by Paul Batista
Her voice amplified by a microphone, Judge Conley said, “I understand there is some uncertainty as to who this man is.”
“There is, Judge,” Margaret Harding answered. She was standing at the other table. She was tall. She had black hair. She was dressed in black except for an elegant green scarf draped over her shoulders. “We believe the defendant is an illegal immigrant. A counterfeit Social Security card was found when the search warrant was executed.”
The judge looked at Theresa Bui. “Give us a hand here, counselor. Does the public defenders’ office know who this man is?”
“I’m not sure,” Bui answered. Her voice quavered. Juan saw a slight tremor in her hands.
“You’re not sure? How can you not know your client’s name?”
Bui said, “I didn’t think his name was an issue.”
Judge Conley glanced over her half-glasses at the prosecutor. “Ms. Harding, why do you think his name is not the name on the indictment?”
“A confidential informant told us that he may in fact have a different name.”
“Ms. Bui, ask your client what his real name is.”
Theresa Bui turned toward him, whispering, “Do you have another name?”
Juan understood what was happening, but a sense of defiance suddenly replaced his fear and wonder. He recalled that the furious cops who arrested him had screamed that he had the right to remain silent. The right to remain silent. Juan, staring at the judge, didn’t answer Bui’s question.
Judge Conley, her eyes shifting from Juan’s steady, almost unnerving stare, said, “Well, Ms. Bui?”
“He won’t answer me, Judge.”
Conley said, “I’ve had enough. We have the defendant’s body. The corpus, as in habeas corpus. So he’s been indicted under the name we have.”
“If we learn his real name,” Margaret Harding said, “we’ll ask the Grand Jury to supersede the indictment.”
“Very well then,” the judge said, sounding curt and impatient. “Let’s proceed with the indictment we do have. Ms. Bui, do you want me to read the indictment? As I assume you’ve told your client—whoever he is—the indictment in effect alleges the murder of Bradford Richardson, the theft of more than $200,000 in cash, and obstruction of justice in light of the defendant’s flight and his assault on two police officers when he was arrested. Now, do you want me to read all the exact words of the indictment or will the defendant waive the reading?”
Without speaking to Juan, Theresa said, “Waive.”
“Then how does the defendant plead?”
“Not guilty,” Theresa said, signaling to Juan that he should repeat the same two words.
Instead, he said, “No culpable.”
“I take it that means ‘not guilty,’” Judge Conley said. “Is that correct? Does he understand that?”
“He does,” Theresa answered.
Peering at Margaret Harding, Helen Conley said, “I assume there is no issue about bail because the defendant is plainly a flight risk as well as a danger to the community, to put it mildly.”
“Clearly,” the black-haired woman said.
Juan sensed even more tension in Theresa Bui. She seemed to inhale for strength. “Your Honor,” she said, “do you really think you should say things like that?”
The judge glared at her. “Such as?”
Theresa Bui stood down from the challenge. “Nothing, Your Honor.”
Speaking with a tone of calm assurance, Margaret Harding said, “Not only is the defendant a flight risk and a plain threat to the community, but the case against him is overwhelming. Our detectives located hair samples from the room where the killing took place. DNA from a hair clipping was taken from the defendant at the time of his arrest and appears to match a hair found in the Richardsons’ bedroom, where we believe the theft took place.”
“I appreciate the comments, Ms. Harding, but I just denied bail. I assume these statements are for the benefit of the cameras. I won’t tolerate that, now or at any other point. This is a court of law, not a television studio.” She took five seconds to look at Margaret Harding, challenging her to react. When it became clear Margaret would not take up the challenge, she continued: “I think the only other business that remains today is to fix a date for our next appearance.”
Pressing her BlackBerry, Harding said, “Does November twenty-one work?”
Glancing at her iPhone, Theresa Bui said, “It does.”
Juan immediately calculated that the date was a month away and that he would somehow have to find a way to pass hundreds of hours with absolutely nothing to do. He had used his hands every day for years: he had laid brick with them, cut grass, lifted stones, washed dishes, cooked, and touched women in their most sensitive places. He would not be able to do any of that.
