Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  * * *

  Now, in the immense silence of the late night—too late for a child to be put to bed—Julie gently moved her daughter’s soft, pli-able body from her collapsed position onto her back in a sleeping position. Julie rested Kim’s head on a pillow and covered her with a fragrant pink blanket.

  67

  Julie then sat alone in another room for two hours, crying.

  8.

  “Mrs. Perini? Agent McGlynn.”

  It was eleven-thirty in the morning, an hour before Julie was scheduled to start work for a four-hour shift. Elena was in the kitchen with Kim, preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a noontime lunch in the park at the 85th Street playground just off Fifth Avenue and north of the slanting glass-walled Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum. Kim was chattering as Elena spoke to her in precise, well-phrased English. Julie sometimes envied Elena—she wanted to be on that picnic, to spend this clear, sun-drenched day outside with her daughter.

  “Hi,” Julie said, feigning pleasantness. “Thanks for calling back.”

  “No problem.”

  “I was really just calling because I’d expected to hear from you by now. It’s been what? Three weeks? Four?”

  “I don’t think it’s been four weeks.” As she listened to McGlynn’s words, the flat tone of voice, the accent straining to sound more formal than he would have sounded in a bar with his Irish buddies, Julie experienced a resurgence of the same contempt she’d felt for him at first. The perfect bureaucrat, McGlynn wanted to defend himself against any suggestion that he was slow or had wasted time.

  “Maybe it hasn’t been that long,” Julie said. “I’ve become a little confused about time. It doesn’t matter. What I really wanted to know is whether anything new has happened.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “We’re working on some leads.”

  “You are?”

  “Tell me, do you have anything new?” he asked.

  “How could I have anything new?”

  She repressed the urge to tell him that she was not Sherlock Holmes or Jack Webb or Inspector Maigret and that he was the one with the responsibility and resources to find her husband’s killer. She controlled herself because she had the uneasy sense that he was her only hope of ever finding that person and that, if she was bitchy or difficult or shrill, he would punish her by doing nothing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to snap. The answer 69

  is no, nothing. Do you have anything?”

  McGlynn paused. “Two people did come forward.”

  “Who?”

  “A man and his girlfriend. Joggers, runners.”

  “What did they say?” Julie’s voice trembled with a rush of anxiety and excitement.

  McGlynn spoke slowly. “They say they think they saw your husband. Running. In the park. They recognized him.”

  “And?”

  “It was dark.”

  “I know that. Is that all they said?”

  “He was with another runner.”

  “Who?”

  “Did your husband have somebody he used to run with? Lots of guys do. It keeps them motivated, or so I hear.”

  “No. I never knew of Tom running with anyone else.”

  “Did he ever call anyone about running? Any appointments, like?”

  “Never,” Julie answered. She saw Kim suddenly begin to run on her short legs from the kitchen toward her. Julie held up her hand like a traffic cop and, in mime, gestured to Elena to pick Kim up and keep her away. “Who saw him?”

  “Like I said. Some guy and his girlfriend.”

  “Please, Mr. McGlynn. You’re making this difficult for me.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  What else, for God’s sake, what else?”

  “Not much, Mrs. Perini. They weren’t running in the same direction.”

  “Who wasn’t?”

  “The man and the woman. They were going in the opposite direction. Opposite from your husband and the other guy. They came toward your husband and the other guy, and then passed.”

  “What did they see? They must have seen something.”

  “Not much, really. The boyfriend said to her, ‘Hey, do you recognize him?’ So they both got a quick look at your husband. Not 70

  really at the other guy. She said they just focused on the famous Tom Perini. They—this couple—they’d seen Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward jogging, slowly, I guess, the night before, and they talked about how that made back-to-back nights as far as the celebs were concerned. Paul Newman one night and Tom Perini the next.”

  “They must have seen more.”

