Crime of Privilege: A Novel (3 page)

I said nothing, tasted my coffee, which tasted like nothing. My bare feet began to
rattle on the stairs. I told myself it was just because I was cold and tried to hold
them steady, press them down into the old wooden planks.

“Mr. Coltrane is dead.”

Mr. Coltrane. Who was Mr. Coltrane, and why was that of any interest to me?

“Which makes Mr. Powell virtually the sole owner of CPA and a very wealthy man. A
very. Wealthy. Man.”

Did he just jab my knee with his finger? Was that what that sudden weight was? Was
that why my leg went numb? I tried to kick it out. It wouldn’t move.

“More wealthy, I would venture to say, than even your friends the Gregorys. The difference
is …”

I waited for him to tell me, waited for the numbness in my leg to clear. Both happened
at the same time.

“… his money was earned during his lifetime.”

Yes, of course. The Gregorys had to go back two generations for theirs. Back to Peter’s
and Jamie’s grandfather. I wondered what he had done to get my leg to spasm like that.

“Not so many people know about Mr. Powell’s money, which makes it a little easier
for him to operate. Doesn’t get in all the right clubs as easily as the Gregorys,
but he’s under a lot less scrutiny, if you know what I mean.”

Did I? A lot less scrutiny for what?

“Mr. Powell wants something done, he’s in a position to get people to do it.”

“People like you, you mean?”

It was a childish swipe and Mr. Andrews easily deflected it. “Know what I did before
I went to work for Mr. Powell?” He did not expect me to answer. He paused just long
enough to build suspense. “I was Special Forces.”

My leg almost spasmed on its own, without him even touching me.

“There were things I learned there that make me a valuable person to a man like Mr.
Powell.”

“Learned how to go around intimidating college kids, did you?”

Mr. Andrews took a long time to respond. He spent that time searing me with his eyes.
It was impossible for me to look back at him. I glanced, looked away, glanced back,
and looked away again. “I learned,” he said, his words coming out slowly, each seemingly
hanging in the few inches of air between us, “a lot more than that, pal.”

I had little doubt that he did. My hand was now shaking in counterpoint
to my feet and I chose not to even try to raise my coffee to my lips. “What is it
you want, Mr. Andrews?”

Very slowly, he reached inside his gray jacket. I thought about throwing the coffee
at him. I would throw it directly into his face and then roll away. Throw, roll, run.
In fact, I could not even move.

“I want you to talk to the Palm Beach County state attorney.” Mr. Andrews was now
holding an envelope that he extended into that very small gap between us. “Round-trip
airline tickets, five hundred dollars expense money.” He nodded at the envelope. “Instructions
on whom to call and where to go.” He pushed it closer, so that it was touching my
chin, then he traced it up my jawline. “I want you to fly down there and tell the
state attorney the truth about what happened at the Gregory home week before last.”

There were cars going by in the street, one after another, a steady stream heading
west. Drive off in that direction, you could just keep on going, get on Highway 80,
take it all the way to California, where nobody would have heard of Josh David Powell
and CPA Properties, and where they might not even care so much about the Gregory family.

The envelope came to rest against the side of my face. “Georgie? You still with me?”

I pulled my head away. The envelope followed. My ear was practically against my shoulder
when I said, “Look, Mr. Andrews, the truth is, I didn’t really see what went on. Kendrick
was really drunk. They all were. We all were.” Suddenly my words were flowing and
I seemed to have no more control of them than I did the cars in front of me. I didn’t
know where they came from or where they were going, they just appeared, one after
another. “She’s a beautiful girl, that much I remember, but I hardly know her. Okay?
I hardly knew anybody at the party and so I was just kind of wandering around by myself.
I was talking to her, talking to some of the Gregorys, looking at all the stuff on
the walls, and then I ended up in the library and there she was on the couch, fooling
around.”

“You keep saying that, don’t you, kid?” The corner of the envelope carved into a spot
beneath my ear. It pinned me as if it were a dart. “Peter Martin was penetrating her
with foreign objects!”

Jesus
, I wanted to say, it was only one foreign object. I stopped the second one. But I
didn’t say anything at all. For a moment or two I may not have been breathing at all.