As she flipped through papers, Judge Conley asked, almost casually, “Ms. Bui, does your client waive the speedy trial act?”
Again, without speaking to Juan, who knew the meaning of the word “speedy,” Theresa said, “He does.”
“Very well. See you all on November twenty-one.”
As if acting on a signal from the judge, two guards grabbed Juan’s arms. Held by the guards, Juan was hustled to the door from which he had entered the courtroom. He looked at the gallery again, searching for the faces of Mariana and her children. Nothing. All he saw was the rush of reporters out of the courtroom.
In the parking lot just outside the rear door of the drab courthouse, as Juan was pushed into the back seat of a police cruiser, he saw people with cameras jostling to get close to him. He recalled the time in July when a picture was taken of him and Joan Richardson, both in bathing suits and just out of the water of the Olympic-size pool. Joan herself had taken the picture with her cell phone, extending her glistening arm and saying, “Smile for the camera.”
Using one of the printers in the Richardsons’ home, Joan had printed out that picture—two beautiful people gleaming with water, laughing, their lithe bodies in full view. She gave it to Juan. He took it to his ranch house and slipped it for safe-keeping in a plastic bag under a moldy rug in the basement, the only secure place he could find. At night, when Mariana and the kids and the other people who lived in the house were sleeping, he had often gone down to the basement and taken the picture out to stare at it. The glorious picture made him happy.
Bo Halsey now had that picture.
13.
Raquel Rematti wasn’t certain she remembered Theresa Bui. Raquel had taught hundreds of law students during her fifteen years as an adjunct professor at Columbia. Attentive to every one of them, she was the most popular member of the faculty. She led and entertained the students in her seminars, which were limited to twelve with a waiting list of fifty. Her lectures on trial practice, at which she spoke fluently and without notes, were held in the largest classroom at the school. She was refreshingly different from most of the dour, awkward men and women on the faculty.
Even though she was busy with her own law practice in midtown, Raquel stayed at her office at Columbia when she taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays until she had seen every student who wanted to speak with her. She carefully read and made written comments on their papers, all limited to five pages because, as she told them, trial lawyers had to be succinct and only short messages were persuasive. Raquel was a gregarious woman who had met an uncountable number of people since she started practicing law in the mid-1980s. She liked to believe, although she knew it wasn’t possible, that she recognized the faces and names of every person she had ever met, particularly her students.
And people remembered her. She was almost six feet tall yet she carried herself with the balance of a dancer. Her face was striking: the dark skin of her southern Italian heritage, a somewhat aquiline yet beautifully shaped nose that no plastic surgeon had ever touched, large brown emotive eyes, and high cheekbones. Raquel’s hair was naturally black; it was now streaked with a single trace of white, Susan Sontag-style.
There was another reason people rec
ognized her. As soon as televised trials started to become popular in the early 1990s, Raquel Rematti was a regular guest on national networks, and that had continued without interruption. She’d even been offered a show as one of the television judges, and declined it. She had no interest in becoming the Italian Judge Judy.
When her secretary Roger mentioned that Theresa Bui, who said she had once been a student in Raquel’s trial advocacy class at Columbia, had made an appointment, Raquel asked him to do a computer run of her name. Raquel had made it a practice to preserve the names of all her students over the last fifteen years, at first in a handwritten journal and later in a computer, so she would never be at a loss to have some information about them—date of graduation, even grades—in order to make any of them who visited her feel welcome. Roger, a 35-year-old with spiky orange hair and silver studs piercing each ear, had returned to Raquel’s office within five minutes. He said, “Columbia, Class of 2007. Was an undergraduate at Vassar. And that, as they say, is all she wrote.”
When Roger led Theresa Bui into her office at noon on the bright, fall-sharpened day, Raquel didn’t recognize her. There had been more and more Asian men and women in her classes over the last few years, as the bright children of ambitious Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese immigrants finally migrated from fields like computer science and medicine to the raw terrain of the law. Raquel gave Theresa Bui a welcoming wave as she continued to listen to someone on her cell phone. She pointed at the sofa, signaling Theresa to sit.