  “Nothing more, really. And then they passed. It was getting dark. It was already dark, really. Hard to see. They ran on. And then they heard what sounded like a firecracker. Bang. That’s it—

  just one bang. And they kept on running. Away. In the opposite direction.”

  Julie was focused, intense. “When did you talk to them?”

  “About a week ago. The guy’s a doctor. He didn’t want to come forward. He thought it would take too much time. He decided they didn’t really know anything anyway. She nagged him, is my guess. She thought they should call the cops. And so they did.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re witnesses.”

  “What?”

  “Like I said, they’re witnesses.”

  “What?” she repeated, in exactly the same tone.

  “They’re witnesses. Confidential informants. At this stage I can’t give you their names, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  She recognized his single-mindedness, his rigidity. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  “It isn’t much to go on. It means very little, almost squat.”

  “Tell me again: what did they say he looked like?”

  “Who, your husband?”

  “No, of course not. The other runner.”

  “Just that he wore running gear—short pants, tank top.”

  “That’s it, then?” she asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Who are they? Please tell me their names, please.”

  71

  “Calm down, Julie. Like I said, I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”

  She clenched her teeth: Julie? Who is this prick to call me Julie?

  Finally she said, “I don’t think you’re being fair to me. I want to know who they are. If you won’t tell me, I have ways of going over you.”

  His answer was surprisingly restrained. “Do whatever you feel you need to do, Julie. I’m just trying to be your friend. I’ve told you too much already—which really isn’t fair, since you haven’t really told me anything.”

  She wavered, uncertain whether to beg or continue in the supercilious, falsely aristocratic tone she had used, her Judi Dench imitation. And then she went with her instincts, saying firmly,

  “Don’t sweetie-pie me. I want to know who they are.”

  “I’ll talk to you in a few days,” McGlynn said, surprising her by hanging up. For a minute she stood near her sun-filled kitchen windows, the receiver in her hand, the telephone giving off that annoying clicking sound when no one is on the other end. She stared at Elena and Kim as her daughter’s glistening hair was being combed.

  * * *

  Five days later Julie received an email from Stan Wasserman.

  The names you wanted are Benjamin Berry and Nancy Lichtman. They live at 7 West 95th Street, Apartment 4-E. Their number’s in the phone book. I have now used up, completely, all of my chits with the powers that be. This message will now self-destruct.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Julie emailed a reply: You’re my hero. And then she added, I’ve already hit delete. Vaporized.

  * * *

  Nancy Lichtman had the large, expressive mouth and bright eyes Julie associated with Carly Simon. She was warm, vivid, and talkative, totally unlike the nagging-woman image McGlynn’s description had cr
eated in Julie’s mind. Julie had no difficulty reaching her, because Nancy Lichtman’s name was in fact in the Manhattan telephone directory. She took Julie’s mid-morning call 72

  as though hearing from a long-lost college friend, inviting Julie to her apartment for coffee that same afternoon. She was a graphic designer “between jobs” and her friend Benjamin, a resident at Mount Sinai, wouldn’t be in until midnight.

  Nancy was a talker. In the white, newly renovated kitchen of her West Side apartment, she told Julie she’d been annoyed with Benjamin for days because he’d resisted going to the police. She was concerned he was becoming, like every doctor she knew, narrow, self-focused, and cold. They weren’t married. They had lived together for three years. She was older than Benjamin. “Why,”

  Nancy asked with a broad smile, unexpectedly shifting the subject,

  “do Jewish men want to be called by their full, Biblical names?”

  Julie didn’t know the answer but said, to amuse Nancy, “It has something to do with circumcision, I think, the need to keep it all whenever they can.”

