by Paul Batista
The squat, muscular man stumbled slightly, thrown off balance by the force of his own momentum in swinging the broken hoop. At that instant, Juan—who was at least five inches taller and almost as muscular—bent and bolted forward. Juan’s powerful, hurtling shoulders drove into the left side of the slightly off-balance man. Juan’s upraised hand clawed his face, peeling skin off his cheek and groping for his eyes. Juan had been a skillful fighter all his life. His only instinct was to kill this man.
When they fell to the yard’s concrete, Juan pressed his knee into the man’s chest and pushed his forearm into his throat. The strong man under Juan, who had the moves of a boxer, freed one arm and struck Juan on the ridge of his left eye with power and accuracy. Juan’s head flicked to the side, but that powerful fury that had protected him so well in the cocaine market that was his hometown, in the truck during the four-day drive to New York, and in the territory that Oscar Caliente ruled in Manhattan, overcame the pain in his face. The pain didn’t matter: Juan had work to do, and it was to kill this man.
Juan was still pressing his forearm into the now-frightened man’s throat—was the cartilage starting to give?—when a guard tackled him and another guard struck him over his shoulder with a black club. Juan immediately went still, releasing the pressure on the other man’s throat. As he lay on his back he was face to face with the frightened guard who had tackled him. Juan heard his attacker gasping for breath, gagging, sounding like a drowning man.
And then Juan thought about Oscar Caliente. The only thing I want from people who work for me is you keep your fucking mouth shut. You never heard about Oscar Caliente. Don’t ever forget it.
Motionless, Juan looked up into the completely blue sky. As he waited to be handcuffed, he knew that Oscar Caliente had somehow sent the now stricken, gasping man to remind Juan that he had never known Oscar Caliente.
Juan never felt safe again.
19.
Joan Richardson used her supple, slender body so intensely and passionately that Hank Rawls shouted at the moment he deliriously came deep inside her. For a few exquisite moments she remained on her knees, still moving back and forth against him. Panting, bracing himself, he slipped out of her, gently falling. He felt her shudder. Her hands were still clenching the pillow under her face. She had strong hands. They seemed to be tearing the fabric apart.
His breath came in short, rapid bursts when he said, almost laughing, “This is God’s greatest fucking invention.”
Sweaty, exhausted, he stretched alongside her on the damp sheets. He was naked. She was under the sheets. She turned, her gorgeous face smiling at him. “I love you,” she said.
They embraced. He still had a hard-on. She felt it against her taut stomach, and she pressed into him. “Love you, too,” he said.
They slept for two hours during the cool afternoon. Hank, thoroughly rested, feeling absolutely calm, stared at the ceiling of the bedroom before she woke up. It was early winter. The curtains on the windows were pulled to the side. Wintry light filled the room. There was an unobstructed view of the heights of the trees in Central Park. Since the sun was beginning to set, its light passed through the trees’ bare upper branches. On the bedroom ceiling traces of light and shadows moved over the white surface.
Joan was still asleep as Hank Rawls gently lifted her right hand off his chest. He went into the bathroom, also flooded with late afternoon light from a translucent window, and urinated. He washed his face and hands and his tumid penis. Gradually he remembered that when he had arrived late in the morning he was as angry as he had been the day before, and that he was angry with her now. It was the day after he had been torn down by dour Menachem Oz in the presence of the rapt jurors and the black-suited Margaret Harding. Margaret’s defiant and attractive face bore a sardonic smile when Rawls said that he’d spent at least five or six hours with Joan Richardson—from late morning to late afternoon—on the day her husband was killed. The memory of her disdain was etched in his mind.
When Joan finally stirred in the quiet bedroom, he said, “Sweetheart, let’s go around the corner to the diner. Dress down.” It was time to talk to her. He needed to know what lies she had told Menachem Oz. Once he heard them, he would have a perfect excuse to tell her that their affair was over: he could display his anger to her, he would have a reason for leaving.
