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.
3.
THE 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.
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 ventur
e 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.
Crime of Privilege: A Novel Page 2
