High Crimes

Claire shook her head, exhaled a cloud of smoke. The room was hazy with cigarette smoke. “They say they lost him in the parking garage.”

“Doesn’t that tell you he’s guilty of something?”

“Oh, come on!” Claire snapped. “That’s such bullshit. Tom’s not guilty of a goddamned thing.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do? They’re right, he’ll get in touch with me. Or he’ll come back. And he’ll explain what’s going on.”

“And if he really is guilty of murder?”

“You know him, Jackie,” Claire said, low and intense and angry. “What do you think?”

“You’re right. He’s not a murderer. But he did run. And you gotta wonder why.”

Claire scowled, shook her head as if to dispel the thought. “You know,” she said after a while, “when all those guys were chasing him down, one of them reached him, and I thought it was all over. But suddenly Tom had him down on the ground. Disabled him with his bare hands. Crippled him or knocked him out — maybe killed him, I don’t know.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s as if— Well, I’ve never seen him do anything like that. I had no idea he could do something like that. It was scary. And the way he scaled that wall, the waterfall. It’s like a different Tom took over.”

“I had no idea he knew how to rock-climb.”

“I didn’t either!”

They sat for a minute in silence.

“Think there’ll be something in the papers about this?” Jackie asked.

“I haven’t gotten any calls yet. I don’t think anyone recognized me, except the waiter, who probably didn’t see the incident.”

Jackie exhaled a plume of smoke through her nose, her chin jutting forward. “Tom’ll be back. He’ll explain all this shit.”

Claire nodded.

“He’s a great stepdad. Annie adores him. Daddy’s little girl.”

“Yeah.” She felt a swelling in her chest. She missed him already, and she was frightened for him.

“Annie told me he came into her school for Mom’s Day last week.”

Claire winced. “I was all set to, but I was in New York, meeting with Lambert’s attorneys, and I couldn’t get a flight back in time.”

“Ouch. She must have loved that.”

“I felt horrible.”

“How come he’s able to just take off time in the middle of the day like that to go to her school? I thought he’s one of those obsessive-compulsive Type-A types.”

“He let his chief trader, Jeff, man the trading desk, I guess. I don’t know. Lot of guys wouldn’t do that.”

“At least he doesn’t call her Princess. That would be gross.”

“I get a feeling Annie thinks I’m the stepparent.”

“She was, what, like two when you guys got married? She doesn’t even remember when he wasn’t her daddy.”

“Still,” Claire said sulkily, “I am the birth mother.”

“You guys got any vodka?” Jackie asked.

Claire was convinced that happy marriages were only really appreciated by those who’d been married, badly, already. She’d met Jay, her first husband, at Yale Law School, and at the time he’d seemed such a good match. He was good-looking, seemingly easygoing (though in reality wound tighter than a clock spring), tall and blond and slim. He’d paid her the kind of attention no man had really paid her before, and that alone — for an insecure young woman whose father had abandoned the family when she was nine (she’d been in therapy; she recognized the issues) — was almost mesmerizing. Jay was as career-oriented, as hardworking as she was, which she’d mistakenly thought made them compatible. After her clerkships, when she was hired to teach at Harvard Law School, he’d moved to Boston to take a job at a high-powered downtown firm, and also to be with her. They were married. They worked, and talked about work. On the weekends Jay would unwind by getting roaring drunk. He also became abusive. He was, it turned out, a deeply unhappy man.

Though she was about to turn thirty, neither one of them was ready to start a family. Only later did Claire realize that her reluctance was an early-warning signal of a bad marriage. When she’d gotten pregnant by accident, Jay started drinking regularly, on weekdays, then at lunchtime, then pretty much all the time. His work suffered, of course. He didn’t make partner. He was told to begin looking at other firms.

He didn’t want a child, he said. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to be married to her. He admitted he was threatened by this high-powered woman he’d married. By the time Annie was born, Jay had moved in with his parents in Austin, Texas.

Here she was, a young star on the Harvard Law School faculty, a great success by most conventional measures, and her personal life was a train wreck. Without the help of her sister, Jackie, she didn’t know how she’d have made it.

Jackie, and a guy named Tom Chapman, the investment adviser Jay had chosen to manage their small but growing portfolio of stocks. Tom became a friend, a support, a shoulder to cry on. When Annie was six months old, Jay, the daddy she’d never known, was killed in a car accident. Drunk, naturally. And Tom Chapman had been there, at Claire’s house, almost nightly, helping her through it, helping make funeral arrangements, counseling her.