High Crimes

“Aw, it was nothing.” She smiled. “And I’ll tell you something else. Even better than being acquitted. We’ve got proof that Hernandez was the shooter.” She explained.

For a moment he seemed not to understand. Then his face lit up. “I’ll bet Waldron wants to bury it.”

She shook her head. “He’s already in touch with CID. They’re going to bring Hernandez in for questioning, but I’d say he’s headed for Leavenworth in six months.”

“Or less, if Farrell’s on the bench. I love you.” He leaned over and kissed her again, this time a serious kiss. “We’re going to be a family again.”

She squeezed his hand. “We’ve got some packing to do,” she said. “And some celebrating.”

For the first time, she dared to believe that they might finally have their life back.

49

“Who’s for more paella?” Tom called out, looking around the crowded dinner table. He brandished a large silver ladle over an immense crockery bowl heaped with lobster, mussels, littleneck clams, chicken, shrimp, and innumerable other kinds of seafood mixed with rice, onions, garlic, and about a dozen other things. He made the finest, most delicately seasoned paella Claire had ever tasted. Of all Tom’s specialties, this was the one he most liked to prepare for guests.

Around their dining table in Cambridge sat Ray Devereaux and his on-again, off-again girlfriend; Tom’s chief trader, the darkly handsome Jeff Rosenthal, and his latest bimbo girlfriend; Claire’s closest friend on the Law School faculty, Abe Margolis, gray-bearded, pudgy, around sixty, and Abe’s wife; and Claire’s good friend Jennifer Evans, very thin, deeply tanned, mid-forties, straight dark hair cut in a highly stylized bob like the silent-film star Louise Brooks. She was unaccompanied, because she was in one of her frequent antimale phases. Next to Claire sat Jackie, who seemed tired, moody, and remote. Annie, in a white sailor dress already stained with saffron-yellow paella drippings, sat on Tom’s lap while he sang to her. She looked little and achingly pretty.

“No more for me,” Ray said. “This is my fourth bowl.”

“I’ll take some,” Jeff said, reaching for the ladle to serve himself.

They were all gathered to celebrate Tom’s return from an extended business trip to the Canary Islands to explore a potentially enormous venture-capital project, a cover story that none of them seemed to question.

“Wanna switch to red?” Claire said to Abe Margolis’s wife, Julia, a large and still very beautiful brunette in her late fifties, who was just finishing a glass of white wine. “Or are you still working on that?” She gave Tom a quick, undetected wink.

“Fill ’er up,” Julia said, extending her glass. “If they mix, what the hell, it’s rosé.” Claire, who’d had a lot to drink, poured unsteadily. “In the glass, if you don’t mind,” Julia Margolis said.

“I’ll have some of that,” Devereaux said. “That Chablis?”

“It’s merlot,” Claire said. “Close enough.”

“Wine is wine to me,” Devereaux said. “Either it has a cork or a screw-top.”

Tom bounced Annie up and down as he continued singing the song he was improvising: “If you’re happy and you know it, pick your nose...”

“No!” squealed Annie. “That’s not how it goes. It’s clap your hands!”

“If you’re happy and you know it, pick your nose!” Tom sang in a booming, pleasant baritone.

“No!” she shrieked with delight. “You don’t know the words!”

He hoisted her way up in the air. “I love you so much, Annie-Banannie!” he exulted.

“Hey, Tom,” called Jen Evans. “In your absence, you missed the grand opening of yet another new restaurant in the South End.”

“Another one?” groaned Jeff Rosenthal. “Remember when the South End used to be a scuzzy hellhole? Now you can’t walk down Columbus Avenue without tripping over an arugula bush.”

“Arugula doesn’t come in bushes,” his bimbo girlfriend, the stunningly beautiful blonde Candy, objected with great earnestness.

“Oh, really?” Jeff said. A look of embarrassment passed briefly over his face. He was clearly in the terminal stages of infatuation with Candy. “Well, then, it must be a weed or something. Like, Italians are yanking it up from their flower gardens and tossing it in burlap sacks and shipping it off to America, laughing at us the whole time.”

Candy shook her head, eyes wide. “It’s not a weed, Jeff!” she exclaimed. “You can buy it in supermarkets! I’ve seen it!”

Jackie, silent and distant, rolled her eyes.

“This restaurant’s so loud,” Jen went on, “that you practically have to wear earmuffs — you know, those things airport workers have to wear to keep from going deaf when they’re working on the jets? Plus they won’t give you water or bread unless you specifically request it. Like it might drive them into bankruptcy or something.”

“If you’re happy and you know it,” Tom sang, “then you never better show it—”

“No! No!” Annie screamed, thrilled. “That’s wrong!”