High Crimes (21 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

There was
the light tap of a car horn, and Claire opened her front door. Grimes’s rusty silver Mercedes was sitting in her driveway. Saturday morning at six-thirty, and Thirty-fourth Street was deserted. The early-morning sunlight was pastel. A bird trilled musically, regular as a metronome. Her head ached and thudded at the temples. The daylight pierced her eyes.

“Rise and shine,” Grimes said, sardonic.

“I read over the Abbott stuff until almost four. I need coffee.”

“We’ll grab some on the way.”

In the lobby of the Madison Hotel they were joined by Ray Devereaux. He handed Claire a small Motorola cellular phone, spoke for a few minutes, and returned to the street.

They met Henry Abbott in the Madison restaurant. He was tanned and prosperous-looking, handsome in a vaguely sinister way. His silver hair was combed straight back from his square forehead. He wore gold wire-rim glasses. He was dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, elegant blue foulard tie.

He looked at his watch, a slim gold Patek Philippe, as they joined him at the small table. “You’ve got twenty minutes,” he said.

Grimes rolled his eyes but said nothing.

“Good morning to you, too,” Claire said, setting down her cell phone on the table in front of her. Caffeine and a fresh application of lipstick had made her feel marginally human. She introduced herself and Grimes.

“I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “No law says I have to talk to military investigators.”

“Then why’d you agree to meet us?” Claire asked.

“Curiosity. I wanted to see what you look like. I’ve read about you.”

“Well, now you know,” she said.

“She normally looks better,” Grimes apologized, “but she’s operating on less than three hours’ sleep.”

“We’ve got a couple of questions for you,” she said.

“Why the fuck should I talk to you? I’ve got a reputation to protect.”

I’ll bet, Claire thought. “Your CID statement is quite specific,” she said. “I’m sure they’ve provided you with a copy to refresh your memory.”

“I didn’t see what Kubik is supposed to have done anyway.”

“That’s not what your sworn statement says,” Grimes put in.

“Yeah, well,” Abbott said, and took a sip of coffee. A waiter came by and poured coffee all around. Claire took a grateful sip. The caffeine had an immediate effect, accelerating her heartbeat, causing prickles of sweat to break out at her temples.

“We know the real story,” she said. “All your statements are exactly the same, all you guys in Detachment 27. Which is too cute by half. As this case goes on, you run the risk of being locked into your statement, the one that was coerced out of you thirteen years ago. You don’t want that.”

“Are you tape-recording this?” Abbott asked.

“No, I’m not,” she said.

He dabbed at his mouth with a white linen napkin. “If, theoretically, I were to change my story, they’d charge me with lying under oath to the CID.”

So that was it. “They can’t,” she said. “You have no criminal liability in the military anymore, now that you’re discharged.”

“Says who?”

“The Supreme Court,” Grimes said. “Decades ago. You want to be the first guy who comes clean. You don’t want to be the last guy holding out, telling the lie.”

“And if I don’t?” He was exploring his options now, looking for wiggle room.

“Simple,” Claire said. “If you perjure yourself, you can be tried in federal district court for perjury. Under 18 U.S.C., you can get five years in prison. And when you get out, say goodbye to all those lucrative government contracts. They dry up right away.”

“Look,” Abbott said, exasperated. “You want a witness, I’m not your guy. I didn’t see him shoot—I was on the other side of that fucking shit-hole village manning the radio.”

“Yet you testified you saw him shoot.”

“Are you really that fucking naïve, or are you just pretending to be?” he snapped.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Are we off the record here?”

“If you insist.”

“Well, I do insist. This is off the record. Don’t tell me you don’t know how the system works. The system works in favor of guys like Colonel Marks—excuse me,
General
fucking Marks. The system wants somebody to blame it on. Right after we got back to Fort Bragg, Marks called each of us in, before our interviews with CID, and says, ‘I’m preparing my statement and I want to make sure I have my facts straight. What is your recollection of what happened?’ And I say, you know, ‘I don’t recall one way or the other, sir.’ I was a good soldier. I knew what to say. But he wanted more than that. He says, ‘Didn’t you see Kubik suddenly raise his weapon and begin to shoot?’ I say, ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’ I mean, this was night, and I was like two hundred yards away. I saw someone fire. How the hell do I know who it was? He says, ‘Are you sure you didn’t see Kubik suddenly go crazy and start firing? Be sure about this, Sergeant. This’ll make or break your career. Kubik has violent tendencies. If you search your memory, I’m sure you’ll recall Kubik suddenly taking out his weapon and firing.’ Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I say, ‘Yes, sir, of course, that was it. That’s what he did, sir, you’re absolutely correct, sir.’ And that’s all it takes.”

Claire nodded as if he were simply confirming something she already knew.

“And let me tell you, I’ll deny all this on the stand. I’ve got to deal with the Pentagon every day. They buy billions of dollars of equipment from my company. And they don’t like snitches and turncoats. I got a meeting.” He stood up. “Was all that true, in the
Post
?”

“I didn’t see the
Post
yet this morning,” Grimes said. “What are you talking about?”

“You,” Abbott said to Claire. “You really do that? You probably don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

“Shit,” she said. “The
Post
found out why I’m in Washington, didn’t they?”

He looked puzzled. “You read it, didn’t you?” He popped open his metal briefcase, reached in, and pulled out a neatly folded copy of the
Washington Post
, which he dropped on the table in front of her.

She saw her photograph, small and below the fold, and the headline—A H
ARVARD
P
ROFESSOR
’
S
T
AINTED
P
AST
—and she felt the blood rush to her head.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Claire smoked.

Annie danced around the kitchen table, chanting: “What? What? What?”

Jackie told her, “Give us some privacy, babe.”

Claire stubbed out her cigarette. She pulled another from the pack, offered it to Jackie, was surprised when Jackie shook her head.

Annie grabbed on to Claire’s skirt. “What are you reading? Tell me. Tell me.”

Claire was too numb to talk.

Annie needed the reassurance of Mommy’s attention. Mommy, however, was a thousand miles away, and almost two decades.

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 H
ARVARD
P
ROFESSOR
’
S
T
AINTED
P
AST

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?”

“Would you be willing to testify?” Grimes asked.

“That I lied to the CID? What, are you crazy?”

“To clear the record. Clear your conscience,” Grimes said.

“I got no interest in visiting that nightmare again.”

“We’ll fly you out here first class,” Grimes said with a weak smile at Claire and a shrug.

“Hey, first-class trip to Quantico,” Fahey said. “What’s second prize? All-expenses-paid vacation in Leavenworth?”

“If you’d rather do it the hard way, we can subpoena you,” Claire said.

“Military courts can’t subpoena people,” Fahey said. “Don’t bullshit me.”

“I’m not talking military courts,” she said. “I’m talking about issuing a subpoena through the U.S. attorney.”

A long silence. “Who says I’m going to cooperate once I get there?”

“The law,” Claire said. “You won’t have a choice.”

“Hey, you do what you gotta do,” Fahey said.

There was a click, and the line was dead.