If you ask a lucky person to tell you what happened on the worst day of his life, he can do so without hesitation. If you ask the same question to a homeless mother of three whose earthly possessions all fit in a stolen grocery cart, she won’t have a clue. I know this is true, because I am one of the lucky ones, but my father was not.
Even by Mexican standards, we were poor. Our tiny three-room house constructed from bamboo and mud was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and leaky when it rained. On a good day, we had two meals of frijoles and corn tortillas. My father never finished second grade. He couldn’t read, and when I needed his signature on a form so I could get financial aid for college, he signed his name with an X. His job literally killed him, and his death killed my mom.
But when Papá rose at dawn he was singing, and at night after dinner he would take Mamá in his arms and dance with her on their rotted porch to the sound of Tejano music coming from the transistor radio by the stove. I saw him frown only once, and never heard him raise his voice. He was the most positive, upbeat person I have ever known. Twenty years after he died I figured out why.
The lucky or the rich can name their worst day because it is special. For people like my papá, daily challenge is mundane. The bad becomes invisible, and they can see only the good. Optimism is not a personality trait; it is a strategy for coping with your lot.
Mamá taught me English and Papá sent me to college. They made sure I was a lucky one. That is why I can tell you my worst day. It was the day someone murdered my wife.
I’m different from my father in a second way too. He was a good and decent man. I am not. It took me a while to admit that to myself. I doubt it will take you as long. What kind of man has sex a couple of times a month but never with his own wife?
I’ll answer that question. I’ve had plenty of time to think. What kind of man am I? I am a shameful human being. You can call me the harshest name you like, and I will not disagree. I am all of those things and probably more, but there is one thing I am not.
I am not a murderer.
My wife’s name was Tieresse. Eleven years ago an ex-con beat her to death with an antique silver-and-crystal candlestick we kept on a rolltop desk in the parlor adjacent to our bedroom where she did her work. I was not there, but my imagination was. An endless video loop of the scene plays in my head, and I wouldn’t stop it even if I could. Some of it I know to be true. His back is to me. He’s short and stocky, with greasy shoulder-length hair. He’s wearing a denim jacket with no sleeves. A tattoo of a swastika dripping blood covers his upper arm. My wife lies on the floor, faceup, hands raised, her nose broken, a deep raw gash running down her left cheek from the corner of her eye to the cleft of her chin.
After we got married, I moved most of my things to Tieresse’s house, but I kept the studio apartment on top of my restaurant. I stayed there when she was away for business, or when I was too tired or drunk after closing time to drive across town. That’s where I was the night she died, in my apartment, having sex with one of my waitresses who was heading off to culinary school the following week.
Tieresse had seen the waitress several times. She knew her casually, knew her name, enough to say hello and exchange pleasantries, but she didn’t know her well. She didn’t care whether I slept with her. I promise she did not. At least I think she didn’t care. Or I believed she didn’t. I suppose the completely honest thing to say is I’d convinced myself she didn’t. Selfish, insensitive people can delude themselves. It doesn’t make them murderers.
At the trial my lawyer used the word arrangement. I felt an electric shock as the word hung in the air. The jurors had to have noticed, but I would not meet their eyes. My lawyer did not ask permission to offer that characterization. If he had, I would have said no. Arrangement is a grotesque and malevolent word. If Tieresse had been alive, hearing our relationship described that way would have wounded her. The fact she was dead didn’t make it okay. I imagined her violently shaking her head, saying to the lawyer, to the jury, to everyone, No, no, you do not understand at all.
Tieresse was my love and my soul mate. I could not have cared less about her money. Roll your eyes if you want to. I don’t care. I adored her. We’d sit next to one another on our sofa for hours, our shoulders touching, and read or watch TV. She liked to watch YouTube videos of unknown lounge singers she’d seen in New Orleans or clips of old black-and-white television shows that were older than I was. We held hands in the movies like teenagers. She’d slip off her shoes and put her feet on top of mine under the table at the restaurants where she loved to eat and drink. She knew as much about contemporary art as a university scholar, and she could talk intelligently about anything—well, anything other than sports. Half the stories in the four newspapers she read every morning made her cry. She was my best friend and the kindest and most generous person I have ever known. She simply didn’t like to have sex. It caused her enormous physical pain. There are people like that. I didn’t use to know it either, but there are.
The waitress’s name was Britanny. By the time my trial finally started, more than a year after the murder, Britanny was married to an investment banker she had met her first week in New York, but she testified for me anyway. She had cut her hair very short and lost weight since I’d seen her. She cried softly as she spoke and had no reason to lie. I cried too. She alternated looking at the judge, the jurors, and me. It was obvious she was telling the truth. I don’t know why the jury didn’t believe her.
Tieresse was fifty-two when she died. I was thirty-eight. She inherited a small fortune from her dad, whose family had come over on the Mayflower and promptly begun acquiring timber land. Tieresse told me he fancied himself a baron and spoke with an exaggerated Brahmin accent. I’d never heard of such a thing. She tightened her mouth and said through a clenched jaw, Dickens was far overrated as an author, dahling. He can’t hold a candle to Jane Austen, and she laughed and laughed. She said, Mother sounded like the Upper West Side, but not on purpose. Father cultivated sounding different. He rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror. She did not exactly dislike him, but I wouldn’t say she loved him either. He left her more than a hundred million dollars. She took that fortune and made it huge. She bought real estate and developed subdivisions all across the Midwest and western US. Her intuition about which cities were set to boom was so flawless a cottage industry of home builders, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents got rich just by following her moves.
Her dad had not been on the Forbes list of richest Americans, but she was. On the day she died, Tieresse was number ninety-nine. Along with Reinhardt, her twenty-five-year-old son from a first marriage that lasted less than a year, I was her only beneficiary, at least until they took it away.
Reinhardt used to hate me. When the police and prosecutors convince a young man his mom was beaten to death by her much younger husband who cheated on her serially and was with her only to take her money, it makes perfect sense for the son to hate the man. I would have hated me too. For seven years he spat my name if he used it at all. He detested every single thing about me. But not anymore. Now he hates the people who lied to him and railroaded me. That’s another thing we have in common.
Until she and I got married at city hall in front of a justice of the peace and a witness we met on the way, Tieresse lived alone, dividing her time between New York, Houston, Paris, and Rome. The four best cities in the world for whiling away the hours in a sidewalk café, she used to say.
Houston? I had asked her. It’s like dining in a sauna. She’d laughed and said, Yes, you’re right. In July and August, Tex-Mex, barbeque, and briny Gulf coast oysters do taste better in an air-conditioned room. But during the wintertime and spring, there’s no place I’d rather be.
That’s how I met her: at one of those cafés she so very much loved. Actually, it wasn’t truly a café. It was La Ventana, a small restaurant and bar I owned near the soccer stadium where real estate had once been cheap. When I bought the building with ten percent down and a small business loan, the ground floor had graffiti-covered sheets of plywood in place of windows, and the story above had moldy carpet covering wide oak-plank floors. I spent fourteen months restoring it myself. Every morning, seven days a week, I would drive my truck to a spot on Westpark where the day laborers waited for work, and at nightfall I would drive them back or offer to let them crash in sleeping bags on my floor. The day before Halloween, when the final lightbulb and framed black-and-white photographs were all in place, I bought a keg of beer and two hundred dollars’ worth of pizza from Frank’s and fed my crew and their friends. We had converted the second floor into a high-ceilinged loft where I’d live, and in the space below we’d installed a slate bar, ten tables, four booths, and a gleaming kitchen with a wall of glass. From late fall through early spring, when dining al fresco in Houston really can be grand, we added six more tables on a deck out front.
I’d been open less than six months when, on one of those days, a cool, crisp evening in early March, the tables were full. My general manager, Benita, ran into the kitchen and told me a guest wanted to see me right away. I peered out through the glass from my station behind the stove, and I saw a gorgeous woman with straight black hair, enormous lucent eyes, and cheekbones that cast shadows. My first thought was to wonder what such a person was doing dining alone.
Tieresse had ordered a red snapper sandwich on a house-made potato roll with fresh-fried garlic-laced potato chips on the side. She’d cut the sandwich in half, and I could see from where I stood that only a single bite was missing. Oil glistened on the tip of her index finger and a fleck of fleur de sel sat at the corner of her mouth where her upper and lower lips met.
I knew the fish was fresh. I’d bought it myself at the market that morning and had eaten a raw slice before I cut the filets for the early dinner crowd. I wondered whether I had missed a small bone.
Benita told me the guest’s name, and I recognized it instantly. Everyone in Houston knew who she was. Her name was on museums, buildings at Rice University, food pantries, and shelters for battered women. I was prepared for this dazzling, imperious, obscenely rich philanthropist to tell me in great detail exactly what I had done wrong.
Her tongue flicked the salt crystal into her mouth, and she asked, Are you the owner?
I felt my knees start to buckle. I told her I was, and it took me some time to process her reply.
She said, I wanted to say this directly to you, not your waitstaff: I’ve never actually felt inclined to compliment a chef for a sandwich, but I must make an exception for this one. Everything about it is extraordinary. How do you manage to get a hint of lemon inside the filet?
I was paralyzed. I could not form the words to answer her. Benita came to my rescue. She said, He poaches it briefly in a Meyer lemon beurre blanc before moving it to the grill.
I stammered, Yes, that’s what I do.
Tieresse said, Well, I might never be able to eat red snapper again.
She smiled. Her teeth sparkled. Her eyes were two shades of green. I wanted to say more but could only manage, Thank you.
She held out her hand, and I shook it. She told me her name. I said, I know who you are, and I told her mine. She said, Well, Rafael Zhettah, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
I do not believe it is only in hindsight I am able to say I felt the magic right then, at that very first touch of her skin on mine, in the wake of words that surprised me yet that I immediately forgot.
I said, If you come back again it will be exactly the same.
And she said, Oh believe me. I intend to.
A month later, she was sipping a dirty martini on the La Ventana deck at half past five. I walked outside to check on her. She said she wanted to invest in me, and she asked whether I would like to open a bigger place.
I told her no. I liked my life. A bigger place would complicate it. The next day and the day after that, she asked again, and each time I said no. On that third day she said she understood, that she would not ask me anymore. The next day she came in again.
