Confessions of an Innocent Man

by David R. Dow

  Reinhardt said, Nobody would want to kill her.

  I said, I know. I told the police exactly that. They think I did it.

  Reinhardt said, Did you?

  I looked at him, not feigning pain.

  He said, I’m sorry.

  Later I would learn he had spent time with Detectives Pisarro and Cole while in town. All I knew then was he was going to ask the police when we could recover his mother so we could hold a ceremony.

  I said, I can ask them that.

  He said, She wasn’t a fan of ritual, but I imagine there are quite a few people who would like a formal opportunity to tell her goodbye. It might speed things up if we are both on top of them.

  Something about the way he said goodbye seemed unnatural to me, as if he was already reevaluating our own relationship. Granted, he did not know me well, but he knew me well enough. Yet anything I said would come off as desperate. I was already terrified and bereft. I didn’t need to be desperate as well. So all I said was, Okay.

  * * *

  • • •

  Then he asked the question I knew he would ask. Where was I? Why hadn’t I been there, is what Reinhardt wanted to know.

  How could I tell him?

  The night of the murder was a Monday, when we are open only for private affairs. This particular Monday, we were hosting a party for one of our own. Britanny, a waitress for me since opening day, was heading off to the CIA. Tieresse stopped by in the late afternoon after signing papers in a lawyer’s office to underwrite the construction of a new state-of-the-art laboratory at Houston’s biggest cancer hospital. She walked into the kitchen as I was sliding a mustard-coated leg of lamb out of the oven. She said, Julia Child’s recipe? And I said, None better. Why don’t you stay and join us?

  Tieresse said, As delicious as it smells in here, I have to be in San Antonio tomorrow morning at seven. I’ll be having sweet dreams by the time you all call it a night.

  She picked up a cashew crusted with pink salt and sesame seeds, studied it, and popped it in her mouth. I said, Delicious, right?

  She looked through the glass into the dining room, where Britanny was sitting with Benita drinking wine. She said, That girl is far too pretty to be a spy.

  I said, Hah, hah.

  Tieresse said, And too hot to be a chef.

  I didn’t say anything in response to that.

  She kissed me, and then she said, I’ll stop by tomorrow night when I get back to town.

  I walked her out then helped the gang put all the food on the banquette. People passed around platters of lamb and rice; a salad of cucumbers, tomato, and roasted lemon; eggplant tossed with tahini; and scratch-made pita prepared by a nineteen-year-old busboy from Beirut I’d hired the month before. We made toasts and told stories. My favorite was when Georgette recounted the night Britanny’s hair caught fire when she bent too close over a flaming tableside dessert and, in her desperation to put it out, knocked over a decanter full of a three-thousand-dollar Bordeaux, spattering it across the seersucker suit of a retired federal judge.

  At just past midnight, with the long rectangular table we had made by pushing six smaller tables together littered with a dozen empty wine bottles, two empty bottles of tequila, and an almost empty liter of cognac, I kicked everybody out. I said, You people need to go home and sleep it off. We can clean up this mess in the morning.

  Everyone shuffled out and got in a cab or on the train. Everyone except Brittany. We woke up naked, hungover, and in my bed when we heard Esteban and Luis dropping bottles in the recycle bin the next morning at nine. She left through the back door, embarrassed to see the others, I suppose, and I did not see her again until over a year later, when she testified at my trial as a newlywed who worked as a sous chef in a three-star restaurant two blocks from Central Park.

  So that, as I’m sure you can understand, is why I did not know quite how to answer Reinhardt’s simple question.

  * * *

  • • •

  In a testament to the talent of the cooks and floor managers I had hired, business went on at La Ventana exactly as it had before. It was yet another reminder of Tieresse, yet another thing she had been right about. I was dispensable. I would approve the menu in the morning and sign off on purchases, then climb the stairs to the second floor and stay in my apartment until the following day. I called the police every few hours to ask about progress. After a couple of days they stopped taking my calls. Reinhardt was staying at a downtown hotel. In retrospect, he might have seemed a bit cool toward me, but at the time, I believed he was suffering from the same shock I was. Three days after Tieresse’s death he flew home, telling me he’d return once the body was released. I did not learn until later that the police had interviewed him for more than six hours over two days about my relationship with his mother.

