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  “What happened?”

  “I ran into Patrick during practice.”

  “Tell me a little about basketball. You know, some inside stuff that I could only get from actually having a date with a bona fide superstar. “Jennifer was kidding, actually mocking what she imagined a groupie might say. Joe uncharacteristically missed the irony. A look of disgust crossed his face.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No, no, it’s not that. Look, I didn’t come here to talk about basketball. I’m sure there are subjects you would rather not discuss.” There was an edge in Campbell’s voice, and Jennifer’s paranoia kicked in—what did he know about her?

  “I was just messing around.” She smiled. “The last thing I want to hear about is basketball, any more than you would want to hear about advertising.”

  “Hey, I’d love to hear about advertising. I’m fascinated by how you can sell some of that junk that they’re marketing these days. I’m also fascinated with how women like you make it to the top in a man’s world. You must be something special.”

  She felt the mood tottering in the wrong direction. “Let’s make a deal. No basketball, no advertising, no bullshit.” Then she paused, and the next words came out of her mouth as if someone else were saying them. “I like you, I’m attracted to you, I’d love to spend the night with you, and I hope you feel the same way.” After she uttered these words, she couldn’t believe that she had been so bold.

  He said nothing in response, just moved gently closer and put his arms around her so as to leave absolutely no doubt about his reply.

  Jennifer luxuriated in his embrace. She felt electrified by the feel of his hard body through his soft cashmere pants. She found herself pushing him closer, hoping to feel his erection. Yet when she felt nothing, she was not surprised. This was a guy who could get it on with a different girl every night, not some adolescent kid having sex for the first time. She would have to use some imagination tonight.

  Gently she brushed her hand down his chest toward his belt. Joe moved away from her embrace, asking whether she would like some champagne. That was the last thing Jennifer wanted, but she said yes, thinking perhaps this was a part of his ritual. She went to the minibar and took out the only champagne she could find—a half bottle of cheap “brut” from California. She handed the bottle and corkscrew to Joe, then went to the bathroom and undressed, leaving on only her black silk shirt. After inserting her diaphragm and some spermicidal jelly, she returned to the living room with the shirt unbuttoned to her waist, exposing her well-toned breasts.

  Jennifer had worked long and hard on her body, lifting weights and doing Nautilus every other day with a personal trainer who called himself a “body sculptor.” Since the legal mess that had started at the office last year, she had thrown herself into hardening her body. “If I keep my body hard,” she kept saying to herself, “maybe I can keep my soul from hardening.” Now it was time to show off her new body. Joe would be the first man she’d slept with in a long time.

  Jennifer had kept on her black pumps, and she forced herself to walk slowly and gracefully toward where he sat on the couch. She relaxed herself against his body in a gesture that was not so much sexual as kittenish. “Are you comfortable here?” she whispered. “Would you like to go into the bedroom?” Not waiting for his reply, she took him by the hand and urged him into the adjoining room.

  Now, lying beside her, Joe found himself holding back. Her eyes flicked open, and he saw so much there: wanting, hurt, need, uncertainty, maybe even a touch of fear. When she closed her eyes again, he ran his strong fingers across her forehead gently. This relaxed her, and he let his touch radiate from there, arranging her hair on the pillow piece by piece, taking his time, holding back. His reticence inflamed her even more; her chest rose faster, and a small anticipatory sigh escaped her lips. She pulled him closer to her and kissed him, tempting him first just by offering little kisses, little nips. She hesitated, waiting for some sign of interest, but no part of Joe stirred. Still, his hand found its way idly beneath the silk shirt, and her soft breasts welcomed his large palms.

  Jennifer began to tremble, moving her hand down his body, but he stopped her. He could sense the warm, moist heat emanating from her. They kissed deeply, and soon Jennifer arched her body upward to engulf his touch. His fingers danced in and out as she slowly directed his face toward her belly. She moved in harmony with his caresses, spinning toward that place where she would shortly be out of control.

