The Borzoi Killings

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.

But now, even months after Brad’s killing and more so as the trial approached, it was all different. As she told Hank Rawls, “I’ve gone from being the cover girl, the Jennifer Aniston sweetheart, to the scheming shrew, Cruella DeVille.” The stories about her in newspapers, magazines, and tabloids, and on television and the Internet were relentless. The billion-dollar babe, the girl who loved to “party down,” the lady with her own Senator. Since Brad’s killing, Joan was never alone on the Manhattan streets except when she managed to slip out of her apartment building through the service entrance wearing the clothes of a fortyish cleaning lady and an oversize Yankee baseball cap. She was always conscious that outside the building were people with cameras, tape recorders, and notebooks waiting for her, and that her chances of escaping in disguise were remote.

Hank, who had spent his life in public since the time, at 27, when he first ran for a seat in the Wyoming Congressional district where he was raised, seemed bemused by all the attention. He was long past campaigning for political office. He no longer had any need to worry about the company he kept or the places he went. His publisher and his managers believed that the added exposure he received as Joan Richardson’s boyfriend-he had been the boyfriend of many famous women-was one of the many factors that fueled sales of his books and the movies based on his books. It was also true that he had loved Joan Richardson, although her nervous distractions and her fears and her impatience (and her jealous possessiveness) were the kinds of traits that had led him away from many women in the past. Hank liked having fun. Joan Richardson had, for the last year, been a lot of fun. Now that Joan was virtually crumbling under the pressures that followed Brad’s death, Hank wanted to be patient with her. At 60, he consciously decided to teach himself, if he could, the traits of patience, tolerance, and acceptance. But he knew he had a short attention span.

When Hank emerged naked from the marble bathroom, toweling himself, he saw Joan doing something completely uncharacteristic. She was smoking. It was a Gauloise. The pack was on the table beside the bed, as succulent-looking as a French pastry.

He smiled at her. “Aren’t you worried about crows’ feet around the eyes?”

“I’m a wreck. I used to smoke at Stanford. When I got my first modeling job, I quit smoking. For years I’ve wanted to smoke again.”

“Doesn’t the Surgeon General warn women off because of what smoking does to their eyes? It’s right there on the packs: ‘Warning from the Surgeon General for all gorgeous women: Smoking causes wrinkles.’” Hank Rawls had attractive, cowboy-like lines around his own eyes, not from smoking but from long spans of time in the sun-in Wyoming, on beaches in Europe and the Caribbean, on boats, on his long foot races.

Joan smiled. “Say that again? When did a woman get to be the Surgeon General?”

Hank laughed. He wore a gold Breguet watch on his left wrist. It was, he liked to say, Winston Churchill’s favorite model. He glanced at it on his naked arm. “I better get some clothes on. I need to be on the set in two hours.”

He made no effort to hide how much he was looking forward to his three-sentence, one-minute role as the United States Secretary of State, in an expensive thriller (explosions, love affairs, guns, assassinations, cars driving upside down on the ceilings of tunnels, Arabs, FBI agents) based on a novel he’d published two years earlier, Extraordinary Rendition.

“How long did you say it took you to memorize your lines?” she asked, trying to lighten her mood.

“Memorize them, baby? I wrote them.”

He dropped the towel to the floor. Naked, he walked toward her, moved the hand in which she held her cigarette away, and embraced her, bending her backwards slightly, tango-style. He stiffened, instantly aroused. He whispered into her ear: “I’ll take care of you later.”

“Get out of here,” Joan said, playfully, relieved that her mood had turned quickly. “You don’t want to keep Matt Damon and Nicole Kidman waiting.”

“Who?”

“Get your cute ass in gear, Mr. Secretary.”

Just thirty minutes later, Joan was again impatient, distracted, and nervous in the Bentley, as the uniformed driver cruised slowly by all the classic Paris buildings-the smooth stone facades, the tiled roofs-on the way to the ornate Italian embassy where the filming was taking place. She barely glanced at the Seine, at the Ile de la Cité (that magic island dividing the river), the Louvre, or the low, curving stone bridges over the Seine.

