High Crimes

Connie shook her head in grave disapproval. She was good at handling the media but considered them all leeches to be plucked off the instant they’d affixed themselves. Claire was grateful, actually, for her secretary’s concern, since she was usually right — reporters tended to sensationalize, exaggerate, and fuck you over if they possibly could. And usually they got their stories wrong. In a minute Connie returned. “Now I’ve got them mad. Carol Novak says she just needs five or ten minutes.”

“Okay,” Claire said. Carol Novak, that was her name, had been good to her — smart, reasonably accurate, with less of the animus toward Harvard than the other local reporters tended to exhibit. “Give me a couple of minutes to check my e-mail, then send Carol Novak in.”

Carol Novak of Channel 4 entered with a cameraman who quickly set up lights, rearranged a desk lamp, moved a couple of chairs, and positioned himself facing Claire’s desk. Meanwhile, the reporter, a small, pert redhead — very pretty, but overly made up, as TV reporters tend to be on the job — made small talk. Her lips were lined perfectly, Claire noticed, and her eyebrows were plucked into perfect slim arches. She asked about Annie; both of them had six-year-olds. She gossiped a bit about another, far more famous member of the Law School faculty. They shared a joke. Carol dispensed some praise and put her hand on Claire’s, woman friend to woman friend. She didn’t seem to know anything about the incident at the mall. The cameraman asked if Claire could move her chair away from the window and against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Then, when the cameraman was ready, Carol sat at a chair next to Claire’s, in the same frame, and hunched forward with an expression of deep concern.

“You’ve been criticized a lot recently for taking on the Gary Lambert case,” the reporter said. Her voice had suddenly become deeper yet breathy, ripe with solicitude.

“For winning it, you mean,” Claire said.

Carol Novak smiled, a killer’s smile. “Well, for allowing a convicted rapist to go free on a technicality.”

Claire matched smile for smile. “I don’t think the Fourth Amendment is a ‘technicality.’ The fact is, his civil liberties were violated in the search of his apartment. My job was to defend his rights.”

“Even if it meant a convicted rapist is free to rape again?”

Claire shook her head. “Lambert was convicted, but the trial was flawed. Our successful appeal proved that.”

“Are you saying he didn’t do it?”

“I’m saying the process was flawed. If we allow flawed trials to take place, then we’re all at risk.” How often she’d said this; did she always sound as hollow, as unpersuasive as she felt right now?

Carol Novak sat back in her chair. She stared into Claire’s eyes with a fierceness that was startling. “As a woman, how do you feel about getting a rapist off?”

Claire responded quickly, unwilling to allow a pause that might be mistaken for misgivings. “As I said, that isn’t the issue—”

“Claire,” Carol Novak said with the deeply felt sorrow, the stricken intensity, the appalled concern of a daytime talk-show host interviewing a trailer-park denizen who was sleeping with the child he’d fathered by his own daughter, “do you ever feel, sometimes — right here” — she tapped her chest — “that what you’re doing is wrong?”

“If I ever felt that,” Claire said with great certainty and a dramatic pause, “I wouldn’t do it,” and she gave a smile that said, We’re all done now, a smile with which, she knew, Channel 4 would end the interview.

Ray Devereaux stood in her office doorway. The private investigator was almost as big as the door, a good three hundred and fifty pounds, but he didn’t appear fat. He was, instead, massive. His head seemed small, out of proportion to the immense trunk below, although that may have been an optical illusion, given his height.

Devereaux had a gift for the dramatic gesture. He didn’t enter a room, he made an entrance. Now he had positioned himself at the threshold, arms folded atop his girth, and waited for her cue.

“Thanks for coming, Ray,” Claire said.

“You’re welcome,” he said grimly, as if he had performed for her a great Herculean feat. “Where the hell do you park around here?”

“I park in the faculty garage. But there should have been plenty of spaces on Mass. Ave.”

He scowled. “I had to park at a hydrant. Left my blank ticket book on the dash.” He hadn’t been on the police force for some twelve years already, but he still used all the tricks and appurtenances, the perks of being on the job. His blank book of parking tickets was no doubt more than a decade old by now, but the meter maids would still observe the shibboleth and spare him a fifty-dollar ticket. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For winning the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, what the hell you think? For Lambert.”

“Thanks.”

“You realize you’re total an-thee-ma to your fellow women now.” He meant “anathema.” “They’re never going to let you into NOW.”