Hell Gate

by Linda A. Fairstein

  “I’m not the front man on this, Lem. Donovan Baynes has to call the shots.”

  “Look at me, Alex. Donny Baynes is one of Ethan’s closest friends. If you don’t think I placed a call to him before coming over here, you’re forgetting how I work.”

  The feds had far more formal rules for accepting proffers in cases than we did. And Baynes’s relationship with Leighton would have disqualified him from handling the matter.

  “You’re telling me Baynes wants me to take this meeting?”

  “Baby steps, Alex. You’ve got to start somewhere. Donny’s hands are tied but, yes, he wants you to do this.”

  “Has he been talking to Leighton?” I didn’t know who was next in line to betray whom.

  “No, no, no. Just to me. I was aware of their long friendship.”

  “Where’s your client?”

  “This way. He’s waiting in that garden beneath the rock wall.”

  Mike tried to take my arm to guide me down the wide winding staircase but I wanted no part of him. The steps led to a round garden that, in summer, was one of the prettiest spots in the city, surrounded by lush greenery and beautiful plantings. Now, the trees were bare and the bushes looked scraggly, but the stunning rock formations provided a natural shield from the wind.

  At the base of the steps, sitting alone on a stone wall, was Congressman Ethan Leighton. He was dressed in jogging clothes, with a hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head and a short windbreaker on top of that.

  When he heard us approach, he stood up and took off his gloves. He didn’t look much better than he had the other night, forcing a smile as he greeted me again. Ethan was a bit taller than I, and his normally slim frame seemed even lighter than I recalled.

  He held out a hand to me and I nodded at him. His lower lip was raw and red from where he’d been biting down on it. He had a ghostly pallor, a hollowness around his eyes that made them look even beadier than before.

  “Sit down, Ethan,” Lem said.

  I sat a few feet away from him. Both Mike and Lem stood as Lem explained what he had told me. I muttered my agreement to this unorthodox arrangement.

  “Why don’t you tell Ms. Cooper about yourself, Ethan? What you’ve been doing since you left the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  “Where should I start?” he asked, looking around to each of us.

  “We can read the official bio,” Mike said. “Tell us something about Salma Zunega.”

  “I’m just so sick that she’s been hurt. It’s haunting me.”

  “Not hurt, Congressman. We call it dead.”

  I wanted to find out how he’d met her before we got into the subject of the missing baby and whose child it might be.

  “How long have you been married?” I asked. I counted on the fact that it would rattle him to talk about his wife and his inamorata in the same breath.

  “Twenty-two years.” Ethan Leighton had been on the hustings too long. His ability to flash an artificial smile in the middle of this was uncanny. “Claire and I tied the knot when I was in law school. She has a degree in business. She’s wonderful—she’s, um, really wonderful.”

  “And children?”

  “Two. Two children. One’s away at college and the other’s in boarding school.”

  “You forgetting one?” I asked.

  “Oh, sorry. Ana, of course. Ana Zunega,” Leighton said. “I want you to know we’re terribly concerned about the child. We’re moving heaven and earth, with private resources, to help find her.”

  The more emotionally wound up he became, the more the tic in his left eye became pronounced. I’d never noticed it before. He stroked it with his forefinger, which was as long and almost as skinny as the finger bones of that skeleton in the City Hall grave.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Mike asked.

  “My father, Moses Leighton. He’s a very wealthy man, Detective. He’s got the money to do this kind of thing.”

  “And Claire,” I said, “—how does she feel about this?”

  He took a deep breath and answered. “Under the circumstances, she’s—she’s—well, she understands completely and will raise the child with me as our own.”

  Mike asked exactly what it was that Claire understood, but Leighton didn’t answer. He was listening to me as I spoke to Lem.

  “I guess you made your point this morning, Mr. Howell. I guess Claire will be doing her Tammy Wynette ‘Stand by Your Man’ best on the podium for your press conference. Congratulations.” I turned back to Leighton. “Of course, she hasn’t yet accounted for her version of where she was the night Salma was killed, by any chance?”

