The Borzoi Killings (17 page)

Raquel decided not to engage Joan Richardson’s blatant, angry effort to damage Juan. She asked, “Do you remember testifying that taking care of the Borzois was part of Juan’s job, part of what he was paid to do?”

“That was part of his job.”

“Did you ever see Juan play with the dogs?”

“I did.”

“Did you see Juan feed the dogs?”

“I did.”

“Did you see Juan groom the dogs?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see Juan hit the dogs?”

“No.”

“Mistreat them?”

“No, never.”

Raquel turned slightly to look at the jurors. She let ten seconds pass. “And you lied to the Grand Jurors about who you were with on the day your husband died, isn’t that right?”

“I shouldn’t have. I wanted to protect someone.”

“And that person was your other lover, Senator Rawls, correct?”

“I didn’t think it was anybody’s business.”

“You also lied to Detective Halsey, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you lied to the prosecutors, didn’t you?”

“At first.”

“And you lied to the Grand Jurors?”

“I shouldn’t have. It was meaningless, it was stupid. I was afraid and confused.”

“And finally, Ms. Richardson, listen to me carefully. There was another man in the house in the days before your husband died?”

“I told you, Ms. Rematti, there were always many people in the house, both the day before Brad died and many other days before that.”

“And one of them was named Oscar Caliente, isn’t that right?”

“Brad said he was new to East Hampton, a polo player from Argentina who wanted to buy a horse farm. He knew people Brad knew who were involved with horses and the August polo shows in Southampton. Oscar Caliente, who Brad said was renting one of those old mansions on the beach in Southampton, wanted to be introduced to the horse people Brad knew.”

“You met Oscar Caliente, didn’t you?”

“At the house.”

“When?”

“Not long before Brad died.”

Raquel paused, stepping away from the podium and standing alone in the well of the courtroom without pencils, easels, or props of any kind. Raquel—tall, composed, and a master of these scenes—looked steadily at the fourteen anonymous jurors seated in two rows, one higher than the other, a kind of choir. “Ms. Richardson, you didn’t see Juan Suarez kill your husband, did you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see Juan Suarez steal money, did you?”

“No.”

“You were 120 miles away when Brad Richardson was killed, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“You never saw the weapon used to kill Brad Richardson, did you?”

“No.”

“And you never saw the weapon used to kill the Borzois, correct?”

“Never.”

In unison, like the choir they resembled, all the jurors had been looking back and forth from Raquel Rematti to Joan Richardson as the questions were asked and the answers given. At that moment, after Joan Richardson said “Never,” they were looking again at Raquel.

“No further questions,” Raquel said.

When Raquel sat at the defense table between Juan Suarez and Theresa Bui, the judge, in one of those frequent interludes that happen after a lawyer finishes a long series of questions, turned off her microphone and whispered to one of her clerks. As they waited, with Joan Richardson plainly angry and impatient, still on the stand, and the jurors staring into space ahead of them, Theresa leaned forward toward Raquel, whispering, “That was amazing.”

Raquel, who knew that people Theresa’s age and younger used the words
amazing
or
awesome
to describe anything they liked, whispered, “Thanks, but take it one step at a time. Amazing or not, it doesn’t matter until there’s a verdict.”

A feverish sweat shined on Raquel’s face. She was exhausted and in pain. When Theresa saw that there were even droplets of sweat on Raquel’s upper lip, she put the edge of her hand next to the edge of Raquel’s elegant, long-fingered hand. It radiated sick heat.

Overcoming the stillness in the courtroom, Judge Conley switched on the sound system. “Ms. Harding, do you expect to have re-re-direct examination?”

Margaret Harding stood. “One or two hours.”

“In light of that,” Judge Conley said as she turned to the jurors, “we’ll break until tomorrow morning.”

As the jurors were being led out of the courtroom through the side door reserved for them, Juan Suarez said to Raquel, “You did something very wrong, Raquel. Bad.”

They were still standing. Raquel glanced at him without speaking. She had never before heard this tone in Juan’s voice: it was harsh, furious, even threatening, so altered that it was scary, as if another person were speaking through him. “You should not have said the name Oscar Caliente to anyone. I told you that.”

