Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  “Speak to me in English, will ya? What’re you trying to say?”

  “Just that we’re concerned for you. We’ve been looking at Marcello. We’re just concerned for you.” Marcello, who was the secretary-treasurer of a Teamsters local, was one of the defendants on trial with Fonseca. He was a quiet man who greeted Fonseca every morning by asking, in the same rote tone, “And how are you today, sir?” He and Vincent Sorrentino always called him the Milkman. Marcello the Milkman.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “I don’t understand,” Fonseca said, quietly.

  “Look, just man-to-man, I’m concerned for you. The people I work for don’t have enough yet to do anything…official…but I thought, man-to-man, I should talk to you.”

  “That’s great. I appreciate it. But what the fuck do you want me to do?”

  “Just watch yourself. Just take care. And if you feel you want our help, if you think we can help you, we can. All you have to do is talk to us.” He held a business card in his hand.

  Fonseca waited and then smiled. “You know how I want you 134

  to help me? As in, right now?”

  “How?” There was a boyish eagerness in Castronovo’s voice.

  “By getting the fuck outta my face.”

  Castronovo looked genuinely offended. “Sir, I just tried to help.”

  “Let Julio here hail a cab. You get in. You drive away. And then, when I feel safe from you, I’ll leave this nice little well-lit spot I’ve got for myself.”

  “No problem, sir. You’ll remember me. Castronovo. It’s not a hard name to forget if your name’s Fonseca. And when you think we can help you call me.” He held his business card toward Fonseca, who didn’t reach out to take it. Castronovo let it drop to the sidewalk.

  On a signal from Fonseca, Julio stepped out onto Central Park South, hailed a taxi, opened the door, and slammed it behind Castronovo. Fonseca watched the yellow car as it sped east past the row of elegant hotels with huge, light-filled banners on Central Park South. Afraid and confused, he picked up Castronovo’s card and then walked quickly from the NYAC’s entrance to the parking garage. He forgot to say goodbye to Julio. The Congressman told himself he’d have to be especially nice to him when he came back to the NYAC. After all, the man might live and vote in his district.

  13.

  Kate Stark: even the name arrested Vincent Sorrentino’s attention. A name like an expletive: waspish, blunt, unusual. She was so attractive, so elegantly turned out, that staring at her bordered on the unavoidable. How old was she? Sorrentino tried to gauge it: thirty-five, thirty-eight, even forty-two? He felt flawlessly healthy, yet half his life, in fact, far more than half, was over, and his wife Helen was only fifty-one when cancer came and swept her away to death within four months of the day of the diagnosis.

  It was too exquisite a day, Sorrentino thought, and Kate Stark was too beautiful a presence, to allow thoughts of age, loss, and death to shadow his mind. He decided he would press to know her. She was plainly unattached, it was a late Saturday afternoon, they were at a vast house on the beach in East Hampton, and a party was just beginning. All he had to do, he instinctively believed, was start a conversation with her. What were the chances that she would be aloof, distant? Not much, experience had taught him. Women liked him. Even Julie Perini—about whom he was so uncharacteristically sensitive and tentative even though he carried her image and her presence in his mind’s eye almost continuously—liked him. She had even held his hand toward the end of the short dinner they had the night after she called him to read Neil Steinman’s letter. He wanted to be with Julie but something about her hurt and her fear made P A U L B A T I S T A

  him hesitate. Julie had kissed his cheek when she left him in the lobby of her building after that dinner.

  Kate Stark was not aloof or distant. Vincent Sorrentino was not tentative or sensitive or cautious about her. Arriving at Richard Vigdor’s house with a group of people from Washington (they were flown in one of Vigdor’s helicopters from LaGuardia to the East Hampton airport), Kate strolled among the fifty or so guests on Vigdor’s terrace, at his pool, in his kitchen, and in his huge living spaces, and then she circled back to Sorrentino. Vigdor, one of Sorrentino’s clients, a magazine publisher who had started with pornography in 136

  the early 1970s and then moved into game, computer, and Internet magazines, had already told Sorrentino about Kate. She was never married, was once a chief aide to a California Senator, and now owned a political consulting firm in Washington. “Gorgeous, you’ll like her,” Vigdor told Sorrentino when he pressed him to spend the weekend at the seaside house in East Hampton.

