Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  48

  Hutchinson didn’t. Instead, he said, “I don’t have to read it out loud, Mr. Sorrentino. It does say what you say it does, not in those words exactly, but yes, it does say that.”

  Sorrentino turned his back on Hutchinson, faced the jury briefly, and then walked to the podium. “You have difficulty with the truth, don’t you, sir?”

  “Objection,” Steinman shouted.

  “Sustained.”

  Sorrentino didn’t care that Judge Feigley had rejected the question. His face and his gestures showed no disappointment.

  “You testified just a few minutes ago that you lied to the Grand Jury to protect the Congressman, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the way, it wasn’t your idea to say that, was it?”

  “That was my testimony.”

  “But over the last year, you’ve met with Mr. Steinman and his friends twenty times, twenty-five times, after you decided to turn on the Congressman?”

  “Objection.”

  “Overruled. It’s cross-examination, Mr. Steinman. I’ll permit it.”

  Steinman persisted, “But, Judge, it’s irrelevant how many times the witness met with us.”

  “Mr. Steinman, didn’t you hear me? Overruled.”

  Hutchinson, who had been looking up at the judge as if waiting for a sign from heaven, realized he had to answer. “Many D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  times. I met with them many times. Those numbers are probably right.”

  “And you rehearsed your testimony for this trial with Mr.

  Steinman before you appeared here three days ago?”

  “I have had many conversations with Mr. Steinman recently.”

  “And he told you to say that you were trying to protect Congressman Fonseca when you lied to the Grand Jury. Didn’t he put those words into your mouth?”

  “I can’t recall.”

  “You can’t recall? It just came to you right now, is that it? You 49

  needed an explanation as to why you were lying then and under oath why you’re not lying now. You needed that kind of explanation, didn’t you?”

  “Objection.”

  “Overruled.”

  Steinman was standing now. Judge Feigley’s grand bench was so elevated and the prosecution table so close to the bench that Steinman had to tilt his head back at a steep angle, like Dorothy looking up at the Wizard of Oz. “The question is compound, Judge, not intelligible.”

  “I just overruled the objection, Mr. Steinman. I think the witness can answer it. I’ll ask the court reporter to read it back.”

  The reporter leaned forward, pulling the folded paper from a small basket attached to his machine. He reread the question in a precise, falsetto voice.

  Hutchinson answered, “Yes, I did.”

  “And Mr. Steinman told you to say you lied to protect my client, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Hutchinson glanced at Neil Steinman, who appeared to be reading notes on the table in front of him, feigning unconcern, just as if he were concentrating on a newspaper in a crowded subway car. Hutchinson then filled the pause that Sorrentino deliberately prolonged. “But it was true, I wanted to protect the Congressman.”

  “I didn’t ask you that, did I, Mr. Hutchinson?”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Steinman was relieved when Judge Feigley spoke into her microphone, “You’re here just to ask questions, Mr. Sorrentino, not to make comments. I’m the judge. This is my courtroom.”

  Steinman was even more relieved when he saw that Sorrentino couldn’t conceal a quick, angry look at Judge Feigley.

  She had interfered with him and Sorrentino plainly didn’t like that. Yet Steinman also knew Sorrentino had made his points.

  Hutchinson’s Midwestern patina of earnest honesty, carefully cultivated over three days of direct examination, had been cracked, irrevocably.

  50

  * * *

  By the afternoon of the next day Hutchinson looked ashen. He was visibly sagging, slumped back in the witness chair, and giving mumbled, monosyllabic answers to Sorrentino’s questions, or answering, “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall” about subjects he should have known or should have recalled.

  For his part, Sorrentino grew in strength and range as Hutchinson wilted. His questions probed everywhere, from the core of the case—what Hutchinson really knew about the government’s claims that Congressman Fonseca accepted paid-for vacations to the Caribbean, stock, and cash in exchange for placing telephone calls and writing letters to help Selig Klein’s companies and other trucking and waterfront businesses—to issues that simply and tellingly related to Hutchinson’s own credibility, such as claims made by his former wife in year-old divorce papers that he had twice beaten her in their apartment in the Watergate and lied to the police about the beatings.

  Hutchinson, as Steinman knew, was now almost incapable of anticipating and dealing with Sorrentino’s shifting subject areas.

  Toward the end of the second afternoon, with the day’s recess not far off ( Judge Feigley was not a hard worker, holding court from ten in the morning to noon, with a two-hour break for lunch, and then limiting the afternoon session to two hours), Vincent Sorrentino asked, “Now, sir, I want to ask you something about why D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  you decided to deal Congressman Fonseca away, to turn on him.

  You recall you testified that you didn’t talk with a lawyer before you were called to the Grand Jury the first time?”

  “I remember that.”

  “Good. It’s nice when you remember something.” There was a relieved sarcasm in Sorrentino’s voice that one or two people in the anonymous jury noticed; they giggled, quickly and sardonically. It concerned Steinman that Sorrentino had built such a rap-port with the jurors that some of them appreciated the blatant sarcasm. And then Sorrentino continued: “And after that, because 51

  you were disturbed by the way your day went, you decided to talk to a lawyer, isn’t that right, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you finally hired Mr. Cerf as your lawyer, didn’t you, and he was the man who helped you do your deal with the government, right?”