  Slowly, almost languidly, Joe came up for air. Jennifer took that as a cue to move her face down his body. As she did so, he kissed her neck and whispered in her ear. At first Jennifer paid no attention to the words themselves, only the sensual feel of his breath on her earlobe. She thought she was hearing sweet nothings, and it was the feeling that mattered. Joe’s manner was sweet and soft.

  Joe repeated the words, more insistently this time, his strong fingers squeezing her cheeks, as if to make certain that she understood him clearly. This time Jennifer heard Joe’s tortured voice. In an instant her mood changed. She gasped and started to speak as he grew hard and rolled on top of her….

  PART I

  Innocent until

  Proven Guilty

  Chapter One

  CAMBRIDGE—THURSDAY, MARCH 16

  “God, another groupie filing rape charges against an athlete to get money,” Abe Ringel couldn’t help musing to himself as he sat reading the sports pages in the small breakfast nook nestled at the back of his Cambridge home. This must be the third or fourth this year alone, the lawyer thought, shaking his head in disbelief. Warm morning sun filtered through a dozen places in the house open to the sun—skylights, floor-to-ceiling windows, even apertures cut into the doors.

  The house had been built by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Abe’s wife, Hannah, had fallen in love with the minimalist effusion of bricks, the dark unexpected spaces, the curved windows that bounded the corners. The Ringel home was one of the few contemporary houses in a neighborhood of Early American classics. Abe had insisted on solar collectors, which illuminated the artwork covering every conceivable space—even the seductive hiding place at the bottom of the steps that beckoned one to sit and contemplate the early Magritte watercolor that had been Hannah’s favorite. For Abe, the challenge was not finding art—it was finding wall space.

  All the light bouncing off the windows seemed to confuse the Canadian geese that passed over Cambridge each winter and early spring. Last month one of the big black birds had become entranced by its own reflection (“Just like some of my clients,” Abe had quipped) and dive-bombed hara-kiri style into the living room window, knocking itself unconscious. Emma, Abe’s seventeen-year-old daughter, had been distraught about the traumatized bird and had insisted they call the Humane Society to put the poor thing out of its misery.

  But then the most amazing thing had happened: the flock had shrieked and called out for their fallen mate to wake up. While father and daughter were standing around feeling helpless and arguing over what to do, the fallen bird had risen and flown up to join its flock.

  “There’s a lesson in this.” Abe had turned to Emma, warming up to his subject.

  “I’m sure there is, Dad, and I’m even surer that you’re going to share it with me.” Emma often teased her father about his morality lessons, which to her marked him as an old-fashioned man still stuck in the 1960s. Yet Abe had the distinct feeling that this was the part of him she also found most appealing. These modern young women were so hard to understand!

  The sound of Birkenstocks clumping on the stairs alerted Abe to his daughter’s impending entrance for her usual breakfast of carrot juice and figs. “What kind of pants are those?” Abe asked as he inspected her outfit of blue jeans and a work shirt. As always, Emma had distracted him from any more gentle preoccupation. “I can practically see your tush through that cutout.”

  “You can tell it’s cut out, Daddy? It’s supposed to look worn out.”

  �
�I don’t care if it looks cut or worn, Emma,” Abe declared with the tone a father uses only when confronted by his teenage daughter’s burgeoning womanhood. “The point is your tush is showing, and you’re sending an unintentional sexual message.”

  As soon as he uttered those words, Abe knew he was in for trouble. But it was too late. Emma was ahead of him, as usual. Someday he’d like to figure out why it was that his doctorate in jurisprudence from Harvard, his nearly twenty years as an attorney, his reputation as a raconteur, and his speaking tours around the globe—how it was that all this experience had not prepared him ever to win an argument with Emma.

  “Who said it’s unintended, Daddy?” Emma’s smile was so like Hannah’s, with the funny way her heart-shaped mouth turned slightly down at the corners, flirting unconsciously with him. This child, who had become his sole responsibility at such a fragile time in both their lives, had the power instantly to transport him back to another time when her mother was alive, when all three of them shared this house and their lives together.

