High Crimes (5 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

“
I want
to eat while I’m watching
Beauty and the Beast,
” Annie chanted.

“You’ll eat at the table,” Claire said as sternly as she could. Jackie served Claire and herself salad from an immense rustic Tuscan bowl. Salads were one of her specialties. Jackie was a vegetarian these days, having gone through vegan and macrobiotic phases, all the while smoking heavily.

“No. I want to eat while I’m watching
Beauty and the Beast.
I want to eat macaroni-and-cheese on the couch while I’m watching
Beauty and the Beast.
”

At one end of the spacious kitchen was a corner where Annie stashed her vast collection of toys, which included a ragged Elmo, a torn Kermit the Frog puppet, a battle-scarred Mr. Potato Head. There were dozens of others that Annie hadn’t touched or even noticed in months. A large television set faced a tattered, slipcovered sofa stained with a thousand microwaved frozen macaroni-and-cheeses, a thousand sippy-cups of grape juice, a thousand red popsicles (no flavor known to man, just red).

“Come on, kiddo,” Jackie said, “come eat with your mommy and me.”

“No.”

“We’re a family,” Claire said, exasperated. “We eat together. And you’re not having macaroni-and-cheese. Jackie made some delicious chicken.”

Annie ran over to the sofa and defiantly popped the
Beauty and the Beast
video into the VCR. “I want macaroni-and-cheese,” she said.

“Not on the menu tonight, kiddo,” Jackie said. “Sorry.” To Claire, she said: “You poor thing. What would you do without me?”

“I don’t know,” Claire acknowledged, and said, louder: “Okay, listen, Annie. Come over here.”

Her daughter obediently returned, stood erect in front of Claire as if at an army inspection. She knew she had maneuvered herself onto the shoals of big trouble.

“If you’ll eat the chicken Jackie made, you can watch
Beauty and the Beast.
On the couch.”

“
Okay
!” Annie said, running back to the couch. “Excellent!” She pressed the VCR’s play button, and dove onto the couch to enjoy the lengthy previews for other Disney videos and the ad for Disney World.

“That’s laying down the law,” Jackie muttered. “You disciplinarian, you.”

“But just this once!” Claire called out lamely. She dished out roast chicken and mashed potatoes on a plate and brought it over to Annie, with a small fork and a napkin. As she turned back to the kitchen table, she noticed something outside the window, a dark shape visible through the lilac bushes.

A dark-blue government car: a Crown Victoria. Jackie saw Claire staring out the window and said, “Aren’t these goons outside driving you crazy?”

“You have no idea,” Claire said. “One followed me to and from work today.”

“You can’t do anything about it?”

“Well, they’re on public property. They’re respecting the curtilage.”

“The who?”

“Curtilage. The area of privacy around a dwelling. They’re not trespassing. They have the right to be there.”

“What about your freedom of—I don’t know, freedom not to be molested by goons?”

Claire half smiled. “Of course, maybe I could go to court to get a 209-A restraining order against them. Make ’em stay a hundred yards away from me.”

“Yeah,” Jackie said, “I bet that would go over big, trying to get some local judge to order the federal government to back off. I don’t
think
so.”

“I called Tom’s office,” Claire said. She returned to the table and, stomach tight, tried to regain an appetite for the dinner Jackie had cooked. “Apparently Tom left e-mail messages for his chief trader, Jeff Rosenthal, and his assistant, Vivian, telling them he had to make a sudden, very hush-hush business trip out of the country. Said he’d be gone for a week, maybe longer. They were wondering what’s going on, because everyone at Chapman & Company was questioned at home by FBI agents asking lots of questions about Tom and his whereabouts.”

“That must’ve made ’em suspicious.”

“To say the least. Tom told them in his e-mail that the FBI might be questioning them in connection with a security clearance. I don’t think they were convinced.”

“No,” Jackie said, “I bet not. They’ve got to be wondering, just like we are.”

