by Paul Batista
“Yes,” Juan said.
“Tell me more, Juan, about everything you remember about the first time you saw Mrs. Richardson with Senator Rawls. You told me it was at a party on the Fourth of July.”
It had taken all of Raquel’s skill at generating a client’s confidence gradually to bring Juan, reticent by nature, to speak about Joan Richardson and Hank Rawls.
“It was a big party,” Juan said. “I met everybody at the front door. I see right away that Mr. Rawls and Mrs. Richardson are friends.”
“What did you see them do?”
“At first they walk around and talked to people. Like they were giving the party.”
“And what else?”
“Later they held hands.”
“Did Mr. Richardson see that?”
“Sure, everybody saw that. No one cared.”
“Didn’t Mr. Richardson care?”
“No. They didn’t spend much time together. He goes away a lot. She doesn’t.”
“Mrs. Richardson and this man Rawls: Can you tell me anything else?”
“That night you mean?”
“Let’s start with that night.”
“Later. They are at the pool. They did things to each other.”
Raquel asked, “What things, Juan?” She knew she was driving forward into new terrain, more and more overcoming Juan’s reluctance to say anything negative about Joan Richardson. She had brought Juan around, at least to some extent, by letting him know that it was Joan Richardson who told the police she believed Juan killed Brad, and Juan remembered the stony face of Joan Richardson behind the tinted glass of the police car against which he was thrown when he was arrested.
“He put his mouth down there on her.”
“And you saw that?”
“They are outside, near the pool, Raquel. Dark out. But they are not hiding.”
“Did anybody else see them?”
“I think only me.”
“Where was Brad?”
“Not far off.”
“What was he doing?”
Juan remembered that Brad was holding Trevor’s hand. “He is with friends. But not far off, Raquel.”
She knew that clients lied to her most of the time. Even when some told her what might have been the truth, she could never be certain that it was in fact the truth. There were other clients who never gave her any story at all: those were the most dangerous ones because they assumed that Raquel would fabricate a story for them, and she never did. In her freshman year at Swarthmore a professor in the class on the Victorian novel had spoken of the “willing suspension of disbelief” that a reader should bring to a work of fiction. Long after she had forgotten everything about the plot of Vanity Fair, she remembered those words. But for the opposite purpose: she had to bring disbelief to everything she heard.
But with Juan she had a sense, although not a certainty, that he was a truth-teller. He said he had not killed Brad Richardson, so why not believe him? How would she ever know the truth? “Isn’t that all we know about truth?” Raquel frequently asked her Columbia students. “That the truth is what happened.”
“Did Brad ever say anything to you about how he felt about his wife? Everyone seemed to know, Juan, that Mrs. Richardson and Rawls were special friends.”
“Brad was a happy man, nice to everybody. He treats his wife and Mr. Rawls in the same nice way.”
Raquel rose from the chair, touched Juan on the shoulder to signal that he should stay seated, and walked to the vending machines. She bought candy bars and sodas for herself, for Juan, and for the three guards. The guards silently accepted the sodas and candy, as did Juan.
Now was the time, she knew, to ask Juan a question she could not have asked before. It was because she intended to ask this question that she had not invited Theresa Bui to join her on this visit. Juan, she sensed, might not answer if Theresa were there, even though he always welcomed her warmly. “Can you tell me anything about you and Mrs. Richardson?”
Juan put down the Diet Coke can from which he had been sipping. He looked directly into Raquel’s eyes.
“I was Mrs. Richardson’s boyfriend, Raquel.”
Of course, Raquel thought, what woman, or man, wouldn’t be this man’s lover? Slightly uneasy with what he said and her own reaction, Raquel glanced down at Juan’s hands. They were large and powerful. The veins looked like hard ropes beneath the skin.
“You made love to her?”
Juan appeared slightly confused, as if not believing that Raquel didn’t understand the meaning of boyfriend. “Sure, we did.”
“When was the first time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Before you saw her with Senator Rawls at the pool?”
“Sure.”
“After that as well?”
“Yeah.”
“How many times, altogether?”
