Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  Soon she found herself becoming exasperated at the rote questions McGlynn was asking. Where did her husband work? How D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  long had he been a lawyer? Who did he work for? These were not the sorts of pointed questions she expected: questions directed at who had destroyed Tom Perini that night in the darkening park.

  She answered McGlynn’s questions by rote. Near the end of the conversation, almost as an afterthought, he began to ask about that Friday night.

  “All I know is that he came home from work,” Julie said. “He was happy. I suggested that he go for a run in the park. He did.”

  “Did he say anything before he left?”

  “He did. He said he loved me and, before he left, he kissed our 39

  daughter. But he always said he loved me and always spent as much time near her as he could. He was a wonderful man.”

  “Did he say anything about any new people? Anything different? Anything new in his life?”

  “No.” Feeling herself on the edge of both tears and an angry outburst—for she now definitely didn’t like this man; she was overwhelmed by his seeming incompetence—she shook her head,

  “No, nothing, nothing different.” Was he about to ask her about other women in Tom’s life?

  Instead he asked, “Did he have any new clients?”

  “Just Selig Klein. He was the only new one.”

  “How did Klein come to him?”

  “I don’t remember. Through another client, I think Tom said.”

  “Remember the name, the other client’s name, the other guy?”

  “Tom never said very much about things like that.”

  “What did he tell you about his business? I mean lately, last two, three months.”

  “He liked to talk about the trials. I liked to listen.”

  “Did he tell you how much money Klein paid him?”

  She snapped a look of disapproval at him. “No. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “We ask a lot of questions, Mrs. Perini. Looking for stuff that might help.”

  “I don’t know. Tom never told me how much money he got from any particular client. Do you tell your wife how much you earn?”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “She knows now. We’re divorced six months.”

  “That’s too bad, or not,” she answered. “But Tom never had any reason to tell me how much any client paid, so I never asked.”

  An internal clock seemed to have buzzed for McGlynn. It was time to leave. “We’ll want to talk with you more later. Can I call you?”

  “Sure.” Julie glanced at her hands because she didn’t want to look at McGlynn’s face any longer. She needed a manicure. “But I don’t think you’ll ever find anything. Do you?”

  40

  “Don’t know,” McGlynn said. “But we’ll try.”

  He asked for the check for their coffees and placed a dollar bill under a spoon as the tip. Julie dismissively shook his hand as he left. She watched him as he walked briskly from the restaurant to his unmarked Ford Crown Victoria with United States government license plates. She continued to stare outside after he drove away, turning west on 79th Street toward Central Park. Because clear, late-morning sunlight slanted through the window and fell on her, she could see her face reflected in the window. Even to herself, she looked cried out, depleted, bad.

  She put the business card with McGlynn’s name and telephone number in the pocket of her blue jeans.

  * * *

  The multicolored Friedsam Memorial Carousel in Central Park glinted as it spun in the bright, early-afternoon sunshine. Its calliope repeatedly played the theme song to Chinatown, that violent 1970s movie whose catchy music had over the decades been transformed into a song for kids. For five minutes Special Agent McGlynn walked among the hundreds of men, women, and children at the low-lying plaza at the center of which the carousel revolved. He felt out of place because he wore a tie and jacket among people who were all dressed for summer. Even the fathers in the colorful crowd wore short pants, sandals, sneakers, shirts with names on them (Nike, Wisconsin, NYPD, Syracuse, I Love Your Mom). This was D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  the way people dressed in public places like this, including airports.

  “Slobs” was the word in McGlynn’s mind. He wanted to take off his jacket, but he was wearing his shoulder holster.

  The man he knew only as the runner wasn’t late. He never was. McGlynn was annoyed with himself for arriving even five minutes early and becoming a too-conspicuous presence. He was the only man in a blue blazer and gray wool slacks. As he had since 9/11, he wore an enamel American flag (bright, in a permanent half wave) on his lapel.

  The runner came at a trotting pace down the long path that led 41

  off the Central Park roadway, where yellow cabs sped northward because they were free to use the park on weekdays. He wore a tank top, very short runner’s pants, and a nylon belt at his waist, from which hung an Army-style green canteen, overly large. Tall, lean-muscled, the runner had bushy blond hair. His eyes were small. He had a permanent squint and deep laugh-lines on his face.

  The man could have been as old as forty-five, thought McGlynn, who was skilled in the art of remembering and describing people and guessing their ages. But the runner’s face appeared older, more weathered than his youthful, muscular arms and body.

  Without speaking at first or even nodding at each other, McGlynn and the runner walked, slightly separated, toward the small arched pedestrian tunnel, a nineteenth-century relic, that led away from the carousel and the crowds of excited parents and children. As they approached the tunnel, they gradually came to walk side by side. Children’s sharp voices echoed from the curved stone walls. There was a whiff of urine in the tunnel.

  When they emerged into the sunshine on the other side, the runner asked, “Did she show up?”

  “Of course, I’m the FBI. People show up for us.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’s an old-fashioned wife. She knew nothing, asked nothing, she said, about where her hubby’s money came from.”

