Joseph Finder

High Crimes

and for Emma & her fan club

Part One

1

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?”