She said, I have a different question for you today.
I waited, surprised to realize I was nervous. She said, I apologize for prying. I asked Benita about your situation.
I felt my stomach lurch. My neck felt hot and damp. She asked whether I wanted to have a drink that evening after I closed. It was not the question I was expecting. I stood there mute.
She said, It’s okay. Never mind. I shouldn’t have asked.
I said, Yes I do. Very much. But we don’t close tonight until midnight.
She said, Perfect. I’ll see you then.
Tieresse had just turned fifty. She was nearly fifteen years older than I was. I had never been married. I had no children. I liked cooking, camping, reading, and canoeing. I lived like a graduate student. I had never known anyone like her. More money had slipped between the overstuffed sofa cushions in her den than I made in a year.
In other words, it was no surprise at all when, two years later, I was the first person police suspected when Tieresse was bludgeoned and killed. From the outside, I might have suspected me too. Being convicted, though, well, that was a different matter.
On our first date, Tieresse got to the restaurant a half hour before we closed and helped the busboys clear the final tables. I came out of the kitchen and saw what she was doing.
I said, Let me pour you a drink while we finish here.
She said, If I help out, you’ll finish here sooner.
She smiled and dropped a handful of utensils and two water glasses into a square plastic container.
Later that night we sat outside and shared a bottle of prosecco with a slab of local cheese and a loaf of warm sourdough. She told me about her son, Reinhardt, twenty-two at the time, doing graduate work in computer science at MIT.
She said, We talk nearly every night. He tells me what he is working on, and I don’t understand a word he says. I go to sleep smiling.
She asked whether I had children, and when I told her no, she asked whether I wanted them.
I said, Awfully intimate question for a first date, don’t you think?
She said, Yes, I do.
She said, Well?
I told her for better or worse, I was not much of a planner.
I said, Possibly I’m Buddhist at heart, but I’ve never dreamed about the distant future. Even here, I think about what I am serving that night, and whether we have enough traffic for me to meet the payroll at the end of the month.
She said, Well, I think you should.
I should what?
Dream.
Before she climbed into the back seat of a town car an hour before dawn, she hugged me and said, Can we do this again?
I said, I sure hope so.
That night I couldn’t fall asleep. Her words were ricocheting inside my brain. Yesterday there hadn’t been anything missing in my life, then she asked me what else I wanted, and I realized not that there was, but that she had asked me a question I should have thought about before. A friend I had known since I was in college wondered what had happened to me, how I had been so smitten so fast.
I said, I realize it makes no sense, but when you fall in love, if you do, you fall in love. That’s why it’s called that. Until it happens to you, it’s impossible to understand.
Valley Falls, Kansas, population fifteen hundred or so, straddles State Highways 4 and 16, thirty miles north of Topeka, in the northeast corner of the state. Four years before I opened La Ventana I had been renting a two-room apartment in Olathe, just south of Kansas City, where I was in flight school getting certified to fly twin-engine planes. My dad taught me how to fly his boss’s crop duster when I was a boy, and I had flown hundreds of hours, but I had never gotten around to getting my pilot’s license. Being a chef was option b; my dream job was to sleep under the stars. So I planned to start a company supporting rafting and kayaking excursions in remote parts of the West. We’d land on a dirt strip near the river’s put-in, and after spending the day on raging whitewater and exploring the canyons on foot, my clients would enjoy first-class catered meals. None of the other outfitters were doing it. But the investors I approached balked at the price of the insurance premiums and potential liability. My fledgling business never got off the ground. Yet I have no regrets. Flight training was its own reward.
One September day, on a cross-country training flight to Nebraska, my flight instructor pulled the power on both engines just south of the state line, simulating a double engine failure. I scanned the ground for a place to land. There are plenty of flat, treeless opportunities in Kansas, but not many are paved. I spotted what looked like an unused road and set the plane down there. The road was actually a mile-long driveway bisecting a hundred-acre wooded tract. It ended at what appeared to be a pasture of nothing.
My instructor congratulated me on both choice of spot and execution of the landing. We got out of the plane and walked around.
I said, Did you know this place was here when you pulled the power?
He said, I’ve never seen it before in my life.
During my sophomore year of college, I was on a second date with a girl I’d met in my accounting class. She was the youngest of eight siblings from a devout Mormon family. She sang in the choir and started the campus organization lobbying to end discrimination against same-sex couples. She asked about my family, and I told her. A few nights later I invited her to dinner again, and she demurred. I was surprised. I said, I’m disappointed. I thought we’d had a nice time. She said, You know, Rafael, there are times you should dole out truth sparingly.
If I’d learned my lesson, or been quicker to construct a lie, I might not have made the same mistake with Tieresse. It was our second date, too, when she asked me to tell her about my family. I told her I was an only child whose parents were dead. She asked how they died.
I said, My father was shot to death by Mexican drug agents during my freshman year of college.
Tieresse asked, He was a drug dealer?
I said, If you ask the DEA, they will say he was, but that’s not exactly true. He was hired help. He flew a crop duster and sprayed the marijuana and cocaine crops with organic pesticides.
She said, There’s such a thing as that?
I said, I have no idea.
She asked, For how long?
I said, For as long as I knew him. He couldn’t read or write but he could fly in places only a crazy person would try. He wasn’t macho. He was responsible. He did it for his family.
And your mom?
I said, She died two weeks later. The death certificate says it was a stroke. She was diabetic and pretty overweight. But it was a broken heart. After we buried my papá, Mamá got into bed and didn’t get out.
Tieresse said, That’s awful. I’m so sorry. And she placed her hand on mine. She said, Tell me more about them.
So I did. When Mamá was eight months pregnant, Papá put her in his plane, flew low across the border, landed in Laredo, refueled, and left her there, standing on the tarmac. I was born two days later, six weeks premature. But I was an American citizen. He’d done what he set out to. After two months in the ICU of a charity hospital, with my mamá sleeping in a lobby chair or a homeless-shelter cot, I was healthy enough to go home. I’m not sure how he got word to Mamá, but he did, and one evening, Mamá bundled me up and paid a farmworker to drive us to a small airport, and Papá came and picked us up. With money he borrowed from his boss at an interest rate people in America would go to prison for charging, he’d bought my mamá Indian jewelry and a trunk of new clothes. Later he told me, Ella hace todo el trabajo duro. It wasn’t completely true. He did plenty of hard work. But he didn’t see it that way.
Every week he deposited a few pesos into a savings account he’d opened in my name at a bank in Dallas. When I was fourteen, he told me, Yo pienso que tú debes ir a la Universidad de Utah. Son amables con los mexicanos allí. I asked him how he knew they were nice to Mexicans in Utah. He said, Hijo, sé un montón de cosas.
I told Tieresse, He did know some things. How he knew the Mormons would welcome a poor Mexican I have no idea. And I still even have fond feelings for that first girlfriend, despite the fact she ditched me because she thought I might be Michael Corleone.
Tieresse said, Lucky for me.
She asked whether the Mormons had sawed off my Spanish accent. I told her I never had one. My mother had been an English teacher and spoke to me in English at home whenever my father was not around. They met when a bus carrying her students back to school after a field trip to the forest broke down on a rutted dirt road and my father landed his plane in a field and helped them get on their way. My mother had said, Hijo, I knew I wanted to marry him before I knew his name. She quit at the end of the school year and moved to the village where I grew up. They dated for two weeks. In their married life, the only nights they ever spent apart were when my mother was in Texas for me to be born.
She asked how I ended up in culinary school. I said, Because it was free, and I told her why.
I’d been working evenings at a downtown restaurant. I couldn’t believe how much food we threw away. I told Tieresse, It wasn’t rotten or spoiled or anything. We just didn’t have any more dishes on the menu calling for it. So I talked to my boss, and he hooked me up with some other chefs and grocery store managers. The group formed a co-op to give food that would otherwise be thrown out to the city’s largest soup kitchen. A retired Hall of Fame basketball player donated moving vans to pick up the food every night and deliver it to the kitchen, and a local car dealer bought refrigerators and freezers so the kitchen could store it all. My contribution to the project was to write an app where administrators could enter the kinds of food they had and the quantities, and how many people they expected to serve; the app would then identify dishes they could prepare with what they had on hand. All the recipes were simple. Even someone with no kitchen training at all could follow them.
I said, Without telling me he was doing it, my boss entered the app in a scholarship competition, and my project won first prize. Tuition and room and board cost me nothing.
Later I would learn Tieresse called her lawyer the next morning and told him to let the mayors of twenty large cities know she would purchase all the necessary vehicles and refrigerators if they agreed to use the app to feed their city’s hungry. But that evening, I was not yet aware that there was virtually no social program she declined to fund. So I said, Now you’ve heard my entire story. Your turn.
She said, My father sent me to school too. Boarding school in Switzerland, beginning in third grade. He and Mother would visit at Christmas. After she died my junior year, he would call instead. He deposited money in my bank account every week. He called it an allowance even though I did no chores and did not have to buy anything. When I mentioned the deposits to my roommate, a girl whose father was number two or three in the Saudi royal family, I never knew exactly which, she told me it was guilt money. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she sounded sure, so I didn’t ask. He sent me new sweaters every winter, and my mother’s jewelry for my birthday. I laughed. Even at Le Rosey, high school students had no occasion to wear a diamond brooch. I received packages every other day. I had to give things away, there was so much. The only thing my father didn’t give me was love. In retrospect, I think I married Roland mainly because he was the exact opposite of my father in every respect except being rich. He dropped out of college, drank too much, used crude language, all of it. When my father met him for the first time he pulled me aside and said, You cannot possibly be serious. You know what I learned from all this?
I said, That men suck?
She laughed and said, Sort of.
Then she said, No, not really. What I learned is that every successful person is extreme in one way or another. Some drink too much. Some chase too many women. Some churn through employees. If a woman is content to be with a moderately successful man, then she can find many wonderful potential partners. But if she is drawn to an extremist, she must make sure his extremism is benign, or she will suffer every day.
I smiled and said, In other words, the bombshells should be with mediocre people like me.
She put her hand on top of mine and said, What is extreme about you, Rafael, is your modesty. That is about as benign as it gets.
