Several years ago, on a trip driven by a reluctant nostalgia, she had returned to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where her family had lived for three generations. Arriving from Sicily in the 1920s, her grandfather had worked for years in a shoe factory in Haverhill alongside the sulphurous Merrimack River, and her father worked there too until the cold day in 1976 when the immense red brick factory building was shut down without any notice to anyone. Raquel was still in high school then, but already tall, strikingly attractive, and first in her class. She knew she was destined for scholarships at any one of several legendary colleges and that she would leave Haverhill behind. The sight of those old factory buildings, some of them renovated but most abandoned and strewn with black graffiti, still painfully tugged at her when she drove through the familiar streets: as a girl she would meet her handsome, happy, and strong father on the iron pedestrian bridge that spanned the Merrimack, which he crossed every day for forty years on his way to and from the factory. She still longed for him: in 1990 he had died of cancer, the disease that had almost taken her own life over the last year. She could still sense his manly, all-enveloping presence.
The prison was on the outskirts of Riverhead. It was a sprawling single-story cinderblock building constructed in the 1970s and surrounded by fences with barbed wire. It was set in what was once a potato field. Raquel passed through the outside security point and parked her car near the main entrance. Many of the cars in the visitors lot were older Mazdas, Toyotas, and Fords. They were the cars and oversize pick-up trucks of family members visiting prisoners. There were also a few Mercedes and BMWs, the cars of visiting lawyers.
For more than a month, Raquel had regularly stopped on Friday afternoons at the prison to visit Juan, sometimes just for twenty minutes or so, on her drives from the city to her weekend house on the Atlantic coast in Montauk. She had bought the house as a generous gift to herself after the terrifying nine months in which she learned she had breast cancer, underwent debilitating weeks of chemotherapy, and the loss and reconstruction of her left breast. Raquel had always loved life, and she was in utter dread at the thought of losing it during the grim months when the cancer took greater hold before it just halted and was reversed, a miracle she attributed to the cures her doctors delivered and also to the prayers she recited. She was raised as a Catholic and had remained one-a fact that she didn’t usually disclose in the world in which she now lived-and believed in the will of God. She was convinced she’d been given a second life, that she’d lived two lives in one. As in the lines in Luke that described the Prodigal Son-For this thy brother was dead and is alive again.
Since her first meeting with Juan, she was fascinated by him and the place where his life had brought him. She was also fascinated by the incessant attention focused on him and the murder of an immensely wealthy man. It was as though Juan were accused of killing Mother Teresa. There were endless news reports dwelling on how the mysterious alien had managed to win the affection and confidence of one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic couples in the world, Brad and Joan Richardson. The New York Post carried stories about the “rat” who had insidiously worked his way into the Richardsons’ storied lives and then betrayed them. The articles mentioned that the Richardsons also cared generously for the rat’s “undocumented” wife and children, who had disappeared, probably with cash stolen from the Richardsons’ estate, on the same day Juan was arrested “after leading the police on a wild run through the woods as he tried to escape.”
When Raquel had announced that she was taking over the defense of Juan Suarez, the publicity ratcheted up yet another notch. The press conference took place on the sidewalk at 57th Street and Park Avenue, near the lobby of her office building. It was a clear, chilly fall day. The crisp sunlight fell on Raquel’s taut, beautifully structured, Sicilian-dark face as she spoke. “As more is revealed in this painful case,” she had said, “we’ll learn that the arrest of Juan Suarez was not the result of a thorough professional investigation, but a symptom of some of our worst instincts as a nation. Juan Suarez is not a blade. He is not a knife. He is not an alien. And he is not an insidious rat. He is part of an invisible, much-scorned population whose presence we as a society don’t want to acknowledge, although we take advantage of it. We treat these people as invisible, but they are our nannies, maids, gardeners. We are demonizing the most vulnerable people among us. Juan Suarez had no motive to commit this crime. He had no reason to commit it. And he did not do it.”
Images of Raquel speaking in the clear fall air, with flowers still in bloom behind her on the colorful median dividing Park Avenue’s uptown and downtown traffic, were broadcast around the world. On the day after the press conference, the headline in the Times read: Famed Celebrity Lawyer Takes Over Defense in Hamptons Murder.
Raquel Rematti was tall and imposing, and she was surprised that Juan was four inches taller than she was. When they first met, Juan’s size and vitality surprised her, just as Joan Richardson had been surprised months earlier by how vibrant Juan’s presence was. Raquel had grown used to seeing the small, cowed men who were steadily appearing on the East End of Long Island. She genuinely wanted to believe she had no race or other prejudices, but the difference between Juan and the other Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Ecuadorian men she saw along the roadsides and in the yards of Southampton, East Hampton, and Montauk was too striking for her to deny. Where did he really come from? she wondered. To her, he looked like a Spanish aristocrat, not an immigrant day laborer. She was disappointed with herself that she made these comparisons, but she did.
They always met in a small room with plastic, childlike chairs and desk, all pink. The guards, one of them a very heavy black woman with a tattoo of a flower on her neck, insisted that the door stay open. The guards had pistols. Juan Suarez was an important prisoner, almost certainly the best-known ever held in the Suffolk County Correctional Institution.
Raquel Rematti never took notes. Leaning forward so that they could talk quietly, she sat directly across from Juan at the plastic table. She had learned long ago that the intimacy of a lawyer sitting close to a client, speaking quietly and without the lawyer taking notes, fostered the growth of confidence.
“Juan,” she said, “do you remember where we left off last week?”
They had abruptly been stopped when they met a week earlier by the harsh alarm bell that was a signal for a head count. When that alarm sounded, every prisoner had to return to his cell no matter who was visiting him-lawyer, wife, priest, parent-and the visit couldn’t resume until the lockdown ended. Raquel left because more than two hours passed without any sign of the end of that lockdown. She had a sense that the guards did this to make visitors and inmates as uncomfortable as possible.
“Yes,” Juan said.
“Tell me more, Juan, about everything you remember about the first time you saw Mrs. Richardson with Senator Rawls. You told me it was at a party on the Fourth of July.”
It had taken all of Raquel’s skill at generating a client’s confidence gradually to bring Juan, reticent by nature, to speak about Joan Richardson and Hank Rawls.