As he sat on a chair in the bedroom, he watched her through the open bathroom door. They were so familiar with each other that she made no effort to hide what she was doing. Naked, she sat on the toilet. She peed so intensely that from twenty feet away he heard the hiss from the toilet. Then she combed her hair and swept it up to the back of her head; strands fell to the nape of her neck. Just the sight of her luxurious hair alone, Rawls thought, could give him another hard-on. Did he really want to dump her?
At only four in the afternoon, the big Greek diner at 73rd Street and Madison Avenue, five blocks from Joan’s apartment, was empty except for the hairy, Greek-speaking waiters and two other customers—a blue-haired ancient woman in a wheelchair and the Jamaican-accented black woman who took care of her. Two reporters—one from the Times and another from the New York Observer—followed them into the diner and sat at the counter. Joan and Hank recognized and ignored them.
They sat in a booth with vinyl seats, the worn Formica table gleaming between them. “Joan,” he said after they ordered a Greek salad for her and a spinach omelet for him, “I had a bad day yesterday. A really, really bad day.”
She’d expected him to say this. She girded herself: she loved him and for that simple reason didn’t want to lose him.
“He’s an awful little man,” she said.
“Listen, Joan. I don’t want to talk about how ugly Menachem Oz is. Or how bad his suits are. Or what a cheap bitch Margaret Harding is. This is what’s important: Oz asked where I spent the day Brad was killed. I told him I was with you, here, in the city, at your apartment. Harding had come into the room at that point, as if on cue, eager to hear what I said. They obviously knew, I realized, that one of us is lying. What did you tell them?”
Hank waited as Joan’s blue eyes gazed at him. “I lied. I started lying on the night I drove out there. I have no idea why I did it. Probably to protect you.”
“To protect me?”
“I think so. I thought it would make a mess for you if they knew you were with me all day.”
“I didn’t need protection.”
She nodded. “I know that now, I probably knew that then.”
“You’re the one who needs protection, Joan. It’s serious business to lie to these people and more serious, of course, to get caught. I think you have to talk to your lawyer, admit to the lie, and beg forgiveness.”
She glanced at the reporters drinking coffee and talking to each other at the counter, acting as though they were casual customers who happened to meet in a diner. Joan, who had once welcomed reporters, now detested them. Lowering her voice, she said, “Yes, I need to do that. And I first need to tell you the truth.”
“Confession is good for the soul, Joan. What else did you tell Oz that you think I should know about?”
“He asked lots of questions, Hank. Too many. I’m smart. But even I got confused. And afraid.”
They didn’t speak during the time the Greek waiter with the big gold chain around his neck placed their food in front of them and asked, “Need anything else now?” He was gruff and unpleasant: there was that sibilance in his Greek accent that male waiters in Greek diners all seemed to have.
With a friendly gesture and his engaging smile—that demeanor that had led him to win every election campaign he’d ever run except the last one—Hank Rawls said, “No, thanks.” And, as soon as the waiter left, he said to Joan Richardson, “And what did you tell them about us?”
“That we have been lovers for months, long before Brad died.”
“I told them the same thing. They also asked the next obvious question because Menachem doesn’t start down a path until he gets to th
e end: Did Brad know about us?”
“What did you say?”
“That we were in plain view. That I had a history of appearing with women in plain view, particularly on beaches. I’m not sure Menachem knew what I was talking about.”
“Did anybody in the room know what you were talking about?”
“I’m sure some did. Most of them were certainly old enough to remember those pictures on the beach. But everybody was hard to read. It was, as the comedians say, a tough audience.” He smiled at her, a smile that always disarmed her. “And he asked me questions about you and Brad.”
“What questions?”
“For example, whether I knew Brad was gay.”
“And you said?”
“I said I didn’t know, but I’d been told he was, and I asked why it mattered. And, as I should’ve known, Menachem didn’t answer me. They live in a perfect world, Joan: they get to ask all the questions.”
