"I"m in New York."
"I know."
"I"m going to need some help."
"What kind of help?" Barbara had not hesitated before. Why now?
"An address, to start with."
"If I can, I will." Barbara, my collaborator, coming through again.
"And I"ll need one more thing."
"What"s that?"
"You to go there, to the address I want you to give me."
"Depends on where it is, doesn"t it? I mean, I"ve got the kids-"
"It"s here. In New York."
"When?"
"Tonight. Tomorrow night. When can you do it?"
"Oh, G.o.d. I don"t know, George. I"ve only been back to work a few days."
"Please, Barbara." I took a deep breath. I forced myself to say it. "I need you."
THE TOWNHOUSE AT THE END OF MORTON STREET WAS MADE OF red brick. Smooth red brick, neatly mortared. A brief walkway led in from the sidewalk to half a dozen concrete steps that rose to a small landing at the base of the front door, which was painted a glossy black and had bra.s.s fixtures. The face of the house was protected by a tiny yard filled with ivy plants and fenced off by curling wrought iron that matched the door in color and gloss.
It was dark when I rang the bell. It grew darker while I waited.
Out on the sidewalk, at the base of the railing, a figure in a soiled and ripped synthetic fur coat and a crushed felt hat sat down, hunched over, contemplated the gutter.
I rang again. And waited some more. I knew someone was inside. I could see the lights on the second and third floors. I could hear music.
I once again was wearing the Zegna suit and the red tie because it was all I had brought to New York. I had stayed at The Benjamin in Midtown, and the hotel had done a good job of getting my white shirt laundered, my socks and underwear cleaned-and for pretty much the same price I would have paid to buy them new.
I was about to ring a third time when the door was flung open.
The man who stood there had the long, straight hair that so many of those in his bloodline had, but he was short, like his sister Cory. Lexi Trotter had an army of men in uniform protecting her door; Jamie Gregory not only opened his door himself, but he had come down two or three flights to do it. Come in his blue b.u.t.ton-down shirt, his cream-colored slacks, his Gucci shoes with no socks. "Oh," he said. "It"s you."
He recognized me.
And that empowered me.
"Heh, heh," I said. An expression of power.
"It"s not a good day for me," he said, as if maybe I could come back another time to accuse him of murder.
"You got that right," I told him.
In Jamie Gregory"s hand was a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s with a gold rim around its top. The liquor in the gla.s.s was floating several solid ice cubes. He dropped his eyes to the cubes and shook them a bit as if they, like me, were not doing what he wanted. "Maybe we could take this up later," he said.
Something about this encounter was wrong. I asked him why he thought I was there.
"You"re the guy running for D.A., aren"t you?"
I recognized the music that was playing. Aerosmith. "Dream On." Any guy my age would recognize it. There was an energy to it, a sense of frenzy that suited the moment.
"No," I said. "I"m the guy from Palm Beach."
"Of course you are. From the party at my family"s home."
Of course you are. The sonofab.i.t.c.h. I thought of hitting him right then. How many people had I thought of hitting lately? How many times had I thought of hitting him, Jamie Gregory, in particular? All my adult life, it seemed.
"The party with Kendrick Powell," I said between clenched teeth.
"Yes." He sighed. He drank. He said, "And you want me to keep quiet about it."
Keep quiet? Did I say that, or did the question just bulge from my face?
Down the stairs came Steven Tyler"s squealing, commanding voice: "Sing with me, Sing for the years."
"The party," I choked out, "where I watched you and your cousin molest her when she was too drunk to know what she was doing." Why couldn"t I make it sound as bad as it was? Make it sound as bad out loud as it did in my head?
The ice cubes in Jamie Gregory"s gla.s.s swirled again. The drink sloshed over his fingers. "Is that the story you"re expecting to tell?"
"It"s the story that"s the f.u.c.king truth," I said. But it wasn"t even the story I wanted to talk about. I had come to tell him I knew he had killed Heidi Telford. Barbara was supposed to be here. She was supposed to hear his confession, his admission. Maybe come down the staircase right now. A slender foot, a long leg, a hand on the railing. I looked and there was nothing. All that was coming down the stairs was the music. "Dream on, Dream on, Dream until your dreams come true."
