Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  The Latino man, Rodriguez, said, “There’s been a terrible 255

  accident on the subway today. Somebody we think you know.”

  “I already know.”

  “We found an appointment book in her bag with your name, address, telephone number, and today’s date.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me, Mr. Rodriguez.”

  “Was she here with you?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m afraid that’s right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, to put it pretty simply for you, I don’t have to.”

  The detectives glanced at each other: what was the expression they exchanged, she wondered, what aspect of the limited male panoply of responses to a woman who says no—contempt, impatience, frustration, anger, amusement? For her part, she knew all of her resentment toward McGlynn and Steinman was focused on these two.

  DiBartolo, the other detective, said, “We really don’t have any suspicions about you.”

  “My God,” she said. “That’s a relief.”

  She recognized their expression now: it was male anger, the warface. DiBartolo spoke. “We’ll have to tell our supervisors you wouldn’t talk to us.”

  “Think of how easy that will be,” she answered. She turned to the elevator and left the lobby.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  In her apartment, she whispered to Elena, “Is Kim still asleep?” She was. Julie then locked herself in her bathroom, sat on the floor next to the toilet, and cried….In the hours they had spent together, Kiyo had said so much, had confided so many facts, doubts, and suspicions, and had been so warm and reassuring, that Julie had felt exhilarated by their encounter, close to freedom. And then, fifteen minutes after they had embraced at the door of the apartment, Kiyo had been destroyed.

  * * *

  256

  Sorrentino’s black Lincoln was waiting for him when he left the federal courthouse in Foley Square through the side entrance.

  There was sleet in the air as the grim daylight turned dark. The mazes of irregular Colonial-era streets around the Foley Square courthouses were thronged with people under umbrellas. After fewer than five seconds in the open air, Sorrentino was in the backseat of his warm car and his driver was making slow progress through the dark, unruly streets.

  The first message his secretary relayed to him over cell phone was that Julie Perini had called. There were at least ten other messages, most of them from reporters. Given that number of reporters’ messages, something specific was up, probably the expected new indictment of the Congressman, and the reporters would be calling him for comment before the daily late-afternoon deadlines. Sorrentino had been in a conference room with a judge and six other lawyers since one in the afternoon, and the closed-door, four-hour session had made him irritable. He was grateful only for the fact that the meeting was for a new client with problems different from the trial problems of the Congressman.

  He decided to call Julie first. He had seen her only once in the last two weeks. He missed her. When they spoke now, she always closed the conversation, “I love you, Vince.” She had left New York for the long Thanksgiving weekend and, in a rented car, had driven to Massachusetts to spend the holiday with Tom’s parents.

  Sorrentino understood the reasons for her leaving and he had no D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  desire to interfere with her obvious attachment to Tom’s parents, but he also felt a sense of jealousy and loss, as well as of concern: here was this particular woman, with her familiar face and the bizarre extravagance of her famous husband’s murder, driving alone with her three-year-old daughter north on grim Route 95, through Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the bleakest parts of Massachusetts, stopping along the way at the identical roadside McDonald’s restaurants. He had a feeling she shouldn’t be traveling in that kind of vulnerable isolation.

  Now, in her deliberate voice, Julie told him that Kiyo Michine 257

  had spent hours with her that morning and afternoon. They had talked, Julie said, about Tom’s death, Hutchinson, Steinman, McGlynn, other people, other names…Sorrentino, staring out the rain-streaked windows as the car moved slowly through Chinatown, ablaze with cheap neon lighting, was mildly surprised and disappointed that Julie hadn’t mentioned to him that she had specific plans to meet with Kiyo.

  And then he heard Julie say, “There isn’t a doubt in my mind that the same people who killed Tom killed her, too.”

  “What? What’s that, Julie?”

  “Haven’t you heard? She was thrown onto the subway tracks a few minutes after she left me.”

  “Julie, that can’t be.”

  “It is.”

  “My God.”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “No, I’ve been in a conference room all day.”

  “Do you think you could come here tonight?”

  “Sure. The traffic is slow, Julie. It may take an hour.”

  “That’s fine, just so long as I know you can make it.”

  “Julie, does anybody else know she was with you today?”

  “All of America. There were detectives here two hours ago, and there are reporters and camera crews in front of my building.”

  “Jesus.”

  During the long, slow drive uptown, Sorrentino placed no P A U L B A T I S T A

  other calls. He turned on the slender, goose-necked reading light over his shoulder and stared at his deeply veined hands in the concentrated light. He thought about a sequence of things: the reporters crowding around Julie’s lobby would assume, when they saw him arrive, that he was visiting her as a lawyer, not as a lover, and he would, of course, do nothing to dispel that impression. He thought, too, about the fact that the police and federal agents would continue to be very interested in what had happened during Julie and Kiyo’s meeting.

  And he thought about this. Fear of injury and harm. During his 258

  year in Vietnam, from mid-1967 through June 1968, he had lived with fear daily. He was only in the country for three weeks before his first flight, in a helicopter, to his first hot landing zone. There was so much automatic weapon fire, so much airborne, invisible flying metal from the trees that encircled the LZ, that the warrant officer who piloted the Chinook refused to bring the helicopter to the ground. The thunderously loud machine hovered at least fifteen feet over the soft terrain, the beaten-flat grass, while another warrant officer, desperate to have the helicopter leap away, pushed Sorrentino and twenty other grunts from the open cargo door.

