Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

“Where was she taken?”

“Near Brownsville, in Texas, at first. With the usual promise that she’d get an agricultural job or be placed as a servant in a family household,” the congressman said. “But that never happened. She was held captive in a farmhouse by the man her family paid to get her out of Mexico. For two years, she was raped repeatedly by him.”

“I hear these tales more often than you can imagine, Mr. Leighton,” I said. “I’ve learned what many of these young women have endured.”

“There’s an ugly twist to this one, Ms. Cooper. The man who kept her chained to her bed when he went off on these smuggling trips? He was Salma’s uncle,” the congressman said. “He was her mother’s brother.”

Now it was my turn to be silent.

Mike waited thirty seconds before pounding on. “Who brought Salma to New York?”

“It’s nothing she would ever talk about with me.”

“Weren’t you the least bit curious?”

“I was much more than curious, Detective. There were entire pockets of her life that were off-limits to me, just as there were areas of mine that were off-limits to her,” Leighton said. “Being sold off to her uncle as an adolescent was nothing she was in any position to change. But once he was ready to get rid of her? I don’t think she was very proud of the fact that she spent the next few years of her life selling herself.”

“So she came to New York as a prostitute, specifically?” Mike asked.

“Yes, she did.”

“Someone must have been pretty well steeped in the trafficking business to get her here,” Mike said. “A professional, not a two-bit Mexican in a cattle truck.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Detective. She never told me who. She wouldn’t go there, and frankly, I didn’t care.”

“Didn’t care?” Mike asked.

“That’s sounds a bit icy. I mean that I had no intention of pushing Salma to talk about it, and I’m ashamed to say, it’s not like I was going to get involved in a prosecution of the man. She had put it behind her and I certainly had nothing to gain by the association with her, or her pimp.”

“The tattoo on Salma’s body,” I said to Leighton, “what do you know about that?”

I couldn’t tell if he had reddened because of the nature of our conversation or because the cold air was biting his skin.

“Nothing,” he said, with a sidelong glance at Lem. “A flower?”

“Do you know what kind of flower?”

Leighton thought the question was ridiculous. “I-I don’t. Everybody’s got tattoos, Ms. Cooper. My own kids have them.”

“Not in the same place on the body as Salma’s was,” Mike said. “Just a hunch.”

“On her leg-her thigh? So what?”

“Doesn’t mean anything to you?” I asked. “That placement?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did Salma have that tattoo when you met her, or get it afterwards?”

“She had that when we met. I don’t know when or how she got it.”

“Where was Salma living when you first started to see her?” I asked.

“On the West Side. Near a Hundred and tenth Street.”

“Not as well as you set her up,” Mike said.

Ethan Leighton didn’t speak.

“How long after you met did you begin dating her?” I asked.

“Look, Ms. Cooper. I’d actually never been unfaithful to Claire in all the years we’d been married. I didn’t set out to get into this mess. Salma started calling me, texting me on my phone, showing up at all my events. She-uh-she was very interested in starting a relationship with me.”

“Oh, man,” Mike said, throwing up his hands as he began to circle the rock garden. “Where are these broads? How come nobody’s ever after my ass? Her fault, was it?”

“Nothing is Salma’s fault,” Leighton said. “I’m not blaming her. I didn’t have to meet with her, make dates, become involved. I responded-okay-I was just as excited about things as she was. You want blood from me? Is that what you want? Take it, Mr. Chapman.”

“Calm down, Ethan,” Lem said. “Just let them get this done.”

“When you began dating Salma, was she seeing other men?” I asked.

“Obviously, Ms. Cooper. She came to my event with another man, didn’t she?” Leighton’s smooth tone was developing an edge.

“How often did you get to be with her?”

“Truly, not often at all. Maybe you know something about the congressional schedule,” he said. “Monday’s my day in New York. Pretty much like clockwork I could see her on Monday. But then I fly to D.C. every Tuesday morning, and the weekend, well-that was always saved for Claire and the kids.”

“But this week you were with her on Tuesday night?”

“We’re not back in session yet, Mr. Chapman. Salma called. She told me Ana was sick and she wanted to see me.”

“And two years ago, when she told you she was pregnant, was she still dating other men?”

“Probably so. Well, yes, I know it was so. And we fought about that.”

“About that, or about the baby’s paternity?”

Ethan Leighton was steaming now. “You’re damn right I wasn’t happy about the fact that Salma was pregnant. She’d been on the pill for years before I met her. She knew how I felt about the whole idea, about how an out-of-wedlock child would compromise my political viability. I couldn’t figure how she had conceived. And I’d spent so much time in Washington the month she became pregnant I just didn’t think it was possible.”

“So what happened?”

“We fought. She flew down to Texas, where her older brother had finally moved and had a home. And I was going crazy without her,” Leighton said, putting his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands. “I guess it was like an addiction.”

“Did you bring her back to New York?”

“Yes, yes, I did. She didn’t want me around for the birth,” he said, as Mike looked at me, “because I had been so vehement in my denial. But once we did the DNA test and she gave me the results, I sort of embraced the whole thing.”

If his tic was anything like a lie detector, it was speeding off the charts when he spoke about embracing the news of the child’s paternity.

“You bought the apartment for her?”

“I did everything I could to set her up comfortably with the baby.”

I leaned in and looked at Leighton’s face. “This last year, year and a half, was Salma still seeing other men?”

“You’re asking me to think about things I don’t want to know, Ms. Cooper. I wasn’t going to leave Claire-never. I’m sure Salma had her ways of taking that out on me.”

“And Ana, did you see Ana often?”

He was shifting positions, trying to get comfortable. “Look, I wasn’t good about the baby, okay? No point lying. Sometimes she was asleep when I got there, sometimes Salma had her spend the night at a friend’s house. You find that child and I’ll make up for all of that. I swear it to you.”

“Money, Mr. Leighton,” Mike said. “How’d you pay Salma’s bills?”

“You’ll see when you get my banking records. I keep an office at my father’s business. Family money, nothing that Claire ever had any access to or reason to see. There’s a corporation I set up, within my father’s firm. The checks were all written on the Leighton Entertainment account. He assumed it was for things I needed for my political advancement.”

“How about cash?” I asked the congressman. “Did you give Salma large sums of cash?”

“Five hundred dollars when I saw her, sometimes a thousand if she wanted something special for the baby.”

He really didn’t seem to be aware of, nor try to explain away, the unusual amounts of cash we had found in Salma’s closet.