“You mean me and Mrs. Richardson?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“Lots, Raquel, lots.”
“The last time?”
“The last time?”
“Yes.”
“Two days before Mr. Richardson died.”
“Did Brad know about you and Mrs. Richardson?”
He paused. “Why are you asking this?”
“It’s simple, Juan. She’s going to testify against you at the trial. She will work with them to get you convicted. When I ask her questions I need to make her seem biased against you.”
“What is that word?”
“That she has something against you, that she’s willing to lie to hurt you.”
“Why would she hurt me?”
“I don’t know why about anything, Juan. All I know is that she will try.”
“I never hurt her.”
Raquel knew she was in a strange business. It was a world where ordinary human standards—such as I love you, I wouldn’t hurt you—didn’t apply, and where people did incalculable damage to others to protect themselves. “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t hurt her. Let me tell you this, Juan. Part of my job is to make people suspicious of her. Who is to say that she didn’t have someone kill him? Do you understand? My job is to protect you. If I can make it seem that somebody else might have killed him, then I’ve raised reasonable doubt.”
“Doubt?
“We talked about this.”
Like many other terms lawyers and judges used, it was elusive to define reasonable doubt. The explanation judges gave to jurors was opaque, a classic tautology. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt, judges said, didn’t mean the prosecution had to prove guilt beyond all doubt. That wasn’t possible. At the other extreme, you couldn’t doubt everything. A reasonable doubt was located some place between no doubt and doubt about everything. Reasonable is reasonable. As she often told her students, the definition was absurd. She had often heard jurors ask again as they deliberated for an explanation of reasonable doubt. The judge always repeated the same words, as though repetition would create meaning. “It’s a joke, ladies and gentlemen,” she told her students. “But in this business, the business of representing criminal defendants, the beauty of it is that the definition of reasonable doubt gives you something to work with, you have the chance to make soap out of stone.”
Juan said, “I didn’t kill Mr. Richardson, Raquel. You know that, don’t you?”
Raquel Rematti was trained to bring doubt to everything. But she said, “Of course I believe you, Juan. I do.”
16.
As soon as Kathy Schiavoni graduated from East Hampton High School, she fulfilled the two driving ambitions of her teenage life. She had a silver earring pierced through her right eyebrow, and she immediately moved to the Lower East Side. She spent six years in Manhattan. She worked as a waitress, a nanny, and a dog-walker. She had only two boyfriends. Each of them was with her for three months. Both of them were haphazard, lazy cocaine-dealers. They were addicts, and dumb enough to use the money they earned from selling drugs only to buy drugs for themselves. She was afr
aid of cocaine, but loved each of them. Kathy, slightly overweight, with frizzy reddish hair and a plain face, was devastated when they walked out on her. She imagined that she would never again find another lover.
At twenty-five she returned to East Hampton. She rented a small apartment on the third floor of a building on Main Street near the East Hampton Cinema. Her parents lived in a neat ranch house less than a mile from her apartment, beyond the windmill and the wood-shingled Episcopal Church on the Montauk Highway. She ate dinner with them on Sunday night once every two months. She worked, at the cash register, in one of the few locally owned hardware stores. At nights and on weekends, for five years, she made the long drive “up-island”—in the direction of New York City—to dreary, over-populated Smithtown, where she took courses in criminology and law enforcement at a community college. Although she had been at sea in her high school courses in biology and basic chemistry—her grades were just above passing, a gift from her teachers—she now gravitated to forensics, to lab work, and to DNA testing.
With pliers on one rainy night, she pulled the silver spike from her eyebrow; she had a festering infection for a few weeks. When the eyebrow healed, it was almost as though it had never been pierced. Only one of the two men who became her lovers in East Hampton ever noticed the almost effaced hole. “I had a spike,” she said. It was important to Kathy Schiavoni to tell the truth.
