Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  For months Kiyo had been clear in her own mind that she didn’t hate Neil Steinman. Hate was an emotion she simply and 217

  definitively didn’t want to have or experience. But she did resent him. No one, in her experience, had ever acted as badly—and badly on such a routine basis—as Steinman. He was imperious, rude, demanding, and insulting. In the early months of the year in which she had worked for him, she tried to excuse the way he acted: she told herself and others that he was a perfectionist, a workaholic, a man driven to succeed, a dedicated public servant who could have earned three times as much if he worked for a private law firm, and also a man who had to contend with other burdens, such as a seven-year-old child with cerebral palsy who was confined to a wheelchair.

  But ultimately, the excuses for the way he acted became mean-ingless to her. He was a harlot high and low, she wrote in an email to a friend. What she resented most about him was the fact that he represented the first real setback in her life. She had been carried through grammar school and high school by that succession of clear-eyed Protestant women who wanted her to succeed. At Mount Holyoke, the professors were predominantly men, but men of a benign nature: they also wanted her to succeed. Chicago had been somewhat different. Among the rancorous intellects on the faculty she never felt as supported as she had in high school and college, but the institution was essentially well-intentioned.

  And the fact that she was a highly literate, attractive Asian-American woman had made her extremely desirable to the large law firms that flocked to the University of Chicago to hire law P A U L B A T I S T A

  students each year. Kiyo had selected a ninety-five-year-old, blue-blood law firm on Chase Manhattan Plaza, a block from Wall Street, as the place to begin her legal career; and the five years she had spent there were passed in an atmosphere which was almost as supportive and benign as her years at high school and Mount Holyoke.

  When she accepted a job as an assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office she saw it as another plateau of prestige in her education and career, a part of the chain that started with quality schools in Northampton, Mount Holyoke, Chicago, the firm, and now the 218

  U.S. Attorney’s office in the most prestigious district in the Justice Department. After her three- or four-year stint with the government, she expected that she would go back to the firm, to a partnership there, and then, by her late thirties, possibly a federal judgeship. (A real possibility, she felt, since the powers that, only twenty years ago, put mainly white men on the federal court were now filling that same court with comparatively young women, African Americans, a lesbian former law professor, two Hispanics. Could a Japanese-American woman be far behind?) But Steinman had interrupted, and interrupted badly, that sequence. Almost from the start he seemed prepared to trivialize, tyrannize, and demean her. He criticized and endlessly revised her writing; he castigated her for not pushing judges hard enough; and he told her that she tried too frequently to be well-liked by defense lawyers. The grades he was giving her, she knew, were low to mediocre. He seemed to have a greater interest in seeing her fail than succeed. And, because he was spreading to other lawyers in the office his view of Kiyo as a candy-ass, she recognized that he had in effect queered this phase of her career.

  Privately and decisively, Kiyo decided that she was going to leave the office, even if her departure would be premature. Her contacts back at the white-shoe firm she had left had assured her that she would be welcomed back, either there or at a similar firm; and she knew that terminating this interlude quickly rather than drawing it out for another few years might still preserve her ability D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  to slip back into the more civilized, genteel atmosphere she preferred, although she might not be able to take credit for yet another successful phase of her life. She would deal with that setback.

  In fact, it was about two months before the trial ended that she reached her private resolution to leave. For weeks she was devoted to the idea that she would release herself when the trial closed. But when it ended, in that spectacular, indecisive collapse, she reached a new conclusion: she would leave the office but not until she had done what needed to be done to deal with the nervous, wracked questions Julie Perini had been asking in the press: 219

  Why was Tom Perini dead? What did Steinman know about why Tom Perini was killed? Her orderly mind balked at that last question, but her experience with Steinman, her endless exposure to his relentless hysteria and vulgarity, gave her a sense that Julie Perini’s tormented, off-the-wall-sounding questions had some bizarre, random point.

