Free The Borzoi Killings by Paul Batista Page A

doormen on the morning shift said they didn’t see her leave the building. What they had seen was the familiar face of Senator Rawls arriving at noon. And the doormen on the afternoon and early evening shifts saw them leave the buildingat seven-thirty in sleek evening clothes to walk the two blocks uptown to the private party in the Museum, where Halsey had reached her hours later on her cell phone. Video surveillance tapes in the lobby showed the Senator arriving and, many hours later, the glamorous couple leaving.
    Halsey knew that the Senator and Joan Richardson had had more than seven hours of uninterrupted time in her apartment. A vigorous guy like Senator Rawls and a very beautiful woman like Joan Richardson could have easily gone at it, Halsey thought, again and again in the course of such a long afternoon and early evening, especially if the 60-year-old Senator used that magical blue pill.
    “When did you leave to go shopping?”
    “I’m not certain, Detective. Ten, eleven? I didn’t keep track.”
    “Did Davey drive you around?”
    “No, I got a cab off the street.”
    “Where’d you go?”
    “Really, Detective, how can I remember that?”
    “When did you get back to the apartment?”
    “Three-thirty? Four? I had to get ready for the party.”
    “Any cell or telephone calls after you got back?”
    “Probably not. I might have turned the cell off. There are days when I really don’t want to talk to anyone.”
    “Did you use email?”
    “I might have. But so many things happened that night, Detective, that I can’t remember much about the day.”
    “Did you go to the party with anyone?”
    “I answered that yesterday, didn’t I? My friend, Senator Rawls, picked me up.”
    “We haven’t been able to reach him. Where is he now?”
    “I believe he’s in Paris.”
    “He hasn’t returned our calls.”
    “He is a busy man, Detective. He must get fifty calls a day. And he’s in Paris, he told me, rehearsing for a movie. I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”
    “When you speak to him, please be sure to ask him to give me a call. You have my card.”
    Joan Richardson glanced at the large clock above one of the sinks. There were Roman numerals on its face. “I have to leave now, Mr. Halsey,” she said.
    “No problem, Mrs. Richardson.”
    “Thanks.” Her voice was sardonic, as it sometimes was when she was irritated, impatient, or afraid.
    Halsey, wanting the last word, said, “We’ll see you when you get back.”
    Joan Richardson was used to having the last word, but this time she let it go.

12.
    Juan was never colder in his life. He had been taken before dawn from the prison on the outskirts of Riverhead, where he’d spent three nights in an unheated concrete cell in isolation and without visitors. Dressed in green prison fatigues under a bullet-proof vest that fit rigidly and tightly over his chest, back, and arms, he waited in a holding pen just behind one of the closed doors to the courtroom. It was just as cold here as in his concrete cell. The guards, their weapons in their hands, wore Eisenhower-style bomber jackets.
    At last, the iron gate to the holding pen slid open. A slim Asian woman came in. She carried a briefcase. She had absolutely black eyes and black hair.
    She said slowly, uncertain whether he spoke English, “Mr. Suarez, I am your lawyer.”
    Not speaking, Juan nodded. He was uneasy with Asian people. He had never seen one in Mexico. And, when he arrived in New York, he found work washing dishes by hand fourteen hours a day at a dirty Chinese restaurant on First Avenue just above 96th Street. The abrupt, unfriendly man and woman who owned the restaurant never once asked his name, and he knew them only as Mr. and Mrs. Wan. They never said hello or good night. They paid him in cash, handing it to him as if they were reluctant tolet it go. In the hot, noisy restaurant, Mr. and Mrs. Wan made slashing hand gestures to relay instructions to him. With the same hand gestures and