“Thanks for letting me see you, Mr. Lupo. And Margaret, it’s good to see you again, outside of the courtroom.”
Glancing first at Margaret Harding and then at Raquel, Lupo said, “Ms. Rematti, what can we do for you?”
“You can help me save a man’s life.”
Riche Lupo glanced again at Margaret Harding, as though looking for guidance in how to deal with this woman. “Help me understand,” he said to Raquel. “You’ve lost me already.”
“I went to visit my client last Friday.”
“Which client is that?”
“I only have one client out here at the moment, Mr. Lupo. That’s Mr. Suarez.”
“What do you want to tell me about Mr. Suarez?”
“When I saw him last Friday his face was bruised and he had a stab wound in his back.”
“He’s gotten proper medical care, hasn’t he?”
Raquel wasn’t surprised that Riche Lupo already knew about the attack. She said, “His medical care is not my major concern. He’s young and strong. He’ll survive the bruises and wounds. But obviously his life is in jeopardy.”
“How so? Did he tell you that?”
“Not at all. Mr. Suarez is a stoic. He said very little, but it’s clear, isn’t it, that he didn’t slip and fall in the shower.”
“You know, Ms. Rematti, I got an incident report from the prison.” He touched a piece of paper on his desk and glanced at it as though checking a sentence. Richie Lupo said, “He seems to have attacked another prisoner, unprovoked, and that prisoner was severely injured.”
With an unexpected edge of anger in her voice, she said, “It didn’t happen that way. People with stab wounds in their backs generally aren’t the attackers.”
“Is that right? I should believe one Juan Suarez, if that’s his name, and not three prison guards who filed the incident report? Now why in God’s name should I do that?”
“What you should do, Mr. Lupo, is take whatever steps you need to take to protect my client’s life.”
“Take steps? I don’t know what happens in other parts of the country, Ms. Rematti, but in this part of the world the DA’s office has absolutely no control over prison security. That’s all up to the prison. I’m sure you know that. Pigs will fly before the prison listens to me.”
“Look, I want to avoid taking this to the judge. You know as well as I do that all you have to do is pick up the phone and the prison will do much more to protect him. The judge doesn’t want a dead defendant on her hands.”
“Go to the judge, Ms. Rematti, be my guest, and she’ll give you exactly the same answer I’m giving you-the prisons make their own rules and do what they feel they need to do to create a secure environment. Secure, that is, for the guards, the other inmates and, last on the scale of priorities, your client.”
“I don’t think she has that narrow a view of the scope of her powers.”
“You know what, Ms. Rematti? I think I know the judge far better than you do. She and I went to law school together at Hofstra. I can’t stop you from asking her to get what you think your client deserves. In fact, your client should have thanked his lucky stars that he was able to get around the prison for work and exercise and meals. They’ve been pretty lenient toward him. If I had anything to say about it, he’d be in lockdown twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Which is where he is now, and he may stay there for good. That should protect him.”
“Somebody tried to kill him, sir. I see jails that are more humane in Alabama.”
Richie Lupo was staring at Margaret Harding as though looking for her to express admiration for him, for his bravery in challenging the legendary Raquel Rematti. “I don’t know anything, Ms. Rematti, about jails in Alabama. This isn’t Alabama. It’s Suffolk County.”
The words that formed in Raquel’s mind were distinct-You’re an asshole, Richie Lupo-but years of self-discipline suppressed the words. Finally she said, “Mr. Lupo, I can have the New York Times and CNN here in ten seconds to hear about the attempt to kill my client and the fact that the guards, after turning their backs on the assault, then filed a false report. They intervened only after Mr. Suarez got the upper hand.”
Richie Lupo was now angry. He leaned toward her. “Bring them out, Ms. Rematti. You know what? I don’t give a flying fuck what they say. As I said, this is Suffolk County. I like it fine here. I’m not going anywhere, and I don’t want to go anywhere. Anderson Cooper can piss all over me. I win elections, he doesn’t.”
Raquel too was angry. She was almost startled by Richie Lupo’s rant. In her career she’d had many tense and acrimonious encounters with prosecutors-after all, this business was not for the faint at heart-but there was something outside the pale, off-the-reservation, about Richie Lupo, who resembled Mitt Romney but spoke like Rush Limbaugh. Was he, she wondered, putting on an act for the very attractive Margaret Harding? Was he crazy? “I get the complete picture now, Mr. Lupo.” She stood up. “I’m going back to planet earth.”
As Raquel left the room, she heard Richie Lupo and Margaret Harding laugh. It was loud and derisive laughter.
22.
The videotape was grainy. Bo Halsey had spent hundreds of hours in his career staring at blurred photographs and then, with the advent of surveillance cameras everywhere, the faint images of people on tape. After five repetitions of the three-minute tape, he recognized the men depicted on it. They were Cerullo and Cohen. They were hastily moving cash from the Richardsons’ stately bedroom to the bathroom. While there was no surveillance tape of the bathroom, Cerullo and Cohen weren’t carrying it out of the house then. Bo Halsey knew they were hiding it.
“When did you see this tape?” Halsey asked Ang Tien, the youthful Asian technician who, two days earlier, had asked for an appointment with him.
“Last week.”
“Why were you looking at tape from the bedroom? He was killed in his office on the first floor.”
“Someone from the security company must have been like curious. She would have known the locations in the house where the security systems were. It’s a subtle system, kind of beyond the state of the art technologically, you know. Like very advanced. It doesn’t rely on cameras. It relies on sensors that aren’t like visible to anyone looking for them. So she probably thought it would be like interesting to review footage from a house where, you know, a murder happened.”
“And she knew to look in the bedroom?”
“Apparently.”
“Why would anyone in his right mind have a surveillance camera in his bedroom?”
Ang Tien was young, geeky. Halsey knew that Ang spent hundreds, possibly thousands of hours every month gazing into computers. He had no friends or girlfriends; his computer life was the only life he wanted to lead. Bo Halsey was once impatient with the young generations of police officers who worked for him and who used like and you know in every sentence. But, despite that annoying tic, many of them were smart and hard-working. Ang Tien, the grandson of a Vietnamese soldier who had fled Saigon in a helicopter in 1975 as the North Vietnamese army rolled to victory, was very smart: he had helped Bo in other cases, and his information and results were always reliable.
“Have you shown this to anybody else?”
“No. You’re in charge of the investigation. I thought, you know, I should go directly to you.”
“Do you recognize the men in the tape?”
“No.”
“Do you see what they’re doing?”
Ang Tien was struck by the question because it was so unnecessary. He wondered for a moment whether Bo Halsey was taunting him. It was obvious what the men were carrying.