by Paul Batista
And, as she sat in the harshly lit kitchen, Julie tried to focus on the reason she had started this voyage back into the paper records of Tom’s life, a life she believed she knew so well, so intimately. “Evidence of crimes,” Steinman’s awful letter had said, a statement that had been transformed yesterday from Steinman’s lawyer-like words into the much more arresting widely broadcast D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
words of Gil Thomas. What evidence? What crimes? She tried to divorce herself from her love for her husband and take a different and skeptical view of what she’d seen in these papers. Nothing, except daily markings that Tom had created of his life as he lived it. And yet here were officials of the federal government writing a letter to her saying, in flat English, that these files of her husband contained “evidence of crimes.” The image of Steinman’s serious face fixed itself in her mind, exactly as she had seen it the night before on that wrenching broadcast Gil prepared. This glum, serious man, she thought, has said that my husband had evidence 125
of crimes, was himself involved in crimes…
* * *
Dawn began at least forty-five minutes before the sun actually rose. Just before five, Julie opened a bedroom window overlooking 87th Street. The pavement was gray; the lozenge shapes of parked cars lined both sides of the street. It was a no-man’s land.
She was lightheaded from lack of sleep and her concentration.
The gathering day, the end of black night, gave her a bleak feeling. She set herself a limit of another fifteen minutes among the file boxes. She recognized she could never finish them all in one long rush and would have to sleep, even if for only half an hour, before Kim woke and another hot day set in.
It was then that she found the file containing Tom’s American Express and other credit card receipts. Her sore mind, numb with exhaustion, became alert when she saw receipts from three restaurants in Miami on three separate dates ten months ago. Tom never mentioned Miami to her. After all those sports years in city after city, Tom had come to hate travel, often told her that he avoided it whenever he could. Miami?
The receipts were arranged in photocopies, four to a page, in chronological order. Rapidly she flipped through the pages.
There were four receipts from four different hotels in Mexico City—eighteen months ago, nine months ago, even five weeks before he died. Mexico City?
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Julie closed the file, feeling as though she had uncovered a cache of private pornography. She knew, with alarm, that it was the kind of file for which she had bought special folders and two bulky Federal Express boxes just large enough for Tom’s two laptops and the long-unused cell phone he had left in his suit-jacket the night he left for his last run. She put the credit card files in the folders. She tied the shoelace straps that enclosed the folders.
And then, for the first time in months, she picked up Tom’s cell phone. She inserted the recharging cord into the hole. Drinking 126
still more coffee, she waited half an hour, watching the early morning CNN program. Catastrophes, she thought, were the staple of the world.
When Tom’s cell phone musically came to life, aroused from its months of somnolence, the screen displayed the words “34
Missed Calls.” She realized she had been automatically paying his cell phone bills when they were forwarded to her apartment. She guessed at his access code. It was 3636—a code he used often on their joint bank accounts and the keypad to the security system in the apartment. The number on his helmet and game shirt at Stanford was 36.
As she methodically passed through the voice mail messages—
the first ten or so were ones to which he had not listened in the last three days of his life (and two were the raspy voice of the now-dead Selig Klein)—there were only three other names she recognized. One unfamiliar name—Richard Dobyns—had left messages saying it was urgent that he call. The voice had a Brooklyn accent—thirty million people, she ruefully thought, lived in Brooklyn, all with Brooklyn accents. There was no callback number. When she checked the list of names and numbers Tom had recorded for speed-dial, there was no Dobyns.
Vincent Sorrentino left two messages, one on the day before Tom died, the other on the day of his death. Sorrentino’s voice was the voice of a friend: “Tom, let’s sit down sometime on Monday to talk about next week.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Using the star key on the small pad, she then passed into the realm of the unknown—voices left after the moment of his death.
There was a man’s Caribbean-accented voice on Saturday morning: “Mr. Jackson here, Mr. Perini. It’s about eleven-thirty in the morning on Saturday here. Some of the T-bills expire on Monday.
Let me know what you want to do. Have a good weekend.”
T-bills? Julie pressed the keypad’s source for names. There were three entries for Jackson, two with international codes, one with an entry for a Miami area code. She used her own cell phone to dial the Miami number. A pre-recorded voice, speak-127
ing in Spanish, answered, “Banco Almaraez.” That was followed by words she could loosely translate as hours of operation. She said nothing.
She wrote down Jackson’s numbers on the reverse side of a grocery-bill receipt and, instinctively sensing that she would want access to the numbers again, folded it into the small sleeve of her credit-card folder.
Several of the other voices were women’s. Julie never considered herself jealous, at least in her adult years. As a teenager she’d silently witness her mother’s repeatedly well-founded jealousy of her father and women propel her deeper into booze, not away from her husband. She knew Tom had female clients; she assumed they were businesswomen. Most left only their first names: Karen, Joanna, even Kim. Nothing suggestive, sensual, or delinquent in any of the tones or words. Some of the calls, as the week after Tom’s death passed, were from credit card companies asking about late payments. And finally, within a few weeks of Tom’s death, the messages ceased.
