Detective Halsey stood on the other side of the marble counter in the middle of the kitchen. Two other men, who she remembered were Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen and who she thought of as Larry and Curly, the Stooges who followed Moe, the leader, stood behind him. Twelve hours earlier, during their solo, late-night visit to the crime scene, Cerullo and Cohen had taken the stacks of hundred dollar bills-they called them “Benjamins”-from the crawl space in the attic to their car.
Joan Richardson was impatient. It was now three days after her husband’s death. She was about to leave for New York for the funeral service at St. Bart’s, with its ornate dome that gave the whole church the look of a mosque. Six hundred invited guests were expected, among them Alan Greenspan, three former Secretaries of the Treasury, Warren Buffett and George Soros. At night she had stayed in East Hampton in the sprawling Hunting Inn during the three days in which other people made the funeral arrangements because Bo Halsey had asked her to stay. She’d become shaken, irritated, and distracted by his frequent although brief visits to ask her questions.
“I don’t know how else I can help you. I gave you Juan’s name and helped you find him. I’m not a detective, and I’ve had a very, very hard time.”
Halsey said abruptly, “We would have found him soon enough, Mrs. Richardson. People knew he worked here and that he had a big old Schwinn bike. People knew he rode around on it. And we found the tire tracks from his bike in the sand near the hedgerow. There aren’t many old-style bikes like that out here. Single-speed, push-down pedal brakes. And a woman who was out on the beach came forward right away to tell us that she’d seen a tall, good-looking Mexican pushing an old bicycle near the dunes the day your husband died. A movie star, she said. Most Mexicans out here don’t look like a movie star. So it wasn’t really that hard to figure out who he was.”
“All right,” Joan responded, waving her right hand dismissively. When she was tense, a barely visible pattern of veins rose to the surface of her skin near her temples. “So I wasn’t any help. I thought I was helping. I didn’t need to bother, I guess, when I drove out to his house with you.”
Ignoring her haughty tone, Bo Halsey gazed at her for five seconds. “Let’s talk again about your day in New York on Tuesday.”
“Again?”
“Your shopping day.”
“Yes, my shopping day. I’m sure Mrs. Halsey has shopping days, too.”
“There is no Mrs. Halsey.”
He looked into her eyes, that extraordinary blue, as if by silence he could elicit more from her. He knew that Joan Richardson had lied to him earlier and was still lying. Cerullo and Cohen had gone to the city and, accompanied by three NYPD detectives, asked the doormen at her Fifth Avenue building how often they had seen her that day. The doormen on the morning shift said they didn’t see her leave the building. What they had seen was the familiar face of Senator Rawls arriving at noon. And the doormen on the afternoon and early evening shifts saw them leave the building at seven-thirty in sleek evening clothes to walk the two blocks uptown to the private party in the Museum, where Halsey had reached her hours later on her cell phone. Video surveillance tapes in the lobby showed the Senator arriving and, many hours later, the glamorous couple leaving.
Halsey knew that the Senator and Joan Richardson had had more than seven hours of uninterrupted time in her apartment. A vigorous guy like Senator Rawls and a very beautiful woman like Joan Richardson could have easily gone at it, Halsey thought, again and again in the course of such a long afternoon and early evening, especially if the 60-year-old Senator used that magical blue pill.
“When did you leave to go shopping?”
“I’m not certain, Detective. Ten, eleven? I didn’t keep track.”
“Did Davey drive you around?”
“No, I got a cab off the street.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Really, Detective, how can I remember that?”
“When did you get back to the apartment?”
“Three-thirty? Four? I had to get ready for the party.”
“Any cell or telephone calls after you got back?”
“Probably not. I might have turned the cell off. There are days when I really don’t want to talk to anyone.”
“Did you use email?”
“I might have. But so many things happened that night, Detective, that I can’t remember much about the day.”
“Did you go to the party with anyone?”
“I answered that yesterday, didn’t I? My friend, Senator Rawls, picked me up.”
“We haven’t been able to reach him. Where is he now?”
“I believe he’s in Paris.”
“He hasn’t returned our calls.”
“He is a busy man, Detective. He must get fifty calls a day. And he’s in Paris, he told me, rehearsing for a movie. I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”
“When you speak to him, please be sure to ask him to give me a call. You have my card.”
Joan Richardson glanced at the large clock above one of the sinks. There were Roman numerals on its face. “I have to leave now, Mr. Halsey,” she said.
“No problem, Mrs. Richardson.”
“Thanks.” Her voice was sardonic, as it sometimes was when she was irritated, impatient, or afraid.
Halsey, wanting the last word, said, “We’ll see you when you get back.”
Joan Richardson was used to having the last word, but this time she let it go.
12.
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?”