by Paul Batista
the same,’ Irwin assured me. He said he would arrange a meeting in New York, the Four Seasons Grill Room, and gave me an insider’s lesson on how to deal with Tom Perini.
“The lesson: don’t be direct with him. By that time Irwin had been dealing with Tom for two years, for other ‘clients’ of Irwin, and they still went through the charade of pretending that Tom was closing real estate transactions in Florida, Arizona, the Bahamas, California, you name it, from his office in New York.
He would park the ‘purchaser’s’ money for two or three weeks in his nontaxable escrow accounts, and then wire-transfer the 226
money to accounts designated by Irwin, who pretended to represent the sellers of all that Sun Belt and Caribbean real estate.
Perini even went through the charade of generating sales documents from his word processor. Apparently he needed something tangible to touch, like a football.
“Another part of the lesson on how to deal with Tom. Never mention Madrigal. I knew who Madrigal was, Irwin knew, Danny had heard of him, but there was no need for Tom to know. He wanted to know very little. He was satisfied with knowing what names to put on his computer-generated documents. That was enough for him. I remember saying to Irwin,
‘Can he be that stupid? What’s that old line about Gerald Ford?
Played football without a helmet too many times?’ And then Irwin made the obvious point, ‘Large portions of that escrow money cling to the walls of Perini’s account when the money transfers. If anything ever surfaced, he thought he would have the phony documents he generated to protect himself. Money is the great suspender of disbelief.’
“And then I made arrangements to fly here to meet him. We went to dinner in the West Village. After the preliminary banter I told him that although I had the title of chief of staff to Fonseca I was essentially an independent consultant for him and other people. I invented a thin story about investors in Arizona and New Mexico real estate, South American, and Arab oil, and I flattered him. Flattery, like money, is the other great solvent of these stupid D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
years. I told him Bill Irwin and the business people he represented were impressed by his grasp of the issues and his ability to provide swift, accurate service.
“To his credit he said very little. He gave the impression of being a busy and efficient lawyer who saw me as just another client, valuable precisely to the extent of my ability to pay his fees. You know the line, the one from Shakespeare: Lawyers’ fingers that straight dream on fees? That was fine with me. I never particularly enjoyed the company of jocks, and Tom had that clean, healthy presence of most quality jocks. Even at the Four 227
Seasons he attracted a lot of attention. He seemed very humble and tolerant about it.
“By the end of that week I gave him the name and location of a piece of real estate in New Mexico—I called it a health spa—and gave him the name of a seller—Canyon II Associates or some phony name interchangeable with the phony names of lots of companies. And the name of a purchaser, equally phony. And by the end of the week he had over five million dollars in an escrow account, wired from a bank in the Cayman Islands, which I told him he was holding as ‘earnest’ money, a nonrefundable down payment.
“Three weeks later I told him that the deal had collapsed and had him wire the funds, less five hundred thousand dollars, to an account at a bank in San Diego. And so it went. Many times. And he had done the same deals many times before with Irwin. Nice work, don’t you think, Kiyo, if you can get it?”
Kiyo heard her overly literate, precise, tight-sounding voice on the recording: “And do you know who owned the money?” Since Hutchinson’s recorded voice sounded precisely like his voice when he spoke, she recognized that this was a faithful reproduction of herself. There were times she wished she had a different voice.
“Who owns money?” Hutchinson laughed, that same quick, phony, aristocratic laugh. “No one owns money. People have temporary or long-term possession of it, and then it moves.
P A U L B A T I S T A
Madrigal, I suppose, owned the right to use and move it. And then Tom had possession of it. I wonder where it is now. His wife probably has it, I’ll bet.”
“How did Madrigal get that money? Was it drugs?”
“I have no idea. It wasn’t my business. And I, you know, shared this with Perini. He had no interest either, it was not his business. His business was handling transactions. Money’s the ultimate chimera—Madrigal’s money could have come from drugs, weapons, loans to real estate ventures, garbage, prostitution, fundamentalist preachers, the Vatican. Whatever it was it 228
was so massive, so huge, there was so much of it, he was willing to share parts of it with people who helped him. I earned my commissions, Perini kept his escrow hold-backs, everybody was happy.”
“Everybody was happy…” Kiyo replayed Hutchinson’s voice three times as he spoke those words. Something about the lighthearted tone struck her. And then she fast-forwarded the tape to another part of the conversation which had also arrested her sharp attention and which she had replayed at least three times.
It began, as she wrote on her notepad, at the tape recorder’s digital reading of 373.
Her voice. “Why didn’t you ever mention this before?”
His voice. “Are you kidding? I told you about this several times.”
“When?”
“How can I remember when? I’ve talked to you people more than I ever talked to my mother.”
“I never heard it.”
“I mentioned it to Neil, to McGlynn. I’m sure you were there.”
“No. Never.”
“All right. May have been one of those times, there were a few, when you were out of the room, or on vacation, or leading whatever other life you lead…”
Her voice, almost coquettish. “I’m all work, there is no other life.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“That’s what they say about you: a piece of work.”