  Ultimately, after Nancy told him she would go to the police by herself, Benjamin had “caved.” When they finally approached the police, through a telephone call to a hotline number established for any information about Tom’s murder, the police didn’t react immediately. She and Benjamin were asked to give their names, their address, and their telephone number, and then five days later they received a call from McGlynn, who asked them to come down to his office at St. Andrews Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Benjamin complained, “See, look at the time this has already taken, and they don’t even give a fuck.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  As she sat in the kitchen sipping coffee, Julie was fascinated by the wide-eyed, eager, subject-shifting way in which Nancy Lichtman spoke. A little off-the-wall, but warm, Julie thought, as Nancy mixed her personal history with a description of what she and Benjamin had narrated to McGlynn in his cramped, windowless office. She told McGlynn she and Benjamin were daily runners.

  In winter, they preferred dawn runs in Central Park. In the other seasons, late afternoon or early evening runs.

  That evening was the warmest of the season so far. They started late. They entered Central Park from 85th Street on the 73

  Upper West Side. They disagreed at the start about which direction to take. Benjamin wanted to run north, to the upper limits of the park at Central Park North. (“Can you believe it?” Nancy exclaimed to Julie. “Central Park North. How many people, white people, do you think, even know there is a Central Park North?”) Nancy wanted to run south. Dusk was coming on, and if they headed north they would be on the hills in the upper forested area of the park at night. That was not a chance she wanted to take. If they ran south, she’d feel safer. Fewer trees, more people, more open spaces, more vitality. Benjamin relented: they ran south to the 72nd Street transverse that crossed the park from west to east. Then they turned gradually north on the eastside road that passed the Boat Basin, the rear of the Metropolitan Museum from 79th Street to 84th Street, and the Engineers’ Gate at 90th Street. Finally, they reached the transverse, the paved roadway closed to traffic, that dissected the park from east to west below the northernmost rim of the park where the steep hills were and where, at night, the terrain looked like a jungle, “complete with wild animals,” Nancy Lichtman said.

  By the time they turned into the roadway it was almost night.

  These lengthy, sweating, rhythmic runs kept them at their clos-est, and the night had been ideal for running—warm, humid. The liquid darkness and their bodies’ motion seemed to merge, as though they were swimming in an ocean at night or “having great sex,” Nancy said. Although the transverse was empty, she P A U L B A T I S T A

  had no sense of the kind of fear that made her, at the outset, argue with Benjamin about avoiding the far northern regions of the park. She knew, in any event, that they were bound to encounter other runners somewhere along the transverse on the first good night of the spring.

  She saw two runners approaching them: two strong white men. Benjamin immediately recognized Tom.

  “Do you know him?” Benjamin asked.

  “Who?”

  “The dark one.”

  74

  “No.”

  “Football player,” Benjamin said.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Nancy teased, short-breathed.

  In the dusk she briefly stared at the man with dark hair. Gloriously handsome, she thought, but no name, no recognition came to her mind. “I knew it wasn’t Joe Montana,” she said, smiling her delirious, expansive smile at Julie. It was the other man who gestured: a wave, a word, a smile. With her attention on Tom, she registered only the other man’s gestures, not his face or appearance. And then, having loomed to their left, the two men—both of them large, vivid, and sweating—were swiftly gone. Suddenly ten paces beyond them, Nancy asked Benjamin, “So, who was that?”

  “Tom Perini. Great football player.”

  “The name meant something to me,” Nancy told Julie, “but not the same as Paul Newman the night before.”

  Julie laughed, and then waited for Nancy, consummate talker, to finish the story. And she did. She and Benjamin decided to end their run at the drinking fountain at the western side of the transverse. They sprinted. In the midst of the sprint, the sound of their running bodies briefly overwhelming the quiet sibilance of the spring trees, they heard a sharp, metallic bang.

  “What was that?” she asked Benjamin as they came to a stop, breathing heavily, at the fountain.

  “A firecracker.”

  She said, breathless, “Early for the Fourth of July.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  It was the following morning when they first heard the news about the killing. She immediately recognized Tom’s face on the front page of the News, the Post, and the Times. Benjamin was at the hospital, on a ten-hour Saturday shift.

  “Don’t do anything until I get home,” he whispered.

  “Why not?”

  They argued, but she waited.

