by Paul Batista
She leaned against the marble counter, bending forward because her stomach was suddenly painful. “My God, how?” Her voice shook.
“Murdered.”
“What?”
“Someone killed him earlier today, probably this afternoon.”
“How do you know that?”
“We got an anonymous 911 call about half an hour ago. We got here as soon as we could. The front door was unlocked. We found him in his office. There was cold coffee in a mug in the kitchen, so we think he was dead for a few hours when we got here.”
“My God.” Joan Richardson noticed the women’s room matron staring at her, a questioning and sympathetic look on her face. “How did it happen?”
“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.” The detective paused. “Is there any way for you to get back here tonight?”
“Yes.” And then she repeated, “Yes.”
“Please do it as soon as you can. We don’t want to disturb the crime scene until you have a chance to look around.”
“I’m at a party in the city. I’ll find my driver and get out there.”
Even in the marble, stainless steel bathroom, she heard the murmur of hundreds of people and the tinkle of glasses from the party. And the Mozart music, that empty, cocktail party music.
“When can I expect to see you?” he asked.
She hesitated. “I don’t know. Four or five hours.”
“Can’t you do it faster? Our forensic people are already here. Things are getting stale.”
“I’ll try. But I’ve got to change first. I’m at a party.”
“Whatever,” he said. “Do what you can. We’ll be waiting.”
Lightheaded, trembling, Joan Richardson went into one of the stalls and sat on the toilet. Her mind felt as though it would burst. She was so profoundly distracted that she couldn’t urinate. She reached through her purse for the brown bottle of Valium she always carried. She called out to ask the bathroom attendant to pass her a cup of water under the stall door. She swallowed three of the always neat, miraculous pills. Gradually, even as she washed her hands and ran her wet fingers through her hair, the pills began working their magic. She took a twenty dollar bill from her purse and handed it to the bewildered Malaysian woman.
In the vaulted entryway to the museum, where hundreds of candles cast their glow from candelabras, Joan Richardson roamed for almost five minutes as she searched for Hank Rawls. She smiled tautly and brushed past the many men and women who tried to engage her—Michael Bloomberg; Jamie Dimon; the pudgy, oval-faced Steven Cohen; and ancient, owlish Felix Rohatyn.
Surrounded as always by people, Hank stood near the hallway that led to the Temple of Dendur. He was happy. He was in his element. He was now sipping scotch. He always enjoyed himself. When he saw Joan wave at him, he slowly disengaged from the men and women around him. Taking his hand, Joan Richardson led him to one of the unoccupied alcoves not far from the coatroom. A statue of a Roman goddess, with robes of gauzy marble draped over her shoulders, rose above them in the alcove.
She said, “Brad is dead.”
“Come again?”
“I just got a call from the police. Brad is dead.”
“Brad is dead?”
“Killed.”
The Senator repeated as if he didn’t understand, “Killed?”
“I have to get out there,” she said. “We have to get out there. Davey will drive us.”
“We? That’s not a great idea, Joan. I’m staying here.”
She stared at him, her expression a strained mixture of surprise, fear, and resentment. But then she said, “Of course. You’re right. You stay. I’ll be okay.”
She took out her cell phone. Cupping her hand over her suddenly very dry mouth, watching the Senator finish his scotch and swirl the leftover ice cubes at the bottom of his glass, she called Davey. The driver was just outside the grand flight of stairs at the front of the museum. He was one of the dozens of chauffeurs allowed to park their SUVs and limousines on the brick-inlaid plaza that stretched for three city blocks in front of the museum. The long and narrow fountains cast up walls of water in which festive lights shined.
“Davey,” she said, “I need to drive out to East Hampton tonight. Now.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. R.,” he said good-naturedly. It was as though she had told him she wanted to drive around the block. Large, beer-bellied, although sober for years, Davey still had an almost attractive, winsome Irish face. He was obedient, unquestioning, charming. “The car’s right here.”
