Crime of Privilege: A Novel

by Walter Walker

  “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.”

  4.

  HOW 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.

  Suddenly I was afraid. What if someone else came in and saw this, saw her, saw me? What would I say? That it wasn’t me? That it was Peter and Jamie? And what about her, why wasn’t she saying anything? Why wasn’t she doing anything?

  “Kendrick,” I said. I must have put my glass on the coffee table because I reached out to her with both hands and tried to pull her into a sitting position. “Kendrick, c’mon. You have to get up. Here, let me get your dress down.”

  She did as I wanted, sat up like a doll that had to be held in place. I was tugging the dress, trying to pull it down to her thighs, tilting her one way and then another. I had to put one arm around her shoulders, use the other to pull down the dress, then switch arms and pull on the other side. Her face was pointed toward the floor so that when I stepped back to see if I had gotten everything I still had to keep my hand on her, make sure she didn’t fall forward. I didn’t know what to do about her breasts. She had a bra. It seemed to be a very flimsy bra and it seemed not exactly in place. I settled for straightening out the straps of the dress.

  I asked if she was all right.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

  I looked around, feeling panic of a whole different kind than I had a few moments before. There was a maroon wastebasket with some kind of old-world map on its sides. I leaned Kendrick into the cushions, told her to hold on, ran to the wastebasket, and got it back to her just in time. I turned my head away so I didn’t have to see.

  I had one hand on her, one hand on the bucket, my head twisted over my shoulder. I heard the sounds and almost instantly smelled the odor. I did not want to retch myself. I waited until she was done, tilted her back again, and ran with the wastebasket to a window. I undid the latch, shoved up the window, threw the entire basket into the bushes. Then I ran back to Kendrick. Her legs were straight out in front of her. She had vomit in her hair. “Shit,” I said.

  “Shit,” she said, and started to laugh.

  Was it a laugh? It wasn’t a real laugh. It didn’t last more than a note or two.

  I looked around the room, trying to figure out how I was going to clean her up. My eyes went to the drapes, maroon, with gold figures on them. If I could get her over to the windows, I could at least use the cloth to clean her hair.

  “Can you get up?” I asked, but I wasn’t waiting for an answer. I was already pulling her to her feet. “Okay, that’s it. Stand. Now lean on me. We’re not going far.”

  The vomit, I feared, was getting on my sport coat. I would throw it out the window, too. No, I would use the drapes to blot it, then find a sink somewhere with running water. This was a twenty-room house. There had to be running water somewhere.

  “You’re so nice,” Kendrick said.

  “Yeah, I’m a saint,” I said, maneuvering her step by step. I got her to the windows, turned her around, guided her into a sitting position on a windowsill. “You okay there?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m okay,” she said, and got to her feet. She took one step, caught herself, and then staggered across the Spanish tile floor to a closed door.

  There were three doors in the wall on the opposite side of the room from where I had intended to do my emergency cleaning. She went directly to the one in the far corner, the one that was behind and to the left of the Senator’s desk. Her head was slightly bowed and she did not walk in a completely straight line, but she knew where to go.

  Which may explain how Mr. Andrews knew about the Winslow Homer.

  She opened the door, hit a switch, and illuminated a small bathroom, a powder room, an antechamber with a toilet and a sink and a mirror over the sink and a rack with towels.

  How drunk could she have been if she was able to go directly there?

  The door closed and I could hear water rushing from the faucet into the basin. I sat on the windowsill, just as Kendrick had done, looked out the window, where the map-covered wastebasket was ensconced in a green-leafed bush with inch-thick branches and where the smell of vomit was mixing with the fragrances of jasmine, hyacinth, and gardenias, and wondered what to do. I settled for closing the window.

  The water kept running. Long enough for me to think I should go in there and check on her. But then a different door opened. It was the one through which we had entered, through which Peter and Jamie had exited, and it brought with it the distant sounds of the cocktail party that I had almost forgotten was taking place.

  The woman holding the door, her hand on the doorknob, her arm stretched out fully in front of her as she leaned in, was one of the Senator’s sisters, famous enough in her own right for me to know who she was.

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said. It was her house, her family’s house, but she was requesting forgiveness for intruding. And then she realized that I was all alone. “Is everything okay in here?” she asked.

  There was someone behind her. She obviously was going to show that person the library, or something in the library, and with that realization my eyes darted to a black object on the floor. I had been sitting there doing nothing for minutes and only now did I notice Kendrick’s silk-and-mesh underwear in a tiny, tangled bunch on top of a burnt-umber tile.

