by Paul Batista
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.
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 th
ese 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.
