by Paul Batista
McGlynn watched her face, in partial profile, as she blinked rapidly. She finally said, in response to Steinman’s sarcasm,
“That’s not fair, Neil.”
“Don’t tell me what’s fair.” Steinman was now shouting and P A U L B A T I S T A
pacing around the room. “What’s not fair is the fact that I’ve been busting my ass all day long in front of dear Judge Feigley and I expected you to get a routine thing done, a magistrate to sign a search warrant. And you didn’t get that done.”
Steinman stopped and stared out the small window of his office, in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. McGlynn admired the way Kiyo continued to gaze straight at Steinman, her virtually lidless eyes blinking regularly. Only McGlynn could see the quiver in her left leg, that sign of her anxiety, anger, or enforced control.
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Steinman had not yet finished. “And now I’ll have to work half the night redoing the affidavit and the warrant so that we can get that fat shit or somebody else to sign it. And then I’ll have to take it to him and persuade him or even Dora to sign it. One more thing for me to worry about. That’s fair, don’t you think?”
Her voice was cool and precise. “I’ll work on it and bring another draft in an hour. But you know it isn’t easy to get a search warrant for a lawyer’s, even a dead lawyer’s, files and computers.”
He impatiently waved his right hand at her. “And it isn’t that hard, either, Kiyo. Juice it up if you have to. Sex it up.”
Kiyo turned and left the room, walking with a swift precision and not looking at McGlynn, who stayed behind, leaning against a small conference table. After Steinman rearranged some papers on his cluttered desk, he said, no longer strident, “How did she do?”
“She tried. Hunter was all over her from the minute he read the papers. You know how he gets—he actually asked her how she thought he could sign a search warrant for any and all documents of a dead lawyer and have that comport—he really did say ‘com-port,’ believe it or not—with the Fourth Amendment.”
“He never changes. A goddamn magistrate, a janitor, always talking like Benjamin Cardozo. What did she say?”
“She’s good. She repeated what’s in the affidavit. In that nice way she has. You know, a Jap girl who sounds like a radio announcer. She said all that stuff about Perini working with people who were laundering money, Perini traveling from place to D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
place with bad people, Perini keeping records. Secret off-shore bank accounts.”
“And what did Hunter say?”
“Do better, he said, you got to do better. Show me a case where any judge said you can have a search warrant for all of a lawyer’s records. Come to me with a brief.”
“The ball-breaker. Why did she go to him in the first place?”
“He was the only one available. The other six magistrates were out doing something else. She knew you wanted the thing signed today. She kept on saying the agents want to go in tomorrow 117
morning early.”
“And he said?”
“Too bad. He said, ‘I’m not sacrificing fairness for speed.
You’ve got to do better. Do you have any proof that his widow’s going to burn her husband’s files?’”
“The man’s a saint, isn’t he? He should get the Bill of Rights Lifetime Achievement Award from Phil Donahue. Fucking John Roberts Jr. would be proud of him.”
Expressionless, McGlynn stared at Steinman. It was five-fifteen.
McGlynn made a point of leaving the office at five every afternoon; it was already beyond that. He said, “Anything else you want this afternoon?”
Steinman looked haggard. Like McGlynn, Steinman, too, tried to leave the office by five every afternoon. Although he had once been legendary as a lawyer who regularly worked until midnight or later, he had changed just as soon as his seven-year-old daughter and only child, Corinne, was born with cerebral palsy. If Steinman left Foley Square on the uptown subway by five or five-thirty, he was able to reach the train at Grand Central that arrived in White Plains at 6:30. They lived in a huge ramshackle house in an old mixed-race neighborhood. His wife, Heather, who taught English at a Westchester community college, often had early evening classes to accommodate the school’s older, working-class students. By 6:30, Corinne—who weighed fewer than fifty pounds of writhing flesh but was encased by what P A U L B A T I S T A
appeared to be tons of braces and tubes—needed to be cleaned and fed and cleaned again.
Neil Steinman over the years had come to see the nightly service he did for his daughter as a religious ritual, his version of his own father’s visits to his Brooklyn shul every morning. Steinman was disturbed whenever the nights came—and there were too many of them—when he had to stay at the office for work and ask whatever glum nurse who happened to have been on duty to stay late with Corinne.
Steinman answered McGlynn: “Not today. Get in early tomor-118
row. Fuck Hunter. I’ll have to stay late and do a new set of papers tonight and you and I will go see Dora early tomorrow morning.
She’ll sign the warrant if I tell her that Perini’s records have information that’ll get this trial over fast.”
“And should I have our people keep an eye on Julie tonight?”
Neil Steinman paused. “Nice-looking, isn’t she?”
“What?”
“I just wondered whether you guys think she’s good-looking.”
“Nice. Sure. A really nice piece of ass.”
Steinman waved at him, trying to act like one of the boys. “Go home. Have somebody keep an eye on her.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to arrange. There’ll be volunteers.”