  His eye twitched wildly. “You’re crazy, Alex. You’re f—”

  Lem cut him off and told him to control himself. The congressman’s front tooth found its groove in his lower lip, drawing droplets of blood as he clamped his mouth shut.

  “When did you meet Salma?” Mike asked.

  “Three, almost four years ago.”

  “She was still a teenager then?”

  “Twenty, sir. She was twenty.”

  “Just a tad older than your own kids,” Mike said.

  “Yes, but could we leave Claire and the kids out of this?” Leighton asked of Lem Howell. “Could we just talk about the accident and Salma’s problem?”

  “Ms. Cooper, here, is a fan of the big picture, Mr. Leighton,” Mike said. “She’ll tie it all up in a package for you before we’re done.”

  “Mr. Howell told me that you were home with your family the night Salma was killed. You understand that Claire necessarily becomes a witness in all this.”

  “You’re not seriously thinking I had any reason to hurt Salma?” Ethan Leighton pulled himself up into a position, posturing his outrage as though he were making a congressional appearance on C-SPAN. “Or that my wife did?”

  “Don’t ever try to go where Ms. Cooper’s thinking,” Lem said. “Just stay calm.”

  There was nothing a prosecutor liked better than the loving family member as alibi witness. What wife—with everything to lose—wouldn’t put her hand on a Bible and swear that her husband had never left her side the night in question?

  “Do you have any photographs of your daughter?” I asked. “Of Ana.”

  “I—uh—I’m afraid I don’t. I’m afraid that wouldn’t have been very smart, under the circumstances.”

  “Which part of the circumstances were smart?” Mike said.

  “How did you meet?” I asked.

  “It was at a fund-raiser, here in the city. One of my events.”

  “Salma was what—a political activist? Rallying the vote?” Mike asked. “Was she here in the States legally?”

  Leighton didn’t say a word. He looked at Lem but got no help.

  “Was she a citizen?”

  “I believe she was legal. She had papers, Detective.”

  “My mother’s dog has papers, Leighton,” Mike said. “Funny, ’cause cops swept her whole apartment and didn’t come up with any documents.”

  “I don’t know why that would be or where she kept them. Maybe at a bank.”

  “Seems to me Salma’s closet was the bank,” Mike said.

  “What do you mean?” the congressman asked. “What are you talking about?”

  Was it possible he didn’t know about the shoe boxes full of cash?

  “So what brought her to your fund-raiser that night?” Mike asked. “Your position on abortion rights? Gun control? Illegal immigrants?”

  Ethan Leighton was keeping himself even. “She didn’t come because of my politics, Mr. Chapman. She was there as someone’s date. We got to talking and—”

  “Now, that’s classy. Not only are you cheating, but you steal her out from under another guy,” Mike said. “A supporter? Somebody who bought a ticket to come in?”

  “She was nothing to him, Detective. I don’t even remember who it was who brought her. I’m sure she wouldn’t either. Salma is a vibrant—”

  “Salma was.”

  “So
rry. I still have trouble believing that,” Leighton said. “Salma was a vibrant, intelligent, high-spirited young woman. She was mature beyond her years, because she’d been to hell and back, quite frankly.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “Salma was smuggled into this country, Ms. Cooper. She was fourteen years old when she was brought across the border from Mexico in a cattle truck, along with thirty or forty people from her region.”

  Lem was watching me to see if Leighton succeeded at melting my armor with another tale of cruelty and abuse. He didn’t realize I had not been able to get Olena’s fresh story from yesterday out of my mind. Little chance of trumping that.

  “Where was she taken?”

  “Near Brownsville, in Texas, at first. With the usual promise that she’d get an agricultural job or be placed as a servant in a family household,” the congressman said. “But that never happened. She was held captive in a farmhouse by the man her family paid to get her out of Mexico. For two years, she was raped repeatedly by him.”

