Part 40 (1/2)
”Put it in your pocket, was that it? Running off with a drunk girl's underwear in your pocket.” He formed his fingers into a circle and made a pumping motion. And there it was, on his face, the same grin I had seen in Palm Beach, the one that had been in my mind for a dozen years.
The hand was pumping, the music was pouring down the stairs, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was grinning at me, and I went after him. I took one lunging step, and Jamie Gregory's eyes went wide. Only they weren't looking at me. They were looking past me, behind me, and the hand, the one that had been pumping, went up in front of his face.
I spun and raised my arm to protect my own head from whatever was coming.
THE POLICE WERE THERE WITHIN MINUTES. TWO MINUTES, MAYBE. Time was a blur. Everything was a blur except what was directly in front of me, which was Jamie's body, crumpled at the base of the foyer wall. He had a hole in his chest, right about where his heart should be, and blood was gus.h.i.+ng out of it. I had both my hands over the hole, trying to keep the blood in, pus.h.i.+ng down on his chest because I did not know what else to do; hampered in everything I tried by Darra Lane, who had come running down the stairs as soon as Jamie collapsed. She had dived on top of him, shaking his shoulders, beseeching him to wake up.
There had been a shot. A single loud, unnatural noise that had come from the street, overwhelming all other sounds for an instant and then swallowed up by accelerating engines and whirring tires and screeching brakes.
A car had appeared out of nowhere, right behind the figure in the old coat and battered hat. Right behind him because he was facing me. The hat did not quite hide the cold, narrow features beneath its brim. The loose sleeve of the coat most definitely did not cover the pistol held in the right hand.
It had happened so fast. I tensed, thinking I was. .h.i.t, thinking that on the other side of me something had been punctured and was letting out air. There was a crash. Then a scream. All the noises started separately, then blended together, and Jamie Gregory, his arms flung over his head, dropped to the floor.
My head whipped back toward the street, toward the figure in the battered coat and hat. With an underhand toss, he flipped the gun into the ivy between the house and the wrought-iron fence. He looked at me. Our eyes held for a moment: He wanted me to know who he was. Then Roland Andrews jumped into the backseat of the car and was gone.
THE FIRST COP TO ARRIVE WAS A BULKY FELLOW, OR LOOKED THAT way in his flak vest and his blue jacket. He recognized Darra immediately and believed everything she said, which, to the extent it was coherent, was that I had shot her boyfriend.
The cop pushed me back from the body and left Darra to flop around on top of it and do even less than I had to try to save Jamie's life. He was holding me against a wall, an arm across my neck, when reinforcements arrived. Two cops in uniform, two without. The guys without were detectives and they were not wearing suits, but they had plenty of comments about mine. While their colleagues tended to Jamie, they braced me, demanding to know why I was there, dressed like I was, on Mr. Gregory's doorstep. They fingered my lapels, told each other the suit must have cost a grand, must have come from Barneys, wasn't ever going to be any good again now that it had blood all over it. They wanted to know if Mr. Gregory had cost me a lot of money, if that was why I was at his house.
”Was it because of what happened in the market today?” said one.
”He lose you a s.h.i.+tload?” said the other.
An ambulance with lights rocketing in every direction arrived, and paramedics raced up the steps and into the house, pus.h.i.+ng past us to get to what was now, clearly, a dead body on the floor. I told the detectives I didn't know what they were talking about, that I was an a.s.sistant district attorney investigating a murder on Cape Cod. We were being jostled this way and that and Darra had gone from screaming to wailing and I was half shoved, half guided into the adjoining room. It was sort of a den, sort of a breakfast room, with a fireplace at one end and a wooden table in the middle, and the detectives backed me into the table and demanded my identification.
They did a lot of smirking when I could not produce it. They got my Bar card out of my wallet, pa.s.sed it back and forth, and decided I was an unhappy investor after all.
”Lost your ID but not your wallet, is that it?”
”What, were you trying to pick up girls by flas.h.i.+ng it around?”
”Don't work for me when I show 'em my badge.”
”Nah, they wanna see your baton instead.”
They were really getting into it, throwing remarks back and forth, when one of the uniforms came rus.h.i.+ng into the room shouting that he had found the gun.
The two detectives looked at each other, looked at me, and began shaking their heads.
”Bad enough you shoot a Gregory,” said one.
”But doin' it in front of a movie star,” said the other.
”Then throwing the weapon in the bushes. What do ya think, we're stupid?”
”Think you can get away with it because you got a f.u.c.kin' suit on?”
”f.u.c.kin' Barneys suit?”
”You're up s.h.i.+t creek, pal.”
”Suit's not gonna do ya much good at Rikers Island.”
”You wanna tell us the truth now?”
I WAS NEVER TAKEN TO RIKERS ISLAND. I SPENT THE NIGHT OF JAMIE'S shooting in a precinct, explaining how I happened to be where I was. I started with the rape of Kendrick Powell in Palm Beach, then talked of Josh David Powell's twelve-year quest for revenge.
The two detectives kept interrupting me. ”Peter Martin, the doctor?” one of them said.
”Guy's devoted his life to helping other people, and you claim he's a rapist?” the other one mocked.
”And you, what, you sitting in some easy chair jerking off while all this was going on?” the first one demanded.
I reminded them I was now an a.s.sistant district attorney investigating a murder.
”Yeah, right,” said the second detective. ”In some p.i.s.s-off fish-town famous for salt.w.a.ter taffy.”
”And for the Gregorys,” said the first. ”That just a coincidence? You bein' there, in their hometown?”
My failure to answer that only encouraged them.
”So,” said detective number one, ”you see the Gregorys rape a girl, you take a job in their hometown, then you're told to find a murderer, and lo and behold, it turns out to be one of them. That your story?”
It was my story. All it got me was eye rolls and guttural noises.
I tried to tell them about Bill Telford, about his theory of Heidi going to the Gregorys' house. They cut me off.
”Those Gregorys must be real bad people,” detective number one said, ”Goin' around raping and killing.”
”Especially Peter Martin,” said the other. ”Devotes his life to saving people, except when he's f.u.c.king 'em up.”