“How did you get out here?”
“In a car. There are men who drive us from the city out here. I asked, I paid them money, and they took me.”
“Did you know the police were looking for you?”
“I know they were looking for me, Raquel. People tell me the cops know who I was. But all I do is protect myself.”
“Juan, they kept the knife and then, when you were arrested out here, your fingerprints and DNA matched the ones on the knife.”
“I understand. Those men, Raquel, they were trying to hurt me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“The man who was stabbed with the knife wasn’t someone who worked in a restaurant. He was a police captain’s son out for the night for fun with friends.”
Juan said, “The guy who came after me was called Chico. He worked in the restaurant.”
“Are you sure? Really sure? None of the three guys worked in the restaurant. They were all brats who were looking for a good time, for a thrill.”
“I don’t know, Raquel. It was dark. I thought it was Chico, the waiter.”
“The cop’s son spent four weeks in the hospital, Juan. He’ll never be able to move his arm again. All the nerves and muscles and tendons are cut. When a cop’s kid is hurt, they never stop looking for the guy who did it.”
“They were trying to hurt me, Raquel. They wanted to kill me.”
“That doesn’t matter. The police and now the prosecutors out here have a knife you used in New York in the way someone out here used a knife on Brad Richardson and the Borzois.”
“I didn’t hurt Mr. Richardson. I hurt those people, not Mr. Richardson.”
There was a pause in the room. “Why didn’t you ever mention this before?” Theresa asked.
Without any hostility, Juan looked from Theresa to Raquel. “I wanted you to like me. Both of you. So I didn’t tell you that.”
“And there’s something else, Juan,” Raquel said.
“What?”
“I need to know your name.”
“Juan Suarez.”
“Are you sure?”
“Juan Suarez, Raquel.”
“Is that your name?”
“Juan Suarez.”
“Is your name Anibal Vaz?”
“No, Raquel.”
“Didn’t you once tell Joan Richardson that your name was Anibal?”
“Did she tell you that?”
Theresa repeated Raquel’s question: “Did you tell Joan Richardson that your name is Anibal Vaz?”
He was still calm. “No.”
Raquel was totally focused on him. “Did you ever sell drugs?”
“I did, a little.”
“Where?”
“In New York.”
“Only there?”
“No, Raquel, a little out here, too.”
How disarming he is, Raquel thought, how much like one of those men whose simplicity and attractiveness and sincerity were so compelling-men like the engaging Ted Bundy who was so successful in persuading so many women to go to private places with him before he killed them. A deadly charmer.
Normally skeptical about the stories most of her clients told her, Raquel wanted to believe him. “When did you do that?” she asked.
“Why are you asking me these things, Raquel?”
“Because one of the things I have to do to protect you is to see whether there is information you can give to the prosecutors about other people. I do that because if you have information about other people that’s valuable to Harding then she might give you some kind of break.”
“What kind of break?”
“We’re not there yet. She and I haven’t talked about that yet. I can’t get there unless you have information about crimes other people did. They won’t give you any kind of break, whatever it might be, until I tell them what you might know about what other people have done. It’s a step at a time. We go first.” She paused. “Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“So talk to me.”
He held her gaze. “Tom Golden, the guy I used to work for before the Richardsons ask me to work, paid me in cash. I don’t think he’s supposed to do that. So did the Richardsons.”
“That kind of thing is not important, Juan. Not at all. What you need to know is something, anything, far more important.”
“I’m not sure, Raquel.”
“Let me try this, Juan. Who gave you the drugs to sell?”
“Some guy named Jocko.”
“Jocko,” she repeated. “How about some guy named Oscar?”
“Oscar?”
“Was there a man named Oscar?”
Juan leaned backward in the small, cafeteria-style plastic chair. “Oscar?” he said.
“They know about someone named Oscar. Oscar runs a big drug gang, in the city and here. They think you know Oscar.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t? They have a tape of you and this Oscar they’re interested in at the Starbucks on the Montauk Highway.”
“I do know that Oscar, Raquel.”
“How much do you know about him?”
“Raquel, please listen to me. What I know about Oscar is that he had his men try to kill me here and that he’ll do it again if he thinks I talk about him. I don’t want to die here.”
25.
Raquel spent the next four days with Theresa Bui at her seaside, slightly rundown and cozy house in Montauk. To Raquel, it was the best season of the year-quiet, cold, isolated. The weekend visitors from the city ordinarily didn’t travel farther than East Hampton. Montauk Point, at the far eastern end of Long Island, was another forty-five minute drive beyond East Hampton, too remote for a weekend. The only other people Raquel and Theresa saw were in the local IGA market when they drove to the village for milk, eggs, steak, bread, and three bottles of red wine. It was exactly the kind of weather Raquel loved-fog on the ocean and over the narrow peninsula, even denser fog embracing the deck of Raquel’s house, and chilly fog at night when the horns on the distant buoys sounded at sea.
They didn’t discuss Juan Suarez when they arrived at the house on Friday evening, two hours after the unannounced headcount at the prison abruptly brought their meeting with him to an end. And they didn’t mention him all day Saturday as they did the simple things that made Raquel’s weekends here so restfuclass="underline" the morning drive to the village for food; the visit to the old hardware store with its scent of wood, paint, and the varnish on the floor boards that Raquel recalled so vividly from her childhood at the hardware store in Haverhill where her father took her to buy nails and car wash; and the afternoon of reading and sweet, brief naps.
It was when they finished on Saturday night their meal of lobster and squash and a bottle of red wine that Raquel finally asked, “What do you think?”
“About Juan?”
“Yes, Juan.”
“I think his name is Anibal Vaz.”
“I’m not sure. In one sense it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s troubling, Raquel. Lying troubles me.”
Theresa, Raquel thought, was still young. Lying would mean something off-center to her. It still concerned Raquel when a client lied to her, but lying was the coin of the realm, not just in the work she did but in the world in which she lived. Even outside of that world, in life in general, people lied about big things and small things; they lied when there was no need to lie, as when someone who has driven twenty miles says she drove thirty, and they lied about issues that matter-a wife claiming she was away on a business trip when in fact she spent those days with a lover. And people lied about guilt and innocence.
“Lying troubles me, too, but I can’t just accept that what Margaret Harding and the DEA claim is the truth is in fact the truth. Isn’t there a line in the New Testament where a lawyer asks Jesus, What is the truth? And Jesus, as I recall it, doesn’t have an answer to that question. He has a parable.” Sipping her wine and smiling, she said, “Jesus didn’t like lawyers.”
“Does anyone?”