High crimes, p.5
High Crimes, page 5
Claire nodded. They sat in silence again. Jackie snubbed out another cigarette, finished her scotch. “Can you hand me that bottle?” She poured out the rest of the Famous Grouse.
“He’s my husband, and I love him,” Claire said very quietly. “He’s a great father and a great husband and I love him.”
“Hey, I kinda like the lug myself. Is this the end of the scotch?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
From the street, the Dunkin’ Donuts in Central Square looked like some high-priced gourmet shop in Concord, the kind that sells forty types of balsamic vinegar and no iceberg lettuce. Its hunter-green façade, with a grid of tiny window panes, had recently been renovated in one of the spasms of gentrification that overcame Central Square every few years. But it would recede, like all the others, leaving the fundamental seediness of the place untouched. Unlovely Central Square, land of a thousand Indian restaurants, home of ninety-nine-cent stores and store-front lawyers and discount jewelry exchanges, would never lose its genuine decrepit proletarian soul.
Ray Devereaux had called her early in the morning and asked her to meet him after she dropped off Annie at school. Claire had an hour to spare before she had to be at Harvard to lecture. She refused to cancel her classes. She was keeping up with all appointments, all classes, all meetings—keeping up appearances, even though she could barely concentrate on anything but Tom. Ray was already sitting at a tiny magenta modular table, his immense girth spilling awkwardly over the narrow rail-back chair attached. An empty baby stroller crowded him. The baby, whose mother sat indifferently nearby with an immense crinkling plastic shopping bag in her lap, toddled around the seating area in a red bunny suit tied at the neck with a pink bow. The mother, a large dark-haired woman, was having a heated conversation in Greek with a silver-haired, large-nosed old man in a black leather jacket. Soft rock blared over the speakers (Rod Stewart rasping “Reason to Believe”), competing with the almost deafening white noise of the exhaust system.
Ray was fastidiously tucking into a chocolate cruller and taking sips from a refillable plastic commuter mug. He was a regular.
“You’ve got company,” he said nonchalantly.
“Hmm?”
“You’ve grown a tail.”
Claire turned back toward the plate-glass front of the shop. A dark-blue Crown Vic was just pulling away from the curb.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, they’ve been tailing me all over the place. To and from work. They’re just trying to bust my balls.”
“They probably think you got balls, honey.” He chuckled. “But they’re gone now. They can’t double-park here, not in the middle of traffic.”
He took another large bite of the cruller, wiped his hands with the little napkins to remove the sticky stuff. “So I put out some lines to my friends in the Cambridge PD,” he said. “The good news is they got the guy who did the B & E. Your paintings will be harder to find.”
“Ray, you didn’t ask me to come to Central Square just to tell me—”
“Cool your jets, honey.”
He fixed her with a glare until she appeased him: “Go ahead.”
“Anyways, so I call up the National Association of Securities Dealers, the folks who regulate brokers and money managers and what have you, and they faxed me down the résumé Tom has on file with them. I look at it. Born Hawthorne, California, graduated Hawthorne High School. Graduated Claremont Men’s College, 1973. So I call Claremont, the Alumni Association, and I’m trying to get in touch with Tom Chapman, old college buddy, do they know where this guy is, what he’s doing now. You’d be amazed at how much the alumni associations of these colleges keep on file. Real treasure trove.”
“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. The air was overheated; she took off her coat and her blazer.
“Bad news is, your FBI friends are right. There’s no record of a Thomas Chapman at Claremont Men’s College. Which has since been renamed, by the way.”
An old Chinese woman a few tables over was clipping her fingernails. The dark-haired mother scooped up her baby, now screaming, and put her in the carriage.
“So that set me digging,” Devereaux said. “Find out what’s really going on with your husband. And I found some really interesting stuff on him.”
“Like?”
“Well, so I check with Social Security, see if there’s any irregularities. Strangest thing—everything’s hunky-dory, everything’s copacetic, but there’s no Social Security payments before 1985. Nothing. Well, that’s a little bit strange for a guy who’s, what, forty-six or so? Unless the guy just never worked before he was thirty or whatever, which I guess is possible. And then I check with TRW, the credit people, and everything’s fine, no delinquencies—but he also has no credit history before 1985. Also bizarre.”
Claire felt her stomach tighten. She shifted her feet, which had adhered to a sticky coffee spill on the gray-and-magenta-tiled floor.
Now Steely Dan was playing on the radio. What was it, “Katie Lied”? “Katie Died”? Something like that. A smarmy saxophone solo competed with the insistent bleating of a microwave, then a lushly harmonized chorus: “… Deacon Blue … Deacon Blue…”
“His résumé lists several jobs after college. Good, respectable jobs with companies, brokerages and the like. So I’m asking myself, why is there no record of Social Security payments if the guy was working all that time? So I make some calls, and another strange thing—all the companies he’s ever worked for before he started his own firm have gone under.”
“Maybe he’s a black cat,” Claire murmured.
“I mean, one maybe. But three? Three investment firms and brokerage houses he used to work for that don’t exist anymore. Which means there’s no records available. Nothing to check up on.”
