Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Trim, olive-skinned, formal, Kiyo never pretended to enjoy Steinman’s sense of humor. “Do you think he wants to discuss a deal for his client?”

  “No, Kiyo. I think he wants to make me a partner: Steinman

  & Sorrentino, Attorneys-at-Law.”

  “When should we meet him?”

  “Later,” Steinman said. “I want him to think a little more about his problems. Let some hair grow on those problems. Tell him that after the jury quits for the day he can meet me in the fourth-floor conference room at the office. You don’t mind talking to 190

  him, do you? And then arrange with security to have a pass for him.”

  He watched Kiyo as she walked through the courtroom toward the hall. She was all slim elegance—a green dress, gleaming black hair, slim, shapely rear. He remembered how intensely he had wanted to have her eleven months ago when she was assigned to work for him on this case and how much he had come to resent her aloofness, her cool demeanor, her prim, well-spoken eloquence.

  * * *

  It was seven-fifteen when Sorrentino entered the windowless conference room. Because Steinman was a meticulous lawyer, he’d spent half an hour with Kiyo and two of his other chief assistants discussing and planning how they would react to what Steinman was certain would be an overture from Sorrentino to negotiate a deal and a plea before the jury came back with its guilty verdict. Steinman, who had the approach of a pedagogue, encouraged them to talk about various alternatives; and then, just before Sorrentino arrived, said that he would take the position that the two nonnegotiable points would be that the Congressman would have to resign and to plead guilty to three counts, carrying a term of twelve years.

  Sorrentino was alone. He sat on the side of the table opposite Steinman, Kiyo, and the others. He placed his half-glasses on the table’s surface. “I thought it was time we should have a discussion, and I appreciate your arranging this for us.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Kiyo was startled by Steinman: his suit jacket off, his tie undone, he leaned sharply forward and said, “Cut the small talk, Mr. Sorrentino. This isn’t the Congress of Vienna. You wanted to see me. You tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Sorrentino didn’t visibly react to Steinman’s words or his physical thrusting forward. “Julie Perini has asked me for help. She has asked me to represent her.”

  “What?” There was genuine surprise on Steinman’s face.

  “She’s concerned that after all of these months no one has arrested her husband’s killer, that you have taken away her and 191

  her husband’s possessions, and that there are leads in her husband’s killing that nobody is following.”

  “Wait a minute, Jack. We’re in the middle of a criminal trial.

  You ask to see me, I assume it’s about this trial, and as a professional courtesy I agree to see you. About this trial. About your client in this trial.”

  “I am seeing you about this trial. By the way, Neil, who’s Jack?”

  “Hey,” Steinman said, looking abruptly at Kiyo, “help me, but has Mr. Sorrentino here mentioned this trial yet?”

  Sorrentino was speaking steadily. “You have a witness in this trial, your friend Tim Hutchinson. I know you’ve spent a great deal of time with Tim Hutchinson. I also believe you know Tim Hutchinson had a long relationship with a man named Madrigal, some sort of banker, a Mexican. And you know Hutchinson knew Tom Perini.

  And I think you know there is a link between Madrigal and Tom Perini’s murder. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “You are out of your tree.”

  “And I think you’ve gone way over the line, Neil. I think you need to tell me what happened, particularly what Hutchinson told you about Madrigal and Perini. I think that might be information useful to the Congressman and Julie Perini.”

  “You got a lot of fucking nerve, Jack.”

  “I think we ought to have a dialogue about this now. We could have a credible claim that the prosecution has withheld evidence about Hutchinson, about Perini, about Madrigal, that could be P A U L B A T I S T A

  useful to the defense in this case. And to Julie Perini.”

  “You’ve got a problem with me, you go to Judge Feigley.”

  “I may.”

  “She’ll know how to take care of you.” Neil Steinman was shouting.

  “What’s the problem, Neil? Look at you.” There was a skillful, taunting tone in Sorrentino’s voice. “What are you all worked up about?”

  “I’m not worked up about anything, except by what a piece of shit you are.”

  192

  “Now, is that any way to talk to a brother lawyer?”

  “Let me tell you something, Jack. I’m gonna start watching you a lot more carefully. I’ve been good to you. I’ve got a good idea where you get your money from, who pays you, what you do with it. I’ve protected you, and you don’t know it. I’ve got people in this office who could give you so much trouble just by nosing around in your books that you’d have no time left for anything else. You wouldn’t have time to get your dick wet. But I’ve figured, live and let live. I thought you were smart enough to know that. But you’re not smart, you’re dumb.”

  “Neil, I have Italian clients who talk better than you do. And I still think you need to tell me more about Hutchinson, Madrigal, Perini, Klein—”

  “Oh, you represent Klein, too? He was a big fan of yours. Last time I heard his beautiful recorded voice he was talking about having a rocket tucked up your asshole.”

  “Look at you, why so upset?”

  “Pick up your candy-ass glasses and get the fuck out of here. Or I’ll have the Marshals throw you out. And, by the way, have Jerry or whatever the fuck his name is who drives your Continental vacuum the backseat of the limo. There’s coke in the creases.”