  “I’m a woman,” Emma continued, pointing unsubtly to her breasts. “And I have a constitutional right to send whatever messages I want to whoever I please.”

  “That’s whomever.” Abe heard the supercilious tone in his voice and sensed that he was quickly losing his authority.

  “Hey, Dad, it’s cool, they’re just messages. I’m still, you know—”

  “Spare me the details.” Abe held up his hand.

  But Emma was not to be silenced now that she had her father where she wanted him. “I don’t pet below the waist even if I do send messages with my a—” She looked at him with those gorgeous deep brown eyes and completed her thought: “Tush….” With that, Emma gave an exaggerated wiggle of Exhibit A.

  It was all too much for Abe. Hannah’s death in an automobile accident had left him to deal with Emma’s puberty, which had been bad enough. Now Emma’s emerging sexuality seemed to be raging out of control. Not out of Emma’s control—out of Abe’s control. As a result, he found himself trying to figure out how Hannah would have handled these situations. Abe realized, of course, that he would soon be spared the daily burden of overseeing Emma’s transition from girl to woman, since this was her last year at home before she left for college. Maybe that was why he treasured and dreaded these final months of being Emma’s live-in chaperon. By this time next year he wouldn’t even know what Emma was wearing and to whom she was transmitting what messages.

  Emma quickly sensed that it was time to change the subject. Her father was squirming in the way he always did when they had one of these talks. And that was too bad, because if she couldn’t talk to her father about this stuff, then she’d never get a man’s point of view—the boys in her class really didn’t count, since they were, well, boys. Thank God at least there was Rendi, her father’s girlfriend or whatever, to talk to, though Rendi seemed to have lots of hangups about sex discussions. What was wrong with these people, anyway? It seemed like the more experience people had with sex, the more nervous they got about discussing sexuality. She’d have to think about this concept for a while.

  Not that Abe was prudish about discussing sex in general—as long as it didn’t involve his own family. Just last week he had helped Emma resolve a dilemma that her friend Janie Warren had imposed on her. Janie had become pregnant and had asked Emma to help her get an abortion without her parents finding out. Emma felt strongly that Janie should tell her parents, but Janie said she was afraid. Emma sought her father’s advice. After listening, Abe asked one question: “Does Janie know that you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, she does. I asked her permission to seek your advice, and she said, ‘Sure.’”

  “Then I know what I have to do,” Abe said. “Janie understands that I have to tell Charlie and Mary now that I know. She wants me to tell them.”

  Emma was worried. “But what if you’re wrong, Daddy?”

  Abe responded by quoting Shakespeare, his frequent source for resolving tough ethical conundrums: “To do a great right,” Abe said, “you sometimes have to risk doing a little wrong.”

  Emma did not object as Abe walked to the phone and called his old friend Charles Warren to tell him about his daughter’s problem and fear.

  Janie was enormously relieved when her parents told her that they knew of her situation and that she could count on their support and love. It was vintage Abe—perceptive, direct, proactive, and right. Emma was proud of how her father had cut through everything so quickly and helped her friend.

  Indeed, this uncanny ability to see through complexity and cut to the chase was one of Abe’s great strengths as a lawyer. His working rule was that every complex problem had a simple and obvious solution. And so far it had proved to be a good rule for Abe. He never obsessed over issues. He reasoned, he decided, he acted, and he didn’t look back. And if he sometimes wondered whether he was guilty of oversimplification, he quickly reassured himself: not a great vice for a busy trial lawyer.

  Both Abe and Emma were news junkies who channel-surfed their way through the network morning news shows while dressing and leafed through the newspapers while in the bathroom. Emma was just about to begin the morning Ringel ritual of discussing the headlines when Abe preempted her.

  “Did you hear about Joe Campbell being arrested?”