  Sorrentino hit the ground stunned. Weighed down by the gear on his back—his M-16, food rations, extra cartridge clips—he had trouble regaining his feet. He was deafened by the thunder of everything: the rotors, the gunshots, the screams. When he managed to stand in the soft Vietnamese soil, he looked straight at the soldier beside him just as a bullet passed through the nineteen-year-old man’s head with the sound of a large blade smacking and slicing a melon. Sorrentino screamed and shit in his pants. That was fear.

  Later in life he witnessed another kind of fear. Early in his legal career he was sometimes fascinated by the men he represented: mob enforcers—men who killed on orders, who knew whatever they needed to know about how to knife or shoot other human beings. He thought then that they had a courage he didn’t have—

  the courage to be brutal and deadly—and that he had a different type of courage in order to deal with them. In time, as his practice D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  and reputation grew, he no longer dealt with the goons who did the killings, but with their bosses, men who had graduated from the ranks and were no longer involved in hands-on brutality. He no longer thought they had courage, and he no longer wondered too often about whether he had courage in dealing with them.

  Eventually, over the last four or five years, as his practice continued to evolve, he no longer represented even the men at the top of the murderous echelons. He represented people like Congressman
Fonseca, and courage wasn’t an issue at all.

  But now he was afraid, for he knew that fear was the strange 259

  emotion he felt in his secure, warm car. Here was a woman whose husband had been murdered. Sorrentino had so much experience that he had no doubt that Perini was taken out in an assassination by a hired killer, even though he had sometimes suggested to Julie that Tom might have been a victim of this dangerous city’s random violence. And then that old clown, Selig Klein, was shot in the chest and face at the diner near LaGuardia a few hours after arranging to see Julie Perini. Anyone with the right equipment—

  equipment you could buy at Radio Shack—could have pulled that cellular call out of the air over Long Island and known exactly when Julie expected to see Klein.

  And now this, a young, talented Assistant U.S. Attorney, involved in the most publicized trial of the year, was thrown onto subway tracks minutes after spending time with Julie Perini. In less than half an hour, millions of people would see Vincent Sorrentino on television walk into Julie Perini’s apartment building. The people who had stalked Tom Perini, Selig Klein, and Kiyo Michine would see that Vincent Sorrentino was someone else whose life had become aligned with Julie Perini’s. For a moment, Sorrentino’s mind fastened on the impulse to tell his driver to leave the FDR at the 42nd Street exit and take him to his office instead of Julie’s apartment, and have his secretary call her to say he had an emergency telephone conference with a judge. He could then spend time thinking about what he wanted to do, or not do.

  But Sorrentino said nothing to the driver. The car continued P A U L B A T I S T A

  uptown on the FDR in the rain. Outside, above the black river, the lights of the huge bridges—the Queensborough, the Triboro—fixed those structures in black space. On the surface of the river, he watched barges and other heavy craft make their difficult headway against the rain, wind, fog, and the tide.

  * * *

  McGlynn was in Kiyo’s apartment one hour after she died.

  She was as neat, he noticed, about her surroundings as she had been about her clothes and her own appearance. It was a one-260

  bedroom apartment, with a small living room overlooking, through casement windows, the low buildings of the West Village.

  There were white curtains, beige walls, books perfectly arranged, a white kitchen. Even on a midweek afternoon with sleet, fog, and rain outside, the apartment was filled with attractive light.

  In her bedroom was a desk. There were books of poetry on the surface of the desk. He opened the drawers, and in them were the things he expected to find. There were notebooks with labels on them, microcassettes with her tiny handwriting on the surface, ruled index cards, chronologically arranged and with her calli-graphic handwriting. All of these things he put into the two briefcases he was carrying.

  McGlynn knew he had all the time in the world, since Kiyo was not coming back and it would take the New York City police hours to make arrangements to enter her apartment. He hadn’t needed to make arrangements. He knew how to open almost any door with a file and credit card. He looked through every bookcase and book and satisfied himself that this small, neat apartment contained no information other than what he had already located in her desk.

  Then, since he had always been intrigued by what he thought of as her shapely Asian ass, and by the fact that she never seemed to have a boyfriend, McGlynn decided to look through the other objects of her life: her clothes, her kitchen cabinets, her refrigerator, her bathroom cabinets. She didn’t drink, she kept small D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  amounts of food, she had no pornographic tapes or books, she had no pictures of lovers, and she harbored no clothes or toothbrushes or razors for men. But she did have a box of condoms in her bathroom cabinet, as well as tubes of contraceptive foam. Half of the condoms were gone, and some of the tubes of contraceptive jelly were not in the box. The little cunt, McGlynn thought, she kept it from me but gave it out to somebody else. He lay down on the floor by her bed, opened his pants, and masturbated.

