The Borzoi Killings

by Paul Batista

  9.

  It was Wednesday. Juan was in the kitchen. He washed by hand the bowls and spoons that Mariana and her kids had used to eat breakfast. The brown dishwasher was broken; it was stuffed with paper and plastic bags. With a small checkered towel he dried the bowls and spoons and carefully put them in the area of the brown cabinets that was reserved for the four of them.

  Just as he closed the cabinet door, he heard the siren. From the kitchen window he saw beyond the yellow and orange trees the revolving red lights of the first of three police cruisers. In that instant he had no doubt that they would stop in the cluttered driveway. Juan ran to the broken deck behind the house. The screen door slammed behind him. There were woods nearby—the deep groves of yellowing leaves that finally led, almost a mile away, to the town dump. He heard the first cruiser squeal to a stop, its sirens now emitting a shrill beep-beep sound. He glanced around the edge of the ramshackle house. The cruiser stopped on the driveway’s broken tar. He thought he saw Joan Richardson in the back seat. There were two men in uniforms in the front seat. More cruisers abruptly stopped in front of the house, lights flashing.

  When he heard the cruisers’ doors open, Juan vaulted over the deck’s wooden railing and dashed across the weeds and fallen branches of the back yard. Juan heard the insane bedlam of the multiple sirens at full volume and the loud, excited voices of the cops.

  Juan was a fast runner. He cruised easily through the woods, dodging the rampant branches and the fallen limbs. Behind him angry voices shouted: Stop, stop, stop. The motherfucker’s over there. Get him.

  Juan was in another world: he imagined he could outrun these heavily uniformed, clumsy men and make his way over the small hills of the dump and speed through the woods toward the ocean three miles away and then swim in the Atlantic to his real home thousands of miles to the south. He had the advantage, he thought, of strength and speed and fear and dreams.

  But then he stopped. He was afraid. His blood throbbed. He shouted, “Here, here I am.”

  An angry voice screamed: “Don’t move. Don’t move. Let me see your hands!”

  Juan saw the shapes of at least six men twenty yards away in the chaotic undergrowth of the woods, all converging in his direction. He saw, too, the glint of sunlight on pistols and rifles. The branches cracked under their feet.

  “Show me your hands! Show me your hands!”

  Juan held out his hands.

  Two of the men rushed at him, knocking him to the ground. His face was pushed into the newly fallen leaves. His hands and arms were pulled up behind him. Pain seared his back and chest. One of the men held a pistol against his temple. He smelled the odor of dirt and fallen leaves. Plastic handcuffs locked around his wrists. He was yanked to his feet. Pieces of leaves and dirt hung from his face and nose. Stumbling, he was pushed from behind toward the police cruisers, their lights flashing regularly, swiftly, all bedlam.

  As he approached the lead cruiser, he saw every feature of Joan Richardson’s rigid face. The window was open half-way. There was no curiosity or hatred or concern in her expression. She was impassive. For a moment, he expected her to help him, given all that had happened between them over the last half-year—the times when they drank iced tea on the pool terrace or when she worked with him in the garden, and the quiet hours inside the house when Brad and everyone else were away.

  He wasn’t able to look at her for long, or to find out whether she would help in some way, because as he was pushed toward the cruiser a truncheon struck his back near his kidneys, forcing him against the door of the car. His nose and mouth smashed into a window and began to bleed. He tasted the blood. A man with red hair, his hat off, leaned near him and shouted in his ear, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have a right to a lawyer. If you can’t afford a lawyer, you’ll fucking get one for free, you spic.”

  Juan’s head was pressed so forcefully against the window that he couldn’t say anything. He was choking. He was less than a foot away from Joan Richardson. A cop yelled, “Is this him?”

  She shook her head up and down: the silent yes.