  * * *

  As he walked across St. Andrews Plaza in the gathering dark, Sorrentino admitted to himself that he was shaken, for Steinman D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  had the power he claimed to have. But Sorrentino also felt exhilarated. He rarely ever stepped out of the mold in which he had lived for so long. As he slid into the backseat of the Lincoln, which was always meticulously clean, he said: “Jerry, when you drop me off take this to that car wash on First and 102nd and get it cleaned and vacuumed again. Especially the backseat and floor.”

  * * *

  In the wake of Kim’s falling securely asleep Julie spread out on the dining room table copies of the newspaper and magazine arti-193

  cles written about her over the last many weeks, particularly since that vivid Friday when she was fired. The flow of articles was beginning to decline, as she knew it would. In the first ten days she had spent hours in interviews with other journalists, from the free local neighborhood newspapers like Our Town and East Side to the Village Voice. She appeared on the Oprah and Montel Williams shows. She was on an intense mission to provoke as many stories as she could on why the federal government had not only been unable to solve the mystery of her husband’s death but was also concealing the facts, neglecting leads, and turning aside suggestions. And why had the government decided to spread rumors, innuendos, suspicions, and accusations about her husband? Why had they “robbed” his home? And what had they found and taken away, other than his trophies? Where had they put his Heisman Trophy?

  As she stared at the stories, arranged in chronological order from the top left to right on her dining room table, she could see that the articles were becoming shorter and less detailed. Her first accusations captured a great deal of attention. She was a professional journalist and she knew that if she was aggressive enough the stories would follow. A Daily News headline that appeared four days after NBC fired her read: “Gridiron Hero’s Wife Says Feds Cover Up.” She wanted to push, expose, stimulate people to come forward, people who must have known how and why Tom was killed, for she could not believe that it was an act of random violence by P A U L B A T I S
T A

  another runner. Or that Selig Klein’s death was unconnected, unrelated, just the predictable end of the life of a professional hoodlum.

  But no one had come forward. And, as Julie knew would happen, the reporters with whom she had been dealing were losing interest because she could give them nothing more than she was able to provide at the outset. Like all journalists, they moved to the newest daily fodder.

  One of the more recent articles, a small one in the Metro section of the Times, quoted a “spokesman” for the United States Attorney’s Office as saying, “Mrs. Perini has a fevered imagina-194

  tion. This office will not respond to delusional claims.”

  She was starting to be portrayed as a kook—isolated, roaming the city, shuttling from newsroom to newsroom, a woman with one theme. She knew that portrait would continue to emerge unless something more concrete surfaced. In another article, published two days before, NBC said that it would not comment on

  “the barrage of bizarre statements” she had made.

  As she sat quietly at the table, concerned to make as little noise as possible because Kim was now a sensitive sleeper, she wrote in one of her notebooks: I have to confess this to myself. I have to come to terms with the fact that Tom did things about which he never told me and that were wrong by anyone’s standards. I have always been skeptical, pes-simistic, suspicious. But never with Tom. He had no guile, I never knew him to dissemble, there was never any shiftiness, there were no lame excuses, no pretenses, in the years I lived with him.

  Tom seemed to hide nothing. What do I mean? He loved to walk, he was a walker in the city. But never a furtive one. He strode down Madison Avenue, his favorite walk, as though loping down a football field on a victory trot. He was tall, he smiled at everyone, he moved. What was it that Nancy Lichtman said about him? He was smiling while he ran, and runners never smile.

  Yet still I have to face this, and face it steadily: Tom had big secrets about money. I can’t deny that those bank statements show things that I was never aware of. Tom never seemed to care about money, he was not greedy, never a spender, and he was generous. Then what are those bank accounts about? What torments me is that all I know is what people are D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  now saying: that my husband was involved in something bad, was laundering money, was a crook…

  And if any of that is true, and he kept those secrets from me, what else did I not know? The terrible jealousy I used to have as a teenager, long before I knew Tom, comes back now with a vengeance. I hated other girls who talked to boys I was interested in, I spent nights, even into my mid-twenties, obsessed with the negative drain of thinking that men who I thought were close to me were at bars, parties, on dates, or in bed with other women.

  I never experienced that concern with Tom, and therefore I never had that obsession. But I plague myself now with the obvious question: if he in fact had 195

  a secret life about money, then why not about women? He was so famous, so good-looking, that any number of women would have been available to him and could have managed quick affairs, fast pops with him—the kind of involvement that wouldn’t require that he spend a lot of time away, that could be handled in short interludes in the afternoon, so that I would never notice…

  The effect of writing both soothed and exhausted her. Julie reread her words. She was relieved that she had put the words down because she would never have been able to say them to anyone.

  * * *

  And then another thought formed in her mind: over the last several months she had become utterly concentrated on how quickly her world could be invaded. After rereading her notes, changing a few words, she carefully tore the pages she had just written to pieces and flushed the pieces down the toilet. She knew that if anyone found the pages then that would lead to finding the bank statements and the laptop computers she still kept locked in the bin in the storage room in the basement.