  “I hear these tales more often than you can imagine, Mr. Leighton,” I said. “I’ve learned what many of these young women have endured.”

  “There’s an ugly twist to this one, Ms. Cooper. The man who kept her chained to her bed when he went off on these smuggling trips? He was Salma’s uncle,” the congressman said. “He was her mother’s brother.”

  Now it was my turn to be silent.

  Mike waited thirty seconds before pounding on. “Who brought Salma to New York?”

  “It’s nothing she would ever talk about with me.”

  “Weren’t you the least bit curious?”

  “I was much more than curious, Detective. There were entire pockets of her life that were off-limits to me, just as there were areas of mine that were off-limits to her,” Leighton said. “Being sold off to her uncle as an adolescent was nothing she was in any position to change. But once he was ready to get rid of her? I don’t think she was very proud of the fact that she spent the next few years of her life selling herself.”

  “So she came to New York as a prostitute, specifically?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Someone must have been pretty well steeped in the trafficking business to get her here,” Mike said. “A professional, not a two-bit Mexican in a cattle truck.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Detective. She never told me who. She wouldn’t go there, and frankly, I didn’t care.”

  “Didn’t care?” Mike asked.

  “That’s sounds a bit icy. I mean that I had no intention of pushing Salma to talk about it, and I’m ashamed to say, it’s not like I was going to get involved in a prosecution of the man. She had put it behind her and I certainly had nothing to gain by the association with her, or her pimp.”

  “The tattoo on Salma’s body,” I said to Leighton, “what do you know about that?”

  I couldn’t tell if he had reddened because of the nature of our conversation or because the cold air was biting his skin.

  “Nothing,” he said, with a sidelong glance at Lem. “A flower?”

  “Do you know what kind of flower?”

  Leighton thought the question was ridiculous. “I—I don’t. Everybody’s got tattoos, Ms. Cooper. My own kids have them.”

  “Not in the same place on the body as Salma’s was,” Mike said. “Just a hunch.”

  “On her leg—her thigh? So what?”

  “Doesn’t mean anything to you?” I asked. “That placement?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Did Salma have that tattoo when you met her, or get it afterwards?”

  “She had that when we met. I don’t know when or how she got it.”

  “Where was Salma living when you first started to see her?” I asked.

  “On the West Side. Near a Hundred and tenth Street.”

  “Not as well as you set her up,” Mike said.

  Ethan Leighton didn’t speak.

  “How long after you met did you begin dating her?” I asked.

  “Look, Ms. Cooper. I’d actually never been unfaithful to Claire in all the years we’d been married. I didn’t set out to get into this mess. Salma started calling me, texting me on my phone, showing up at all my events. She—uh—she was very interested in starting a relationship with me.”

  “Oh, man,” Mike said, throwing up his hands as he began to circle the rock garden. “Where are these broads? How come nobody’s ever after my ass? Her fault, was it?”

  “Nothing is Salma’s fault,” Leighton said. “I’m not blaming her. I didn’t have to meet with her, make dates, become involved. I responded—okay—I was just as excited about things as she was. You want blood from me? Is that what you want? Take it, Mr. Chapman.”

  “Calm down, Ethan,” Lem said. “Just let them get this done.”

  “When you began dating Salma, was she seeing other men?” I asked.

  “Obviously, Ms. Cooper. She came to my event with another man, didn’t she?” Leighton’s smooth tone was developing an edge.

  “How often did you get to be with her?”

  “Truly, not often at all. Maybe you know something about the congressional schedule,” he said. “Monday’s my day in New York. Pretty much like clockwork I could see her on Monday. But then I fly to D.C. every Tuesday morning, and the weekend, well—that was always saved for Claire and the kids.”

  “But this week you were with her on Tuesday night?”

  “We’re not back in session yet, Mr. Chapman. Salma called. She told me Ana was sick and she wanted to see me.”

  “And two years ago, when she told you she was pregnant, was she still dating other men?”