As Theresa waited, she looked at the array of pictures on the walls. She recognized some of the men and women with whom Raquel had been photographed over the years. Except for slight shifts in her hairstyle, Raquel hadn’t really changed since the first pictures taken of her in the mid-1980s when macho Oliver North, just after she graduated from Yale Law School, hired her as one of the small cadre of lawyers to represent him in the Iran-Contra trial. He was crazy—one of those men who wanted the world to believe he was the go-to guy for clandestine assignments vital to what they saw as the security of the United States—but despite the profound differences in their politics, she liked him. He was charming in a goofy, self-deprecating way. There were a few times over the years when, as a gentle spoof, he had her as a guest on his radio show. He also had a sense of humor: he called her Jane Fonda and Hanoi Hannah.
There were other faces Theresa Bui recognized in the array of pictures of Raquel’s clients—Manuel Noriega, Michael Milken, Robert Blake, Darryl Strawberry, Roger Clemens. There were also pictures of her with famous people who had never been her clients Hillary Clinton, Jessie Jackson, Oprah. And, on the wall near the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Park Avenue were pictures of her with some of the men she had dated: Jack Nicholson, Jesse Jackson, Mortimer Zuckerman, Philip Roth. She had never married, she had no children.
Raquel Rematti was that rarest of all lawyers: the only woman among the six or seven most famous criminal trial lawyers in the country.
“Theresa,” Raquel said warmly when the call ended. “Sorry, some clients like to talk on and on. I’ve never learned the fine art of dumping them when they start repeating themselves. How have you been?”
“Really well, Professor Rematti.”
“I’m Raquel.” She had the instinctive ability to put people at ease. Even when she was cross-examining a hostile witness, she treated the person with apparent rapport until, still engaging him or her almost deferentially, she shifted quietly into a devastating series of questions that a confused, suddenly off-balance witness didn’t expect. She asked Theresa, “What are you doing these days?”
“I work in the public defenders’ office in Suffolk County.”
“Good for you.” She was genuinely pleased to hear this. “Almost all your classmates run headlong into corporate law firms, some of them to pay off student loans, some for the love of money, some for both reasons. A young public defender learns so much about human nature. And about injustice. And the vanishing art of how to try a real case.”
“I’m learning, Raquel. But slowly.” Theresa found it difficult to use her former professor’s first name. Still tentative and nervous in the presence of this famous woman, she raced to explain why she was there even though Raquel hadn’t yet asked the question: “But I haven’t learned enough to handle a murder trial for a man who’s being called by every newspaper and television station in the world the Blade of the Hamptons or, as the New York Post loves to put it, Juan the Knife.”
It was then that Raquel recognized that this was no ordinary courtesy visit from a former student. Over the last several weeks she’d read newspaper and magazine articles and watched television news about the Mexican immigrant charged with the murder of Brad Richardson, the billionaire hedge fund owner, author, and philanthropist. The “alien” was again and again called either the Blade of the Hamptons or Juan the Knife. Raquel was struck, as she had been many times in her career, by the intensity of the hate leveled at some men and women charged with a crime. Even Bernie Madoff, who had only stolen money from people who were as greedy as he was, had become a universal pariah. No one believed in the presumption of innocence. Unless, of course, she often said, they were indicted. It was then that even a right-winger or a Tea Party member whole-heartedly and suddenly embraced civil liberties. Oliver North certainly had.
Theresa told Raquel she was “scared” to defend Juan Suarez. She was intimidated, she said, by the worldwide news coverage the case was receiving. She wasn’t certain that she or anyone else in her office had the strength and skill and resources to try the case or to withstand the onslaught from reporters and bloggers. It was painful to Theresa to open the Google entries that now referred to her. Her identity on the Internet had once been only her name and her status on Facebook—in other words, almost complete anonymity. Now there were pages and pages of references to her, not one of them flattering, and most insulting and demeaning. Vicious words: lightweight, sucker, incompetent, not qualified. And the stupid variations on her name. Ms. Boo-hoo, Ms. Boo-boo, Ms. Wowie, Ms. Fooey. There were three anonymous bloggers—or one with different screen names—who were incessantly trashing her. Every word these crazy cyber stalkers wrote instantly became etched forever on Google. She cringed at the thought that her great-grandchildren would someday see the postings.
