Crime of Privilege: A Novel (10 page)

Cut to perky brunette, sitting at a studio desk that looks very much like a real anchorman’s
desk:
“Kendrick Powell did not return to her studies at Bryn Mawr, not even to complete
the second semester of her junior year. She appears to have kept a low profile until
she checked into this hotel (
cut to gray-walled high-rise with modest awning and glass door just off busy Lexington
Avenue in New York City
) three days before her death.
Back to brunette:
As for Peter Gregory Martin, he remains a second-year medical student at Northwestern
University in Chicago. Both he and members of his family declined to be interviewed
for this segment.”

C
HUCK, CHUCK LARSON, HAD ASSURED ME I DID NOT NEED TO
worry. I worried anyway.

Every day that I walked to or from the classroom building at George Washington I would
look down alleys, between parked cars, over my shoulder, for any sign of Roland Andrews.
When I ate in restaurants I always faced the door. I stopped going to the gym and
quit the flag football team. I stopped having conversations with strangers after I
met a woman on the Metro whom I thought was asking too many questions. I stopped socializing
with my classmates, and gradually developed the reputation that I was a rather peculiar
fellow. I couldn’t find fault with their thinking. Especially when I lay in bed unable
to sleep at night.

After a month of this self-imposed exile, I allowed myself to be talked into returning
to the 21st Amendment for Friday-afternoon beers. I was the subject of a lot of questions,
to which I did not give answers. This apparently made me mysteriously attractive to
a woman from my section named Marion, and that night I ended up back at her apartment.

She was several years older than I was, divorced, and obviously pleased that I found
her attractive. Which I did. She had long, flowing dark hair, spirited eyes, and a
figure that some of my male classmates
had commented on at least once a week since school began and that I got to discover
all on my own. I am sure we had a good time, but I had drunk so much beer that most
of what happened was but a blur. I woke up at some point with her sleeping soundly
beside me. Rather than stick around till morning, I dressed in the dark and snuck
out. Afterward, we only said “Hi” in the hallways.

In December I took my first semester exams. I thought I did well. Why not? With the
exception of my one experience with Marion, I had, since Roland Andrews’s visit, done
almost nothing but study. In the week between Christmas and New Year’s I got my grades:
an A in criminal law, an A in torts, a B in real property, a B in contracts, a D in
civil procedure.

As soon as I returned to school for the new semester I went to see my civ pro professor,
a septuagenarian who always wore suspenders and a bow tie, a man whom I had no reason
to believe knew me as anything other than a name on one of his class rosters. We were
in his office, just him and me, and I explained as deferentially as I could how well
I had done in my other classes, how equally well I thought I had done in his. He got
out my blue exam book and spent no more than a minute glancing through it.

“Civil procedure is not an easy subject,” he informed me. I agreed. I told him that
I enjoyed it.

He flipped the notebook onto his desk. “The grade looks appropriate to me.”

I probably sputtered.

“Mr. Becket, I do not expect this D will ruin either your life or your legal career.”
And then he looked at me knowingly beneath great white clouds of eyebrows.

If he had pointed out flaws in my reasoning, my citations, my writing style—one flaw,
any flaw—I might have understood. If he had urged me to use this barely passing grade
as a springboard, a motivational moment, a learning experience, I might have accepted
it. But instead I immediately began thinking of Roland Andrews and Josh David Powell.

I do not remember arguing with the professor; I do not remember thanking him for his
time or his comments. I remember only staring at
him with a feeling of utter betrayal, and him staring back at me with what I was sure
was utter disgust.

MARION INVITED ME TO A PARTY
. I was surprised. We had barely spoken since I had snuck away from her apartment.
She had gone out with other guys, I knew. I had heard them talking. One had even bragged
about what a fantastic time they had in bed. But she wanted to go out with me. I agreed
because I had not had a date, a planned-ahead date, in about a year, not since I had
gone to Palm Beach, and because I had some vague idea that I might be able to make
up for sneaking out on her the last time we were together.

