Bo Halsey now had that picture.
13.
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.