Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  “Hey,” Hector said, “do me a favor. Let me get you a cab.

  Walk some other night. This guy’s sure as shit’s gonna be a pain in the ass, I know it. He’s a fuckin’ nuisance.”

  “Thanks, Hector. I’ll let you do that.”

  Hector swept through the revolving door and flagged down a taxi for Tom in about five seconds. The car sped north on Third Avenue. Three blocks from the building, Tom turned in the backseat and saw the black-tailored man still staring across Third Avenue, still waiting. But now he was speaking into a cell phone.

  * * *

  The apartment at 87th and Madison was on the eighteenth floor of a pre-war, twenty-one story building. Julie and Tom had loved it from the day they first saw it. The view swept over the lower, staid buildings on the block between Fifth and Madison. Season after season, Tom and Julie had wide views of P A U L B A T I S T A

  the northern expanse of Central Park, including the broad, sky-reflecting surface of the reservoir. Even after that deep blue September day years earlier when they had stared at the white wall of smoke and dust streaming eastward from the collapsed World Trade Center, they often told each other they’d live there forever.

  When she heard the familiar sound of the front door opening and closing, Julie walked briskly from the kitchen to the hallway.

  She slipped her arms under Tom’s suit jacket and around his waist. He was six-two and still weighed two hundred and fifteen 10

  pounds. His agent had tried several times to persuade him to appear in a centerfold spread for Playgirl. He turned the idea down but, years later, when he first met Julie, he mentioned it to her. “Playgirl,” she sometimes still called him, teasing. “Come here, playgirl,” she’d say.

  Julie was six inches shorter than Tom. This afternoon her gleaming black hair was pulled away from her face and tied at the back of her head. She raised her face and sweet mouth to kiss him. Since Kim’s birth, she had worked, part-time, as a news writer for NBC. Before she met Tom, she’d never seen a football game. But, addicted to news since the time when she was a lonely twelve-year-old in Oxnard, California, she recognized his name.

  But for what? It was only after a Google search that she realized the Tom Perini she had met—a youngish, incredibly good-looking lawyer working at the time in the federal prosecutor’s office—was once one of the most famous college and professional football players in the country.

  “Guess what? I’m not working this weekend. The judge didn’t ask for any briefs, letters, anything. She just said, ‘Enjoy the weekend.’”

  “See, I told you women make the best judges.”

  They walked from the foyer to the living room. The sofa was placed so that it faced the large windows and the high view of Central Park. They lay down side-by-side on the sofa. Playfully, Julie told him Kim had just started her late afternoon nap. They D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  would wake her for dinner, now two hours away, and then put her to bed for the night.

  “Want to mess around?” Julie asked.

  Tom loved her, and her playfulness. “Not the right time of day,” he answered, kissing her delicate ear, “and besides, my mind is on food, not sex. It happens that way to older guys.” Pungent meat sauce with garlic, tomatoes, and thyme was cooking slowly in the kitchen. Its aroma filled the apartment, as did the light from the sun, slowly falling, radiant, behind the lush trees in the park.

  11

  As always, Julie was interested in his work and asked about the trial. He’d given her a daily narrative. Now he talked about Judge Feigley, a massive woman, famous in her own right, known to the lawyers at the prosecution table and the defense lawyers as Dumb Dora. Tom complained, briefly, that the judge, despite her background as a young civil rights lawyer in the sixties, had become the kind of judge prosecutors loved on their cases. She let everything in, ruled in the government’s favor on all the small, killing details which, as they accumulated, built a mosaic for the jury pointing toward guilt, and was a classic hanging judge at sentencing time. Tom told Julie how relieved he was, “a kid let out of school,” when the judge blandly announced that the trial would be in recess until the next Tuesday.

  As she later recalled again and again, it was Julie who suggested that Tom go for a run in Central Park. “Dinner won’t be ready for a while,” she said. “It’ll be a good way to break with work and start the weekend.”