Julie retrieved her notebook and wrote down the fifty or so names and telephone numbers stored in the memory of Tom’s cell phone. She also listened again to all the messages Tom had not heard and copied out what was said and when it was said. She wrote down, too, all the telephone numbers displayed in the “Messages Received,” “Missed Messages,” and “Dialed Numbers” of the call log. She saw that for months Tom called Mr. Jackson, at P A U L B A T I S T A
the international and Miami numbers, more than he dialed anyone other than Julie herself.
Once the work of writing the cell phone information was done, she took a wooden cutting board out of its kitchen cabinet and a hammer from a tool box. She went into the bathroom in her bedroom, the farthest place in the apartment from Kim’s bedroom. She hammered Tom’s cell phone into such small shards, fragments, and pieces that, separating them carefully, she was able to flush them down the toilet in ten consecutive flushes with no risk of clogging the drain.
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After smashing the cell phone, she went back to the spare room. She gathered up the folders with Tom’s credit card receipts and the Federal Express boxes with his two laptops. She stuffed them in a Metropolitan Museum of Art tote bag. She walked down flights of emergency stairs in the core of the building and placed the envelopes, the Federal Express boxes, and the tote bag in the narrow sub-basement storage bin each tenant in the building owned. Most of the bins for other tenants, she noticed, had bottles of wine lying in neatly stacked rows. In her exhausted mind she recalled the title of the Poe story The Cask of Amontillado. Wasn’t that the story, she wondered, in which a man had been sealed behind bricks in a basement from which he never emerged?
Julie walked up the many flights of stairs to her apartment, sweating with exhaustion and nervousness on the last several concrete flights, because she was gripped by the image that her daughter had awakened with no one there. As Julie saw, Kim hadn’t stirred.
Arms folded, Julie stood at the windows in her living room.
And then she went to sleep. It was six-thirty.
* * *
McGlynn had been awake for ten minutes. He sat on the toilet, reading the Daily News. He was impressed by the appearance of D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
his own face in a photograph from yesterday’s news conference.
He grabbed the telephone he had installed in the bathroom as though it were a fast ground ball. “Yeah?”
“She was up all night. She made a cell phone call. The lights just went out.”
“Meet me in the Jew’s office in an hour and a half.”
“Christ, I been up all night. I want to go home.”
“See you in an hour and a half.” McGlynn dropped the telephone on the receiver. He was sick of this case and he thought—
fleetingly, smiling at his picture in the News—about shooting 129
Steinman in his brown-freckled, unhandsome, bespectacled face.
* * *
Danny Fonseca pivoted at the corner of the squash court after lofting the small black ball over his left shoulder toward the center of the front wall. As he bolted on strong legs to the “T” at the court’s center he watched Mario Spina scramble forward to reach the ball as it fell, softly, near the tin fender along the base of the front wall. Instinctively Fonseca knew that Spina would wedge the softest imaginable shot to the seam where the side wall and the front wall met. When Spina had committed himself to that shot, Fonseca raced forward, his squash racket held at a forehand angle by his agile wrist, and smashed the ball to the low right corner of the front wall, just above the tin. The ball sped backward, a “rail shot” in squash players’ lingo, less than an inch from the right wall and no more than a foot above the floor. When Fonseca turned to regain the court’s center, he saw that Spina was already in the right-hand corner, crouching low to reach the shot.
It should have been a point for Fonseca. It was an ideal rail shot. But Spina, stretching, his eyes bulging, hit it. The ball glanced off the right wall, veered toward the left front corner, and fell off the seam where the left wall and front wall met, softly, as though dropped from a child’s hand.
Mario Spina was thirty-four and the squash pro at the New York Athletic Club. Although he was Italian, he looked Pakistani: P A U L B A T I S T A
short, lithe, agile, and hairy. Fitting that he looked that way, since, for decades, Pakistanis had been the best squash players in the world. Mario Spina had curly black hair and, when he played squash, wore a red sweatband over his forehead. When he made that killer shot, he smiled at Fonseca, who grimaced and said,
“Beautiful, baby, beautiful.”
The Congressman had loved this rich man’s game for many years. He began playing when he launched his political career as a state Assemblyman from Brooklyn. It was during that period when people first started to seek him out and, almost immedi-130
ately, to offer and give him things. One of the early people was Robert Mancuso, who worked for an investment banking firm on Wall Street and who introduced himself to Assemblyman Fonseca in 1964 at a dinner for Italian Americans at the Columbus Club in the East Fifties where two state court judges were being honored. Bobby Mancuso was a member of the New York Athletic Club. He was a sharp dresser, and he introduced the Assemblyman to squash. Bobby’s firm paid the NYAC squash pro for seven months of lessons.
Fonseca, who had played baseball from the time he was seven until he graduated from Queens College, was a natural athlete.
Although he never performed as well as the men who had learned squash in prep schools like Exeter and Choate (names he had never heard until he was first elected to Congress in the 1960s and from which some of the stony, standoffish New England representatives had graduated), Fonseca became a formidable player.