  “Hello, Mrs. Martin. I’
m sorry.” I pushed off the windowsill with my hips, took a step toward the little black mound. “I’m just waiting for my friend Kendrick.” I thrust my hand toward the door of the bathroom, thrust it harder than I needed to, harder than anybody in his right mind would have done, but I was taking another step and trying to get Mrs. Martin to look that way, to notice the noise of the rushing water, to not notice the cloth on the floor. “She isn’t feeling too well.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Martin, and looked back at her companion. Then she looked at me again and by this time I had made it all the way to the underwear. I was standing in front of it. I had one shoe next to the other and was posed as rigidly as a West Point cadet while Mrs. Martin asked, “Do you think she needs some help?”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Martin, she’ll be all right in a minute.” And when my hostess seemed dubious, I added, “I think she’s embarrassed. That’s why I’m sort of standing guard.”

  See? See how I’m standing?

  “Oh,” she said to me. Then she looked at her companion again. Then back to me. “Maybe we’ll return in a minute,” she offered.

  “Gosh, if you would. I’m sure it won’t be long and I know she’ll feel so much better if she thought nobody knew.”

  Nobody knew she was drunk, shitfaced, puked on herself. Nobody knew she had just been fingered, fucked, screwed with a candle by your son, Mrs. Martin. Your deplorable son and your repulsive nephew.

  5.

  I CALLED BRYN MAWR. IN THOSE DAYS YOU COULD DIAL THE SCHOOL’S main number, get a school operator, ask for the student by name, and you would be connected to the student’s room.

  “I’m sorry,” the operator said after putting me on hold for half a minute, “Miss Powell is no longer attending Bryn Mawr. She’s withdrawn from the school.”

  “But she was just there a few weeks ago.”

  “That’s all the information I have. Her number has been disconnected.”

  I wondered if I should call information in Delaware. If the Powells lived in Delaware, they probably lived in Wilmington. Maybe Dover. Those were the only cities in Delaware I knew. But Powell was a common name and if Mr. Powell was as wealthy as Mr. Andrews said, he would have an unlisted number.

  I thought of calling CPA Properties. Hello, can I speak to the owner? To the owner’s daughter?

  In the end, once again, I did nothing.

  6.

  THE WATER HAD BEEN SHUT OFF AT LAST. THE DOOR HAD BEEN flung open. She had come out of the powder room without looking at me and gone along the line of bookshelves, heading back into the heart of the party.

  “Kendrick?”

  I ran to head her off. Sprinted. She put her hand out for the door handle and I got there first.

  “Get out of my way,” she said. Her green eyes were not as glazed as before. They did not seem to be normal, but it was hard to tell what was going on behind them because they were looking right through me.

  I tried to get her to focus on me, dipping my head to get on eye level with her. “You okay?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  What did I think? The theme of the evening. The thing to which I keep coming back, even now.

  “I think you probably had a little too much to drink.”

  “Fuck you,” said Kendrick Powell, defying me to say anything more.

  Her skin was somehow pale beneath her tan. Her hair was slightly wet, but all the signs of sickness had been removed, along with all traces of eyeliner and lipstick. She still looked beautiful, but dangerous, like a jungle cat that could strike out at any time. I wanted to put my hand on her bare arm, tell her everything was going to be all right. But it seemed like such an inappropriate thing to do, to touch her after she had been touched so much.

  I got out of her way.

  She walked straight out of the library, past Mrs. Martin, who was waiting on the other side of the door with not one but two friends, both older women wearing pale greens and pinks and giant diamonds on their left hands. Was Kendrick’s head held high or was she hanging it in shame? Why do I think now that she was doing both? She took three, maybe four, steps and then her foot slipped, her ankle rolled, and I realized she was barefoot.

  Mrs. Martin and her friends went from staring at Kendrick to looking at me in horror. What had I done to the poor girl? Kept her in a closed room with her shoes off? Sent her stumbling out in a stripped-down, almost disheveled, state, trying to be brave, trying not to reveal her abject level of humiliation? Oh, young man, how could you?

