by Paul Batista
“I do.”
“So talk to me.”
He held her gaze. “Tom Golden, the guy I used to work for before the Richardsons ask me to work, paid me in cash. I don’t think he’s supposed to do that. So did the Richardsons.”
“That kind of thing is not important, Juan. Not at all. What you need to know is something, anything, far more important.”
“I’m not sure, Raquel.”
“Let me try this, Juan. Who gave you the drugs to sell?”
“Some guy named Jocko.”
“Jocko,” she repeated. “How about some guy named Oscar?”
“Oscar?”
“Was there a man named Oscar?”
Juan leaned backward in the small, cafeteria-style plastic chair. “Oscar?” he said.
“They know about someone named Oscar. Oscar runs a big drug gang, in the city and here. They think you know Oscar.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t? They have a tape of you and this Oscar they’re interested in at the Starbucks on the Montauk Highway.”
“I do know that Oscar, Raquel.”
“How much do you know about him?”
“Raquel, please listen to me. What I know about Oscar is that he had his men try to kill me here and that he’ll do it again if he thinks I talk about him. I don’t want to die here.”
25.
Raquel spent the next four days with Theresa Bui at her seaside, slightly rundown and cozy house in Montauk. To Raquel, it was the best season of the year—quiet, cold, isolated. The weekend visitors from the city ordinarily didn’t travel farther than East Hampton. Montauk Point, at the far eastern end of Long Island, was another forty-five minute drive beyond East Hampton, too remote for a weekend. The only other people Raquel and Theresa saw were in the local IGA market when they drove to the village for milk, eggs, steak, bread, and three bottles of red wine. It was exactly the kind of weather Raquel loved—fog on the ocean and over the narrow peninsula, even denser fog embracing the deck of Raquel’s house, and chilly fog at night when the horns on the distant buoys sounded at sea.
They didn’t discuss Juan Suarez when they arrived at the house on Friday evening, two hours after the unannounced headcount at the prison abruptly brought their meeting with him to an end. And they didn’t mention him all day Saturday as they did the simple things that made Raquel’s weekends here so restful: the morning drive to the village for food; the visit to the old hardware store with its scent of wood, paint, and the varnish on the floor boards that Raquel recalled so vividly from her childhood at the hardware store in Haverhill where her father took her to buy nails and car wash; and the afternoon of reading and sweet, brief naps.
It was when they finished on Saturday night their meal of lobster and squash and a bottle of red wine that Raquel finally asked, “What do you think?”
“About Juan?”
“Yes, Juan.”
“I think his name is Anibal Vaz.”
“I’m not sure. In one sense it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s troubling, Raquel. Lying troubles me.”
Theresa, Raquel thought, was still young. Lying would mean something off-center to her. It still concerned Raquel when a client lied to her, but lying was the coin of the realm, not just in the work she did but in the world in which she lived. Even outside of that world, in life in general, people lied about big things and small things; they lied when there was no need to lie, as when someone who has driven twenty miles says she drove thirty, and they lied about issues that matter—a wife claiming she was away on a business trip when in fact she spent those days with a lover. And people lied about guilt and innocence.
“Lying troubles me, too, but I can’t just accept that what Margaret Harding and the DEA claim is the truth is in fact the truth. Isn’t there a line in the New Testament where a lawyer asks Jesus, What is the truth? And Jesus, as I recall it, doesn’t have an answer to that question. He has a parable.” Sipping her wine and smiling, she said, “Jesus didn’t like lawyers.”
“Does anyone?”
More and more enveloped in the sleepy aura that three glasses of wine brought to her, Raquel looked out through the sliding doors that opened to the deck over the dunes, the beach and the Atlantic. The doors were partially open. She could hear the hiss of the waves.
“Anibal Vaz, Juan Suarez,” Raquel said. “There are millions and millions of people out there who have no reason to carry through life the names they were born with. My grandfather was born Giacomo in Italy. At 17 he became Joe and died Joe at 85. That’s the name on his headstone. He was never Giacomo again. There always were people, and there are many more now, who have no reason to have permanent names or addresses, birth certificates, driver licenses, marriage licenses. In fact, there are so many people out there who have every reason not to have real names, Social Security numbers, documents. Under the radar screen, off-the-reservation, disappearing, showing up, reincarnating in place after place. And the longer they live the more unmoored and elusive they become.”
Theresa turned in her chair to look out at the deck, the dunes, and the sea. “The problem is this, I think. You know those instructions we give to juries at the end of a trial. If you believe a witness has lied on one issue, you are entitled to believe, if you wish, that he has lied about everything.”
“I never believed that instruction. No one lies all the time about everything, no one tells the truth all the time. We’re all vulnerable, superstitious, fearful, weak. And we are also brave, determined, optimistic against all odds.”
Theresa said, “I’d prefer to believe he wasn’t lying. And even if he is lying about many things he could still be innocent.”
“And isn’t it Hemingway who ended The Sun Also Rises with Jake Barnes or Lady Brett Ashley saying, Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to think so?”
