Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  “I’m not as unhappy as I seem. In a way, I’ve never felt so alive.

  I see things more clearly now. Mornings, especially clear ones, mean more: I want to be awake to see them. I look at people D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  around me, standing at street corners, self-absorbed, as all people are, and I see them in a way that’s sharper, more realistic, more precise. I think back and I see connections between events I overlooked when they were happening.”

  “Tell me,” Elena said.

  “Take Sy Klein. I did talk to him the afternoon before he was shot, just as the article says. I felt he might know something about Tom’s killing that I didn’t know. I knew he was speaking to me from his boat, off Montauk, a hundred and twenty-five miles away. I should have known at the time—but I didn’t—that people 235

  were eavesdropping on what we said.”

  “I think,” Elena said quietly, “that it goes deeper than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t be sure what I mean. But how, I wonder, did the woman who writes this article know that you talked with that man? Why would she be told that?”

  “That’s what people in her line of work, my line of work, do, push until somebody tells us something, usually those things they believe we want to hear.”

  Kim began to make her way from her bedroom to the kitchen.

  Children speak when they move, they have no stealth. Kim was murmuring “Mommy, Mommy…” Hurried, whispering, Elena leaned forward to Julie and, face to face with her, said, “I love you, I worry about you. I worry that whoever the people are who have been out there are still out there.”

  Julie had no time to answer or to absorb what Elena had said.

  Kim, diminutive and adorable-sounding, was on the other side of the louvre doors, anxious to touch her mother.

  18.

  A purple-and-white-lettered banner was suspended from the two spires over the main entrance to the Church of the Heavenly Rest at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. The banner bore the word “Celebrate.”

  Hutchinson was in a talkative, exuberant mood. He pointed at the banner. “I wonder when the stern old Protestant church started all this bright-life, Moonie stuff? Do you know? When I was growing up, churches were hardwood, chilly, disciplined places.”

  “Jonathan Edwards was a formative influence for you?” Kiyo asked, an inflection of impatience in her voice. For more than half an hour she had been trying to focus him on the conversation she wanted to have and he had cavorted and deflected her, insisting that they leave the hotel and walk the streets and avenues around the Upper East Side.

  “Jonathan Edwards,” he repeated. “How long has it been since somebody, anybody mentioned that name? When I was a sopho-more, I took, of all things, a course on religion in America, and I wrote a long, turgid paper on Jonathan Edwards. I remember how caught up I was in his rhetoric, all that fear, guilt, and salvation language, the imagery, spiders burning, sinful men and women turning into ash in the brick-kilns of God…You must be the only person in my adult life who ever brought up the name.”

  Kiyo answered, “It doesn’t come up that often in Manhattan cocktail conversation.” They walked by the entrance of the D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Engineers’ Gate into Central Park, across Fifth Avenue from the church. People on racing bicycles sped by on the park’s internal roadway. An oversize statue of Fred Lebow, the legendary runner, rose from the nearby shrubbery.

  “I got the classic gentleman’s C on that paper. The experience taught me not to dabble in things, like Jonathan Edwards’s rhetoric, that I was not cut out to handle.”

  She laughed at that comment, conflicted by two thoughts: a desire to stop him so that he could begin to answer the questions she intended to ask and a desire to spend time with him, a reluc-237

  tant pleasure she continued to have in the company of this tall man who was still attractive to her despite his recent accretions of weight and eccentricity.

  Finally, as Hutchinson continued a quick pace uptown on Fifth Avenue on this cold, clear late November morning, after a weekend of wet weather which had finally stripped all the remaining leaves from the trees, Kiyo said, “Enough of the exercise. Let’s stop and talk. I want to find out more about what you were cut out to handle.”

  She saw that he gave her one of those sexually suggestive, droll expressions that a comment like that could elicit. She was grati-fied by the expression but didn’t respond to it.

  They sat in the warming November sunshine on a bench across from the red-brick, collegiate bulk of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, whose leaf-strewn yard was surrounded by a stone-and-iron wall.

  The scene, she thought, had to remind him of the Harvard campus; it certainly reminded her of a lovely, hundred-year-old corner of the Mount Holyoke campus in November, before the snow came.

  She held the tape recorder aloft between them as she asked, all business now, each word distinct so that the sound of their voices would rise above the background noise of car and bus traffic flowing downtown on Fifth Avenue. “Tell me about the time you flew up to New York for legal advice from Perini.”

  “Legal advice? Everybody bought that load of shit from Steinman. Even you. And certainly the judge. When Sorrentino—that P A U L B A T I S T A

  smart Eye-talian fella—asked that question about what lawyers I talked to after I first went in front of the Grand Jury, I thought, shit, how will this turn out? Neil hadn’t prepared me for this one.”

  “Why did you mention Perini’s name?”

  “Hey, I was sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The question was what lawyers had I seen after I went before the Grand Jury. I had seen Tom Perini. He was a lawyer. I had no way of knowing whether Sorrentino was stumbling around, or whether he knew I had seen Perini, and could catch me in a lie if I didn’t mention Perini. So I answered the 238

  question I was asked. Had I seen a lawyer? Yes. Who? Tom Perini.”

