“He was a selfish loser. You know what smell I associate with him?” Jackie said. “Seriously. The smell of gasoline when a car’s starting up. You know, partially combusted gas? I remember standing outside the house on the gravel driveway saying goodbye to him, watching him drive off, smelling that smell. I loved that smell. I mean, it’s a bittersweet smell to me, ’cause I never knew if he’d be coming back. I never knew if he was going away for good.”
Claire nodded. They sat in silence again. Jackie snubbed out another cigarette, finished her scotch. “Can you hand me that bottle?” She poured out the rest of the Famous Grouse.
“He’s my husband, and I love him,” Claire said very quietly. “He’s a great father and a great husband and I love him.”
“Hey, I kinda like the lug myself. Is this the end of the scotch?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
From the street, the Dunkin’ Donuts in Central Square looked like some high-priced gourmet shop in Concord, the kind that sells forty types of balsamic vinegar and no iceberg lettuce. Its hunter-green façade, with a grid of tiny window panes, had recently been renovated in one of the spasms of gentrification that overcame Central Square every few years. But it would recede, like all the others, leaving the fundamental seediness of the place untouched. Unlovely Central Square, land of a thousand Indian restaurants, home of ninety-nine-cent stores and store-front lawyers and discount jewelry exchanges, would never lose its genuine decrepit proletarian soul.
Ray Devereaux had called her early in the morning and asked her to meet him after she dropped off Annie at school. Claire had an hour to spare before she had to be at Harvard to lecture. She refused to cancel her classes. She was keeping up with all appointments, all classes, all meetings-keeping up appearances, even though she could barely concentrate on anything but Tom. Ray was already sitting at a tiny magenta modular table, his immense girth spilling awkwardly over the narrow rail-back chair attached. An empty baby stroller crowded him. The baby, whose mother sat indifferently nearby with an immense crinkling plastic shopping bag in her lap, toddled around the seating area in a red bunny suit tied at the neck with a pink bow. The mother, a large dark-haired woman, was having a heated conversation in Greek with a silver-haired, large-nosed old man in a black leather jacket. Soft rock blared over the speakers (Rod Stewart rasping “Reason to Believe”), competing with the almost deafening white noise of the exhaust system.
Ray was fastidiously tucking into a chocolate cruller and taking sips from a refillable plastic commuter mug. He was a regular.
“You’ve got company,” he said nonchalantly.
“Hmm?”
“You’ve grown a tail.”
Claire turned back toward the plate-glass front of the shop. A dark-blue Crown Vic was just pulling away from the curb.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, they’ve been tailing me all over the place. To and from work. They’re just trying to bust my balls.”
“They probably think you got balls, honey.” He chuckled. “But they’re gone now. They can’t double-park here, not in the middle of traffic.”
He took another large bite of the cruller, wiped his hands with the little napkins to remove the sticky stuff. “So I put out some lines to my friends in the Cambridge PD,” he said. “The good news is they got the guy who did the B & E. Your paintings will be harder to find.”
“Ray, you didn’t ask me to come to Central Square just to tell me-”
“Cool your jets, honey.”
He fixed her with a glare until she appeased him: “Go ahead.”
“Anyways, so I call up the National Association of Securities Dealers, the folks who regulate brokers and money managers and what have you, and they faxed me down the résumé Tom has on file with them. I look at it. Born Hawthorne, California, graduated Hawthorne High School. Graduated Claremont Men’s College, 1973. So I call Claremont, the Alumni Association, and I’m trying to get in touch with Tom Chapman, old college buddy, do they know where this guy is, what he’s doing now. You’d be amazed at how much the alumni associations of these colleges keep on file. Real treasure trove.”
“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. The air was overheated; she took off her coat and her blazer.
“Bad news is, your FBI friends are right. There’s no record of a Thomas Chapman at Claremont Men’s College. Which has since been renamed, by the way.”
An old Chinese woman a few tables over was clipping her fingernails. The dark-haired mother scooped up her baby, now screaming, and put her in the carriage.
“So that set me digging,” Devereaux said. “Find out what’s really going on with your husband. And I found some really interesting stuff on him.”
“Like?”
“Well, so I check with Social Security, see if there’s any irregularities. Strangest thing-everything’s hunky-dory, everything’s copacetic, but there’s no Social Security payments before 1985. Nothing. Well, that’s a little bit strange for a guy who’s, what, forty-six or so? Unless the guy just never worked before he was thirty or whatever, which I guess is possible. And then I check with TRW, the credit people, and everything’s fine, no delinquencies-but he also has no credit history before 1985. Also bizarre.”
Claire felt her stomach tighten. She shifted her feet, which had adhered to a sticky coffee spill on the gray-and-magenta-tiled floor.
Now Steely Dan was playing on the radio. What was it, “Katie Lied”? “Katie Died”? Something like that. A smarmy saxophone solo competed with the insistent bleating of a microwave, then a lushly harmonized chorus: “… Deacon Blue… Deacon Blue…”
“His résumé lists several jobs after college. Good, respectable jobs with companies, brokerages and the like. So I’m asking myself, why is there no record of Social Security payments if the guy was working all that time? So I make some calls, and another strange thing-all the companies he’s ever worked for before he started his own firm have gone under.”
“Maybe he’s a black cat,” Claire murmured.
“I mean, one maybe. But three? Three investment firms and brokerage houses he used to work for that don’t exist anymore. Which means there’s no records available. Nothing to check up on.”
Claire listened in stricken silence. She watched an anxious, short-haired, bespectacled woman with two handbags slung over her shoulder stride in, clutching a Filofax, and order a large coffee, light, two sugars.
“So, what does this mean?” Devereaux said. “Before 1985-when he was, what, over thirty-he had no credit cards, no AmEx, no Visa, no MasterCard. And I check some more-the IRS has no returns on file for him before then either. So he lists all these jobs with companies that no longer exist, and he paid no Social Security and filed no tax returns.”
“What am I supposed to make of all this?” Claire said. She could not think. She stared. She felt vertiginous.
“Well, I have a buddy works out of L.A., and I asked him to take a little trip down to Hawthorne. Right near LAX-”
“And he didn’t go to Hawthorne High,” Claire interrupted. “You don’t have to tell me this. I’ve figured it out.”
“There’s no record at the high school. None of the teachers, the old-timers, remember him. No one in the Class of ’73 remembers him. He’s not in the yearbook. Plus, going back in the old phone directories, there’s no record his parents ever lived there. No Nelson Chapman ever lived there. Now, I’m not saying the FBI isn’t full of shit. I’m not saying your husband committed any crime. I’m just telling you that Tom Chapman doesn’t exist, Claire. Whoever your husband really is, whatever he really is-he’s not who you think he is.”
After class, Claire returned to her office, met with a few frantic students-the semester was almost over, and final exams were imminent-then checked her e-mail.