  Julie was right. After years of training, Tom’s body still craved physical effort: running, weight-lifting, biking, anything that brought a drenching sweat to his skin, including sex with his firm, shapely wife. Work—especially the kind of time-consuming work he now did—often interfered with his love of exercise. Julie, a squash player for years, naturally fleet, coordinated, and graceful, always urged him to run when he could. Tom was never able to play squash with her because her speed and agility on a small P A U L B A T I S T A

  court were greater than his.

  Changing quickly, wanting to finish the run before it became completely dark, Tom put on a sweatshirt, faded running shorts with the blue word “Columbia” sewn into the fabric, and an old pair of running shoes. They once had that high-tech look Tom disdained, but by now, after hundreds of hours of pounding on the roadways of Central Park, they were worn into the battered, almost flattened look and feel he preferred.

  Before he left the apartment he slipped into Kim’s bedroom.

  She still slept in a crib, although one side was permanently down.

  12

  Shades drawn, the room was near-dark. The scent of the room was beguiling. His clean daughter slept on her side. She had the light skin and black hair of Julie’s family. Her breathing was deep. It was regular. It was vital. And it was miraculously scented as he leaned as close to her face and lips as he could without touching her.

  “Be back in about forty-five minutes,” he whispered to Julie as he left the apartment. “I love you,” he said. He patted her rear.

  “You’ve got a great ass.”

  3.

  Julie Perini had never been touched directly by death before. Her distant mother and father were still living in California, none of her few close friends had died, she had never known any of her grandparents, and her daughter’s life had just started.

  On Friday night she waited for Tom for more than two hours before Kim emerged, crying and sweaty, from her nap. The anxiety in Julie’s body, a sense of sickness, grew steadily as she played briefly with Kim, washed her, and tried to settle her into bed by nine-fifteen. Tom never carried any kind of identification when he ran—his face was still readily recognizable in this city of well-known people—but he did put quarters in a wristband he wore, enough for a telephone call and a bus ride. He refused to carry his cell phone when he ran. “Nothing,” he told her, “is more annoying than the sight of some New Yorker pretending to run and talking into a cell phone at the same time. Me, I can barely chew gum and run.”

  Kim at last settled into sleep shortly before ten. Because her father so frequently worked late at night, she didn’t ask where he was or mention his name. By ten-thirty, Julie was walking from room to room in the apartment. Where’s Tom? He must have twisted an ankle, seen an old friend, helped another runner who had tripped. She looked repeatedly from their high windows at the northern expanses of Central Park. Rows of lights in the park traced the mile-long outline of the reservoir and, in the rest of the P A U L B A T I S T A

  park, the intricate patterns of footpaths and roadways. Glistening jewels on a black cloth.

  The spacious, elegant views of the park at night didn’t calm or reassure her. The feverish words I know what happened kept coming into her mind, almost audibly. She called his office: no answer. She called his cell phone: maybe this once he’d taken it.

  She heard it ringing in the pocket of his suit. Since she wanted to believe he’d come back and didn’t want him to think she had pan-icked, she decided she’d wait until midnight to call the police.

  And what would she sa
y? My husband went out and he’s not home yet.

  14

  A cop would sardonically answer: Right, lady, it’s Friday night, lots of husbands aren’t home yet.

  At eleven she switched on the radio. One of the all-news stations broadcast the foreign and national news for five minutes (another suicide bombing in Iraq, at least ten people dead). Then the familiar, almost bored voices of the station’s man-and-woman pair of late-night announcers began a routine run through the local news.

  “This just in,” the male voice intoned. “A shooting in Central Park has left one man, apparently a jogger, dead. Police have no information about the identity of the victim. And they have made no arrests.”

  And then the well-rehearsed woman’s voice: “We’ll have more for you on this story as soon as we get it.”

  The words burst in her mind: I know.

  Somehow she managed to find one of the porters to sit in the apartment while Kim slept. Julie also found the telephone number of the Central Park police precinct. To an indifferent policewoman she said what she knew about the radio broadcast and about her husband’s absence in the park. After keeping Julie on hold, the woman finally said, “Maybe you better get over here.”