Central Park was absolutely
black when Joan Richardson rose from the back seat of the car to the sheltering cone of the umbrella the doorman Frank held over her head. Streams of rain fell in rivulets from the eight points of the umbrella. A cold trickle struck the back of her neck. As he kept the umbrella above her on the short walk from the car to the awning, Frank said, “Nice to have you back, Mrs. Richardson.” Doormen, who knew everything, also liked to appear impervious to everything. She was certain that Frank had followed every word she said during the televised trial, yet his tone was the same as if he were welcoming her home from a vacation.

As soon as she reached the awning, Joan took out her cell phone, pressed the button for Hank Rawls’s number, and put the sleek instrument to her ear. This was the tenth call she had placed to him since leaving Riverhead. His cell was turned off. As she waited, she looked out from under the dripping awning into the massed black tree trunks and branches of Central Park. Cold rain blew through the street lights on Fifth Avenue. Yellow taxis created a constant hissing noise as they sped down the avenue, tossing wings of rain water from their tires.

At the seventh ring, just before his message was about to start, Hank Rawls answered. “Joan?”

She had been certain she’d lash out angrily at him, or treat him icily, because of his vanishing act. Instead, she was deeply relieved to hear his voice. “God, Hank, I’m so glad you answered.”

“Things suddenly got crazy for me.”

“Are you upstairs?” For months the doormen had just waved Senator Rawls in. He had his own key to the apartment. She added, “I’ll be right up.”

“Joan, I’m in Miami. I’ve been here a few days. I got a call out of nowhere for a role. Donald Sutherland cancelled a short part at the last minute, and, if you can believe it, they called me.”

She didn’t believe him. She sensed throughout her body an anxiety more profound than anything that had happened since the night she received the call from Bo Halsey. Even though she was actually trembling, she stepped out from under the awning, which had radiant heaters under the canopy that cast warming light down onto the sidewalk, into the sleety darkness. She didn’t want anyone to hear her. “I really need to lie down with you, to hug you,” she said.

“I saw pieces of the trial on TV, sweetie. You were a real trooper. But it must have been painful for you.”

“Hank, I really want you to come home.”

“We’re in the middle of this. Another two or three days.”

“I’ll fly down. I can leave tonight. Where are you staying?”

“Joan, I’m working my tail off. I’ll be on the set for the next two days. I won’t have time to see you.”

She stared into the alluring comfortable glow created by the lights from the awning. To her left the monumental Fifth Avenue building rose into the mist and sleet; the stone surface of the building was streaked with wet stains. When she focused on the conversation that was now unfolding, she remembered the very few times when a man had spoken so evasively to her. She had only been dumped twice in her life, once, twenty years earlier, by
the young George Clooney. Two years before she had married Brad Richardson, the scary-looking Salman Rushdie had dumped her with his convoluted locutions. It sounded like a philosophy lecture. She had cut him off. “Just do it,” she had said.

But tonight, wanting not to hear what she imagined she was about to hear, she said, “I don’t mind staying in the hotel room while you’re out, Hank. I could read Trollope again.” This was painful to her. She felt desperate.

“Joan, I really need to concentrate on what I’m doing. For some reason, I really don’t want Fred Thompson to be the only ex-Senator to make millions on television.”

Joan thought of saying, “I can give you millions,” but she sensed that would be like a lash, one that would hurt her more than it would hurt Hank and might give him a reason to utter angry, decisive, irretrievable words. She asked, “Is there a woman with you?”

“That’d never happen, sweetie. All I need is a few days.”

“It’s all right,” she said, as quietly as she could in a world where there was noise all around her—the sibilant rain, the rushing tires on the pavement of Fifth Avenue, the sound of slamming taxi doors.

Joan closed the lid on her cell phone. She was crying. She wiped the rain from her forehead and cheeks. Smiling for the doormen, she walked under the awning and into the lobby.

Hank Rawls, who was in New York and not Miami, never had to tell Joan Richardson that Rain Chatterjee, a gorgeous, 32-year-old Pakistani woman educated at Oxford and now a weekend anchor at CNN, was in his apartment, as she had been for three days. Hank Rawls never had to tell Joan Richardson that because he never saw her again.