I was not sure exactly what she meant, but she said it in a way that made me sure of one thing: that I wanted to see her again.
Two months later we had dinner one evening when my restaurant was dark. I told Tieresse to wear jeans and took her to a Mexican seafood dive on the east side where customers sat at long wooden tables next to strangers and ate whole fried red snapper, giant Gulf prawns, and grilled octopus, using mostly our fingers in lieu of forks. Hardly anyone spoke English, and everyone brought beer. The place had no liquor license. I’d brought a bottle of añejo, which we shared with the people sitting to our left and to our right. After, we went to a bar in Montrose and listened to a trio playing roots music on a banjo, viola, and mandolin. I had my arm around her shoulders as we walked to the car. She hooked her index finger into my mouth and pulled my face down toward hers, and I tasted cognac mixing with the mint she’d just swallowed.
Later at her house, we had sex for the first time. I fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and woke up seven hours later with it still there. She picked grapefruits from her tree and squeezed fresh juice. Her backyard sloped down to the bayou. We sat outside together in a glider, legs touching, and watched the muddy water flow south to the Gulf of Mexico. The look on her face was either worry or regret, and I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to know, until the silence grew more painful than knowledge, and at last I said, I take it not everything is okay.
She said, Since my divorce, I have had sex twice. I surprised myself last night. I’m supposed to live like a nun.
I said, A nun?
She told me she had endometriosis, a condition that made intercourse excruciatingly painful. She tried a variety of treatments, including drugs and holistic medicine. Nothing worked. Finally she agreed to have surgery. She said, The pain from the scar tissue is worse than what I had before.
I said, Why didn’t you sue someone?
She said, Because it wouldn’t fix the problem, and I don’t need the money. I don’t believe the doctor made any mistakes. Some people win the lottery, and when there is a one-in-a-thousand chance of postoperative complications, one in a thousand women will suffer. God drew my number.
I held her hand.
She said, I guess I am wondering whether that changes what you think about me, about us.
I said, I’m the one who doesn’t make plans for the future.
She said, That’s not an answer.
I said, Okay, I’ll tell you my answer. I like you. I like going places with you. I like hanging out with you. So really the question is whether it’s okay with you.
She said, What do you think?
A month or so later we slept together again. It would be the last time. Either she did a worse job of hiding the pain she was in than she had before, or I had become more attentive.
I said, We don’t have to do this, and she leaned forward and kissed me.
Later that morning she said, You do know I am aware how much younger you are than I.
I smiled. I said, Yes, I am aware.
We spent every night together for the next month. She slept inside my arms. We did not have sex, but I still felt an intimacy I never had before. Late one Sunday morning, we were sitting outside, swinging our legs in unison up and down. Four wild parrots sat high in a pine watching three hummingbirds sip sugar water from a feeder hung from a branch.
Tieresse said, I don’t mind if you sleep around every now and then with people your own age. I do not need to know. In fact, I do not want to know. But I will feel less guilty about your missing something important in life.
It took me a moment to get past the shock. In college I knew some polygamists, and their lifestyle baffled me. I said to Tieresse, I’m not missing anything. What is important in my life is to be with someone I love and care for, and I don’t much want to have sex with anyone who doesn’t fit that bill.
She said, Not now you don’t. I’ve discovered things can change.
I sensed this conversation was not going to end until I conceded. To get it to conclude, I said, Whatever.
After that conversation, nothing changed. Unless I was too tired or had had too much to drink, I would go to her house after we’d cleaned and closed, arriving around twelve thirty or one. Half the time she’d be awake reading in bed, and we’d talk about the news or how things had gone at dinner service, or how she was liking her book. The other half the time she’d be sound asleep, and I would find a note on my pillow wishing me sweet dreams.
On a Friday evening in early May, a bachelorette party of sixteen twenty-somethings took up half my tables and stayed until we closed. They were still there after we’d cleaned all the other tables and swept the floor. Finally all but one departed in two stretch limos. The one came upstairs with me. When I put her in a cab at three thirty, she handed me her business card and said, Thanks for the nightcap. I felt shame.
I suspect Tieresse knew right away because my hair was still damp from the shower I did not customarily take before driving myself to her house. As I sunk into the bed beside her, my heart racing, guilt churning in my belly and bowels, she ran her fingers across the top of my head, and from deep down in her slumber she said to me, I love you.
Like all sins, it was easier the next time. People in the restaurant industry sleep around. Before Tieresse died, I had sex with four other women, including Britanny. I did not tell them, or anyone else, about my license. It wasn’t their business. If they deemed me a lout, they had good reason. I did still feel guilty, I will admit that, but I did not think I was doing anything wrong. I’ve had years to puzzle over that paradox. If there’s a solution, I’m not smart enough to see it.
Tieresse liked to come to the restaurant in the late afternoons and sample the dishes for that evening with the waitstaff. As the early diners arrived, she would move to the bar and drink a snifter of cognac or a dirty martini. Two or three nights a week she would go to some social or philanthropic event. Once she said to me, I’m not going to ask you to accompany me to these horrid evenings because I do not want to pressure you to go somewhere you’d be bored and unhappy.
I said, How do you know I wouldn’t enjoy it?
She raised her eyebrows and smiled.
She said, Do you want to test me?
Two nights later I went with her to a reception to raise money for somebody running for the US Senate in Missouri. The price of admission was more than I earned in a year. Not counting me and the people serving alcohol and hors d’oeuvres, everybody there was white, except for one Asian woman. All the men were dressed like they shopped at the same place: dark suits, white shirts, mostly solid red or blue ties, American flag lapel pins.
About fifteen minutes into it I brushed back Tieresse’s hair, put my lips next to her right ear, and whispered, Uncle. I surrender. You were right.
She smiled and said, Then let’s get out of here.
We went to a soul-food dive in the Third Ward and ate fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens while still dressed in our fancy clothes. It was a favorite spot of mine, and I couldn’t believe she knew anything about it.
I said, How on earth did you know I love this place?
She said, Do you mean to tell me you haven’t googled me?
She smiled. I had, of course, but I was worried she would think I was creepy if I said so.
She said, You revealed all your secrets in the interview you gave to the paper last year.
I had forgotten I gave that interview.
I said, Of course I’ve googled you, beginning the day we met.
No matter the bedtime, Tieresse was an early riser. In the mornings she would go to the gym while I was still asleep. When she got home we’d play tennis in her backyard or float in her pool. We saw movies that started before noon. She was on the board at the museums, and so we had VIP tours of new exhibitions the day before they opened. La Ventana was dark on Sundays and Mondays. We usually ate out on one and stayed in and cooked on the other.
I’d always thought the woman I loved would be the only person I ever had sex with, not the one person with whom I never did. It was not a life I had either pictured or planned. Tieresse had a painting hanging above her fireplace. It was a young woman looking into a mirror. The side of her face was scarred, but the image in the mirror was not. Tieresse had said, The difference between the life you have and the life you envision is equal to the distance between perfection and reality. I had said, Did you make that up? She’d said, It’s what Reinhardt said when he saw the painting. I’ve never forgotten it. I looked at the woman in the painting the morning after I betrayed Tieresse for the first time, and I saw myself.
The night we ducked out of the fund-raiser she said, I’m ahead by one in the contest of who knows whom.
I said, True.
She said, So your job is to take me somewhere I think I am going to hate but that you know I won’t. Think you’re up to it?
I smiled and said, No doubt.
We’d been seeing each other for six months when I told her I was playing my move. I invited her on a road trip. She asked where we were going and I told her to pack light and for the outdoors.
She said, That’s all the information I’m getting?
I said, Yes, it is.
I picked her up and we drove to a hangar west of Houston adjacent to a three-thousand-foot grass strip where a friend of mine kept a plane he let me fly.
I said, You are going to love this place.
She had never been in a small plane and seemed nervous. I said, There’s nothing to worry about.
She said, You’re mistaking excitement for anxiety. I can’t wait. You’ve already won. Can you teach me to fly?
We climbed past five thousand feet, high enough to be safe, low enough to see the countryside. Her face was glued to the window. Just north of Oklahoma she asked if she could fly, and she gently steered us through a series of S-turns as we followed the Cimarron River mostly north. She asked where we were going and I told her we were almost there. I turned toward that spot in northeast Kansas and landed on the same driveway where I’d made an emergency landing more than four years before. She had already unlatched her door before we came to a stop.
She said, This place is amazing.
We walked around the forest hand in hand and had a late, light lunch sitting by the creek. Later we put on swimsuits and went canoeing on the Delaware River. Early that evening, eating a picnic of ribs and Shiraz beneath the shade of a massive cottonwood just outside Ozawkie, she said to me, Kansas City barbeque isn’t as good as Texas, but it sure ain’t bad.
I said, Listen to you, saying ain’t.
She said, Is the property where we landed for sale?
I said, I have no idea.
She said, If it is, let’s buy it and get married.
I said, What?
She said, It’s beautiful here, a combination of very remote and also manageable. What can I say? The geometry of the Midwest has always appealed to me. All these perfect right angles. I built my first subdivision near Lincoln, Nebraska.
I said, I was talking about the marriage part.
She said, Oh that. Quit being so damn Germanic already. Aren’t you Latin men supposed to be impulsive?
Tieresse opened her tablet, spent five minutes doing some research, then reached for her phone. She asked three questions and after each said, Yes, I see. Before she hung up, she offered to buy the place with cash.
She said, I bought it, now close your eyes.
I said, Seriously?
She said, I mean it. Close them.
I went along. She said, You can open your eyes now, and when I did, she was holding out two rings she had fashioned from a half dozen pine needles she’d braided into a strand and tied in a loop. She said, We can buy something more substantial when we get back to Houston. Now give me your hand. I closed my eyes again, and she said, Now what are you doing? I said, I’m making sure this is real.
After that day, it became a private game of ours. If I was feeling stressed or down, she would say, Close your eyes, amor, and once I had she would place her hand on my face and say, Now when I tell you to open, the world will be a better place. It worked every time.
We spent the night in a cheap motel and began to sketch the house we planned to build on the back of an envelope. Tieresse hired an architect from Houston to move up to Kansas for half a year and supervise the construction.
