Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

“No, no, no. Just to me. I was aware of their long friendship.”

“Where’s your client?”

“This way. He’s waiting in that garden beneath the rock wall.”

Mike tried to take my arm to guide me down the wide winding staircase but I wanted no part of him. The steps led to a round garden that, in summer, was one of the prettiest spots in the city, surrounded by lush greenery and beautiful plantings. Now, the trees were bare and the bushes looked scraggly, but the stunning rock formations provided a natural shield from the wind.

At the base of the steps, sitting alone on a stone wall, was Congressman Ethan Leighton. He was dressed in jogging clothes, with a hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head and a short windbreaker on top of that.

When he heard us approach, he stood up and took off his gloves. He didn’t look much better than he had the other night, forcing a smile as he greeted me again. Ethan was a bit taller than I, and his normally slim frame seemed even lighter than I recalled.

He held out a hand to me and I nodded at him. His lower lip was raw and red from where he’d been biting down on it. He had a ghostly pallor, a hollowness around his eyes that made them look even beadier than before.

“Sit down, Ethan,” Lem said.

I sat a few feet away from him. Both Mike and Lem stood as Lem explained what he had told me. I muttered my agreement to this unorthodox arrangement.

“Why don’t you tell Ms. Cooper about yourself, Ethan? What you’ve been doing since you left the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

“Where should I start?” he asked, looking around to each of us.

“We can read the official bio,” Mike said. “Tell us something about Salma Zunega.”

“I’m just so sick that she’s been hurt. It’s haunting me.”

“Not hurt, Congressman. We call it dead.”

I wanted to find out how he’d met her before we got into the subject of the missing baby and whose child it might be.

“How long have you been married?” I asked. I counted on the fact that it would rattle him to talk about his wife and his inamorata in the same breath.

“Twenty-two years.” Ethan Leighton had been on the hustings too long. His ability to flash an artificial smile in the middle of this was uncanny. “Claire and I tied the knot when I was in law school. She has a degree in business. She’s wonderful-she’s, um, really wonderful.”

“And children?”

“Two. Two children. One’s away at college and the other’s in boarding school.”

“You forgetting one?” I asked.

“Oh, sorry. Ana, of course. Ana Zunega,” Leighton said. “I want you to know we’re terribly concerned about the child. We’re moving heaven and earth, with private resources, to help find her.”

The more emotionally wound up he became, the more the tic in his left eye became pronounced. I’d never noticed it before. He stroked it with his forefinger, which was as long and almost as skinny as the finger bones of that skeleton in the City Hall grave.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Mike asked.

“My father, Moses Leighton. He’s a very wealthy man, Detective. He’s got the money to do this kind of thing.”

“And Claire,” I said, “-how does she feel about this?”

He took a deep breath and answered. “Under the circumstances, she’s-she’s-well, she understands completely and will raise the child with me as our own.”

Mike asked exactly what it was that Claire understood, but Leighton didn’t answer. He was listening to me as I spoke to Lem.

“I guess you made your point this morning, Mr. Howell. I guess Claire will be doing her Tammy Wynette ‘Stand by Your Man’ best on the podium for your press conference. Congratulations.” I turned back to Leighton. “Of course, she hasn’t yet accounted for her version of where she was the night Salma was killed, by any chance?”

His eye twitched wildly. “You’re crazy, Alex. You’re f-”

Lem cut him off and told him to control himself. The congressman’s front tooth found its groove in his lower lip, drawing droplets of blood as he clamped his mouth shut.

“When did you meet Salma?” Mike asked.

“Three, almost four years ago.”

“She was still a teenager then?”

“Twenty, sir. She was twenty.”

“Just a tad older than your own kids,” Mike said.

“Yes, but could we leave Claire and the kids out of this?” Leighton asked of Lem Howell. “Could we just talk about the accident and Salma’s problem?”

“Ms. Cooper, here, is a fan of the big picture, Mr. Leighton,” Mike said. “She’ll tie it all up in a package for you before we’re done.”

“Mr. Howell told me that you were home with your family the night Salma was killed. You understand that Claire necessarily becomes a witness in all this.”

“You’re not seriously thinking I had any reason to hurt Salma?” Ethan Leighton pulled himself up into a position, posturing his outrage as though he were making a congressional appearance on C-SPAN. “Or that my wife did?”

“Don’t ever try to go where Ms. Cooper’s thinking,” Lem said. “Just stay calm.”

There was nothing a prosecutor liked better than the loving family member as alibi witness. What wife-with everything to lose-wouldn’t put her hand on a Bible and swear that her husband had never left her side the night in question?

“Do you have any photographs of your daughter?” I asked. “Of Ana.”

“I-uh-I’m afraid I don’t. I’m afraid that wouldn’t have been very smart, under the circumstances.”

“Which part of the circumstances were smart?” Mike said.

“How did you meet?” I asked.

“It was at a fund-raiser, here in the city. One of my events.”

“Salma was what-a political activist? Rallying the vote?” Mike asked. “Was she here in the States legally?”

Leighton didn’t say a word. He looked at Lem but got no help.

“Was she a citizen?”

“I believe she was legal. She had papers, Detective.”

“My mother’s dog has papers, Leighton,” Mike said. “Funny, ’cause cops swept her whole apartment and didn’t come up with any documents.”

“I don’t know why that would be or where she kept them. Maybe at a bank.”

“Seems to me Salma’s closet was the bank,” Mike said.

“What do you mean?” the congressman asked. “What are you talking about?”

Was it possible he didn’t know about the shoe boxes full of cash?

“So what brought her to your fund-raiser that night?” Mike asked. “Your position on abortion rights? Gun control? Illegal immigrants?”

Ethan Leighton was keeping himself even. “She didn’t come because of my politics, Mr. Chapman. She was there as someone’s date. We got to talking and-”

“Now, that’s classy. Not only are you cheating, but you steal her out from under another guy,” Mike said. “A supporter? Somebody who bought a ticket to come in?”

“She was nothing to him, Detective. I don’t even remember who it was who brought her. I’m sure she wouldn’t either. Salma is a vibrant-”

“Salma was.”

“Sorry. I still have trouble believing that,” Leighton said. “Salma was a vibrant, intelligent, high-spirited young woman. She was mature beyond her years, because she’d been to hell and back, quite frankly.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Salma was smuggled into this country, Ms. Cooper. She was fourteen years old when she was brought across the border from Mexico in a cattle truck, along with thirty or forty people from her region.”

Lem was watching me to see if Leighton succeeded at melting my armor with another tale of cruelty and abuse. He didn’t realize I had not been able to get Olena’s fresh story from yesterday out of my mind. Little chance of trumping that.