At least a mile out on the Atlantic a freighter blew a very long, hoarse whistle. The freighter would soon let go of the last sight of America—the scattered lights lining the ocean beach until they abruptly ended at the old Montauk Lighthouse—and make its long voyage out into the world.
Three days later, as she sat in her office on Park Avenue with Theresa Bui, Raquel stared out at the black steel-and-glass Seagram Building—the prototype of many other office buildings in Manhattan since it was built in the 1950s but still classic and uniquely attractive—while waiting for the conference call with Margaret Harding to begin. Her secretary came on the line several times to say, “Ms. Harding is about to join the call.” Outside of the window the sunlight shining along Park Avenue was intense; there were days in New York when the winter sun filling the long avenue was as bright and pure as it was anywhere in the world.
Finally Margaret Harding’s voice rang out. “I’m here.”
“So am I. Theresa is with me. Who’s with you?”
“Dimitri Brown, a new lawyer in my office who will be working on the case.”
Raquel said, “Welcome, Dimitri.”
“Hello, Ms. Rematti.” Dimitri was a woman.
“Anyone else?” Raquel asked.
“Detective Halsey. I mentioned his name to you, remember?”
“Certainly, I met him in the courtroom. How are you, Detective?”
There was a mumbled, indistinct sound, a man’s grunt.
“Anyone else?” Raquel asked.
“Two other detectives working on the case, Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen.”
“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Again there was no response.
Her voice resonating over the speakerphone, Margaret Harding said, “I assume this is a follow-up to the talk we had the other day.”
Raquel said, “One other question: are you recording this?”
There was a pause during which, Raquel sensed, Margaret was glancing around her room. “No,” she said. “What about you?”
“No.”
“So go ahead, Raquel, you asked for this conference.”
“I spoke to my client. He does know a man named O
scar.”
Margaret Harding was, as Raquel had come to recognize, a very experienced lawyer. She said after a pause, “There’s no surprise there. It’s a pretty common name. Give me more.”
“This is only a proffer, of course, as I’m sure the agents understand. It’s just me speaking about something that may or may not have been said, that may or may not be known, that may or may not have happened. I’m not the witness.”
“We all get that.”
“Your instinct about Oscar may be right, and my client may know who he is.”
“That’s really no surprise either, Raquel. We have the Starbucks tape, after all. More important, we have informants who know both of them. We need to know how often he has seen Oscar, what Oscar has done, who Oscar knows, where Oscar operates, who works for him, what happened at the Richardson home and in the run-up to the murder. It might be that your client knows only a little, in which case we don’t need him and he can go away for life. Fuck him. It may be that he knows enough, in which case maybe something can be worked out. I don’t know what that might be, but it might be better than life plus 200 years.”
Raquel recognized that Margaret Harding was putting on a little show for the boys in the room. But Margaret was also carefully playing out the script for these kinds of negotiations. “Before we go there, Mr. Suarez needs protection.”
“Protection? We’ve been all over this, haven’t we? With Richie Lupo? Your client’s in solitary confinement.”
“That didn’t stop some of Oscar’s helpers from getting to him. We need another prison. We need anonymity. We need guards who will genuinely protect him.”
“And, Raquel, before we go any further we need more information than you’re giving us. I don’t think your client really understands. Oscar, we are told, is no mere mid-level drug dealer operating with a few mules. He’s developing the Sinaloa cartel in the city and now, the DEA believes, out here in the Hamptons, too.”
“They can’t really believe, Margaret, that lowly Juan Suarez knows what Oscar’s plans are for the Sinaloa cartel. How can a guy like Juan Suarez know anything about the strategic planning of the Sinaloa cartel? They are the most dangerous people in Mexico.”
“Did you ever ask your client what he did for a living in Mexico?”
“What did he do there?”
“You know how this works, Raquel. You have to tell me.”
Raquel leaned toward Theresa and touched the mute key on her telephone. She could hear but not be heard. She said to Theresa, “Do you have any ideas? I think we’ve gone as far as we can go.”
Theresa shook her head.
After she released the mute key and reconnected, Raquel said, “Let’s keep the door open, Margaret. We may be able over time to get closer to where you want to be.”
“I know you won’t be offended, Raquel, to hear this, but the door is closing soon. Our trial starts in three weeks. Once the trial starts I won’t be interested in talking. Or as I used to hear older lawyers say when I started working here, ‘The boat is leaving the dock.’”
“Ah,” Raquel said. “That old dock somehow always manages to stop moving, or the boat gets delayed.”
“Don’t count on that.”
At midnight, Cerullo and Cohen were inside an unmarked police car at a dreary mall in Smithtown, thirty miles west of Southampton. A cold mist created white halos around the mall’s lights. The interior of the car was steamy. The heater was blowing dry, irritating air. Soon after they parked, a black Audi sedan slowly pulled to the side of their car, and Oscar Caliente, swift as a phantom, left the Audi and slipped into the seat behind them.
“So,” Oscar Caliente said, “what’s going on? I don’t necessarily enjoy driving out from Manhattan to see you gentlemen in the middle of the night.” His English was far more polished than Cohen’s and Cerullo’s.
“Suarez is talking,” Dave Cohen said.
“What is he saying?”
