Hank spoke quietly, “I told them the truth, Joan. I told them I didn’t know anything more than the fact that he worked for you. And Oz asked me what kind of work, and I said that all I had ever seen was that he worked at the parties. I never saw anything else.”
Still whispering, Joan said, “What else did he ask? Was there anything else?”
“He asked me if I knew that you were having sex with Juan Suarez.”
“My God,” she said. “Where does this end?”
“Did you?” Hank asked.
“No, Jesus Christ, no.”
He glanced at her, and then looked away. To Joan, he now looked impatient, or weary, or skeptical. His sweet, exhausted groans that afternoon as he collapsed at her side seemed to have happened in another world and long ago. “He also asked if you knew Juan’s real name.”
“Wasn’t Juan his real name?”
“Was it?”
“Of course, at least that’s the only name he gave me.”
“Menachem seemed to think his real name was Anibal, Anibal Vaz. Did you ever hear that name?”
“When he asked that question I said no.”
“And that was a lie, wasn’t it, Joan? Why are you lying to me now?”
Sliding to the side the plate with the food she hadn’t touched, she put her hand over his clenched hand. “I’m not,” she said. “Not about Juan Suarez. He was a handyman. He worked for us for months. Brad was attached to him. But the truth is Brad had reached the point where it was hard for him not to court another man. Court is the right word-Brad had the manners of a Southern gentleman. Something may have happened between him and Juan. And Juan killed him.”
This is insane, Hank thought. She has no idea what the truth is. As he’d been doing for the last twenty-four hours, Hank was calculating the losses he might soon suffer by having been her lover before her husband died and by continuing as her lover-as what the newspapers called the “lady billionaire’s boyfriend”-after her husband’s death. When he searched his name in Google, Bing, or Yahoo the first five pages were sensational entries about his relationship with Joan Richardson, as if that were all he had ever done in life. It was only deep into his Google pages when a reader looking for information about Hank Rawls would see that he had been a United States Senator, had briefly run for President, and was a best-selling novelist, and an actor. Fifty years from now, when people looked at the Internet to learn about him they would come away with the impression that all he had done in life was to be the boyfriend of a very rich woman whose husband had been murdered in the Hamptons. He said, “And they asked me how much money you inherited from Brad.”
“How could you know, Hank?”
“They were fishing. Hell, maybe Mr. Oz has it in his mind that a gorgeous woman has to buy my love.” For the first time in the conversation he gave her one of his engaging smiles: he had the gift of lighting up any space he inhabited. “But Hank Rawls can’t be bribed.”
She smiled, briefly. “This is really painful, Hank. I loved Brad for a very long time. I had my difficulties with him. He had his with me. But, God, don’t these people realize that it was my husband who was killed? Don’t they know what I saw when I walked into that house? I could smell the blood in that room. His and the dogs’ blood.” She closed her eyes. “I know they think I had him killed, and that I hired Juan Suarez-my lover-to do it.”
“Both of us have to live in the real world, Joan. And the real world for us today is that Mr. Oz and his bosses want to get more than the conviction of a Mexican gardener. And they have a license to roam anywhere they want, and they are looking at you, at me, at Ozzie and Harriet, at al-Qaeda. But we are the most obvious.”
She leaned across the Formica table, whispering. “I’m scared, Hank.”
“And there’s something else, Joan. You lied to them. That makes them very angry. You hurt their case against Juan. Before they can use you as a witness, they are going to have to tell Rematti you lied to them and to the Grand Jury.”
She waited for more. When he didn’t say anything, Joan asked, “Do you want to leave me?”
How many times, he wondered, had he heard this question? Twelve? Fifty? He’d never spent more than two years with any one woman, and, as a beautiful, golden-haired boy, he had started a lifetime with women when he was fifteen. When he had to abandon his short campaign for President after the pictures on the beach first appeared in the National Enquirer, he briefly saw a psychiatrist. She was a woman who had treated at least seven other Senators. She probed him about why there had been so many women in his life. She said there had to be complex answers.
For him, the real answer was simple and obvious. He was attracted to women, and there were many women in the world, and many of them were as restless, fun-loving, and adventurous as he was. Why not? was the real question, and Why not? was the real answer.
And, besides, there was this: the most intense pleasure in his life-more intense than winning elections, giving speeches on the Senate floor, appearing at parties for his books and now for the movies in which he had roles-was that moment when he first entered a new woman, that moment when her vagina embraced him, the newness of it, the pleasure, the closeness, the movements, the words, the odors.
Hank Rawls was not about to abandon that for Joan Richardson, as gorgeous as she was, and until now as vital and fun-loving as she had been. He had arrived at her apartment earlier to tell her he was leaving because she was a liar. But now he decided he could postpone that, at least for another day or week or more.
Hank Rawls raised her hand. He kissed her fingers. He said, “Let’s go back to the apartment.”
20.
Kathy Schiavoni entered her seven-digit code on the keypad next to the door that led to the windowless, musty locker room in which current case evidence was stored. Once inside the room, her first task was to write in an old-fashioned ledger her name, her time of arrival, and the purpose of her visit. She wrote: “Examination of the Richardson sheets.”
There was always a metallic chill in the room; there was also always the smell of chemicals and compounds-formaldehyde, ammonia, and cordite and gun grease from the confiscated bullets, pistols, and weapons that were stored there.
She walked directly to box 6773, one of the more than two thousand lockers in the warehouse-size building. She knew the combination to the lock and opened it.
The box was empty.
Kathy Schiavoni walked to the computer near the entrance to the icy room. The computer contained information disclosing who had access to lock box 6773. Only her name appeared on the screen, with seven different dates of removal and return. No one else had signed in to remove the sheets and no one had signed them out.
Kathy was methodical and deliberate, so different from her earlier self when she was rootless and confused in her six fugitive years in Manhattan. As soon as she left the building, she scrolled on her cell phone to Bo Halsey’s number. He was the only man in the world she believed she could trust.
After leaving the Army in 1987, Bo became a friend of her difficult father, a Vietnam veteran. Bo joined the VFW club in Sag Harbor, the youngest member of the group, because her father had asked him to do that. Years later, she and Detective Halsey, now approaching early retirement age, had worked on three cases together. Her contacts were usually with the haughty lawyers in the District Attorney’s office, who treated forensic technicians like servants. Whenever she needed to speak to a field person-a cop with “boots on the ground” as they liked to describe themselves ever since Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq-she turned to Bo Halsey. Without ever expressing it, he felt an obligation to give special treatment to Kathy Schiavoni; she had been a lost, unhappy teenager when he first knew her but had evolved into a dedicated professional. He admired her. Transforming yourself was tough. He knew that to move from lost to found, from dead to alive, to be the prodigal child returning home, was a kind of miracle.