High Crimes

She’d meant to use the obscure law-review article only for inspiration. She had no interest, really, in civil procedures. The draft she handed in she’d meant to rework extensively, but she had a plane to catch. She’d just gotten the phone call from the attending telling her that her mother had just died. Anyone else would have taken a leave of absence, but she wanted to maintain a semblance of normalcy.

It was a bad break, really. A lousy coincidence.

Her professor was quite familiar with the obscure law-review article she’d all but rewritten under her name. The law-review article had been written by a former student of his, who’d proudly sent a signed reprint of it to his old professor.

A bad break.

He called her into his office and confronted her. Not for a moment did she try to deny it or make excuses. He was an acerbic and bitter man, not inclined to grant clemency.

Plagiarism, pure and simple. The dean was more understanding than the professor. She’d been under stress. Her mother was dying. She should have requested a leave. At least she should have requested an extension. She’d been irresponsible, not criminal.

The charge was buried. She was given the chance to resubmit the paper. Only the understanding dean, and the aggrieved professor (whose later nomination to the Supreme Court was acrimoniously rejected), would ever know.

In the background the phone rang repeatedly, but no one rose from the kitchen table to answer it. Claire reread the article for the hundredth time. Substantially it was accurate. Here and there a detail was off, but it was a good job of reporting. The Post reporter could even say, truthfully, that repeated calls to Ms. Chapman’s home were not returned.

The headline burned her insides like a red-hot poker.

A HARVARD PROFESSOR’S TAINTED PAST

Celebrated Lawyer Plagiarized

While a Student at Yale Law School

Annie clung to the hem of her skirt as if afraid her mother would leave her.

“What happens to you now?” Jackie said.

“I don’t know,” she said thickly. “I may lose my position at the Law School. I’m pretty sure that’s what happens.”

“But you have tenure.”

“Tenure doesn’t cover this sort of thing.”

“There were mitigating circumstances.”

“I could make the argument. Harvard might even listen. But more likely they’ll quietly ask me to leave the faculty. I know how they work.”

“The general warned you,” Jackie said ruefully. “‘You have a career to be concerned about,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to ruin it.’”

“Yeah,” Claire agreed. “He warned me. But a threat like that wasn’t going to stop me.”

Finally Claire and Jackie began to take turns answering the phone. At least two dozen reporters, wire-service, newspaper, radio, and television, called to follow up on the Post story. To all of them she either refused to comment or declined to come to the phone. A few friends from Cambridge called, wonderfully full of understanding; loyal friends. Abe Margolis, her Law School colleague, called, and though he wasn’t exactly the touchy-feely type, he too expressed his anger at the intrusion by the Post into a part of her personal life that was no one’s business, and he talked strategy. He said he’d talk to the dean of the Law School. He thought this thing could be beat.

Claire was less sanguine.

Work had to go on.

Grimes and Embry interviewed witnesses, took depositions, pored over transcripts. Late that afternoon they all gathered in her library for a conference call with Mark Fahey of Pepper Pike, Ohio. Former Special Forces, now a realtor. Stranger things had happened.

“I heard Kubik slaughtered them all,” came Fahey’s resonant baritone over the speaker phone.

“But you didn’t see it,” Claire said.

“No. But everyone was talking about it afterward. They were really spooked.”

“You gave a statement to the CID,” Grimes said. “It said something totally different.”

“Yeah, it was bullshit,” Fahey said. “Canned. A total put-up job.”

Grimes nodded, smiled.

“How so?” Claire asked.

Fahey’s voice rose, both in pitch and in volume. “They fuckin’ wrote it out for me and told me to sign it.”

“The CID agent.”

“Fuckin-A right.”

“Did Colonel Marks prep you for the interview?”

“He prepped everyone. Called us in before our interviews, said, ‘Now, let me get my facts straight here.’”

“Why was he so concerned with having everyone pin it on Kubik?” Embry asked.

“He was covering his ass.”

“You mean Kubik didn’t do it?” Claire asked. She felt herself holding her breath, waiting for his response.

“I told you, I didn’t see the massacre. But everyone said the Six gave the order.”

“The Six?” Claire asked.

“The colonel — O-6. He ordered Kubik to do it. And Kubik, fucking wacko that he was, mowed ’em down happily.”

“But Marks wasn’t there,” Grimes said.