by Paul Batista
Decker said, “Listen to me, Mr. Stanski. Who is he?”
“You mean his name?”
“Let’s start with that.”
“How would I know?”
“Do you know his name?”
“No, not that I can remember.”
“Had you ever seen him before this photograph was taken?”
“Probably.”
“Did you have any understanding as to why the handsome man with the ponytail was there, talking to Ms. Baldesteri?”
“You’ve shown me this picture before, Mr. Decker. You showed it to me again yesterday or maybe the day before. If I thought about the ponytail guy at all, I thought he was a bodyguard for the guy I was talking to. But I’m not sure. The ponytail guy is a very strong kid. The kind of guy you see these days who works as a bodyguard. He could be a movie star for all I know. He’s that good looking.”
“But you are sure that the guy you were talking to was the guy who told you to let Ms. Rematti know Ms. Baldesteri wanted to hire her and to send the five-hundred-thousand-dollar wire?”
“I’m pretty sure of that.”
Decker said in a quiet voice as he gathered up the notes on the podium, “No further questions, Your Honor.”
The tactic was abrupt. It was skillful. Decker knew it was time to get Leon Stanski out of the witness box. He had proven himself to be unreliable. It was only midmorning, not the time for a bathroom break or even to ask for one.
Naomi Goldstein, without missing a beat, said, “Your witness, Ms. Rematti.”
CHAPTER 6
RAQUEL HATED USING sports analogies or references, especially during trials. One expression she particularly disliked was “swinging for the fence.” As she often told the eager young students in her trial practice seminars, lawyers who “swing for the fence” not only failed to hit a home run, they missed the ball. Usually, she said, it was the steady player who won. “Trials” were called trials for a reason. They were trials, not a game played for fun.
And yet, as her time for cross-examining Leon Stanski had already and unexpectedly arrived, she had only one thought in her mind: Swing for the fence.
“You and I have never met before, Mr. Stanski, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“But we’ve talked before, haven’t we?”
“Once.”
“And that, as you’ve testified, was when you let me know that the Senator wanted to hire me?”
“Right.”
Raquel, still without notes, was at the podium next to the jury box. “Let me ask you,” she said after a pause, “to look at Senator Baldesteri.”
He did.
“How long have you known her?”
“More than ten years. Eleven, twelve maybe.” Suddenly he sounded sober, concentrated, mentally present.
“How did you meet her?”
“When her husband was still a Senator himself and still in the early stages of his presidential campaign.”
“Why did you meet her?”
“President Young, who was then Senator Young, needed a veteran campaign manager for his presidential run.”
“And you were under consideration, right?”
“I was.”
“And Senator Young’s wife interviewed you?”
“She did.”
“What was her role at the time?”
“She had his complete confidence. They were partners in every sense of the word right up to the day he was assassinated.”
“So is it fair to say that you have known Senator Baldesteri for at least ten years?”
“That’s fair.”
“And spoken to her frequently?”
“Yes.”
“Including the time she was the First Lady?”
“Sure.”
“And after President Young was assassinated?”
“Many times. Yes, we met and spoke to each other many times before and after that terrible murder.”
“Let me ask you this. In all the time you have spoken to Senator Baldesteri, has she ever asked you to do something you thought was questionable?”
In a clear voice, Leon Stanski answered, “Never.”
“Has she ever asked you to do anything you viewed as illegal?”
“Not once. Never.”
“Has she ever asked you to do anything you did not want to do?”
“No. Not ever.”
“Has she ever asked you to obtain money or support from foreign sources?”
“Never.”
“And you do not know anything about the man shown with you in the picture?”
“Nothing more than I’ve already testified about.”
“And you don’t know anything about the man with whom the Senator appears to be talking in the picture?”
“Nothing at all.”
And here, Raquel knew, was the ultimate swing for the fence. “As a seasoned professional, you believe in Senator Baldesteri’s absolute integrity, correct?”
