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simply had too much to drink. (Pettit in his cups was a legend. He once gave a much quoted speech on the various ways you could use the word fuck-- as a noun, as a verb, as

an adjective, and so on.) But over the next six months, it became obvious to Tucker that

Dillman and Pettit were growing more and more intimate. Complicating things further,

Dillman was pregnant that year and gave birth to a son, Tom Dillman.

Pettit let an inkling of his feelings for her slip out after the 1993 Christmas party in the

Museum of Natural History. Shearson had just been spun off, and once again Pettit

soaked his sorrows in Scotch.

At the end of the evening, Pettit and Dillman and others were walking to the Stork Club

on the Upper West Side when one person recalls that Pettit started mumbling, over and

over: "Martha, I love you."

The rumors slowly crystallized into fact. During a Eurobond conference held in Brocket

Hall, a stately home in Hertfordshire, England, one Lehman attendee, David Bullock, told

people he had seen Dillman coming down the stairs near Pettit's hotel room at 6 A.M. A

few hours later, the New York headquarters was abuzz with the news.

Dillman was viewed as highly ambitious. Some people thought she was fantastic at her

job and enormously likable. Craig Schiffer (who didn't work for her) was godfather to

one of her children. She was not afraid to air her views and succeeded in alienating some

people--particularly Gregory, whom she told people she considered "dumb as rocks" and

"untrustworthy." Gregory in turn once told Tucker he thought she was "evil." Others said

she was a prima donna. She had risen swiftly to the head of research position, yet

according to Tucker she also had a reputation for taking breaks during the day to run

personal errands, which was not considered a Lehman-like work ethic. Now she began

showing up to meetings with Pettit that Mary Anne felt she had no business attending.

Some people wondered: Had she slept her way to the top?

For many months Pettit kept the affair from his family. Lara Pettit recalls that one

evening a week her parents would go off together, supposedly to see the architect

supervising the construction of their grand new house down the road. What she didn't

know was that they were seeing a marriage counselor.

But since Lara now worked for Lehman (in structured credit sales), it was inevitable that

she would hear the office gossip about her father. In 1993 Lara marched into her father's

office and confronted him.

"If I find out you 're lying to me, I am gone," she said. "I will not be lied to like this."

She says he looked at her a moment, then said, "Lara, I am not having an affair."

In February 1994, Mary Anne found two plane tickets to Washington in Chris's coat; the

passengers were listed as Martha Dillman and Christopher Pettit. She phoned Tucker late

that night and asked what they were for and he had to pretend he had no idea. He liked

Mary Anne very much, and the guilt ate at him. Why, he thought, won't Chris just end the

affair and go home?

Pettit still phoned Mary Anne every day from the office. He rented a house in Oyster Bay

to be near his son, Chris Jr., who was in high school in the area. Dillman often stayed

over.

Still, Mary Anne waited for him to come home. She continued to believe Dillman was

just a drinking buddy of Chris 's. "We were the Cinderella couple," she says years later. "I

felt that he really loved me."

When Chris asked Mary Anne for a divorce, she refused to cooperate. Years after Chris

had moved out, Steve Lessing told people she kept Chris's slippers under the bed and his

clothes in the closet.

Chris Pettit and Martha Dillman officially "came out" when he brought her as his date to

the wedding of Bob Genirs's daughter in October 1994. Martha had divorced her husband

in November 1993; Martha had told people her husband first learned about her affair

when he saw a diaphragm in her briefcase.

The affair was enormously divisive in the Lehman offices,