  * * *

  261

  There was an eerie serenity in Julie’s apartment. Kim played quietly in the living room, Elena was on the floor near Kim, reading Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, and Julie was listening to National Public Radio in the kitchen as she cooked pasta and an aromatic red sauce. She was listening to the sophisticated male and female voices of the evening news announcers: they provided, somehow, a reassuring sound.

  When Sorrentino walked into the apartment, he was still fearful; he was also edgy, because he had been crowded and even jos-tled by the shouting reporters and cameramen on the sidewalk in front of Julie’s building. Kim looked up happily at him, because he ordinarily brought small presents for her and would hold her aloft, gently rocking her from side to side. This time he carried no gift for her, but he did pick her up, and she giggled. Elena stood with Levi’s book in her hand, a finger marking her page. She had come to like Sorrentino and gave him a demure, attractive smile.

  He nodded to her.

  Out of sight of Kim and Elena, he kissed Julie on the forehead.

  She accepted the kiss, then wrapped her arms around his waist because the kiss was not enough for her. He said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  Julie answered, “I’m really fine. Just hold me.”

  It was a wonderful hug. For him, it embraced the scent of her washed hair, her skin, and a mild perfume she wore that stayed in the fabric of his clothes after they spent time together. The P A U L B A T I S T A

  embrace brought to her the scent of his cologne and a faint, oddly pleasant aroma of cigar smoke. And, for both of them, the embrace also merged somehow with the warm atmosphere of cooking in the kitchen.

  “What happened between you and Kiyo, Julie?” Sorrentino’s voice was quiet.

  “God, it’s difficult to remember now. What’s happened since has simply shattered it all for me. I remember she wanted to tell me that Hutchinson could help us to understand the relationship between Tom and Madrigal, and understand how Madrigal could 262

  have had a role in arranging to hurt Tom. But that something had happened on ‘her end’ to divert people from drawing the right linkages, although Hutchinson had always been there, ready, willing and able to draw a road map.”

  “What did she mean by ‘her end’?”

  “The people she works with.”

  Sorrentino was still holding her. Their faces were so close that he could smell her sweet breath and see that the faintest imaginable line was starting to form between her dark eyebrows. “What did you tell her?”

  “That I hated McGlynn from the minute I saw him. She rolled her eyes when I said that—her way of expressing agreement, understanding. Vince, she had absolutely black, beautiful eyes.”

  “Julie, she was a striking young person.”

  “She was warm, direct, and honest. I can’t believe that she was alive six hours ago and dead now.”

  “Are you all right? Do you want a drink? Can you get Valium, something like that?”

  “I don’t need any of that, Vince. It’s sick to say it but I’m becoming a pro at dealing with this kind of thing.” She paused.

  “What I need is for you to stay for supper with us, play with Kim, hold my hand…”

  “And then I’ll have to leave.”

  “Of course. We can’t have the newspapers say that the legendary Vincent Sorrentino arrived at five in the afternoon to D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  comfort and counsel Julie Perini and then stayed until ten the next morning. I want less publicity, not more.”

  For the next three hours, they finished preparing supper, ate slowly, had several glasses of wine, played with Kim, and spoke to Elena. At nine Vincent Sorrentino left and, in the lobby and on the sidewalk, pushed his way through reporters, microphones, and cameras to his car. He didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  Julie Perini never told Vincent Sorrentino that she had 263

  recorded, on a hidd
en tape machine, every word of her conversation with Kiyo. Nor had she told Kiyo that she was doing that.

  And Julie Perini hadn’t told Vincent Sorrentino—a man she loved—how startling the things were that Kiyo Michine said to her. Julie was certain now that she knew who had killed her husband, why he had been killed, and what her husband had done that led to his death. She didn’t want anybody to know for now that she had the tape, because she wanted to think about how to use it to destroy the people who had destroyed Tom.

  And there was something else she hadn’t told Vincent Sorrentino: what she had learned on her recent visit to Tom’s parents and what she had done four days later.

  She arrived in Lowell early on Thanksgiving afternoon. Sparse snow was falling. The triple-decker house with a flat roof in which Tom had been raised needed paint: it was a gray structure humbled even more by a gray day. The old street was lined with identical apartment buildings. Old cars were parked solidly end-to-end on each side of the street. Snow was gathering only on the cold steel surfaces of the vehicles. It melted to a mess on the sidewalks and streets.

  Julie was exhausted as she carried Kim and all the equipment children require up the three flights of stairs. Inside the apartment Lou and Mary embraced Julie and hesitated with Kim, who looked tired, bewildered, and uncertain. She had seen her grandparents only three or four times in her short life, and not at all since Tom’s P A U L B A T I S T A

  funeral. Lou, who looked as though he had advanced rapidly from seventy to ninety, held back from Kim. Mary drew her out with small toys and candy she had bought at a Duane Reade drugstore.

  As they prepared dinner and ate, Julie’s bone-chilling sense of fear and isolation—bred on the long, lonely drive on Route 95

  from New York to Massachusetts—melted. The old furniture and wallpaper of this apartment began to feel familiar and comfortable: Mary was, as always, easy to talk with, and even Lou emerged mentally every once in a while to engage Julie and Kim before he retreated into whatever thoughts he had, that internal 264