  And here she was now, so close to him on the sun-drenched terrace that he could detect the refreshing, cleansing scent on her breath of the gin and tonic she carried. She said, “So this is how America’s most famous trial lawyer relaxes on a Saturday?”

  He met her frank gaze. “The same way Washington’s most legendary consultant does. What a coincidence.”

  He liked what he said even as he was speaking, but, at the same time, it was difficult to avoid the impact of her remarkable face. It was also difficult to avoid looking at the outline of her breasts: she was wearing a jumpsuit that wrapped itself tightly but tastefully around all the full proportions of her body. She was not a small woman. She wore slender, expensive shoes with slight heels that made her almost as tall as Sorrentino. The physical presence she created, effortlessly, made it difficult to be with her at the same time that it made it impossible to leave her. She was the rare woman who could give a man a hard-on just by standing near him.

  As the long afternoon and evening unfolded, she made it clear she wanted Sorrentino to be with her for the night. At first, they D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  spent time moving from conversation to conversation. Kate knew more people than Sorrentino. Vigdor spent money lavishly and gathered at this party people who were well-known politicians, writers, actors, and journalists, and Kate appeared to know and be recognized by everyone. In contrast, Sorrentino was recognized by many people, since several of his criminal trials had been broadcast live on Court TV and other networks, and his acquittals were more legendary than his losses, but he simply didn’t personally know most of the people at Vigdor’s party. Kate Stark was soon introducing him. “Of course you know Vincent Sorrentino, 137

  lawyer extraordinaire?”

  Over the course of the hours, as they drank, ate, and even started to hold hands, Kate obviously liked everything she saw Vincent Sorrentino do and say. And she loved the style. It was the sure-footedness, the perfectly calibrated words, the aura of the man in whom politicians and gangsters confided their deepest secrets, and the intrigue he conveyed, as when Vigdor searched him out just as a spectacular sunset spread long, eastward-pointing shadows over the East Hampton beach that encircled the mansion.

  “Believe it or not,” Vigdor said to Sorrentino as Kate, sipping another gin and tonic, listened, “Danny Fonseca found out you’re here. He says your cell phone isn’t working. You probably didn’t pay the bill, he said. He’s holding for you.”

  “Is he? Where’s the phone?”

  “I’ll have one of the waiters bring it to you. Wait over there, it’s quieter.” Vigdor waved toward a corner of the terrace, well away from the Mexican mariachi band he had flown in from New York for the night’s party.

  “Can I sit over there with you?” Kate asked as they waited for the cordless telephone. “Over there” was next to him, on the arm of a chair.

  “Absolutely, Kate.”

  Sorrentino was flattered. He took her hand and led her to the lounge chairs on the edge of the terrace. Some people were watching them, two just-met beautiful adults holding hands.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  When the telephone arrived he pulled the antenna out a little further to hear Fonseca’s gravelly, distinct voice. As Fonseca talked, Sorrentino held the portable receiver to his left ear with his left hand and, with his right, t
ouched Kate’s fingers. Fonseca spoke to Sorrentino with a strangely focused precision. Although Sorrentino genuinely liked the Congressman, he would sometimes become impatient with the looseness of his words, the enigmatic expletives, the rambling stories, the nightclub style of quick jokes and one-liners. But now Fonseca was clear and concise as he described his encounter the night before on the steps of the New 138

  York Athletic Club.

  Kate listened raptly as Sorrentino finally spoke to Fonseca.

  “You, my friend, have just been treated to one of the more insidious little tricks that the powers that be have developed. They try to break down the unity of defendants in a big case by sending a stalking horse to pull one of the group away, to make him feel that he’s at risk from one of his codefendants.”