  The half hour Kiyo spent in a locked conference room with Steinman and others shortly after Judge Feigley declared the mistrial had only reinforced her resolve. Seated at the head of a conference table, Steinman had quietly, even politely, started the meeting by asking Agent McGlynn to lock the door. He then stared at the five people in the room—the people who had been his team through all the long months of preparation and trial—and made the awkward, losing-coach comment that litigation was like a game, and the big break of this game had gone against this team. He then said, calmly, that he was going to call a news conference later that afternoon and read a statement he had already started to draft about the certainty of a retrial on the same charges or a new, expanded indictment of the same defendants and others. Leaning against a wall, Kiyo was certain that the rational start Steinman had made wouldn’t continue.

  She was right. “Next time around,” she heard him say, the tempo of his voice accelerating, “this is all going to be handled differently. We were too polite, too nice. We never really scared these fuckers. We didn’t use what we have. I listened to too many of you; P A U L B A T I S T A

  I ignored my instincts. I never really made Sorrentino, Fonseca, the rest of those shits, worry. Really worry. But not next time.”

  Steinman bent forward, his thin body forming a rigid, slanting line from the edge of the seat to the edge of the table, a characteristic pose. “Next time we do it differently. I want a new indictment with each of these characters in it. And others. We work the Grand Jury more effectively: everyone who ever kissed Danny Fonseca will get a subpoena, we subpoena every fucking lawyer’s bank records, we claim that they were and are being paid with tainted money. And, when the new indictment gets unveiled, no waltzing.

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  We go to Dora right away and we get her to sign a restraining order, a big order, one that tells these guys that they can’t spend a dime to buy coffee because their money belongs to Uncle Sam. Let them take it to the Court of Appeals: that will take weeks and in the meantime they get worried. That’s the strategy. Take no prisoners.”

  Arms folded, Kiyo continued to lean her left shoulder against the wall. When Steinman pointed at her she did not react, did not allow her expression to alter. Her blood rushed.

  He said, “I’ll want you to sit with me tomorrow. We need to divide up assignments. I’ll think about it overnight. One thing I do know, and I know it now, I’ll want a separate Grand Jury to pony up charges against Julie Perini. Obstruction of justice, defrauding the United States of funds, whatever. I want you to make sure she comes crawling in here to tell us what she knows about her husband, his sources of money, who he knew, what he knew, when he knew it, where his money is…”

  When he saw that Kiyo would have no discernible reaction to him, Steinman swung his attention to the other lawyers at the table and to McGlynn, who sat with folded legs and the deliberately disinterested expression his face always conveyed. “Next time around, I don’t want to fuck with a trial. I want these fuckers’ friends so harried they come in and beg to help us. I want guilty pleas from these fuckers, not trials. I don’t want to have to deal again with some fat zero who’s fucking his sister.”

  Kiyo moved away from the wall, walked to the door, turned D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  the lock, stepped out of the room without a word, and pulled the door closed behind her. She remembered where she had left the notes with Tim Hutchinson
’s telephone number, new name, and temporary address. She would start with Hutchinson.

  * * *

  For Kiyo, Hutchinson was easy to find. During the last seven months he had been living under the name Rick Hodges in hotel rooms in New York, first at the Waldorf at two hundred dollars a night and, for the last three months, for fifty dollars less a night, 221

  at the Wales, a quiet, tasteful, British-style hotel at 92nd and Madison, only a few blocks from Julie Perini’s apartment. His living expenses were paid by the Department of Justice. He received a stipend of nine hundred dollars a month from the same source.

  Steinman had ordered him to stay in New York, readily accessible at any time, in the event Steinman needed him as a rebuttal witness to respond to the defense case. For all these months only Kiyo, Steinman, and McGlynn had his telephone number and knew where to find him.