  The fever and unquiet in her mind were starting to trace markings on her face. In the bathroom mirror, always harshly lit with fluorescent lights that she and Tom planned to change, she could see a papery, sharp edge of flesh developing near her eyes and the more pronounced lines around her mouth. Sleep, she knew, would help her, but the last few months had murdered sleep. In her insomniac nights she had started reading again, throwing P A U L B A T I S T A

  aside current books and novels, and reading, often aloud, Pascal, Yeats, Spinoza, Shakespeare, her mind fastening on certain lines, such as Macbeth hath murdered sleep. It was already twelve-thirty, and this night, she saw, would be no different.

  She also knew that Lou and Mary rarely slept; three hundred miles away in Lowell, they were bound to be awake. She was concerned about them but they were beyond her ability to help.

  Tom’s death had sent Lou spiraling away. He was still alive, but his life was over. He spoke mainly in the Italian of his childhood now and rarely left the apartment. Mary did the shopping, paid the 196

  bills. Julie made an effort every Sunday morning to call them and to put Kim on the line. Last Sunday’s call had jarred Julie, frightened her. It was not just that Lou seemed, as usual, not to know who Kim was. It was that Mary, sounding ashamed, told Julie that two men had come to their house a week earlier and had asked Mary not to tell Julie that they had visited.

  Mary said, “I feel like I should’ve told you right away.”

  “Who were they, Mom?” Julie asked.

  “They said they were from the FBI. Can you imagine?”

  “Did you get their names?”

  “Only one. An Italian name. Castronovo. The other name was Irish. I didn’t write them down. They showed us their badges.

  They were polite enough, you know, but the more I think about them the more I don’t like it.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They said they were trying to figure out who killed Tommy.”

  “And they asked you not to tell me?”

  “Uh-huh. They asked to see our bank books. They wanted to know how much money we had in the bank. Me, I took the books out, can you believe that? I’m stupid. They asked me whether Tommy had given us any money before he died.”

  “Did you answer them?”

  “I did. I told them no. I told them we didn’t need any money from Tommy. And then I asked them why they wanted to know that, and they said, ‘We just need to follow leads.’ I thought about D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  that after they left. I must be as stupid as they thought I was, answering that.”

  “You’re not stupid, Mom. You were just doing what everybody else would do.”

  “They asked me whether Tommy was giving you lots of money before he died.”

  “They asked you that?”

  “How would I know that, I said. Tommy had his own life. He didn’t tell me what he did. And then they asked me if I ever talked to you now. I said I did. They asked me what you talked 197

  about. I told them ‘her kid.’ They asked me whether you made any trips before Tommy died. How would I know, I said. Were you planning to move? Did you give me any of Tommy’s things, his papers? His computers? I started to cry. Lou just sat there staring at them, never said nothing.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  “When they left Lou sat there for a long time and asked me who they were. Can you believe that? He’d been there all the time. He had stared at their badges, he looked impressed by the badges.”

  “I know how hard it is.”

  “Julie, what’s going on? Do you know?”

  “No. It’ll be all right.”

  “Take care.”

  “Take care, Mom.”

  * * *

  Judge Feigley adjusted her reading glasses as she faced the semicircle of lawyers arrayed just below her bench.

  “Let the record reflect,” she said formally but not into the microphone, concentrating on the court stenographer and lawyers around her, “that all counsel are present and that the jury has just passed a note to me which I
will have marked as the court’s exhibit number seven. It reads: ‘We haven’t been able to reach a verdict because we have a juror who has an attitude that makes it impossible.’’’

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Judge Feigley looked at them over her reading glasses. “Does anyone want me to read that again? No one? All right, let me give it to the reporter to mark.” She waited. No one spoke as the stenographer put a small yellow sticker on the note, penned in the date and exhibit number, and then resumed his position with his fingers poised over the machine, like a pianist waiting for the start of the next movement. When she was certain the stenographer was ready, Judge Feigley said:

  “Now, it’s late in the day, but let me tell you what I intend to do.

  I want to meet with the jurors as a group in the jury room and get 198

  to the bottom of this. I intend to have all of you who want to be there in there with me. I don’t want this done in open court. Whatever the problem is that we have, I don’t think it’s going to be fixed if it’s aired with all of those other people in the courtroom, looking and listening. Do any of you have a problem with what I propose to do?”

  “Your Honor,” Sorrentino began.

  “Ah yes, Mr. Sorrentino…”

  At various points during the trial Sorrentino had attempted, by turns, to charm her and intimidate her. Now he smiled and wrapped his voice in a quiet, sibilant, almost flirtatious tone. “My only comment, Judge, is that I think the defendants should be present, too, as observers.”

  Judge Feigley tilted her massive head at Neil Steinman, her expressive face asking for his response. “No, Judge, the room will be too crowded,” Steinman said. “The jurors might feel intimidated, might not be as candid as they should be…”

  “I agree with that. Mr. Sorrentino, your request is denied.”

  “Judge,” Sorrentino said, flaring, dropping his smoother approach, “my client has a constitutional right to be present.”

  “I doubt that, Mr. Sorrentino. This is not an adversarial stage in the trial. All we want to do is find out what the problem seems to be.