Crime of Privilege: A Novel (2 page)

I had four red drinks and was clutching them together so that extraction of any single
glass had to be done quite carefully. “Oh,
thank
you!” she cried as I bent at the waist to give her first choice. I turned then to
Peter, who was positioned down by Kendrick’s feet, one haunch on the couch cushion,
one leg extended behind him, almost as if he was ready to start a sprint. “Put them
over there, Georgie,” he said, waving to a credenza that was under the painting I
had seen Kendrick admiring.

The painting turned out to be a Winslow Homer. I was pretty sure it was a Homer. A
seascape illuminated by a spotlight that did little more than emphasize how dark and
dusty the painting was, as though nobody had paid attention to it for a very long
time. Kendrick was drinking. Peter and Jamie had taken up positions on either end
of her. And I was staring at the Homer. Ah, the patina provides a palpable sense of
the perils of pursuing a large
poisson
in a small boat on the open sea after dark.

I think the Senator looked in when Peter was still half on the couch and half off.
When he was still wearing his blazer. When it was possible to look from the door to
the couch and not be absolutely positive what was going on.

But what was going through my mind?

Was
anything
? Was I just there, holding the remains of my third
Palm Beach Special? Kendrick, by this point, had had at least three, which was why
she was in the condition she was, more or less spread-eagled on the couch in the library,
saying nothing, doing nothing, while Peter and Jamie moved their hands over her. While
I stood by, a half-smile on my face.

Was I smiling?

I try to imagine that I wasn’t. But what else would I have been doing? Peter wasn’t
paying any attention to me, but Jamie kept looking up and grinning almost maniacally.
What are you supposed to do when someone grins at you like that? When you barely know
him? When you are a guest in his family’s house? Like the Senator, I was being polite.

I think now I should have slapped that grin off Jamie’s face. Now when I see his picture
in a newspaper or a magazine I remember the way he looked at me and it literally makes
my stomach turn. Sometimes I gouge his face out of the picture, leave just a hairline
and a body, usually clad in a sport coat, a white shirt, a loose tie, khaki pants.
Even when I do that you can still tell who it is, by the hairline and the family uniform.

Back then I didn’t slap, didn’t gouge. I just watched. It was only when I thought
Peter was going to hurt her that I stepped in.
Hurt her
. Jesus, what was I thinking before, that she wasn’t being hurt? Hurt, harmed. I didn’t
want him to do physical damage to her. Permanent damage. Go ahead, abuse her. Foul
her. Debase her. But don’t hurt her.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. What was I thinking?

Peter was looming over her, looking like a Cape buffalo eyeing its prey. He had one
hand on the back of the couch, one hand on the coffee table. She was leaning back.
To lean back meant tucking herself into the corner of the couch. Was she trying to
escape or was she relaxing? One bare foot was on top of the couch. A narrow foot at
the end of a long, slender, well-tanned leg.

Why do I remember that part? Was that what I was looking at?

Kendrick wasn’t saying anything. Had she not paid attention when Jamie kneeled on
the floor behind her head? Did she not care when he put his hands on her shoulders,
when he started rolling his wrists to
make the transition from black cloth to bare skin? Wasn’t he making little cackling
sounds like a roulette ball makes when it drops into a slot?

Peter was stroking her ankle, her shin, sliding his hand up to her knee, sliding it
back down her calf. Couldn’t she have pulled the leg away? Especially when his hand,
on the third or fourth passage, went over the apex formed by her knee and slid down
her thigh? The front of her thigh. And then around the side, to someplace where the
black dress had bunched. Peter’s hand disappeared, then came into sight again as it
traced its way along the back of her leg to the crux of her knee. Where it lingered.
Where it twisted and turned in a gentle little screwing motion designed to open the
angle between calf and thigh. And all the while he was talking to her, complimenting
her, murmuring something about her perfume. He recognized her perfume.

If you are just standing there and a girl, a college girl, who seems to know so much
more than you about things that count, isn’t protesting that two men are touching
her with increasing intimacy, is it up to you to tell her she should be? Is it up
to you to ask if she is all right when she isn’t saying anything about the one man’s
hands down the top of her dress and the other man’s up the bottom of it?