  Over time, Kiyo had been fascinated and repelled by Hutchinson. In the long months before the trial she spent hours with Hutchinson, always in the presence of Steinman, debriefing him and fashioning the testimony he would provide against Congressman Fonseca. At first Hutchinson struck her as attractive and beguiling: he was slightly over six feet tall, sandy haired, blue-eyed, Harvard-educated, the kind of ideal WASP that her upbringing had taught her was the most desirable type America could offer. In college she had always tried to date boys with that prep-school demeanor, the boys at Amherst and Williams, and she had never been intensely disappointed by any of them. They were all responsible people, as she thought of them.

  In his late thirties, Hutchinson still bore that demeanor, and he tried to maintain it at first despite the fact that Neil Steinman—dark, urgent, intense, the product of Brooklyn Law—had him under his control.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  The cooperation agreement Hutchinson had signed before these long, closed sessions began dictated that Hutchinson, who had agreed to plead guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of tax evasion, would be sentenced only after the prosecution of Fonseca was concluded and that his sentence would depend on the prosecutor’s recommendation to the sentencing judge—a recommendation that Steinman was free to make based exclusively on his level of satisfaction with the quality and usefulness of Hutchinson’s cooperation and trial testimony. Hutchinson hoped he would be put on probation. He dreaded jail and the vision of what might hap-222

  pen to him there. He was not physically strong. Once he overheard McGlynn say about him, “He’s as weak as a puppy.”

  Kiyo’s favorable perception of Hutchinson in those long early sessions changed rapidly, as it had to. Steinman hammered away quickly at the facade of noblesse oblige Hutchinson brought to the early sessions. Hutchinson had tried to orchestrate these debriefings as though they were a meeting of a bank executive committee.

  Steinman had no tolerance for that. Kiyo witnessed the fragility of Hutchinson’s facade and his collapse from the confident WASP to a nervous, twitching, distracted felon (“You are a convicted felon, you know that, don’t you?” Steinman once screamed at him), increasingly anxious to follow Steinman’s lead, to please Steinman.

  Over the seven months of Hutchinson’s seclusion, Kiyo also witnessed him take on the physical characteristics of an eccentric recluse: his blond hair grew long even as the crown of his head and the front hairline became balder, blonder, so fine as to be infantile. Essentially confined to his room, he had become heavier and, as his aristocratic bearing broke down, with the increased weight he looked shorter. His eyes were furtive, fast-moving. He ate and drank too much.

  During the final long weeks of the trial, while the possibility of calling Hutchinson again as a rebuttal witness drew closer, Steinman would periodically order McGlynn to drive Hutchinson downtown from the Upper East Side for what Steinman called

  “getting-to-know-you-again sessions.” These meetings took place D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  early in the evening, with Hutchinson, head bowed and hands covering his face, escorted into the building by McGlynn and at least one other agent. Taking in Hutchinson’s haggard look, Steinman once said to Kiyo, in Hutchinson’s presence, “This fucking guy is looking more like Howard Hughes every day.” And then he said to Hutchinson, who had no visible reaction, “If you get called again, I want you cleaned up, alert, and smart. Just as you were the first day you walked into Harvard Yard.”

  As she watched Hutchinson, who did not react to Steinman’s words, she felt contempt and pity for him. What can it be like, she 223

  wondered, having your life—your one life—so beset by obvious chaos (scorn, bankruptcy, divorce, the threat of imprisonment, isolation, loneliness) that you reach a point at which you stand wall-eyed in a room as a man like Neil Steinman calls you a piece of shit?

  * * *

  As soon as Kiyo entered the surprisingly tidy, small room that Hutchinson occupied at the Hotel Wales, she registered that this was the first time she had ever been alone with him. Always, Steinman and McGlynn had been with her, Steinman orchestrating and running the session, Kiyo listening, rarely commenting, occasionally taking notes, McGlynn in the background, bored, smug, and distracted. As she now passed by Hutchinson into the Victorian-style room, he waited at the door and continued to hold it open, expecting others to follow.