*   *   *

Annie went to bed without any trouble, and Claire and Jackie sat in the enclosed sun porch, both smoking. Jackie sipped at a tumbler of Famous Grouse; Claire, in an oversized Gap T-shirt and sweatpants, drank seltzer.

“Well, Annie seems to be holding up okay with Daddy gone,” Jackie said, exhaling a lungful of smoke through her nostrils.

“She’s had her difficult moments,” Claire said.

“You’re not surprised she’s difficult sometimes, are you? Don’t forget, you did read
Rosemary’s Baby
while you were pregnant. What if she’s really the spawn of Satan?”

Claire smiled pallidly.

“You holding up okay?” Jackie asked.

Claire nodded. “I don’t know what to think. I asked Ray Devereaux to look into it, see what he came up with.”

“They’re telling you he used to have a different
name
, a different identity—you think they might be telling you the truth?”

“You
know
him, Jackie,” Claire said. “You know he’s not a murderer.” Claire put her cigarette down in the ashtray.

“I don’t know him,” Jackie replied. “Obviously you don’t know him either.”

“Oh, come
on
!” Claire cried. “You have good character judgment—so do I. Look how much time we’ve both spent with Tom in the last three years. How can you say you don’t know him?”

“Or is it Ron?”

“Fuck you.”

“Look, we know he can get pretty angry. He’s got a temper. We’ve all seen it. You remember when we were driving down to the Cape and this car cut in front of us, cut us off, and Tom just about lost it?”

“He didn’t lose it.”

“Oh, come on, his face got red, he cursed the guy out, took off after him. It was terrifying! You were yelling at him to calm down, and finally he did, but … Remember?”

“Yeah,” Claire said wearily. “So what? He’s got a temper. Does that make him a murderer? Okay, he lied to me about his past—but does
that
make him a murderer either?”

“Jesus, Claire, how much do you really know about him? I mean, you’ve never met his family, right?”

“Not true. I met his father, Nelson, at the wedding and once after that, when we visited him at his condo on Jupiter Island, Florida. But, look, I think I met Jay’s parents only once.”

“And you’ve hardly met any friends of his.”

“Friends? Guys in their forties rarely have more than a couple of friends, haven’t you ever noticed that? Men aren’t like women. They get married and get buried in their jobs and sort of fall off the face of the earth. Every guy considers every other guy a potential rival. Men his age have colleagues, they have contacts. Maybe they have guys they play sports with or watch basketball or football with. I mean, Tom has plenty of casual friends—everyone likes him. But no
old
friends, as far as I can tell. Then again, Jay didn’t have any old friends either.”

“Claire, you never met any boyhood friends of his, any college friends. Or anyone who knew him before he moved to Boston. Am I wrong?”

Claire sighed. She traced her index finger down the sweat on the outside of her glass tumbler. “Once in a while he’d get phone calls from an old college friend. Once I remember him getting a phone call from a friend of his in California. No, he didn’t seem to be in touch with any old friends, not on any regular basis. But, Jackie, you don’t seem to be listening to me. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that. Why in the world would I assume he was lying to me?”

“So where is he, do you think? Where do you think he’s gone?”

Claire shook her head. “I have no idea.”

A long silence passed between them.

“Do you remember what Dad looked like?” Claire asked suddenly. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I wish I could forget. He was an asshole.”

“Remember how he smelled—his aftershave?”

“I remember he reeked like a French whore.”

“I loved the way he smelled. Old Spice. Whenever I smell it, it takes me right back.”

“Right back to your happy childhood and our loving dad,” Jackie muttered. “I hope Tom doesn’t wear Old Spice.”

“Dad was a troubled guy.”

“He was a selfish loser. You know what smell I associate with him?” Jackie said. “Seriously. The smell of gasoline when a car’s starting up. You know, partially combusted gas? I remember standing outside the house on the gravel driveway saying goodbye to him, watching him drive off, smelling that smell. I loved that smell. I mean, it’s a bittersweet smell to me, ’cause I never knew if he’d be coming back. I never knew if he was going away for good.”

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
.
L
ENEHAN

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.