  Just after midnight Julie took a taxi to the police station in the middle of the 86th Street crossing in Central Park. She had seen this assembly of old-fashioned stone-and-wooden buildings a thousand times on quick bus transits through the park from east D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  to west, west to east. The buildings always had the look, the texture, of run-down riding stables, cobbled English-style roofs, gray walls—a comforting image. Inside, what she found was fluorescent lighting, harsh and unreal, scraped metal desks, and linoleum floors. She kept thinking I know. The three policemen who led her to a rear room also seemed to know.

  There was a body under a sheet on a steel table. The sheet was blood-stained. A tag was tied to the right foot with a twisted wire.

  The older policeman lifted the sheet from the blood-soaked sneakers to the middle of Tom’s overwhelmingly recognizable 15

  body. She saw the faded, years-old shorts he wore. They bore the word “Columbia” stitched below the left-hand pocket. There was an odor of blood and open wounds in the room. Blood had an odor like freshly turned soil, wet dirt. Julie’s entire body shook.

  “Recognize him?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Let me see his face to be sure.”

  “Is this your husband?”

  “God, yes.”

  “You don’t have to look at his face.”

  “I need to be sure. I want to know.”

  “It won’t help, lady. I’m tellin’ you. It won’t help.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  A gentler voice said, “Why don’t you come and tell us who you are and who he was?”

  My husband who was, she thought.

  * * *

  It was almost two in the morning when she returned to her building, delivered there by a police cruiser. She told the porter, Yolanda, that Tom was dead, as simply and bluntly as that—“My husband’s dead”—and the woman’s heavy Mexican face, smiling expansively when Julie opened the door to her apartment, P A U L B A T I S T A

  became contorted, pained. She asked if she could do anything. Julie said, “No, but thank you for what you’ve done.” Julie instinctively pressed two twenty-dollar bills into her hand.

  Then she sat for hours on the floor in a corner of Kim’s bedroom. Her daughter slept soundly and barely stirred. The simple fact of being in Kim’s room kept Julie from crying, and she was afraid to cry, because that might last forever. At four in the morning, however, when the telephone started ringing with reporters leaving messages such as “Hello, hello, this is Candy Roberts of CNN, we need to talk with you about your hus-16

  band,” she realized she had to do something. If radio, newspaper, and magazine reporters were trying to reach her in the middle of the night in Manhattan to ask about the murder of the legendary Tom Perini, it was only a short time before they would seek out Lou and Mary.

  Tom’s simple, devoted parents still lived on the old street near the closed brick factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, where Tom was born and raised. From time to time through the years, their pictures appeared with Tom’s in magazines and newspapers.

  Their number was listed in the Lowell telephone directory. Julie thought for a time that it would be better for her if Lou and Mary learned what had happened to Tom from one of the reporters, but then she said, aloud, “I have to do this myself.”

  Moving quietly through the dark spaces of the apartment they loved, Julie carried the portable telephone to their bedroom. She closed the door behind her. Tom’s suit was still draped over a chair. The suit bore his smell—the residue of the cologne he wore, the one cigar he smoked each day, the day’s sweat. From a pocket in the suit Tom’s cell phone emitted a beep-beep to signal the presence of stored messages. She checked the bedroom door again to be sure it was shut. No matter what happened in this conversation with Lou and Mary, she didn’t want Kim to hear her.

  The digital clock read 4:58. After years of working in factories with morning shifts that began at five-thirty, Lou and Mary, long D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  since retired, were often awake at that hour.

  Mary answered after three rings. She was making breakfast in the kitchen of the apartment, the only room with a telephone. It still had a rotary dial.

  “Yes?” Mary’s voice was alert, strong, and totally unaware.

  “Mom? It’s me...” Julie choked, suddenly unable to speak.

  “Julie? Julie? What is it?”

  Julie decided that, with a husky monotone, she might be able to get the words out. “Mom, I have to tell you something. It’s bad.”