Was it enough for me to be on alert in case she got hurt?

Peter’s hands went under her buttocks, lifted her up, and came out from under her
dress with her panties, black silk underwear with a filigree front on which was embroidered
an intertwined set of vines. I didn’t know that detail when he took them off her,
when he tossed them back over his shoulder. I knew only that the panties were black.
And small. With a front panel that you appeared to be able to see through.

I waited for her to say something. She didn’t. I didn’t.

Peter took a red candle out of a brass candlestick.

She didn’t say anything and I didn’t.

His blazer came off. His pants and boxers went below his knees. He took her legs and
put them on either side of his waist. He held the candle in front of him and moved
forward, grinning at Jamie. And Jamie grinned back.

She didn’t say anything and neither did I.

It was only later, when he dropped the candle and I realized what he meant to do with
the brass candlestick, that I acted.

“Hey, that’s not cool,” I said, putting one hand on Peter’s shoulder. I was still
holding what was left of my drink in my other hand.

Peter twisted his head predatorily, looked at me as if my opinion meant nothing. How
did I know what was cool? He had gone all his life without taking advice from me,
or the likes of me. Who was I to tell him what was cool in his family’s house?

I squeezed his shoulder, tugged on his striped shirt.

Peter was big, but he wasn’t strong. I squeezed harder, pulled more. My fingers were
digging deep into his flesh.

He could have swung the candlestick at me, but Peter was not interested in fighting.
He just kept looking at me, his pink-and-white face slightly flabby and dissolute,
his pale blue eyes seeming not quite to recognize me or understand my message.

I was trying to smile while I squeezed. It wasn’t a real smile, my lips never opened,
but it served its purpose. I was telling him it wasn’t my house. Not my party. The
girl wasn’t my friend. But guys don’t do this sort of thing.

I just wanted him to stop, that was all.

T
HE PLACE I LIVED MY SENIOR YEAR AT PENN WAS FOUR BLOCKS
from campus. It was a house with antique oak floors, built-in bookcases, a leaded
glass front window with a window seat, three bedrooms and a bath on the second story,
another bedroom and a bath in the basement. It was trashed most of the time. McFetridge
wouldn’t wash dishes or put food away. Ellis took a vow that he would not do McFetridge’s
cleanup for him. Tuttle was oblivious.

On any given day, pizza boxes, beer cans, soda cans, and newspapers covered the chairs,
the couch, the coffee table, the dining room table, the kitchen table. If we needed
the space, if we wanted to sit down, we pushed the clutter aside.

One problem with throwing out boxes or cans or containers was that any one of them
could be a repository of scraps and butts of marijuana, and there were times when
those roaches had to be stripped down and consolidated into re-rolled joints. These
times usually occurred around 10:00 p.m., when someone made a hoagie run. It was spring
of senior year and the only one who was still studying was Ellis. He was hoping to
become a doctor.

It was not likely that anybody would ring our doorbell at 9:30 in the morning, but
there it was. Ellis was off at class; McFetridge was out; Tuttle wasn’t going to get
up for anything or anyone. The bell
rang and rang until I had to come down from the second floor to get it. I did not
even brush my teeth. I should have at least done that.

A grown man was standing on our front porch. He wore a plaid shirt, jeans, running
shoes, a gray jacket that was unzipped. Could have been a neighborhood guy, come to
complain about the music, the junk in the yard, the lights that stayed on all night.
Except he had an air of authority about him. If he had flashed a badge, I wouldn’t
have questioned it. But what he showed instead was a cardboard tray holding two coffees,
a couple of small containers of cream, stir sticks, and half a dozen packets of sugar.

“You George Becket?” he wanted to know.

I told him no.

Very slowly, a smile spread across the man’s mouth. It was not a wide mouth and the
smile did not have far to go, but it was there. “I’m not a bill collector, kid,” he
said.