"You know, my friend," he said, as if I needed a lesson and he was resigned to giving it to me, "sometimes things happen. They might seem all right at the time, and then, years later, you"re doing something else, you want to do something else, and all of a sudden you realize you have to explain this thing you did way back when." The gla.s.s went to his mouth. He spoke over the gold rim. "I understand that."
"f.u.c.k you."
He looked disappointed at my argument. "I a.s.sume that"s what"s going on with you," he said, shaking the ice. "I mean, I know what you did. My uncle knows. He doesn"t condone it, but he did the best he could to get you out of it because you were a guest in his house. In truth, he feels quite guilty about whatever little partic.i.p.ation we had."
Partic.i.p.ation? They were the ones who took her into the library. I just followed. I just stood there with a drink in my hand and a stupid half-smile on my face.
"He thinks, well, Peter and I should have watched you closer. Things happen in our house, anywhere near our house, anything to do with anyone who was at our house, and the whole family gets held responsible. It"s the way it is, we realize that. We"re supposed to realize that. And so we were responsible for you, and what happened is embarra.s.sing all around. Especially embarra.s.sing when someone tries to make a criminal case out of it."
What was he talking about? It was a criminal case. It was only because the Florida state attorney quashed the investigation that it wasn"t.
Jamie was drinking again. It was not a matter of giving me time to say something so much as it was simply time for him to drink.
When he was done he put his c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s down on what must have been a shelf or a table just inside the door. He let his hand stay there where I couldn"t see it. He returned his eyes to mine. It had been time to take a drink, and now it was time to pay attention to me. Except his hand stayed out of sight. "Fortunately," he said, "that"s all behind us now."
What was? The rape?
"I mean, you got out of it all right, didn"t you?" he asked, as if he was inquiring about a sunburn. "All these years, you"ve been able to fly beneath the radar and everything"s been fine."
Was he asking or was he telling me? No, I wanted to say. I"ve been in retreat, hiding, wasting my life while you went on to do whatever you wanted, wherever you wanted.
"And then one day you took a look at your boss and decided you should have his job." Jamie shook his head. His hair fell over his brow and he had to use his free hand to brush it out of his eyes. "So now you come here because you want to make sure I"ve still got your back. Do I have that right?"
Where had he come up with this? And who was he saying it for? Someone had to be behind the door or just up the stairs. Someone who was doing for him what Barbara was supposed to have done for me.
Unless it was Barbara.
Maybe he wouldn"t know she was there for me. There to hear his confession. To be my proof.
"On Memorial Day of 1999 you hit Heidi Telford over the head with a golf club and killed her," I blurted out.
Jamie Gregory recoiled. "Hey, guy," he said, "you don"t have to do this." Then, when I did not blubber anything else, he began to speak soothingly, the way people do to horses that are spooked. "You want to talk about how to handle the Palm Beach matter, that"s fine. You don"t have to go around tossing out wild accusations." His eyes left mine, traveled over my shoulder to the street, and seemed to get stuck there. "You want to come inside?"
Sure, go inside. And if Barbara was not there, what was I supposed to do then? Grab him in a headlock with one arm while I used the other to call the police?
Of course, chances were it wasn"t Barbara I would find in there. It could be someone like Pierre Mumford, ready to snap my neck, say I fell down the stairs. The Gregorys probably had family boot camp, where they learned how to deal with adversaries, people who came after them, threatened them, wanted something from them. Never admit anything. Always have someone to back you up.
Jamie continued to look out to the street. I gathered his attention was on the guy in the soiled coat and crushed hat at the base of his wrought-iron fence, and then his hand suddenly came out from wherever it had been, came out with an ice cube and threw it. I turned in time to see the ice hit the person in the middle of the back. "Hey, you!" he yelled. But the figure took his abuse and did not so much as move.
Jamie shrugged at me, as though we had just done this together, thrown an ice cube at a homeless man. Then he stepped back, inclined his body slightly forward and did a mock sweep of his arm. "You coming in?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Well then," he said, pointing upward with his index finger, "I"ve got company."
He did not grin the way I had seen him in Palm Beach, but that grin was what entered my mind. Here I had just accused the man of murder and he was excusing himself because he had a date. I knew what that meant, having a date with Jamie Gregory, and I stomped my foot onto his threshold before he could close the door. "I"ve spoken to Lexi Sommers," I said.
