by Paul Batista
Goldstein, without ever once expressing it, respected Raquel and she knew after all her years that long intense trials aroused passions and even irrationality in the most seasoned lawyers such as Raquel. Trials, Goldstein often commented, were not for the fainthearted.
Goldstein finally and without emotion said, “I think we’ve covered enough ground here. These are, I know, difficult circumstances for everyone. Even for me. I will see you all in the courtroom in ten minutes so that I can speak, as I’ve indicated, to the jurors. And I will then see all of you here in my chambers at nine tomorrow morning to learn the defendant’s decision and move on from there. And, Mr. Decker, I will tell the jurors they are free to return home. Your motions regarding them and Ms. Rematti are denied.”
CHAPTER 35
AS HAD HAPPENED so often in his life, Hugo Salazar had only one objective: to survive. At the moment he recognized that Lydia Guzman was dead, he realized, too, that Oscar Caliente would order his death. In the years he’d known Caliente, he had developed a sixth sense as to the man’s lunatic ways of thinking, planning, and irrationally giving irrevocable orders. Caliente detested failure to carry out his orders.
Thousands of dollars had already been spent, both in cash and cocaine, on Lydia Guzman. She was supposed to live to perform her assignment—to vote for the acquittal of Angelina Baldesteri. All that money was now wasted. And Lydia had died while with Hugo. It was a unique one-person assignment. It wouldn’t matter that Hugo had succeeded in seducing Lydia Guzman: “She’s a slut and a cokehead,” Robert Calvaro had said when Hugo first told him Lydia agreed to take the money and the cocaine in exchange for her vote. “How could you miss?”
Nor would it matter that Hugo had converted Lydia into his girlfriend. Her emotional and physical attachment to him was insurance that the deal would be kept. And Lydia had another important virtue: she was street-smart and knew that if she failed to deliver on her promise, Hugo’s men would inevitably punish her. She was bound to him by money, drugs, sex, affection, and fear.
Above all, Hugo recognized that Oscar Caliente not only did not tolerate failure but never allowed anyone to be left in a position to tell secrets. Men who knew his secrets were men who needed to be watched, controlled, or made silent forever. Everyone could be replaced, including Hugo Salazar.
After leaving the penthouse apartment—which for three years was rented at $25,000 each month by the Polo Grounds, LLC, but used only six times by Robert Calvaro, for five weeks by Hugo and was otherwise empty—Hugo went to the apartment he had rented, under the name Hugo Cortes, on York Avenue at 88th Street. It was a spare, neat, one-bedroom apartment in an immense but nondescript building that had a British-sounding name, the Oxford. Hugo was popular there with the uniformed doormen and the small army of porters and handymen. All of them spoke Spanish. They admired Señor Cortes. He dressed each day in tastefully tailored British suits, he was an executive, he traveled often, and it seemed that almost every night he was home he came through the lobby with different women, all gorgeous, most of them blond. The doormen admired Hugo as if he were a famous baseball player, a modern conqueror. He had never brought Lydia Guzman to this building.
Hurriedly and methodically, he packed three leather suitcases with his most expensive clothing and also with the kinds of clothes he had worn when he worked years earlier as a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant—blue jeans, tee shirts printed with the names of the Mets and the Yankees, and the almost inflexible and oversize baseball caps that were worn with the stiff bills pulled to the right or left side of his head like a teenager who was already in a gang or aspiring to a gang membership. Hugo also carefully packed supple, four-thousand-dollar dress shoes with wooden shoe trees in them. Finally, he took from the safe drilled into the back of one of the closets $225,000 in cash, two pistols, bullets, a switchblade, and his favorite weapon, a machete. He also removed the three passports from Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina, three drivers’ licenses from New York, California, and Florida, and six American Express cards. The passports, credit cards, and licenses all had his pictures and the names Ramon Alvarez, Gustavo Lopez, and Raul Escribano. The credit limits on each card were unrestricted.