“Not much so far. But there is a chance that pretty soon he’ll talk more. His own lawyer keeps on lifting her skirt and then dropping it, suggesting she has information and then going quiet, teasing us. This is how these fucking lawyers make a deal. ‘Show me what you’ve got and I’ll show you what I’ve got.’ It’s a bullshit game.”
“And how do you know that? What’s the source?”
“His own lawyer, that Raquel lady,” Cohen said. “The only other Raquel I ever heard of was Raquel Welch. And this Raquel, in her day, must have been almost as good-looking.”
Oscar stared at Cohen in the same rearview mirror through which Cohen could see Oscar. “I’m not interested in football-and-beer bullshit,” Oscar said. “Don’t waste my time.”
His words did what he intended them to do: they dropped Cerullo and Cohen into an icy bath of fear. It was Cerullo who spoke next, taking over from the rattled Cohen: “We were at what they call a proffer session. His lawyer was on the phone, the DA was in the room with us.”
“Go ahead,” Oscar said, “I know what a proffer session is. What did she say?”
“That Suarez knows you, and that he might know what you do, who works for you, who you work for. The lawyer wants us to think Suarez knows a lot.”
“The problem you have,” Oscar Caliente said, “is that Suarez’s lawyer knows too much, or she may. I don’t like that. That does not work for me.”
Cerullo was facing forward as he spoke. He knew that Caliente was glaring at the back of his head. Cohen, still distracted by the fact that he had annoyed Caliente, was staring out the rain-streaked window.
“And she’s not the only one,” Cerullo said. “There is a Chinese lady who’s working with her. She’s been in the room with Suarez when Rematti is with Suarez. They know the same things.”
Abruptly, Oscar Caliente opened the rear door. As he was leaving, he said, “So that gives you guys two problems. Fix them.”
26.
All her years of experience had given Raquel Rematti an almost unerring sense of the course a trial was taking, just as a ship’s pilot has a sense of where the dangers in a channel are. By the second day of trial, Raquel had the unsettling sense that things were going very badly for Juan Suarez and for her. A television reporter had remarked on air after the first day of the trial that the legendary Raquel Rematti had been “flat” in her opening to the jury. And, late at night, when Raquel had replayed her opening on her iPad, she agreed. Her performance bothered her and her memory of it caused a pang of embarrassment. She had the tense sense that she herself was on trial. This was her first trial since the year-long struggle with cancer, the chemotherapy, and the surgery.
In the difficult week before the trial started, as she and Theresa worked twelve-hour days, Raquel was completely unsettled by the sudden lassitude, the all-pervasive weakness, that seemed to infuse the flow of her blood throughout her body. She knew it might be possible that her anxiety made her feel that way and that it was not the first dreadful signal of a recurrence, a resurgence, of the disease. Please, God, don’t let this happen again.
Although Raquel kept the sensation of weakness and fear to herself, Theresa, who was young, vibrant, and indefatigable, asked three days before the trial, “Raquel, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she had answered. “Just tired.”
Raquel was also worried about her trial instincts. She had not expected Joan Richardson to be the first prosecution witness. The more conventional approach, and the approach she had expected, was that Margaret Harding would start with the detectives. It took Raquel by surprise when Margaret Harding responded to Judge Conley’s instruction “Call your first witness” by announcing, “The People call Mrs. Joan Richardson.”
From the very beginning, Margaret Harding wasted no time: her first question, after Joan Richardson had spelled her name for the court reporter, was, “Mrs. Richardson, were you married to Brad Richardson?”
“I was.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“He was murdere
d.” Joan’s voice was clear and forceful.
“When?”
“In October of last year.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw it.”
“Did you see his body?”
“I did.”
“Where?”
“In our home.”
“Where is that?”
“On Egypt Beach, in East Hampton.”
The testimony was already riveting, it had the jury’s full attention, and Raquel Rematti was startled by the speed of this. It was like opening a movie about an assassination plot with the assassination itself, in vivid detail.
“And what did you see?”
“My husband, his body, blood on the floor.”
“Were you with other people?”
“There were detectives and police.”
“What else did you see at the time you saw your husband’s body?”
“We had two dogs. They were not far from my husband’s body. Their heads had been cut off.”
“How do you know that?”
Raquel Rematti knew she had to interrupt this flow of questions and answers. As she stood, she said, “Objection. This is not relevant. This is a trial about the murder of a person, not dogs.”
Bland-looking as always, Judge Conley spoke distinctly into her microphone. She sounded commanding, as if her ego was enlarged by the television cameras broadcasting the trial to the world. “Ms. Rematti, I instructed both sides not to explain their objections. Just say ‘Objection.’ I don’t need an explanation for this. Objection overruled.”
“Let me ask you the question again, Mrs. Richardson. How do you know what happened to the dogs?”
“I saw their heads in one place and their bodies in another.”
When Margaret Harding gave a hand signal to a technician, the lighting in the courtroom dimmed. A police video of the room in which Brad was killed appeared on a white screen facing the jurors. Partially covered in a blood-stained sheet, Brad’s body was plainly visible.
“Does this film,” Margaret asked, “depict what you saw?”
