by Paul Batista
“And you never saw the weapon used to kill the Borzois, correct?”
“Never.”
In unison, like the choir they resembled, all the jurors had been looking back and forth from Raquel Rematti to Joan Richardson as the questions were asked and the answers given. At that moment, after Joan Richardson said “Never,” they were looking again at Raquel.
“No further questions,” Raquel said.
When Raquel sat at the defense table between Juan Suarez and Theresa Bui, the judge, in one of those frequent interludes that happen after a lawyer finishes a long series of questions, turned off her microphone and whispered to one of her clerks. As they waited, with Joan Richardson plainly angry and impatient, still on the stand, and the jurors staring into space ahead of them, Theresa leaned forward toward Raquel, whispering, “That was amazing.”
Raquel, who knew that people Theresa’s age and younger used the words amazing or awesome to describe anything they liked, whispered, “Thanks, but take it one step at a time. Amazing or not, it doesn’t matter until there’s a verdict.”
A feverish sweat shined on Raquel’s face. She was exhausted and in pain. When Theresa saw that there were even droplets of sweat on Raquel’s upper lip, she put the edge of her hand next to the edge of Raquel’s elegant, long-fingered hand. It radiated sick heat.
Overcoming the stillness in the courtroom, Judge Conley switched on the sound system. “Ms. Harding, do you expect to have re-re-direct examination?”
Margaret Harding stood. “One or two hours.”
“In light of that,” Judge Conley said as she turned to the jurors, “we’ll break until tomorrow morning.”
As the jurors were being led out of the courtroom through the side door reserved for them, Juan Suarez said to Raquel, “You did something very wrong, Raquel. Bad.”
They were still standing. Raquel glanced at him without speaking. She had never before heard this tone in Juan’s voice: it was harsh, furious, even threatening, so altered that it was scary, as if another person were speaking through him. “You should not have said the name Oscar Caliente to anyone. I told you that.”
31.
Central Park was absolutely black when Joan Richardson rose from the back seat of the car to the sheltering cone of the umbrella the doorman Frank held over her head. Streams of rain fell in rivulets from the eight points of the umbrella. A cold trickle struck the back of her neck. As he kept the umbrella above her on the short walk from the car to the awning, Frank said, “Nice to have you back, Mrs. Richardson.” Doormen, who knew everything, also liked to appear impervious to everything. She was certain that Frank had followed every word she said during the televised trial, yet his tone was the same as if he were welcoming her home from a vacation.
As soon as she reached the awning, Joan took out her cell phone, pressed the button for Hank Rawls’s number, and put the sleek instrument to her ear. This was the tenth call she had placed to him since leaving Riverhead. His cell was turned off. As she waited, she looked out from under the dripping awning into the massed black tree trunks and branches of Central Park. Cold rain blew through the street lights on Fifth Avenue. Yellow taxis created a constant hissing noise as they sped down the avenue, tossing wings of rain water from their tires.
At the seventh ring, just before his message was about to start, Hank Rawls answered. “Joan?”
She had been certain she’d lash out angrily at him, or treat him icily, because of his vanishing act. Instead, she was deeply relieved to hear his voice. “God, Hank, I’m so glad you answered.”
“Things suddenly got crazy for me.”
“Are you upstairs?” For months the doormen had just waved Senator Rawls in. He had his own key to the apartment. She added, “I’ll be right up.”
“Joan, I’m in Miami. I’ve been here a few days. I got a call out of nowhere for a role. Donald Sutherland cancelled a short part at the last minute, and, if you can believe it, they called me.”
She didn’t believe him. She sensed throughout her body an anxiety more profound than anything that had happened since the night she received the call from Bo Halsey. Even though she was actually trembling, she stepped out from under the awning, which had radiant heaters under the canopy that cast warming light down onto the sidewalk, into the sleety darkness. She didn’t want anyone to hear her. “I really need to lie down with you, to hug you,” she said.