She heard herself reproduced on the tape, a nervous laugh.
Before she could speak, Hutchinson said:
“I told Neil in fact that this business with Perini was more complex than any of the chickenshit stuff involving Fonseca, that deadhead Klein, or any of the other goons he had indicted. That the real case was much more important than the playlet he was performing in the courtroom.”
“When did you tell him?”
“I can’t really remember. Early on. He told me that he already 229
had his case built around Fonseca taking money from Klein and bestowing favors on Klein and the other idiots. He said he wanted a simple case. I said the other train—the train with Madrigal, Irwin, Perini, me—had to be bigger, much bigger. Certainly the money involved was bigger, hugely, immensely bigger. He told me, in that polite way he has, to mind my own fucking business.
He’d get around to it, he said, in his own good time. I was going to be spending lots of time, he said, vindicating and avenging the interests of our wonderful government and the heroic, post-9/11
people of the United States of America.”
Kiyo rewound the tape cassette; it whirred swiftly backward as she wrote, on a yellow slip of paper, the date and Hutchinson’s name. After she popped the tape out of the recorder and secured the yellow paper around it with a rubber band, she stared from her high window at the dark, late-night streets of the West Village.
“Why,” she ultimately wrote in the same small notebook in which she had been sketching out more questions to ask Hutchinson,
“didn’t N.S. tell me that Perini, a lawyer representing a major defendant in a major case, could have been indicted for tax fraud, wire fraud, money-laundering, God knows what else?”
Then, remembering how Sorrentino in cross-examining Hutchinson months before had stumbled onto at least one meeting between Hutchinson and Perini, she also wrote, “Next time start by asking H. why he went to Perini for legal advice. And then probe him, since I now know that th
at could not have been the reason P A U L B A T I S T A
Hutchinson went to Perini after his first Grand Jury appearance.”
That was typical of her. Kiyo needed the packaged symmetry of a place to start and a place to stop.
* * *
The narrow, foul-smelling magazine and cigarette store just south of 90th Street on Madison Avenue was owned by two Pales-tinian brothers who knew Julie by name. She had always been an avid buyer of newspapers, magazines, and tabloid-sized periodicals such as the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary 230
Supplement. Until Tom’s death the brothers expected to see her every Thursday afternoon at four, because she knew that was when the store received its large weekly infusion of new magazines and papers. She would stack them in her daughter’s carriage and then walk the block and a half to her apartment with her little girl. Before Tom’s death they knew that she was a journalist, a reader, and the wife of a very famous man. After his death—which they never mentioned to her—they knew that she bought fewer magazines and that she had the grave, distracted appearance of a woman who had suffered punishing losses, a look they had seen in the faces of many women in Beirut before they left in 1987.
Both brothers were behind the counter on Thursday afternoon when Julie barged into the store and asked, “Did you get New York yet?” It was not like her to ask for anything. For years she had methodically searched out and collected the magazines and newspapers she wanted herself.
“Sure, we must,” Saddam said in English before speaking in Arabic to his brother Jabril, who, with a knife, cut the taut plastic cord that bound a heavy package of new magazines. The cord snapped and Jabril pulled a freshly printed copy of New York from the middle of the stack.
Usually polite, Julie said nothing to either brother and bought nothing else. She had that rapt, urgent look they saw on the faces of well-dressed men quickly, furtively buying hardcore pornography.
Saddam tried to catch her attention as he handed over her D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
change, but she never looked at his face. With her shoulder Julie pushed at the glass door and ran out to Madison Avenue, where, as Saddam saw, she stopped on the sidewalk, stared at the cover, and then riffled through the pages.
On New York’s cover she saw the stylish magazine artwork and the title of the cover story: Cash, Trophies and Murder in the Park. Those words were superimposed over a faint but still distinct photograph of Tom, smiling. Below the headline and Tom’s picture was an image of the Heisman Trophy falling from a pedestal into a basket of cash, mainly hundred-dollar bills. At 231
the bottom of the montage was the name Cassie Barnes, the author of the article.
So intent was the expression on Julie’s face that Saddam, himself picking up a copy of New York, looked at the same cover. He was enough of a reader to know that the article was about the dead husband of the distracted woman he saw immobilized on the sidewalk. He was also enough of a wary, patient observer of life in places like Beirut and Manhattan to see that two men in sport jackets and ties standing across Madison Avenue, beyond the noisy flow of car and bus traffic, were also staring at her. They left when she finally left. And Saddam was enough of a realist to know instinctively that what he had just seen—two men watching a woman and following her—was none of his business.
* * *
Two days earlier Julie had been alerted to the fact that New York was about to carry a long story on Tom, the Fonseca trial, and Tom’s murder. She was also tipped off that Cassie Barnes was the author of the article, that Tom would be described as having been a conduit for passing millions of dollars over the last two years between the United States and Latin America, and that he had been killed because the people he dealt with had become concerned about his loyalty.