  Initially the local news media were kind to me, but the first suspect is always the spouse, and when the spouse is brown-skinned, over a decade younger, and billions of dollars poorer, he is also the second and the third. So I was not surprised when several parties canceled their reservations. It didn’t matter, though. The tables remained filled with walk-ins. In fact, business actually picked up, from people wanting to show their support, I suppose. Once or twice I started downstairs to thank them, but I couldn’t summon the will. So I sat on my bed, with the TV tuned to the local news and the volume on mute, ready to listen if the reporters started to talk about the case. The aroma of onions and garlic cooking in butter wafted up from below and made me queasy. I pressed pillows over my ears to muffle the sound of corks popping and dull the din of diners and drinkers enjoying themselves. When my stomach growled I brewed an espresso or ate tuna from a can or peanut butter from the jar.

  Eight days after the crime, just as we were opening for lunch, Cole and Pisarro came to arrest me. Neither one was a good cop anymore. Pisarro said, We are here to arrest you for murder. They put handcuffs on my wrists and paraded me through my kitchen and dining room. People on my staff were crying. Diners put down their forks and stared.

  They took me downtown and put me in the same room where they had interviewed me the last time. Cole had a theory. I was nervous Tieresse was going to divorce me. She had been angry I was flirting with Britanny and had gone home rather than stay at the party. I lured Britanny upstairs and got her drunk so she would pass out, and then I sneaked off, killed Tieresse, and crawled back into bed before Britanny awoke. I had ransacked Tieresse’s closet and stolen gem-laden necklaces to make the motive appear to be robbery.

  I said, That is ridiculous. Tieresse thought diamonds were an obscene indulgence and buying them provided blood money for despots and warlords. All her jewels were fake.

  Cole said, But a thief would not know that. You’re a deviously clever man.

  Pisarro said, Your fingerprints and DNA were on the desk in the parlor and the murder weapon.

  I said, I lived there. My DNA is all over the place.

  Pisarro said, The housekeeper told us she has the same cleaning routine every week. You would know what it was.

  I said, I am calling a lawyer.

  The courts hadn’t yet taken my money away. I called the only lawyer whose phone number I knew by heart, a friend who worked for a nonprofit, and asked him whom he would recommend. He mentioned two names, and I hired them both—a somewhat older white man from Houston named Jonathan who wears a bow tie with his three-piece suits and talks so softly you have to lean forward to hear him eviscerate the witnesses, and a German woman from New York named Heidi who specialized in representing accused Islamic terrorists and white nationalists and had reportedly never lost a case. They had worked together before, most recently winning an acquittal for a cattle rancher in Idaho accused of ambushing two federal agents attempting to serve a warrant. My lawyers persuaded the jury their client had believed these men wearing camouflage and carrying long guns aimed to rob him and had
fired out his window in self-defense. I paid them each a quarter of a million dollars up front. I was in good hands.

  Jonathan, whose office was a block away from the jail, arrived less than an hour after I called him just to introduce himself. The room grew quiet when he entered. He had a gleam in his eye, like he was having more fun than anyone alive. He explained I’d be booked into the county jail, but that he would be back first thing in the morning with his colleague to start planning our defense, and that I would be sleeping in my own bed the following day.

  I said, I want you to know I did not kill my wife and have no idea who did.

  He said, I believe you. It doesn’t matter to me, but I know it matters to you. So yes, I believe you.

