Crime of Privilege: A Novel (9 page)

But Mr. Andrews did not do that. He didn’t slap me, he didn’t kick me, he didn’t grab
me by the shirtfront and throw me through the dining room window to the sidewalk fifty
feet below. He just stood over me and waited for me to explain.

I had time to gather my thoughts. Gather them up, have them split apart again. “Look,
Ralph Mars, the state attorney down there, told me it was a very sensitive matter
because of who was involved. He said he had to be careful the claims weren’t just
politically motivated. That was all he seemed to be interested in.”

It was not good enough. Mr. Andrews twisted my words in his mouth and spit them back
at me. “
Politically motivated?
A girl gets violently raped and you claim that all the prosecutor cares about is
whether her complaint is politically motivated?”

“He wanted to know if the Senator had come into the library when Kendrick was in there
with us. He wanted to know if the Senator had participated in any way.”

“Participated?”
He was twisting again, making everything I said sound foolish.

“I told him the Senator just stuck his head into the room and I didn’t think he really
could see anything other than, you know, there was a girl in there with a couple of
guys.”

“A girl who was being raped.”

“Well, see, it wasn’t all that clear. Even to me.”

“What wasn’t … clear … Georgie?” He used the diminutive like I was a child. Like I
was an idiot.

“Like whether she was …” I didn’t want to use the word again.

“Participating?”

“The thing is, she wasn’t saying anything. She wasn’t doing anything to stop them.”

“She was passed out, you perverted little creep.”

“She wasn’t passed out,” I argued, my voice rising. And then I cut it off.

“What was she doing, Georgie, while people were shoving things up her vagina?”

It was a candle. I had stopped Peter from using the candlestick … Peter’s dick maybe,
although I hadn’t seen that for sure. And his finger. And Jamie’s finger.

“Look, I didn’t get Kendrick drunk. I didn’t invite her into the library, and I didn’t
get her to lie down on the couch, take her shoes off, put her leg up.”

He bent at the waist, moved his face close to mine. “And you didn’t do anything when
those scumbags began shoving shit inside her, did you?”

Don’t say a word. Don’t say anything, George. Let him hit you if he wants. Whatever
it is he does, just take it. Take it and keep your mouth shut.

Mr. Andrews, however, still did not hit. He straightened up instead, pivoted as though
he could not stand breathing the same air I did, and walked to the dining room table,
where he looked at my books and my notebook. “Quite an accomplishment, you getting
into this school, Georgie. How do you suppose that came about?”

“I had good boards.”

The man kept his back to me. “That so?” He picked up my notebook and flipped through
it. “I happen to know that before you went to see Ralph Mars, you and your good boards
had been turned down by every law school you applied to. You had given up any thought
of going anywhere and all of a sudden, after a half-hour talk with a state attorney,
there they were, acceptances from Boston College and GW, one school where the Senator
lives and one where the Senator works. Pretty remarkable coincidence, don’t you think?”

“What I think is remarkable is that you seem to know so much about my life.”

“Oh, you can bet on that, Georgie.” Mr. Andrews turned with deliberate slowness. He
held my notebook as if he were calculating its weight, and then tossed it behind him,
showing no sign of caring when it hit on the edge of the table and slid to the floor.
“Mr. Powell has lost his only daughter. Mr. Powell is one pissed-off, vengeful, resourceful
sonofabitch who can buy things that aren’t even for sale. And Mr. Powell is going
to burn your life down around you, my fatuous little friend.”

He put his hands behind his waist and rocked forward onto the balls of his feet as
if he were very much going to enjoy the fire. “I can guarantee you that things are
going to start happening now that never would have happened before. And they are going
to keep happening in every aspect of your life until you get to the point that if
you so much as buy a losing lottery ticket you’re going to think Mr. Powell rigged
the game against you.”

Mr. Andrews kept his eyes on me as he walked to the door. He stopped when he got there.
“You’ve gotten yourself caught up in a very nasty war here, Georgie. And I daresay,
I think you’ve chosen the wrong side.”

