by Paul Batista
Raquel said, “Angelina, you’re forgetting Raquel’s rule number one. Remember? Never talk to me about anything other than lunch when anyone else is around. We’ll talk about this when we get inside my office.”
At the end of each trial day, Angelina and Raquel went to Raquel’s office to discuss what had happened that day in court and what might happen the next day. They were always the only two people in the room. Raquel at first had found a stubbornness in Angelina’s unwillingness to understand a basic rule of the world in which Raquel earned her living: what a lawyer and client said to each other was always confidential, a secret, unless someone else who was not also a lawyer of the client was present. That was the essence of the attorney-client privilege, the omerta between lawyer and client; it was a private and insular relationship. The driver and the agents in the SUV were not Angelina’s lawyers. They were her safe keepers. If they wanted to, or if they were somehow compelled to, they could freely repeat anything and everything Raquel and Angelina said to each other in the agents’ presence.
Angelina, a highly accomplished woman who had a PhD in economics from Yale, always had difficulty in following Raquel’s “Rule Number One.” By instincts and by years in politics, Senator Baldesteri was a collaborator, although always the boss. Even when her husband was alive and during all of his political campaigns, she met and talked constantly with his and her aides, advisors, and consultants. When her husband was President, she was described by many as the sole member of a British-style Shadow Cabinet; others called her the “Princess of Darkness.” She encouraged freewheeling discussions, the broaching of new or radical ideas and approaches. She always questioned and probed her and the President’s aides as she and the President jointly worked their way to decisions. So the idea that she had to treat Raquel Rematti like a priest, the one person to whom she could not speak without losing the attorney-client privilege if anyone else was in earshot, was still alien to her. It still irritated her.
During the thirty-minute drive through rain-delayed traffic in downtown Manhattan to Raquel’s Midtown office, Senator Baldesteri simply stared out the window, knowing that, while she could see people, umbrellas, storefronts, and New York’s incredible array of stone buildings, no one from the outside could see her because of the deep tinting of the bulletproof windows. People stopped on the sidewalks in the rain as the black vans passed, with armed agents seated behind slightly open windows despite the rain as they scanned the walkers on the streets while the black entourage of vans passed. It was an impressive sight even for jaded Manhattanites.
* * *
Ever since she had started representing Angelina, there were always three parking spaces left open directly in front of Raquel’s office building. They were cordoned off by yellow cones with orange police tape linking them. Immediately drenched in the downpour, one of the agents jumped out of the lead vehicle and moved the yellow cones to create an opening for all three SUVs to park as soon as the vans reached Raquel’s office building.
As usual, there were several members of the Senator’s staff waiting in the reception area of Raquel’s office. They were all between twenty-five and thirty-five. They stood up when Raquel and Angelina walked through the glass door to Raquel’s suite. And they all sat again when the two women walked into the inner office and that door closed.
“So,” Raquel said as she sat behind her sleek glass desk, “what’s the story?”
Angelina, now free to speak after being furiously pent up on the slow uptown drive, said, “Do you think I’d ever be in a shower with that guy?”
“I don’t know. Stranger things have happened. These walls have heard some very odd and unusual things through the years. It’s good they can’t speak.”
“He’s lying. He made it up. Or that Decker bastard had him make it up. Any suggestions? I’m all ears.”
“And I need,” Raquel said, “to show that he made it up.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. I can see the editors in the News and Post right now coming up with the same front-page headline: Dirty Money Shower Talk.”
Angelina was straightforward and blunt. “I didn’t hire you to worry about the public relations aspects of all this. I hired you to be my lawyer.”
Raquel leaned backward in her chair without speaking. Behind her, outside the large windows, the rain was now falling so intensely that, even though it was only five on a mid-May afternoon, it was dark outside. Dark, too, was her office: only a small lamp on a table next to her sofa was on.