“That’s crazy,” Julie said, her voice shaking, to Liz Braun, the woman from Newsweek who had called to explain what she P A U L B A T I S T A
described as the “real” reason Julie was rejected when she applied for work as a copy editor. “Absolutely crazy, Liz, you know that.”
There was no reassurance, no agreement from Liz, a competitive woman with whom Julie had once worked on a newspaper and who had arranged a job interview for her at Newsweek. Liz’s only words in response were, “I just didn’t want you to believe the bullshit they told you when they told you that you were too far from print journalism. That was, in a word, a pretext.”
In the relative quiet on 89th Street, in the late Thursday after-232
noon light of the fall evening, Julie sat on the steps of the small Church of St. Thomas More, installed like a jewel between two large apartment buildings. The stone steps were cool, hard, well-worn: Julie welcomed the feeling of cold austerity and privacy they gave. But despite the unusual comfort of the stone, her mind was racing as she tried to absorb the words, the messages, of the article.
In that encounter with New York’s slick pages and the chatty style of Cassie Barnes’s writing, Julie could absorb very little. She could focus only on a series of pictures of herself, one with Tom (taken on a street sometime before Kim was born) and the other of her alone, obviously taken after Tom’s death. And there were five playing-card-sized pictures of men with Latin names, arrayed as in a hand of poker.
One picture was of Luis Madrigal de Souza. The tag line below the pictures read: “Federal prosecutors believe Perini handled money for all of these South American money men, and that one or more wanted him out of the way.”
A picture of Selig Klein carried the line: “A security hit? Mafia trucking king may have been caught in the crossfire, killed on a guess that he knew too much because of his contacts with Perini.”
And, under Julie’s second, lonely-looking picture: “Prosecutors wonder whether she knows where the money is, or whether she may even have it.”
… Hateful. The word formed in her mind as she looked away D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
from the magazine at the surfaces of the perfect church. These are hateful people, writing words like this… Hateful… Hurtful…She tried to concentrate on something, anything else: what did she remember of Saint Thomas More? Images of a persecuted, steadfast, thoughtful man sped through her mind and then she thought, But that was Becket, Thomas Becket. Or was it Sir Thomas Browne? She had learned these names, now jumbled in her mind, at Wellesley. Why had she ever learned anything? Had she in fact learned anything? Nothing I have ever learned is of any use to me, she thought. I don’t know a thing about how to deal with my life. Experience, living, has taught me nothing 233
useful—no lessons, no preparation, no foresight, nothing…
When Julie reached the apartment, Kim was watching the late afternoon television shows for children—those artificial fantasies constantly projecting lessons of humaneness, sweetness, harmony, and cooperation (what a misleading lesson for life, Julie thought). Elena was starting dinner. Julie quickly kissed Kim, who was absorbed by the program, and closed the French-louvre doors behind her so that she and Elena were alone in the kitchen. Elena, turning from the oven, saw with one look at Julie that another event, unsettling and new, had happened to this woman.
“What?” Elena said. “What is it?”
Julie handed the New York article to Elena and quietly asked her to stop cooking and read it. “Then I want you to tell me what it says. I just can’t read it all myself.”
Elena looked almost bashful. “I read English so slowly, so poorly.”
“You read it well. And I can trust you to tell me what it says.”
Elena did read it, leaving Julie in the kitchen behind the closed, slatted doors. Elena sat in the living room, near the fading autumn light from the large, high windows. She read the article, and when she finished she walked back to the kitchen and told Julie what the article said, as though she were translating from another language into English, as she often did in the immigrant community in which she lived.
P A U L B A T I S T A
When Elena finished, as they sto
od in the kitchen and faced each other, separated by the distance of the refrigerator, the sound of Kim’s program brightly and artificially resonating in another room, Julie quietly asked, “Do you want to leave me?”
Elena’s frank eyes concentrated on Julie. “Is that what you want?”
“No, you know I don’t. I will,” Julie said, articulating this for the first time to anyone, “run out of money. I have less than two hundred thousand dollars from Tom’s life insurance, we had almost no savings, and no one—no one—will hire me. I am unem-234
ployable. With this apartment, food, car fare, health insurance, all the rest, I am spending close to ten thousand dollars each month.
I will run out of money.”
Elena stared at her. “I could take less.”
“I would never let that happen. That’s not why I mentioned this. I mention it because I have to face it.”
“Do you know where the money Tom took is?” Elena’s straightforward asking of the question—a question raised in at least three separate places by the Cassie Barnes article she had just read—came as a relief to Julie because she wanted to answer it.
“I wish I did, I’d be tempted, God knows, to take it, and disappear.” Julie almost laughed. “I never thought, when I was growing up and in school, I never imagined how important money is. I never had it—my father was flashy but broke. I never prepared myself for spending every waking minute, and every sleepless hour, calculating, falling short, worrying. I used to want to believe that other things were more important than money: love, respect, thinking, intangible qualities…Tom seemed to share that with me.
We never talked about money. But I guess Tom must have had a deep need for it. So deep that I was either blind to it or he was so devious, so crafty, that he placed it beyond what I could see.”
Elena said, “You are too unhappy.”