She had worked in the police lab in Smithtown for seven years when she was given the plastic bag tagged with the identification “Richardson sheets.” Normally unfazed by any evidence she was handed for testing, she immediately recognized that the Richardson case was what she had heard described at headquarters as a “big, big one, the biggest ever out here.” None of the several dozen cases she had testified in as an expert had ever received attention from the newspapers. They were anonymous, unremarkable trials. Kathy was a stolid, careful witness. In every case in which she testified, the defendant had been convicted.
In handling the “Richardson sheets,” she didn’t want to be distracted by the visibility of the case, but she was even more careful than usual. She was given several strands of hair from Juan Suarez’s head. She also had a group of ten of his wiry jet-black pubic hairs. There were at least five distinct areas on the luxuriant sheets from the Richardson bedroom that she recognized even before testing them were stained with vaginal fluids and semen: the stains were flaky and off-white.
Working quietly, knowing that Margaret Harding, the assistant district attorney handling the “billionaire murder” case, was waiting impatiently as usual for the results, Kathy spent several days before she made an appointment at Harding’s cluttered office in Riverhead.
When she arrived with her report in a document-sized plastic cover for her appointment at ten, she had to wait for Margaret Harding for a full hour. Harding was a late riser. She was, in Kathy Schiavoni’s eyes, a prima donna, more like a manicured Manhattan woman with a house in the Hamptons than a local working girl. Kathy neither liked nor disliked Margaret Harding. The lawyer had a job to do, and Kathy understood that she did it well, although she was difficult.
Margaret Harding was always late. It was her entitlement. Everyone knew that for the last several months she’d been spending late afternoon and early evening hours at her apartment in Quogue with her boss, Richie Lupo, the Suffolk County District Attorney. Although Richie was the boss, he never tried a case and rarely walked into a courtroom. He often called press conferences. He loved being on camera: with the even, regular features of Mitt Romney, he looked more like a WASP than an Italian. Richie Lupo was married. A Republican who ran on law-and-order, family values advertisements, he had been re-elected three times to four-year terms. He was certain he would never lose an election. He called himself “the DA-for-Life.”
“Kathleen,” Margaret said when she swept into her office at eleven-thirty, knowing that she was the only person in the world who called Kathy anything other than Kathy, “can I get you a cup of coffee?” The bitch, Kathy thought, she isn’t even going to apologize for being late.
“I’ve had six already, Margaret. Thanks.”
“How do you stay so calm with so much coffee?” Margaret sipped her own black coffee from a plastic cup. She grimaced. It was bitter. Even when she grimaced, every fine feature of her face was attractive.
“Beats me,” Kathy answered. She always maintained a terse blandness with Margaret because she knew she could never engage her in that level of quick conversation Margaret had mastered.
Margaret’s cell phone chimed a refrain from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. She snapped the small, shiny instrument open, without hesitation, as if Kathy weren’t even in the room. Whoever was on the other end of the conversation spoke more than Margaret, who was smiling. Although reserved and private herself, Kathy had become an acute observer of people, and she knew it was Richie Lupo, calling to follow up on the evening before or even on the sex they had that morning.
As soon as Margaret flipped the phone closed, Kathy said, “I’ve got the Richardson test results. At least as far as I can go on what I’ve been given.” She slipped a copy of her eight page report, labeled Confidential, out of her valise.
“God,” Margaret said, smiling, “I thought I’d never see this day. Talk to me.”
“Why don’t you read it,” Kathy said. She found it difficult to have a conversation with Margaret Harding, an impatient woman who had a reputation for interrupting the Pope.
“No, talk to me, Kathleen. I can read it later. Give me the skinny.”
“Suarez’s DNA is all over the place. There was even a pubic hair from him wedged in the stitching of the sheets in the Richardsons’ bedroom.”
“Really?” Margaret was excited, as if sharing a racy secret with another woman.
“Yes, really.” Kathy placed the report on the edge of Margaret’s messy desk. How could such a sleek, fastidious woman, Kathy wondered, be such a slob?
“I’ll read this later. Go on, girl.”
Kathy paused. “There were other secretions.”
“Lordy! Quite a busy bed. Maybe Joan Richardson isn’t the corn-fed country girl we see in Town & Country, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Malala?”