At the end of the driveway we installed a prefabricated hangar and bought a single-engine turboprop plane for Tieresse’s lessons. Leading west from the hangar, a covered path extended fifty meters to the spot where we built a three-thousand-square-foot rectangular house with a bedroom, living area, exercise room, library, and chef’s kitchen. It had a porch that wrapped all the way around, well water, solar panels covering the roof, and a fireplace that doubled as a wood-burning oven. Across the garden was a small guesthouse just in case.
Tieresse was ready to move there, but I was scared. I worried about how La Ventana would survive. She said, De Gaulle used to say the graveyards are full of indispensable men. I wanted to change the subject. I said, That’s pretty sexist, don’t you think? She said, Seriously, amor, your creation can run without your being there constantly. I said, If you want to know the truth, what I’m worried about is your running off if you have to be constantly with me. And it was true. I was never someone who was falsely modest. I was simply aware she was too smart and too interesting not to get bored with me. She said, For the first guy in his family to go to college, you appear to know nothing.
She liked to take long walks around the property at dawn and dusk, cutting trails through the forest. In the late winter, Tieresse spread wildflower seeds in the pasture, and in late June and early July we had an explosion of bird’s-foot violets and purple poppy mallows.
It was the first and last flower season she spent there.
She sold all her houses except for the places in Houston and Kansas and put the profits straight into her charitable foundation. The only indulgence she couldn’t bear to surrender was air travel. Tieresse said to me, The very thought of these TSA agents passing around pictures of my bum gives me the willies. I said, I don’t think they do that. She said, Ah, Rafa, your naïveté charms me, and she kissed my nose, then my mouth. No matter where we went together, a private car took us to the airport, and a private jet flew us to our destination. Soon after our engagement, she wanted to watch Reinhardt defend his doctoral dissertation, so we headed off to Boston.
He looked nothing like the computer geek I expected. He looked instead like the middleweight college wrestler he had been. He said, Nice to meet you, and he shook my hand with a palm as calloused as my papá’s had been. I said to Tieresse, Why didn’t you tell me he was an NCAA champion? She said, Because if you brag about too many qualities of those you love, other people will think you are either lying or delusional. It’s the same reason I tell everyone you cook better than Escoffier, but I never say you’re more handsome than George Clooney. The two hours we spent listening to Reinhardt discuss international financial security measures with four women and three men was like watching a movie in Urdu without subtitles. As we walked out I said, I have no idea what I just observed. He said, What you just observed is a silly monastic ritual. I hope it was not insufferable. Let’s go get pizza and beer. At dinner we discovered we both love baseball and found ourselves debating which team was better, the 1939 Yankees or the 1908 Cubs. He said, But best is not the same as favorite. For me, the 1978 Reds are it. I said, Ah yes, the Big Red Machine, and Tieresse said, I’m begging you both. Can we please talk about anything else?
It helped that he was baby-faced and had the body of a high school athlete. It helped, too, that he knew so much about a feature of our world I associated with youngsters, and of course that we had baseball in common. But whatever the explanation, despite my worries, the fact that I was as close in age to him as I was to his mother caused no awkwardness. He walked us to our hotel that evening and brought bagels to our suite for breakfast in the morning. On the way back to Texas I said to Tieresse, I didn’t want to say anything before, but I was nervous about meeting Reinhardt. Now I feel silly. He put me completely at ease. I really like him. Tieresse said, Before Reinhardt was old enough to talk, he already knew when I was happy. I said, How do you know he wasn’t sensing me?
One Sunday evening we were at her house. She was sitting at the counter drinking a glass of wine while I cooked risotto. She said, What’s the matter? I was singing an Otis Redding song when she asked. I said, Some dogs have such a great sense of smell they know whether their masters will be in a good mood or a bad one while they are still sleeping. She said, Nice try. Now, spill it. Resistance and denial would be futile. So I told her it had been bothering me that she knew all my friends, they all worked at La Ventana, but I did not know any of hers. I told her it made me feel like she was embarrassed.
She said, Rafa, I have acquaintances, scores, maybe hundreds of acquaintances, but they are not friends. My friends are Reinhardt and you.
I said, I think it’s interesting that you had a shitty relationship with your parents and now have a wonderful relationship with your son, whereas I adored my mamá and papá and have no children at all.
She stared at me. I said, What? Did I say something wrong?
She said, I don’t think you have any idea how smart you are.
The next night was the party for Britanny’s going away.
Two detectives came to the restaurant at one. I was in the kitchen when Benita told me they were there. One of them, a fit-looking Navy SEAL type wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, introduced himself as Detective Pisarro and asked me whether I could answer a few questions. I said, About what?
They drove me across the bayou to the central station and left me in a windowless room. I lost track of time. I called Tieresse and got her voice mail. I called her again and again. I placed the phone on the table and kept my thumb on redial. To this day I do not know how many messages I left. The prosecutor would later say it was all a charade.
Pisarro’s partner, Detective Cole, finally came into the room, apparently to play the role of bad cop. In time I would find out it was no act. He was wearing a cotton knit squared-off tie, which he loosened as he plopped himself down in the interview room’s other chair. He must have been spying on me from outside.
He said, It’s a little late for an alibi.
I said, What?
Pisarro came back in. Good cop. He must have been spying too. He was looking right at me when he said to Cole, Maybe he’s being sincere. Maybe he’s repressed it. It happens.
I said, What in the world are you two talking about?
Cole said, We know you killed your wife.
That’s when I fainted. I obviously do not remember being unconscious, but I have watched the videotape of the interrogation many times. I simply collapsed, like a tent whose poles snap in the wind. Pisarro walks out and only Cole is there when I come to. Pisarro walks back in and hands me a glass of water. I asked them where she was killed and how she died and who found her and when, my questions crowded together in too small a space. I said I wanted to see her. I said she had no enemies, everybody adored her.
Cole said, Not everybody, and I wanted to hurt him. They asked me questions about her life and her routine, her friends and her work. Then Cole asked where I had been.
My legs were shaking so hard the chair I was sitting in bounced and scratched. At some point Cole gave me a pen and a pad and asked me to put down my cell number, and I couldn’t write.
I said, I am going to call a lawyer.
Cole said, You don’t need a lawyer. Just tell us what happened.
I said, I have no idea what happened. I’m going home.
They did not try to stop me. Cole said, Her house is a crime scene. You can’t enter. It’s too late for you to clean up.
I said, She’s my wife. It is our house.
Cole said, You’ll feel better if you tell us what happened.
I said, Fuck you.
It was one A.M. I drove without intention or destination. I crept down Navigation, then Wayside. I turned west and went by La Ventana, surprised to see it clean and locked. I looked at my watch and remembered the time. I drove all night, circling the city on Loop 610. The eastern sky began to lighten. I went to Tieresse’s house. Cole hadn’t been lying. There was yellow tape blocking the yard and the door, and a squad car parked out front. I called Reinhardt.
I said, I am sorry to call so late. Or so early. I’m sorry. Your mother is dead. Tieresse is dead. Somebody killed her.
He asked how, and I told him what I knew, which was basically nothing. For a long moment the line was quiet. He said, I will fly down tomorrow.
I met him at the airport the next morning and told him what I had read in the paper earlier that day.
The housekeeper arrived at nine fifteen, her usual time. She saw that Tieresse had not squeezed juice, which was unusual, and the coffeepot was still full. She noted my car was not in the porte cochere, which was not unheard of. She called out to Tieresse and got no reply. A Modigliani hanging on the wall in the foyer to the parlor and bedroom was askew. The housekeeper went over to straighten it. Lying on the floor next to the desk was Tieresse, wearing her bathrobe, a damp towel on the floor beside her. The housekeeper screamed, dialed 911, and started to do CPR, until she realized Tieresse was already gone.
Reinhardt said, Nobody would want to kill her.
I said, I know. I told the police exactly that. They think I did it.
Reinhardt said, Did you?
I looked at him, not feigning pain.
He said, I’m sorry.
Later I would learn he had spent time with Detectives Pisarro and Cole while in town. All I knew then was he was going to ask the police when we could recover his mother so we could hold a ceremony.
I said, I can ask them that.
He said, She wasn’t a fan of ritual, but I imagine there are quite a few people who would like a formal opportunity to tell her goodbye. It might speed things up if we are both on top of them.
Something about the way he said goodbye seemed unnatural to me, as if he was already reevaluating our own relationship. Granted, he did not know me well, but he knew me well enough. Yet anything I said would come off as desperate. I was already terrified and bereft. I didn’t need to be desperate as well. So all I said was, Okay.
Then he asked the question I knew he would ask. Where was I? Why hadn’t I been there, is what Reinhardt wanted to know.
How could I tell him?
The night of the murder was a Monday, when we are open only for private affairs. This particular Monday, we were hosting a party for one of our own. Britanny, a waitress for me since opening day, was heading off to the CIA. Tieresse stopped by in the late afternoon after signing papers in a lawyer’s office to underwrite the construction of a new state-of-the-art laboratory at Houston’s biggest cancer hospital. She walked into the kitchen as I was sliding a mustard-coated leg of lamb out of the oven. She said, Julia Child’s recipe? And I said, None better. Why don’t you stay and join us?
Tieresse said, As delicious as it smells in here, I have to be in San Antonio tomorrow morning at seven. I’ll be having sweet dreams by the time you all call it a night.
She picked up a cashew crusted with pink salt and sesame seeds, studied it, and popped it in her mouth. I said, Delicious, right?
She looked through the glass into the dining room, where Britanny was sitting with Benita drinking wine. She said, That girl is far too pretty to be a spy.
I said, Hah, hah.
Tieresse said, And too hot to be a chef.
I didn’t say anything in response to that.
She kissed me, and then she said, I’ll stop by tomorrow night when I get back to town.
I walked her out then helped the gang put all the food on the banquette. People passed around platters of lamb and rice; a salad of cucumbers, tomato, and roasted lemon; eggplant tossed with tahini; and scratch-made pita prepared by a nineteen-year-old busboy from Beirut I’d hired the month before. We made toasts and told stories. My favorite was when Georgette recounted the night Britanny’s hair caught fire when she bent too close over a flaming tableside dessert and, in her desperation to put it out, knocked over a decanter full of a three-thousand-dollar Bordeaux, spattering it across the seersucker suit of a retired federal judge.
