The Borzoi Killings (7 page)

Juan was never colder
in his life. He had been taken before dawn from the prison on the outskirts of Riverhead, where he’d spent three nights in an unheated concrete cell in isolation and without visitors. Dressed in green prison fatigues under a bullet-proof vest that fit rigidly and tightly over his chest, back, and arms, he waited in a holding pen just behind one of the closed doors to the courtroom. It was just as cold here as in his concrete cell. The guards, their weapons in their hands, wore Eisenhower-style bomber jackets.

At last, the iron gate to the holding pen slid open. A slim Asian woman came in. She carried a briefcase. She had absolutely black eyes and black hair.

She said slowly, uncertain whether he spoke English, “Mr. Suarez, I am your lawyer.”

Not speaking, Juan nodded. He was uneasy with Asian people. He had never seen one in Mexico. And, when he arrived in New York, he found work washing dishes by hand fourteen hours a day at a dirty Chinese restaurant on First Avenue just above 96th Street. The abrupt, unfriendly man and woman who owned the restaurant never once asked his name, and he knew them only as Mr. and Mrs. Wan. They never said hello or good night. They paid him in cash, handing it to him as if they were reluctant to
let it go. In the hot, noisy restaurant, Mr. and Mrs. Wan made slashing hand gestures to relay instructions to him. With the same hand gestures and a few explosive words, they threatened to fire him if he took one minute more than the ten minutes allotted to him during the two breaks in each fourteen-hour shift.

She asked, gently, “Do you speak English?”

“Some, not much.”

“My name is Theresa Bui.”

He nodded.

“I’m your lawyer. Do you understand? I’m a public defender. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. It was a kind smile. She said to one of the nearby guards, “I need privacy for a few minutes with Mr. Suarez.”

The men stepped back no more than a foot, no more out of earshot than they had been. They weren’t about to listen to a 34-year-old Asian woman with a briefcase.

Theresa Bui decided to ignore them. She explained that Juan was about to enter the courtroom with her; that she would be handed a paper; that the paper was an “indictment”; that he was accused of the murder of Brad Richardson and the stealing of more than $200,000; and that he would have to say
not guilty
to the judge.

“Mr. Suarez, you do understand me, don’t you?”

“I do. Yes.” He saw, or wanted to believe he saw, patience and sympathy in her eyes.

“Do you want to tell me anything?” she asked.

He whispered, “I didn’t hurt Mr. Richardson. He was my friend. Good to me. I never take any money. I don’t need his money.”

Theresa Bui gazed into his face.
Such a handsome man
, she thought. “I understand,” she said. “We’re going to plead not guilty.”

“Yes, not guilty.”

“And then I will come to visit you soon. To talk more. To help.”

He was close to her. He was ashamed of his odor: he hadn’t been allowed to shower in all the time since his arrest and he knew he smelled of sweat, of fear. “Where is my wife?”

“Mr. Suarez,” she whispered, “I didn’t know you had a wife.”

“And my kids?”

Kids?
she thought.
My God
. “You have children?”

“Two—a boy and girl. Where are they?”

“I’ll try to find out,” she said, knowing that she had no way to do that.

A harsh buzzer sounded above the door. It was shrill. It startled her. Reacting instantly, a guard unlocked the door of the holding pen. Juan walked between the guards into the beige courtroom. He was dazed by what he saw. The ceiling was very high. There were rows of wooden benches arranged like church pews. And there was an immense bench behind which sat Judge Helen Conley, a severe-looking woman whose gray hair was pulled into a bun. Three lawyers stood at a table in front of the judge’s bench. A television camera, with a small red light glowing, was trained on Juan. He glanced fleetingly at the people on the benches. Mariana and her children weren’t in the courtroom. Had the world, he wondered, swallowed them up?

Her voice amplified by a microphone, Judge Conley said, “I understand there is some uncertainty as to who this man is.”

“There is, Judge,” Margaret Harding answered. She was standing at the other table. She was tall. She had black hair. She was dressed in black except for an elegant green scarf draped over her shoulders. “We believe the defendant is an illegal immigrant. A counterfeit Social Security card was found when the search warrant was executed.”

The judge looked at Theresa Bui. “Give us a hand here, counselor. Does the public defenders’ office know who this man is?”

“I’m not sure,” Bui answered. Her voice quavered. Juan saw a slight tremor in her hands.

“You’re not sure? How can you not know your client’s name?”

Bui said, “I didn’t think his name was an issue.”

Judge Conley glanced over her half-glasses at the prosecutor. “Ms. Harding, why do you think his name is not the name on the indictment?”

“A confidential informant told us that he may in fact have a different name.”