Claire listened in stricken silence. She watched an anxious, short-haired, bespectacled woman with two handbags slung over her shoulder stride in, clutching a Filofax, and order a large coffee, light, two sugars.
“So, what does this mean?” Devereaux said. “Before 1985—when he was, what, over thirty—he had no credit cards, no AmEx, no Visa, no MasterCard. And I check some more—the IRS has no returns on file for him before then either. So he lists all these jobs with companies that no longer exist, and he paid no Social Security and filed no tax returns.”
“What am I supposed to make of all this?” Claire said. She could not think. She stared. She felt vertiginous.
“Well, I have a buddy works out of L.A., and I asked him to take a little trip down to Hawthorne. Right near LAX—”
“And he didn’t go to Hawthorne High,” Claire interrupted. “You don’t have to tell me this. I’ve figured it out.”
“There’s no record at the high school. None of the teachers, the old-timers, remember him. No one in the Class of ’73 remembers him. He’s not in the yearbook. Plus, going back in the old phone directories, there’s no record his parents ever lived there. No Nelson Chapman ever lived there. Now, I’m not saying the FBI isn’t full of shit. I’m not saying your husband committed any crime. I’m just telling you that Tom Chapman doesn’t exist, Claire. Whoever your husband really is, whatever he really is—he’s not who you think he is.”
* * *
After class, Claire returned to her office, met with a few frantic students—the semester was almost over, and final exams were imminent—then checked her e-mail.
Unfortunately, the dean had only recently discovered e-mail and had started using it to send every notice, in addition to any stray thought that crossed his mind. He’d left several pointless memos. There were a couple of press queries—attempts to get to her through the back door—but she knew how to deal with them: complete and utter silence. No answer. And a long-winded, chatty message from a friend in Paris.
And a message whose return address she didn’t recognize, in Finland. It was addressed to Professor Chapman, which was strange, because almost everyone knew her as Professor Heller. She read it, then read it again, and her heart began to thud.
Dear Professor Chapman,
I am interested in having you represent me in a matter of great urgency and utmost personal concern. Although circumstances prevent me from meeting with you in person, I will be in touch directly soon. Telephone, including voice mail, insufficiently private. Please do not believe the incorrect impressions about my case that you may have been given. When we meet I will explain all.
Fondest regards to you and your offspring.
R. LENEHAN
R. Lenehan, she knew at once, referred to their favorite small restaurant in Boston’s South End, a place called Rose Lenehan’s, where they’d had their first date.
She clicked the reply icon and quickly typed out:
Very eager for meeting soonest.
CHAPTER NINE
In the middle of the night Claire sat up suddenly, drenched in sweat. Her heart racing, she walked around the darkened bedroom, the only illumination coming from a streetlight outside, until she found the drawer where they kept the family photos. The FBI search team had left it more or less alone. They were interested in more revealing, more immediate things—itineraries, travel times, flight numbers, that sort of thing.
There were countless pictures of Annie, album after album of photos from her birth to her last school picture. She had to be one of the most fully documented children in the history of the world. There was an album of pictures of herself, a bunch of baby pictures: Claire with Jackie, Jackie tagging along behind Claire and Claire looking aggrieved. A number of pictures of the family, Claire, Jackie, and their mother, who always seemed to look tired. A lot of pictures of Claire on a vacation in Wyoming with some college friends. Shots of her college graduation (she’d had a miserable outbreak of acne and had gained a lot of weight during spring semester senior year, and so never allowed herself to look at these pictures).
And Tom’s photos?
One baby picture, a small black-and-white with a scalloped border. It might have been any generic baby; it looked nothing like the adult Tom, but baby pictures often bear no resemblance to the adult.
And photos of him as a boy? None.
High school? Nothing.
College, too. Nothing.
There were no pictures of Tom except that one generic baby picture. No high-school yearbook with pages defaced by long goodbye notes in loopy handwriting from girls who had had unrequited crushes on Tom.
What kind of person had no pictures of himself growing up?
Why had she never wondered where all his photographs were?
* * *
Returning from class late that morning, trailing two insistent students who’d attached themselves to her like limpets, Claire gracefully asked them to return later in the day. She had a meeting, she told them. They were nervous about finals; she’d be happy to spend time with them later on.
Connie was at her desk doing correspondence. She looked up, started to say something.
Claire smiled, gave a nice-to-see-you-but-I’m-too-rushed-to-stop-and-talk-just-now wave, went into her office, and shut the door behind her.
Ray Devereaux was sitting in her chair.
“The shit has hit the fan,” he said. He was dressed in a gray suit, surprisingly well cut, a white shirt, a pale turquoise tie.
“Tell me about it.”
She sat down in one of the visitor chairs, dropped her briefcase to the floor. “Your sources are good?”
“Not especially. I’ve been calling around, but everyone’s awful tight-lipped. This isn’t a rinky-dink operation. This is big stuff.”
“How big are we talking?”