8.
“We’re home, Mrs. R.” She didn’t stir. “We’re home,” Davey repeated.
Drugged by the champagne and Valium, she had slept for the last fifty miles of the one-hundred-twenty-mile drive. Davey had noticed, when he glanced from time to time into the rearview mirror as the Mercedes raced late at night along the empty Long Island Expressway, that when she slept Joan Richardson didn’t look as put-together and well cared for as she usually did: her head leaned too far back against the head rest, her mouth was wide open, her legs were splayed out.
“We’re home,” he said again, louder. Waking, disoriented, she pulled her hair back off her face, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them. For a moment, she didn’t seem to know where she was or have any sense of what was happening. But then she focused: the country road in front of her home was blocked by yards of glistening yellow tape with the words “Police Line” repeated endlessly.
She opened the rear window of the Mercedes. Chilly air laden with mist washed over her face, a wave of relief. All around her were police cars with lights crazily revolving. Floodlights starkly illuminated the lawn like a movie set at night. Everything was ash white, a moonscape. It was well past midnight.
The tiny eyelets of at least a dozen digital cameras pulsed brightly as soon as she stepped out of the car. The cameras stunned her. She raised her hands defensively. With Davey trying to fend off the reporters from The East Hampton Star, Southampton Press, and local television and radio stations that had already been alerted to the killing of Brad Richardson, she hesitated at the police tape that surrounded her home.
Soon a man in a sports jacket and regimental striped tie, an identification tag hanging from a ribbon draped around his neck, walked toward her. “Mrs. Richardson?” he asked. She nodded.
He raised the gleaming tape high enough for her to walk under it. “I’m Detective Halsey. I’m the guy who called you.” His head was completely shaven.
Following her, Davey bent to pass under the tape. Halsey’s voice was not pleasant: “Wait a minute, fella. And who are you?”
“The driver.”
“You stay here.”
Joan Richardson glanced at him. “It’s all right, Davey.”
As soon as she entered the house, she saw men and women in police uniforms and emergency worker garb crowding the wide entryway. For her it was chaotic, almost otherworldly.
“Don’t touch anything,” Halsey said. “And keep walking right behind me.” His voice had an edge of rudeness, not at all deferential.
When she realized they were walking through the long hallway toward Brad’s office—his sanctuary, his special place, the center of his world—she sensed her knees and legs weakening, as though her bones were turning to dust.
From the open doorway to the office she saw what first struck her as black oil spread over the bare wooden floor. It took the beat of a moment or two until she recognized, to her right, lying uncovered side by side, the bodies of Felix and Sylvia. They were not, she saw, whole bodies. Their heads were gone.
Joan Richardson threw up: she tasted the now-vile canapés, shiitake mushrooms, and sushi she had eaten four hours earlier in the civilized interior of the Met. Instinctively she bent forward so that her vomit wouldn’t spill over her dress and shoes. At the sight of what had come out of her, she vomited again; her body shook uncontrollably. A sweet-faced black woman in a green uniform, an emergency worker, handed her a towel. Joan Richardson wiped h
er mouth and face. The woman extended a bottle of water toward her. She waved it away. She wanted never to put anything in her body again.
As if other people’s vomiting was an everyday event for him, Halsey said, “He’s over there.”
Alongside the old-style wooden chair Brad always used—it was now tipped over, utterly transformed—was his body. She saw the white slacks, leather shoes, no socks, and his thin virtually hairless ankles. A white canvas was spread over the rest of his body.
Halsey said, “That’s your husband’s body, isn’t it, Mrs.Richardson?”
Joan Richardson put her hands over her face, bent forward, and vomited again. This time she couldn’t keep her dress or shoes clean: the vomit spilled over them.
