2.

EVEN NOW THERE ARE TIMES I LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT, UNABLE to sleep, playing and replaying the events of that distant night in Palm Beach, thinking about how the lives of so many people were ruined by what took place in a period of no more than one hour, imagining what might have occurred if only I had acted differently. What would have happened if I had pulled Peter off her? Knocked Jamie away? Tried to raise Kendrick to her feet, shake her out of her stupor?

Was she in a stupor? She had not said anything. She had made noises. They had sounded like … moans. Is that what they were? And if they were moans, were they indications of pleasure or the fact that she could not formulate words?

She had formulated words later. “Fuck you,” she had said. “Fuck off,” she had told me. And she had driven that car. Without her shoes. Without a purse. When young women go to a cocktail party at a place like the Gregorys’, don’t they bring purses? If she had left it there, wouldn’t the Gregorys have found it? Somebody in the Gregory family had to have known who she was. Somebody had invited her.

I get lost sometimes, conjuring up things I do not know, or that I know only in part. And then I can’t get to sleep at all. I lie there until the sun comes up, not sure if I am remembering things as they actually happened or if I am just remembering what I imagined on other nights that I have lain here like this.

And now Bill “Anything New” Telford tells me what a straight shooter I am, how I am not obligated to anyone or anything but the truth, how I see a crime and go after it. Stand right up to the people in power.

Poor Bill Telford.