At just past midnight, with the long rectangular table we had made by pushing six smaller tables together littered with a dozen empty wine bottles, two empty bottles of tequila, and an almost empty liter of cognac, I kicked everybody out. I said, You people need to go home and sleep it off. We can clean up this mess in the morning.
Everyone shuffled out and got in a cab or on the train. Everyone except Brittany. We woke up naked, hungover, and in my bed when we heard Esteban and Luis dropping bottles in the recycle bin the next morning at nine. She left through the back door, embarrassed to see the others, I suppose, and I did not see her again until over a year later, when she testified at my trial as a newlywed who worked as a sous chef in a three-star restaurant two blocks from Central Park.
So that, as I’m sure you can understand, is why I did not know quite how to answer Reinhardt’s simple question.
In a testament to the talent of the cooks and floor managers I had hired, business went on at La Ventana exactly as it had before. It was yet another reminder of Tieresse, yet another thing she had been right about. I was dispensable. I would approve the menu in the morning and sign off on purchases, then climb the stairs to the second floor and stay in my apartment until the following day. I called the police every few hours to ask about progress. After a couple of days they stopped taking my calls. Reinhardt was staying at a downtown hotel. In retrospect, he might have seemed a bit cool toward me, but at the time, I believed he was suffering from the same shock I was. Three days after Tieresse’s death he flew home, telling me he’d return once the body was released. I did not learn until later that the police had interviewed him for more than six hours over two days about my relationship with his mother.
Initially the local news media were kind to me, but the first suspect is always the spouse, and when the spouse is brown-skinned, over a decade younger, and billions of dollars poorer, he is also the second and the third. So I was not surprised when several parties canceled their reservations. It didn’t matter, though. The tables remained filled with walk-ins. In fact, business actually picked up, from people wanting to show their support, I suppose. Once or twice I started downstairs to thank them, but I couldn’t summon the will. So I sat on my bed, with the TV tuned to the local news and the volume on mute, ready to listen if the reporters started to talk about the case. The aroma of onions and garlic cooking in butter wafted up from below and made me queasy. I pressed pillows over my ears to muffle the sound of corks popping and dull the din of diners and drinkers enjoying themselves. When my stomach growled I brewed an espresso or ate tuna from a can or peanut butter from the jar.
Eight days after the crime, just as we were opening for lunch, Cole and Pisarro came to arrest me. Neither one was a good cop anymore. Pisarro said, We are here to arrest you for murder. They put handcuffs on my wrists and paraded me through my kitchen and dining room. People on my staff were crying. Diners put down their forks and stared.
They took me downtown and put me in the same room where they had interviewed me the last time. Cole had a theory. I was nervous Tieresse was going to divorce me. She had been angry I was flirting with Britanny and had gone home rather than stay at the party. I lured Britanny upstairs and got her drunk so she would pass out, and then I sneaked off, killed Tieresse, and crawled back into bed before Britanny awoke. I had ransacked Tieresse’s closet and stolen gem-laden necklaces to make the motive appear to be robbery.
I said, That is ridiculous. Tieresse thought diamonds were an obscene indulgence and buying them provided blood money for despots and warlords. All her jewels were fake.
Cole said, But a thief would not know that. You’re a deviously clever man.
Pisarro said, Your fingerprints and DNA were on the desk in the parlor and the murder weapon.
I said, I lived there. My DNA is all over the place.
Pisarro said, The housekeeper told us she has the same cleaning routine every week. You would know what it was.
I said, I am calling a lawyer.
The courts hadn’t yet taken my money away. I called the only lawyer whose phone number I knew by heart, a friend who worked for a nonprofit, and asked him whom he would recommend. He mentioned two names, and I hired them both—a somewhat older white man from Houston named Jonathan who wears a bow tie with his three-piece suits and talks so softly you have to lean forward to hear him eviscerate the witnesses, and a German woman from New York named Heidi who specialized in representing accused Islamic terrorists and white nationalists and had reportedly never lost a case. They had worked together before, most recently winning an acquittal for a cattle rancher in Idaho accused of ambushing two federal agents attempting to serve a warrant. My lawyers persuaded the jury their client had believed these men wearing camouflage and carrying long guns aimed to rob him and had fired out his window in self-defense. I paid them each a quarter of a million dollars up front. I was in good hands.
Jonathan, whose office was a block away from the jail, arrived less than an hour after I called him just to introduce himself. The room grew quiet when he entered. He had a gleam in his eye, like he was having more fun than anyone alive. He explained I’d be booked into the county jail, but that he would be back first thing in the morning with his colleague to start planning our defense, and that I would be sleeping in my own bed the following day.
I said, I want you to know I did not kill my wife and have no idea who did.
He said, I believe you. It doesn’t matter to me, but I know it matters to you. So yes, I believe you.
In the morning he was back with his colleague. Heidi did not ask whether I was guilty. She asked, Where were you when it happened?, and when I told her, she said, That’s going to be our biggest problem. I asked what other problems there would be, and she said, I’m not clairvoyant, I just know the math. They explained to me a death penalty trial is actually two trials. At the first one the jury decides whether I committed the crime. If the jurors think I did, there is a second phase where the only question is whether the sentence is life or death. They said that in a typical death penalty case they would devote most of their energy to the punishment trial, but in my case they believed they could win an acquittal.
I said, That’s why I hired you. I did not kill my wife.
Heidi had said, God, you sounded just like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive when you said that. I had seen the movie several times, but I did not know what line she was referring to, and didn’t care enough to ask. So I just shook my head. Then she said something chilling.
She said, Here’s the thing, Rafael. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the jury thinks happened, and the prosecutors trying to put you away are very good, and they are going to tell the jury you are a broke Mexican who runs a small restaurant and fucks his waitresses and just waited for the chance to murder a cash cow you had hoodwinked and bamboozled.
I said, Oh my God, not a single word of that is true. I am a US citizen. I do not fuck my waitresses. They’re not just hookers.
She said, I don’t want to argue about verb choice here. That’s not really my point.
And Jonathan said, I’m not sure you are understanding what we are telling you about how a trial works.
Then he said, But what we want to make sure you are comfortable with is our strategy. We both think our best chance is a not guilty verdict, because if the jury thinks you did it, they are going to hate you too much for us to be able to persuade them later they should do anything other than sentence you to death.
Heidi said, Apparently the police have already found four different women you have had sex with since the day you and Tieresse exchanged vows.
She stared at me, waiting for a reply. I felt my head drop. My neck and throat felt hot, and I suspected they were turning red. I do not know how to explain what I was feeling right then. It wasn’t embarrassment or fear; it was more like shame. God, what could I possibly have been thinking? What kind of man treats the love of his life the way I treated mine? I said, If they’ve already found four, they won’t find any more. I told them both about everything.
Heidi stopped writing. She put down her pen and folded her hands. She said, So, our biggest problem just got very much bigger.
Jonathan asked me, Are you comfortable with taking the enormous risk of concentrating our efforts on the guilt phase?
I said, I told you I am innocent.
He said, I heard you, but that is not an answer to the question I asked you.
I said, Yes I am comfortable with that. If the jury believes I could have done this to Tieresse, I do not care what else they do to me.
Heidi said, Okay, then. We have work to do.
They shook my hand and left, she bouncing on her toes, and he barely lifting his feet off the ground. Considering the stakes, I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. If a double murderer like OJ could get acquitted, then I, who had absolutely nothing to do with Tieresse’s death, would surely be found innocent as well.
My lawyers were confident too. They had read out loud to me from notes that police and prosecutors had made from their interviews with witnesses. The statements were banal. My staff all talked about how in love Tieresse and I seemed to be. They told the story about how we had met, and how I did not care at all about money, so long as La Ventana brought in enough that I could pay my team a better salary than they could earn at any other restaurant in town. None of them had any doubt I adored my wife and could never harm her.
On the other side, Reinhardt said something similar about his mother. The interviews with him were recorded. You could hear in his voice disbelief that I could have been involved. Yes, he wavered when Detective Pisarro told him about my promiscuity, but he still resisted Pisarro’s repeated if subtle efforts to get him to say Tieresse had expressed jealousy or worry about my motives in marrying her. He said, I think she might have proposed to him. She started to act twenty years younger. She was in love, but also brilliant and clear-eyed. If Rafael had been a gold digger, my mother would have known instantly. When he said my name, Rafael, there was no hint of enmity in his tone. It was only at the very end of their final conversation, when Detective Cole implied there was physical evidence implicating me in Tieresse’s death, that Reinhardt equivocated. Initially he said, What physical evidence? Rafael and my mother lived together. Cole had said, Exactly, we didn’t find his DNA where we should have. It is because he did too good a job cleaning up the crime scene. You could hear the blade of doubt even though the words were right. Too good a job? What does that even mean? But the barb was planted. The jury was already going to dislike me. That much was clear. But so long as Reinhardt assured them I loved Tieresse and could never do her harm, they’d put that dislike aside. If, however, the son was not going to stand shoulder to shoulder with his mother’s husband, if even he had doubt, if he had any at all, the other bad evidence my lawyer had predicted had made its appearance.
The value of the estate Tieresse left me was more than two billion dollars. Reinhardt received an equal amount, and the remainder—almost five billion dollars more—was left to her charitable foundation. On paper I was one of the richest men in America, but it was money I would never see if convicted of her murder.
I didn’t need it, though. More than a year earlier Tieresse had moved two hundred and forty million dollars into a trust I controlled in several offshore accounts. I told her I had no need for such sums. She’d replied, One never knows. If I get kidnapped on a trip to visit one of my orphanages, I’d like you to be able to quietly pay the ransom. Laugh lines around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. Investments had swelled the trust’s value to north of three hundred million dollars, and now, as it turned out, I was going to need the money for my own ransom, so I could post my bail and get back home.