Hugo stacked his locked leather suitcases and bags just inside the apartment door. After a ride with a woman and her tiny child in the opulent elevator, he strolled through the lobby. Instead of retrieving his new Lexus sports car from the garage in the building’s basement, he turned left on York Avenue in the direction of a Hertz rental garage on 91st Street, only a few blocks away. Discreetly, he took his gold-plated iPhone from the left pocket of his sports jacket and Lydia’s diamond-encrusted iPhone and, unnoticed by anyone in the cool night, ground both of them under the heel of his right shoe as if he were extinguishing a cigarette. He was a strong man in every possible way: the cell phones were flattened to pieces. He quickly picked the fragments up and, with surprising ease, ripped the flattened phones into pieces. He dropped each of the unidentifiable pieces into separate trash cans as he walked to the Hertz garage.
He was now, he knew, untethered: Robert Calvaro and the ever-changing cast of men who did his bidding could not find him any time they wished through the unique signal from the cell phones.
At the Hertz counter he decided to use the license and American Express card of Raul Escribano. He ordered a Chevrolet four-by-four rather than the Lincoln Navigator the woman at the counter urged on him at the same price, as if she thought the black Lincoln was the ornament that a man as attractive as Raul Escribano should have.
Hugo parked the car one block from his apartment building rather than in its underground garage. Instead of the lobby, he reentered the building through the service entrance and took one of the wheeled luggage carts in the worn service elevator to his apartment. He loaded the luggage cart and, after tossing the apartment keys on the floor, wheeled the loaded cart back to the service elevator and out of the building to the nearby street where the Chevy was parked. Once he loaded the car, he used the handle of his pistol to smash the GPS screen and the dashboard buttons of the car’s navigation system.
CHAPTER 36
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, he was driving on the upper reaches of the West Side Highway. He had decided to travel to Canada. In the world in which he had so long lived, he’d learned that the border between the United States and Canada was porous even in the years after 9/11. To his left were the black waters of the Hudson River. There were moving points of light from barges and tugboats on the dark surface of the river. The New Jersey Palisades loomed high over the river’s western shore. The walls of the Palisades were a cliff. At the top of the cliffs were towering apartment buildings, all alight. Ahead of him was the expanse of the George Washington Bridge outlined against the night sky by strings of lights. And to his right were the mossy black trees, shrubs, and boulders of Riverside Park.
The north-flowing traffic on the highway was sparse. Hugo intended to drive four hours to the north before stopping at any random chain motel he could find when he reached that four-hour point. He drove carefully, slightly below the speed limit. He was surprised, then, when a black unmarked patrol car in the vicinity of West 128th Street began flashing its lights, signaling for him to stop.
All along the West Side Highway were multiple areas where vehicles could pull over. Most of the cutoffs were large enough for only one, two, or three cars. They had originally been designed for unobstructed views and pictures of the majestic Hudson River and in the farther distance the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. Now Hugo knew them only as places where suburbanites at night made quick stops to buy cheap bags of coke or five or six joints before speeding away. Sometimes the cut-out areas held abandoned, stolen, or burned-out cars.
Hugo eased his car into one of the cutouts within fifteen seconds of the start of the flashing lights. He stopped far enough to leave room for the black cruiser to have space behind him. In the rear-view mirror, he saw two men leave the cruiser, one from the driver’s side and the other fro
m the passenger side. They were dressed in black. They moved quickly.
Hugo instinctively understood what was happening and who they were even though he could see only black silhouettes. In a series of fluid movements, Hugo turned off the lights in his car, took the switchblade from the inside pocket of his cashmere sports coat, and leaped outside. As intermittent traffic swept by, he stabbed the driver in the heart and, two seconds later, plunged the long blade into the other man’s stomach, swirling the blade so as to eviscerate him. They were the blond men who had served him and Lydia Guzman on the yacht, the same men who had followed Raquel Rematti on Madison Avenue. They had the zigzag symbols on their scalps.
