Crime of Privilege: A Novel (48 page)

He shrugged helplessly. “Which means, all we’ve got is you.”

“And,” added Reid, “you’re tainted.”

I
WENT HOME AND I WAITED. I WASN
’
T SURE FOR WHAT
.

Every day I listened to the radio: the local Cape stations, WBZ in Boston, NPR. The
airwaves were filled with talk about the economic crisis. Every day I read
The New York Times, The Boston Globe
, the
Cape Cod Times
. There were articles about Jamie’s death, about the funeral, about his family. There
continued to be speculation about the connection between his killer and the money
that Jamie had lost for investors. Both the police and the FBI claimed to be investigating.
“But,” explained one NYPD spokesman, “there were just so many people who were wiped
out, it may take years.”

Every day I got out my bike and rode as far as I could, for as long as I could.

I HAD A CALL
from Barbara. She wanted to know how I was doing.

She also wanted to tell me that with my office door closed and locked, there were
rumors flying around the office about where I was and what was happening to me. Sean
Murphy, she said, was telling people it was not just a coincidence that I had disappeared
on the very day Jamie Gregory was shot.

I hung up with Barbara and immediately called Dick O’Connor. He told me I needed to
lie low, let the process take its course. I repeated
what I had heard about the rumors and Dick agreed that it was unfortunate. He said
he would speak to Sean and urged me to be patient. “Things are being taken care of,
Georgie,” he insisted.

THE RESULTS OF
the autopsy were released. It turned out Darra Lane had done me an enormous favor.
In her press conference, in her stories to the police, on television and in magazines,
she had insisted that a man in a suit had shot Jamie Gregory from just a couple of
feet away. The autopsy confirmed that Jamie had been shot from a distance, at least
twenty-five feet, said the coroner, who commented that it was a rather remarkable
feat of marksmanship for a nine-millimeter pistol. The shooter must have been well
trained, he said.

I waited for a call from Dick. It didn’t come. I tried calling him. He wasn’t available.
His secretary said he would call me back. He didn’t.

I placed three more calls: one to Dick, one to Reid, one to Mitch. Nobody took them.

I
RODE MY BIKE ALL THE WAY TO PROVINCETOWN. I HAD NOT MEANT
to go that far. I had ridden the Rail Trail, taken the Chatham route, then continued
on through Orleans until I got to the roundabout that marked the transition from Mid-Cape
to Lower Cape. I could have gone one hundred eighty degrees around the rotary, then
on to Rock Harbor, where I could have stopped and looked at the fishing boats, maybe
bought a lobster roll at a place called Cap’t Cass on the edge of the Harbor parking
lot, then gotten back on the Brewster leg of the Rail Trail and returned to my car
in Dennis. This time of year I wasn’t sure Cap’t Cass was still open, and so I decided
to head east instead, go to Arnold’s Lobster and Clam Bar along Route 6. It was closed
for the season, so I kept going, through Eastham, with a vague idea that there were
more roadside lobster shacks and one of them was bound to be open. I kept riding through
Wellfleet, and by the time I got to Truro I decided to go all the way.

It was almost dark when I got to the end of the continent. I wasn’t going to be able
to ride back. I didn’t have a light, didn’t even have a windbreaker, and it was getting
cold. I booked a room at a motel at the far end of town, out on a jetty, the very
edge of the world.

IT WAS FOGGY WHEN
I got up in the morning, and still cold. I had walked partway along Commercial Street
the night before, looking for something to eat. I had gotten some catcalls from men
who had enjoyed my spandex outfit, and now I was going to have to make the walk again
if I wanted to buy something warm to wear for the long ride back.

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.”