At seven the next morning two burly deputies escorted me through a series of underground tunnels then up a freight elevator to the seventh floor of the criminal courts building where they put me in a holding cell with the names of lawyers and their phone numbers scratched into the gray paint cracking off the cinder-block wall. Usually these cages had twenty or twenty-five people crammed into them, but I was the only one there. I said, Why so quiet? But the deputies took their handcuffs and walked away without answering. Two hours later my lawyers arrived. My fingers were blue and my arms and neck were covered with goose bumps. Heidi said, I can see my breath in here. Jonathan said, One of the deputies told me the boiler was broken. My teeth chattered as they described to me how the hearing would proceed.
After another half hour, the deputies came back and walked me into the courtroom. I sat shivering between my lawyers. Six feet away the prosecutor stood behind a table covered with photographs of my dead wife. She held one up and told the judge I was a dangerous brutal killer who needed to be locked up. She said I was a flight risk who would find safe haven with my family in Mexico, and because the district attorney would be seeking the death penalty, Mexico might refuse to extradite me back to Texas if I were to flee. Jonathan rose to speak. His voice had a Texas twang that had not been there yesterday. He told the judge I was a US citizen and had not lived in Mexico since coming here for college more than twenty years before. He said I was a respected chef and small business owner, and my ties to the local community were deep. They were prepared to surrender my passport and have me wear an ankle bracelet and remain under house arrest. The judge asked the prosecutor whether those terms were acceptable to her if he set bail at five million dollars. She said no one knew how much money I had stolen from my wife and hidden away, so no, she said, those terms were not acceptable. The judge said, I am persuaded, and he ordered me held without bail. I gasped as they led me away.
We retraced our footsteps through the maze of underground tunnels and emerged into a new wing of the jail. They gave me an orange jumpsuit that smelled like bleach, plastic flip-flops, and a laminated ID. I was one of 9,416 inmates, half black, twenty percent Latino, ten percent Asian. Cell doors were electronically controlled. Most held two inmates, a few housed three. The one other inmate facing capital murder charges and I had cells to ourselves. Mine had a bunk, a sink, a toilet, and a metal shelf. Cells were arranged around a central area in an architecture that reminded me of the quadrangle where I’d gone to college. The common area had octagonal tables with attached stools bolted to the floor where we inmates would eat our meals after going through a cafeteria line with no choices and getting our trays. A TV tuned to a local station was on all the time. The diet was carbohydrate rich: rubbery pancakes and scrambled eggs, bologna sandwiches on pillowy white bread, Salisbury steaks with mashed potatoes from a box. Beverage choices included water, milk, instant coffee, and red punch from a plastic gallon jug. The other inmate facing death and I ate by ourselves in a separate room. After two days, his trial started, and when it ended two days after that, I never saw him again.
Five days a week at nine A.M. guards shackled me up and took me to a room where I met with my lawyers or members of their team until midafternoon. When I got my dinner tray at night, it also held the sandwich I had not eaten for lunch. By the time my trial finally began, I had lost sixteen pounds and grown flabby at the same time. During my thrice-weekly showers, I would look down at my concave chest and rounded belly and wonder how that was possible.
I was allowed to buy newspapers or books, but I did not have the concentration to read. I did purchase a spiral notebook and made notes of things I needed to tell my lawyer. I slept a lot. Escaping into unconsciousness is how I avoided fixating on how suddenly and without warning my entire life had gone from privileged to bereft.
My legal team wanted to delay the trial so they could talk to people who had known my family in Mexico, but I said no. Nothing my aunts or uncles or cousins might have to say had anything to do with my case. I didn’t even know if any of them were still alive.
Given the circumstances, my complete confidence might surprise you. But I knew the truth, and I still had faith in the system. I was positive the jury would find me innocent, because I didn’t do it. So when my lawyers suggested a three-month delay, I said, Not a chance, or you’re both fired. Let’s get this show on the road.
Early one Monday morning, after I’d spent more than thirteen months in jail, a female guard brought me a suit and a tie and told me to be dressed in fifteen minutes. It was not yet dawn. Two heavyset deputies carrying Mace and armed with holstered .45s came for me and walked me through the same set of underground tunnels I’d been through before. In the holding cell I practiced looking worried yet confident. I’d heard jurors form an impression about guilt or innocence right away, merely by looking at the defendant, before they have heard even a single shred of testimony. I wanted them to see an innocent man when they looked at me—scared and uncomprehending, but innocent. I opened my eyes wide, then narrowed them a bit. I rubbed them until they were swollen and red. My palms were wet and I wiped them on my wool trousers. The suit was navy blue and off-the-rack. Whichever member of my legal team picked it out had done a good job.
By the third day of jury selection I worried I was looking bored. Here’s the way it worked: Sixty people with Harris County Juror stickers affixed to their shirts or blouses packed the courtroom’s benches. The judge talked to them first, then the prosecutor, then my lawyer. They asked questions like, Are any of you related to the defendant or the victim in this case? Have any of you or a member of your immediate family been convicted of a crime? Have you served on a capital murder jury before? Questioning went on like this for half a day. Before court ended that afternoon, the lawyers stood whispering in front of the judge, and a few minutes later, the judge called out the numbers of eight of the potential jurors and told them they were released, and all the others should return the next morning at eight.
On day two, jurors came into the courtroom one at a time. They were individually questioned at great length by the lawyers and the judge on topics ranging from their attitude toward the death penalty to what television shows they watch. The lawyers asked them what books and magazines they read, which websites they visit, where they go out to dinner, how often they attend church, whether they follow sports, and how they felt about defense lawyers and police. They could have been filling out online applications for a dating site. You might be surprised to learn that many Americans think someone is guilty if he gets arrested and the prosecutors take him to trial. My side didn’t want those people on our jury. Their side did. They were looking for people who trust that the police get it right. My side preferred jurors who are skeptical of government. Their ideal jurors were people who demand an eye for an eye. We wanted women and men who know couples consisting of very different social and economic backgrounds. They wanted people who support building a border wall. The prosecutor would try to identify jurors who were against the death penalty, and then corner that juror into saying she could never sentence someone to death, the result being she was disqualified from serving on the jury. My lawyers would try to get the same person to admit she could listen to all the evidence and evaluate it impartially, and sentence someone to die if the circumstances warranted that punishment. It was a verbal chess match between the lawyers, who were manipulating potential jurors like pawns on the board. For part of the first day I marveled, but soon it became tiresome, and then I grew alarmed my future depended entirely on guessing right.
The scripts did not change. By the time the prosecutor was asking the fifth potential juror whether he could sentence a defendant to death if that defendant had never before committed a crime but had bludgeoned his wife to death to collect an inheritance, I was already losing the battle to keep an engaged expression on my face. And yet we were just getting started. These individual colloquies lasted three and a half weeks. I actually looked forward to going back to my jail cell at the end of the day. I wondered what the jurors would think if I fell asleep at my own trial.
Then, midday on a Thursday afternoon, the judge banged his gavel and we had a jury: six white men, four white women, one black woman, and one Latina, ranging in age from twenty-eight to sixty-four. When they took their seats, the black woman stared straight at me. The other eleven looked away. The judge gave them some instructions, told them he had some technical matters to go over with the lawyers the following day, wished them a pleasant weekend, instructed them not to watch the news or read the paper about the case, and directed they be in their seats first thing Monday morning. They murmured among themselves as they filed out. Heidi watched them leave. Jonathan looked at her and said, So? She said, It’s rare I find myself counting on the men. But all we need is one. They were not talking to me, but I offered an opinion anyway. I said, I think three of the women looked sympathetic. Heidi said, Maybe so. She was just being polite.
Whatever my lawyers were doing that weekend to prepare for Monday’s start apparently didn’t require me, so the jailers left me in my cell. I lay on the bunk, stared at the wall, and had the first of what would become many fantasies of escape. I wondered what the guards earned in a year. Twenty-five, maybe thirty thousand dollars? What could I offer one to bring me jeans and a shirt and turn me loose? How could I transfer the money? How could I be sure they’d do what they promised once I had paid? If I did escape where would I go? Are there some countries that would refuse to send me home? On Sunday afternoon, with a local pastor preaching on TV, I said out loud, This is ridiculous. There is no way the jury won’t know I’m innocent. I finally fell asleep and didn’t wake until the guards came for me on Monday morning at half past five.
Jonathan reminded me to keep my face open and warm, especially if anyone said anything untrue. Heidi said, The jury will watch how you react. They’ll know if you’re faking. Their advice made me self-conscious and nervous, but once the witnesses finally started to testify, it was easy to be sincere. Tieresse’s housekeeper, Stella, was first to take the stand. She explained she had been working for Tieresse for almost fifteen years, that she usually arrived at work shortly after nine and stayed until five thirty or six, that she did housekeeping and laundry, ran errands, and sometimes cooked. She said Tieresse was an early riser who had already gone to an exercise class at the gym by the time she got to the house but that I would usually still be sleeping when she arrived. She spoke with a heavy Latvian accent and the judge kept reminding her to speak up and slow down. She said she was confused the day of the murder because Tieresse was not there and the door to the parlor was ajar. Sometimes, she told the jury, Tieresse and I would be swimming. She kept the water heated all year round. But the pool was empty. The coffeepot was on a timer, and the carafe was full, with not a single cup gone. Usually there was freshly squeezed grapefruit juice in a carafe with ice, but the pitcher wasn’t on the counter, and there were no fruit rinds in the sink. At first she thought the exercise class had run late, or that Tieresse had stopped to buy bagels on the way home, but she went into the garage and saw Tieresse’s car parked and empty. That was when she began to worry.
The prosecutor showed Stella a photo of Tieresse, with her head resting in a pool of black blood, and asked whether that was how my wife had looked when Stella found her. Stella choked up and looked straight at me. She said I was there most mornings but not that day. A buzzing started inside my head. I concentrated on maintaining a neutral face. I glanced quickly at the jurors. They were all focused on the witness. One man and two women were leaning forward in their chairs. I saw Stella’s lips moving and two jurors nod, but I could not hear what she was saying. Then the prosecutor sat and my lawyer stood, and it was quiet again. Heidi asked Stella whether she ever witnessed us fight. Stella said, You mean like did he hit her? My lawyer said, Yes, did you ever see my client hit his wife or even raise his voice to her? Stella said, Mr. Rafael? No, ma’am. Never. He love her. Heidi asked her whether Tieresse was happy, but the prosecutor objected, and the judge would not let her answer, even though she had already started to vigorously nod. When it was the prosecutor’s turn again she asked whether I ever had strange women over to the house, and Stella looked at the judge, confused. The prosecutor said, I want to know whether you ever saw the defendant at the victim’s house with another woman. Stella said no, never. The prosecutor said, You understand that I am asking you because the defendant has admitted to having sexual affairs with at least four women during the time he was dating or married to your employer. I am trying to learn whether you witnessed any of these liaisons. Jonathan objected, and the prosecutor withdrew the question, but it was too late for me to hide the shame that had spread across my face. When Stella stepped down, she left without looking my way. I felt jurors staring at me, but could not force myself to return their gaze.