  Sipping her gin and tonic, Kate watched Sorrentino as he paused, listening again to the Congressman. Then she heard Sorrentino say, “It works, sometimes. They hope that the guy who’s been targeted by his newfound friends will cooperate. Suddenly he’s no longer in league with the defendants, works out a deal, leaves the reservation, and becomes a witness.”

  Sorrentino paused again, listening. Kate squeezed his hand, playfully. “I hear you, but I don’t want you to worry. But I am going to call Steinman on this, catch him up short. He can’t just send FBI agents around to play mind-fuck with my clients.”

  Sorrentino listened for another two minutes as Fonseca, who was obviously at a confused midpoint between bravado and concern, continued to speak. After several drinks, Sorrentino was not as fixed and clear as he usually was. While listening to this old man, he gazed at Kate, at the broad brick terrace, at the Atlantic, darkening, beautiful, and at the dozens of people in their summer clothes. Sorrentino felt relaxed and happy. Finally, wanting to wind down the conversation, he said, “Look at it this way. I think what happened last night is D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  good news. Steinman is so worried about his case, he’s looking for something to break it his way. So he uses a pretty cheap trick.”

  Sensing that the conversation was virtually over, Kate blurted out, “Tell Danny I love him.”

  Sorrentino looked surprised. “Danny, Kate Stark says she loves you.”

  Sorrentino heard Fonseca say, “What?”

  “Kate Stark is sitting here with me, and she says she loves you.

  I didn’t know you knew her.”

  Even though he knew Sorrentino was not on speakerphone, 139

  Danny Fonseca whispered, “What the hell are you doing with her, you lucky son of a bitch? You never told me you knew her.”

  Speaking to both of them—Kate at his right and Fonseca one hundred twenty miles to the west—Sorrentino said, “Sure, I’ve known her for a long time. About two hours.”

  Fonseca said quietly so that only Sorrentino could hear, “That is the most fabulous fuckin’ body I’ve ever seen. And when you get to the right spot it’s like dipping it into a barrel of honey.”

  Sorrentino smiled at Kate and said to her, “Danny says he loves you too.”

  * * *

  An hour later Sorrentino and Kate left Vigdor’s party. They walked, arms around each other’s waists, down the hill from the vast dune where Vigdor’s house dominated that area of the coast.

  They heard the fine gravel crunching under their feet and then under the wheels of Sorrentino’s red Porsche. They drove for three miles on the gorgeous, flat roads of East Hampton to Main Street. Kate was staying in The Huntting Inn, a sprawling old building with an attractive restaurant in a latticed, breezy wing.

  As they ate, Sorrentino had no doubt that this remarkable-looking, verbally brilliant woman would bring him to her room and expect him to stay the night.

  He also had no doubt that she was fascinated by the men he knew—the kind of men with whom she couldn’t have had any contact.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Sorrentino became her pipeline to the underworld (a word she actually used): to men like Vito Carneglia, whom the newspapers always described as the capo of the Gambino crime family and who was acquitted last year after a four-week trial in which Sorrentino had represented him; Gianfranco “Frankie the Bug” Domasso, the head of the Lucchese crime family, now serving seventy-five years in a federal prison after a three-month trial Sorrentino had lost.

  Sorrentino had no difficulty with the fact that this woman wanted to probe him as to what these legendary men were like.

  In return, she had no difficulty with the fact that his quietly deliv-140

  ered answers were evasive, suggestive, and oblique. “As far as I know,” he said as he smiled at her over another glass of red wine,

  “the only family that Frankie the Bug is the head of is his own: he’s your typical Italian man who believes in lots of kids. He lives in a split-level in Corona, Queens. There’s a stone angel, with wings, on his front lawn. Admittedly, the house does have big locked gates in front. It does kind of stand out. But his papa trained him how to be a mason, after all.”

