by Paul Batista
“About Perini.”
“Anything else?”
“He told her about Madrigal.”
“He did what?”
“He told her about Madrigal.”
“What did he say?”
“That Perini was on the take from Madrigal, from Irwin. He’s an honest boy. He told her everything he knows.”
Neil Steinman paused. In that pause he gazed into the next D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
room, where his frail, immobilized daughter sat in a small wheelchair. She was alone; she was hopeless. Most of her hair was gone. “Don’t you speak to Kiyo, I’ll talk to her.”
“Good,” McGlynn said. “Hutchinson won’t be seeing her again.”
* * *
As Congressman Danny Fonseca sat in a blue suit on the black sofa in Sorrentino’s office, the late afternoon light, autumn light, enveloped him. It was November: outside the high office win-245
dows wisps of cold clouds caught the light as the sun passed down to the west over the New Jersey palisades. In the soft light the Congressman looked, Sorrentino thought, almost beatified, but he had in fact become a pain in the ass.
“Did you know this judge, Dick Howard?” Fonseca asked.
“No, never heard about him.”
“He was an old friend of mine. I saw him two weeks ago. He’d just finished up thirty-six fucking months in some federal jail in Indiana somewhere. You know who was there with him?
Schvartzes and spics. Drug dealers. Mexicans. Nicaraguans. Arabs.
The federal prisons aren’t what they were ten years ago. No more tennis courts.”
“Danny, Danny, those are the laws you voted for when Reagan and the Bushes ran things. Remember? Get tough on criminals.”
“I never voted for that shit.”
“But you must have known what was coming.”
Fonseca smiled, his silver hair and false teeth momentarily radiant. Then he caught himself, and he said, “I don’t want to go there.”
Sorrentino couldn’t count the times he had talked with the Congressman about plea bargaining, cooperating, compromising.
During the months leading to the trial and all the months of the trial itself, all his efforts to talk about a compromise ended with one irreducible fact of life the Congressman could never accept: Steinman insisted that Fonseca not only plead guilty to at least two serious felony counts of the thirty counts on which he had P A U L B A T I S T A
been indicted but that he cooperate in the prosecution of his codefendants, including Sy Klein and others. Repeatedly, the Congressman had said, “I never heard of any fucking deal like that. Is that a deal?”
“It’s not a deal, Danny,” Sorrentino would say. “You’re not in the hallways of Congress anymore. It’s an ultimatum, it’s drop-dead stuff.”
“You tell the fucker to go drop dead, I’m gonna go over his head, I’ve still got friends.”
“Hey, Danny, if you can go over his head, go. I’m just a sim-246
ple country lawyer. All I know how to do is try cases, not fix them.”
Nothing that the Congressman had done had derailed the trial or the onset of the retrial or resulted in any better offer. But Danny Fonseca had deal-making in his veins, the same way a heroin user has heroin in his system: he was addicted to it. “Don’t you think, Vinnie, that you can get a better deal for me now before this retrial?”
“I don’t know, Danny, it’s complicated. On the one side, they’d like to avoid another long trial. But there’s another side, as always. They’ve invested a lot of prestige and time in trying to convict you, they got so close to it that it was only because of one eccentric fat man that you’re still walking, and they can’t leave the arena without you on their shield.”
“What does that mean?”
“The same as always. They will want you to plead guilty and cooperate.”
“Cooperate? What the fuck does that mean?”
“Neil and his friends are in the business of making cases and getting convictions, just like Nathan’s is in the business of making and selling hot dogs. If you can lead them to somebody else, preferably somebody higher in the food chain, then your value increases and the better your deal can get.”
“Higher in the food chain? What do they want me to do, tell stories about Hillary Clinton?”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“That might help.”
“Vinnie, I really don’t know nothing about anybody except me.
I’m the big enchilada. What am I gonna do, cooperate against me?”
Sorrentino was amused as he stared at the dapper Congressman seated in the serene light, for there was a certain level, Sorrentino knew, at which all of his clients thought he was a fool. He asked,
“Why don’t you help them make a case against Mr. Madrigal, just to toss out an example for you?”
So unchanged was the expression on Fonseca’s face that Sorrentino thought his gambit might have been completely off the 247
mark, that the Congressman had never heard the name in his life.
Then Fonseca said, “How do you know I know anything about him?” There was anger in his voice.
“Kate Stark.”
“Are you still seeing her?”
“No.”
“Good. You can save yourself a lot of diseases that way.”
“What about Madrigal?”
“Look, Vinnie, he lives in another country. Bin Laden is more likely to visit here than he is.”
“But what about the people around him? He has to have contacts here, people who work for him. Maybe you can make a case against them?”
“Do you know how old I am?”
“Seventy. Seventy-three.”
“About right. And I want to live to be ninety-eight, preferably without spending a day in jail. If I did what you’re suggesting I’d live another six or seven hours.”
“Nobody’s that powerful, Danny.”
“You could be right, I could be wrong, but it’s not your dick that’s gonna be on the cutting board.”