Hank said, “All right, Joan, it’s time to talk. You’ve been down over the last two days. I fell in love with and I still love a beautiful, generous, vital woman. We shook off the reporters on the way to JFK. Didn’t that help? Nobody has found you here.”

“I’m really, really confused, Hank. Worried.”

He looked at her, waiting for more.

She said, “I spoke to Jake yesterday.” As much as she hated to use the words, Jake Hecht was her “public relations advisor.” A former journalist, he had an uncanny ability to learn about news reports before they were printed, broadcast, or posted on the Internet. Jake Hecht was like a game fixer: through a bribe, a fixer could react impassively as a horse race was underway because he lived in the future, he knew the outcome.

“What did our little wizard learn?”

“That bitch Raquel Rematti has been giving interviews. Jake said she’ll be a guest tomorrow night on CNN. She’ll say that she’s at last persuaded the DA to subpoena you to go in front of a Grand Jury.”

Hank Rawls’s body was instantly suffused with that spasm of anxiety he’d only experienced two or three times in his life, including when, fifteen years earlier, he first saw the long-lens pictures of Cynthia Hall and himself on that remote, sun-drenched beach on Saint Kitts. They were naked. He was married to someone else at the time. As soon as he saw the pictures, he knew that his short campaign for President was over. “Maybe Bill Clinton could survive this,” he had told his campaign manager. “I can’t.”

Deliberately concealing his anxiety, he said, “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ve told you that was the other shoe. They always look at the husband or wife first, and then at the boyfriend or girlfriend. Don’t forget, I’m a lawyer, even though, thank God, I never practiced a day in my life.”

Over the last two months, Joan Richardson had sat in front of a Grand Jury on three separate days. Each day was a draining ordeal. The badly dressed young prosecutor, Menachem Oz, never once was pleasant, never treated her with the kindness or sympathy she imagined a widow of a murdered man might deserve, or with the respect she thought one of the most generous philanthropists in the world merited. Menachem Oz-a name she could not forget-had the sour demeanor of an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, which he was. He wore a yarmulke. His suits were off-the-rack from Target. He was very smart and very tenacious. She was afraid of him.

And she had lied to him. Menachem Oz knew it and again and again returned to questions about the day Brad was murdered, searching her for inconsistencies. “What time did you wake up?” “Where did you go in Manhattan?” “Who was your housekeeper?” “Was she there that day?” “Did anyone visit you?” “Were there any deliveries?” “How long were you at lunch?” “Did you eat alone?” “How many times in the last year have you had lunch alone?” “What are the names of the doormen who worked at the building that day?”

She had lied in her answers to almost all of these and many other questions. Joan never said that Senator Rawls came to her apartment in the morning of the day Brad was killed and that they didn’t leave until seven that evening, both of them dressed in classic evening clothes for the party at the Met. Instead, she said she’d had a lunch alone at a small restaurant on East 77th Street and then strolled uptown on Madison Avenue, stopping at the intimate Crawford-Doyle bookstore between 81st and 82nd Streets.

Menachem Oz knew she hadn’t been in the bookstore. “Did you use a credit card to buy books?”

“No, cash.”

“What was the book?”

“You mean the name?”

“Right, the name of the book?”

“The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin.”

She knew the skein of her senseless lying was fast unraveling but felt powerless to stop herself.

As the Bentley approached the rented embassy, she waited for Hank to say more. He leaned forward, looking at the camera trucks, the catering trucks, and the trailers where the lead actors had their private rooms. He was excited, like a boy arriving at a carnival, or like a politician approaching a cheering crowd.

The Bentley slowly made its way toward Helen Whitehouse, one of the assistant directors. Helen opened the door of the car. She was 25. She looked at him as though he were her favorite man in the world. As Hank Rawls rose to his feet, he engaged the woman with his famous smile and said, “Helen, it’s just great to see you.”

When Joan emerged from the car and was introduced to her, she entered the force field of the tacit, excited connection between her lover and this young woman. She had no doubt that Hank Rawls would in the not-too-distant future be screwing Helen Whitehouse.

Joan Richardson was wrong. That had already happened.