  In the morning he was back with his colleague. Heidi did not ask whether I was guilty. She asked, Where were you when it happened?, and when I told her, she said, That’s going to be our biggest problem. I asked what other problems there would be, and she said, I’m not clairvoyant, I just know the math. They explained to me a death penalty trial is actually two trials. At the first one the jury decides whether I committed the crime. If the jurors think I did, there is a second phase where the only question is whether the sentence is life or death. They said that in a typical death penalty case they would devote most of their energy to the punishment trial, but in my case they believed they could win an acquittal.

  I said, That’s why I hired you. I did not kill my wife.

  Heidi had said, God, you sounded just like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive when you said that. I had seen the movie several times, but I did not know what line she was referring to, and didn’t care enough to ask. So I just shook my head. Then she said something chilling.

  She said, Here’s the thing, Rafael. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the jury thinks happened, and the prosecutors trying to put you away are very good, and they are going to tell the jury you are a broke Mexican who runs a small restaurant and fucks his waitresses and just waited for the chance to murder a cash cow you had hoodwinked and bamboozled.

  I said, Oh my God, not a single word of that is true. I am a US citizen. I do not fuck my waitresses. They’re not just hookers.

  She said, I don’t want to argue about verb choice here. That’s not really my point.

  And Jonathan said, I’m not sure you are understanding what we are telling you about how a trial works.

  Then he said, But what we want to make sure you are comfortable with is our strategy. We both think our best chance is a not guilty verdict, because if the jury thinks you did it, they are going to hate you too much for us to be able to persuade them later they should do anything other than sentence you to death.

  Heidi said, Apparently the police have already found four different women you have had sex with since the day you and Tieresse exchanged vows.

  She stared at me, waiting for a reply. I felt my head drop. My neck and throat felt hot, and I suspected they were turning red. I do not know how to explain what I was feeling right then. It wasn’t embarrassment or fear; it was more like shame. God, what could I possibly have been thinking? What kind of man treats the love of his life the way I treated mine? I said, If they’ve already found four, they won’t find any more. I told them both about everything.

  Heidi stopped writing. She put down her pen and folded her hands. She said, So, our biggest problem just got very much bigger.

  Jonathan asked me, Are you comfortable with taking the enormous risk of concentrating our efforts on the guilt phase?

  I said, I told you I am innocent.

  He said, I heard you, but that is not an answer to the question I asked you.

  I said, Yes I am comfortable with that. If the jury believes I could have done this to Tieresse, I do not care what else they do to me.

  Heidi said, Okay, then. We have work to do.

  They shook my hand and left, she bouncing on her toes, and he barely lifting his feet off the ground. Considering the stakes, I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. If a double murderer like OJ could get acquitted, then I, who had absolutely nothing to do with Tieresse’s death, would surely be found innocent as well.

  My lawyers were confident too. They had read out loud to me from notes that police and prosecutors had made from their interviews with witnesses. The statements were banal. My staff all talked about how in love Tieresse and I seemed to be. They told the story about how we had met, and how I did not care at all about money, so long as La Ventana brought in enough that I could pay my team a better salary than they could earn at any other restaurant in town. None of them had any doubt I adored my wife and could never harm her.

  On the other side, Reinhardt said something similar about his mother. The interviews with him were recorded. You could hear in his voice disbelief that I could have been involved. Yes, he wavered when Detective Pisarro told him about my promiscuity, but he still resisted Pisarro’s repeated if subtle efforts to get him to say Tieresse had expressed jealousy or worry about my motives in marrying her. He said, I think she might have proposed to him. She started to act twenty years younger. She was in love, but also brilliant and clear-eyed. If Rafael had been a gold digger, my mother would have known instantly. When he said my name, Rafael, there was no hint of enmity in his tone. It was only at the very end of their final conversation, when Detective Cole implied there was physical evidence implicating me in Tieresse’s death, that Reinhardt equivocated. Initially he said, What physical evidence? Rafael and my mother lived together. Cole had said, Exactly, we didn’t find his DNA where we should have. It is because he did too good a job cleaning up the crime scene. You could hear the blade of doubt even though the words were right. Too good a job? What does that even mean? But the barb was planted. The jury was already going to dislike me. That much was clear. But so long as Reinhardt assured them I loved Tieresse and could never do her harm, they’d put that dislike aside. If, however, the son was not going to stand shoulder to shoulder with his mother’s husband, if even he had doubt, if he had any at all, the other bad evidence my lawyer had predicted had made its appearance.

