The Borzoi Killings

4.

It was Brad Richardson who drove to the work gang on the Montauk Highway in Wainscott at six-thirty on Thursday morning. From the open window of his Land Rover, Brad waved Juan over. He remembered the kind man who earlier that week had carried bags of Pepsis to the crew before the rainstorm. A clear dawn, with just a slight chill, was rising through the stark branches of the trees at the roadside. Tom Golden and the other contractors hadn’t yet arrived.

“Juan, good morning,” Brad called out through the open window.

Pointing at his chest, Juan asked, “You want me?” Then he walked to the Land Rover’s open window.

“Juan, my wife and I were talking. We thought about having you come to work for us full-time for a while.”

Juan hesitated. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you work for Tom Golden every day?”

“No.”

“Good. We need a full-time caretaker and handyman. Do you want to work for us?”

“You sure?”

“Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask. Gardening, pruning, some carpentry, raking, whatever you know. Just raking and cleaning up, if that’s what you want to do. If you don’t like it, you can quit, no hard feelings.”

Brad was an efficient man. He told Juan that he and his wife would pay him one thousand dollars each week. After three years in America, Juan knew what that number meant. “You sure?” he mumbled.

Brad ignored him, saying his driver would pick him up at seven each morning wherever he lived. All Juan had to do was tell the driver where that was. The same driver would take him home. Brad and his wife would buy comfortable work clothes for him. The clothes would be cleaned and pressed so that he could start each day fresh. They would first be tailored for him. His name would be stitched over the left pockets and the name of the estate-the Bonac-over the right pockets.

All that Brad and Mrs. Richardson expected of Juan was that he would in the first days walk around the buildings at the estate-the house itself, the ancient potato barn mostly buried in the earth with its roof just above ground-level, the tennis court, and the gardens. Juan was to decide what needed to be done. It was important to Brad that Juan be a “self-starter.” Juan knew, and had been in America long enough to appreciate, that a self-starter was a guy who made up his own mind about what needed to be done, how to do it, and how to get it done, quickly.

“And,” Brad said, smiling, “we want you to spend some time each day with the dogs.”

Juan remembered two sleek dogs trotting from time to time down the hallway that connected Brad’s office with the gleaming kitchen. Their toenails had clicked on the burnished wooden floors.

The dogs were Borzois. Juan had never before seen or touched, fed or groomed, a Borzoi. In fact, he’d never heard the name of the breed. But he knew that no matter how elegant or inelegant a dog’s coat, muzzle, ears, legs, and tail were, all dogs responded the same way to love, discipline, attention and play-they became attentive, loving, obedient, sweetly dependent. Within a week, Felix and Sylvia, both of them benignly neglected during the two years they had lived essentially as trophies in the Richardsons’ homes, became Juan’s dogs. They followed him, waiting for him to play with them or feed them. They stayed near him as he worked inside or outside the house. He loved them.

And Juan also loved his work. He easily fell into the patterns of the Richardsons’ home-the treasures of the carefully constructed estate, the sloping expanses of the grounds so much like the nearby undulating golf course at the Maidstone Club, the needs of the seawalls, and the endless, repetitive sibilance of the ocean surf.

He also quickly fell into the patterns of the Richardsons’ lives. They lived with largesse and generosity, not just to their friends and Juan but to the furtive, cautious population of immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Costa Rica. They learned through Juan that there were houses and small warehouses that collected donations of cash and food and clothes for the men, women, and children, a kind of underground support system designed to elude the surveillance of the immigration police. The Richardsons bought large quantities of clean, durable clothes-jeans and sweatshirts and Nike and Adidas sneakers for the men, shirts and blouses and slacks for the women, sweatshirts with popular names like Ecko and A &F for the kids. The Richardsons bought food. They even paid for doctor visits. Many of the people among whom Juan lived knew that he worked for a generous man and woman. Some people admired him for that. Others resented him.

There were other aspects of the Richardsons’ lives that Juan soon came to love, including the parties. Joan and Brad gave parties almost every weekend, some small, most large. Brad even called the Borzois-so sleek, so clean, so perpetually groomed-“party animals.”

And Juan became a “party man.” At the start of the summer, Brad Richardson asked Juan to work at the weekend parties as a greeter at the front door, in a tuxedo. Together with Brad, Juan even made a one-day visit to Manhattan, to the corner of Madison Avenue and 45th Street, to buy the tuxedo at the muted, elegant Paul Stuart store where Brad’s father had started shopping in the late 1940s when it opened and to which he started bringing Brad when he was nine and already a well-mannered preppy. When the other Mexican men Juan had once worked with learned that he now sometimes wore a tuxedo, they ribbed him that even more of the white women in East Hampton and Southampton would take Juan to bed. “You get rich someday, Juan,” they said. “You give it hard enough to them you get rich.”

During the party season, Mariana, a dark, comely woman with two kids with whom Juan started living just a week after he arrived in Sag Harbor, served food and drinks and helped to clean in the quiet hours of early Sunday morning as the parties slowly dissolved after hours and hours of music, dancing, conversation, drinking, and cocaine-inhaling by the Richardsons’ guests. Mariana was paid five hundred dollars in cash each time she worked. This was a staggering amount. And it was made even more staggering because Juan was given seven hundred dollars each time he, in his beautifully tailored tuxedo, acted as a greeter and guide, Felix and Sylvia quietly roaming around him.