  “And then Sorrentino asked what you said to him and what he said to you. I remember that.”

  “And Neil was, as ever, quick, quick, quick. I remember admiring how quick he was, the agile little man. Legal advice, he said, attorney-client communication. And the judge bought it. Now there’s one dumb NAACP lady.”

  Kiyo detested any kind of prejudice, and she winced at this slur and wondered how she still found this effete, snobbish man attractive. She restrained herself. She asked, “Don’t tell me: you hadn’t gone to him for legal advice?”

  “Does the Pope go to Osama bin Laden for confession? I went to Perini because I was, for the first time in my life, in a panic, an absolute panic. Fonseca and one of his old warhorse lawyers from Brooklyn had figured I could finesse this Grand Jury. We weren’t even sure what you people were looking into. You were not even there; it was at least two years ago. Go, Fonseca said, waltz them around, and come back and tell us all about it. In less than ten minutes I wanted to run out of that room. I outsweated Nixon. Clearly Neil knew more about things I was involved in than I knew. He seemed to have a whole picture, much broader than I had.”

  “I saw the logs from the wiretaps. The FBI had been stalking you for a year.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “At that point, I thought they had been stalking me for a lifetime. But to get back to your question. I went to Perini and I told him that the proverbial shit had hit the fan, and I pressed him to burn records, shred paper, sow confusion…”

  “What did he do?”

  “He looked at me as though I had landed from Mars. He said,

  ‘You probably need to find a lawyer.’ Can you beat that? I told him, ‘Wake up, my friend. Listen to what I’m saying: you are in trouble.’ He got this haughty look and said: ‘ You’re in trouble.’ I said, ‘You’re living in a dream world.’”

  239

  “What happened then?”

  “I left his office, flew back to Washington, found a lawyer,
and the rest is history. I began to cooperate. And I have become Neil’s sex slave. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

  “Did you ever talk to Perini again?”

  “I tried to call him once. The day before the first time I went to meet with Neil I wanted to see that one thing was done before I passed into my new sanctified life.”

  “What was that?”

  “I had done my last Arizona deal with Perini about a month before I visited the Grand Jury for the first time. Tom at the time had more than one-hundred million dollars in his escrow account. Mr. Madrigal wanted it transferred. I called Tom to tell him that one of the silent partners in the deal wanted the funds wired to the Caymans. I started to give him the account numbers, and he hung up.”

  “Did the money get transferred?”

  “Who knows? I don’t remember. The next day I crossed over into the twilight zone, and I’ve been a protected person ever since.”

  “And you’ve told Neil all of this?”

  “Except that last. I never wanted him to know that right up until the last minute, even as I was about to renounce my evil ways, I was still fucking around. The groom at the bachelor party.

  Neil is a jealous wife.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “What do you think Perini did with the money?”

  “You don’t understand people and money, do you? He kept it.

  I was the one who got it to him, as far as I knew I was the only one he was dealing with from our side, and he cut me off before I could even read the numbers for the wire transfer to him. Obviously he was going to keep it.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “What do I think happened? I can’t know for sure but, again, since I know the relationship between people and money better than you do, other people wanted to find ways to get the money 240

  back. People kill for money, did you know that? Without thinking about it. No moral dilemmas, no thoughts, no introspection. They didn’t teach me that where I went to school, and they sure as hell didn’t teach you that at Mount Holyoke—I always thought that was a sexy name for a woman’s college—and Perini was probably too dense to understand that. Although in his closing moments, whatever they were, he probably got the picture. ‘Maybe,’ he might have said to himself, ‘I shouldn’t have kept that money.’”

  “Do you have any idea who killed him?”

  “Only guesses, but good ones. The people he took the money from: Madrigal, Irwin, the other money men who were in their group, these are the kinds of men who know how to find the thousands of men born every year who kill other people for money.

  Why do you care about Tom Perini?”

  “Let me tell you why,” Kiyo said. She clicked off the handheld recorder. “Neil assigned me the project of indicting his wife.”

  Hutchinson got that slightly drunk, cocktail-party glitter in his eye.

  “You know, I like Neil. He’s got no patience for the things that are supposed to motivate people in his position, with his kind of power: things like patience, discretion, good judgment. Here’s this woman, with a dead husband; she’s as good-looking, as fetching as any young mother can be. So what do you do, you indict her. Makes sense.”

  “He thinks she’s obstructed justice.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “That’s something. Neil Steinman is justice. Something gets in his way and, mirabile dictu, justice is obstructed. Anyhow, I shouldn’t be so judgmental about Neil. Hell, she could have the money. Perini had no visible friends, no partners, no associates.

  Only his wife. And the money had to go somewhere. If Madrigal and his boys didn’t get it back, then she has it.”

  “It’s quite a nest egg.”

  “You know, Kiyo, you’re not listening to the Socratic lessons I’m giving you. It would be better for her, to the extent life has a value greater than money, if she didn’t have it. Remember what 241

  I told you: people and money. People kill for money.”