  “Today it’s only me,” she said.

  Hutchinson shrugged as he closed the door, a bemused smile on his face. He sat on a chair next to a varnished, pseudo-Victorian table in the middle of the room, folded his hands, and waited. She sat opposite him and put a handheld, pocket-size tape recorder on the empty surface of the table.

  “Is this a new toy?” he asked. In the past no tape recorder had ever been used when he met with Steinman, Kiyo, and McGlynn.

  “Not really,” she responded. “I just don’t feel like taking notes today.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Where’s our little Jewish friend?” Over the months Hutchinson had alternated between a dead-eyed demeanor, barely speaking and then only by rote, to a kind of spellbinding verbosity, which Steinman always cut off. When he lapsed into that wandering, talkative attitude, Hutchinson peppered his monologue with tart, abrupt questions, like this one.

  “You mean Neil?”

  “No, I mean McGlynn.”

  “Neil’s downtown. He has a couple of witnesses in front of the Grand Jury.”

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  “He must be charming the pants off them. If they’re wearing pants.”

  “Neil doesn’t rely much on charm.”

  “Really, did you notice that, too?”

  She touched the off switch of the small device. It made a loud click, almost like a weapon, totally out of proportion to its size.

  “What’s the matter,” Hutchinson asked, “are you afraid Neil will get mad at us if he hears this?”

  “No, I just don’t want to waste tape.”

  “My, are we going to be here that long?”

  “A little while. There are some things I want to cover.”

  “Go ahead. I’ve come to love these sessions, you know.” He laughed, a falsely urbane chuckle that made her uneasy, curious.

  Was he gay? she wondered. “The more I tell the same stories the more I believe them.”

  “Today I want to cover a few different things,” she said.

  “Ah, some variety.”

  “Today I want to talk about you and Tom Perini.”

  “Dear Lordy,” he rolled his eyes and lifted his hands, palms out, a deliberate effeminate gesture. “I was beginning to think you would never ask.”

  Hutchinson wanted to talk.

  * * *

  Later that night, in her apartment, Kiyo replayed the six tapes D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  several times; she was fascinated each time by what she heard. As the tapes revealed, Hutchinson was in one of his spellbinder moods, and she had refrained from interrupting his flow of words with questions. Replaying the tapes, she made notes of questions she would ask later as she listened again a
nd again to the key segments of Hutchinson’s monologue.

  His taped voice said, “I met Perini three or four years ago. By that time I had been taking cash from Bill Irwin to Fonseca for more than a year. It was small stuff, a thousand, twelve hundred dollars, once every three or four weeks. It was easy. Irwin and I’d 225

  schedule a racquetball game at the Harvard Club in Washington.

  We would meet in the locker room, change into our sweats and, carrying our gym bags, go to the racquetball court. Why racquetball? Unlike a squash court, most of which have those little rectangular windows in the door and open galleries on top, a racquetball court is completely closed, because you use all of the walls, the floor, and the ceilings. It’s invisible to the outside world.

  There isn’t even a peephole. You close the door and have utter privacy. At some point Irwin would make the switch of cash from his gym bag to mine while we recovered from a point. He played well. We were two prep-school boys who had learned to play well. He went to Exeter. I went to Groton.

  “But ultimately the numbers got too big to handle in cash, because the more Fonseca got the more he wanted, and the fun on the racquetball court had to end. Irwin told me he had developed a special relationship with a lawyer in New York who was

  ‘broad-gauged’ about what a lawyer should be willing to do for a client. He said that in a serious tone. ‘Broad-gauged.’ Irwin was one of these people who assumed that his prerogatives in life were shared by people exactly like him who knew how to deal in money.

  “When he told me this broad-gauged lawyer was Tom Perini I did a mental double-take. I was never a football fan—it’s a stupid game—but the Tom Perini I knew about had been one of the big college names in the country when I was in high school. ‘One and P A U L B A T I S T A