  * * *

  • • •

  The value of the estate Tieresse left me was more than two billion dollars. Reinhardt received an equal amount, and the remainder—almost five billion dollars more—was left to her charitable foundation. On paper I was one of the richest men in America, but it was money I would never see if convicted of her murder.

  I didn’t need it, though. More than a year earlier Tieresse had moved two hundred and forty million dollars into a trust I controlled in several offshore accounts. I told her I had no need for such sums. She’d replied, One never knows. If I get kidnapped on a trip to visit one of my orphanages, I’d like you to be able to quietly pay the ransom. Laugh lines around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. Investments had swelled the trust’s value to north of three hundred million dollars, and now, as it turned out, I was going to need the money for my own ransom, so I could post my bail and get back home.

  At seven the next morning two burly deputies escorted me through a series of underground tunnels then up a freight elevator to the seventh floor of the criminal courts building where they put me in a holding cell with the names of lawyers and their phone numbers scratched into the gray paint cracking off the cinder-block wall. Usually these cages had twenty or twenty-five people crammed into them, but I was the only one there. I said, Why so quiet? But the deputies took their handcuffs and walked away without answering. Two hours later my lawyers arrived. My fingers were blue and my arms and neck were covered with goose bumps. Heidi said, I can see my breath in here. Jonathan said, One of the deputies told me the boiler was broken. My teeth chattered as they described to me how the hearing would proceed.

  After another half hour, the deputies came back and walked me into the courtroom. I sat shivering between my lawyers. Six feet away the prosecutor stood behind a table covered with photographs of
my dead wife. She held one up and told the judge I was a dangerous brutal killer who needed to be locked up. She said I was a flight risk who would find safe haven with my family in Mexico, and because the district attorney would be seeking the death penalty, Mexico might refuse to extradite me back to Texas if I were to flee. Jonathan rose to speak. His voice had a Texas twang that had not been there yesterday. He told the judge I was a US citizen and had not lived in Mexico since coming here for college more than twenty years before. He said I was a respected chef and small business owner, and my ties to the local community were deep. They were prepared to surrender my passport and have me wear an ankle bracelet and remain under house arrest. The judge asked the prosecutor whether those terms were acceptable to her if he set bail at five million dollars. She said no one knew how much money I had stolen from my wife and hidden away, so no, she said, those terms were not acceptable. The judge said, I am persuaded, and he ordered me held without bail. I gasped as they led me away.

  We retraced our footsteps through the maze of underground tunnels and emerged into a new wing of the jail. They gave me an orange jumpsuit that smelled like bleach, plastic flip-flops, and a laminated ID. I was one of 9,416 inmates, half black, twenty percent Latino, ten percent Asian. Cell doors were electronically controlled. Most held two inmates, a few housed three. The one other inmate facing capital murder charges and I had cells to ourselves. Mine had a bunk, a sink, a toilet, and a metal shelf. Cells were arranged around a central area in an architecture that reminded me of the quadrangle where I’d gone to college. The common area had octagonal tables with attached stools bolted to the floor where we inmates would eat our meals after going through a cafeteria line with no choices and getting our trays. A TV tuned to a local station was on all the time. The diet was carbohydrate rich: rubbery pancakes and scrambled eggs, bologna sandwiches on pillowy white bread, Salisbury steaks with mashed potatoes from a box. Beverage choices included water, milk, instant coffee, and red punch from a plastic gallon jug. The other inmate facing death and I ate by ourselves in a separate room. After two days, his trial started, and when it ended two days after that, I never saw him again.