody would mention my involvement in Jamie’s shooting or the Palm Beach rape. Six weeks from now, with Mitch safely reelected, he would prepare an excellent letter of recommendation, and by January I should have landed myself a new job, preferably quite far away.

  There was no contract, nothing in writing. I was simply to tell Dick okay.

  I told him.

  It was hard to determine if he was disappointed.

  I know we did not shake hands.

  7.

  I CALLED BARBARA AND EXPLAINED WHAT WAS GOING ON. ONCE again, I asked for help.

  This time, she said she couldn’t do anything for me.

  I reminded her what she had said that day on my patio about doing the right thing, and she agreed everybody should, but she had two kids and one of them had special needs. She had to put them first. I brought up what she had done already, going to Costa Rica, directing me to France, and she said yes, she had done all that, but that had been behind the scenes. Her position was different than mine. Her life was different. She couldn’t afford to lose her job, she couldn’t just leave the Cape, and she couldn’t stay and be a pariah.