One problem was that I didn’t have a car and the party was outside the district, in
Old Town Alexandria, down the Potomac River and into Virginia a few miles. Not a problem,
said Marion. She would pick me up in her car, which turned out to be an Audi coupe,
a going-away present from her former husband.

We went and we had fun, partying in a townhouse that had been built before the Revolution
and now belonged to a third-year student who had made a fortune at a private equity
firm before he attended law school. We danced and drank. Marion knew everyone, and
I knew almost no one, except by sight. I overheard one of the other women ask how
she had managed to “snag” me. I heard another tell her I was so “mysterious,” and
ask what I was really like. One woman actually said she and her friends thought I
didn’t like girls, but she was clearly drunk. I laughed and joked and danced with
everyone who asked me.

When it was time to leave, I was the one who ended up with the keys to Marion’s car.
Her driving was not an option. She could barely walk. I helped her into the passenger
seat, got her buckled up, and took my position behind the steering wheel.

It was necessary to drive three blocks west to Washington Street, turn right, and
then just keep going straight until the road became the George Washington Memorial
Parkway. From there we had only to go past National—or Ronald Reagan Airport, as they
were now calling it—and continue on into the District. Even a drunk guy could do that.
We made it a block and a half.

The red light came on behind us, accompanied by some otherworldly blipping sound.
I immediately pulled over. “Oh, Christ,” gurgled Marion, and she struggled to sit
all the way up in her seat. She wasn’t going to fool anyone. I still had aspirations
for myself.

“Yes, officer?” I said, powering down the window.

The cop was middle-aged and portly, with bad skin. While I was looking at him his
partner somehow managed to creep up on Marion’s side of the car. The partner was a
sinewy fellow, also middle-aged, and he was bent at the waist, his hand on the butt
of his gun, looking through the window from Marion to me and back again. Two middle-aged
cops riding in a patrol car and performing traffic stops in a neighborhood like this
did not bode well.

I asked Marion for the registration and she was unresponsive. I reached in front of
her, intending to go into the glove box, but the cop next to me screamed in my ear,
“Freeze!”

I froze.

“Keep both hands where I can see them,” he said, his voice still louder than it needed
to be, and somehow I knew that he, too, had his hand on his gun. “I’m gonna open this
door, and I want you to sidestep out with your hands away from your body.”

I was only part of the way out of the car when I heard the other officer opening Marion’s
door. I was not completely out when the cop on my side grabbed me by the back of the
shirt and slammed me up against the side of the Audi.

“Put your hands behind your head, asshole,” he said.

Asshole?

He was breathing hard as he put his foot between mine and kicked me on each instep.
I gathered he wanted me to get my feet apart, and I tried to comply. He smacked me
in the back of the head and told me not to fucking move.

On the other side of the car, the sinewy cop had Marion out of her seat but was unable
to get her to stand up straight. Her hair, her one great vanity, was tumbling all
over the place, covering her face like a veil. He tried to push her against the car
the way my cop was doing to me, but she slithered down and he had to plaster her against
the side with both hands. “Roy, we got a problem over here,” he called out.

“Put her on the ground,” my guy told him.

With some effort, the sinewy cop got Marion lying facedown on a strip of grass between
the road and the sidewalk. She lay there and didn’t move. He then looked to see what
he should do next, and the cop behind me told him to leave her alone, check the glove
compartment, see if the registration was there. It took the sinewy guy about a minute,
but he came up with a card in his hand. “Lars Bjorklund,” he read. “Darien, Connecticut.”

“That you?” my cop said. “You don’t look like a Lars. Guys named Lars are big guys
with big heads and stupid looks on their faces.”

I had not seen enough of my captor to ascertain what would constitute a stupid look
to someone like him, but the whole event was taking on a surreal aspect. Why hadn’t
he asked me if I had been drinking? Made me walk a straight line, touch my nose, say
the alphabet backward?

“Yeah,” the cop said, seeming pleased with his knowledge of Scandinavian physiognomy,
“you don’t look like a Lars. You look like Prince Charles. Is that who you are? You
some kind of prince or something?”