“There’s the witness protection program.”
“Sure, I could become a retired grocer in Kansas, and get a plastic surgery job that makes me look like that guy on TV for Wendy’s, Bob something-or-other.”
P A U L B A T I S T A
Sorrentino’s smile hid his exasperation. He had now spent more than an hour with the Congressman, in this waning light on a day when Sorrentino had new clients to see, and he had made no progress toward persuading Fonseca that he should think in terms of pleading guilty and resigning his office—for that was Sorrentino’s secret agenda for his client. Sorrentino, moreover, had not been able to penetrate the Congressman’s deft parrying of any discussion about paying any part of Sorrentino’s unpaid legal bill, which was now more than half a million dollars.
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“Danny,” Vincent Sorrentino said, “I don’t live your life, I don’t know who or what you know, but you must know by now the kinds of things the Government is interested in prosecuting people for.
That’s why I brought up Madrigal. If not him, then maybe you know something or someone else. Maybe, if you can give up something or somebody important, I can approach Steinman and work out a deal for you, have you plead guilty to a misdemeanor, you resign, maybe only a couple of months in jail.”
“Sure, Vinnie, I’m always interested in a deal.”
“But you’ve got to give me something to work with. Otherwise, we’ll be back on trial in two months, and, you know what, Danny, I can’t go through that again, not without getting paid the money I’m owed plus at least another five-hundred thousand.”
Fonseca’s face looked as angry as a good-natured, tanned face could look. He was hearing what he didn’t want to hear—Sorrentino again asking for money—and he said, “I could talk, Vinnie, about Tom Perini.”
Sorrentino looked out the window. He could see in the beautiful distance the yellow and yellow-red leaves of Central Park.
> “They don’t want to hear about Tom Perini. He’s dead.”
“Well, I could talk to them about his wife.”
Julie, Sorrentino thought. Julie? “I don’t want to hear about her.”
“Why?”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“There is no way I could arrange a deal for you that would turn on your giving her up.”
“Why so?”
“That’s really my business, Danny.”
249
19.
The restaurant where Julie ate with Sorrentino was gorgeous, close, and warm. Outside the old windows overlooking the corner of Madison Avenue and 92nd Street she could see the cold November wind drive gusts of leaves back and forth through the light from the streetlamps.
“She said she got my number from Nancy Lichtman, a woman I saw many months ago. She was the one who, with her boyfriend, saw Tom running just before it happened. I never heard another word from Nancy, or about her, until Kiyo called me yesterday. I had a strange feeling that Nancy, who I felt was a warm person, could become a friend of mine. I never had any special ability to attract or keep friends, and now I feel like Scar-let Sister Mary.”
Sorrentino thought the obvious thing for him to say was that he was her friend, but he didn’t like saying obvious things unless he was in court, on television, or in some other public setting.
Instead, he said, “It wouldn’t be unusual for Nancy to have been told the FBI felt she shouldn’t speak to you. And it wouldn’t be that unusual for Nancy to have passed your home telephone number to Kiyo. People tend to do what they’re asked to do, particularly if they’re called by the U.S. Attorney’s Office or the FBI.”
“I did leave my number with Nancy, because I really wanted her to—what?—help me and befriend me.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Sorrentino searched her face for some feature or detail that was less than perfect, for something in the structure of that face as a whole that was not in balance. Everything was. He stared down at that perfect face each time he made love to her. Perfect, too, was her voice: none of the fast New York staccato he had heard all his life, from men and women, none of that garment-center inflection of New York business-speak, and none of that younger-woman sentence structure in which the end of each declarative sentence had the inflection of an upward-rising question. She spoke slowly, distinction in each word.
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“What did Kiyo say?” he asked.
“That she wanted to see me.”
“And what else?”
“That there would be nothing official about our talk. She thought, she said, there might be a way she could help me.”
“I don’t have to tell you how unusual that is.”
“I know.” She smiled. “What isn’t in my life?”
“Me.”
The waiter, a vivid actor-type, cleared the appetizer plates, and Sorrentino poured more wine into Julie’s bowl-like glass; the red liquid had at its core a reflected spear of light from the tall candle on the table. Sorrentino drank only water.
“She also said she’s talked a great deal with Hutchinson lately.
That Hutchinson claims to have known Tom well.”
“Julie, I could be wrong, but I think you should stay away from her. How did you leave it with her?”
“That I’d have to think about it. I said I had no reason to trust her.”
A white-haired man approached Sorrentino and touched his shoulder. Sorrentino recognized him and stood, graceful and assured in his movements. Julie smiled without rising, her face turned upward. Sorrentino introduced him—a name that didn’t register with Julie—and said, “This is Julie Perini.” That registered.
The man’s look was one of sudden surprise, even awe.
Julie thought ruefully: I’m a celebrity.
