The Borzoi Killings

15.

Raquel Rematti was always struck by how much Riverhead, the town seventy-three miles east of Manhattan where Long Island divided into the North Fork and the South Fork, resembled the decaying factory cities of Rhode Island, southeastern and northeastern Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire. Instead of abandoned factories, Riverhead had abandoned gas stations, most of them on lots with grass and weeds growing through the fissures in the broken concrete. There was even a rusty Esso sign rising over the lot of a long-closed gas station. Esso signs were artifacts of another era, like the big cars with whitewall tires she could remember from her childhood in the late sixties. Most of the storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead were boarded over with plywood. Graffiti was sprayed on the plywood. The only active stores were essentially indoor flea markets. There wasn’t even a McDonald’s or a Burger King.

The residential streets around Riverhead had the look of small towns in Appalachia; there were hundred-year-old houses that must have looked poor when they were built, pick-up trucks in the driveways, and sofas and stuffed chairs on the porches. Raquel knew the poverty of most of America-the decrepit housing, the rundown public schools, the bleak shopping malls-the America that the cheery, pervasive television and print advertising for cars and vacations and prescription drugs never depicted.

Several years ago, on a trip driven by a reluctant nostalgia, she had returned to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where her family had lived for three generations. Arriving from Sicily in the 1920s, her grandfather had worked for years in a shoe factory in Haverhill alongside the sulphurous Merrimack River, and her father worked there too until the cold day in 1976 when the immense red brick factory building was shut down without any notice to anyone. Raquel was still in high school then, but already tall, strikingly attractive, and first in her class. She knew she was destined for scholarships at any one of several legendary colleges and that she would leave Haverhill behind. The sight of those old factory buildings, some of them renovated but most abandoned and strewn with black graffiti, still painfully tugged at her when she drove through the familiar streets: as a girl she would meet her handsome, happy, and strong father on the iron pedestrian bridge that spanned the Merrimack, which he crossed every day for forty years on his way to and from the factory. She still longed for him: in 1990 he had died of cancer, the disease that had almost taken her own life over the last year. She could still sense his manly, all-enveloping presence.

The prison was on the outskirts of Riverhead. It was a sprawling single-story cinderblock building constructed in the 1970s and surrounded by fences with barbed wire. It was set in what was once a potato field. Raquel passed through the outside security point and parked her car near the main entrance. Many of the cars in the visitors lot were older Mazdas, Toyotas, and Fords. They were the cars and oversize pick-up trucks of family members visiting prisoners. There were also a few Mercedes and BMWs, the cars of visiting lawyers.

For more than a month, Raquel had regularly stopped on Friday afternoons at the prison to visit Juan, sometimes just for twenty minutes or so, on her drives from the city to her weekend house on the Atlantic coast in Montauk. She had bought the house as a generous gift to herself after the terrifying nine months in which she learned she had breast cancer, underwent debilitating weeks of chemotherapy, and the loss and reconstruction of her left breast. Raquel had always loved life, and she was in utter dread at the thought of losing it during the grim months when the cancer took greater hold before it just halted and was reversed, a miracle she attributed to the cures her doctors delivered and also to the prayers she recited. She was raised as a Catholic and had remained one-a fact that she didn’t usually disclose in the world in which she now lived-and believed in the will of God. She was convinced she’d been given a second life, that she’d lived two lives in one. As in the lines in Luke that described the Prodigal Son-For this thy brother was dead and is alive again.

Since her first meeting with Juan, she was fascinated by him and the place where his life had brought him. She was also fascinated by the incessant attention focused on him and the murder of an immensely wealthy man. It was as though Juan were accused of killing Mother Teresa. There were endless news reports dwelling on how the mysterious alien had managed to win the affection and confidence of one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic couples in the world, Brad and Joan Richardson. The New York Post carried stories about the “rat” who had insidiously worked his way into the Richardsons’ storied lives and then betrayed them. The articles mentioned that the Richardsons also cared generously for the rat’s “undocumented” wife and children, who had disappeared, probably with cash stolen from the Richardsons’ estate, on the same day Juan was arrested “after leading the police on a wild run through the woods as he tried to escape.”

When Raquel had announced that she was taking over the defense of Juan Suarez, the publicity ratcheted up yet another notch. The press conference took place on the sidewalk at 57th Street and Park Avenue, near the lobby of her office building. It was a clear, chilly fall day. The crisp sunlight fell on Raquel’s taut, beautifully structured, Sicilian-dark face as she spoke. “As more is revealed in this painful case,” she had said, “we’ll learn that the arrest of Juan Suarez was not the result of a thorough professional investigation, but a symptom of some of our worst instincts as a nation. Juan Suarez is not a blade. He is not a knife. He is not an alien. And he is not an insidious rat. He is part of an invisible, much-scorned population whose presence we as a society don’t want to acknowledge, although we take advantage of it. We treat these people as invisible, but they are our nannies, maids, gardeners. We are demonizing the most vulnerable people among us. Juan Suarez had no motive to commit this crime. He had no reason to commit it. And he did not do it.”

Images of Raquel speaking in the clear fall air, with flowers still in bloom behind her on the colorful median dividing Park Avenue’s uptown and downtown traffic, were broadcast around the world. On the day after the press conference, the headline in the Times read: Famed Celebrity Lawyer Takes Over Defense in Hamptons Murder.

Raquel Rematti was tall and imposing, and she was surprised that Juan was four inches taller than she was. When they first met, Juan’s size and vitality surprised her, just as Joan Richardson had been surprised months earlier by how vibrant Juan’s presence was. Raquel had grown used to seeing the small, cowed men who were steadily appearing on the East End of Long Island. She genuinely wanted to believe she had no race or other prejudices, but the difference between Juan and the other Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Ecuadorian men she saw along the roadsides and in the yards of Southampton, East Hampton, and Montauk was too striking for her to deny. Where did he really come from? she wondered. To her, he looked like a Spanish aristocrat, not an immigrant day laborer. She was disappointed with herself that she made these comparisons, but she did.

They always met in a small room with plastic, childlike chairs and desk, all pink. The guards, one of them a very heavy black woman with a tattoo of a flower on her neck, insisted that the door stay open. The guards had pistols. Juan Suarez was an important prisoner, almost certainly the best-known ever held in the Suffolk County Correctional Institution.

Raquel Rematti never took notes. Leaning forward so that they could talk quietly, she sat directly across from Juan at the plastic table. She had learned long ago that the intimacy of a lawyer sitting close to a client, speaking quietly and without the lawyer taking notes, fostered the growth of confidence.

“Juan,” she said, “do you remember where we left off last week?”

They had abruptly been stopped when they met a week earlier by the harsh alarm bell that was a signal for a head count. When that alarm sounded, every prisoner had to return to his cell no matter who was visiting him-lawyer, wife, priest, parent-and the visit couldn’t resume until the lockdown ended. Raquel left because more than two hours passed without any sign of the end of that lockdown. She had a sense that the guards did this to make visitors and inmates as uncomfortable as possible.

“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.”