“One of the other semen stains is a near-perfect match for Brad Richardson.”
“My, my, who do you think he was in bed with?”
“It was his bed,” Kathy said, laconically. “He had a right to sleep there, too.”
“God, is she something else. First the gardener and then the hubby, or the hubby and then the gardener, or could it be both at the same time?” Margaret took another sip of coffee. “It’s convenient that way: she wouldn’t have to change the sheets, if it all happened together. A conga line.”
“Actually, and you may enjoy this even more, there is at least one other semen stain that doesn’t match either Brad Richardson or Juan Suarez.”
Margaret leaned forward and lifted the report. “God, how I love this job.”“So who was the third stain? Sounds like a good movie title: The Third Man. The Third Stain.”
“I don’t know whose semen it is. What I need to complete the report are samples from any other men who may have been in the house for the two or three days before the killing.”
“That could be a cast of thousands.”
Kathy recognized that Margaret was trying to be chummy, to have a girl-to-girl conversation. Kathy, stolid and persistent, said, “I’d also like to have a sample of Joan Richardson’s DNA, preferably a vaginal swab.”
“Listen, between us girls, I think Joan is interested in protecting her family jewels from any more exposure.”
“We know,” Kathy said evenly, “that her friend Senator Rawls was around. I’d like a DNA sample for him, too. There’s a mosaic, I think, on these sheets. I want to be thorough.”
And then Margaret surprised Kathy Schiavoni. Margaret said, “I also know that Brad Richardson had special friends. This can get naughty, but it could even be, Kathleen, that the stain from the
unknown male was dropped there at the same time as the stain from Brad. I don’t think Senator Rawls was taking care of the wife and the husband at the same time. At least his publicity people have wanted us to believe for a long time that he plays for one team only. You know, that Clint Eastwood style.”
Kathy smiled faintly. “I need to get back to the lab, Margaret. How long do you think it will take to get a subpoena to get some hairs from Rawls so that we can compare them to the other stains?”
Suddenly Margaret looked petulant. She sat back in her chair and touched her cell phone as if preparing to make a call. “Kathleen, that’s our job. We do the mosaics. We pull all of the evidence together, not just DNA. Your job is to give me the pieces; mine is to do the mosaic. I’ll have to talk to Menachem. And to Richie, of course. And to Halsey. We can’t just go out and get a judge to issue a search warrant to cut the pubic hair of a former U.S. Senator and a bereaved billionaire widow. But you don’t need to worry about that, Kathleen. We’ll deal with it.”
“But I do need to worry about a complete report, Margaret. That’s my job.”
“I’ll read your report. Maybe you’re short-changing yourself. Maybe it’s complete just as it is. I’ll let you know.”
It was only when Kathy walked through the bright mid-autumn air of the parking lot toward her Mazda that she realized how the odor of perfume—which she had loved as a teenager when she took bottles of inexpensive perfumes from her mother and sprayed herself but now never used—disturbed her. There was an odor, very faint, of perfume that enveloped Margaret Harding and permeated her office. Kathy, who no longer noticed the stench of blood and flesh, had an almost physical revulsion to the scent; it made her throat constrict. But soon the clear snapping air took away all traces of the perfume that had settled on her own clothes while she was in Margaret’s office.
17.
After so many years in public life, Hank Rawls couldn’t remember when he felt as uncomfortable as he did now. As Menachem Oz pretended to glance at some yellow notepaper, Hank on the witness stand shifted his nervous gaze from this homely man whose yarmulke somehow stayed in place on his bald head to the three rows of people who sat behind Oz. The faces of these twenty-three people, all white, all members of the Grand Jury, most in their fifties and sixties, were focused on the witness. Hank Rawls, himself a performer, knew that this poorly dressed lawyer was simply pausing for effect to let the last series of questions and answers resonate with the intent people behind him. I’m sweating, Hank Rawls thought in that long drawn-out pause, like fucking Richard Milhous Nixon. No matter how he tried to compose and settle himself, he couldn’t make the sweating stop. He could only hope that his weathered blond skin made it undetectable.