The Borzoi Killings (9 page)

“Doubt?

“We talked about this.”

Like many other terms lawyers and judges used, it was elusive to define
reasonable doubt
. The explanation judges gave to jurors was opaque, a classic tautology. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt, judges said, didn’t mean the prosecution had to prove guilt beyond all doubt. That wasn’t possible. At the other extreme, you couldn’t doubt everything. A reasonable doubt was located some place between no doubt and doubt about everything. Reasonable is reasonable. As she often told her students, the definition was absurd. She had often heard jurors ask again as they deliberated for an explanation of reasonable doubt. The judge always repeated the same words, as though repetition would create meaning. “It’s
a joke, ladies and gentlemen,” she told her students. “But in this business, the business of representing criminal defendants, the beauty of it is that the definition of reasonable doubt gives you something to work with, you have the chance to make soap out of stone.”

Juan said, “I didn’t kill Mr. Richardson, Raquel. You know that, don’t you?”

Raquel Rematti was trained to bring doubt to everything. But she said, “Of course I believe you, Juan. I do.”

As soon as Kathy
Schiavoni graduated from East Hampton High School, she fulfilled the two driving ambitions of her teenage life. She had a silver earring pierced through her right eyebrow, and she immediately moved to the Lower East Side. She spent six years in Manhattan. She worked as a waitress, a nanny, and a dog-walker. She had only two boyfriends. Each of them was with her for three months. Both of them were haphazard, lazy cocaine-dealers. They were addicts, and dumb enough to use the money they earned from selling drugs only to buy drugs for themselves. She was afraid of cocaine, but loved each of them. Kathy, slightly overweight, with frizzy reddish hair and a plain face, was devastated when they walked out on her. She imagined that she would never again find another lover.

At twenty-five she returned to East Hampton. She rented a small apartment on the third floor of a building on Main Street near the East Hampton Cinema. Her parents lived in a neat ranch house less than a mile from her apartment, beyond the windmill and the wood-shingled Episcopal Church on the Montauk Highway. She ate dinner with them on Sunday night once every two months. She worked, at the cash register, in one of the few locally owned hardware stores. At nights and on weekends, for five years, she made the long drive “up-island”—in the direction of New
York City—to dreary, over-populated Smithtown, where she took courses in criminology and law enforcement at a community college. Although she had been at sea in her high school courses in biology and basic chemistry—her grades were just above passing, a gift from her teachers—she now gravitated to forensics, to lab work, and to DNA testing.

With pliers on one rainy night, she pulled the silver spike from her eyebrow; she had a festering infection for a few weeks. When the eyebrow healed, it was almost as though it had never been pierced. Only one of the two men who became her lovers in East Hampton ever noticed the almost effaced hole. “I had a spike,” she said. It was important to Kathy Schiavoni to tell the truth.

She had worked in the police lab in Smithtown for seven years when she was given the plastic bag tagged with the identification “Richardson sheets.” Normally unfazed by any evidence she was handed for testing, she immediately recognized that the Richardson case was what she had heard described at headquarters as a “big, big one, the biggest ever out here.” None of the several dozen cases she had testified in as an expert had ever received attention from the newspapers. They were anonymous, unremarkable trials. Kathy was a stolid, careful witness. In every case in which she testified, the defendant had been convicted.

In handling the “Richardson sheets,” she didn’t want to be distracted by the visibility of the case, but she was even more careful than usual. She was given several strands of hair from Juan Suarez’s head. She also had a group of ten of his wiry jet-black pubic hairs. There were at least five distinct areas on the luxuriant sheets from the Richardson bedroom that she recognized even before testing them were stained with vaginal fluids and semen: the stains were flaky and off-white.

Working quietly, knowing that Margaret Harding, the assistant district attorney handling the “billionaire murder” case, was
waiting impatiently as usual for the results, Kathy spent several days before she made an appointment at Harding’s cluttered office in Riverhead.

When she arrived with her report in a document-sized plastic cover for her appointment at ten, she had to wait for Margaret Harding for a full hour. Harding was a late riser. She was, in Kathy Schiavoni’s eyes, a prima donna, more like a manicured Manhattan woman with a house in the Hamptons than a local working girl. Kathy neither liked nor disliked Margaret Harding. The lawyer had a job to do, and Kathy understood that she did it well, although she was difficult.

