Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  terrain which Julie believed was probably dominated by memories of his son, his years working in the mills across the river, and the stunning interlude of freedom from Lowell and factory work he had when he was a soldier in Europe during World War II.

  It was Mary, of course, who first raised the subject. They were washing dishes in the kitchen sink as Kim napped. “Tom dropped by here two months before it happened.”

  This was news to Julie. “Really?”

  “He used to do it when he came to Boston for business. He’d call us, drive up, stay for a few hours, then leave to catch the plane in Boston.”

  “He never mentioned that to me.”

  Mary swirled a damp washcloth around the inside of a glass that had cartoon characters painted on its surface: the glass squeaked cleanly as she rubbed it. “Sure, he used to do that, and he’d leave those Federal Express envelopes here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, they had money in them. Usually three thousand dollars in cash. We always told him we didn’t need it and didn’t want it.

  Once, long ago, he used to send us checks, and we’d never cash them, so he started leaving these envelopes here with cash. I guess he felt that we wouldn’t trust the mail to send cash back to him. Eventually, we’d use the money. It wasn’t really much money, I guess, but we’d spend it.” She started rubbing the interior of another glass. “He was more stubborn than we were.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “I didn’t know about that. But I know Tom always wanted to give you presents and he complained to me that you wouldn’t take them. He loved you; he always wanted to do more for you.”

  “We didn’t need more. We had all we needed.”

  Julie loved these people, but she had a rueful thought. They had never had anything. Tom once told her that the most money his father had made, working fifty hours each week in the mills in Lowell and Lawrence, was $7,500 in 1974, just a few years before the last plant in which he had worked was closed for good.

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  “We keep the Federal Express packages under the floorboard in the attic.” Mary pointed upward to what looked like a trapdoor in the ceiling of the kitchen. “You need a ladder to get up there and we’re the only people in the building who can get there unless the landlord comes and says he wants to go up from here.

  That hasn’t happened in thirty years. The landlord hasn’t been here in thirty years.”

  “So the money’s safe,” Julie said, gently chiding her mother-in-law. “Like in a mattress.”

  “We finally looked inside the last envelope a few weeks ago. It had the usual three thousand dollars in it. It also had an envelope with your name on it.”

  “I’ve got to see it, Mom.”

  “I know. I got it down for you this morning. It’s in the bureau in my bedroom.” Mary dried her hands, walked briskly out of the kitchen, and came back with a regular business-size envelope with Julie’s full name typed on it.

  Julie squeezed the envelope. It appeared to have several sheets of folded paper in it. She looked at Mary.

  “Why don’t you take it to the bedroom to read it,” Mary said.

  “I’ll keep an eye on Kim.”

  Julie sat on the soft bed in what had once been Tom’s childhood and teenage bedroom. It was not a love letter, it was not an explanation, it was not an apology. Instead, in computer print, not handwriting, with nothing to identify Tom as the writer, the two P A U L B A T I S T A

  pages contained the name, address, and telephone numbers of Mr. Jackson and a foreign bank branch in South Miami, a lengthy series of numbers and letters, and a column of numbers under the words “route transfers.”

  As she stared quietly at the dim walls in the room where her husband had been raised, Julie knew immediately what these pages meant and what they suggested she do. It was a message from the land of death. What did Tom know in the months and weeks before his death that led him to take these pages to his parents and leave them for his wife? All she needed to know was 266

  whether any of the numbers corresponded to the numbers of the bank statements in the locked, dusty cage in the basement of her apartment building.

  And she had learned other unexpected things in the time since Tom’s death. It was far safer in this new world in which she lived to mail these pages from Lowell to her apartment building in Manhattan than it was to carry them on her long drive back to New York City. There was too much cold, empty road between Lowell and New York, and there were too many roadside restaurants at which she would have to stop in bleak Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, for her to feel safe for herself and her daughter with these papers in her bag.

  When the mail arrived on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the envelope was there. She asked Elena to take Kim upstairs, and she went to the basement, where she retrieved the manila folders.

  Locked in her bathroom, she compared one of the rows of numbers on the pages Tom left to the numbers on the bank account statements. They were the same. Two hours later, from a public telephone inside the circular immensity of the Guggenheim Museum, she placed a call to Mr. Jackson. She introduced herself.

  She said she was calling about the numbers, and was about to start reading them when he stopped her and suggested she fly to Miami the next day to see him.

  The next morning she dressed casually in jeans, a short coat of cracked brown leather, and cowboy boots—for it was a warm day D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  in late November in New York and would be even warmer in Miami—and took Kim and Elena with her to the Metropolitan Museum. They looked, for the benefit of anyone who might be watching them, like an Upper East Side mother, nanny, and baby starting a pleasant day of museum-going and shopping in unseasonably warm weather. Inside the museum, Julie told Elena that she was leaving on a sudden trip and would be back at the apartment around midnight. She asked Elena to stroll through the museum for at least an hour after she left.