“Ms. Bui, ask your client what his real name is.”

Theresa Bui turned toward him, whispering, “Do you have another name?”

Juan understood what was happening, but a sense of defiance suddenly replaced his fear and wonder. He recalled that the furious cops who arrested him had screamed that he had the right to remain silent.
The right to remain silent
. Juan, staring at the judge, didn’t answer Bui’s question.

Judge Conley, her eyes shifting from Juan’s steady, almost unnerving stare, said, “Well, Ms. Bui?”

“He won’t answer me, Judge.”

Conley said, “I’ve had enough. We have the defendant’s body. The
corpus
, as in
habeas corpus
. So he’s been indicted under the name we have.”

“If we learn his real name,” Margaret Harding said, “we’ll ask the Grand Jury to supersede the indictment.”

“Very well then,” the judge said, sounding curt and impatient. “Let’s proceed with the indictment we do have. Ms. Bui, do you want me to read the indictment? As I assume you’ve told your client—whoever he is—the indictment in effect alleges the murder of Bradford Richardson, the theft of more than $200,000 in
cash, and obstruction of justice in light of the defendant’s flight and his assault on two police officers when he was arrested. Now, do you want me to read all the exact words of the indictment or will the defendant waive the reading?”

Without speaking to Juan, Theresa said, “Waive.”

“Then how does the defendant plead?”

“Not guilty,” Theresa said, signaling to Juan that he should repeat the same two words.

Instead, he said, “
No culpable.
”

“I take it that means ‘
not guilty
,’” Judge Conley said. “Is that correct? Does he understand that?”

“He does,” Theresa answered.

Peering at Margaret Harding, Helen Conley said, “I assume there is no issue about bail because the defendant is plainly a flight risk as well as a danger to the community, to put it mildly.”

“Clearly,” the black-haired woman said.

Juan sensed even more tension in Theresa Bui. She seemed to inhale for strength. “Your Honor,” she said, “do you really think you should say things like that?”

The judge glared at her. “Such as?”

Theresa Bui stood down from the challenge. “Nothing, Your Honor.”

Speaking with a tone of calm assurance, Margaret Harding said, “Not only is the defendant a flight risk and a plain threat to the community, but the case against him is overwhelming. Our detectives located hair samples from the room where the killing took place. DNA from a hair clipping was taken from the defendant at the time of his arrest and appears to match a hair found in the Richardsons’ bedroom, where we believe the theft took place.”

“I appreciate the comments, Ms. Harding, but I just denied bail. I assume these statements are for the benefit of the cameras. I won’t tolerate that, now or at any other point. This is a court
of law, not a television studio.” She took five seconds to look at Margaret Harding, challenging her to react. When it became clear Margaret would not take up the challenge, she continued: “I think the only other business that remains today is to fix a date for our next appearance.”

Pressing her BlackBerry, Harding said, “Does November twenty-one work?”

Glancing at her iPhone, Theresa Bui said, “It does.”

Juan immediately calculated that the date was a month away and that he would somehow have to find a way to pass hundreds of hours with absolutely nothing to do. He had used his hands every day for years: he had laid brick with them, cut grass, lifted stones, washed dishes, cooked, and touched women in their most sensitive places. He would not be able to do any of that.

As she flipped through papers, Judge Conley asked, almost casually, “Ms. Bui, does your client waive the speedy trial act?”

Again, without speaking to Juan, who knew the meaning of the word “speedy,” Theresa said, “He does.”

“Very well. See you all on November twenty-one.”

As if acting on a signal from the judge, two guards grabbed Juan’s arms. Held by the guards, Juan was hustled to the door from which he had entered the courtroom. He looked at the gallery again, searching for the faces of Mariana and her children. Nothing. All he saw was the rush of reporters out of the courtroom.

In the parking lot just outside the rear door of the drab courthouse, as Juan was pushed into the back seat of a police cruiser, he saw people with cameras jostling to get close to him. He recalled the time in July when a picture was taken of him and Joan Richardson, both in bathing suits and just out of the water of the Olympic-size pool. Joan herself had taken the picture with her cell phone, extending her glistening arm and saying, “Smile for the camera.”

Using one of the printers in the Richardsons’ home, Joan had printed out that picture—two beautiful people gleaming with water, laughing, their lithe bodies in full view. She gave it to Juan. He took it to his ranch house and slipped it for safe-keeping in a plastic bag under a moldy rug in the basement, the only secure place he could find. At night, when Mariana and the kids and the other people who lived in the house were sleeping, he had often gone down to the basement and taken the picture out to stare at it. The glorious picture made him happy.

Bo Halsey now had that picture.