  “Right. Mr. Cerf.”

  “And Mr. Cerf knows his way around Mr. Steinman’s office and he had no problem delivering a deal for you, right?”

  “I wanted a man with experience.”

  “In fact, Mr. Cerf used to work in exactly the same office as Mr. Steinman, didn’t he?”

  “I was told that.”

  “And he managed to tie you up in a package and deliver you here, didn’t he?”

  “Objection.” Neil Steinman tried to sound exasperated.

  Judge Feigley, quiet for a long time, now roused herself. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, Mr. Sorrentino, I truly don’t. I want to give you all the leeway in the world but I don’t know where you’re going.”

  “I’ll withdraw that question, Judge. But let me just ask one other question before I leave this area—”

  “When you leave this area,” Judge Feigley said with a broad smile, “we leave for the day.” She liked to feel she entertained the jurors, and they in fact laughed. “So make it fast, Mr. Sorrentino.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Sorrentino had sense enough to laugh as the jurors laughed before he asked, almost casually, “Between the time you left the Grand Jury room and you hired Mr. Cerf, how much time was that? What was the interval?”

  “Almost six weeks. I don’t know for sure.”

  “Did you see any other lawyer in that time?”

  Judge Feigley said, “Now, Mr. Sorrentino, you’ve just proved again what I always say about lawyers. Never believe them when they say just one more question.”

  The jurors laughed, and again so did Sorrentino before he 52

  repeated the question: “What other lawyer did you see?”

  “I saw Tom Perini.”

  In the many weeks since Tom Perini died, his
name hadn’t been mentioned once in the jury’s presence in the courtroom.

  Even Sorrentino was visibly startled by the answer. The jury was alert, focused.

  “How often did you see Mr. Perini?”

  “Four, five times.”

  “Did you hire him?”

  “No.”

  “Was there a reason for that?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  “Did he do anything for you?”

  “Look, Mr. Sorrentino, I really can’t remember. It was more than a year ago. I needed a lawyer. Someone brought up Mr.

  Perini’s name. I recognized the name. I called him. I took the train up from Washington. We talked. And then I talked to other people. I decided to go with Mr. Cerf.”

  “What did you talk to Mr. Perini about?”

  Steinman rose to his feet. “Objection. Attorney-client privilege.”

  Alert as a jaguar, Sorrentino responded, “But the witness said he never hired Perini.”

  Judge Feigley commented, “But, Mr. Sorrentino, this man plainly spoke to Mr. Perini to get legal advice—”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “We don’t know that, Judge, until we know what the witness discussed with Perini. This is all news to me. And it’s news, as far as I know, to everyone involved in this case—”

  “Mr. Sorrentino, there you go cutting me off again.” She hit the bench with the palm of her hand. Sorrentino despised her. He waited for her next words, as he gripped both edges of the podium. She said into her microphone, “But I’m not going to rule on your question or the objection now, Mr. Sorrentino. And I’m not going to have discussions like this in the presence of the jury.

  If any of you hardworking ladies and gentlemen would like to 53

  write a brief on this subject tonight, have it delivered by eight tomorrow morning to my law clerk. It’s not my business how you spend your nights.”

  Then she swiveled in her high-backed chair and smiled benignly at the jurors. “I told these ladies and gentlemen of the jury that the day was almost over, and here we are sixty-four questions later. We’ll reconvene at ten-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  7.

  Julie had taken Stan Wasserman’s invitation and started working again five weeks after Tom’s burial. She began with only two or three hours a day, trying to adjust Kim and herself to what would have to become longer absences. During her pregnancy, she and Tom had tacitly expected she’d return to work full-time at some point after Kim’s birth. At thirty-six, she was, after all, a career woman. Journalism was her career.

  But they soon developed another tacit understanding after Kim was born. They both fell in love with the new, unexpected depth of their life together. They agreed Julie would stay at home indefinitely, only filling in occasional half-days (the most tenuous of links, making the newsroom like the recurrent dream of a house where she no longer lived), even if that meant that NBC

  might ultimately just let her go entirely. In Julie’s mind, the business world’s glass ceiling was the smile on her child’s face. For both Julie and Tom, Kim was more important than either his work or hers. Almost every day there was an unexpected deepening of the texture which the child’s new presence in their lives brought them.

  In any event, Julie’s feelings about the work she did had always been complex and ambivalent. She started in journalism after she graduated from Wellesley, working first for a moderate-sized newspaper in dreary Manchester, New Hampshire, and then moving to New York a few years later to work for AP. Fluent, well-read, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  interested in a variety of subjects (but not arts and leisure, cooking, or wine), she had become extremely proficient in weaving together disparate dispatches from multiple sources. She produced seamless copy. Writing in that way never brought her a byline, a name recognition she no longer really desired. By the time she married Tom, she had already joined the newswriting staff at NBC where her job was to prepare words that were ultimately broadcast by the onscreen announcers. The only recognition she received—and it was the only recognition she wanted—was that her name appeared every Friday night at 6:59 on the television screen, rolling quickly 55

  in bright graphics with the fifty-five other names of writers, staffers, and photographers who worked for the station. It was the weekly bouquet to the unseen staff from the egomaniacs on the screen.