P A U L B A T I S T A
* * *
After they finished dinner they crossed Madison Avenue in the cold air and walked to Julie’s apartment. Elena was reading, Kim had just fallen asleep, and Sorrentino was already familiar enough with the apartment’s rooms, this space, to know the closet in which to hang his overcoat. Elena swiftly slipped her book into her knapsack, told Julie that Kim had fallen asleep without any fuss, and said good-night, calling him “Mr. Sorrento.” She had a long subway trip to Brooklyn on a cold night ahead of her.
Julie brewed tea for them, and they sat for a long time—forty-252
five minutes, an hour, even longer?—on the sofa in the living room. The radio played classical music: the nighttime announcer’s austere, quiet voice said it was the music of Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki. In time Julie was leaning against his chest in the warm room. “I want you to stay again tonight.”
“I think I can manage that.”
* * *
Sorrentino left early in the morning before Elena arrived or Kim woke. Julie drank coffee and, in her bathrobe, looked down at a steep angle from her living room windows to the street. She saw him, far below, emerge from under the green awning at the building’s entrance and slip into a taxi. He was agile.
And he was now her lover, she thought. She had been married to Tom for ten years and in that time had no lovers other than Tom.
Not even a man she had kissed even casually, not a man with whom she had flirted, not a man she’d allowed to touch her hand, or her elbow, or her shoulder, for anything more than a chaste second.
Over the past many months she had wondered when she would have another lover—for she knew it had to happen and she wanted it to happen—or who that lover would be, or what would happen.
Now she had answers. Vincent Sorrentino was a warm, adept lover, different from Tom. Her husband was an athlete. He was always careful and considerate of her but there was a level at which he was absorbed in his own performance. Sorrentino didn’t D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
sweat as much, didn’t exert himself as much, but he watched her, gazed at her, appeared to want to understand what was happening to her. His body was well-constructed, it was slim, and it wasn’t muscular. Her husband had been muscular, even bulky. After listening to be sure Kim was still asleep, Julie parted the front of her bathrobe and, as she thought about the two times Vincent Sorrentino had made love to her during the night, she stroked the beautifully aroused swell of her clitoris.
* * *
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Vincent Sorrentino was a teenager in the fifties and early sixties; he came of age in an era when young people had crushes.
Instinctively he had despised that word and never used it. But privately he knew what it meant—not being able to take your mind off a girl who attracted you. You walked around all day thinking about her, and when you woke up at night you thought about her and couldn’t fall back to sleep. You went places—school rooms, street corners, coffee shops, basketball games—hoping to see her there and to have her see you. Even decades later, he could remember the names of the girls he had crushes on: Angela Valenti, Francine Augemma, Mary Villani.
And now, as he made his way through the beautiful streets of early-morning Manhattan and charted his course through the day, he knew he had a complete crush on Julie Perini.
* * *
The subway station at Lexington Avenue and 86th Street was cold for an early December afternoon. There was freezing rain outside and that rain had also seeped underground to drench the station platform. Kiyo Michine, wearing a trim, tan raincoat that was too light for this weather, was chilled to her core. She often felt there was something about her natural body chemistry that not even all those cold winters in western Massachusetts during her childhood and college years at Mount Holyoke, or the law school years in Chicago, had ever conditioned her to live comfortably in dismal northern P A U L B A T I S T A
weather like this. In a few months, she thought, she would take her talents and her life to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Miami.
The downtown number 6 train was running sporadically. In her impatient effort to keep warm, she moved arou
nd the platform, buying a copy of The New Yorker at the underground news-stand, sitting briefly on a bench to glance at the magazine’s pen-and-ink cartoons, pacing from the far southern end of the platform to the northern end, where she stopped and decided to stand stoically. She breathed deeply, regularly. She wanted to manage her impatience, she wanted to see the headlights of the 254
subterranean train as it finally approached.
Kiyo still stood stoically when, at last, the long-delayed train raced toward the station. She knew that in fifteen seconds she would be inside the warm subway car for the trip downtown.
Then, even though it would still be early afternoon, she was going home to her wonderful apartment at 2 Horatio Street to write down her notes about her fascinating, hours-long, just-finished talk with Julie Perini.
The train’s engineer was a friendly-looking, gray-haired black man. She was so close to the train and to him as the train screeched into the station that she could see his features. So fascinated was she by the intent, confident expression on his face as the train eased toward its stopping point that she felt, but couldn’t react to, the immensely powerful hands that threw her onto the tracks just in front of the wheels of the first car.
Those wheels crushed her.
The blond man who had picked her up and thrown her as if she were a doll quickly walked through a nearby rusted metal door with the words “Service—Do Not Enter,” climbed an empty flight of service stairs, emerged onto 87th Street, and began a leisurely jog to Central Park.
* * *
By four in the afternoon on the day Kiyo Michine was killed, two New York City detectives were in the lobby of Julie’s building.
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
When the doorman buzzed her apartment she quietly said,
“Bobby, ask them to wait for a second, and I’ll be right down.”
Kim was napping, and she told Elena she would be in the lobby for a few minutes.
Julie believed she had learned much about dealing with the police over the last few months and, when these two men—one Italian and one Latino—asked if they could speak with her in some place more private than the lobby of her building, she immediately said, “No.”