* * *
Late that night, after Julie stroked Kim to sleep, she started a long voyage backwards into her husband’s life. Because she was lithe and strong, she easily spread the twenty transfile boxes around on the floor of the spare room. They had been stacked, untouched, in three high columns along one of the walls in the weeks after they were removed from Tom’s office. Spread out now in orderly rows on the floor, all their lids on securely, they had a neat, uniform look.
Tom was a scrupulous worker. The interior of virtually all of the transfiles held rows on rows of organized folders that had labels, usually with the typed names of his clients, along the upper D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
edges. Even the boxes containing bulky memorabilia of Tom’s life—bronze footballs, trophies, the framed degrees from Stanford and Columbia—were packed neatly by the moving company Vincent Sorrentino had hired to move the contents of Tom’s office, the record of his life, to the apartment.
Randomly, Julie began with the transfile nearest the door of the spare room. It was already eleven. The night quiet was dense in the apartment and, since it was midweek, the city was unusually quiet as well. A perfect night for reading: she had the spiral notebook in which she had started making her private entries in 119
the last few days, she had a handful of sharpened pencils, she had expandable folders in which she could put whatever papers she decided she wanted to hide, and she had a cup of coffee and two of those “no-doze” pills that she had rarely taken in college and managed to find that afternoon in the old-fashioned pharmacy at 88th Street and Park Avenue.
As she saw when she roamed, paper by paper, through the contents of the first four boxes, Tom had led thousands of hours of his working life about which she’d never heard and about which she knew nothing. The separateness of Tom’s daily life from hers was what struck her as she expanded her reading. She believed they had always talked to each other about everything.
This was one level of her life with Tom that was the acutest loss: he and she made the effort, at the end of each day, to recount the day’s happenings—Kim’s new words, shopping, telephone conversations, visits to doctors, all the interlocking pieces of each day’s events. They were reciprocal oral diarists, and they recorded the events of the days in their words to each other.
> Now, however, as she continued through each folder, she recognized that a life is always essentially private, that only a person who lives a life can know all that happens in that life. There were cases, clients, and people whose names she had never heard Tom mention.
But there was nothing that surprised her as she passed from eleven on that Tuesday night through two on Wednesday morning P A U L B A T I S T A
before taking her first break. Tom’s work generated enormous reams of paper: hundreds of letters to clients, other lawyers, and judges; transcripts of trial testimony; briefs and copies of decisions.
Julie had a sense that she could, with enough time, reassemble all the separate pieces of paper in Tom’s files and develop a day-by-day chronology of his life. She also knew McGlynn and his friends could do that as well.
During her first nighttime break, Julie brewed more coffee, took another no-doze pill, washed her face, and looked in on Kim, who slept soundly. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking the 120
too-bitter coffee, she tried to force her mind in two directions: first, to think through her conversation, late in the afternoon, with Vincent Sorrentino and, second, to evaluate what she had already seen in Tom’s papers before she began the next stage of her nighttime quest.
The conversation with Vincent had stemmed from a short, dis-jointed talk with Stan Wasserman, who called her less than an hour after she left the office. He sounded somewhat weary in the conversation. As she spoke to Stan, she was seized by the thought that he was beginning to view her as a distracted, troublesome employee ( Good God, she thought briefly during her conversation with him, if I lose this job then where does my free fall end? ). When she explained that what forced her to leave the office earlier that day was the letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Stan said swiftly, “Do you want to read it to me?”
She read it to him.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said after an interval of thought. “Most people would call a lawyer after getting something like that. It is, after all, the U.S. Justice Department writing to you.
Not Bernie the Attorney. Have you called anyone?”
“Not every lawyer knows the answer to every question.”
“I know, Julie, but have you called one?”
“I’m expecting a call from a lawyer Tom used to work with.”
“Has he called back yet? Or she?”
“He will.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Then Julie was silent for such a long time that Stan Wasserman said, “Julie?” as if to make sure that the line wasn’t disconnected.
“Stan?”
“What, Julie?”
“After I saw this letter, I was waiting for you.”
“I know. I was out. You were gone when I got back.”
“I wanted to talk to you about the piece Gil did last night. The one about Tom.”
“I think we should talk about that some other time, later. I think you have to deal with what’s in your hands right now.”
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“But we have to talk, later, about Gil. And about that story on Tom.”
“Sure, but later.”
Not long after her disquieting conversation with Stan Wasserman, Julie’s cell phone rang. A secretary announced,
“Mr. Sorrentino calling,” and put Julie on hold momentarily.
Then Vincent Sorrentino said, “Julie, what can I do for you?
How do you feel?”
It was a warm tone. He had often fantasized about her. Now, he hoped, she was calling just to hear the sound of his voice.
Enough time had passed since Tom’s death that he thought he’d gather the nerve—he felt like a teenager about this—to ask her to dinner.
“I really hate to bother you,” she said, “but I have something here, and I thought maybe you could give me a name, a recommendation, for a lawyer to talk to?”