  “Did she know his clients?”

  “Just Klein, maybe a few others.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Did she know where Perini’s bank accounts are?”

  “You know, I’m the agent. I’ve spent my whole fuckin’ adult life interviewing witnesses. Some want to talk, some hesitate, some clam up. Some take work. She’ll need work.”

  “Do you two have plans to talk again?”

  “She wants to know who killed her husband. And she believes people like me find things out, at least some of the time. She doesn’t like me. But she needs me.”

  The runner stopped at an old stone water fountain. With his sweaty thumb, he pressed down on a metal lever. A gleaming arc 42

  of water rose from the steel spigot. He drank from the top of the water’s arc. When he finished drinking, he continued to push down on the fountain’s handle. He asked McGlynn, “Like some?”

  McGlynn instinctively thought that he didn’t want to lean down in front of the runner. If he drank—and he was thirsty—he would have the back of his head exposed to a man he didn’t know that well. The most sensitive parts of his body—mouth, nose, eyes—would be just above the narrow, upward-pointing faucet.

  “No, thanks,” McGlynn said. “I need to take a wicked leak already.”

  The runner said, “I know this park inside and out by now.

  There’s a men’s room just down the way near the zoo. Sure you don’t want some? It’s hot.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The arc of water stopped. The runner asked, “Did you set up a definite appointment to see her again?”

  “I need to take her gradually. She has my number. I have hers.”

  “The poet’s going to be in town soon. I see Mr. Perez tomorrow and he’ll give me a note telling me when the poet gets here.

  And then Mr. Perez will take the note back an
d eat it. We’re going to have to start to have some answers.”

  “The poet’s going to have to be patient. He’s not going to be running out of money soon. Not in fifty lifetimes.”

  “But he’s an impatient poet.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “He won’t have to wait fifty lifetimes, I promise.”

  The runner pointed down a winding pathway lined by ancient London plane trees with greenish bark like algae on their trunks and lush leaves at their tops. “The toilet’s down there. That brick building near the zoo. I’ll have Mr. Perez let you know when we want to see you again.”

  Long-legged, powerful, the runner abruptly bolted away from McGlynn. Since there were many other joggers, runners, and walkers that beautiful afternoon, some of them as tall and blond as the runner and dressed the same way, McGlynn soon lost track 43

  of him. The hundreds of people who passed by him had no idea, McGlynn thought, who the blond, swift runner was or what he had already done in his life and was likely to do again and again.

  As McGlynn finally reached the edge of the park, he passed the immense bronze statue of a seated man. The engraved name on the base of the monument said that Fitz-Greene Halleck was a nineteenth-century American poet. Halleck stared out into space, frozen in thought, a quill pen held perpetually in his right hand.

  Although McGlynn had graduated from Northeastern and liked to read in his big bachelor apartment on Staten Island overlooking the full length of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, he had never heard of Halleck.

  The only poet McGlynn knew personally was Luis Madrigal de Souza who, when he came to New York, stayed in the rundown Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street in the Chelsea-Clinton neighborhood. Madrigal stayed there, he said, because Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there. And Tennessee Williams once lived there. Madrigal also stayed there because no one would imagine that a South American with his wealth (and with casually dressed bodyguards swarming through the hotel as other guests) would take a room at a worn-out place like the Chelsea. Madrigal claimed to write poetry, even to have published some in an Argentine literary magazine under the name L. de Souza. McGlynn had never seen any of it. Nor had he ever seen Madrigal with a quill or a pen in his hand. And de Souza could have been another person.

  6.

  Even Neil Steinman had to concede that Sorrentino’s ability as a cross-examiner was impressive. Steinman sat at the prosecution table just below Judge Feigley’s high wooden bench, flanked by his four assistants. Steinman watched Vincent Sorrentino gazing sternly at Tim Hutchinson, the government’s most important witness and the former chief assistant to silver-haired Congressman Danny Fonseca. Hutchinson, prim, well-spoken, and bland, was crumbling—mentally, verbally, even physically—as Sorrentino moved into the fourth hour of the cross-examination. Hutchinson’s decay was something Steinman had expected.

  Although Steinman had Hutchinson on the stand for almost three days on direct examination, and had been impressed by the steady, detailed—and convincing—testimony, the prosecutor knew there was little strength below Hutchinson’s prepared exterior. The only question in Steinman’s mind was how radically Sorrentino would break Hutchinson’s well-stated testimony and well-rehearsed demeanor and pick apart, like a superb verbal decon-structionist, the words he had spoken on direct examination.

  Vincent Sorrentino knew he had paused long enough, as he glared at Hutchinson over the top of his half-glasses, to convince the jurors that they should be as upset as he was with Hutchinson. “So, when you told the Grand Jury eighteen months ago you didn’t remember that the Congressman had met with Mr. Klein’s insurance brokers, you were lying to them, weren’t you?”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Yes.”

  “And that wasn’t the only time you lied that day, was it, sir?”

  “I suppose it wasn’t.”

