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 shitload?” said the other.
An ambulance with lights rocketing in every direction arrived, and paramedics raced up the steps and into the house, pushing 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 assistant 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, passed 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 flashing 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 rushing 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 fuckin’ suit on?”
“Fuckin’ Barneys suit?”
“You’re up shit creek, pal.”
“Suit’s not gonna do ya much good at Rikers Island.”
“You wanna tell us the truth now?”