Raquel stood, too. “I’d welcome that.”
Juan Suarez was in the holding cell outside the courtroom. Raquel hadn’t seen him since the day the trial recessed, a day when Theresa Bui was still alive, vital, and filled with the promise of the young. Raquel said, “Juan, there are two things I want to talk to you about before we go back into the courtroom.”
“What?”
“The first is that there was a film that somebody sent out showing that two cops, not you, stole the cash in Brad’s bedroom.”
“You know I never stole anything, Raquel.”
What, Raquel thought, do I really know about this man? “The theft charges have been dropped,” she said. “You’re not charged with stealing anymore. The jury won’t be asked to decide whether or not you took the money.”
“I never had any money. I only had money I worked for.”
They were face to face, whispering even though the guards were inattentive. “But understand, Juan, there are still the killing charges.”
“I didn’t kill Mr. Richardson.”
Raquel Rematti had learned over the years that even the guilty could frankly, earnestly, and disarmingly stare into her eyes while saying, I’m innocent. For her it was an illusion that people who lie can’t look you straight in the eye. And it was an illusion, too, that an evasive, nervous person was lying. Continuing to look at Juan’s unwavering, earnest eyes, she decided to say nothing.
“I never lied to you, Raquel.”
“And there’s something more I need to tell you, Juan.”
Strangely impassive, not speaking, he waited.
“Theresa was killed last Friday night. Murdered by a sniper.”
“I know that,” he said, his voice oddly fluent, as though he always had the capacity to speak English far better than he had.
“How?”
“Prisoners watch television, they talk all the time.”
“I know how much you liked Theresa.”
“I did, Raquel.” But suddenly the eyes with which he now stared at her, the expression on his face, and the stance of his body, were transformed into hostility.
Raquel Rematti, who had spent years dealing with dangerous men and never once was afraid of them, was now afraid.
“You killed her. You spoke about Oscar Caliente. And now see what happened.”
35.
Bo Halsey lived in a ranch house where he was raised in the Springs area of East Hampton. Still covered with dense woods, Springs was where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had lived. It was where Pollock had driven his car into a tree at ninety miles an hour. Bo knew their names and had seen pictures of the paintings. Awed tourists sometimes knocked on his door for directions to the artists’ shingled weather-beaten houses. For Bo, the blessing of the area was not that these inexplicably famous men had once lived there but that the bay waters were less than a mile from his house, the waters where fish were abundant every day of the year.
When he heard the knock on his door as he cooked a breakfast of eggs and bacon, he thought that tourists had come to the house for directions.
There were no tourists this morning. The men at the door were Vic Santangello and Paul Arena, two FBI agents who had worked from time to time with Bo.
Bo Halsey knew exactly why they were there.
“Hey, guys, come on in. I just made some coffee.”
Santangello and Arena followed him into the kitchen. Just outside the big window two deer stood completely still. The woods in Springs were filled with deer. “When I was a kid,” Bo said as he pointed to the coffee, which he still made in an old Pyrex percolator his mother had used years ago, “I loved to see the deer. It was like Christmas all the time. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Now there are so many of them they look like rats on long legs to me.”
“Bo,” Santangello said, “I gotta get this out because we really hate doing this.”
“It’s part of being on the job, Vic. We’re supposed to hate doing the things we do. It’s lousy work no matter how you look at it.”
Arena said, “They want to talk to you. There are two fucking U.S. Attorneys waiting for you in Riverhead. You gotta come with us.”
“My, my. U.S. Attorneys? When did the feds get involved in this?”
“When that gook who works for you went to the Justice Department and said you were a racist who suppressed evidence in order to convict a Mexican.”
“Since when,” Bo said, “was that a crime?”
“The Italian broad took him to our bosses in the city. They think the DA out here can’t really investigate one of his own people.”
“And that would be me, right?”
“Appears to be,” Arena said.
“Sorry about this, Bo,” Santangello said, genuine apology in his voice.
“No problem, guys.”
36.
“And tell me again,” Judge Conley said, “why you think I should let the jury hear this woman.” She glanced at her notepad, searching for the name. “Kathy Schiavoni?”
There was an uncharacteristic urgency as Raquel Rematti spoke, “We know she conducted all the forensics tests on evidence taken from the Richardson bedroom.”
Margaret Harding, standing next to Raquel but looking only at the judge, said, “We’ve presented our case, Judge. The prosecution has rested. At no point did we find it necessary to put on forensics evidence. We’ve conceded that Mr. Suarez’s fingerprints and DNA were not in the office where the killing took place. We know that his fingerprints are all over the kitchen and other areas of the house where he would have worked. We didn’t use that evidence because we were trying to be careful in what we presented. We want a fair trial for this defendant as much as Ms. Rematti does.”
“And I know,” Raquel said, “that the next thing Ms. Harding will say is that, since the state presented no forensics evidence, we don’t have a right to present any.”
Raquel recognized that Judge Conley was again deliberately working in this conversation, just as she had two days earlier with the tape, to navigate a way through the maze to exclude more evidence, now the testimony of Kathy Schiavoni that there were semen stains on the sheets in the Richardson bedroom that had no known source, the semen of an unidentified man.
Conley tried a new approach: “Let’s assume, Ms. Rematti, that it doesn’t matter that the state elected not to use a fingerprint or DNA expert, and that you are entitled to put on any witness you think would assist your client. What’s the relevance of whether there were any stains at all on the sheets? This is not a rape case, it’s a murder case, isn’t it?”
Raquel said, “And I have information from a forensic scientist employed by Ms. Harding’s office that there is an unknown source of semen undoubtedly placed there by an unknown man at some point within twenty-four hours of the killing.”
Through her thick, unfashionable glasses, Conley looked at Raquel. “I know you’ve said that, Ms. Rematti. But isn’t that information tenuous, remote, possibly misleading to the jury? Whatever your views may be, I’ve given your client a fair trial, but I don’t have to give him the opportunity to present any evidence he wants to present if it’s not relevant to the case. What is relevant is that his semen is on the sheets, but the state decided not to use that DNA evidence. What is the conceivable relevance of the fact that there are also semen stains of an unidentified man? It can be said, can’t it, that Ms. Harding did your client a favor by not presenting evidence that we know gives the identity of one set of semen stains-Juan Suarez?”
“We appreciate all the favors we are blessed with,” Raquel said, “but Mr. Suarez is entitled to present his own evidence, not just evidence that responds to what the state has put on.”
“Ms. Rematti, I was trying to avoid making comments on strategy, particularly for a lawyer of your experience. But if I let you put on Ms. Schiavoni to testify about her findings aren’t we opening the door to Ms. Harding putting on rebuttal evidence that Mr. Suarez’s semen was there?”