Detective Halsey was one
of those crisp, no-nonsense cops who made great witnesses because they were laconic, informative, and impossible to ruffle. Almost all of his answers were
yes
or
no
; when he had to say more, his sentences were terse, the modern version of Sergeant Joe Friday. Generally, as Raquel Rematti knew, it was best to get witnesses like Halsey off the stand as quickly as possible and not to linger on cross-examination. Through Margaret Harding’s own crisp questioning, Halsey had spent his two hours of direct examination describing the emergency call that led him to the seaside estate in East Hampton, his entry into the office where Brad’s body and the bodies of the two Borzois were already covered under the tarpaulin-like sheets, the arrival of Joan Richardson, and his sending of two detectives upstairs after Joan told him that Brad kept cash in the bedroom.

And he testified that the two detectives, Cerullo and Cohen, came downstairs with nothing. Bo Halsey didn’t testify that several weeks earlier Ang Tien had shown him a clear video that unmistakably depicted Cohen and Cerullo carrying brick-like stacks of cash out of the Richardsons’ bedroom.

Raquel Rematti asked, “Detective Halsey, let’s just be clear: there were no eyewitnesses to the killing of Brad Richardson, correct?”

Halsey leaned forward to the microphone slightly, just as he had in all his answers to Margaret Harding’s questions. His shaved head glinted. He looked at the jurors each time he answered a question: years earlier he had learned that jurors found witnesses who looked at them were trustworthy. He said, “None.”

“And there were none of Mr. Suarez’s fingerprints in Mr. Richardson’s office, were there?”

“That’s right.”

“And there was no DNA from Mr. Suarez at the crime scene, was there?”

“None.”

“And no weapon was found in Mr. Suarez’s possession?”

“None.”

“And no cash was found in Mr. Suarez’s possession, right?”

“None.”

“And the only reason you sent Detectives Cerullo and Cohen to look for cash was because Mrs. Richardson told you there might be cash in the bedroom, isn’t that right?”

“Not right. She told me there
was
cash in the bedroom. Well over two hundred thousand dollars. She didn’t say it might be there. She said it was.”

“And Cerullo and Cohen reported to you that there was no cash, is that right?”

Detective Halsey again leaned forward to the microphone and, looking at the jury, said, “The cash was gone. That’s in their report.”

“Let me understand: the only reason you, as the lead investigator, believe that Mr. Suarez stole more than two hundred thousand dollars is because Mrs. Richardson told you there was cash in the bedroom, isn’t that right?”

“Not right, counselor. Point one, she said it was there. Point two, it was gone.”

“And you didn’t ask Jimmy if he saw cash there the day before Brad was killed, the day Mrs. Richardson said Jimmy was in the house, is that right?”

“We never heard of Jimmy, counselor.”

“When did you hear about Jimmy?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Did you look for him?”

“We did.”

“Did you find him?”

“We did.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Not much.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was in a drug rehab in Arizona trying to recover from crack addition during the month Mr. Richardson was killed. The records at the place, which is very expensive, show he was there. He said he was a drug user, not a drug dealer.”

“Did he say he knew Brad Richardson?”

“He said he did.”

“Did he say he visited the Richardson home?”

“He did.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Richardson paid him, he said, two thousand dollars a pop—his words—for oral sex.”

“Did Jimmy say there was cash in the bedroom?”

“He said if there was he never saw it.”

“And you never asked Trevor Palmer if he saw cash in the bedroom, right?”

“Never heard of him either until two weeks ago. When we interviewed him, he said he thought there might have been cash there, but he said he wasn’t sure.”

“So this could be phantom money, Detective Halsey?”

Margaret Harding rose to her feet. To Raquel’s surprise Judge Conley said, “Overruled,” before Harding could even object.

Halsey was an experienced witness. He knew he had to answer the question as though no objection had been made. “I don’t know what phantom money means, Ms. Rematti.”

“Money that never existed?”

“Mrs. Richardson said it had been there. And when my officers looked it wasn’t there. Is that phantom money?”

It was time, Raquel knew, to wind down the cross-examination.