“I saw pieces of the trial on TV, sweetie. You were a real trooper. But it must have been painful for you.”
“Hank, I really want you to come home.”
“We’re in the middle of this. Another two or three days.”
“I’ll fly down. I can leave tonight. Where are you staying?”
“Joan, I’m working my tail off. I’ll be on the set for the next two days. I won’t have time to see you.”
She stared into the alluring comfortable glow created by the lights from the awning. To her left the monumental Fifth Avenue building rose into the mist and sleet; the stone surface of the building was streaked with wet stains. When she focused on the conversation that was now unfolding, she remembered the very few times when a man had spoken so evasively to her. She had only been dumped twice in her life, once, twenty years earlier, by the young George Clooney. Two years before she had married Brad Richardson, the scary-looking Salman Rushdie had dumped her with his convoluted locutions. It sounded like a philosophy lecture. She had cut him off. “Just do it,” she had said.
But tonight, wanting not to hear what she imagined she was about to hear, she said, “I don’t mind staying in the hotel room while you’re out, Hank. I could read Trollope again.” This was painful to her. She felt desperate.
“Joan, I really need to concentrate on what I’m doing. For some reason, I really don’t want Fred Thompson to be the only ex-Senator to make millions on television.”
Joan thought of saying, “I can give you millions,” but she sensed that would be like a lash, one that would hurt her more than it would hurt Hank and might give him a reason to utter angry, decisive, irretrievable words. She asked, “Is there a woman with you?”
“That’d never happen, sweetie. All I need is a few days.”
“It’s all right,” she said, as quietly as she could in a world where there was noise all around her—the sibilant rain, the rushing tires on the pavement of Fifth Avenue, the sound of slamming taxi doors.
Joan closed the lid on her cell phone. She was crying. She wiped the rain from her forehead and cheeks. Smiling for the doormen, she walked under the awning and into the lobby.
Hank Rawls, who was in New York and not Miami, never had to tell Joan Richardson that Rain Chatterjee, a gorgeous, 32-year-old Pakistani woman educated at Oxford and now a weekend anchor at CNN, was in his apartment, as she had been for three days. Hank Rawls never had to tell Joan Richardson that because he never saw her again.
32.
Detective Halsey was one of those crisp, no-nonsense cops who made great witnesses because they were laconic, informative, and impossible to ruffle. Almost all of his answers were yes or no; when he had to say more, his sentences were terse, the modern version of Sergeant Joe Friday. Generally, as Raquel Rematti knew, it was best to get witnesses like Halsey off the stand as quickly as possible and not to linger on cross-examination. Through Margaret Harding’s own crisp questioning, Halsey had spent his two hours of direct examination describing the emergency call that led him to the seaside estate in East Hampton, his entry into the office where Brad’s body and the bodies of the two Borzois were already covered under the tarpaulin-like sheets, the arrival of Joan Richardson, and his sending of two detectives upstairs after Joan told him that Brad kept cash in the bedroom.
And he testified that the two detectives, Cerullo and Cohen, came downstairs with nothing. Bo Halsey didn’t testify that several weeks earlier Ang Tien had shown him a clear video that unmistakably depicted Cohen and Cerullo carrying brick-like stacks of cash out of the Richardsons’ bedroom.
/> Raquel Rematti asked, “Detective Halsey, let’s just be clear: there were no eyewitnesses to the killing of Brad Richardson, correct?”
Halsey leaned forward to the microphone slightly, just as he had in all his answers to Margaret Harding’s questions. His shaved head glinted. He looked at the jurors each time he answered a question: years earlier he had learned that jurors found witnesses who looked at them were trustworthy. He said, “None.”
“And there were none of Mr. Suarez’s fingerprints in Mr. Richardson’s office, were there?”
“That’s right.”
“And there was no DNA from Mr. Suarez at the crime scene, was there?”
“None.”