  I thought to run back into the library to get the shoes. They were little more than sandals, really. Small heels, thin straps, probably didn’t weigh a pound between then. How do I know what they weighed? I never picked them up. I didn’t pick them up before Mrs. Martin gaped disbelievingly at me, and I didn’t pick them up afterward. I followed Kendrick instead, followed her through the sea of people in yellow sport coats and blue blazers and Lilly Pulitzer dresses with patterns of shells that looked like flowers and flowers that looked like shells, followed her all the way to the front door. Where was McFetridge? Where were the Gregory boys? Didn’t Kendrick know anybody at the party? Why was I the only one standing under the portico with her, waiting for her car?

  She hadn’t even called for it. She just appeared, stood there barefoot, her arms at her sides, and one of the smiling young black men in white jackets went and got it for her.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive?” I said.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  Fuck off, fuck you, the last four words she said to me; and she told Mr. Andrews how nice I had been to her?

  The Alfa arrived. Its engine throbbed and what might have sounded like music somewhere else was almost unseemly in front of the Gregorys’ front door. The young man leaped out, held the door, and Kendrick, placing her right hand on the trunk for support, hobbled around the back of the car and got in the driver’s seat without so much as looking at him. The valet shut the door gently but firmly; Kendrick put the car in gear and was off, the pebbles in the driveway spattering in every direction.

  She drove away and I stood there.

  “Can I get you a car, sir?” the smiling man asked. Not “your” car, but “a” car. He seemed astute enough to know I didn’t have one of my own.

  I gave him the five bucks that was loose in my pocket and went back inside, where a crowd was gathered around the grand piano. One of the Senator’s buddies, a radio talk-show host up on Cape Cod, was playing and singing “Goodnight, Irene.” But he changed the lyrics, spiced them up, directed them to one of the older ladies, who started to dance, to move her hips, until she realized how risque his version was, and then she called out, “Ohhhh,” in a throaty voice that made everybody laugh as she raised her hand to her face in feigned embarrassment.

  Then the Senator himself began to sing, “We were sailing along …” The pianist found the right notes on the keyboard, took up the accompaniment. “… on Moonlight Bay. We could hear the voices ringing, They seem to say, ‘You have stolen her heart, Now don’t go ’way!’ ” The Senator reached out to grab the hand of his sister, the one who was married to the movie actor, and twirled her toward him. The crowd shook their highball glasses appreciatively as she spun in close and twirled back away again, her dress blowing outward, showing off a pair of legs that were quite commendable for a woman her age.

  The verse was finished, repeated, and everyone around the piano joined in. A few brown-spotted hands were clapping and bracelets were jingling as the voices sang, “You have stolen her heart …,” and this time when the Senator’s sister spun back to him, it was he who changed the lyrics, his voice booming out in a passable baritone that made all the others drift off, “We were strolling along.…” His right arm slipped around her waist and his left hand took hers and held it chest high as he sang, “On Moonlight Bay.” He looked over his shoulder, grinning at us, grinning wholeheartedly, a grin that said, Look! Look what I can do! Can you believe it? And then he adjusted his position, mo
ved in slightly behind and to the side of her, and the two of them began gently waltzing away from the piano, “We can hear the voices singing, ‘You have broken my heart, please go a-way!’ ”

  The guests roared. Fingers tapped on the heels of palms as the brother-and-sister dance team continued across the floor. It was all great fun, so much so that I almost would have forgotten the incident in the library if it were not for the small ball of cloth in my pocket.

  1.

  CAPE COD, March 2008

  I WENT INTO FOGO’S FOR DINNER. BAD NAME. I’M NOT EVEN SURE how good the food is, but for years I went there three or four times a week. I could eat at the bar, a lovely slice of veneered log in which the natural contours provided cutouts that allowed a man to sit comfortably in whichever of the twelve long-legged, spindle-back chairs happened to be available. I liked that veneered log. I liked the television behind the bar. I liked the post-middle-aged people who worked there and knew just enough about me to ask how things were going without inquiring too deeply.

  I suppose certain aspects of my life were obvious. I wasn’t married and I didn’t live with anyone, or I wouldn’t have been in there eating dinner as often as I did. I usually wore a suit, particularly if I stopped off on my way home from work, so I had to be a professional. I never dined with clients—or, for that matter, anyone else—so I was unlikely to be involved in business. I didn’t have an accent, or at least not a Boston or Cape Cod accent, so I was not originally from the area. I liked to watch whatever sporting event was on TV and I made appropriate noises in support or condemnation of the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots, so I had to have been around for a while. And I liked to have a Manhattan, or a couple of beers, or a glass or two of wine, or even an occasional martini, so I was a man of party potential without being an alcoholic.