A few years later, when he was appointed to the board of a New York City pension fund to which Bobby Mancuso’s firm wanted to become an advisor, Fonseca remembered those early days on the courts at the NYAC and did what he could to reward Bobby’s firm for those squash lessons and other tokens of Bobby’s respect down through the years. Mancuso’s firm got the contract.
Now, on this hot Friday night at the end of August in this classic building across from Central Park at the corner of Central Park South and Sixth Avenue, Fonseca drew deep pleasure D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
from the game. He and Spina were literally encased in the white rectangular box of the squash court, a world apart. The only access to the court was through a half-size door on the rear wall that closed flush with the wall, forming a part of the seamless interior. They had already been playing for an hour, the ball ricocheting from wall to wall, glancing from the floor, pop-pop-pop-popping with beautiful rapidity around the white interior. Fonseca felt separated from the outside world.
That was precisely what he wanted. That afternoon, as the trial approached its end for the day at four, he had almost dropped off 131
to sleep but then had been aroused. The witness on the stand was yet another government agent: what made him remarkable was that he was the two-hundredth witness called by the government in the six months of trial. The witness was a government account-ant, who, by using a blow-up of a worksheet, described how he had traced money from Selig Klein’s business into a Mexican bank account in various numbered accounts linked, he testified, to Fonseca.
During the final Friday afternoon break, the Congressman said to Sorrentino, “I got to get the fuck outta here. You don’t need me tonight, do you?”
“What’s the matter, you don’t love me anymore?” Sorrentino answered.
Fonseca’s eyes brightened behind his aviator glasses, “Christ, I’ve spent more time with you than I spent with all my wives put together.”
“And I probably gave you better pussy.”
Fonseca laughed. “Seriously, you don’t need me, do you?”
“No. What’s up?”
“I’m gonna try to play some squash up at the NYAC.”
“Use Steinman’s head for a ball. It’s about the right size.”
From the telephone in the lobby near the courtroom door, Fonseca called Spina and reserved a court for 6:30. He didn’t want to use his cell phone because he didn’t want the FBI to know where he planned to be. By eight Fonseca was exhausted, P A U L B A T I S T A
drained, and exhilarated. He drank Gatorade with Spina as they sat, after the games, on the wooden benches near Spina’s office.
When he cooled down, Fonseca took the elevators from the sixth floor where the squash courts were to the eleventh-floor locker room. The club was virtually empty. The Puerto Rican attendants in the locker room, who had been sitting, rose when the Congressman emerged from the elevator. Carrying his protective eyewear and racket in his right hand, Fonseca waved at the boys with his left as he waited for the towels. Usually dour and sullen, the attendants were pleased to see the Congressman.
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They called him “Sir.”
Fonseca took three separate showers in the big, old-fashioned shower room. Between showers he sat in the sauna for ten-minute intervals, his body glistening. He then took a long time to dress.
When he left the locker room, he passed a five-dollar bill to one of the attendants.
Alone, Fonseca had two beers and a light sandwich at the bar in the wood-paneled grill room on the third floor. The three waiters recognized him, even though it had been more than six months since he last visited the club. If they knew that he was on trial for racketeering, fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, they didn’t show it. They were obviously delighted to have the Congressman there again at last and treated him like royalty. As he ate, he watched a baseball game on the large-screen television.
In the NYAC’s clubby, run-down lobby, the Congressman retrieved from the main desk the keys to the car he had parked in the garage across Sixth Avenue. After he pas
sed through the revolving door a club doorman asked if he wanted a cab. Fonseca shook his head, smiled, and dangled his car keys. In the dusk the doorman recognized him. “How are you, Congressman?”
“Fine,” Fonseca answered, and then stopped. A man in a business suit approached him from the corner of the sidewalk on Central Park South. Fear harrowed him. Fonseca instinctively stepped closer to the doorman.
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“Can I talk to you, sir?”
Fonseca had been approached hundreds of thousands of times in his life. He felt foolish at his initial, frightened reaction. He knew it was an instinct generated by what happened to Klein. “What can I do for ya?” It was a rehearsed line Fonseca had used for years.
“My name is Castronovo. Dick. Special Agent with the FBI.”
“What’s up?”
“Can we talk in private?”
“This doorman is my friend, aren’t you, Julio?” Fonseca read the doorman’s name on the plastic tag on his chest. Julio was 133
wide-eyed, silent. “Besides,” Fonseca smiled, “doormen don’t hear anything and don’t remember anything. We can talk here, right in front of Julio.”
“It really would be better if we had a private word.”
Fonseca became abrupt, feigning anger. “Say whatever you want, but right here.”
“All right, all right. I’m really not supposed to be doing this, it’s just that I’m concerned for you. I’ve been looking into the Klein case…Perini, too…a few other things. We’ve really got nothing hard to go on, nothing we could arrest anybody with yet, but we feel that some not-too-nice guys are on the hunt, and we’re concerned for you.”
In the heat, as they stood in the soft downward glow of light from the awning over the entrance to the club, Fonseca gazed at the man. There was no doubt in Fonseca’s mind that he was in fact an agent: the close-cropped hair, the narrow eyes with perfect vision, the inexpensive suit, the beginnings of a beer paunch.