“Theresa, the amount of contempt that a criminal defendant—not to mention his lawyer—faces used to amaze me. Now it saddens me.”
Theresa responded quickly, like a child making a confession. “I can’t leave my house without being asked what he’s like, what his real name is, when he came to this country—even why he killed the Borzois.”
“The what?”
“Two dogs were killed at the same time as Brad Richardson. With a machete, apparently the same one. Sometimes I think he’s going to be indicted for animal cruelty. And,” she smiled, “I’ve never tried a case for animal cruelty.”
“And let me guess, Theresa, not one of those reporters asks you about the possibility of his innocence. And not one of the bloggers ever mentions the presumption of innocence?”
She shook her head no. And then she brought herself to the question that had led her to Raquel Rematti. “Can you take this over from us?”
It had been two or three years since Raquel had represented a client in a highly publicized case. The last one was an assault and gun possession charge against a famous rapper and record producer named 007-Up. The charges were dropped because the three witnesses against him had in fact been in Miami, not in New York, when 007-Up was arrested in East Harlem. Listening to Theresa Bui, Raquel was swept by the rush of adrenaline she always felt when there was the opportunity to represent a notorious client.
“Who knows you’re here?” Raquel asked.
“No one. I didn’t speak to my bosses. I know that only two of them have handled one or two murder cases. The clients were convicted in an hour.”
Raquel said, “That’s not unusual, Theresa. There’s a pretty reliable statistic th
at ninety-eight percent of the murder trials in this country end in convictions. If trial lawyers were judged like major league hitters on their batting averages, little kids would throw away the baseball cards with our pictures on them.”
Theresa smiled, but only faintly. “I think he could be innocent, Raquel. I don’t know, of course, but I think so. I want him to have a chance.”
“I’ll go to see him, Theresa. It’ll be his decision. And I need to get a sense of the man before I take him on.”
“Good, thank you.”
“Another thing,” Raquel said. “I’ll need you to work with me. Only wizards work alone. I’m not a wizard.”
“You’re not?”
They smiled at each other.
Raquel Rematti knew from that moment that she would take on Juan Suarez. It was the attraction of the challenge, the lure of the outcast. She had always found that combination irresistible.
And it was even more irresistible now, as she was seeking to leave behind the cancer that for the last year had, like a stalker, been trying to claim her life.
14.
Joan Richardson was in a place she’d always loved: the Plaza Athenée hotel, on the Avenue Montaigne, in Paris. Through the slatted wooden shutters, the ceiling-to-floor windows let soothing light from the sunny winter afternoon into the room. The stately windows, the understated furniture of the hotel suite, and the glorious allure of the cold and sunny Paris streets just outside usually calmed her on her visits to the city. But this afternoon she was restless, irritable, and constantly in motion.
She had come to Paris with Hank Rawls, because the producers of a movie based on one of his novels had asked him to take a small role. She also saw Paris as a refuge from the endless daily publicity dominating her life since Brad’s killing. While he was alive, they attracted many reporters and photographers, particularly when they donated the money for a new wing at the Met and the reconstruction of the East Hampton library. She had enjoyed the level of attention from society reporters, financial journalists, and photographers. She sometimes treated the photographers with the same care she’d shown to the yard workers, on the first day she met Juan, when she invited them into the East Hampton house because of the rain on that chilly April morning. In the past, she would from time to time send coffee, sandwiches, and fruit to the reporters and photographers who waited on the street for Brad and her to emerge from a dinner party. They rewarded her with attractive pictures on Page Six in the Post, on the society page in the Sunday New York Times, on the cover of Town & Country and Elle. She treated the elfin, 80-year-old Bill Cunningham, who had taken society pictures for the Times for decades, as a friend. He moved all over Manhattan on his bicycle. He never once failed her: all the photos were flattering.