by Paul Batista
“Did you,” Gil asked, pausing tentatively as waiters hovered over the table pouring coffee, “know her husband?”
“Not really. I met him five or six times. He seemed shy. He was very attentive to her. At first I thought it was phony—a man like that must have had opportunities with ten thousand women, but it was clear he loved her.”
Hogan asked, as he sipped black coffee, “What did you think of him?”
“To be honest?”
“Sure.”
“I felt a little awkward around him, a little diminished.
Remember, I’ve spent most of my time with politicians, most of whom are clowns, and it’s easy to feel superior to a clown. With D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Tom it was different. He looked and conducted himself like a genuine sports hero, someone who had done well a thing that was very difficult to do…I felt a little foolish around him, I admired him, and, of course, I found myself in the ambiguous position of being the boss of this hero’s wife.”
Still sipping his coffee and smiling, Hogan knew that Stan didn’t like or respect him, and never had. Although they were virtual contemporaries, they had arrived at different and unequal places in the same business. Hogan was born to wealth in Massachusetts, where his family had owned a small-town newspaper for 153
generations; had cruised through Princeton; and had started in television sports journalism. Moodier, more intelligent, Jewish, Stan had reached his limit in the field. Hogan could still reasonably expect to travel further.
“Do you think he was a big-time criminal? Perini, I mean?”
“I have no idea. If he was, he didn’t flaunt it. They lived pretty modestly. I can’t think of a party they ever went to, except Saturday-afternoon birthday parties for their daughter and her friends.”
“I’ve heard,” Hogan said, “that he was not that good a lawyer.
At least other lawyers have told me that.”
“It ain’t necessarily so. Remember, next to ours, it may be the cattiest profession ever created.”
Hogan laughed. Gil was staring at him. And then Hogan said:
“Could you work on her?”
“Come again?”
“Come on, Stan, don’t be coy. We know from Cassie that when she tried, weeks ago, to talk to Julie—about the trial, something interesting but not too interesting—Julie said no and you said no way, I can’t get her to help. But this is different now. Gil and I agree this has the dimensions of a major, major story and we have this incredible resource available to us. We want you to help in tapping it.”
“Incredible? Not a bad word. Incredible.”
Finished with his coffee, Hogan was leaning backwards, gazing through narrowed eyes at Stan. “What’s incredible?”
P A U L B A T I S T A
“Have you two thought this through? What do you expect her to say? Yes, friends and colleagues, my husband was the key man in an international drug, money laundering, or weapons ring, or all of the above. And of course I’m so grateful for my forty-six-thousand-dollar-a-year salary that here’s all the information you need—”
Hogan said steadily, boring into the stream of Stan’s words,
“We won’t know what she has to say until we ask—”
Stan interrupted him: “Or, friends and colleagues, my husband was a saint. Some evil forces are now trying to implicate 154
him in a fantasy. Hogan, I just don’t think you’ve thought this through.”
“Look, Stan, we’d be foolish not to press the advantage we have here.”
“We don’t have an advantage. The woman’s not stupid. She knows lawyers, and those lawyers will focus her attention on other concerns. What other things is the government going to do now that they’ve done this? Examine her bank accounts, find out how much money she has and how she spends it? How could she safely say anything to us?”
“Maybe we could help her, develop her husband’s side, explore other alternatives.”
“That doesn’t work, Hogan, and you know it.”
Hogan paused and leaned forward, pushing his cup and saucer away. “I guess there’s another dimension to this, too.”
“What’s that?”
“Maybe as an institution we should be more concerned. Deal with this in a different way. Here we have an important employee—a person who writes the news, a person we implicitly ask the public to trust—closely connected with what appears to be a major investigation by the United States government. Maybe we should put her on a leave of absence. Unpaid. After all, we don’t want to compromise the integrity of our institution.”
Stan controlled himself, again fixing his gaze not on Hogan Blackburn but on the lovely, light-shifting steel curtains. Hogan D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
knew Stan Wasserman well enough to know that he wouldn’t respond immediately. Hogan signaled in the air for the waiter to bring the check. Stan saw that lunch had cost one hundred and eighty-seven dollars.
* * *
It was now the fourth time that she had replayed the videotape of Tuesday evening’s eleven o’clock news. It was already one-thirty on Wednesday morning, as she saw in the orange digital lights of the sleek black VCR. When she pressed the remote-155
control button she heard the distinctive “tap” as the tape rewound, and then the equally distinctive but different “tap” as she pressed the play button.
Steinman’s face emerged against a background of buff-colored law books: the curly, slightly thinning hair; the wire-rimmed glasses; that Groucho Marx expression always striving to appear sincere. And she heard his words, as he responded to what she knew was an orchestrated question from Gil Thomas: “I want to stress that the material we obtained from Mr. Perini’s files could be of very high value in an ongoing criminal investigation. And that investigation touches only on some of the issues that are involved in the ongoing Fonseca trial. There is a possibility of superseding indictments or other indictments.”
Gil Thomas, off-screen, asked, “And could Tom Perini be an unindicted co-conspirator in those others charges?”
