High Crimes

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.