Mr. Andrews swung around so that one of his legs was below mine, his foot on the stair
below where my feet were. He was practically surrounding me, so close I should have
been able to smell the coffee on his breath as he hissed, “That girl’s in therapy
now. Probably will be for a long time.”

I thought of telling him the things I had been telling myself. Kendrick knew what
she was doing when she went to the party in her fancy little sports car and her tight
little dress. She knew what she was doing when she got drunk, when she went into the
library with those guys. Who would go into a closed room with Peter and Jamie, for
God’s sake?

I said none of that and yet Mr. Andrews seemed to have heard it all. “You really are
an arrogant little shit, aren’t you?”

The last guy who had said something like that to me had gotten a fist in the face.
But I wasn’t doing that now. I was just trying to move my head to keep Mr. Andrews
away, keep his teeth away, keep them from ripping the skin from my skull.

And then suddenly he pulled back, as though he couldn’t stand being near me any longer.
“I don’t know how you justify it,” he said, “but what Peter Martin did to Kendrick
Powell was something you wouldn’t accept from an animal. And he’s going to pay for
it.”

Rich girl, tight dress. If she was so drunk that she allowed what happened to happen,
then she couldn’t really be psychologically scarred, could she?

“So, she’s going to sue him?” I said, because I had to say something, because I wanted
to know if this girl who was so humiliated was going to exchange her humiliation for
money.

“Sue? No, George, she’s not going to sue.” He spoke as if only an avaricious weakling
like me would think of such a thing. “Like I told you, the Powells have every bit
as much if not more money than the Gregorys. No, what Josh David wants is to bring
them in line, once and for all.” He waited for me to lift my head again. He wanted
to make sure I was listening to every word. “The Gregorys have been getting
away with this sort of outrageous behavior for a long time, and Mr. Powell’s determined
to put an end to it. Expose them for what they are. Let the world see they have to
play by the same rules as everybody else.”

“And I gather you need me to do that.”

He waved the envelope.

I looked down at it, looked up and saw McFetridge come walking along the street. Mr.
Andrews saw that, too, and the envelope disappeared.

McFetridge wasn’t just walking, he was sauntering. He had spent the night with one
of the girls from Tri Delt, and he had his socks sticking out of the pockets of his
jacket to prove it.

The sauntering slowed as he saw the stranger next to me. His eyes darted between us.
McFetridge was six-feet-four, a tennis player, and used to using his size to his advantage.
He was trying to figure out if he needed to do that now. “Hey,” he said softly as
he turned onto the cement walkway leading to the steps.

“Hey,” I said, and did not otherwise move.

“Hey,” said Mr. Andrews. He did not move, either.

McFetridge stopped. “What’s going on?”

“This is Mr. Andrews. He used to be in Special Forces.”

Funny how you can use a person’s accomplishment in such a snide way. With that one
remark, the die was cast.

“Yeah?” said McFetridge, staring down at the older man. No doubt McFetridge was feeling
full of himself, having just gotten laid, this being his front porch, it being spring
semester of his senior year.

“Kendrick Powell’s father sent him to talk to me.” Craven, that’s what I was. Looking
for help.

“Who’s Kendrick Powell?” McFetridge said.

“She was at the party at the Gregorys, down in Palm Beach.”

McFetridge nodded. He had heard the story. “You want to talk to me?” he said, addressing
Mr. Andrews like he was issuing a challenge. “I was there.”

“Were you?” said Mr. Andrews. His tone was every bit as challenging as McFetridge’s.
It was, in a way, like watching two Thoroughbreds
about to start a race, each one leaning forward, waiting for the gun to go off.

“Were you in the library with Kendrick and Peter Martin and Jamie Gregory?”

“Yeah,” said McFetridge, moving his feet apart, squaring up his stance. I remember
looking at the socks sticking out of his jacket pockets. I remember thinking they
looked like little bunnies. I remember thinking he was about to get annihilated.

“Nothing happened,” he said.

“Is that right?” Mr. Andrews’s eyes narrowed. “You were all just standing around?
Admiring the Winslow Homer?”