“In fact,” Angelina said, “it was you who reminded me that your business was running a saloon, like Bogart in Casablanca, not the politics of the world. I have people who know how to deal in public relations.”
Raquel, early in her career, had made a conscious decision never to like or dislike her clients, although it was often impossible to ignore this instinctive human tendency to have favorable or unfavorable feelings about another person. During her popular seminars on trial practice at Columbia Law School, she always emphasized the importance of maintaining a distance from, but not an indifference to, clients. From time to time in her career, she’d broken her own rule, as she had during the long trial, several years earlier, of Juan Suarez, an illegal immigrant accused of killing the tenth richest man in the world, Brad Richardson, in East Hampton, at the far east end of Long Island. Juan was charming, charismatic, and utterly believable to her. Raquel had realized not long after she first met Juan, known as The Blade of the Hamptons in the world press, in his jail cell that she not only liked him, but as time passed, she had fallen in love with him without ever saying that freighted word love to anyone. The thought of him still sometimes preoccupied her although she had no idea where he now was. After the trial, Juan, whose real name as she came to learn might have been Anibal Vaz or something else, was deported when she miraculously won his release from the sentence of life imprisonment. Raquel was virtually certain that he’d returned to the United States, probably, in fact, to New York City. He had many reincarnations, many names, as she now knew. She found herself often looking for him in crowds, a sure sign of her lingering attachment, despite the simple fact that he was a consummate liar.
“I do have an idea,” the Senator said. “Give me a second.”
She opened the door to Raquel’s office, that inner sanctum, the realm of secrets. Angelina said, “Laura, bring me the laptop.”
A thirty-year-old woman rose from one of the cushioned seats in the waiting room. She carried a silver Apple laptop and handed it to Angelina, who closed the door. Angelina silently and intently spent three minutes scrolling through the picture section of the miraculous device. When she found the picture for which she’d been looking, she then slid the open laptop computer to Raquel.
“When was this taken?” Raquel asked after studying the vivid color picture.
“Three years ago. You see my face turned to the side. My name. The date. You see all that?”
“I do,” Raquel said. “I also see the technician’s name and the words Mount Sinai Hospital.”
“You’d have no reason to know this,” the Senator said. “But for two weeks three years ago I simply vanished from public sight. I wasn’t walking the Appalachian Trail with Terry Sandford.”
“Is this actually three years old?”
“Of course. Can’t you see the date?”
At her Columbia seminars, Raquel had always stressed the importance of listening to clients, of letting them talk. After all, it was the client who was there when the events happened, the words were spoken, and the actions were taken. They later gave, or chose not to give, the lawyers the information. Lawyers could not, or at least they should not, make up stories for clients. The art of listening, Raquel told the students. Lawyers talk too much, she instructed them. You don’t learn by talking. You learn by listening.
And now Raquel was not only listening. She was looking at the crucially important picture Angelina Baldesteri had just given her.
>
CHAPTER 4
NAOMI GOLDSTEIN, AT precisely nine in the morning, said, “Mr. Hughes, you know you’re still under oath?”
“I do.”
Raquel was already standing at the podium. Every one of the jurors had a computer screen in front of him or her. And there was a large computer screen to the side of the old-fashioned easel on which Raquel had started her black letter list of Gordon Hughes’ lies and crimes. She was not a fan of computer screens. She thought of technology as a distraction in a courtroom, believing the best technique was for jurors to watch and listen, not to be distracted by the addictive wizardry of technological devices. But this was one of those times she knew she had to be flexible. At the outset of this day’s cross-examination, all the computer screens were blank. But that would soon change.
“Listen to me, Mr. Hughes: When we ended yesterday, you described taking a shower with the Senator, do you remember that?”
Gordon Hughes had obviously slept well. He looked relaxed. Like most former high school and college athletes—for that matter, like most men—he had the confidence that anything he said about sex with a woman was accepted as true; it stuck, an assertion that could never be proven false.
“Yes, I do remember,” he said, plainly satisfied with himself.