She was struggling to cover her face while she threw up. Tears streamed from her eyes as if stung by tear gas. Her face was red, contorted. When she ran her hands through her hair they left trails of vomit and spit. Halsey didn’t move. Finally, the woman in the green uniform began wiping Joan Richardson’s face and hair with a wet towel, using the practiced gestures of a mother cleaning a five-year-old who has taken a fall into dirt and bruised herself. Joan let herself be cleaned, even comforted.
After Joan had settled somewhat—her crying stopped, her face was as clean as wiping with towels could make it—Bo Halsey said, “Can you follow me, Mrs. Richardson, for just a second?”
She nodded, speechlessly, and walked behind him to the door. She felt stripped down and utterly vulnerable. There was no artifice to her. Appearances didn’t matter. She stumbled slightly. Halsey turned. He took her arm. It wasn’t a gentle grip. In the hallway just outside the office, he stopped. “I know this is hard,” he said.
She shook her head up and down, a quick gesture relaying the unspoken words, It is, it is.
“Let me just cut to the chase right now for a second. I need to know some things right now. The guy who did this might not be far away, understand? Can you tell me anything about how this happened?”
Her whole body was shaking, as if overcome by a sudden fever. “Everybody loved Brad.”
He repeated, “Do you know anything about how this happened?”
Her eyes were wide open, the same startling blue as always, even though there were jagged red streaks all converging on the irises. She was struggling to understand, as though Halsey were speaking an unknown language. “What do you mean?” she asked, hearing the tremor in her own voice so unlike the confident, clear resonance it usually had.
“What do I mean? Your husband is dead, Mrs. Richardson. Do you know anything about how that happened?”
Now she understood. She quickly shook her head, the universal signal for no, no, no.
“Has anyone threatened him?”
“No, never.”
“Who has access to this house? Who can get in?”
“Many people. Brad makes friends with everyone. This is like an open house.”
“Can you think of anything that’s valuable that anyone might have wanted to take from the house?”
She waved her right arm, a gesture that meant Everything, everything is valuable.
“Think about money,” Halsey said. “Money was taken from his pockets. They’re ripped open, some change was spilled over the floor, with one or two dollar bills. All the drawers in his desk were ransacked. All the furniture in the room is broken because whoever did this thought there was cash.”
Suddenly she became alert and tense. “Brad always kept cash in one of the closets upstairs.”
“How much?”
She said, “A great deal.”
Brad was heedless with cash. Even though he was neat about everything else, he dropped crumpled cash on tables, countertops, shelves, just as many men have places where at the end of every day they drop change, keys, cufflinks, dollar bills—the dumping ground of objects they carry in their pockets.
“How much?”
She said, “He might have had two or three hundred thousand dollars in cash upstairs.”
Even Bo Halsey, with more than twenty years of experience as a homicide detective, was taken aback. He was uncertain that he’d heard correctly.
“Two or three hundred dollars?”
“No, no,” Joan Richardson answered. “Hundred thousand. Two or three hundred thousand dollars.”
Halsey glanced over Joan’s right shoulder into Brad’s office, where at least eight people were videotaping, taking pictures, or placing objects into transparent bags with tags tied to them. “Cerullo,” Halsey called out, loudly.
Joan watched as Dick Cerullo, a tall, awkward man in an inexpensive sport jacket and a red-and-blue striped tie, approached Halsey. Whispering to each other, they walked away from her. During these seconds while she was utterly isolated, she felt terror, wildly imagining that the killer might still be in her house, waiting for her. From a distance, she watched Halsey, appearing almost bored, point at another man standing in Brad’s office. Shorter than Cerullo by a head, the other man joined Halsey and Cerullo. He wore the same style of ill-fitting sport jacket as Cerullo, but at least two sizes smaller. As if in a huddle, the three men whispered, even giving hand signals.
Halsey finally turned to her. “Mrs. Richardson,” he said, “these are Detectives Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen. They’re veteran homicide detectives. They worked with me for years on the NYPD before coming out here. They’re going to help me find the man who did this.”