Three police officers testified next. Two were the lead homicide detectives, Cole and Pisarro. The other was the patrol officer who had been the first to arrive at the house in response to the 911 call. He recounted how he checked to make sure the victim was dead and upon finding no pulse secured the crime scene and called for support. He described finding the candlestick next to the body and said it was covered with blood, strands of hair, and pieces of Tieresse’s scalp. My lawyer objected and the judge said, Sustained. The prosecutor showed him photographs he had taken of open jewelry boxes scattered on the closet floor and asked if that was how he had found them. She asked him, Officer, have you investigated robberies before? He said he had. She said, Did this look like a robbery to you? My lawyer objected but the judge said, Overruled, and told the officer he could answer. The policeman said, No ma’am. Usually a thief makes a mess. In this case, except for the jewelry boxes, the rest of the house was pristine. She said, No more questions for this witness, Your Honor. Thank you, Officer.
It was my lawyer’s turn. Jonathan established the officer was a six-year veteran who had investigated a dozen home robberies or burglaries and had testified previously in eight trials. He said, Do you consider yourself skilled as a robbery investigator? and the officer said he did. My lawyer asked, Officer, if a thief was planning to steal a butcher knife, would you expect him to make a mess in the bedroom? The policeman said probably not. My lawyer said, And if the thief was looking to steal a shoe, would you expect a mess in the kitchen? The police officer looked at the prosecutor. She remained seated. He said, Probably not. Jonathan took a swallow of water then said, Are you married, sir? The prosecutor objected. My lawyer said, I will get to the point quickly, Your Honor. The judge told the policeman to answer. The policeman said yes he was, that he had been married for eleven years. My lawyer asked, And does your wife have any jewelry? He said, Yes, her wedding ring, a couple of others, some earrings, a few necklaces. My lawyer said, Where does she keep it? The police officer looked at the prosecutor again, but she did not stand up. My lawyer said, You may answer, sir, and the policeman said, In our closet.
Detective Cole was next, followed by Pisarro. They confirmed that crime scene photos shown to the jury reflected the way Tieresse’s body looked when they found her. Cole described how he and two crime scene technicians had dusted for fingerprints in various locations, including the doorknobs, desktop, bathroom, and closet. Pisarro said they had made a mold of a shoe impression in the flower bed adjacent to the front door, but the impression turned out to belong to a yard worker. The most damning testimony came from Cole. Earlier, Stella had said she assumed Tieresse had already gone to and returned from her exercise class because the house alarm was turned off. Cole testified that after he and Pisarro had interviewed Stella, and she had told them the alarm was off when she got to the house that morning, they examined it and found it to be in working order. The prosecutor asked, What conclusion do you draw from that, Detective? Cole said, Well, ma’am, it means someone who knew the code turned it off. She said, Do you know who had the code? Cole said, The homeowner, the housekeeper, the alarm company, and the defendant.
Before the prosecutor had a chance to sit down, my lawyer was already on her feet. Heidi said, It is possible, isn’t it Detective Cole, the alarm was never turned on. Cole said, The housekeeper told us the victim always turned on the alarm before retiring. My lawyer asked, But it is possible she didn’t that night, isn’t that true? Cole said, I suppose. Almost anything is possible. My lawyer said, And what time did the victim retire the night before she was killed? Cole said he didn’t know. She said, Well, Detective, if the victim turned on the alarm before retiring, and the thief broke in before she went to retire, you would expect the alarm not to be set, isn’t that so? Cole said, I do not think the homeowner pulled all-nighters. My lawyer objected and the judge said, Sustained. My lawyer said, Please answer my question, Detective: If the thief was already in the house before the victim got ready for bed, the alarm would be off in the morning, isn’t that so? He said, Yes ma’am. My lawyer nodded, as if to say, Exactly, and she sat back down.
The prosecutor asked, Did the defendant have the alarm code, Detective Cole? Cole said, He told my partner and me he did, and the housekeeper confirmed as much, so I assume so. She said, Thank you, Detective.
Opening day’s final witness was the coroner. He testified that Tieresse had died from blunt trauma. Her skull had been fractured and showed evidence of at least thirteen blows. I held my head in my hands. He said that Tieresse’s left wrist and right hand were shattered, indicating she had tried to fight the intruder off. I inhaled sharply, and for the first time since her death, I felt unable to control my rage. I gripped the arms of my chair. My lawyer said, Look at me, and when I did, she whispered, I need you not to look angry. I need you to relax. I dropped my head into the crook of my right arm and squeezed shut my eyes. I felt Jonathan touching my arm and Heidi’s fingers on my back. It was the first sign of affection anyone had shown me since the day of my arrest. I felt the black juror staring at me, but I didn’t look back. The prosecutor asked the medical examiner approximately what time Tieresse had died. The coroner said, Based on the temperature of the liver as well as indicia of rigor and livor mortis—essentially, the color and rigidity of the body—death appears to have occurred between ten at night and three A.M.
I do not know how the jury reacted to this testimony because I was not watching them. I was not concentrating on my expression. I think Jonathan was asking him questions, but I was not listening any longer. Instead, I was thinking to myself. I was thinking how Tieresse was fighting for her life at the very moment I was in bed with a waitress, and I didn’t care anymore what the jury decided. Nothing they could do to me would be punishment enough. Maybe I hadn’t killed her, but I hadn’t saved her either.
The judge reminded the jurors not to watch the news or read the paper, and he sent them home for the evening. The lawyers sparred over some technical issues about jury instructions. The two deputies came over with their handcuffs. Before they took me back to jail, I told my lawyers I wanted to change my plea to guilty.
Instead of taking me to my cell, the deputies put me in a room where I would meet with members of my legal team. A moment later, Heidi walked in. She said, You are in charge. If you want to change your plea you can. Did you beat your wife to death?
Everything I had been doing to hold myself together failed at once. I sobbed so violently I could neither catch my breath nor speak an answer to her question. I shook my head, and Heidi said, Don’t worry about it. I know the answer to that question. She placed her hand on top of mine, banged on the door to let the deputies know we were through, and said, See you in the morning, Rafael.
The prosecutor had told the jury before even a single witness was called that the case against me was entirely circumstantial. There were no eyewitnesses, no damning calls to 911, no videotape, no physical evidence. She said, It was a case of the dog not barking. Whoever killed Tieresse knew the code to turn off the alarm. Whoever killed her knew exactly where she kept her jewelry. Whoever killed her knew when she would be alone. Whoever killed her knew that what looked like a delicate antique candlestick was actually a rock-hard potential murder weapon. She said, There is only one person in the world who has all those characteristics, and he is sitting there in front of you. She pointed at me and let her arm float in the air as she walked backward to her chair.
She said, Of course, there is always a motive, and I knew what she was going to say, and I wanted to look down, but even more than shame, I felt anger. This person accusing me of a violence beyond my capacity had no idea how I adored my wife, how the best part of my day was seeing her and the worst part was telling her goodbye. Her entire case depended on portraying me as a caricature. She said, People of all stations loved this generous woman. Who on earth would have butchered her, other than a much younger husband, a serial philanderer, a struggling line cook who had lived hand to mouth for his entire life and now stood to inherit billions—billions she had worked hard for? She paused, pretending she needed to catch her breath, then she whispered again, Who else on earth? Pointing again at me she said, No one.
If the theme of the first day’s testimony had been, This is how you know the husband did it, the theme of the second day was, And this is why. The prosecutor put up a video screen and showed a picture of Tieresse and me walking out of city hall after our wedding. Underneath was the date. The state then called a succession of three women, who all testified they had sex with me in between the day of my wedding and the day Tieresse was killed. The prosecutors did not call Britanny, however, and that omission gave me hope. It shouldn’t have. They were lying in wait.
My lawyers asked each of the women the same set of questions: Did you know he was married? Did Rafael say anything about leaving his wife? Did it feel like anything more than a one-night stand to you? They all answered the same way: Yes, I knew he was married because he was wearing a ring. No, he did not say anything negative about his wife or that he was going to leave her. No, it was just sex. Three of the jurors stared at me, and I could sense disgust. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care if they deemed my behavior the worst sort of infidelity. It was, after all. In truth, I didn’t care what they thought of me. I confess I hoped these strangers could see I did not kill my wife, but all I really cared about was that they know how much I loved her.
On the third day of the trial, it was finally our turn. The prosecutor might have had passion on her side, but we had the truth on ours. My lawyers called as witnesses neighbors who had known Tieresse for twenty years and me for two. They had seen us together and been to our home. Maybe they could not swear that I did not do it, but they could swear it was unimaginable. They called people who had worked at La Ventana since the day we opened. They also could not swear to a negative, but they could say they had never seen me happier since the day Tieresse and I went on our first date, and they did.
Benita was also my business manager, and her testimony was a direct rebuttal to the prosecution’s case. She testified we had never struggled financially. Since being on the New York Times list of ten places to watch, we had a four-month waiting list for reservations. She told the jury how Tieresse had asked me not just once, but at least three times, to open more restaurants using her money, and how I had declined each and every offer. She was sincere and angry, and I loved her for it.
Many of the witnesses cried. They looked me in the eye when they first took the stand, and they stared straight at the jurors when saying there was no way I could have done this. I wanted to hug every one of them.