Margaret Harding was always late. It was her entitlement. Everyone knew that for the last several months she’d been spending late afternoon and early evening hours at her apartment in Quogue with her boss, Richie Lupo, the Suffolk County District Attorney. Although Richie was the boss, he never tried a case and rarely walked into a courtroom. He often called press conferences. He loved being on camera: with the even, regular features of Mitt Romney, he looked more like a WASP than an Italian. Richie Lupo was married. A Republican who ran on law-and-order, family values advertisements, he had been re-elected three times to four-year terms. He was certain he would never lose an election. He called himself “the DA-for-Life.”

“Kathleen,” Margaret said when she swept into her office at eleven-thirty, knowing that she was the only person in the world who called Kathy anything other than Kathy, “can I get you a cup of coffee?”
The bitch
, Kathy thought,
she isn’t even going to apologize for being late
.

“I’ve had six already, Margaret. Thanks.”

“How do you stay so calm with so much coffee?” Margaret sipped her own black coffee from a plastic cup. She grimaced. It was bitter. Even when she grimaced, every fine feature of her face was attractive.

“Beats me,” Kathy answered. She always maintained a terse blandness with Margaret because she knew she could never engage her in that level of quick conversation Margaret had mastered.

Margaret’s cell phone chimed a refrain from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. She snapped the small, shiny instrument open, without hesitation, as if Kathy weren’t even in the room. Whoever was on the other end of the conversation spoke more than Margaret, who was smiling. Although reserved and private herself, Kathy had become an acute observer of people, and she knew it was Richie Lupo, calling to follow up on the evening before or even on the sex they had that morning.

As soon as Margaret flipped the phone closed, Kathy said, “I’ve got the Richardson test results. At least as far as I can go on what I’ve been given.” She slipped a copy of her eight page report, labeled
Confidential
, out of her valise.

“God,” Margaret said, smiling, “I thought I’d never see this day. Talk to me.”

“Why don’t you read it,” Kathy said. She found it difficult to have a conversation with Margaret Harding, an impatient woman who had a reputation for interrupting the Pope.

“No, talk to me, Kathleen. I can read it later. Give me the skinny.”

“Suarez’s DNA is all over the place. There was even a pubic hair from him wedged in the stitching of the sheets in the Richardsons’ bedroom.”

“Really?” Margaret was excited, as if sharing a racy secret with another woman.

“Yes, really.” Kathy placed the report on the edge of Margaret’s messy desk. How could such a sleek, fastidious woman, Kathy wondered, be such a slob?

“I’ll read this later. Go on, girl.”

Kathy paused. “There were other secretions.”

“Lordy! Quite a busy bed. Maybe Joan Richardson isn’t the corn-fed country girl we see in
Town & Country
, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Malala?”

“One of the other semen stains is a near-perfect match for Brad Richardson.”

“My, my, who do you think he was in bed with?”

“It was his bed,” Kathy said, laconically. “He had a right to sleep there, too.”

“God, is she something else. First the gardener and then the hubby, or the hubby and then the gardener, or could it be both at the same time?” Margaret took another sip of coffee. “It’s convenient that way: she wouldn’t have to change the sheets, if it all happened together. A conga line.”

“Actually, and you may enjoy this even more, there is at least one other semen stain that doesn’t match either Brad Richardson or Juan Suarez.”

Margaret leaned forward and lifted the report. “God, how I love this job.”“So who was the third stain? Sounds like a good movie title:
The Third Man. The Third Stain.
”

“I don’t know whose semen it is. What I need to complete the report are samples from any other men who may have been in the house for the two or three days before the killing.”

“That could be a cast of thousands.”

Kathy recognized that Margaret was trying to be chummy, to have a girl-to-girl conversation. Kathy, stolid and persistent, said, “I’d also like to have a sample of Joan Richardson’s DNA, preferably a vaginal swab.”

“Listen, between us girls, I think Joan is interested in protecting her family jewels from any more exposure.”

“We know,” Kathy said evenly, “that her friend Senator Rawls was around. I’d like a DNA sample for him, too. There’s a mosaic, I think, on these sheets. I want to be thorough.”

And then Margaret surprised Kathy Schiavoni. Margaret said, “I also know that Brad Richardson had special friends. This can get naughty, but it could even be, Kathleen, that the stain from the unknown male was dropped there at the same time as the stain from Brad. I don’t think Senator Rawls was taking care of the wife and the husband at the same time. At least his publicity people have wanted us to believe for a long time that he plays for one team only. You know, that Clint Eastwood style.”