“I certainly do.”
Raquel stared at Leon Stanski for the pulse of a moment. “No further questions.”
CHAPTER 7
HAYES SMITH, AS the nightly news anchor on NBC, was world famous. His apartment on Central Park South overlooked all of the park’s hundreds of acres, a spectacular view at all hours of the day and night, in all seasons of the year. He was in his midforties, several years younger than Raquel. He had a full head of brown hair beginning to turn gray at the temples. He was as handsome as a middle-aged Robert Redford.
For the last six months, Raquel had spent almost every night at Hayes’ apartment. She entered the building through the service doors. All the staff knew who she was, and all of them kept the secret that she was virtually living with the NBC anchor. On the weekends they stayed either at her somewhat run-down house on the dunes in Montauk or at his freshly re-shingled house near the jewel of a pond on Main Street in the Village of East Hampton. Because of stories in People magazine, the New York Post, and elsewhere, there was no secret that Hayes Smith and Raquel were full-time lovers, a celebrity couple; they both thought, however, that it was important her nightly presence in Hayes’ apartment remain private information. It was simply a decision they had tacitly made even though they knew it was almost futile to maintain the charade. She kept her old-world apartment on Riverside Drive, where she had lived for two decades.
When the trial started, Hayes and his producers at NBC decided that in the nightly broadcasts he would say as little as possible about the trial. Each time a story about it came up, as it often did, Hayes would simply announce, “And here are more developments in the trial of former First Lady Angelina Baldesteri.” And then for details, Danielle Quinn, an NBC reporter for five years and herself a lawyer, would appear on the courthouse steps to broadcast the day’s events. No cameras were ever allowed in federal courtrooms. When the now defunct Court TV was in its heyday, all the broadcasts of trials were in state courts, not federal ones.
Hayes and Raquel were an intimate couple. They were unrestrained in what they told each other about their private histories and about their current feelings and experiences. To Raquel only, Hayes had described the night when, at midnight, the police arrived at the family home in rural South Dakota to arrest his father, a small-town lawyer who, without effort or plan, resembled Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch. Hayes’ mother had screamed, “What are you doing to him?” as the State Troopers put handcuffs on his father. One of the troopers bluntly answered, “Your husband sucks little boys’ cocks, ma’am.” On his first night in the local jail, Hayes’ father hanged himself by tying bedsheets together and looping them over an exposed steam pipe in the ceiling. The small-town prosecutors and the state police altered their records forever to show that Hayes’ father had a heart attack while he was in a police ambulance after a minor injury sustained in a single-car accident.
Hayes, who had never described the sickening scene of his father’s arrest to anyone, told Raquel about it not long after they
became lovers. It was at that moment that he fully realized he loved Raquel, for he had imparted to her, and her alone, his most painful, private secret.
Raquel for a time was more reserved. At first, she said little about the cancer that had afflicted her for thirteen months four years earlier. She kept hidden in her now seldom-used apartment the three pictures she took of herself with her iPhone when she was bald from the chemotherapy—she privately called them the “Dead Sea Selfies.” There were still some traces of the radiation burns on the sides of her beautiful breasts. Hayes would never have noticed them until she pointed them out, as if to prove to him that she had once struggled with cancer, her own secret that he at first naively appeared not to want to believe.
But by now she felt no restraints. They had agreed when the Baldesteri trial started that she’d tell him everything about each day’s events and that he would repeat none of it to anyone, not even to the ambitious Danielle Quinn or her producers and assistants. The trial dominated Raquel’s life, just as it dominated the news, eclipsing Putin’s invasion in Syria and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims to Europe and the drowning of many of them in rickety boats in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.