“I can’t comment on that. But it would not be the first time in the history of the world that an absent person figured promi-nently in a criminal trial.”
Using the remote, Julie sped forward briefly: because she had replayed this sequence of the news so often she automatically sensed, as though at a rehearsal, where the next scene was. Vincent Sorrentino’s face—angry-looking, combative—loomed into focus.
“You know what Mr. Steinman isn’t telling you, don’t you?
That anything he got from Tom Perini’s files can’t be used at this trial. Legally it can’t. And there’s the problem, can’t you see it?
P A U L B A T I S T A
Mr. Steinman’s spent months prosecuting an innocent man, Congressman Fonseca, on bribery charges that he can’t prove. His real case is somewhere else, maybe locked away in the conduct of a man or men he can’t pursue, but he can’t let go of this endless, stupid case against the Congressman.”
* * *
Although it was late and she was exhausted, Julie felt the sleep-destroying anxiety that had settled in the core of her mind as she watched these two men exchange their views about her husband.
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She also knew that in order to sleep (for she needed to sleep) she would have to put something between herself and the images of these two men repeating their words. She pressed and held the channel button. The screen flashed through an upward sequence of station numbers and their programs.
At this hour of the night and in this section of the world, the television cable suddenly brought a pornographic station to her screen. She muted the volume as she watched two naked women take the clothes off a man who had been dressed as a construction worker. At first the women—both blonde, one with huge, shapely breasts, the other much smaller-breasted—seemed hesitant, awkward, forced to do what they were doing. But, as the now naked man kissed each of them, the women actually smiled and appeared to forget
the camera, the sterile, depressing setting (one of those white-walled, ordinary, and new apartments in a high-rise Manhattan building), as they licked the man’s richly veined penis. The women were rapt by what they were doing. Rapt, too, Julie watched as the man entered the larger-breasted woman: the woman’s eyes widened, her hands gripped his arms. The other woman pressed her vagina into his face…After three minutes, the women changed positions, and he entered the smaller-breasted one as the other, leaning behind him, caressed his powerful thighs.
Fascinated by the scene, Julie watched intently as the camera homed in on the slip-siding, back-and-forth view of the man’s D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
penis pulling outward, plunging inward…She wanted to stop watching, but knew she couldn’t; she turned the set off only after the man had suddenly reared back, released himself from the smaller woman’s vagina, and allowed his swollen penis to ejacu-late onto the breasts of the larger woman. Julie, swept by what she had just witnessed, found her clitoris and stroked herself into a frenzy and a climax, murmuring aloud, “Vince, Vince, Vince…”
She managed to fall asleep five minutes later, thinking about Vincent Sorrentino.
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* * *
Stan Wasserman was surprised by Julie several times over the course of the next few days. The first surprise relieved him. Shortly after she arrived in the newsroom at midmorning on Wednesday, he asked her to go to the cafeteria on the fourteenth floor with him and, speaking directly and deliberately over coffee, told her that he had been “deputized by the powers that be” to ask her to speak with Gil Thomas and Cassie Barnes about her husband, the news stories, and the accusations. Looking somber—and in fact feeling guilty about a betrayal of trust toward her and his knuckling under to authority—he waited for her answer, adding, “This is not something you have to do.” It was a statement he didn’t believe, for he knew the resourcefulness of Hogan Blackburn’s ego and Blackburn’s need to control. He was even worried about his own job.
Brightly, almost gaily, Julie said, “Lighten up, Stan. They want me to talk to them, no problem.”
Immediately relieved, he said he’d arranged for a preliminary interview that afternoon at two, in one of the small studios, with just Julie, Gil, and Cassie present. And then he added, “You know, they’re friends of ours. Maybe even helpful friends.”
Julie smiled. “That sounds great,” she said. “I’m beginning to think I need friends.”
Gazing at her perfect face, Stan registered yet again the thought that she was beautiful. He had long since given up what he considered the adolescent habit of evaluating and ranking P A U L B A T I S T A
women based on how they looked, on a scale of 1 to 10. Yet now Julie’s beauty struck him, an unqualified 10. And what also struck him was how grateful he felt toward her because she had so gracefully relieved him from the burden that had vexed him ever since his lunch with Hogan Blackburn in the Grill Room.
* * *
By five that same afternoon Stan Wasserman was surprised again by Julie. Gil Thomas and Hogan Blackburn were crowded into his small office. Julie had already left for the day at four, wav-158
ing goodbye cheerily to Stan as she retrieved her small umbrella from under her desk after her two hours with Gil and Cassie in the privacy of the studio.
In Stan’s cramped office, Hogan was speaking. “Your lady is losing it, did you know that?”
“In what way?” Stan asked, surprised, forcing a smile. He recognized that Hogan was intense and angry.