  Instead of calling a taxi at the base of the museum’s grand steps, 267

  Julie walked briskly down Fifth Avenue for about ten blocks. To her right, the beautiful, sere spaces of Central Park in late fall were spread out, and to her left, the monumental apartment buildings of Fifth Avenue were arrayed. She deftly slipped into a taxi as it waited at a red light and she told the startled Muslim driver to take her to Newark Airport.

  At Newark she bought a one-way ticket for Miami, with cash, using her driver’s license, the name on which she had never changed. It was Julianne Whitmore. She knew from reading newspapers that one of the profiles of drug couriers was of people who flew to Miami from the New York area with one-way tickets purchased with cash, yet she instinctively felt no fear at the prospect of being halted by drug enforcement police. She wasn’t carrying drugs, either in her fashionable knapsack (her only lug-gage) or in her rectum, vagina, or stomach, and she had only $1,800 in cash, enough for her return flight and one or two days of hotel costs if she had to stay over in Miami. In any event, she thought it was better to fit a drug-courier profile than to travel in her own name and with her own credit cards.

  The bank was on the ground floor of an office building on a wide avenue fringed with palm trees. There were Spanish hacienda–style buildings everywhere, and the moist outdoor air was windless, smelly, sinister. Inside, the small bank was air-conditioned and orderly. She was introduced to the man with whom she had spoken.

  Mr. Jackson had the look of an insurance salesman—pudgy, blonde P A U L B A T I S T A

  moustache, thinning blond hair. She handed him the two pages Tom had placed in the envelope for her.

  He left her for almost forty-five minutes. She sat by the side of his desk in the open office of the bank. There were teller windows but only one teller, and in all the time she waited, only two customers entered and left the bank. Every other employee looked like the same mid-American type as the man who had just met her.

  He was smiling when he returned. As he asked her about the weather in
New York, he wrote a note on a sheet of paper and pushed it toward her while they spoke about cold weather and 268

  warm weather. She read the note: The $98 million is now in one Liechtenstein bank. In three days it will be equally divided and sent to new banks in Lebanon, the Cayman Islands, and Ireland. How much do you want to receive each month? And for how long? And at what bank?

  Write the answers here.

  Julie, her hand trembling, wrote the answers next to each question. He stared at the paper, memorizing it, and then tore the paper into many pieces, giving half the pieces to Julie.

  While wishing her well on her flight back to New York, Mr.

  Jackson wrote a long number on a small sheet of paper and said,

  “Keep this number in a safe place and use it when you contact me or anyone else here if you want to change anything.”

  At the Miami airport she had a two-hour wait for her plane.

  She went into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall. She took the sheet of paper out of her knapsack, emptied a small plastic baggie of the tube of concealer she had been carrying in it, and put the slip of paper in the plastic bag. She rubbed the outer surface of the plastic baggie with Vaseline. Then she sat on the toilet seat, undid her jeans, pulled down her panties, and slipped the small plastic bag into her vagina. She would memorize the number later that night, in the security of her home, when her wild heart had stopped throbbing.

  20.

  The Metropolitan Correctional Center was a ten-floor building connected by tunnels and enclosed elevated walkways to the two federal courthouses in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan. MCC

  was the place in which federal prisoners awaiting trial or on trial were held: John Gotti had been there for months, as had the 1993

  World Trade Center bombers and the Muslim men arrested after 9/11, and countless other ordinary men, who, after their convictions, had been shipped out to the seventy or so federal prisons around the country.

  Sorrentino had visited this strange building regularly in the more than twenty years since it had been built. It always struck him that the brown-brick structure resembled a dormitory at an upstate public university campus: utilitarian, austere, vaguely modern. It was even difficult from the outside to see that the rows of windows had iron mesh in them. The windows simply looked narrow, an architectural mistake.

  But that was only from the outside. As soon as he walked through the sliding doors he knew he was in a prison. There were federal marshals everywhere, metal detectors, and huge signs in English, Spanish, and Arabic giving instructions. There were also the unmistakable signs of a modern prison—dozens of Spanish-speaking women and children lined up awaiting passage through the metal detectors, raised voices speaking in many languages, children shrieking. Just fifteen years ago, Sorrentino thought, P A U L B A T I S T A

  before the federal prisons began to be inundated with drug inmates, federal prisoners tended to be different, quieter, neater, their families orderly and intense.

  It was a stupid thought, Sorrentino recognized, but years ago these raucous, Spanish-speaking people were the inmates you saw much more often in the state court and prisons just a few blocks away. There was once an aristocracy in the prison system—people in federal prison were white men guilty of white-collar crimes, people in state prison were blacks or Hispanics guilty of violent crimes. Since the Reagan era, drugs were the great equalizer.

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  Sorrentino had been called to the MCC in this way many times before. Earlier in the day a man had contacted him from the prison three hours after his arrest, saying he had been charged with money laundering and fraud and that Sorrentino had been recommended to him by his business associates. Sorrentino took the names and telephone numbers of those business associates and asked the man to call him in two hours, since it was impossible for anyone from the outside to place a call to any inmate in MCC or any other federal prison. In those two hours, Sorrentino called around and learned that the man was “important,” a “real player,” and that money for legal fees was not a big problem at all. When the man called back, Sorrentino said he would be at the MCC in about an hour but that it might well take another hour to pass through security before he could reach a lawyer-client conference room.

