Joseph Finder
High Crimes
Copyright © 1998 by Joseph Finder.
For Michele and for Emma & her fan club
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
– Sigmund Freud, Dora
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
At exactly nine o’clock in the morning, Claire Heller Chapman entered the cavernous old Harvard Law School lecture hall and found a small knot of reporters lying in wait for her. There were four or five of them, one a TV cameraman hefting a bulky videocam.
She’d expected this. Ever since the Lambert verdict was announced two days ago, she’d been fielding calls from journalists. Most of them she’d managed to avoid. Now they stood at the front of the old classroom by her lectern, and as she walked right by them, they shouted questions at her.
Claire smiled blandly and could make out only fragments.
“-Lambert? Any comment to make?”
“-pleased with the verdict?”
“-Are you at all concerned about letting a rapist go free?”
A murmur of student voices went up. With the lectern giving her the advantage now of two feet of height, she addressed the reporters. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave my classroom.”
“A brief comment, Professor,” said the TV reporter, a pretty blonde in a salmon-colored suit with shoulder pads like a linebacker’s.
“Nothing right now, I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a class to teach.”
Her criminal-law students sat in long arcs that radiated outward from the front of the room like the rings around Saturn. At Harvard Law School, the professor was construed as a deity. This morning the deity was being assaulted.
“But, Professor, a quick-”
“You’re trespassing, folks. Out of here, please. Out.”
Muttering, they began turning around, straggling noisily up the creaky floor of the center aisle toward the exit.
She turned to the class and smiled. Claire Heller, as she was known professionally, was in her mid-thirties: small and slender, brown eyes and dimpled cheeks, with a tangle of coppery hair nuzzling a swan neck. She wore a tweedy but not unstylish chocolate-brown jacket over a cream silk shell.
“All right,” Claire said to the class. “Last time someone asked me, ‘Who’s Regina? And who’s Rex?’” She took a sip of water. There were a few chuckles. A few guffaws. Law-school humor: you laugh to show you get it, you’re smart-not because it’s funny.
“It’s Latin, folks.” Another sip of water. It’s all in the timing.
A gradual crescendo of giggles. “English law. Regina is the queen. Rex is the king.”
Loud, relieved laughter, from the slower ones who finally got it. The best comedy audience in the world.
The back door of the classroom banged shut as the last cameraman left. “All right, Terry v. Ohio. One of the last Warren Court decisions. A real landmark in liberal jurisprudence.” She cast her gaze around the classroom, a Jack Benny poker face. A few students chortled. They knew her politics.
She raised her voice a few decibels. “Terry v. Ohio. That great decision that permitted the police to shake people down for just about any reason whatsoever. Mr. Chief Justice Earl Warren giving one to the cops.” She swiveled her body suddenly. “Ms. Harrington, what if the cops burst into your apartment one evening. Without a search warrant. And they find your stash of crack cocaine. Can you be prosecuted for possession?” A few titters: the humorless, studious Ms. Harrington, a very tall, pale young woman with long ash-blond hair parted in the middle, was not exactly the crack-smoking type.
“No way,” said Ms. Harrington. “If they burst in without a warrant, that evidence can be excluded at trial. Because of the exclusionary rule.”
“And where does that come from?” Claire asked.
“The Fourth Amendment,” Ms. Harrington replied. The purple circles underneath her eyes advertised how little she’d slept her unhappy first year of law school. “It protects us from unreasonable government searches. So any evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from a criminal trial. It’s called ‘fruit of the poisoned tree.’”
“Like your vial of crack,” said Claire.
Ms. Harrington peered gloomily at Claire through raccoon circles of purple and gave a grim half-smile. “Right.”
The students, the smarter ones anyway, were beginning to sense the undertow: the good old liberal wisdom from Claire Heller, old Sixties Liberal, arrested during her student days at Madison, Power to the People, Fuck the Establishment. Time to whipsaw them.
“Okay, now will someone tell me where in the Fourth Amendment it says that evidence illegally obtained must be excluded from trial?” Claire asked.
Silence.
“Ms. Zelinski? Ms. Cartwright? Ms. Williams? Mr. Papoulis?”
She stepped off the rostrum, took an Oprah-like stroll down one of the creaky-floored aisles. “Nowhere, folks. Nowhere.”
From the back of the room came the reedy baritone of Chadwick Lowell III, sandy-blond hair already receding above round British National Health Plan wire-rim glasses, probably from his year as a Rhodes. “I take it you’re no fan of the exclusionary rule.”
“You got it,” Claire said. “We never had such a thing apply to the States until maybe forty years ago-a hundred and seventy years after the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”
“But the exclusionary rule,” Mr. Lowell persisted disdainfully, “didn’t exactly bother you at the Gary Lambert appeal, did it? You got his conviction overturned by getting the search of his trash excluded, right? So I guess you’re not so opposed to it, are you?”
There was a stunned silence. Claire slowly turned to face him. Secretly she was impressed. Mr. Lowell did not flinch. “In the classroom,” she said, “we can talk about principle. In the courtroom, you put aside whatever the hell you believe in and fight with every goddamned scrap of ammunition you’ve got.” She turned to her podium. “Now, let’s get back to Terry v. Ohio.”
“Still working on that?”
The waiter was tall and rail-thin, early twenties, insufferable. He looked like a Ralph Lauren model. His blond hair was cropped short; his sideburns were trimmed. His sandpiper legs were clad in black jeans and he wore a black linen T-shirt.
Claire, her husband, Tom, and her six-year-old daughter, Annie, were having dinner that evening at a family-friendly seafood restaurant in an upscale shopping mall in downtown Boston. “Family-friendly” usually meant helium balloons, crayons, and paper placemats. This place was a cut or two above that, and the food was decent.
Claire caught Tom’s eye and smiled. Tom liked to make fun of that old standard waiter’s line. They both did: since when was eating dinner supposed to be work?
“We’re all set,” Tom said pleasantly. Tom Chapman was a youthful mid-forties, trim and handsome in a navy Armani suit. He’d just come from work. His close-cropped hair was graying and receding slightly. His eyes, bracketed by deep-etched crow’s feet, were gray-blue, more gray than blue, and almost twinkled with amusement.
Claire nodded agreement. “All done working,” she said with a straight face.
“I’m all done, too,” said Annie, her glossy brown hair in pigtails, wearing her favorite pale-pink cotton jumper.
“Annie-Banannie,” Tom said, “you didn’t even eat half your burger!”