“Let me get directly to the point, with no bullshit. I’ve seen the tape, so I know what happened. Gil and Cassie begin by telling her what they’ve been told, off the record, by the prosecutors about her husband. Gil stresses that he and Cassie don’t believe what they’ve been told, because they begin with the premise that the government is either confused or lying, but the story that’s emerged is this: about three years ago her husband is approached by a Florida businessman named Bill Irwin who claims he is an oil-and-gas venture promoter who wants to establish a ‘presence’
in New York and needs a lawyer here. He says he’s registered with the SEC and has heard a lot about Tom. Tom demurs at first, saying that he doesn’t do that kind of work. But this Irwin is a spellbinder, a regular TV-type preacher. He tells Tom that there’s nothing particularly complicated about that kind of legal work, the big-time corporate lawyers have made a mysterious specialty out of it, you don’t need to be Louis Brandeis to handle it.
“Irwin is a persuasive guy. He flies to New York a couple of times, talks to Tom, Tom reconsiders, and they do two or three D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
deals. Irwin provides Tom with investment partnership agreements that big law firms have put together for him in the past and Tom realizes that the new deals require only a word processor and the ability to change a few words. Simple work, like Irwin says. Cookie-cutter work.
“And lucrative work. Tom not only gets paid big fees for his small efforts but Irwin also has a need to have the one million, the ten million, even the hundred million, that he’s collected from his investors lodged in Tom’s escrow account for a few days or weeks. Tom at the start is concerned with the source of 159
the funds, and Irwin persuades him that the source is his investors, Reagan-Bush Republican types in Arizona, California, Florida. And so the money gets lodged in Tom’s escrow account, stays there briefly, gets sent on, but leaves behind large interest payments and handling charges and ‘legal fees’ for Tom.
Like any other lawyer, Tom simply waits for instructions from his client as to where to wire the funds, and he follows his client’s instructions.”
“You really talked to Julie this way?” Stan’s question was leveled at Gil.
It was Hogan who answered, “Gil’s a little more diplomatic than I am. He did better. But the point that Gil made was that the government believes Tom became just a tad reckless with Mr.
Irwin. And, while the sequence isn’t clear, the charade of the paperwork ended at some point, and Irwin and some of his friends were able to use Tom’s escrow account at will. And Tom became far more cooperative in terms of not checking the source of the funds and in terms of where he would send the funds—
minus the interest, handling charges, and legal fees, of course—
when he received instructions from Irwin.”
“You know, that all sounds pretty primitive to me,” Stan said.
“Tom may not have been the world’s greatest lawyer, but what you’re talking about leaves too clear a paper trail.”
Hogan moved, bracing his back against the door, “Don’t be a wiseass with me, Stan, for once, please. I’m not interested in P A U L B A T I S T A
whether you think the government’s got a plausible theory or not.
Even the government admits to Cassie and Gil that they don’t yet know all the details, not by a long shot. That, after all, is why they wanted the documents that our own good lady was hoarding in her house. To get information, to find leads. Without her sanitizing the papers.” Hogan paused and then spoke more deliberately:
“And that is what we wanted and didn’t get: full, honest information from her.”
Stan, seated at his desk and staring impassively, was in fact afraid of Hogan Blackburn. Because he knew Hogan’s habits, and 160
that Hogan in fact wanted a response, Stan said, “As I told you, what did you expect from her?”
“Expect? Maybe honest answers. After Gil finishes with his summary, Cassie asks, for starters, whether Tom ever talked to her about Irwin. And what does she say?”
“Tell me.” Stan could not and did not conceal the sarcasm in his tone.
“She believes we are missing the point. That the real story here is why the government is concealing the real facts about her husband’s death. She sat there talking like one of those Kennedy-assassination nuts about how the investigators are avoiding all the real leads. She talks about conspiracies. Ask Mr. Steinman and the FBI, she
says, about Mr. Madrigal, about a doorman named Hector who saw her sainted husband on the night he died, about a woman who was running in Central Park with her boyfriend…”
“Again, Hogan, what did you expect her to say?”
“I expected her to have integrity, to answer straightforward questions or tell us, flatly, that she wouldn’t answer them. Not to turn this into a loony-tunes session. I’ve got the tape. Do you want to see it?”
“Did she know she was being taped?”
“Know? Christ, she wanted it that way.”
“No,” Stan said, “I don’t want to see it.”
“You ought to, you really should. She sounds like one of these mind-control, Moonie types, talking steadily about subjects D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
nobody wants to listen to.”
Stan Wasserman felt trapped, physically uncomfortable, and concerned about where the conversation would lead. Quietly he said, “She has been through a lot, you know that.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Sorry if I bore you.”
“Let me tell you what concerns me, more than anything else.
You tell me she’s bright. She’s not bright. And I worry about your judgment. I want people working on my staff who’ve got brains: she might as well be on Sesame Street.” Hogan was shouting.
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Stan checked himself, not wanting to get caught up in the shouting. “Look, Hogan, I think I understand. You want her out.”
“You don’t understand anything, do you?”
There was a genuine look of fear on Stan’s face. “I guess not,”
he said quietly.
“Tell me, we’re old friends. What’s going on between the two of you?”
Stan put his elbow on his desk and spread his long, slender fingers over his forehead. He said, “That’s a pretty despicable question.”
“What did you say?”
“What’s this, a schoolyard, Hogan? You heard me.”
“I’m going to get out of here before I do something I regret.”