Raquel Rematti wasn’t certain
she remembered Theresa Bui. Raquel had taught hundreds of law students during her fifteen years as an adjunct professor at Columbia. Attentive to every one of them, she was the most popular member of the faculty. She led and entertained the students in her seminars, which were limited to twelve with a waiting list of fifty. Her lectures on trial practice, at which she spoke fluently and without notes, were held in the largest classroom at the school. She was refreshingly different from most of the dour, awkward men and women on the faculty.

Even though she was busy with her own law practice in midtown, Raquel stayed at her office at Columbia when she taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays until she had seen every student who wanted to speak with her. She carefully read and made written comments on their papers, all limited to five pages because, as she told them, trial lawyers had to be succinct and only short messages were persuasive. Raquel was a gregarious woman who had met an uncountable number of people since she started practicing law in the mid-1980s. She liked to believe, although she knew it wasn’t possible, that she recognized the faces and names of every person she had ever met, particularly her students.

And people remembered her. She was almost six feet tall yet she carried herself with the balance of a dancer. Her face was
striking: the dark skin of her southern Italian heritage, a somewhat aquiline yet beautifully shaped nose that no plastic surgeon had ever touched, large brown emotive eyes, and high cheekbones. Raquel’s hair was naturally black; it was now streaked with a single trace of white, Susan Sontag-style.

There was another reason people recognized her. As soon as televised trials started to become popular in the early 1990s, Raquel Rematti was a regular guest on national networks, and that had continued without interruption. She’d even been offered a show as one of the television judges, and declined it. She had no interest in becoming the Italian Judge Judy.

When her secretary Roger mentioned that Theresa Bui, who said she had once been a student in Raquel’s trial advocacy class at Columbia, had made an appointment, Raquel asked him to do a computer run of her name. Raquel had made it a practice to preserve the names of all her students over the last fifteen years, at first in a handwritten journal and later in a computer, so she would never be at a loss to have some information about them—date of graduation, even grades—in order to make any of them who visited her feel welcome. Roger, a 35-year-old with spiky orange hair and silver studs piercing each ear, had returned to Raquel’s office within five minutes. He said, “Columbia, Class of 2007. Was an undergraduate at Vassar. And that, as they say, is all she wrote.”

When Roger led Theresa Bui into her office at noon on the bright, fall-sharpened day, Raquel didn’t recognize her. There had been more and more Asian men and women in her classes over the last few years, as the bright children of ambitious Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese immigrants finally migrated from fields like computer science and medicine to the raw terrain of the law. Raquel gave Theresa Bui a welcoming wave as she continued to listen to someone on her cell phone. She pointed at the sofa, signaling Theresa to sit.

As Theresa waited, she looked at the array of pictures on the walls. She recognized some of the men and women with whom Raquel had been photographed over the years. Except for slight shifts in her hairstyle, Raquel hadn’t really changed since the first pictures taken of her in the mid-1980s when macho Oliver North, just after she graduated from Yale Law School, hired her as one of the small cadre of lawyers to represent him in the Iran-Contra trial. He was crazy—one of those men who wanted the world to believe he was the go-to guy for clandestine assignments vital to what they saw as the security of the United States—but despite the profound differences in their politics, she liked him. He was charming in a goofy, self-deprecating way. There were a few times over the years when, as a gentle spoof, he had her as a guest on his radio show. He also had a sense of humor: he called her
Jane Fonda
and
Hanoi Hannah
.

There were other faces Theresa Bui recognized in the array of pictures of Raquel’s clients—Manuel Noriega, Michael Milken, Robert Blake, Darryl Strawberry, Roger Clemens. There were also pictures of her with famous people who had never been her clients Hillary Clinton, Jessie Jackson, Oprah. And, on the wall near the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Park Avenue were pictures of her with some of the men she had dated: Jack Nicholson, Jesse Jackson, Mortimer Zuckerman, Philip Roth. She had never married, she had no children.

Raquel Rematti was that rarest of all lawyers: the only woman among the six or seven most famous criminal trial lawyers in the country.

“Theresa,” Raquel said warmly when the call ended. “Sorry, some clients like to talk on and on. I’ve never learned the fine art of dumping them when they start repeating themselves. How have you been?”

“Really well, Professor Rematti.”

“I’m Raquel.” She had the instinctive ability to put people at ease. Even when she was cross-examining a hostile witness, she treated the person with apparent rapport until, still engaging him or her almost deferentially, she shifted quietly into a devastating series of questions that a confused, suddenly off-balance witness didn’t expect. She asked Theresa, “What are you doing these days?”

“I work in the public defenders’ office in Suffolk County.”