  “Probably so. Well, yes, I know it was so. And we fought about that.”

  “About that, or about the baby’s paternity?”

  Ethan Leighton was steaming now. “You’re damn right I wasn’t happy about the fact that Salma was pregnant. She’d been on the pill for years before I met her. She knew how I felt about the whole idea, about how an out-of-wedlock child would compromise my political viability. I couldn’t figure how she had conceived. And I’d spent so much time in Washington the month she became pregnant I just didn’t think it was possible.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We fought. She flew down to Texas, where her older brother had finally moved and had a home. And I was going crazy without her,” Leighton said, putting his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands. “I guess it was like an addiction.”

  “Did you bring her back to New York?”

  “Yes, yes, I did. She didn’t want me around for the birth,” he said, as Mike looked at me, “because I had been so vehement in my denial. But once we did the DNA test and she gave me the results, I sort of embraced the whole thing.”

  If his tic was anything like a lie detector, it was speeding off the charts when he spoke about embracing the news of the child’s paternity.

  “You bought the apartment for her?”

  “I did everything I could to set her up comfortably with the baby.”

  I leaned in and looked at Leighton’s face. “This last year, year and a half, was Salma still seeing other men?”

  “You’re asking me to think about things I don’t want to know, Ms. Cooper. I wasn’t going to leave Claire—never. I’m sure Salma had her ways of taking that out on me.”

  “And Ana, did you see Ana often?”

  He was shifting positions, trying to get comfortable. “Look, I wasn’t good about the baby, okay? No point lying. Sometimes she was asleep when I got there, sometimes Salma had her spend the night at a friend’s house. You find that child and I’ll make up for all of that. I swear it to you.”

  “Money, Mr. Leighton,” Mike said. “How’d you pay Salma’s bills?”

  “You’ll see when you get my banking records. I keep an office at my father’s business. Family money, nothing that Claire ever had any access to or reason to see. There’s a c
orporation I set up, within my father’s firm. The checks were all written on the Leighton Entertainment account. He assumed it was for things I needed for my political advancement.”

  “How about cash?” I asked the congressman. “Did you give Salma large sums of cash?”

  “Five hundred dollars when I saw her, sometimes a thousand if she wanted something special for the baby.”

  He really didn’t seem to be aware of, nor try to explain away, the unusual amounts of cash we had found in Salma’s closet.

  “Who knew about your affair with Salma?” I asked.

  “My secretary,” Leighton said, taking time to think. “She wrote the checks. I never told anyone else.”

  “No one at all? No friends, no colleagues?”

  “My closest friends are guys like Donny Baynes, Ms. Cooper. I didn’t go there.”

  “And no one at work?”

  “Just Kendall. Kendall was around at the beginning. He picked up on it. He’s got a nose for trouble. I’m sure he figured it out.”

  Mike was all over this. “Kendall Reid, the city councilman who was just indicted on the phantom funds scheme?”

  “Yes. Kendall actually worked for me before he ran for the council job. He knows Salma.”

  “Kendall knew about her, or actually met her?”

  “They’ve met. He knew her, that’s what I meant.”

  “How well?” Mike asked.

  Ethan Leighton seemed surprised by the direction of the questions. “I guess, just through me. I guess.”

  “And it was Reid you called after your accident?” I said. “He’s the guy who tried to take the weight for you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, he did. Crazy, I know.”

  “Have you talked to him since you found out Salma was murdered?” Mike asked.

  At the same time that Leighton answered with a single word—“Yes”—Lem Howell spoke. “Ethan hasn’t talked to anyone about this except Claire, his father, and me.”

  Leighton exhaled as Mike stepped between Lem and the congressman.

  “When did you talk to Kendall Reid? Exactly when?”

  “I’m sorry, Lem. I should have listened to you,” Leighton said to his lawyer, before answering Mike’s question. “I met him yesterday, just for a few minutes. Just to commiserate about my arrest and the news of his indictment.”