For the first time, I got the reaction I was expecting. Jamie looked at my face, looked at my foot, then stepped back. "I told you," he said, moving away from the door, backing toward the wall of his foyer, creating s.p.a.ce between us, "you don"t have to do any of this. You want the D.A."s job, there"s plenty of ways we can help. But it doesn"t serve anybody"s best interest to go around threatening people. Someone hears you ... they might even think you"re engaged in blackmail."
Did his eyes flick to one side when he paused, or was it just my imagination?
"Lexi told me she was sleeping with your cousin Ned when it happened."
"Then she wouldn"t be able to tell you anything, would she?" he said softly.
"She says they got woken up because something had to be done."
"And what was that?"
"Something had to be done about the dead girl downstairs."
It was unclear if I had guessed right, but his lips spread. It was still not the Palm Beach grin, just one that said I was nuts, didn"t know what I was talking about, was profoundly mistaken. It was a grin that did not require his eyes to do anything at all.
Was I panting? Hyperventilating? Something was affecting my voice, making it tight and low. "She said it was Peter who woke them, Jamie. Because you were downstairs, trying to clean up the mess you had made."
"That"s bulls.h.i.t," he said. He didn"t sound angry. I was certain now that there was someone in the room next to him, someone just beyond my vision.
"Something bad happens," I said, trying to speak louder, "no matter how mad you Gregorys are at each other, you stick together. That"s the family code, right?"
"We do stick together," he agreed. "We stuck with you down in Florida, didn"t we?"
"Peter was going to get the last girl that night and you were going to be the loser, weren"t you, Jamie? Couldn"t entice her to go off with you, so you decided to make sure he didn"t get her, either. That"s the way all you hypercompet.i.tive Gregorys are, isn"t it?"
"What we are is loyal to our friends and to those who are loyal to us. You took advantage of that girl down there; you wanted help. We gave it to you. Now you"re afraid it"s going to come back and bite you in the b.u.t.t."
"Heidi Telford never left by the side gate, as you guys tried to make it seem. There was no motorist who picked her up while she was walking home. It was just you, Jamie, who screwed everything up that night."
"What I apparently screwed up was not turning you over to the police after catching you violating Kendrick Powell."
"You and Peter actually got into a fight over Heidi, and when Paul McFetridge broke it up, you ran off and got the first weapon you could find."
"So what you"re thinking is that you can keep me from talking when you announce your candidacy by pretending you"ve got something on me. I talk about the rape and you"ll tell everyone I"m a murderer, is that it?"
"Came back with a golf club. But you weren"t going to beat in your cousin"s skull, were you? That would tear the family apart if you killed your cousin. And your family doesn"t tear apart. You"re against each other only until it"s time to be against everyone else."
Jamie Gregory looked into my face as if he were searching for something.
"So you snuck up on Heidi and hit her from behind."
"Fact is," he said, "a girl like Kendrick would never have had anything to do with a guy like you."
"How do you like your date now, Peter, huh? Like her with her skull split open?"
"And there she was, practically pa.s.sed out on the couch, unable to stop you from doing anything you wanted." He moved to one side. Toward what? Toward a room that I couldn"t see, toward whatever was going to get me if I actually went inside the house?
I stayed where I was. "Heidi Telford wasn"t just pa.s.sed out," I said, my voice pursuing him. "She was dead. And you and Peter were scared. You had to do something before the guests woke up in the morning and found the body, the blood, the little bits of brain and bone you had left scattered around."
"You must have thought you were in heaven. Seeing her lying on the couch like that."
"So Peter went to get Ned, get some help, while you started the clean up."
"She couldn"t even resist."
"One of you, one of the three, came up with the idea of taking her to the golf course, putting her out there in the trees along the fairway. It was dark, it was accessible, it kept to some kind of theme in terms of how she had gotten killed."
"What did you do with her underwear, anyhow?"
"It wasn"t a good idea, but all three of you partic.i.p.ated, and then the family machine started putting its spin on things, planting rumors, stories, buying off witnesses, just like you did down in Florida. Just like you always do."