  Juan was jerked away toward another cruiser. It had a wire mesh between the front and rear seats. The rear door opened. A powerful hand on the top of his head pushed him down and into the cruiser. A woman in uniform sat to his left. She held a wet towel and wiped his face to clean off the blood and dirt. She didn’t want his face smeared with blood or visibly bruised when he was led into the red brick Southampton police station, where television news trucks would be filming him on the short walk from the cruiser to the door of the station. The police had already announced his arrest and he had already been endowed with a name.

  Juan the Knife.

  10.

  Mariana’s favorite work at the supermarket was stacking cans. With the gift of her agile hands, she loved removing them from the cardboard boxes in which they were delivered and placing them in gleaming, colorful rows along the shelves for all the world to see. They formed a bright mosaic.

  Mariana was in the second aisle arranging the oval-shaped cans of sardines when Alfonso, a man with a limp whom she sometimes jokingly rebuffed when he tried to kiss her, approached. He spoke in Spanish: “Juan’s been picked up.” Fear washed over her like a sudden infusion of cold water. Picked up: to her and all the people she knew, the words meant you disappeared, you entered the endless maze of prisons and detention centers. No one ever returned from a pick up.

  Mariana walked to a storage room at the rear of the store, put on her hooded sweatshirt, and picked up her small knapsack. She left nothing behind; she knew she would never return. In the clear autumn air, she made her way through the curving, quaint heart of the village, passing the Sag Harbor Cinema with its big 1930s-style marquee, the antique stores, the stone-and-brick library with its green dome, and the stately houses along Main Street. At the end of the Village, where Main Street became the old turnpike and the houses became more and more run-down, she broke into a trot. The ranch house was less than a mile away.

  Mariana stopped when she came close enough to see the house. Three police cruisers and a large van were in the driveway. She was afraid, almost panicked, as she had often been when she sensed that immigration police were poised to arrest her. As soon as she saw men carrying Juan’s bicycle out of the house, she knew what she had to do. She walked back to the village, went into the library, found the bathroom, and stayed there for the two hours until her children would arrive on their school bus at three. It was the first day of school in the new year.

  When the bright yellow bus came to a halt at a corner several stops before her children’s usual drop-off place, Mariana held the door open and said to the woman driver, who recognized her: “I want my kids. We walk today. It’s nice out.”

  The boy and girl strapped on their colorful knapsacks, looking happily at their mother. They were smart, outgoing kids, well-liked in the pretty grammar school in Bridgehampton. When Mariana told them they were not going home, they became quiet. She said they were going to Celia’s house. They referred to Celia, a 65-year-old kindly Salvadoran, as “aunt” even though she was not related to them. Celia’s house was closer to Bridgehampton and the Montauk Highway than Mariana’s now-abandoned ranch house.

  Over the next three days, Mariana and her children stayed inside Celia’s neat home. Mariana kept the newspapers away from her children, who read English fluently. The radio and television were turned off. Every time they asked about Juan, Mariana said that he had returned to Mexico. They, too, she said, would soon be in Mexico. It was home. Their grandmother lived there. It was always warm, she said, you never needed any winter clothes. Life would be better there.

  The old Buick station wagon stopped in the driveway of Celia’s house. Clutching an oversize leather bag, Mariana and her children climbed into the third row of seats because the first two rows were crowded with Mexican men who were also on their way to New York. Wide-eyed, the children stared at
Main Street in Bridgehampton, where some of their young friends lived, as they passed through the beautiful village.

  The windows of the car were tinted so darkly they were almost black. They drove cautiously west toward the city, never above the speed limit and never below it. The driver wanted to avoid the attention of state police cruisers.

  11.

  “Mrs. Richardson, I need you to help us more.”

  Detective Halsey stood on the other side of the marble counter in the middle of the kitchen. Two other men, who she remembered were Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen and who she thought of as Larry and Curly, the Stooges who followed Moe, the leader, stood behind him. Twelve hours earlier, during their solo, late-night visit to the crime scene, Cerullo and Cohen had taken the stacks of hundred dollar bills—they called them “Benjamins”—from the crawl space in the attic to their car.