Hugo quickly leaned into the black car. Using his elbow, he turned off the car’s flashing lights and all of its other lights. With a paper towel, he switched off the ignition key and put the key in his pocket. The driver’s-side door had been left open and he pushed it closed with his elbow. He didn’t have to touch anything and he would toss the key out the window eighty miles north of the city into a rural field.
As he walked away from the black cruiser, he heard moans from the man he had stabbed in the stomach. There was no need for Hugo to do another thing to the man who was groaning; he was only seconds away from death, as Hugo Salazar well knew. He was, after all, The Blade of the Hamptons.
CHAPTER 37
KEN’S BROOME STREET Bar, at the corner of Broome Street and West Broadway, was an old-fashioned saloon. In the three decades Raquel Rematti had lived in Manhattan, the bar had never changed. Despite all the cheesy gentrification of SoHo over the years, Ken’s remained what it always had been. The bar dated from the late 1800s, the tables and chairs were still all old wood—many of the tables had carved on their surfaces names and initials that must have been etched there as long ago as half a century—and the waiters were still old and surly.
Raquel had loved the place since she first set foot in it in 1985, three weeks after she graduated from law school. She had long ago forgotten the Waspish name of the young partner from Sullivan & Cromwell, where she spent two boring years immediately after leaving Harvard with her magna cum laude law degree. Although she’d long ago forgotten the man’s name—he had picked Ken’s bar because it was then so out of the mainstream that he was sure none of the more senior partners at the stuffy, genteel firm would ever be there to see a junior partner with a gorgeous new associate, a violation of the firm’s then-unwritten but iron code of conduct—Raquel had for years cherished the seedy, never-changing saloon. She could, when she needed to isolate herself in order to relax, sit for two hours at the long counter that ran along the windows and gaze out at the parades of downtown walkers. The surface of the street was made of smooth white brick.
Ken’s had other advantages for Raquel. For years she had known well the three successive managers and through them she could arrange the use of the small private party rooms, about which very few customers seemed to know. It was difficult for Raquel to imagine a more private place in Manhattan, other than someone’s apartment, to have a secret meeting. She certainly was not going to have a meeting with Angelina Baldesteri at her own apartment on Riverside Drive or at her office on Park Avenue or at the Waldorf Astoria. So she had called Irish-accented Tommy Bond, the bar’s manager for the last six years, to ask him to let her use one of the small private rooms for two hours.
“For you, Councilor, anything your little heart desires. How many other revelers will you have with you?” Tommy had asked.
“Just one. But people will recognize her. I’d really appreciate it if you could rush her in as soon as she walks into the front door.”
“Ain’t Angelina Jolie now, is it?”
“Close, Tommy, but no cigar.”
One virtue of Angelina Baldesteri was that she was always on time. Raquel sat in the private room, with a mug of coffee, for only a few minutes when she heard a slight commotion just outside the closed door. When it opened, Raquel caught a glimpse of three Secret Service agents in business suits. They closed the door as soon as Angelina entered the room.
Angelina sat down. “This is quite a dump,” she said.
“I like it. Lots of privacy. And, lady, do we need privacy.”
“What do you think?” Angelina asked.
“That’s the first time you’ve asked me that question about anything,” Raquel answered.
“I asked you a question.”
“Well,” Raquel said, “obviously having eleven jurors increases the chances of conviction. That’s simple math. That’s what I think.”
Angelina was three feet away from Raquel on the other side of the table. They stared into each other’s eyes. Absolute hostility. The mutual locked-in gaze of true anger, fear, and naked hatred of warriors.
Angelina said, “That’s not a particularly insightful comment. I could get that point from a sixth grader, not from America’s greatest female defense lawyer.”
“Thanks for the compliment, such as it is.” Raquel took a sip of her lukewarm coffee. “I’ve been around jurors for years. Ninety-nine-point-five percent of them are inscrutable. But Lydia Guzman liked you. Nothing inscrutable about her.”