“Good for you.” She was genuinely pleased to hear this. “Almost all your classmates run headlong into corporate law firms, some of them to pay off student loans, some for the love of money, some for both reasons. A young public defender learns so much about human nature. And about injustice. And the vanishing art of how to try a real case.”

“I’m learning, Raquel. But slowly.” Theresa found it difficult to use her former professor’s first name. Still tentative and nervous in the presence of this famous woman, she raced to explain why she was there even though Raquel hadn’t yet asked the question: “But I haven’t learned enough to handle a murder trial for a man who’s being called by every newspaper and television station in the world the
Blade of the Hamptons
or, as the
New York Post
loves to put it,
Juan the Knife
.”

It was then that Raquel recognized that this was no ordinary courtesy visit from a former student. Over the last several weeks she’d read newspaper and magazine articles and watched television news about the Mexican immigrant charged with the murder of Brad Richardson, the billionaire hedge fund owner, author, and philanthropist. The “alien” was again and again called either the
Blade of the Hamptons
or
Juan the Knife
. Raquel was struck, as she had been many times in her career, by the intensity of the hate leveled at some men and women charged with a crime. Even Bernie Madoff, who had only stolen money from people who were as
greedy as he was, had become a universal pariah. No one believed in the presumption of innocence.
Unless, of course,
she often said,
they were indicted
. It was then that even a right-winger or a Tea Party member whole-heartedly and suddenly embraced civil liberties. Oliver North certainly had.

Theresa told Raquel she was “scared” to defend Juan Suarez. She was intimidated, she said, by the worldwide news coverage the case was receiving. She wasn’t certain that she or anyone else in her office had the strength and skill and resources to try the case or to withstand the onslaught from reporters and bloggers. It was painful to Theresa to open the Google entries that now referred to her. Her identity on the Internet had once been only her name and her status on Facebook—in other words, almost complete anonymity. Now there were pages and pages of references to her, not one of them flattering, and most insulting and demeaning. Vicious words: lightweight, sucker, incompetent, not qualified. And the stupid variations on her name. Ms. Boo-hoo, Ms. Boo-boo, Ms. Wowie, Ms. Fooey. There were three anonymous bloggers—or one with different screen names—who were incessantly trashing her. Every word these crazy cyber stalkers wrote instantly became etched forever on Google. She cringed at the thought that her great-grandchildren would someday see the postings.

“Theresa, the amount of contempt that a criminal defendant—not to mention his lawyer—faces used to amaze me. Now it saddens me.”

Theresa responded quickly, like a child making a confession. “I can’t leave my house without being asked what he’s like, what his real name is, when he came to this country—even why he killed the Borzois.”

“The what?”

“Two dogs were killed at the same time as Brad Richardson. With a machete, apparently the same one. Sometimes I think he’s
going to be indicted for animal cruelty. And,” she smiled, “I’ve never tried a case for animal cruelty.”

“And let me guess, Theresa, not one of those reporters asks you about the possibility of his innocence. And not one of the bloggers ever mentions the presumption of innocence?”

She shook her head
no
. And then she brought herself to the question that had led her to Raquel Rematti. “Can you take this over from us?”

It had been two or three years since Raquel had represented a client in a highly publicized case. The last one was an assault and gun possession charge against a famous rapper and record producer named 007-Up. The charges were dropped because the three witnesses against him had in fact been in Miami, not in New York, when 007-Up was arrested in East Harlem. Listening to Theresa Bui, Raquel was swept by the rush of adrenaline she always felt when there was the opportunity to represent a notorious client.

“Who knows you’re here?” Raquel asked.

“No one. I didn’t speak to my bosses. I know that only two of them have handled one or two murder cases. The clients were convicted in an hour.”

Raquel said, “That’s not unusual, Theresa. There’s a pretty reliable statistic that ninety-eight percent of the murder trials in this country end in convictions. If trial lawyers were judged like major league hitters on their batting averages, little kids would throw away the baseball cards with our pictures on them.”

Theresa smiled, but only faintly. “I think he could be innocent, Raquel. I don’t know, of course, but I think so. I want him to have a chance.”

“I’ll go to see him, Theresa. It’ll be his decision. And I need to get a sense of the man before I take him on.”

“Good, thank you.”

“Another thing,” Raquel said. “I’ll need you to work with me. Only wizards work alone. I’m not a wizard.”

“You’re not?”

They smiled at each other.

Raquel Rematti knew from that moment that she would take on Juan Suarez. It was the attraction of the challenge, the lure of the outcast. She had always found that combination irresistible.

And it was even more irresistible now, as she was seeking to leave behind the cancer that for the last year had, like a stalker, been trying to claim her life.