  “Julie?” Mary’s voice was controlled, strong, but at this point 17

  she knew, too.

  “What, Julie?” Mary urged. “What is it?”

  “Tom’s dead. Somebody killed him.”

  “Say that again?”

  “Tom is dead. Somebody shot him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, Mary.”

  “My God, Lou will die, too. His father will die.”

  Julie was crying now. She held the shaking receiver close enough to her ear to hear Mary say, “I have to go take care of Lou. We’ll get down there. We’ll call. We’ll take care of you...”

  And Mary let the receiver drop. Somehow, Julie thought, she would have to make arrangements for Lou and Mary to travel.

  They had never been in New York in their lives. They had never flown anywhere. And they were too old to drive themselves from Lowell to New York.

  Before dawn Julie drifted toward sleep on a thin exercise mat on the floor of Kim’s room, alongside the crib. She was awakened by Elena just before seven on Saturday morning. Elena helped to lift her from the floor and to half carry her to the living room. Julie clung to her shoulders without speaking or crying. Elena had worked for Tom and Julie for more than a year. She lived with them during the workweek, caring for Kim, and on Friday afternoons she left for the subway trip to Brighton Beach, where she spent the weekends with her parents. When she was still a child, her family P A U L B A T I S T A

  had left Romania at the end of 1989, three days after Ceausescu and his wife were executed. It was Elena’s mother who woke her to say she heard a radio broadcast at four in the morning that Tom Perini had been murdered. Instinctively Elena made her way back to Manhattan by subway in the dangerous predawn hours. She let herself in to the apartment and found Julie on the floor.

  After Elena helped Julie wash her tear-drenched face, they returned together to Kim’s bedroom. They found Kim playfully rattling the side of her crib—this had been her wake-up signal for the last three months. She was smiling extravagantly when Julie 18

  and Elena came into the room.

  “Kim wake up,
” the child said of herself, as she had been doing for the last week.

  Julie, forcing a smile, lifted her from the crib. “Good morning, sunshine.”

  Elena and Julie began Kim’s day with the usual morning rituals. They changed her soaked diaper, gave her a bottle of apple juice, and sat with her on the sofa in the living room as a DVD of Sesame Street unrolled the familiar songs, the comforting presence of Bert, Ernie, and Elmo, the miracle of good feeling and hope.

  As she went through these motions, Julie’s mind was rigid, locked onto the thought she’d expressed to Elena in that fifteen-minute interval before Kim woke. “I’m numb. I don’t know what to do.” Now, on the sofa, in the beautiful early morning light from the wide windows overlooking the park where her husband had died, she found herself absorbed in thinking about the image of the three of them seated together, the Sesame Street DVD

  unfolding, forever. Maybe, she hoped, she would never have to do anything other than this again.

  And then Kim said, “Daddy?”

  Instantly Elena distracted her by joining in the tune Big Bird was singing. Shouting happily, Kim repeated some of the song’s banal words. Julie quietly left for the kitchen, and started a day, a weekend, a week, a time beyond anything she had ever imagined.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  * * *

  Saturday began, and ended, with clear, cool weather—the kind of day Tom loved, “football sunshine.” Throughout the day Julie had the sense that the news of Tom Perini’s death had spread everywhere around the world, and she found herself thinking, even fastening on the thought, that she’d never fully recognized how famous her husband was. By mid-morning, messages had arrived from the offices of both senators from New York and the city’s mayor, and flowers from the commissioner of the National Football League.

  It was Elena, twenty-five, sad, and capable, who stopped the 19

  building doorman from buzzing the apartment and the building porters from bringing flowers to the apartment. It was also Elena who disconnected the plugs to the telephones and shut off the cell phones, including Tom’s, which had rung many times in his suit pocket. Elena told Julie that the police had set up barricades on the sidewalk in front of the building, that television vans were parked on 87th Street between Madison and Fifth, and that dozens of people were on a vigil, either mourning Tom or waiting for Julie to emerge.