  * * *

  A sharp, clear, late-afternoon autumn breeze blew across Central Park as Kiyo and Hutchinson walked east on 93rd Street toward Madison Avenue. She surprised herself by suggesting that they stop at the neat, schoolhouse-red bookstore at the corner of Madison and 93rd Street. In the lucid late afternoon light, the bright front of the store looked inviting. Hutchinson had the collar of his worn herring-bone coat up: the collar rose into the fringe of his blond, disheveled hair and, in her eyes, he looked like a middle-aged college professor, not a man in the federal witness protection program who was likely to spend at least eighteen months in jail before he turned forty.

  He lingered for a long time in the history section of the store’s warm interior. He took down from the shelf three different biographies of Churchill, and she wondered what kinds of ambitions he once had or even still imagined. She slowly walked toward him and stood near him as he placed one of the Churchill biographies back on the shelf.

  “Have you read that?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to buy it for you.”

  “You are?” For once, his voice was unadorned. None of the archness, none of the sarcasm, none of the cynicism, none of the worldliness. “Thank you.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, when he unlocked the door to his small room in the Hotel Wales, the west-facing windows absorbing the late sun and diffusing the light through the room, Hutchinson saw that the red message light of his telephone was on. He dropped the thick, hardcover biography on the bed, and dialed the front desk. McGlynn wanted him to call.

  He had McGlynn’s number memorized. “You called?” he asked.

  “Where you been?”

  “Kiyo took me out,” Hutchinson said. And there was a pause.

  242

  He said, “Kiyo. Ms. Michine?”

  “Tokyo Rose?”

  “You have to learn to respect your superiors, Agent McGlynn.”

  “What the hell were you doing with her?”

  “I was getting debriefed. By now I’ve been debriefed more in my life than I’ve been fucked.”

  “I didn’t know she was detailed to you today.”

  Hutchinson said nothing. He wanted to start reading right away, to absorb again the grand, familiar details of Churchill’s life. But the bizarre protocol of being a government witness was that he could never himself end a conversation.

  “What you talk about?”

  “Tom Perini.”

  “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

  “What? It’s five-thirty.”

  McGlynn hung up: the conversation was over.

  * * *

  Hutchinson was in the bathroom when he heard the key in the hotel room’s cylinder lock. The inner chain lock had been removed by McGlynn when Hutchinson first arrived in this room months earlier: Hutchinson understood then that he had no access to privacy, no space of his own, since McGlynn, Steinman, and others not only had keys to the room but had also removed Hutchinson’s ability to grab thirty seconds or D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  more of privacy by the removal of the inner chain lock. It just wasn’t there.

  “I’m in the bathroom,” he called out.

  “Make it quick.”

  “Sure.”

  “I told you I was coming.”

  “Hey, come on in. I’m only taking a shit.”

  McGlynn did. Hutchinson was still on the toilet, his pants down on the floor at his feet, his hand on the roll of toilet paper.

  Stunned, he looked up at McGlynn when the bathroom door 243

  swung open.

  McGlynn hit the side of Hutchinson’s head with an open, powerful palm. He picked an area just over Hutchinson’s temple and above the hairline so that the bruise he wanted to cause wouldn’t show. Hutchinson fell on his side to the floor, crying. His pants were still around his feet and ankles.

  “Don’t wise-ass with me, you piece of shit. Clean yo
urself up, keep the door open, and come out. Fast. Jesus, you stink.”

  Hutchinson cried. He used the hotel’s facecloths and towels to wipe himself and the smears his own shit had left on the outer surfaces of the toilet and the floor when he fell. Finally, when he belted his pants and stood fully, he looked at himself in the mirror. His face was streaked with tears and he could see the edge of the red bruise near his hairline.

  When he walked into the room, he saw McGlynn standing next to the television. There were two other men in the room. One he recognized as Mr. Perez, a man with a pencil-thin Latin American mustache. The other man, sinewy and tall, wore summer running clothes even though a chill fall wind was blowing outside.

  “Señor Perez,” Hutchinson said. And then, sarcastically, “How is Mr. Madrigal?”

  It was a tight room. The Victorian-style furniture was large. It took no effort at all for the man in running clothes to punch Hutchinson in the center of his chest, completely knocking the breath out of him.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  The thought came to Hutchinson that McGlynn or one of these men was going to kill him. The fear made him weak. He sat on the bed.

  McGlynn’s voice was calm, “Tell me what you told her.”

  And Hutchinson did.

  When he finished, McGlynn said, “I don’t ever want to hear you mention Madrigal’s name to anybody.”

  Hutchinson said, “I won’t.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I won’t.”

  244

  McGlynn, Mr. Perez, and the blond runner left.

  * * *

  Steinman was in the kitchen of his house in Yonkers when the call from McGlynn came. “She’s been seeing Hutchinson.”

  “Who’s been seeing Hutchinson?”

  “Tokyo Rose.”

  “Kiyo?”

  “Right.”

  “When?”

  “Last couple of days.”

  “What for?”

  “To ask him questions.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Hutchinson thought he should tell me.”

  “What kinds of questions?”