“
C
HUCK, CHUCK LARSON
,”
AS HE ALWAYS INTRODUCED HIMSELF
, was the Senator’s man. He would say his first name, then his whole name, then pause
to see if you recognized him. It was not an unreasonable expectation. He was at least
six-feet-five, at least two hundred and ninety pounds, and he had been a stalwart
on the offensive line for the Washington Redskins for many years.

Chuck had a broad red face and sandy hair that was getting thin but was still long
enough to form curls. He had the kind of face that was built to smile, that made you
think the only thing that made him sad was not smiling. When I told him about my visit
from Mr. Andrews, the outer edges of his pale blue eyes became a mass of crinkles
and the lines at the corners of his mouth turned into grooves.

“Oh,” he said, “I am so sorry, George.”

“Like, I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t. “He was threatening me without
actually threatening, if that makes any sense.”

“Well, they’re feeling bad in that family, George, you can understand that. Girl they
gave birth to, loved and raised, did everything they could for, something like this
happens and they’ve got to make it somebody else’s fault.” He nodded his big round
head at the tragedy of it all. He bathed me in sympathy as he explained, “Otherwise,
the universe is in chaos. You have to find a reason something happened so you can
restore order. Usual thing is finding it was somebody else’s fault.”

He was sitting on my couch, the same place where I had sat when I received Mr. Andrews’s
guarantee of how bleak my future was going to be. Chuck’s job was to tell me that
wasn’t so. He was wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt that was white but had faint
red stripes spaced several inches apart. He was wearing blue jeans that had to have
been purchased in the Midwest for use as work clothes, and tan lace-up boots that
you might see at a construction site. This was pretty much the way he had dressed
when he had first come to see me in Philadelphia, back in the spring, shortly after
the visit from Roland Andrews.

Roland appeared. Chuck followed. Except this time I had called him.

“It’s almost as if he was telling me he was putting a curse on me, you know?” I laughed
lightly, because guys like Chuck and me knew there was no such thing as a curse.

“You know,” he said back to me, “I once broke my helmet. It was just a snap for the
chinstrap, but I borrowed someone else’s and ran onto the field. Didn’t fit quite
the same, but it was still a helmet just like the one I always wore. First play, I’m
supposed to trap the D-end. Dude blows right by me, flattens our quarterback, who
lets the ball go fluttering away like a homesick brick. I sure looked bad on television,
on the game film, in the coaches’ eyes, QB’s eyes. I blamed it on the helmet.”

“What are you telling me, Chuck?”

“That we get knocked out of our ordinaries and it can bother us in ways it never should.
Ever see that movie
Pumping Iron
? Arnold Schwarzenegger, there, he’s in some Mr. Universe contest or something, and
he wants to throw his opponent off his game so he hides the guy’s yellow shirt. It’s
just a shirt the guy warms up in, but the guy freaks. You watch him come completely
apart and, naturally, he loses the competition. Arnold had gotten in his head, see?”

“And you’re saying this guy Andrews wants to get into my head by making me think Mr.
Powell’s going to cause bad things to happen to me?”

“Sure. And once he’s got you in that position he’ll come back to you, say, ‘Okay,
now tell me something bad about the Gregorys and I’ll make everything all right for
you again.’ ”

“Lift the curse, huh?”

Chuck’s broad shoulders rose an inch or two and crashed back down again.

“But you’re saying his threats are all bullshit.”

“That’s right,” Chuck said.

And I believed him because under the circumstances he knew a whole lot more than I
did.

I
T TOOK A WHILE FOR THE NEWSPAPERS TO CATCH ON. THE FIRST
reports were matter-of-fact: Kendrick Powell, twenty-one, of Wilmington, Delaware,
was found dead of an apparent overdose in a Midtown hotel in New York City. Then
The Wilmington News Journal
identified who she was and ran a respectful article on the unexpected passing of
the daughter of one of the city’s more prominent citizens. A day later the Florida
newspapers picked it up and expanded on the story: “Gregory Accuser Found Dead in
Hotel Room.”