“Showers with another person are intimate events?”
“In my life they always have been.”
“How many times did you shower with the Senator?”
“I can’t be sure.” Gordon Hughes, fresh and alert, had remembered to look at the jurors when he answered. Decker must have told him he needed to reestablish that rapport.
“Why did you shower with her?”
“Every time we had sex she wanted to shower.”
“Did you soap and clean every part of her?”
“I did. Every part. Outside and inside.”
“How often did this happen?”
“Often. Twenty times, maybe more.”
“Did you wash her back during those showers?”
“Her back? Sure. I was usually behind her.”
“And you’ve had showers with her recently, isn’t that right? As recently as a month ago, is that correct?”
“Maybe more recently. Until she saw my name on the Government’s witness list. Then it stopped.”
“What is her back like?”
“Strong. Shapely. When she was a student at Wellesley College, she was on the female rowing team. You can still see the strength and shapeliness that created on her back.”
Raquel paused. “How big are the scars on her back?”
Gordon Hughes took a sip of water from his Evian bottle. His grip tightened on the half-empty plastic bottle and the crackling noise of crushing plastic reverberated in the big ceremonial courtroom. His hand was too close to the microphone.
“Scars?” he repeated.
“You know what a scar is, don’t you?”
“I do.”
Raquel said to Naomi Goldstein, “May I have the technician put a single image on the screen?”
Naomi Goldstein said, “Certainly.”
And then the image Raquel had first seen on Senator Baldesteri’s laptop simultaneously filled the big screen and the laptops in front of each of the jurors.
“You see that computer image, don’t you, sir?”
“I do.”
“Who’s depicted in it?”
“The Senator.”
“You see her profile, correct?”
“I do.”
“You see her name?”
“I do.”
“You see the date?”
“I do.”
“It’s three years ago, isn’t that right?”
“That’s what it says on the photo.”
“You see that running from her shoulder blades to her waist and following the sides of her spine are two prominent rows of healed-over scars, isn’t that correct?”
“I see them,” Hughes answered.
“They’re healed but they’re swollen, correct?”
“They look that way.”
“They have that Frankenstein kind of look, correct, sir?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You see them clearly, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“When you soaped the Senator’s back, you never saw those, isn’t that right, Mr. Hughes?”
Gordon Hughes said nothing.
Finally, Naomi Goldstein spoke, “You have to answer the question, Mr. Hughes. You do understand the question, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You never saw those scars, did you, Mr. Hughes, during any of your twenty or more showers with the Senator, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“And that’s because you never showered with the Senator, correct, sir?”
Hughes, completely disarmed, didn’t hesitate: “Never.”
One of the lawyers at Hunter Decker’s prosecution table audibly groaned.
Raquel asked, “And she never told you in the shower or anywhere else not to report the $1.5 million to the Federal Election Commission, isn’t that correct, sir?”
“Yes. Never.”
Raquel took the magic marker to the white sheet on the easel. She wrote, Next crime of Gordon Hughes: Lied to the jurors—perjury at trial.
Naomi Goldstein, almost in a whisper, said, “Do you have any more questions, Ms. Rematti?”
“No.” Unlike most lawyers, Raquel knew the great skill of when to stop.
“Mr. Decker,” Goldstein said, “do you have any questions on re-direct?”
“No.”
“You can step down,” Goldstein said to Gordon Hughes as if she were telling a smelly drunk to leave the room.
Clutching the now empty and crumpled bottle of Evian, Gordon Hughes left the elevated witness stand and passed by the entire length of the jury box. Not one of the jurors even glanced at him. Nor did Hunter Decker.
* * *
“Judge,” Raquel said, “I’d ask at this point for a conference in your chambers.”
“First come up here to the bench.”
To keep the jurors from hearing the conversation, the court reporter, lugging her elaborate equipment, stepped up to Goldstein’s elevated bench at the same time the lawyers did.