  Joan Richardson was impatient. It was now three days after her husband’s death. She was about to leave for New York for the funeral service at St. Bart’s, with its ornate dome that gave the whole church the look of a mosque. Six hundred invited guests were expected, among them Alan Greenspan, three former Secretaries of the Treasury, Warren Buffett and George Soros. At night she had stayed in East Hampton in the sprawling Hunting Inn during the three days in which other people made the funeral arrangements because Bo Halsey had asked her to stay. She’d become shaken, irritated, and distracted by his frequent although brief visits to ask her questions.

  “I don’t know how else I can help you. I gave you Juan’s name and helped you find him. I’m not a detective, and I’ve had a very, very hard time.”

  Halsey said abruptly, “We would have found him soon enough, Mrs. Richardson. People knew he worked here and that he had a big old Schwinn bike. People knew he rode around on it. And we found the tire tracks from his bike in the sand near the hedgerow. There aren’t many old-style bikes like that out here. Single-speed, push-down pedal brakes. And a woman who was out on the beach came forward right away to tell us that she’d seen a tall, good-looking Mexican pushing an old bicycle near the dunes the day your husband died. A movie star, she said. Most Mexicans out here don’t look like a movie star. So it wasn’t really that hard to figure out who he was.”

  “All right,” Joan responded, waving her right hand dismissively. When she was tense, a barely visible pattern of veins rose to the surface of her skin near her temples. “So I wasn’t any help. I thought I was helping. I didn’t need to bother, I guess, when I drove out to his house with you.”

  Ignoring her haughty tone, Bo Halsey gazed at her for five seconds. “Let’s talk again about your day in New York on Tuesday.”

  “Again?”

  “Your shopping day.”

  “Yes, my shopping day. I’m sure Mrs. Halsey has shopping days, too.”

  “There is no Mrs. Halsey.”

  He looked into her eyes, that extraordinary blue, as if by silence he could elicit more from her. He knew that Joan Richardson had lied to him earlier and was still lying. Cerullo and Cohen had gone to the city and, accompanied by three NYPD detectives, asked the doormen at her Fifth Avenue building how often they had seen her that day. The doormen on the morning shift said they didn’t see her leave the building. What they had seen was the familiar face of Senator Rawls arriving at noon. And the doormen on the afternoon and early evening shifts saw them leave the building at seven-thirty in sleek evening clothes to walk the two blocks uptown to the private party in the Museum, where Halsey had reached her hours later on her cell phone. Video surveillance tapes in the lobby showed the Senator arriving and, many hours later, the glamorous couple leaving.

  Halsey knew that the Senator and Joan Richardson had had more than seven hours of uninterrupted time in her apartment. A vigorous guy like Senator Rawls and a very beautiful woman like Joan Richardson could have easily gone at it, Halsey thought, again and again in the course of such a long afternoon and early evening, especially if the 60-year-old Senator used that magical blue pill.

  “When did you leave to go shopping?”

  “I’m not certain, Detective. Ten, eleven? I didn’t keep track.”

  “Did Davey drive you around?”

  “No, I got a cab off the street.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Really, Detective, how can I remember that?”

  “When did you get back to the apartment?”

  “Three-thirty? Four? I had to get ready for the party.”

  “Any cell or telephone calls after you got back?”

  “Probably not. I might have turned the cell off. There are days when I really don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “Did you use email?”

  “I might have. But so many things happened that night, Detective, that I can’t remember much about the day.”

  “Did you go to the party with anyone?”

  “I answered that yesterday, didn’t I? My friend, Senator Rawls, picked me up.”

  “We haven’t been able to reach him. Where is he now?”

  “I believe he’s in Paris.”

  “He hasn’t returned our calls.”

  “He is a busy man, Detective. He must get fifty calls a day. And he’s in Paris, he told me, rehearsing for a movie. I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”

  “When you speak to him, please be sure to ask him to give me a call. You have my card.”

  Joan Richardson glanced at the large clock above one of the sinks. There were Roman numerals on its face. “I have to leave now, Mr. Halsey,” she said.

  “No problem, Mrs. Richardson.”