Kathy smiled faintly. “I need to get back to the lab, Margaret. How long do you think it will take to get a subpoena to get some hairs from Rawls so that we can compare them to the other stains?”

Suddenly Margaret looked petulant. She sat back in her chair and touched her cell phone as if preparing to make a call. “Kathleen, that’s our job. We do the mosaics. We pull all of the evidence together, not just DNA. Your job is to give me the pieces; mine is to do the mosaic. I’ll have to talk to Menachem. And to Richie, of course. And to Halsey. We can’t just go out and get a judge to issue a search warrant to cut the pubic hair of a former U.S. Senator and a bereaved billionaire widow. But you don’t need to worry about that, Kathleen. We’ll deal with it.”

“But I do need to worry about a complete report, Margaret. That’s my job.”

“I’ll read your report. Maybe you’re short-changing yourself. Maybe it’s complete just as it is. I’ll let you know.”

It was only when Kathy walked through the bright mid-autumn air of the parking lot toward her Mazda that she realized how the odor of perfume—which she had loved as a teenager when she took bottles of inexpensive perfumes from her mother and sprayed herself but now never used—disturbed her. There was an odor, very faint, of perfume that enveloped Margaret Harding and permeated her office. Kathy, who no longer noticed
the stench of blood and flesh, had an almost physical revulsion to the scent; it made her throat constrict. But soon the clear snapping air took away all traces of the perfume that had settled on her own clothes while she was in Margaret’s office.

After so many years
in public life, Hank Rawls couldn’t remember when he felt as uncomfortable as he did now. As Menachem Oz pretended to glance at some yellow notepaper, Hank on the witness stand shifted his nervous gaze from this homely man whose yarmulke somehow stayed in place on his bald head to the three rows of people who sat behind Oz. The faces of these twenty-three people, all white, all members of the Grand Jury, most in their fifties and sixties, were focused on the witness. Hank Rawls, himself a performer, knew that this poorly dressed lawyer was simply pausing for effect to let the last series of questions and answers resonate with the intent people behind him.
I’m sweating
, Hank Rawls thought in that long drawn-out pause,
like fucking Richard Milhous Nixon
. No matter how he tried to compose and settle himself, he couldn’t make the sweating stop. He could only hope that his weathered blond skin made it undetectable.

There was a nasal intonation in Menachem Oz’s voice. “Let me ask you this, Mr. Rawls. You told us you couldn’t remember how many times you saw Ms. Richardson in the month before her husband was killed, is that right?”

“I really can’t, Mr. Oz. That was two or three months ago, wasn’t it?”

Menachim Oz didn’t answer questions, he asked them. “And you can’t even give us an estimate, correct?”

“I just don’t remember, Mr. Oz. I don’t want to guess. My new book had just come out. I was traveling a lot. I told you that I can give you copies of my diary for those weeks. They show where I traveled.”

“We’ll get to those, Mr. Rawls. But what I want now is simply your best recollection.”

“Of what?”

“The number of times you saw Joan Richardson during those four or five weeks.”

“The weeks before Brad died?”

“Those weeks, Mr. Rawls.”

“Three times, four times, maybe six.”

“Did she travel with you?”

“During those weeks before her husband died?”

“Those weeks.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why absolutely, Mr. Rawls? Didn’t she travel with you to Paris just a week ago? You remember that, don’t you?”

That riveted Hank Rawls’s attention. How the hell would Menachem Oz know that? Hank toyed with the idea of asking for a recess so that he could leave the room and talk to his lawyer, Josephine Hart, in the hallway where she had been waiting just outside the locked Grand Jury room. He knew that Josephine, a black woman in her mid thirties and a former federal prosecutor, would tell him that there was nothing she or he could do and that he had to go back into the room alone and answer anything and everything that Menachem Oz asked him or risk being taken in front of any available judge to be threatened with contempt for refusing to answer a question. “The only way you can refuse to respond to a question,” Josephine had said in her languorous
Southern accent, “is if you take the Fifth Amendment. You probably don’t want to take the Fifth.”

“Look, Mr. Oz, I know I didn’t travel with Mrs. Richardson in the four or five weeks before her husband died.”

“But you did travel with her before that period, correct?”

“I said that, Mr. Oz, a few minutes ago.”

“And after he died, isn’t that right?”

“Right.”

“To Paris, correct?”

“To Paris.”

Suddenly, as if on some cue, a woman in a black sweater and expensive black slacks entered the room. He assumed she was the lawyer whose name Joan had mentioned several times as “that Harding bitch.” The jurors obviously knew her: they continued to stare at him, not at Margaret Harding.