Naomi Goldstein’s eyes had a filmy sheen over them, a symbol of her age. Raquel was so close to Goldstein that she smelled that outdated, slightly vanilla-scented perfume that her own grandmother used when Raquel was a child.
“Why?” Goldstein asked. “I have a jury here. Every minute of delay in this trial takes a minute out of their lives.”
“We have just had a witness for the prosecution, its lead witness, who has just lied, and grossly so.”
“I’ve been sitting on this bench for thirty years, Ms. Rematti. This is not the first time I’ve heard a witness lie.” She stared at Raquel. “What is it that you want to discuss in my chambers? Why do we need to squander time? The jury has every reason to believe this witness is a liar.”
“It goes beyond that,” Raquel said. “Was it his idea to lie? Or did the prosecution instruct him to lie?”
Naomi Goldstein looked at Hunter Decker. “Do you want to say something?”
“What Ms. Rematti has just said, Your Honor, is without a doubt the most outrageous thing I have ever heard from a trial lawyer in twenty years of practicing law. She’s accusing me and my associates of the crime of suborning perjury.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Mr. Decker,” Goldstein said. “And describing something as outrageous is not a legal argument. It’s an expression of hurt pride.”
“If this witness has lied, and I emphasize if, I’ll have the Attorney General undertake an investigation. At this point, I don’t even know what Ms. Rematti wants.”
Goldstein, with no change of expression, now looked at Raquel. “What is it exactly that you want? A mistrial?”
“No, this is the most publicized trial in the
world today. A former First Lady, a sitting Senator, a potential candidate for President, is on trial on political charges on the orders of a Republican President, a Republican Attorney General, and a Republican United States Attorney.”
“And your point?”
“I suggest you give a curative instruction to the jury now that if it finds a witness has lied in any one respect, it can find the witness has lied in all respects.”
“No, Ms. Rematti, you know better than that. It’s an instruction I give at the end of every trial, along with many other instructions, when all the evidence is in. I won’t do that now. No matter how you may view what we are involved with here, it is no different from any other criminal trial.”
“It is, Judge,” Raquel said. “The world will think this is a court in a third-world country where the truth does not matter, particularly where the charges are politically motivated. This trial will take weeks. That instruction, when you give it at the end of the trial, will be buried in a host of other instructions.”
As usual, Naomi Goldstein did not visibly react, but she angrily whispered, “Ms. Rematti, I’ve known you for years. Don’t ever call my court a third-world country again, or one of my trials a show trial. I will hold you in contempt if you do. Your request is denied. Let’s move on with the trial. You’ve made your record. You can raise this on appeal if there is a conviction. We have real work to do. Mr. Decker, send someone into the hallway and call your next witness. And be careful, Mr. Decker.”
As Raquel and Hunter Decker left the bench, returning to their separate tables, he whispered to her, “You’re a dead woman for this.” He sounded serious.
Raquel smiled.
At the defense table, Baldesteri quietly said to Raquel, “What was that all about?”
“I was trying to get Decker disbarred,” Raquel said, smiling. “Just like you wanted. It didn’t work.” The two women again shared their mutual sense of humor. “In fact, he just now said I was a walking dead woman.”
“Bullshit, you’re immortal,” the Senator whispered.
CHAPTER 5
IT WAS NOT unusual in very major cases—and the case against Angelina Baldesteri was both major and in many ways unprecedented—to have two hundred names on the Government’s list of potential witnesses. The list was almost always a “shock and awe” tactic, not a well-thought-out anticipation of people the Government actually intended to call. When Angelina first saw the list one week before the trial after Hunter Decker was required to turn it over to Raquel, the Senator had laughed sardonically, “What kind of sick joke is this? Some of the names here are people I went to high school with back in Louisiana. Their dads were oyster fishermen, just like my daddy. Some of these people were my classmates in high school. Did I do something wrong when I was elected class president?”