  This wasn’t the way Sorrentino usually met new clients, but he knew that sometimes this could be the most explosive and lucrative way to meet one. Ordinarily over the last decade he had first encountered clients when they were under investigation, which often continued for months. If the clients were ultimately indicted they weren’t arrested, because Sorrentino had built enough rap-port with the prosecutors’ offices through the years to enable him to arrange to produce his clients for arraignment. They would walk through the front door of the courthouse with him and, after a short bail hearing, leave the same way, as though they had had a business appointment.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  This was not that kind of arrangement: the man he was about to meet had been arrested before even knowing that he was under investigation, abruptly and unexpectedly seized at an airport as he was about to leave for Europe. He had come into the system in a harsh way, almost literally through a trapdoor under his world, and this sudden, wrenching way of starting could, in Sorrentino’s experience, lead to intense pressures, interesting results.

  Lawyers had to wait in line at the MCC like every other civilian. Sorrentino was no exception. As he finally reached the metal 271

  detectors, he emptied the contents of his pockets into plastic trays, placed his briefcase on a conveyor belt, and walked carefully through the door frame of an airport-style security scanner. A uniformed guard—a man who had the slow, insolent gestures of a customs officer on a Caribbean island—asked him to unbutton his suit jacket, spread his legs, and hold his arms out. The guard passed an electronic wand around the outline of Sorrentino’s body, and when finished, said gruffly, “Take your things.”

  Feigning politeness, Sorrentino thanked him. It was the same subversive tone of voice he had used when, many years earlier, he was compelled to say “sir” to officers in the Army.

  Almost forty-five minutes passed before Sorrentino was finally brought through many locked gates to the fifth floor to meet his new client. Arrested only eight hours earlier, the man was already in the kind of uniform all prisoners inside this grim, chilling building wore: a green jumpsuit. He didn’t smell well and anxiety had him in a sweat whose staleness permeated the prison uniform.

  Sorrentino and Bill Irwin sat on wooden chairs at a metal table in a soundproof room. The door had a large window in it. Bill Irwin knew who Sorrentino was, since he had heard his name and seen him on television many times. He knew who his clients were. Sorrentino was the only lawyer Irwin had called because Irwin instinctively felt that Sorrentino could lead him out of the troubled land in which he now found himself. Sorrentino had never heard Irwin’s name before that first call earlier in the day.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  They were allotted only forty-five minutes for this first meeting, and Irwin—a plump, balding man with soft hands who resembled one of the Midwestern Republicans in the Bush Administration—

  knew what he wanted to say and had a salesman’s instinct for fitting it into the time available.

  He was a Washington lobbyist, he said quickly. He had known Danny Fonseca for years. He knew, in fact, just about everybody in Congress. He could arrange to have $300,000 wired into Sorrentino’s account by early the next day, as an advance on legal fees. There was “no way” he was going to spend time in prison: 272

  the eight hours here had already been enough. He had absolute confidence, he said, that Sorrentino could “walk him out.”

  “I’m a lawyer, Bill, not the Pope,” Sorrentino said after listening for ten minutes to this driven, self-obsessed man. Like many people Sorrentino had encountered through the years who were faced for the first time with the freezing reality bath of a criminal prosecution, Irwin wasn’t being realist
ic. Part of Sorrentino’s work was to infuse people like Irwin with reality, and he used his familiar speech: “If there are going to be any deals, you’ve got to give me something to work with. The assistant who’s handling this told me you’re facing charges of money laundering, drug trafficking, fraud, and suborning of perjury. That’s big. You’ve got to give me something big in return.”

  Irwin was very bright. Without any more prodding, he told Sorrentino that from time to time he had done work for a Latin American businessman named Madrigal—a name Sorrentino immediately, vividly remembered—and that Madrigal’s people in the United States had recruited FBI agents to work for Madrigal in strategic areas around the country: Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, New York.

  Sorrentino spoke slowly, “Do you know who they are?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I gave them money.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “I wore tiny video and audio equipment that Madrigal’s people equipped me with. Nothing exotic. They bought it all at Radio Shack.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “For insurance, for loyalty, for control.”

  “Where are the tapes?”

  “I can get them.”

  “Can I?”

  “Sure: you’re my lawyer, aren’t you?”

  “If you want me.”

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  “I want you if you tell me you can get me out of here.”

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Bill, to any client, but this is radioactive stuff.”

  “I know you can do it.”

  Sorrentino pushed aside on the metal table the notepad on which he had been writing intermittently. He said, “We don’t have much time before the goons buzz you out of here for the day and back up to the eighth floor.” That was the floor on which the most dangerous, or most well-known, prisoners were held, essentially in solitary confinement. “Let me ask you this: who is the agent in New York?”