“And no weapon was found in Mr. Suarez’s possession?”
“None.”
“And no cash was found in Mr. Suarez’s possession, right?”
“None.”
“And the only reason you sent Detectives Cerullo and Cohen to look for cash was because Mrs. Richardson told you there might be cash in the bedroom, isn’t that right?”
“Not right. She told me there was cash in the bedroom. Well over two hundred thousand dollars. She didn’t say it might be there. She said it was.”
“And Cerullo and Cohen reported to you that there was no cash, is that right?”
Detective Halsey again leaned forward to the microphone and, looking at the jury, said, “The cash was gone. That’s in their report.”
“Let me understand: the only reason you, as the lead investigator, believe that Mr. Suarez stole more than two hundred thousand dollars is because Mrs. Richardson told you there was cash in the bedroom, isn’t that right?”
“Not right, counselor. Point one, she said it was there. Point two, it was gone.”
“And you didn’t ask Jimmy if he saw cash there the day before Brad was killed, the day Mrs. Richardson said Jimmy was in the house, is that right?”
“We never heard of Jimmy, counselor.”
“When did you hear about Jimmy?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Did you look for him?”
“We did.”
“Did you find him?”
“We did.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Not much.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was in a drug rehab in Arizona trying to recover from crack addition during the month Mr. Richardson was killed. The records at the place, which is very expensive, show he was there. He said he was a drug user, not a drug dealer.”
“Did he say he knew Brad Richardson?”
“He said he did.”
“Did he say he visited the Richardson home?”
“He did.”
“Why?”
“Mr. Richardson paid him, he said, two thousand dollars a pop—his words—for oral sex.”
“Did Jimmy say there was cash in the bedroom?”
“He said if there was he never saw it.”
“And you never asked Trevor Palmer if he saw cash in the bedroom, right?”
“Never heard of him either until two weeks ago. When we interviewed him, he said he thought there might have been cash there, but he said he wasn’t sure.”
“So this could be phantom money, Detective Halsey?”
Margaret Harding rose to her feet. To Raquel’s surprise Judge Conley said, “Overruled,” before Harding could even object.
Halsey was an experienced witness. He knew he had to answer the question as though no objection had been made. “I don’t know what phantom money means, Ms. Rematti.”
“Money that never existed?”
“Mrs. Richardson said it had been there. And when my officers looked it wasn’t there. Is that phantom money?”
It was time, Raquel knew, to wind down the cross-examination.
33.
At the end of Bo Halsey’s testimony, Ang Tien, who had been sitting in the back row of the gallery, walked out into the crystalline late winter afternoon. He’d waited to hear Bo Halsey’s testimony, hoping Halsey would describe the surveillance tape. That hadn’t happened.
Ang Tien had twenty of his business cards in his pockets. He moved among the reporters standing near the glistening television panel trucks. He handed out his cards. Deferentially he asked every man and woman holding a microphone or a notepad for their business cards. All of the dozen or so reporters he approached either handed him a business card or, after he explained he had important information about the trial, wrote their names and email addresses on pieces of paper. They were hungry for information, and even though they didn’t know the young Asian man with spiky black hair who looked like a computer-obsessed nerd, they didn’t hesitate to give him their contact information and take his cards. He could be anyone—a friend of a juror, someone who knew Juan Suarez, or just one of the law junkies who haunted courtrooms.
That night Ang Tien created an untraceable email address for himself. He typed “Bedroom in the Richardson House on Murder Day” in the subject line—he knew the subject line had to have a message that the reporters couldn’t ignore—and in the body of the email he wrote: “Law enforcement officials taking cash from the Richardson bedroom.” Then, without hesitation, he pressed the Send key to distribute the video to the reporters. He then posted it on YouTube. His screen flashed that the message had been sent.
