“It was a big party,” Juan said. “I met everybody at the front door. I see right away that Mr. Rawls and Mrs. Richardson are friends.”
“What did you see them do?”
“At first they walk around and talked to people. Like they were giving the party.”
“And what else?”
“Later they held hands.”
“Did Mr. Richardson see that?”
“Sure, everybody saw that. No one cared.”
“Didn’t Mr. Richardson care?”
“No. They didn’t spend much time together. He goes away a lot. She doesn’t.”
“Mrs. Richardson and this man Rawls: Can you tell me anything else?”
“That night you mean?”
“Let’s start with that night.”
“Later. They are at the pool. They did things to each other.”
Raquel asked, “What things, Juan?” She knew she was driving forward into new terrain, more and more overcoming Juan’s reluctance to say anything negative about Joan Richardson. She had brought Juan around, at least to some extent, by letting him know that it was Joan Richardson who told the police she believed Juan killed Brad, and Juan remembered the stony face of Joan Richardson behind the tinted glass of the police car against which he was thrown when he was arrested.
“He put his mouth down there on her.”
“And you saw that?”
“They are outside, near the pool, Raquel. Dark out. But they are not hiding.”
“Did anybody else see them?”
“I think only me.”
“Where was Brad?”
“Not far off.”
“What was he doing?”
Juan remembered that Brad was holding Trevor’s hand. “He is with friends. But not far off, Raquel.”
She knew that clients lied to her most of the time. Even when some told her what might have been the truth, she could never be certain that it was in fact the truth. There were other clients who never gave her any story at alclass="underline" those were the most dangerous ones because they assumed that Raquel would fabricate a story for them, and she never did. In her freshman year at Swarthmore a professor in the class on the Victorian novel had spoken of the “willing suspension of disbelief” that a reader should bring to a work of fiction. Long after she had forgotten everything about the plot of Vanity Fair, she remembered those words. But for the opposite purpose: she had to bring disbelief to everything she heard.
But with Juan she had a sense, although not a certainty, that he was a truth-teller. He said he had not killed Brad Richardson, so why not believe him? How would she ever know the truth? “Isn’t that all we know about truth?” Raquel frequently asked her Columbia students. “That the truth is what happened.”
“Did Brad ever say anything to you about how he felt about his wife? Everyone seemed to know, Juan, that Mrs. Richardson and Rawls were special friends.”
“Brad was a happy man, nice to everybody. He treats his wife and Mr. Rawls in the same nice way.”
Raquel rose from the chair, touched Juan on the shoulder to signal that he should stay seated, and walked to the vending machines. She bought candy bars and sodas for herself, for Juan, and for the three guards. The guards silently accepted the sodas and candy, as did Juan.
Now was the time, she knew, to ask Juan a question she could not have asked before. It was because she intended to ask this question that she had not invited Theresa Bui to join her on this visit. Juan, she sensed, might not answer if Theresa were there, even though he always welcomed her warmly. “Can you tell me anything about you and Mrs. Richardson?”
Juan put down the Diet Coke can from which he had been sipping. He looked directly into Raquel’s eyes.
“I was Mrs. Richardson’s boyfriend, Raquel.”
Of course, Raquel thought, what woman, or man, wouldn’t be this man’s lover? Slightly uneasy with what he said and her own reaction, Raquel glanced down at Juan’s hands. They were large and powerful. The veins looked like hard ropes beneath the skin.
“You made love to her?”
Juan appeared slightly confused, as if not believing that Raquel didn’t understand the meaning of boyfriend. “Sure, we did.”
“When was the first time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Before you saw her with Senator Rawls at the pool?”
“Sure.”
“After that as well?”
“Yeah.”
“How many times, altogether?”
“You mean me and Mrs. Richardson?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“Lots, Raquel, lots.”
“The last time?”
“The last time?”
“Yes.”
“Two days before Mr. Richardson died.”
“Did Brad know about you and Mrs. Richardson?”
He paused. “Why are you asking this?”
“It’s simple, Juan. She’s going to testify against you at the trial. She will work with them to get you convicted. When I ask her questions I need to make her seem biased against you.”
“What is that word?”
“That she has something against you, that she’s willing to lie to hurt you.”
“Why would she hurt me?”
“I don’t know why about anything, Juan. All I know is that she will try.”
“I never hurt her.”
Raquel knew she was in a strange business. It was a world where ordinary human standards-such as I love you, I wouldn’t hurt you-didn’t apply, and where people did incalculable damage to others to protect themselves. “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t hurt her. Let me tell you this, Juan. Part of my job is to make people suspicious of her. Who is to say that she didn’t have someone kill him? Do you understand? My job is to protect you. If I can make it seem that somebody else might have killed him, then I’ve raised reasonable doubt.”
“Doubt?
“We talked about this.”
Like many other terms lawyers and judges used, it was elusive to define reasonable doubt. The explanation judges gave to jurors was opaque, a classic tautology. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt, judges said, didn’t mean the prosecution had to prove guilt beyond all doubt. That wasn’t possible. At the other extreme, you couldn’t doubt everything. A reasonable doubt was located some place between no doubt and doubt about everything. Reasonable is reasonable. As she often told her students, the definition was absurd. She had often heard jurors ask again as they deliberated for an explanation of reasonable doubt. The judge always repeated the same words, as though repetition would create meaning. “It’s a joke, ladies and gentlemen,” she told her students. “But in this business, the business of representing criminal defendants, the beauty of it is that the definition of reasonable doubt gives you something to work with, you have the chance to make soap out of stone.”
Juan said, “I didn’t kill Mr. Richardson, Raquel. You know that, don’t you?”
Raquel Rematti was trained to bring doubt to everything. But she said, “Of course I believe you, Juan. I do.”
16.
As soon as Kathy Schiavoni graduated from East Hampton High School, she fulfilled the two driving ambitions of her teenage life. She had a silver earring pierced through her right eyebrow, and she immediately moved to the Lower East Side. She spent six years in Manhattan. She worked as a waitress, a nanny, and a dog-walker. She had only two boyfriends. Each of them was with her for three months. Both of them were haphazard, lazy cocaine-dealers. They were addicts, and dumb enough to use the money they earned from selling drugs only to buy drugs for themselves. She was afraid of cocaine, but loved each of them. Kathy, slightly overweight, with frizzy reddish hair and a plain face, was devastated when they walked out on her. She imagined that she would never again find another lover.
At twenty-five she returned to East Hampton. She rented a small apartment on the third floor of a building on Main Street near the East Hampton Cinema. Her parents lived in a neat ranch house less than a mile from her apartment, beyond the windmill and the wood-shingled Episcopal Church on the Montauk Highway. She ate dinner with them on Sunday night once every two months. She worked, at the cash register, in one of the few locally owned hardware stores. At nights and on weekends, for five years, she made the long drive “up-island”-in the direction of New York City-to dreary, over-populated Smithtown, where she took courses in criminology and law enforcement at a community college. Although she had been at sea in her high school courses in biology and basic chemistry-her grades were just above passing, a gift from her teachers-she now gravitated to forensics, to lab work, and to DNA testing.