  “Yeah, it’s all over the news. It’s about time they did something to athletes who think they’re God’s gift to women.” Wait a minute, Emma thought to herself. Here she was, sitting across the table from a bona fide expert on a topic that Jon, her main love interest these days, was bound to want to talk about, and she was wasting time making a political point on a man who wouldn’t even understand it! Wake up, girl!

  She placed a respectful look on her face. “Do you think Campbell’s arrest will get him suspended?” Jon would just die if Campbell weren’t able to participate in the playoffs.

  “No, I don’t think so. Even the NBA has to live with the presumption of innocence, and in this case it seems more than a mere presumption.” He was comfortable now, warming up to a more impersonal subject. “I imagine the league will assume it’s just another frustrated groupie crying rape because the ballplayer didn’t ask her out again, or another gold digger looking for a pot of cash at the end of a rainbow.”

  “That’s not fair, Dad. It’s just another example of your Jurassic attitudes toward women. Have you ever stopped to consider the possibility that Campbell might actually have raped this woman?”

  Abe realized he wasn’t going to get out of this conversation without another lecture. “All right, maybe,” he said, “but I find it hard to believe. I mean, the woman had been out on a date with him, not once, twice. You read about that, right? And why would Joe Campbell have to force a woman to have sex with him? He’s got groupies following him around wherever he goes. You can’t very well rape a groupie.”

  “Daddy, that’s ridiculous. Anyone can be raped, even a prostitute. And it doesn’t matter if she knew him—if they had two dates or ten. We’re not talking about sex, Dad, we’re talking about violence—you should know that.”

  “Well, maybe,” Abe said grudgingly, yet without really believing it. “Campbell gets all the violence he needs driving to the hoop. Have you watched him recently, since Oakley sprained his ankle? He’s banging more bodies on the boards than the power forwards.”

  “You just don’t get it, Daddy.” For a moment Emma’s expression turned thoughtful, serious, as though she were in touch with a feeling he could never totally appreciate or understand. Maybe it was true what Rendi said, that all women were born with the precognitive experience of being raped—“gender memory,” she called it. Whatever the case, Abe wasn’t about to ignore his daughter’s opinion, even though he didn’t believe for a minute that Campbell had raped the woman.

  “I get it all right. Remember, I belonged to a fraternity once. I knew some guys who could be real assholes when left alone with a woman—but rapists? Clods, maybe, cavemen, even, but
I don’t see how an average guy could change over the course of an evening from a good date to a violent predator.”

  Abe was a 1960s liberal who believed in free speech, equality for minorities, environmentalism, abortion rights—the whole agenda. This new feminism, on the other hand, had him confused and a bit hostile. On sexual issues, he—along with all men—was the target, the bad guy. He really didn’t get it, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He had always treated women as equals, hiring several as associates even before it was voguish. And then there was Rendi, who was any man’s equal. But when it came to issues such as date rape, Abe had real difficulty understanding what all the fuss was about. What did they want from him?

  As usual, Emma read his mind. “Why do guys have such a hard time believing date rape can happen, anyway? It’s not like we’re saying you’re all rapists or anything. Yet it happens, guys get crazy. You can’t change facts just by saying it’s the victim’s fault.”

  Hannah, where are you? Abe thought. What do I say now? Out loud he asked: “Is this what they teach you in school?”

  “No, of course not. You know our headmaster, Mr. Cravers. Talk about antiques! He’d never let us discuss this stuff. No way. We study it in our feminist group.”

  “I thought your feminist group was about politics—you know, women candidates and all that.”

  “It is about politics. We discuss the politics of rape, the politics of sex, of marriage. It’s great.”

  I can’t deal with this, Abe thought to himself, removing his glasses and massaging his temples, which he had noticed just that morning were showing small streaks of gray. Suddenly he was looking his age, unlike his father, who had remained youthful looking until his death at seventy-five a year ago. Harry Ringel had died at work while cutting the hair of a friend whom he had barbered for more than fifty years.