He leaned backward in his chair, raising his arms above his head. Suddenly lifted from him were the anxiety, resentment, and anger he had felt for weeks while Bo Halsey never again spoke to him about the tapes of Cerullo and Cohen methodically carrying cash from the bedroom to the bathroom. Ang Tien shouted and pumped his hands in the air.
Less than two hours later a CNN anchor introduced another story at the start of the seven o’clock news: “A bizarre twist in the trial of the man accused of killing billionaire hedge fund owner Brad Richardson in ritzy East Hampton. CNN has received through anonymous sources a tape of two police officers taking cash found in the Richardson bedroom. Here is part of the tape, taken several hours after Richardson was murdered, police say, with a machete.”
The high-resolution tape, enhanced by Ang Tien’s wizard skills, captured the faces of Cerullo and Cohen and their quick, furtive movements. The tape also captured them as they continuously looked around the room for the kinds of small security cameras they obviously expected to see. There was even an occasional murmur of voices, almost of grunts, but that was far less distinct.
As soon as the tape ended a young reporter—Asian, sleek, articulate, attractive—said, “Our sources have definitively identified the men on the tape as law enforcement officers named Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen, described as experienced detectives with years of experience in the NYPD and the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office. Interestingly, their names were mentioned today at the trial by seasoned lead detective Bo Halsey as the two officers he had sent on the night of the murder to look for more than two hundred thousand dollars in cash that Brad Richardson allegedly kept in his bedroom. Halsey said at the trial that the two officers came back from the assignment with no cash.”
The screen suddenly turned into a tape of Bo Halsey that afternoon walking from the courthouse. He wore sunglasses. He looked like the veteran soldier—tall, strong, his head completely shaved—he in fact was.
The reporter continued, “The illegal Mexican immigrant on trial for the murder of the billionaire is also accused of stealing well over two hundred thousand dollars in cash from the bedroom where the law enforcement officers were filmed. The lead detective, Halsey, was reached a few minutes ago. He said he had never seen the tape before. It was, he said, news to him. He also said that any further questions had to be referred to the prosecutors. The lead prosecutor, Margaret Harding, hasn’t yet returned messages left for her.”
Raquel’s cell phone rang as she was having dinner with Theresa at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. They were in the room with the ancient bar and the fireplace, which was lit. The carefully carved tin ceiling glowed with the ca
ndlelight from the tables and the fire. In the wine at Raquel’s table a deep glow filled the glasses.
“Hello,” Raquel said when her cell phone screen lit up with the caller ID New York Times.
It was Jennifer Hoover, a reporter from the Times who had Raquel on what she called her go-to list. She said, “Raquel, where are you?”
“We’re at the American Hotel. In Sag Harbor.”
“Do they have a television set?”
“No, and I hope they never do. They do have a moose head high on the wall with a cigarette dangling from his lips.”
“Let me tell you what the entire country has been looking at for the last half hour. Maybe I can get your reaction. I’d like to get my article into the online edition pronto.”
“I never heard you breathless before, Jennifer. What’s happening?”
“An hour ago someone sent out emails and posted on YouTube a video of two Suffolk County detectives.”
“Tell me more.”
“In it the cops are carrying stacks of cash out of Brad Richardson’s bedroom.”
“What?”
“It was a surveillance tape taken on the day he was killed. The two cops are the ones Bo Halsey mentioned today as the guys who came back empty-handed from the search for the cash. Obviously they found it, and they kept it.”
Raquel paused, holding her breath. “Jennifer, I think all I can say now is that if the tape depicts two rogue policemen stealing cash that Juan Suarez is alleged to have stolen then this situation is outrageous, particularly if the prosecutors knew about the existence of this tape.”
“Did you ever see it?”
“Of course not.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“Jennifer, why don’t you just write that we’ll take all necessary steps to vindicate Mr. Suarez’s rights, or something like that. That’s for the record. But between us, off the record, you were wonderful to call me. This is the best news I’ve heard in a very, very long time. I’ll give you the first word on anything that develops from this.”