The
New York Post
took it from there.
The Washington Post
and even
The New York Times
were obliged to follow. The
New York Post
’s article was lurid, carrying an old picture of Peter looking half crazed as he exited
some unidentified drinking establishment and referring to a “wild party” at the Gregory
mansion without providing any specifics. The others had short articles that appeared
to have been written by someone who did not really want to touch a keyboard. Kendrick
was identified, her father was identified, and in a last paragraph it was noted she
had filed a criminal complaint against Peter Gregory Martin, nephew of the Senator,
and that the Palm Beach state attorney had declined to press charges, citing a lack
of corroborating evidence.

After that, one of the national television networks hurriedly put together a half-hour
show of investigative journalism that was long on titillation and short on facts.
The network had come up with a few
photos of its own, including one of Kendrick as a preteen equestrian in full riding
garb, another of her father standing next to the mast of some gargantuan sailboat,
and yet another of her mother dressed in a formal gown and accompanying her latest
husband to a New York City gala, so they were able to refer to Kendrick as a beautiful
young socialite victimized by the depredation of the Gregorys.

Josh David Powell, a beefy man with an unruly head of graying hair, was featured prominently
in the show, saying there was no doubt in his mind that his daughter had been raped
by Peter Gregory Martin and that the authorities’ failure to act on it had sent her
into a state of depression that led to drug use, drug dependency, and now this, the
fatal overdose. The show cut first to a still photo of a bunch of pills spilling from
a jar and then to a video of a body on a gurney covered by a white sheet being wheeled
from a building to an ambulance.

The show then caught Mr. Powell in a close-up, looking particularly wild-eyed as he
declared that he had reason to believe that it was not a self-inflicted overdose.
Even now, he announced, he had investigators working to prove that.

There was a snippet of an interview with Ralph Mars, state attorney for the Fifteenth
Judicial Circuit, in and for the County of Palm Beach. Mr. Mars, looking Hollywood
handsome and, unlike Mr. Powell, with every hair on his head combed neatly into place,
gazed with complete sincerity at his interviewer and explained that he could fully
understand Mr. Powell’s emotions, but his office had looked into the matter and there
just wasn’t any evidence to support the accusation.

The television reporter, a perky brunette whom I would wager was not hired because
of her investigative acumen, was then shown standing on the street in front of the
Gregory home on Ocean Boulevard wearing a low-cut blouse and tight slacks as she explained
to the viewers: “In fact, on the evening in question there was a full-blown party
going on here at the Gregorys’ storied waterside estate, attended by some sixty or
so members of Palm Beach society, and not a single person has come forward with the
evidence Ralph Mars says he needs.”

Cut back to Mr. Mars:
“We’d prosecute a Gregory just as fast as we would prosecute anyone else. But there
simply was no evidence.”

Cut to Mr. Powell, his shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, his eyes puffy, his hair
matted as if he had just swum up from the bottom of the ocean:
“That’s a load of crap and he knows it. My daughter went to Humana Hospital and they
confirmed that she had been raped.”

Cut to perky brunette, still on Ocean Boulevard, this time with documents in her hand:
“In fact, Kendrick Powell did not go to the hospital until the day after the party,
when she was taken by a female friend who was staying at the Powell home about a mile
and a half from the Gregorys’ here in Palm Beach. A spokesperson for the hospital
has informed us that it is against hospital policy to release patient records or even
to confirm whether someone was a patient. Josh David Powell, however, readily provided
records (
pause, wave sheets of paper at the camera
) that show that both the doctor who examined her and a rape counselor believed her
story.” (
Cut to the pages, lying in V-formation; close in on top page, scan down, then highlight
and magnify the words “vaginal bruising.”
)

Cut to Mr. Mars, now in shirtsleeves and tie, leaning forcefully across his desk:
“Look, there was evidence that Ms. Powell had been involved in some sexual activity.
But there was no proof as to who it was with or whether it was consensual. And let’s
be honest here, the type of accusation that is at issue is one that our police department
deals with every day. If it were not for the family of the person being accused, I
have no doubt we would not be having this conversation.”