She moved her fork over the surface of her salad, not touching it. “Did they ask you how you knew Brad was gay?”
“Simple, Joan: I said you told me, that this was one of those cases where the wife might have been the first, not the last, to know.” Hank sipped his Diet Coke. “And what did you tell them?”
“That it took two years into the marriage for me to find out that Brad had boyfriends, not girlfriends. That I had suspected it for a long time, because of Brad’s mannerisms, his glances at some of our male friends. I said that when I asked Brad years ago, point blank, he didn’t deny it.”
“Did they ask you about Trevor? That guy from last summer? The songwriter? The interior decorator? Whatever the hell he is?”
Joan glanced at the diner’s wallpaper: a beige scene of a hillside above a Greek village. Every Greek diner in the city appeared to have wallpaper that memorialized the Icarus myth. In the pastel air there was an image of a boy falling gracefully, wings extended, toward his death in the Aegean Sea. Icarus. She said, “Trevor had already talked to the Grand Jury. Thank God I volunteered his name before they asked too many questions, or they would have caught me lying again, denying I knew him.”
“How do you know Trevor was there?”
“He’s one of those gay nellies who loves to gossip. He calls everybody girl. ‘Girl, did you hear about this one?’ He despises anyone’s privacy. Brad was involved with him, and I was so used to this that I even had dinner with just the three of us, usually at Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton, usually in the middle of the week. The world was there to see us. Brad liked having him around so much that I just gave in at a certain point and didn’t resist. I can’t stand the little pest.”
Hank Rawls, too, looked at the pastel wallpaper. That single scene of Icarus falling was repeated again and again through the diner’s interior between every seam in the wallpaper. “And they asked me about Juan Suarez and you.”
She pushed her food aside and reached for his hand. His fingers were closed and didn’t respond to her touch. She asked, “Did they ask what you knew about why Juan killed Brad?”
“No, Joan, they never asked that. They asked about what kind of relationship you had with Juan.”
“God, what’s going on?” she said. “This is too much. He worked for us. We paid him. We paid his wife, too, and sometimes we had his little kids over to play at the pool. What did you say?”
Hank spoke quietly, “I told them the truth, Joan. I told them I didn’t know anything more than the fact that he worked for you. And Oz asked me what kind of work, and I said that all I had ever seen was that he worked at the parties. I never saw anything else.”
Still whispering, Joan said, “What else did he ask? Was there anything else?”
“He asked me if I knew that you were having sex with Juan Suarez.”
“My God,” she said. “Where does this end?”
“Did you?” Hank asked.
“No, Jesus Christ, no.”
He glanced at her, and then looked away. To Joan, he now looked impatient, or weary, or skeptical. His sweet, exhausted groans that afternoon as he collapsed at her side seemed to have happened in another world and long ago. “He also asked if you knew Juan’s real name.”
“Wasn’t Juan his real name?”
“Was it?”
“Of course, at least that’s the only name he gave me.”
“Menachem seemed to think his real name was Anibal, Anibal Vaz. Did you ever hear that name?”
“When he asked that question I said no.”
“And that was a lie, wasn’t it, Joan? Why are you lying to me now?”
Sliding to the side the plate with the food she hadn’t touched, she put her hand over his clenched hand. “I’m not,” she said. “Not about Juan Suarez. He was a handyman. He worked for us for months. Brad was attached to him. But the truth is Brad had reached the point where it was hard for him not to court another man. Court is the right word—Brad had the manners of a Southern gentleman. Something may have happened between him and Juan. And Juan killed him.”