“I felt the same way about her,” Angelina said.
Slowly, deliberately, Raquel said, “There’s a cardinal rule of life, Senator: don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You didn’t feel she liked you. You knew she would never vote to convict. Personally, I don’t think she cared whether you lived or died, whether you were a President or a janitor’s girlfriend.”
“Why are we talking about a dead junkie?”
“Why not? Who are you going to have bribed next?”
“You can’t be that stupid. I wouldn’t bribe anyone.”
“Where’s Calvaro? Or should I say Caliente?”
“I don’t know. But I do know one thing. I regret the day I laid eyes on you.” She waited, unblinking, and staring at Raquel.
Raquel said, “Senator, right now we’re sisters. Right now, we can’t disown each other. And you want to know something? I can’t ask you any questions if the trial goes on and you get back on the witness stand.”
“You think so? I call that malpractice.”
“Funny, I call what you did lying. Do you think anybody was fooled when you denied that janitor was Calvaro? Do you think I can have a client on the stand who I know is a liar?”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“It’s a simple, single word that has only one meaning. If I go along with the charade of asking you questions to which the answers will be lies—and I know that from you, by the way—I’ll have my license pulled.”
“That’s the last thing you should be worried about. I can make it happen that you’ll wind up in a Bronx courthouse chasing clients for traffic cases.”
“I doubt that.”
“Don’t doubt it.”
“I also doubt that Calvaro can get to any of the other jurors. Salazar could pull pearls out of an oyster in five seconds as he did with Guzman—”
“Just like he did with you, by the way,” Angelina interrupted.
“But not with any of the others. And if he did, I’d have to report you. We can talk confidentially about anything illegal you did in the past, but I have a duty to go to the prosecutors if I believe you and others are planning to break the law in the future or are in the process of doing it. That’s not me speaking from the holy mountain, that’s basic ethics.”
“What do you know about ethics?” Angelina asked.
“Without a doubt, more than you.”
Angelina’s eyes narrowed. There was a slyness in her expression. “What about the ethics of sleeping with Hayes Smith while you were defending me?”
“Nothing unethical about that. I can sleep with anyone. You do.”
Angelina Baldesteri said, “You need to know something. I slept with Hayes Smith. Even while he was sleeping with you and telling you that you were his love forever and anon. He was quite good. In fact, I was sleeping with him right up to
the time the trial started. And you, Ms. Confidentiality, were having pillow talk with him about everything I told you. So please don’t you bullshit a bullshitter.”
A freezing wave of jealousy, hatred, betrayal, and the urgent need to cry washed through Raquel’s entire system. She hoped desperately that this stone-cold woman didn’t detect her feelings or sense that freezing, all-engulfing internal wave.
“Are there any more questions,” Raquel said, “that you want to ask me about the decision Naomi Goldstein wants you to make?”
“One of those things about Hayes,” Angelina persisted, “was that when his dick was fully erect he had that birthmark on the shaft that somehow resembled a cross. It was like having sex with Jesus.”
“I can tell you that if you go back on that stand you are going to wind up being indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Or, to put it in a more lawyer-like fashion, you’ll be pulled to pieces, flayed. In other words, convicted.”
“I told you when we met that I wanted to get this trial over quickly so that I can clear the path for my campaign.”
“And I told you that politics didn’t concern me at all, that my job as a lawyer was to avoid a conviction.”
“No, your job was to get an acquittal, not a mistrial, not a conviction.”
“That might have been the job you had in mind, Senator, but I live on this planet. A world without guarantees. You thought you had a guarantee with Guzman.” She paused, hoping that the tape recorder function in the iPhone in her bag next to her Ruger was still running. “And in your world of guarantees,” Raquel said, “you or Calvaro or someone got it into your head that bribing a pathetic drug addict like Lydia Guzman was one sure way to get a guaranteed acquittal.”
