Mommy was twenty-three now. A One-L at Yale Law School. Probably one of the smartest students in her class, but she didn’t actually feel like it. Most of the time she felt like crying, and very often she did. Most of the spring semester she’d been flying back and forth between Pittsburgh and LaGuardia. Renting cars at the Pittsburgh airport and driving to Franklin. Taking buses from LaGuardia to New Haven. Sitting by her mother’s hospital bed and watching her succumb to liver cancer.
There were a dozen excuses. She was barely in New Haven that semester, the second term of her first year. She was distracted. She should have taken a leave but didn’t. She was frightened. Even for a full-time student, law school was a challenge, and she barely saw the inside of the law library.
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.
“He gave the order over the field radio. He said, ‘You got ’em rounded up?’ And Hernandez, the XO, he goes, ‘Yeah, we got ’em.’ And he says, ‘Wax ’em.’ And Hernandez goes, ‘But, sir’-and Marks says, ‘Wax ’em.’ And wacko Kubik does it happily. Knowing they’re all innocent.”
“So you were told,” Claire corrected. “You didn’t see that.”
“Right. But those guys had no reason to lie to me.”
“But isn’t it possible,” Claire persisted, “that the cover-up was already beginning by then? That a number of the men had carried out the murders and they were already planning to blame it on Kubik?”
After a long silence came Fahey’s voice: “Anything’s possible, I guess.”
“If you’re asked to testify,” Claire said, “you can’t talk about what you heard about Kubik. Or, for that matter, what you heard about Marks. That’s all hearsay, and it’s not admissible. But you can testify about how Marks called you in to prep you for your CID interview, and about how the CID wrote it out for you.”
There was a short laugh. “What makes you think I’m going to testify?”
Grimes asked, “Did anyone come talk to you about testifying?”
“Yeah, some guys from Army CID came to see me, ask me to take the stand. I told them what I told you. Told them I’m not going to lie to cover Marks’s ass. I don’t care if he’s the fucking President of the United States. So they said they were going to use my sworn statement from 1985, and I’d better come in and testify the same way.”
“Or?” Claire prompted.
“They muttered something about my veteran’s benefits, shit like that. I knew they were bullshitting. They can’t take that away. I told ’em to go fuck themselves. They got no power over me anymore. I gave a fake statement, what more do you want? I’m not going to go in there and perjure myself.”
“Excellent,” Claire said. “You’re right, they have no power over you.”
“That it?”