This is insane, Hank thought. She has no idea what the truth is. As he’d been doing for the last twenty-four hours, Hank was calculating the losses he might soon suffer by having been her lover before her husband died and by continuing as her lover—as what the newspapers called the “lady billionaire’s boyfriend”—after her husband’s death. When he searched his name in Google, Bing, or Yahoo the first five pages were sensational entries about his relationship with Joan Richardson, as if that were all he had ever done in life. It was only deep into his Google pages when a reader looking for information about Hank Rawls would see that he had been a United States Senator, had briefly run for President, and was a best-selling novelist, and an actor. Fifty years from now, when people looked at the Internet to learn about him they would come away with the impression that all he had done in life was to be the boyfriend of a very rich woman whose husband had been murdered in the Hamptons. He said, “And they asked me how much money you inherited from Brad.”
“How could you know, Hank?”
“They were fishing. Hell, maybe Mr. Oz has it in his mind that a gorgeous woman has to buy my love.” For the first time in the conversation he gave her one of his engaging smiles: he had the gift of lighting up any space he inhabited. “But Hank Rawls can’t be bribed.”
She smiled, briefly. “This is really painful, Hank. I loved Brad for a very long time. I had my difficulties with him. He had his with me. But, God, don’t these people realize that it was my husband who was killed? Don’t they know what I saw when I walked into that house? I could smell the blood in that room. His and the dogs’ blood.” She closed her eyes. “I know they think I had him killed, and that I hired Juan Suarez—my lover—to do it.”
“Both of us have to live in the real world, Joan. And the real world for us today is that Mr. Oz and his bosses want to get more than the conviction of a Mexican gardener. And they have a license to roam anywhere they want, and they are looking at you, at me, at Ozzie and Harriet, at al-Qaeda. But we are the most obvious.”
She leaned across the Formica table, whispering. “I’m scared, Hank.”
“And there’s something else, Joan. You lied to them. That makes them very angry. You hurt their case against Juan. Before they can use you as a witness, they are going to have to tell Rematti you lied to them and to the Grand Jury.”
She waited for more. When he didn’t say anything, Joan asked, “Do you want to leave me?”
How many times, he wondered, had he heard this question? Twelve? Fifty? He’d never spent more than two years with any one woman, and, as a beautiful, golden-haired boy, he had started a lifetime with women when he was fifteen. When he had to abandon his short campaign for President after the pictures on the beach first appeared in the National Enquirer, he briefly saw a psychiatrist. She was a woman who had treated at least seven other Senators. She probed him about why there had been so many women in his life. She said there had to be complex answers.
For him, the real answer wa
s simple and obvious. He was attracted to women, and there were many women in the world, and many of them were as restless, fun-loving, and adventurous as he was. Why not? was the real question, and Why not? was the real answer.
And, besides, there was this: the most intense pleasure in his life—more intense than winning elections, giving speeches on the Senate floor, appearing at parties for his books and now for the movies in which he had roles—was that moment when he first entered a new woman, that moment when her vagina embraced him, the newness of it, the pleasure, the closeness, the movements, the words, the odors.
Hank Rawls was not about to abandon that for Joan Richardson, as gorgeous as she was, and until now as vital and fun-loving as she had been. He had arrived at her apartment earlier to tell her he was leaving because she was a liar. But now he decided he could postpone that, at least for another day or week or more.
Hank Rawls raised her hand. He kissed her fingers. He said, “Let’s go back to the apartment.”
20.
Kathy Schiavoni entered her seven-digit code on the keypad next to the door that led to the windowless, musty locker room in which current case evidence was stored. Once inside the room, her first task was to write in an old-fashioned ledger her name, her time of arrival, and the purpose of her visit. She wrote: “Examination of the Richardson sheets.”
There was always a metallic chill in the room; there was also always the smell of chemicals and compounds—formaldehyde, ammonia, and cordite and gun grease from the confiscated bullets, pistols, and weapons that were stored there.
She walked directly to box 6773, one of the more than two thousand lockers in the warehouse-size building. She knew the combination to the lock and opened it.
The box was empty.
Kathy Schiavoni walked to the computer near the entrance to the icy room. The computer contained information disclosing who had access to lock box 6773. Only her name appeared on the screen, with seven different dates of removal and return. No one else had signed in to remove the sheets and no one had signed them out.