  Then, as they ate dessert, she began to talk about Sorrentino’s most famous current client, Congressman Fonseca. The restaurant was quieter now. It was almost eleven. The stereo played a tape of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing music by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington—all those lush sounds of another era. Sorrentino didn’t want to talk about Fonseca, but he listened quietly as Kate spoke.

  “Like this music,” she said, “Danny is one of those beautiful relics of a simpler time. He believes in taking things in exchange for favors. It’s his job to serve people—for Danny, good politics is getting shares in a company that does business in Brooklyn, then using his influence to send more government contracts to the company, so that all those workers can go on working. That’s what a politician is supposed to do: help people. And where is it written down that a politician can’t get something for doing what helps people? Danny was schooled to do that, and he can’t understand what’s wrong with it.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Sorrentino tried to seem noncommittal, diffident. He thought of a quick line, echoed from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca:

  “Your business, my dear, is the politics of the world. Mine is running a saloon.”

  As she wound down on the subject of Fonseca, Kate said,

  “That’s why I can’t understand this Madrigal business that Danny’s involved in.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Sorrentino shook his head.

  141

  “A banker, supposedly, in Mexico. Danny’s been taking favors from Madrigal. Danny may have become such a compulsive taker that he can no longer differentiate.”

  Sorrentino shrugged, smiling, “Like Rick said in Casablanca, the politics of the world are not my business.”

  Kate Stark gave him a great, blazing blonde smile.

  * * *

  In her notebook Julie wrote: What is that line in Yeats I think about all the time now, especially this horrendous weekend? I know I don’t remember it exactly. Something about the fever that is in my brain.

  He wrote it in that poem, the prayer for his daughter. Those days when I used to lock myself in my room—what was I then, 14? — and recite and memorize poetry (Yeats, Stevens, Robert Lowell) are long gone. But the memory of some lines still lasts, to some extent. Is the Yeats line “the great gloom that is in my mind”?

  Hard to be sure. But I know this as I write: Tom’s presence is all around me; he is the fever in my brain that won’t go away. I need to write these notes down because there is no one I can talk to now.

  Item One: those credit card receipts. I have looked at them and looked at them. Those are Tom’s signatures. I wish they weren’t. So he didn’t lend his card to someone else to go Miami. Or Mexico City. But when was he in those places? I can remember nights here and there in the last three years when he was in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles…Calls by cell phone, never at the hotel numbers. But he was always back a
fter a day or two.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Item Two: those bank account statements, dozens of them, stapled together in a file labeled “Miscellaneous” and then transferred into the computers. First four hundred thousand dollars, five hundred thousand dollars, in, and then, a week or two later, out, or almost all out; and then another million in, and then almost all out. And, over the twelve months before he died, much bigger amounts, suddenly ninety million, more, mind-boggling amounts if I’m reading them correctly and, who knows, maybe I’m not. But nothing showing that all or any of that went out.

  Not one of the statements has Tom’s name on it. They are statements from the Cayman Islands, Panama, Ireland, the Seychelles, Liechtenstein.

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  They have numbers on them. How did they get to Tom? It is easy to understand them—the amount of money in, the amount out, and then the huge amounts in, nothing out—but why did he have them? Why didn’t he tell me about them?

  And then Item Three: the man just outside the lobby this morning. He looked guilt-ridden when he spoke to me, and I was upset with myself for having been rude to him at first. When he asked, “Ain’t you Julie Perini?”

  I did what every stupid New Yorker does when a black man speaks. I got snooty: “Please?” I made sure that our doorman stayed nearby, ready to act to protect precious me.

  It turned out that this tall black man was polite, earnest, and kind. He told me that he was sorry that he had let all these months go by but that he had seen Tom’s picture—and even mine, God help me—on television the last few nights and he wanted to tell me that he had been the security guard in Tom’s office building. His name was Hector. He had seen Tom the night “it happened.” He had been brooding for months over “something funny.”

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “A weird-looking dude was there, looking for Tom, waiting for him.

  Tom talked to him on the intercom from the lobby and then he told me to get rid of him.”