I figured he wasn’t a coffee delivery guy, either. He was probably five-feet-ten,
but looked taller, just by the way he carried himself. His hair was dark, cut short
around the ears, combed carefully from left to right on top of his head. His eyes
were as dark as his hair, his features narrow. There was, from what I could see, not
an ounce of fat on him. Indeed, he seemed almost spring-loaded, as though he could
bounce up and hit his head on the ceiling of the porch, come back down and not spill
a drop of the coffee.

The longer we stood there the more sure he became that I was George Becket. Perhaps
he had seen a picture. Perhaps it took him a while to realize that the tousle-haired,
sleepy-eyed guy in front of him was, in fact, the same person who had appeared in
a coat and tie for a fraternity or graduation photo.

“I’ve got a little something to talk to you about, Georgie,” he said. He gestured
to the porch, where perhaps he expected there to be chairs. He recovered fast enough
to keep his hand moving until it ended at the top step. “We can do it out here.”

I could have, I suppose, simply closed the door in his face. But I was not thinking
clearly. I moved to the top step and sat down. I had nothing on but jeans and a gray
athletic department T-shirt that had the
number 46 on its chest. I shivered in the morning air and tried to place myself in
as much sunshine as possible.

The man handed me one of the coffees, let me take a cream and a sugar and a wooden
stir stick, and waited until I had mixed and stirred and sipped.

“My name is Roland Andrews,” he said. “I work for a man named Josh David Powell.”
He let the name sink in before he continued. He wanted to see what kind of effect
it would have. “I believe you know his daughter. Kendrick.”

I gave a lot of thought to my next move. I, of course, had no idea what Mr. Andrews
did for Mr. Powell, but I had my suspicions.

“She said you were very nice to her.”

Nice. I helped clean her up. I walked her out of the party. Put her in her car. Kept
her panties in my pocket.

I sipped my coffee and tried to buy time. How much time can you buy when a man on
a mission is sitting right next to you, watching every breath you take, every flick
of your eyes, every twitch of your face?

“She said you were there when she was raped by Peter Gregory Martin.”

Raped
. It was a word I had been thinking about for two weeks straight, ever since we returned
from Florida. I had even looked it up. “Illicit sexual intercourse without the consent
of the woman and effected by force, duress, intimidation, or deception as to the nature
of the act.” Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary
. I had carried that definition around with me for a few days, telling myself it did
not apply to what Peter and Jamie had done. There had been no force, duress, intimidation,
deception.

“I don’t exactly remember it that way,” I said.

“Which part don’t you remember, son?”

I wondered if I could say I didn’t remember any of it. But Kendrick had told him I
had been there. She had told him, told someone, enough to track me down. Had I given
her my last name? I must have told her where I went to school. She said Bryn Mawr,
I said Penn. Just a few miles apart. See how much we have in common?

Had she been sober enough to remember any of it? She had been sober enough to drive.
She had had a little sports car. A red one. An Alfa Romeo drop-top. With a stick shift.
And I had let her get in it, get behind the steering wheel, go off down the gravel
driveway and out the gate to Ocean Boulevard. But so had the valet. A smiling young
black man, to whom I had given five bucks.

He should have said something.

“I was just there in the room when she was fooling around with those guys.”

The man’s breathing became more shallow, as if somehow I had just insulted him, the
man who had brought me coffee, the man who had called me “son.” “Fooling around?”
he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Is that what you call it?”

I didn’t answer. There was nothing I could say that was going to bring this conversation
to a pleasant end.

“Do you know who Mr. Powell is, George?”

“No.”

“You ever hear of CPA Properties?”

“No.”

“CPA stands for Coltrane Powell Associates, out of Delaware. It’s the largest developer
of commercial properties in the Mid-Atlantic region.”

I didn’t know CPA. I didn’t know the first thing about developers.

“Delaware, Maryland, eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey.” He delivered the
names of each place directly into my ear, as if he fully intended the accumulation
to cause me to break down, beg for mercy, promise a lifetime of cooperation if only
he would stop hitting me with geographic areas.