Devereaux leaned back in the chair, which creaked alarmingly. She half expected him to topple over backward. “They’ve accelerated the surveillance. They know he left a voice-mail message for you at home, and they’re approved to get your office voice mail at Harvard. They have no idea where he is, but they’re waiting for him to contact you. They have people outside his office downtown. A couple of guys outside this building. Everywhere you drive, they’ll follow you, in case you might be driving to meet him somewhere.”
“Like that song by the Police, right?” Claire smiled grimly. “‘Every Step You Take.’”
Devereaux looked blank. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
* * *
They went for a stroll through the Law School quadrangle. She noticed the two plainclothesmen following at a not-so-discreet distance.
“Nice day, huh?” Devereaux said. “Real late-spring day.”
“Ray—”
“Not yet, honey. I’ve always thought those long-range directional microphones they got are overrated, particularly on a crowded street. But I don’t want to take a chance. I mean, we could walk along Mass. Ave. and drive them crazy trying to pick out our voices from a hundred other babblers, but why chance it? Let’s take a ride in my car. I just picked it up this morning, and I know I wasn’t followed, so it’s not likely they put a bug in it. Yet.”
Devereaux’s car was a new Lincoln. One of his clients ran an auto-leasing agency and let him lease cars for free, as compensation. She sank back in the comfortable, well-cushioned leather seat while he drove around aimlessly.
“You mentioned his father,” Devereaux said. “Nelson Chapman. You said he lives in Florida.”
“You talked to him?”
Devereaux shook his head slowly. “No such person.”
“I’ve met him. We visited him at his condo on Jupiter Island.”
“You’ve met a man who called himself Nelson Chapman. The condo you said you visited is owned by someone who’s never heard of any Nelson Chapman. Neighbors there, even longtime neighbors, have never heard of him. You don’t believe me, call if you want.”
“Are you saying Tom arranged for someone to play the role of his father?”
“That’s what it looks like. It’s real compartmented, this operation.” He steered with one index finger. “Real tough to get anything. My contacts don’t know shit, and those that know anything are shut up tight. But this much I learned: they’re saying Tom used to be a covert operative for the Pentagon.”
“Oh, come on!” she scoffed.
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
“He’s a money guy.”
“Now. But I’m told that he was in the military and disappeared, went AWOL, like more than a decade ago, that he’s escaping something really nasty, real serious. Some bad kind of shit.”
“What are you telling me?”
“They’re saying he’s wanted for murder.”
“So they tell me.”
“That he was some kind of clandestine operative for the U.S. government who committed some horrible crime and then went on the lam.”
She shook her head, chewed on a fingernail. An old law-school habit she thought she’d stopped. “That’s not possible.”
“You’re married to him,” Devereaux said equably. “You’d know.” He turned to look at her, then turned back to the road.
Claire smiled, a strange, bitter smile. “How well do you ever know the person you married?”
“Hey, don’t ask me. I didn’t know when I married Margaret that she was a bitch, but that’s what she turned out to be. Is it possible that Tom could have worked for the government, for some clandestine branch of the military? Sure. Fact is, he made up a history, a biography. The college thing was just the tip of the iceberg. He’s covering something up, escaping something. That much I’d say for sure.”
“But couldn’t there be a—benign explanation?”
“Like he ran up a lot of parking tickets in Dubuque? Doubtful.”
Claire did not smile.
“But I’ll tell you the truth,” Devereaux said somberly. “I always thought Tom was a little too smooth for his own good, but he’s your husband, so I gotta side with him. When the government starts gathering its forces to go after one guy, you gotta believe they’re trying to hide something, too.”
* * *
That evening, as she was trying to convince Annie that it was bedtime, the phone rang.
She recognized the voice right away: Julia Margolis, the wife of her closest friend on the Harvard faculty, Abe Margolis, who taught constitutional law. “Claire?” she said in her big contralto. “Where are you? You’re an hour and a half late—is everything all right?”
“An hour—oh my God. You invited us for dinner tonight. Oh, shit, Julia. I’m so sorry, I totally forgot about it.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? That’s not like you at all.” Julia Margolis was a large and still very beautiful brunette in her late fifties, a great cook and an even greater hostess.
“I’ve been insanely busy,” Claire said, then revised that: “Tom had to go out of town on business suddenly, and I feel like everything’s falling down around me.”
“Well, I’ve had the swordfish marinating for something like two days, and I really hate to waste it. Why don’t you come over now?”
“I’m sorry, Julia. I really am. Rosa’s gone home, and I don’t have a sitter, and I’m just frantic. Please forgive me.”
“Of course, dear. But when things settle down, will you call me? We’d love to see you two.”
CHAPTER TEN
Later that evening Claire and Jackie sat in the downstairs study, in paired, slightly weathered French leather club chairs. Tom had spent two months searching for the perfect chairs for Claire’s office, because she’d once admired them in a Ralph Lauren ad. Finally he’d located a dealer in New York who imported them from the Paris flea market. They’d gone from a Paris nightclub in the twenties to Cambridge in the late nineties, and they were still magnificently comfortable.