  “Yes or no, Mr. Hutchinson. Was it or wasn’t it?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “In fact, on the next page—take a look at it, turn the page—you lied when you said you didn’t know how the Congressman paid for his Christmas trip to St. Bart’s.” Sorrentino, now with his half-glasses in his left hand, waved in his right hand a copy of the transcript of Hutchinson’s Grand Jury testimony. “You lied. Didn’t 45

  you?”

  “I did.” The acoustics in the ornate courtroom were remarkable. Hutchinson’s “I did” was a liquid sound, distinct and dominant. There was a pause after the words, Sorrentino again letting the words the jurors had just heard sink in.

  And then Hutchinson volunteered, “I may have lied that day, Mr. Sorrentino. But I did that to protect your client.”

  Sorrentino was waiting for those words. He had heard them many times in the past from government witnesses who had turned against old friends, partners, even husbands, wives, and children in exchange for promises of immunity or leniency. Yet these particular jurors, Sorrentino knew, had never heard that explanation before. It was new to them. It had the potential to sound convincing.

  Sorrentino said, “Oh, I see, Mr. Hutchinson. You lied then to protect Congressman Fonseca. And who are you lying to protect now, sir?”

  “Objection.” Steinman didn’t even bother to rise. He simply shifted in his chair as Judge Feigley, broad-faced and inscrutable as ever, intoned, “Overruled.”

  “I’m not lying now, Mr. Sorrentino.”

  “You’ve been lying for the last three days to protect yourself, haven’t you?”

  “I haven’t lied for the last three days, Mr. Sorrentino. For the last three days I’ve been telling the truth.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Of course, you’ve been telling the truth, sir, for the last three days. We all know that. Why? Because just three days ago you took an oath, right in front of these good people, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And you would never lie to people you made such a promise to, would you?”

  “Not now, not now that I understand how important all this is.”

  “I see. You’ve changed, you understand these oaths better now, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, when you testified just a year and a half ago to the Grand 46

  Jury, and you took the same oath to tell those people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, you didn’t understand the importance of the truth?”

  “I was trying to protect the Congressman.”

  “And so you lied to those people because then you didn’t understand the importance of telling the truth and now you do understand, is that right?”

  “It is.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine and a half.” The words, even to Sorrentino, sounded like a child’s precise, precocious, eager-to-please recitation. Thirty-nine and a half.

  “And, when you lied to the Grand Jury, you were just thirty-eight then, and you didn’t understand the importance of telling the truth then, did you?”

  “I wanted to protect your client.”

  “And you thought that was more important than telling the truth, right?”

  “At the time, I did.”

  “I understand, sir, now I see, and I’m sure, aren’t you, that the Grand Jurors you lied to, they’d understand it, too, they’d have no problem with you, because you were lying to protect the Congressman? It was okay to lie for that reason, God, we’d all do it.

  You worked for him. He was your friend, your benefactor. But these jurors here, looking at you now, they know you wouldn’t lie D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  to them because now you’re protecting yourself, isn’t that right?”

  The voice was listless. “I’m not protecting myself, Mr. Sorrentino.”

  “Oh, you’re not? Isn’t it true that whether you go to jail or not, or for how long, depends on how well Mr. Steinman and his friends there at the prosecution table think you’ve performed for these jurors?”

  “I don’t understand.
”

  “If Mr. Steinman thinks you did a good job, you walk, correct?

  No jail. If he and his friends think you didn’t do so well, maybe 47

  they don’t recommend as much leniency to the judge, and you go to prison, isn’t that right, sir?”

  Alone in the witness box, Hutchinson, with a broad forehead and thinning, sandy hair, finally said, “I don’t understand that to be the deal.”

  Sorrentino feigned shock, scorn. “You don’t? You told Mr.

  Steinman you went to Harvard College, that you went to business school at Yale, but you don’t understand what your deal is?”

  “I understand my agreement with the government, Mr. Sorrentino. But I don’t believe it is what you say it is.”

  “Let’s read it, sir.”

  Sorrentino asked the judge to have the courtroom deputy, a burly woman in a black business suit, give government exhibit 163 to the witness. It was a three-page letter, signed more than eleven months ago by Hutchinson and Steinman. During his direct examination of Hutchinson, Steinman had the skill to produce the plea and cooperation agreement then so that the jury wouldn’t learn the news of the promise of potential leniency for Hutchinson for the first time on cross-examination.

  “Why don’t you look at the second page of that letter, sir?

  Toward the bottom.”

  Vincent Sorrentino paused. He walked away from the podium where he had been standing and moved toward the middle of the rail of the jury box. He was in profile to the jurors. He held a copy of the letter.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Take a look at the paragraph at the bottom, sir, the paragraph numbered four. Read it out loud. And then tell me this: doesn’t it mean that Mr. Steinman and his friends can decide that if they don’t think you perform well, if they think you’ve been anything less than terrific here, they can urge the judge to send you to jail for the tax evasion and mail fraud you’ve pleaded guilty to?”

  Leaning backward in his chair as Hutchinson stared at the document, Neil Steinman glanced at Sorrentino—slim and lithe—and wondered if Hutchinson would remember the careful way Steinman had rehearsed him for this scene.