Without skipping a beat or glancing at Margaret, Menachem Oz asked, “Now you told us before our break that you were with Joan Richardson on the night Detective Halsey called her, correct?”

Hank shook his head as if to say an exasperated
yes
.

“Remember, Mr. Rawls, you have to answer with words.”

“Yes. The answer is yes. I said that already.”

“And you were with her during all that day, correct?”

“That’s right.”

Suddenly there was, Hank Rawls sensed, an even more rapt attention among the people in the room; a few of them whispered. And Margaret Harding leaned forward, anticipating something.

Joan Richardson, he now fully realized, had lied to these people about almost everything.

“Were you in her apartment that day?”

Hank took a sip of water from a steadily deteriorating paper cup. “I was.”

“From when to when?”

“Late morning to the time we left for a party.”

“How many hours?”

“Five, six, seven, I’m not certain.”

“Was anyone in the apartment with you?”

“No.”

“Did you make any cell phone calls in those hours?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Did she?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did you use a computer?”

“No.”

“Did she?”

“I didn’t see that happen, Mr. Oz.”

“Do you have a BlackBerry or iPhone?”

“Of course. An iPhone. I couldn’t communicate with my five-year-old granddaughter unless I had one.”

Menachem Oz didn’t smile. “Did Mrs. Richardson use your iPhone during the day?”

“Mr. Oz, we weren’t there to make calls or send emails or text messages.”

“What did you do during those hours?”

“What do you think we did? Use your imagination.”

“What did you do during those hours?”

“Had sex. I made lunch for us. Then more sex.”

“How often?”

“Come on, Mr. Oz.”

“How often?”

“Five or six times. The miracle of Viagra.”

Even Menachem Oz smiled as some of the people in the Grand Jury laughed. “Did the two of you talk about Brad Richardson that day?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“When did you find out that Brad Richardson was dead?”

“That night, at the party in the museum.”

“How did you find out?”

“From Mrs. Richardson.”

“What did she say?”

“She said he was dead.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“That he was murdered.”

“Did she say when she found out?”

“No, but I assume while we were at the party. Clearly she didn’t know before that.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything, Mr. Oz. I didn’t know what to do. It’s way beyond the range of my experience in life to have a woman tell me that her husband had just been murdered.”

“How did she react?”

Hank Rawls waited. He was genuinely baffled, even annoyed, by the question. “She was upset, Mr. Oz. As you would expect. She loved her husband.”

“Did she cry?”

“No, Mr. Oz. Was she supposed to?”

“What happened next?”

“She left. She said she was going to East Hampton.”

“Did you go?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“What could I have done, Mr. Oz?”

Standing at the podium on which documents and an open bottle of Evian water were spread, Menachim Oz again flipped through the pad of yellow paper in front of him. The subject shifted as he asked, “How well did you know Brad Richardson?”

“Not well. He was a friendly man, somewhat shy, I thought.”

“Did he know you were having an affair with his wife?”

“Come on, Mr. Oz, how would I know that?”

“Did he know it?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“Did Mrs. Richardson tell him?”

“Ask her.”

“It’s you I’m asking, Mr. Rawls.”

“I didn’t hear her tell him, if she did. What did she tell you?”

“Did she ever talk about divorcing Mr. Richardson?”

“Not to me. Did she, Mr. Oz?”

Like other men who had no sense of humor, Menachem Oz made it obvious when he took a stab at it. His voice was a shade higher as he said, “Remember, I get to ask the questions, Mr. Rawls.”

No one laughed.

But several people did laugh when Hank Rawls said, “So, is that what’s been going on here?”

“Mr. Rawls, do you know if Mr. Richardson had any affairs?”

“To be honest, I didn’t know Mr. Richardson well, but it seemed to me he didn’t take an interest in other people that way. So I don’t know the answer to your question. I never saw him in bed with anyone.”

After another interlude in which he shuffled the papers on the podium in front of him, Menachem Oz moved on to new territory. “What did you know about Juan Suarez?”

“He worked for Brad and Joan.”

“What kind of work?”

“All that I saw him do was greet people at parties.”

“Did Mrs. Richardson ever say anything about him?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“That he was an attractive man who was also very sweet and smart. And that he took good care of his family.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Mr. Oz, I know it’s not politically correct to say this. But he was a servant, plainly an illegal immigrant, he wasn’t someone she mentioned often, and I never asked about him. I had no reason to.”