We saved the star witness for the next day. Britanny was my alibi. That was the good news. The bad news is that her testimony certainly wasn’t going to cause the jurors to like me. Jonathan had tried to lay the groundwork during his opening statement. He told the jury they would hear from some women I had sex with since getting married. He said the prosecution would make it sound as if I were a gold digger who had been cheating on my wife since the first day of our marriage. But I hadn’t, Jonathan said. According to my lawyer, who held a thick Physicians’ Desk Reference in his hand, Tieresse was a non-libidoist—someone who got no pleasure from sex. Even worse, because of a series of unfortunate medical decisions, having sex caused her agonizing pain. She knew that about herself, and she had given me permission to sleep with others. They had an arrangement, he said, and when he used that word, I shuddered. I leaned over to Heidi and whispered, That is not what it was at all, and Heidi patted my knee and whispered back, Let us be the lawyers here, okay?
Britanny’s husband was in the courtroom, sitting in the first row, watching his newlywed tell the jury about her final fling before meeting him. She told them about the going-away party, how the entire La Ventana staff, from the cooks and waitstaff to the Hispanic kids who bus the tables and keep the water glasses full, sat around a giant makeshift table and ate and drank and told stories about obnoxious guests. She told the story about her hair catching on fire. She told them I brought the finest bottles of wine up from the cellar and passed around the most expensive liquor we poured. She told the jury everyone at the restaurant knew I sometimes had lady friends upstairs to my loft and they suspected Tieresse knew as well. The prosecutor objected, and the judge instructed the jury to disregard Britanny’s speculation. She seemed rattled. She sipped from her water glass and wiped her palms on her skirt. She told the jurors she had not planned on staying. She said, Things just happened, I wasn’t expecting it, and the next morning, Rafael told me to please stay in touch, and I told him I would. He was my friend. He still is my friend. When she said that, she looked first at the jury, and then to me.
Every word she said was the truth. There is no way anybody could think she was lying. Why would she? She had absolutely nothing to gain. My lawyer thanked her for her testimony, and it was the prosecutor’s turn.
What time did you fall asleep? the prosecutor asked her. I didn’t remember. Britanny didn’t either. The prosecutor said, Do you have a lot of one-night stands? Heidi objected and the prosecutor withdrew the question. She asked, What time did you leave in the morning? Britanny told her it was around nine. I looked over at the jury. I was wondering what any of these questions had to do with anything, but I was worried because the jurors appeared interested. She asked, Had you been to the defendant’s house prior to that evening? Brittany said, You mean his house house, or his apartment above the restaurant? The prosecutor smiled. The fish had taken the bait. She said, Oh, so you know he had two houses. Is the answer to one different from the other? Britanny stammered. She was nervous. Finally she said, I’d never been to either. The prosecutor said, Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive from La Ventana to the defendant’s house? She drew out the word house as if it had three syllables. Brittany said she didn’t. The prosecutor asked whether she would be surprised to learn the drive was less than ten minutes, and Britanny shook her head. The judge asked her to speak up, and Britanny said, No, I would not be surprised. I did not know where their house was.
In her closing argument the next morning, the prosecutor would say I had at least two hours, and possibly closer to four, to drive to the house, murder my wife, clean myself up, and drive back. She used our star witness to make her timeline plausible. She said, Could that have happened? Britanny said, No, that didn’t happen. The prosecutor said, Do you know what is happening around you while you are asleep? Britanny said nothing. The prosecutor said, I am asking you whether it could have happened, and when Britanny still said nothing, the judge told her to answer. The judge said, Ma’am, you have to speak up. My lawyer objected and the judge overruled it and told her to answer. Britanny said, No, I do not know what happens when I am asleep. I do know Rafael is not capable of this. The prosecutor said, The jury will decide that issue, miss. My question for you is whether you slept more than four hours that evening after your rollicking party. Britanny said, Yes. I did. Britanny looked softly at me as she left the witness stand, apologizing, I think, for not being helpful, and I shook my head, meaning to say, No, you did fine. When the judge sent the jury home, not a single juror met my eyes.
That night I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning, Friday, the lawyers gave their closing arguments. The jury started deliberating at eleven o’clock. Not counting the days spent picking the jury, the entire trial had taken less than four entire days. Shortly before six they came back. The judge asked the foreman whether they had reached a verdict, and he said they had. The judge asked him to read it aloud, and he didn’t even say my name. He said, Will the defendant please rise? I stood flanked by my lawyers and looked at the foreman. He was staring straight down. None of the jurors was looking at me. The foreman read, We, the jury, find the defendant, Rafael Zhettah, guilty of capital murder. His pronunciation of my name was perfect. I collapsed into my chair.
For the next few moments, I heard many voices, but I did not comprehend any of what they said. I heard the sounds of the judge talking to the jury, my lawyers talking to the judge, the jurors talking to my lawyers, my lawyers talking to each other. Then the judge banged his gavel, and I was present again, in time to hear him tell the twelve who believed me a murderer he would see them Monday morning at nine, and as they filed out Heidi slumped into the chair next to me and began to explain what would happen next. Jonathan stared blankly at the empty jury box.
Until I became a defendant, my knowledge of criminal trials came from reading To Kill a Mockingbird and watching A Few Good Men every time it was on TV. Atticus Finch had a human relationship with his client Tom Robinson, and Tom Cruise struggled to connect with the marines he was defending. The central relationship in both stories was the one between lawyers and their clients. What I never noticed was the importance of the relationship between the lawyers and the women and men who would judge their clients. That night in my cell, though, it hit me. The trust between the lawyers and the jury matters way more than the trust between the lawyers and the client, and my lawyers had none left. They promised the jury I had nothing to do with Tieresse’s murder, and the jury hadn’t believed them. Their credibility was spent, and credibility was all they’d ever had.
In a room at the jail reserved for inmates to meet with their attorneys I sat in silence while my legal team desperately debated what kind of lifesaving narrative to construct. It would have been hopeless even if they’d had a month. They had sixty hours. Their only option was to use my neighbors, colleagues, and employees to beg the jury to spare my life, but those same witnesses had already testified I was innocent, and the jurors hadn’t believed them the first time. I asked the deputy to take me back to my cell and left them there without saying goodbye.
If I slept at all the next three nights, it was only for an hour or two a day. My plan was to be so tired on Monday that I would literally fall asleep during the trial. I could think of no more powerful way to communicate to the jury how little I cared about what they thought.
The prosecution called Reinhardt as their first witness. He testified about how he had been raised by a single mother who managed to build a business behemoth and cook him breakfast every morning. Twice he stopped to compose himself. He did not look at me even once. After he stepped down, a parade of philanthropists told the jury Tieresse was an innovator who inspired them to give more to the community. More than one said she was irreplaceable. I did not resent any of the state’s witnesses. If asked, I would have said the exact same things.
Before lunch on Tuesday the state rested its case, and it was our turn. An expert on the prison system explained to the jury I would never get out of prison if sentenced to life instead of death, and there was no reason to believe I would be dangerous either to guards or to other inmates inside. The point of his testimony was to make the jury feel like they could lock me up and throw away the key and not worry they were taking the risk I would injure someone else. For our second witness, my lawyer called me to the stand.
The night before, in the county jail, I skipped dinner and met until midnight with Heidi and Jonathan. They had a script, and we practiced my answers to their questions half a dozen times. They coached me on inflection, pace, and when to look at the jury and when to look at them. I worried I would sound practiced or robotic, but I shouldn’t have. The next day, when I raised my right hand and swore to tell the truth, I felt drops of sweat sliding down my spine and my hands were shaking so hard I sloshed water out of the cup when I picked it up to drink. My voice was a rasp when Jonathan asked me my name.
I didn’t sound rehearsed because I couldn’t remember a single thing they had told me. The first thing he asked me was how to pronounce my name, and then he said, Did you kill your wife? I think the prosecutor objected, but I’m not sure, because I was so shocked by the question. I am positive we hadn’t gone over it before. How could he have the audacity? I felt flushed with anger. There must have been some sort of argument among the lawyers because what happened next was the judge said, Mr. Zhettah, and I turned toward him, and he said, I’ve ruled, you may answer the question. I said, I’m sorry, what was the question? Jonathan repeated it. I wanted to say, Fuck you, and stand up and leave. Let the deputies tackle me. I was done with this circus. But I did not. I said, No sir. I loved my wife.
He asked how we had met, what sort of things we did together, what we talked about, where we liked to go. At some point I was delivering a eulogy in a question-and-answer format, and for a moment a wave of overwhelming sadness rose up inside me, but then I realized I was given this opportunity to tell twelve strangers and a room full of reporters who knew nothing about her except that she was rich what a special creature she was.
I said, You hear about people like Mother Teresa who devote their lives to the poor. I don’t mean any disrespect, but I can guarantee you Tieresse was every bit as angelic as Mother Teresa. She could have walled herself off from the rest of the world if she’d wanted to, lived in a castle, vacationed on private islands, given up on the world. Instead she went on a mission to improve it.
I said, I am the saddest person in this room, I don’t care whether you believe that or not. I am also the luckiest.
We had not rehearsed that, either. And I saw Jonathan freeze and Heidi’s mouth open, and I had no idea whether that was a good sign or a bad. But when at last I finished talking, and the prosecutor had no more questions either, Jonathan came up to the chair where I was sitting between a court reporter and the judge, and he placed his hand on top of mine, and I felt the jurors watching me, and I believed they knew their earlier verdict was wrong.
My lawyers and the prosecutor made closing arguments. The prosecutor said I was a conniving, deceitful predator. My lawyers said nobody was duplicitous enough to fool as many people as had testified on my behalf. I thought the black juror was staring at me, but when I followed her line of sight, I realized she was looking at Reinhardt, who was sitting in the second row. The judge read the jury their instructions and told them deliberations would begin in the morning.
Back at the jail on Tuesday night, I paced in my cell. I could hear an infomercial for a treadmill playing at three A.M. on the TV that was never turned off. On Wednesday morning I drank a cup of instant coffee but vomited it back up before the guards came for me at seven. I sat there, while Heidi and Jonathan tended to other matters, other clients, on their mobile phones. Before the lunch hour, the judge’s law clerk let both sides know the jury had reached a verdict. I stood up, flanked by my lawyers, and the courtroom was completely still. Then the judge said something and the foreman rose and spoke, but I didn’t hear a thing, except for a gasp from Heidi when the foreman sat back down and the judge told me I had been sentenced to death.