Joan’s moment of isolation and terror lifted. She stared at Halsey and the other men, thinking that together they looked like the Three Stooges and had as much chance of finding the man who had killed her husband as Moe, Larry, and Curly. They were not confidence-inspiring. “I hope so,” she said quietly.
“Where is that cash?”
“He kept it in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.” She gestured to the staircase on which she had walked thousands of times over the last eight years and on which, she now thought, Brad would never walk again. “Just to the right.”
Cerullo and Cohen had never seen such an opulent bedroom. They were both basketball fans. “My fucking word,” Cerullo said, “this place has got to be the size of a court.” The bedroom’s floorboards shined in the muted light as if they were waxed and polished in the same way a professional basketball court would be.
Cohen was more efficient than Cerullo. With a video camera hanging on a strap from his left hand, he glanced calmly around the entire room. He learned long ago that it was important and possibly life-saving to first assess everything in a room before focusing on anything specific. He walked toward a finely crafted sliding door in one of the walls. He rolled the door to the right, revealing a row of very orderly drawers and, to the left, the even more orderly rows of hanging suits, jackets, and slacks. He picked up a clean poker from the fireplace next to the closet. Handling the poker like a scalpel, he used its curved point to pull out two drawers.
Cohen called out to Cerullo, “Dick, get over here.”
As Cerullo approached, Cohen handed him the bag in which he carried the clunky, ten-year-old video camera. Cerullo started the camera while Cohen began narrating and describing who they were, where they were, the time, and the date. His hands in plastic gloves, Cohen displayed the first drawer to the camera. It was empty. He repeated the same scene with the other drawers. They too were empty. Cerullo turned the camera off.
Cohen went to the windows that faced the ocean. He opened another sliding closet door. Inside was a dazzling array of women’s clothes. He reached through some of the dresses to look for drawers in the back wall. There were none. He started to turn away. It was in that moment when he was about to slide the door closed that he saw stacks of cash simply lying on the floor. They were tightly bound in red elastic bands. He pulled forward one of the packets. It was the size and shape of a brick. The elastic bands held the bills so tightly that the stack weighed as much as a brick.
At the top of the packet were hundred dollar bills; that meant, Cohen was certain, that the rest of the
bills in each packet were hundreds. He quickly counted the number of neatly stacked packets: there were at least thirty. “Holy Mother of Jesus,” Cohen said. “Look at this shit.”
Cerullo, who was at the other side of the bedroom, was startled. He was certain that Cohen had just discovered a body. Despite fifteen years with the New York Police Department and another five as a homicide detective in Suffolk County, he had never passively reacted to the sight of dead or wounded people. He walked warily toward Cohen, who motioned with his head for Cerullo to look into the closet. Cerullo saw the cash immediately. He wasn’t distracted by the elegant clothes.
Cohen whispered, “Check for security cameras in here?”
Most people, they knew, didn’t have security cameras in their bedrooms. Neither of them saw anything like a camera in the places in which they were usually concealed, such as the corners of the ceilings or the tops of picture frames.
Dick Cerullo had noticed in the bathroom a small door in the wall near one of the two showers. He had been in big houses before, so he knew it was likely to be a door to a crawl space in the attic where the machinery was located that controlled the bathroom’s air-conditioning, steam room, and sauna.
Picking up the first brick of cash, Cerullo whispered to Cohen, “Let’s get this shit into the attic.” Since they were homicide detectives, they would have free access to the house for at least three days at any time they wanted, even when no one else was there, and there were bound to be times when no one else was there. After all, they had a license to investigate.
Cohen, the smaller man, slipped into the crawl space, and Cerullo handed the packets to him. When they closed the door, Cohen whispered, “This never happened, right? Oscar doesn’t know, right?”
Cerullo chuckled. “Oscar who?”
“Oscar, like in Felix and Oscar.”
When they came downstairs, Dave Cohen saw Bo Halsey talking to three technicians. When he had Halsey’s attention, Cohen said, “There’s nothing up there, Bo. The money’s gone.”