  They continued to argue that night and all the next day about whether to call the hotline number. Benjamin was stubborn.

  He insisted they knew nothing more than the police already 75

  knew—Tom Perini had been in the park at night and was now dead. Benjamin was busy. If they called that number, they would spend hours with police, with lawyers (“those shits,” he said), repeating the same noninformation.

  “But we know there was somebody else with him,” Nancy had said to Benjamin.

  “And so what?”

  Benjamin was not only stubborn but abrasive. She was out of work, a lady of leisure. He told her she might have time to kill with cops and lawyers. He didn’t have that luxury.

  “When I finally called the hotline number, Benjamin was actually more gracious than I expected him to be. I think he was relieved I had summoned him to his duty, so to speak. He even got angry and impatient when no one seemed to answer our call at first. Hello, is there anybody there?, we felt like saying.”

  Julie poured both of them more coffee from the Krups cof-feemaker. “How long did it take?”

  “I’m not sure. Four, five days before our favorite Irish cop called.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “A creep. He sat in that miserable little office, taking notes. At the end he said ‘Tanks a lot,’ and we left. Strangely enough, Benjamin was annoyed. After all that time arguing with me about how much time this would all take, it ended up taking two hours, including the trip downtown and back. It seemed to him it P A U L B A T I S T A

  should’ve taken more. More time. More effort. Somebody sharper to ask the questions. I think he was insulted that it wasn’t a lawyer. Somehow his pride was hurt.”

  Julie felt a series of emotions. Gratitude toward this New York woman for taking her in and speaking so freely, anger with McGlynn and with the government for what she believed was their inept,
inattentive, ineffective approach, and fascination with this witness to her husband’s death, this woman who was the last person but one to see him alive.

  “You know what struck me as strange?” Nancy was speaking 76

  slowly for the first time. She stared at Julie. She had detected a look of precariousness, of possible collapse, in Julie’s fine, small-boned and small-featured face. “They never even tried to show us pictures. Mug shots. We described this guy as best we could, about three inches taller than Tom, full head of blond hair, a bushy moustache. He had that look John Newcombe had, remember him, that tennis player from Australia? In the sixties, before all those rotten, bad-boy tennis players came along?

  Before Nastasi and McEnroe? Anyway, McGlynn had no idea who John Newcombe was. He wrote that down, but that was it.”

  Nancy leaned forward in her chair toward Julie and placed her hands on both sides of Julie’s delicate neck. She almost touched her forehead to Julie’s. “You poor woman. What’s happened to you is beyond imagining. Your husband was beautiful. When I saw him, he was smiling. Runners never smile. Your beautiful man was smiling.”

  Still seated, Julie leaned her forehead into Nancy’s. Julie cried.

  Nancy stood and pressed Julie’s head into her stomach, where Julie felt and smelled the clean fabric of Nancy’s blouse and let her body and her mind shake themselves with long shudderings.

  9.

  Vincent Sorrentino was furious with her. Buddha-like, her oval face smoothly gleaming under a layer of makeup, she softly said again: “I’m totally disinclined, Mr. Sorrentino, to let you stroll down this avenue. Totally disinclined.”

  Sorrentino’s face was no more than eighteen inches from Judge Feigley’s. He knew his fury with her was laid bare in his own expression. She enjoyed his struggle. She had waited for him to pose only two or three questions to Hutchinson before she held up her large right hand and announced, “Sidebar, ladies and gentlemen. All of you lawyers come up here.”

  More than a dozen lawyers moved forward to her massive, ornate bench. As Hutchinson continued to sit in the witness stand on the right side of the bench, she lowered herself to the alternate witness stand on the left side. The court reporter, balancing his machine, leaned into the center of the group gathered around Judge Feigley, Sorrentino, and Steinman. Every voice was kept low, since the jurors were not supposed to hear. The voices around the judge were sibilant, straining for audibility so that the court reporter could take down all that was said.