  She fell back easily into the ability to turn out short copy that was never altered when it was printed into the black box—called

  “the hole”—from which it was read aloud by the anchors. They were able to give the millions of viewers the impression that they spoke flawlessly, without prompting, the words Julie wrote. Suc-cinct, no embellishment, simple. But, within hours of her return to the high-tech newsroom, with its modern odor of new plastic computers, she felt the encroachment of the old problems that had concerned her before Kim’s birth: the sense that she was not a doer but instead only an anonymous writer; that news organizations and the people who worked in them had an exaggerated sense of their own importance; and that her ability to splice diverse pieces of information into news stories that could be read in twenty seconds or less was not an important talent and not in any acceptable sense a valuable life’s work.

  And now she felt the encroachment of other old demons from her childhood and early adult years: the station paid reasonably well, but Tom’s death had plunged her back into that recurring sense of precariousness about money she had felt as a bookish girl in Southern California, where her father, who owned a series of car dealerships in the sixties and seventies, passed from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, surfacing in small city after small city with names such P A U L B A T I S T A

  as Mr. Al’s Dodge, Kensington Buick, Suburban Datsun.

  As for Tom, he had always produced enough money so that, as a couple with no extravagant tastes, they lived well. Tom, however, born to working-class Italian parents, had not accumulated a fortune. His four years in professional football were not long and he had been under a contract worth about $1 million for each of the years. Although taxes consumed almost half of those payments, and his agent’s fees another fifteen percent, it had been sufficient for him in those years. And what remained of it was enough to put him through Columbia Law School and to buy the 56

  apartment they loved.

  But, as far as Julie knew, there was no fortune. He left in the top drawer of his bureau at the apartment, in a box which once held a new tie, a four-page will leaving all of his assets to Julie and making her the trustee of $100,000 to be spent on his parents’

  care if they outlived him. In the weeks since his death she had located only his business operating account, which had less than eighty thousand dollars, and two small retirement accounts. She knew that, ultimately, she would have to look for other accounts for Kim’s sake and her own. She imagined, and hoped, that there were other accounts, but she hadn’t yet found the stamina or will to search for them.

  Several weeks after returning to NBC, she expanded her time each day to four hours, from one in the afternoon to five, the portion of the day when Elena was able to care for Kim by herself, to focus on the minute-by-minute requirements of play, cleaning, and attention the child required. There were times when Julie missed Kim so intensely she daydreamed about her daughter while she composed a news piece on her computer.

  Stan Wasserman’s practice was to circulate batches of information through the computer system to his pool of writers, randomly assigning material to each of them. As she daydreamed about her daughter, Julie suddenly found herself reviewing that day’s material on what had come to be known as the Danny Fonseca Marathon—the trial that would last forever.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Julie opened a secure AP subject line on her computer. She inhaled sharply when she saw her husband’s name. “The government’s key witness disclosed a surprise today at the racketeering trial of Congressman Daniel Fonseca in federal court in Manhattan. He once hired lege
ndary football star Tom Perini as his lawyer.”

  Julie looked again at the words on the computer’s bright screen. Her daydreams evaporated. She and Tom had talked almost daily about his work. Of the two of them, he was the doer, the actor. His days, she believed, were crowded with events he 57

  helped to shape. And in particular he talked to her about the complexities his work involved: twisted motives, conflicts of interests, shifts of allegiance, characters like Sy Klein, the silvery Congressman Fonseca, the thoughtful, resourceful Vincent Sorrentino.

  And yet she couldn’t remember that he had ever mentioned Hutchinson, the blond, WASP, well-spoken chief assistant to a classic machine politician, a self-seeking, latter-day version of Nixon’s John Dean.

  Other sentences in the wire copy struck her. Sorrentino—the handsome man she had admired so much in the months since he worked his miracles for her after Tom’s killing—was quoted as saying that if Tom Perini had once represented the government’s key witness and the prosecution had not disclosed that representation, the judge should declare a mistrial. The existence of the relationship between Hutchinson and Perini, Vincent Sorrentino said, must have been known to the prosecution and should have been disclosed to the defense. Julie reread the quotation from Vincent.

  It was, she sensed, one of those statements lawyers made which other people couldn’t really understand.

  More pieces of information about the day’s events at the trial were swarming onto her computer screen. Abruptly she left her desk and went to the small cubicle where Stan Wasserman had his office. He was elegantly bald, one of those well-shaped, Adlai Stevenson–type heads shining with intelligence. He had bulging, thoughtful eyes.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Stan,” Julie said, “I can’t do this piece.”

  She handed him some of the wire service copy she had printed out of the computer. He didn’t read it—in fact, he already seemed to know what it was about.

  “I didn’t realize it had made its way to you.”

  “I’m just not comfortable working with it.”