“Mr. Howell told me that you were home with your family the night Salma was killed. You understand that Claire necessarily becomes a witness in all this.”
“You’re not seriously thinking I had any reason to hurt Salma?” Ethan Leighton pulled himself up into a position, posturing his outrage as though he were making a congressional appearance on C-SPAN. “Or that my wife did?”
“Don’t ever try to go where Ms. Cooper’s thinking,” Lem said. “Just stay calm.”
There was nothing a prosecutor liked better than the loving family member as alibi witness. What wife-with everything to lose-wouldn’t put her hand on a Bible and swear that her husband had never left her side the night in question?
“Do you have any photographs of your daughter?” I asked. “Of Ana.”
“I-uh-I’m afraid I don’t. I’m afraid that wouldn’t have been very smart, under the circumstances.”
“Which part of the circumstances were smart?” Mike said.
“How did you meet?” I asked.
“It was at a fund-raiser, here in the city. One of my events.”
“Salma was what-a political activist? Rallying the vote?” Mike asked. “Was she here in the States legally?”
Leighton didn’t say a word. He looked at Lem but got no help.
“Was she a citizen?”
“I believe she was legal. She had papers, Detective.”
“My mother’s dog has papers, Leighton,” Mike said. “Funny, ’cause cops swept her whole apartment and didn’t come up with any documents.”
“I don’t know why that would be or where she kept them. Maybe at a bank.”
“Seems to me Salma’s closet was the bank,” Mike said.
“What do you mean?” the congressman asked. “What are you talking about?”
Was it possible he didn’t know about the shoe boxes full of cash?
“So what brought her to your fund-raiser that night?” Mike asked. “Your position on abortion rights? Gun control? Illegal immigrants?”
Ethan Leighton was keeping himself even. “She didn’t come because of my politics, Mr. Chapman. She was there as someone’s date. We got to talking and-”
“Now, that’s classy. Not only are you cheating, but you steal her out from under another guy,” Mike said. “A supporter? Somebody who bought a ticket to come in?”
“She was nothing to him, Detective. I don’t even remember who it was who brought her. I’m sure she wouldn’t either. Salma is a vibrant-”
“Salma was.”
“Sorry. I still have trouble believing that,” Leighton said. “Salma was a vibrant, intelligent, high-spirited young woman. She was mature beyond her years, because she’d been to hell and back, quite frankly.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Salma was smuggled into this country, Ms. Cooper. She was fourteen years old when she was brought across the border from Mexico in a cattle truck, along with thirty or forty people from her region.”
Lem was watching me to see if Leighton succeeded at melting my armor with another tale of cruelty and abuse. He didn’t realize I had not been able to get Olena’s fresh story from yesterday out of my mind. Little chance of trumping that.
“Where was she taken?”
“Near Brownsville, in Texas, at first. With the usual promise that she’d get an agricultural job or be placed as a servant in a family household,” the congressman said. “But that never happened. She was held captive in a farmhouse by the man her family paid to get her out of Mexico. For two years, she was raped repeatedly by him.”
“I hear these tales more often than you can imagine, Mr. Leighton,” I said. “I’ve learned what many of these young women have endured.”
“There’s an ugly twist to this one, Ms. Cooper. The man who kept her chained to her bed when he went off on these smuggling trips? He was Salma’s uncle,” the congressman said. “He was her mother’s brother.”
Now it was my turn to be silent.
Mike waited thirty seconds before pounding on. “Who brought Salma to New York?”
“It’s nothing she would ever talk about with me.”
“Weren’t you the least bit curious?”
“I was much more than curious, Detective. There were entire pockets of her life that were off-limits to me, just as there were areas of mine that were off-limits to her,” Leighton said. “Being sold off to her uncle as an adolescent was nothing she was in any position to change. But once he was ready to get rid of her? I don’t think she was very proud of the fact that she spent the next few years of her life selling herself.”
“So she came to New York as a prostitute, specifically?” Mike asked.
“Yes, she did.”
“Someone must have been pretty well steeped in the trafficking business to get her here,” Mike said. “A professional, not a two-bit Mexican in a cattle truck.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Detective. She never told me who. She wouldn’t go there, and frankly, I didn’t care.”
“Didn’t care?” Mike asked.
“That’s sounds a bit icy. I mean that I had no intention of pushing Salma to talk about it, and I’m ashamed to say, it’s not like I was going to get involved in a prosecution of the man. She had put it behind her and I certainly had nothing to gain by the association with her, or her pimp.”
“The tattoo on Salma’s body,” I said to Leighton, “what do you know about that?”
I couldn’t tell if he had reddened because of the nature of our conversation or because the cold air was biting his skin.
“Nothing,” he said, with a sidelong glance at Lem. “A flower?”
“Do you know what kind of flower?”
Leighton thought the question was ridiculous. “I-I don’t. Everybody’s got tattoos, Ms. Cooper. My own kids have them.”
“Not in the same place on the body as Salma’s was,” Mike said. “Just a hunch.”
“On her leg-her thigh? So what?”
“Doesn’t mean anything to you?” I asked. “That placement?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did Salma have that tattoo when you met her, or get it afterwards?”
“She had that when we met. I don’t know when or how she got it.”
“Where was Salma living when you first started to see her?” I asked.
“On the West Side. Near a Hundred and tenth Street.”
“Not as well as you set her up,” Mike said.
Ethan Leighton didn’t speak.
“How long after you met did you begin dating her?” I asked.
“Look, Ms. Cooper. I’d actually never been unfaithful to Claire in all the years we’d been married. I didn’t set out to get into this mess. Salma started calling me, texting me on my phone, showing up at all my events. She-uh-she was very interested in starting a relationship with me.”