There. She couldn’t have been that drunk if she recognized the Winslow Homer. Unless
she had been there before. Or unless Mr. Andrews had.

McFetridge’s eyes clouded just enough to make me think he either didn’t know about
the painting or didn’t know who Winslow Homer was. But he recovered nicely. “Hard
to say what we were admiring, we were all so drunk.”

There, see, Mr. Andrews? Just like I said. You can go home now. Leave the two of us
alone.

But Mr. Andrews didn’t go home. He pretended to think through what McFetridge had
just told him. “So then you don’t remember if nothing happened,” he said.

“No,” McFetridge said, knowing he had just been played and not liking it. His head
dropped lower, bull-like. He had not had a haircut all year. It had been the subject
of much discussion among the older set down in Palm Beach, and now his hair was dangling
down in long, looping spirals as he tried to press his point on the ex-soldier. “I
do remember. Nothing happened.”

Mr. Andrews gazed up at him as if in all his life he had never met such a clueless
moron. I have tried many times since then to piece all those elements of his expression
together to form some semblance of the overwhelmingly unflinching look of contempt
that Mr. Andrews bestowed on McFetridge, and I have been unable to do it.

McFetridge faltered. His movements were all slight: a shift of his
weight, a lift of his head, a baring of his lip; but none of them was quite complete
before Mr. Andrews popped into a standing position in front of him. The stairs were
a help. They put the shorter man on direct eye level with the taller, they allowed
Mr. Andrews to smirk right in his face, promising without saying anything that if
McFetridge so much as hinted at another act of aggression he would slit him from hip
to shoulder, pull out his guts, stomp them into the planks of the porch.

“Well, I guess there isn’t anything more you can tell me,” Mr. Andrews said, and the
two men continued staring at each other until finally McFetridge was reduced to blinking,
to glancing down at me, to saying, “Well, unless you need me for anything, Georgie,
I’m going inside. Shower up.”

He had to step past Mr. Andrews to get to the door. He did it by going around me.
He tapped me on the shoulder as he went. A slight tap. It could have meant many things.
It could have meant farewell.

Our visitor turned his upper body without moving his feet and watched McFetridge enter
the house. McFetridge looked back and Mr. Andrews nodded mockingly, as if paying respects
that they both knew were not due. Then Mr. Andrews looked down at me.

I was sipping my coffee again, trying to appear as though nothing strange had just
taken place, as though my reinforcements had not just fled the field.

The envelope appeared again. Directly in front of me. Held as steady as if it were
resting on a table. “All you have to do is tell the truth, son,” said Mr. Andrews.
“That’s what makes it so bloody easy.”

H
OW DRUNK COULD SHE HAVE BEEN IF SHE MANAGED TO
drive away? That Alfa had to have had at least five gears. She had to have been able
to coordinate the clutch and the stick shift, maneuver it out of the driveway, turn
in the right direction on Ocean Boulevard, find her way home.

Peter and Jamie had left after I stopped Peter from using the candlestick. He had
looked at me and then down at the girl. I had a sense that he couldn’t believe what
he almost had done. Or maybe he couldn’t believe what I had done.

Kendrick lay sprawled on the couch, her black hair splayed out in three different
directions. Her left arm was over the back of the couch; her left knee was tilted
against the cushions. Her dress was pulled up so high that she was fully exposed.
I could see every inch of her tan mark from hip to hip. I knew exactly how small the
bottom was to her two-piece bathing suit. I knew precisely the color of her skin before
the sun touched it.

“I gotta take a piss,” said Peter, and then he pushed his way into me, making me back
up, as he took a circuitous path out of the room.

His cousin looked at the girl, reached down between her legs and rolled his finger
slowly across the arch. She did not react. He rolled his finger back and forth and
then thrust it inside. Kendrick bounced a little, but that was all.

“Hey!” I said.

Was I moving in slow motion? I know I stepped forward, regained the ground I had lost
from Peter’s push, but I know also that Jamie slid his hand from side to side and
then pulled out his finger, jammed it into his mouth and was gone before I reached
him, scampering out of the room, the door closing behind him, leaving me standing
over a nearly naked girl whose green eyes seemed to be staring at absolutely nothing.