“It would help if you tell me what it’s about. I want to help.”
“I got a letter from Neil Steinman this morning. Hand-delivered.”
“You did?”
“It said Steinman wants me to turn over all of Tom’s files to him.”
“Where are the files?”
“Here. In my house.”
“Does the letter say why Steinman wants them?”
“Yes.”
P A U L B A T I S T A
“Do you want to read the letter to me?”
Just as she had done earlier with Stan Wasserman, she read the letter out loud again. As she later thought, with a sense of school-girl chagrin, she was like a little girl responding to an authorita-tive adult.
“Julie, I wish I could help you with this. It’s an unusual letter; it’s a difficult request.”
“Why?”
“If I tell you to ignore it—and you can ignore it if you want to—
and Mr. Steinman learns that I’ve told you to ignore it, I’ll have 122
questions to answer. If I tell you to do what he wants, I can’t know where that will lead, since I don’t know what’s in Tom’s papers or his computers.”
Julie felt utterly isolated. “There are thousands of pages. I don’t know what’s in them. And there are two laptops. I can guess, but I’m not even sure I know what the passwords are. I don’t want to just give them up.”
“Julie, the letter’s not an order. But if you ignore it they can probably go get a search warrant and take what they want.”
“You mean just come into my home?”
“Welcome to America, Julie.”
Although those last words were delivered in a quiet tone, Vincent instantly regretted using them. Years of practicing law had taught him that most people, including most lawyers, had no concept of the government’s power and how deeply it could reach into people’s lives. The cynicism of government lawyers and judges about their power had bred a level of cynicism in Sorrentino, too, and one shock technique he had developed in dealing with clients was to tell them, bluntly, the scope of what the government could do to them: arrest ordinary tax evaders in handcuffs in the presence of their wives and children; close securities and other businesses completely and immediately; get orders stopping indicted but not-yet-tried men and women from paying their living expenses; and persuade their friends and relatives to become witnesses against them. “Welcome to America” was something Vincent Sorrentino D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
often said to people who didn’t appear to gauge adequately what they faced in their dealings with the government, a way of arresting attention.
He had struggled internally for weeks with the idea of calling Julie Perini. He knew that his motives were not simply those of a generous friend wanting to lighten the life and mood of a lonely woman whose husband had died. So he regretted using the flip-pant words with Julie as soon as he said them.
He said, “Julie, I shouldn’t have put it that way. I don’t think they’ll just come barging into your house with a search warrant.
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What’s more likely is that they’ll send you a Grand Jury subpoena.
That means you’ll have time to speak to me, so that I can help to find you a lawyer, and then you’ll have time to take the documents to the government, instead of their coming to break down your door. That’s the difference between a search warrant, which gives them the power to act like Nazis with the midnight knock, and the more gentlemanly pace of a Grand Jury subpoena.”
“Tom, I think, had once mentioned that to me.”
“He probably did. That’s one of the bedrock rules of our line of business.” He paused. “You and Tom seemed to have such a wonderful life together. He talked about you all the time. He was different from all the other famous men I’ve known. Not ashamed to show his devotion and love.”
For a moment Julie’s fevered mind replayed the words she had heard from Brooks Stoddard and Gil Thomas on television hours earlier, just before she began her search through Tom’s boxes of papers. “It’s nice of you to say that, Vinnie. I
appreciate that and everything else.”
He paused again. This time he whispered, barely audibly,
“Where are Tom’s computers?”
“In a box.”
“Julie, all I want to say is this, since people could be listening on your line. And if they are, let me say I’m now a lawyer giving legal advice to a client. And listen to me: computers can be the hidden snakes in the jungle.”
P A U L B A T I S T A
Julie immediately understood him. “You’re a dear friend, Vincent. And I always listen to my lawyers.”
Vincent Sorrentino paused again, almost nervous at what he was quietly persuading himself to say. “Can I come to see you tomorrow? The Judge always stops at four. I’d like to take you out for a bite to eat.”
He held his breath, nervously. He was certain she’d demur, say no. She said, “Can you please do that, Vincent?”
“I’ll be at your building at six.”
“I’ll ask Elena to stay with Kim. Thanks.”
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* * *
Before she went to the spare room for her second shift of reading, she tried to focus on what she’d seen so far in those orderly documents. Passages from a life: although most of the neat folders contained papers relating to Tom’s business, he had also taken the time to have his personal papers filed in the same orderly settings. There were his college acceptance letters: Yale, Duke, Cornell, Stanford; old newspaper clippings, cleanly cut out, copied, and preserved, chronologically, by one of Tom’s secretaries.
There were also thick folders with fan letters he received from strangers all over the country, together with copies of Tom’s replies to many of those letters. They spanned almost twenty years. She always admired that stream of modesty and care in his public personality. His innocuous short notes to these hundreds of people reflected that modesty, that care. Although he never mentioned these letters to her, they were there and he had obviously taken the time and effort, not long ago, to have his secretary pull together these pieces of papers and organize them.