  “Thanks.” Her voice was sardonic, as it sometimes was when she was irritated, impatient, or afraid.

  Halsey, wanting the last word, said, “We’ll see you when you get back.”

  Joan Richardson was used to having the last word, but this time she let it go.

  12.

  Juan was never colder in his life. He had been taken before dawn from the prison on the outskirts of Riverhead, where he’d spent three nights in an unheated concrete cell in isolation and without visitors. Dressed in green prison fatigues under a bullet-proof vest that fit rigidly and tightly over his chest, back, and arms, he waited in a holding pen just behind one of the closed doors to the courtroom. It was just as cold here as in his concrete cell. The guards, their weapons in their hands, wore Eisenhower-style bomber jackets.

  At last, the iron gate to the holding pen slid open. A slim Asian woman came in. She carried a briefcase. She had absolutely black eyes and black hair.

  She said slowly, uncertain whether he spoke English, “Mr. Suarez, I am your lawyer.”

  Not speaking, Juan nodded. He was uneasy with Asian people. He had never seen one in Mexico. And, when he arrived in New York, he found work washing dishes by hand fourteen hours a day at a dirty Chinese restaurant on First Avenue just above 96th Street. The abrupt, unfriendly man and woman who owned the restaurant never once asked his name, and he knew them only as Mr. and Mrs. Wan. They never said hello or good night. They paid him in cash, handing it to him as if they were reluctant to let it go. In the hot, noisy restaurant, Mr. and Mrs. Wan made slashing hand gestures to relay instructions to him. With the same hand gestures and a few explosive words, they threatened to fire him if he took one minute more than the ten minutes allotted to him during the two breaks in each fourteen-hour shift.

  She asked, gently, “Do you speak English?”

  “Some, not much.”

  “My name is Theresa Bui.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m your lawyer. Do you understand? I’m a public defender. Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. It was a kind smile. She said to one of the nearby guards, “I need privacy for a few minutes with Mr. Suarez.”

  The men stepped back no more than a foot, no more out of earshot than they had been. They weren’t about to listen to a 34-year-old Asian woman with a briefcase.

  Theresa Bui decided to ignore them. She
explained that Juan was about to enter the courtroom with her; that she would be handed a paper; that the paper was an “indictment”; that he was accused of the murder of Brad Richardson and the stealing of more than $200,000; and that he would have to say not guilty to the judge.

  “Mr. Suarez, you do understand me, don’t you?”

  “I do. Yes.” He saw, or wanted to believe he saw, patience and sympathy in her eyes.

  “Do you want to tell me anything?” she asked.

  He whispered, “I didn’t hurt Mr. Richardson. He was my friend. Good to me. I never take any money. I don’t need his money.”

  Theresa Bui gazed into his face. Such a handsome man, she thought. “I understand,” she said. “We’re going to plead not guilty.”

  “Yes, not guilty.”

  “And then I will come to visit you soon. To talk more. To help.”

  He was close to her. He was ashamed of his odor: he hadn’t been allowed to shower in all the time since his arrest and he knew he smelled of sweat, of fear. “Where is my wife?”

  “Mr. Suarez,” she whispered, “I didn’t know you had a wife.”

  “And my kids?”

  Kids? she thought. My God. “You have children?”

  “Two—a boy and girl. Where are they?”

  “I’ll try to find out,” she said, knowing that she had no way to do that.

  A harsh buzzer sounded above the door. It was shrill. It startled her. Reacting instantly, a guard unlocked the door of the holding pen. Juan walked between the guards into the beige courtroom. He was dazed by what he saw. The ceiling was very high. There were rows of wooden benches arranged like church pews. And there was an immense bench behind which sat Judge Helen Conley, a severe-looking woman whose gray hair was pulled into a bun. Three lawyers stood at a table in front of the judge’s bench. A television camera, with a small red light glowing, was trained on Juan. He glanced fleetingly at the people on the benches. Mariana and her children weren’t in the courtroom. Had the world, he wondered, swallowed them up?