Leon Stanski’s testimony at the trial earlier that day had been harrowing for Raquel. It was the picture marked as Exhibit 673, not his testimony, that profoundly disoriented her. She was certain that the man in the forefront of the picture was the man known as Oscar Caliente in her other celebrated trial after her recovery from cancer. And in the same picture, she was certain she recognized the man she had known as Juan Suarez, her client, the Mexican immigrant accused of murdering Brad Richardson at Richardson’s oceanfront estate in East Hampton. During that trial, in fact during the weeks she had prepared for it, she’d violated so many of the cardinal rules of her profession, including her belief that the handsome Juan Suarez, who exuded simplicity and straightforwardness, was innocent and that he was prosecuted solely because he was an “illegal” Latin American immigrant, a victim of the hidden prejudices of the rich, famous, and odd men and women of the fabled Hamptons.
In fact, Raquel had passed even further into the territory of the forbidden: she had, she knew, fallen in love with Juan Suarez, even though their physical contact was limited to the quick embraces they exchanged each morning as she waited for him to be released from the holding cell in the courthouse before each day’s trial session. Only the cynical guards detected that.
“I’m frightened, Hayes,” Raquel said at his dining room table at the end of the day when she had “swung for the fence” with Leon Stanski and in fact had hit a home run.
Hayes was surprised. “Tell me about it. What’s up?”
“During the Suarez trial a few years ago, the name Oscar Caliente was repeated over and over again. The prosecutors argued that Juan Suarez was really named Anibal Vaz and that Anibal Vaz was in fact a skilled drug-runner for Oscar Caliente.”
Hayes said nothing. He simply tilted his head, waiting for more.
And Raquel said, “I only saw pictures and surreptitiously recorded films of Oscar Caliente. The prosecutors, whom I couldn’t stand because they were racists, I thought, out to punish an ‘illegal’ in the Hamptons, claimed that Caliente was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel in New York City who was trying to expand his ‘market’—that is what the prosecutors called it—to East Hampton and Southampton. He had already succeeded in completely dominating the drug trade in Manhattan. Caliente, they said, had ordered the murders of dozens of competitors. And Juan Suarez, or Anibal Vaz, or whatever his real name was, had the job of being Caliente’s loyal soldier. And Suarez, the prosecutors said, murdered Brad Richardson because Richardson, a secret addict, had somehow upset Caliente. And Caliente wanted Richardson dead for the sport and pastime value of it. And because Caliente is, to put it simply, crazy.”
“Don’t you remember,” Hayes said, “that I first met you during that trial? Suarez was convicted. I interviewed you. And after the conviction, didn’t some kids then find in the old Sag Harbor dump the actual machete with Richardson’s blood on it? They found the clothes the murderer was wearing, and there was nothing on the machete or the clothes to connect Suarez to the killing. So, The Blade of the Hamptons was someone else, and your client’s conviction was tossed out. He was deported and he’s free. Another victory for Raquel Rematti.”
“I wish,” she said. “No, Hayes, Juan Suarez was the killer. Just before he was thrown out of the country and after his conviction was set aside, I met him in the big federal prison on the Brooklyn waterfront while he was waiting to be deported. I told him he could never be tried again, because of the rule against double jeopardy, for the killing of Richardson. He was more sophisticated than I thought: he already knew the total immunity double jeopardy gave him.
“And then he told me the truth. He, in fact, was the killer. Caliente gave him the assignment. He had Caliente’s cooperation in an elaborate cover-up that involved cleaning the machete and the clothes so that Richardson’s and another man’s blood and DNA would then be smeared on the murder weapon and the clothes. And then Suarez and others drowned the other man, the stalking horse. At night, five miles out from Montauk in the Atlantic. The body was never recovered.”
“Is there more?” Hayes asked.