“Has she said anything about Juan Suarez since her husband died?”

“That she wishes she’d never seen him. She feels responsible for bringing him into their lives.”

“Did she tell you what his real name is?”

“Real name? Juan Suarez.”

“Did she ever use another name for him?”

“No.”

Menachem Oz spent at least a quiet minute at the podium, using a pencil to check off subjects he had covered. Hank hoped this was a signal that Oz was winding down.

“Mr. Rawls, did you ever have sex with Mrs. Richardson in a public place?”

“Repeat that, Mr. Oz. I can’t have heard that correctly.”

Oz was looking down at his notepad. “Did you ever have sex with Mrs. Richardson in a place where other people could see you?”

“Enough, Mr. Oz. That’s it. I’m not going to answer that.”

“You have to.”

“No.”

“Is that no, I didn’t?” Oz asked.

“No, as in
no
I won’t answer.”

“A judge will order you to do that or hold you in contempt.”

“Listen to me, sir. Let me keep it simple for you. I will not answer that.”

“We’ll see,” Oz said. He looked up from his notes. “Do you know a man named Trevor?”

“You mean any Trevor in the span of my entire life?”

“Since you met the Richardson?”

“I’m a well-known man, Mr. Oz. I’m not a private person. I meet many people every day. Some of them, maybe many of them, are named Trevor.”

“Did you ever see a man named Trevor with Mr. Richardson?”

Hank did remember a flamboyant man, undeniably gay, who had spent most of the last Fourth of July party with Brad. “I did, I think. If it’s the man I think it was, he was with Brad at the party.”

“The same Fourth of July party you attended with Mrs. Richardson?”

“Please, Mr. Oz. We’ve been over that party again and again and again. Nobody gave me a roster of who was there.”

“What is Trevor’s last name?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t introduced to him, Mr. Oz.”

There was less than a five-second lapse before Menachem Oz veered to yet another subject. “What plans do you and Mrs. Richardson have?”

Hank felt a sudden and vivid anger: he was tired, he was annoyed. “I don’t understand the question.”

“What plans do you and Mrs. Richardson have?”

“We talked about having dinner tonight.”

“How often have you talked about marriage?”

“You know, the only thing I remember from law school is that you need a foundation for a question.” He took a sip of water. “You’re assuming we discussed getting married. We didn’t.”

“How much money does Mrs. Richardson have?”

“More than God, I assume. At least that’s what the newspapers say. She doesn’t give me any of it. Hell, I pick up the check at dinner.”

“Did she ever tell you how much she inherited from Brad Richardson?”

“Let’s stop this game, Mr. Oz. I’m not stupid, sir. And the folks behind you aren’t either. So let me be clear—I didn’t conspire with Joan Richardson to kill her husband. We didn’t hire a hit man to kill her husband. I have no plans to marry Joan Richardson. And I never got a dime from Joan Richardson.”

“Are you finished, Mr. Rawls?”

Hank leaned forward in the witness chair. He sat back. He looked at Menachem Oz with his stony, cowboy gaze. “Are you, Mr. Oz?”

Menachem Oz said, “For today. We’ll let your lawyer know when you’re coming back.”

It was a drizzly afternoon when he left the grim, utilitarian Riverhead courthouse. The landscape was dreary and sad: bare wet trees, ramshackle houses, and rusted Toyotas and pick-up trucks parked on the streets. A wet, heavy snow had fallen two days earlier, quickly melted, and now made dirty streaks on the ground.

In that barren landscape, the only new object was the black Mercedes that Hank Rawls had summoned from his cell phone as soon as he walked out of the Grand Jury room. Just as he was about to slide into the car, he was suddenly surrounded by a group of reporters. He was blindsided by this. He had assumed that his appearance was a secret and that no one outside the DA’s office would know the date or place of the appearance of the legendary Hank Rawls before a Grand Jury.

Instinctively beaming that engaging smile that had made his life so easy from boyhood, he slipped into the back seat without saying a word. He was furious. He recognized the subtle hand of Raquel Rematti in the unexpected appearance of reporters, and he wanted to find a way to punish her. Joan Richardson, he now
realized, had been right to hire private investigators to find something to discredit her, to intimidate her, even to drive her away from the case.
Let’s find a way to make the bitch suffer
, Joan had said.
Yes, let’s
, Hank now thought as he told Davey, “Don’t run anybody over, but get the fuck out of here.”