Why would he think that? What had I done besides drive someone else’s car for a block
and a half? I tried to tell him the car belonged to Marion, that I believed Lars Bjorklund
was her ex-husband.

“So we find her license, it’s gonna say her name is Bjorklund, is that it?”

I knew it wasn’t. I couldn’t remember what it was. Something Italian.

“And if we call up there to Dairy-Anne, Connecticut, they not gonna tell us this car’s
been stolen, are they?”

Before I could answer he grabbed me by the collar and the belt and manhandled me over
to the strip of grass where Marion was lying, her eyes blank and unblinking so that
I couldn’t tell if she was seeing anything or not. “Get down,” he said, and roughly
pushed me first to my knees and then to my stomach. I was now staring at Marion from
about two feet away and she still had not blinked.

There was a tremendous crushing sensation in the middle of my back and I knew that
Roy the cop was kneeling on me. I made some
kind of noise from deep in my chest as air rushed out of my lungs, and then suddenly
the whole area in which we were lying was lit up with headlights.

A car stopped, then another, then another after that. The cop bellowed at the cars
to move on, but they didn’t. Doors began opening, footsteps began sounding on the
asphalt.

Roy was stuck then. He was surrounded by law students—six, eight, ten of them.

“Good evening, Officer,” said a calm, cheerful male voice. “May we be of some assistance
here?”

“You’ll be in the back of a patrol car in two minutes, you don’t get the hell out
of here.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m counsel to these people.” The speaker did not say he was
our lawyer.

The cop lightened the load he had put on me, giving me the chance to turn my head.
The speaker was, of course, one of the partygoers, a third-year student, a guy people
had been talking about as having already secured one of those coveted associates’
positions with one of the premier D.C. firms. Behind him, one of the other students
was taking pictures with a flash camera. She took a picture of me, then took several
shots of Marion lying on the ground, glassy-eyed, with the sinewy cop standing over
her.

“Hey,” my cop shouted, “you can’t do that. Cyrus, get that camera away from her. And
you, all of you, get outta here before I call for backup and have you all arrested.”

The third-year student held up his hand with such authority that Cyrus stopped moving.
When he was sure he had Cyrus’s compliance, he said to my cop, “On the contrary, Officer,
as long as we are standing back a significant distance and not interfering with the
conduct of your official duties, we have a right peacefully to gather and observe
the proceedings.
People v. Baldwin
. Supreme Court, 1984.”

Both cops were silent.

“My father argued it,” the third-year said. “He is now United States deputy attorney
general.”

“I don’t give a damn what your daddy does,” said the cop. But it was clear that he
did.

“Oh, I concur with that sentiment exactly, Officer. I only mention it because he lives
right here in Old Town, and if you will allow me to, I can call him and have him here
within just a few minutes so he can give you not only the cite to
People v. Baldwin
, but he can bring the published opinion, show you where—”

“You’re already interfering with our official duties,” the cop said. But lights were
going on in the homes lining both sides of the street, and out of the corner of my
eye I could see the cop swinging his head from one lighted house to another. This
was not what he had anticipated. He knew even better than we did that anyone could
be living in Old Town: Supreme Court justices, cabinet officers, elected officials.
It was that kind of place.

The cop got off me altogether, pushing down with his hand on my shoulder harder than
was necessary as he stood up. I stayed where I was and waited to see what would happen
next.

“With your permission, Officer,” the third-year student said, “I would like to have
one of my colleagues attend to Ms. Bettinelli, who appears to be in some danger. My
colleague is an Army medic who served in Bosnia.” He pointed to a rather dazed-looking
fellow with short hair. “And if you would prefer not to have him approach her, then
we really should call the EMTs. In fact”—he pulled out a cell phone—“I can do that
right now, if you wish.”

Roy hesitated. From my position on the ground, the left side of my face in the dirt,
what I saw was a pack of drunken law students. Roy must have seen it differently.
He said, “You got a medic, send him over.”