“On the day before he was deported, Suarez also told me that Caliente was very angry with me for bringing his name up at trial, as I did when I was cross-examining some of the prosecution’s witnesses. Suarez had repeatedly told me not to do that. He was adamant about that. Suarez was a man in an altered state after I brought out Caliente’s name. He was no longer the gentle, appealing soul I’d come to know. I ignored him. After all, I’m the lawyer, I know what has value. My bringing up Caliente put the focus elsewhere, other than on my client. If I did what Suarez wanted, it would be like a patient telling a doctor what instruments to use during surgery.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“During that trial someone tried to kill me. You remember I had an assistant, a young woman named Theresa Bui who had been a student of mine at the Columbia seminars I give?”
“Sure, Raquel, I remember. I know you’re still disturbed by it. You’re a good Catholic girl, after all: you think you’re responsible for her death.”
“The rifle shot came at night into the big bedroom at the Montauk house where I always slept, except that night. Theresa was sleeping in that room that night. Whoever did the shooting that killed Theresa was sent by Caliente to kill me.”
“How do you know that? There are thousands of crazies with guns and rifles, even in Montauk, who shoot just for the fun of it. At all hours of the day and night. Everywhere. Everywhere. The joys of the Second Amendment.”
“Suarez told me, in that last conversation I had with him in the federal prison, that Caliente ordered the shooting.”
“What happened to Caliente?”
“The police, the DEA, the FBI—they all tried to find him. He vanished.”
Hayes said, “That’s good. So why are you afraid? Not every bad thought we have is an existential threat.”
“Well, Suarez’ last words to me were be careful.”
“Has something happened?”
“I saw Caliente again today.” She paused. “And I saw Suarez again today.”
“You did? Where?”
“They were both in a picture the Government has that was a trial exhibit today.”
“In the Baldesteri trial?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of picture?”
“It turns out that Angelina knows them. In the picture, Angelina was talking to Suarez. But her hand was on Caliente’s shoulder.”
“What was she doing with them? Did you ask her?”
“I did. She said she never heard of Oscar Caliente. The man in the picture, she said, is Robert Calvaro, a naturalized U.S. citizen who made a fortune with oil exploration in South America, and now with fracking in this country. And that Suarez,
or Vaz, or whoever, was the president of one of Calvaro’s companies. Angelina said he is Hugo Salazar. She said Calvaro was a huge contributor to the super PAC that provides sixty percent of the money used for her campaign. He is, she said, a Yale graduate. And Salazar, she said, is from a big, reputable Bolivian family.”
“Why isn’t she right?”
“I’d recognize Suarez in a dark closet, Hayes. I spent hundreds of hours with him. Caliente’s hair color is different, and he has had some plastic surgery, but I saw more than enough secretly taken pictures and film of him that there’s not a doubt in my mind that it’s Caliente. The same is true, I’m convinced, of Hugo Salazar. Different color hair than when he was Juan Suarez. Even some plastic surgery. But I know.”
“What else did you say to Baldesteri?”
“Nothing. Remember, I’m defending her at her criminal trial. I can’t ask her whether she knows that Calvaro as Oscar Caliente is a key part of the Sinaloa cartel, and that Salazar is a killer. I can’t go down that rabbit hole. I suspect she still sees both of them and that Calvaro still feeds funds to the PAC that supports her campaign. And it was Calvaro who had that old fox Stanski tell me that Angelina wanted me to represent her. Calvaro, I’m sure, arranged to pay my fee. I could ask her whether she knows who these men really are. But there are some things, many things, in fact, that a lawyer shouldn’t know.”
“Come on, baby. There’s no way she could know.”
“Really, Hayes? You don’t know the sainted Angelina Baldesteri as well as I do. Nobody does.”
Hayes walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park. It was night. Lights like laces of pearls shined along the twisting walkways of the park. Hundreds of runners and speedy bicycle riders filled the closed-to-traffic roads even in the dark. Many of the cyclists had tiny headlights that raced through the darkness. Farther north was the immense, irregular oval of the reservoir, its shore defined by dozens of stately lanterns. Near the southern end of the reservoir, a powerful fountain pushed tall towers of water at least sixty feet above the surface. Lights illuminated the rising water, silver columns in the dark.