Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  During the night Kim woke twice. Each time, Julie gave her a bottle with apple juice and stood near her high windows as she held Kim while the child instinctively drank.

  The dark, almost quiet city was beneath her, the oval surfaces of the Guggenheim Museum faintly illuminated, the strings of streetlamps in Central Park, the black surface of the reservoir, the dual towers of a grand old apartment building on Central Park West. Each time, Kim said sleepily that she wanted to be taken into her mother’s bed, and the second time, Julie gave in and brought her there, and Kim slept between her mother and the 283

  sleeping, dressed Sorrentino.

  * * *

  Just as he had promised, Stan Wasserman arranged to bring Hugo Brown to the meeting. Hugo was an investigative reporter for the Times, and Julie had asked Stan to set up the meeting because she had been reading Hugo’s stories for months and had admired his style and the tough articles he wrote about the New York City police. Hugo had concentrated on how the upper echelons of the police department put together false statistics on the decrease in crime. Julie knew that, as a result of those articles, three senior commanders, all with Irish names, had been forced to retire, and Hugo was still following through, still exploring whether the police commissioner or the mayor himself had engineered the phony statistics.

  She met Stan and Hugo at an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue just below 79th Street. It was a rainy day at midweek, and the restaurant was almost empty. Stan was warm, open, receptive to Julie. She was grateful to him for setting up the lunch, and Hugo, to her surprise, was a Hispanic man with a full moustache, powerful cleft chin, and the eyes of Che Guevara. He spoke beautifully, with exquisite patience. She had expected someone younger, since she had begun seeing his byline in the Times only a year ago. He was her age. He had worked for at least twenty years for various newspapers in San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston, and P A U L B A T I S T A

  had only recently come north. She instinctively liked him, for he had put in hard time in this profession.

  Julie and Hugo met six more times over the next five days.

  Stan, after bringing them together, withdrew quietly, knowing that Julie had explosive news but not wanting NBC to get it first—

  this was his way of retaliating against the people responsible for her firing and making amends to her for that. Stan had delivered her into the hands of a skillful journalist.

  Julie and Hugo met in a different place each time. It was in the ornate reading room in the New York Public Library that she first 284

  shared with him the tapes of her meetings with Kiyo Michine. They sat next to each other in hardback chairs with a tape player between them and earphones connecting the machine to their ears. They listened simultaneously. Hugo listened once to the ninety-minute conversation, and then listened again, furiously taking notes. On their fourth meeting, since she was by then completely confident in him and his intention to finish the story, she gave him copies of the tapes.

  Hugo then disappeared for almost four weeks. Several times she left messages for him at the Times; he returned none of the calls. She was hurt, confused, betrayed, and even concerned for his safety. She still hadn’t mentioned the tapes to Sorrentino, who was spending most nights at her apartment, and she never mentioned to him that she was meeting with Hugo Brown. Sorrentino detected that she was distracted, anxious; he tried to soothe her.

  Then Hugo Brown called her on a snowy afternoon in late March. “The lawyers are taking a look at the article.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Talking to everyone I could find who would talk to me. I even found Nancy Lichtman, who doesn’t live with her doctor friend anymore.”

  “Hugo, I know I’m not a novice in this business, but I hoped this would happen faster.”

  “This is an important story, Julie, certainly the most important I’ve done. Once my editors saw the first draft of the article, the lawyers had tests done on the tapes you gave me.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Tests?”

  “Forensic tests: it turns out Kiyo had given some broadcast interviews during the Fonseca trial, and they wanted to compare the voice on that audiotape, which after all showed her speaking, to the voice on your tape.”

  “They’re the same, Hugo.”

  “They’re the same.”

  “Hugo, tell your editors that I’m losing my patience with the Times. There are television stations and networks and newspapers that would take much less time to examine and reexamine this.

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  Rupert Murdoch would have had this on every television station in America by now.”

  “Trust me, Julie. You’ve helped me develop a rock-hard story.

  Give me a little more time.”

  “Of course I will, Hugo.”

  * * *

  That same afternoon, as late-winter snow fell outside on the brick expanse of St. Andrews Plaza between the United States Attorney’s Office and the old Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, Vincent Sorrentino was meeting with Brooks Stoddard, the U.S. Attorney, and Ted Fogelman, the head of the Criminal Division. Together the two of them supervised a staff of several hundred lawyers, federal agents, and others. Ordinarily Stoddard would never have agreed to meet face-to-face with a criminal defense lawyer, even one as famous as Vincent Sorrentino, but Fogelman had worked briefly eighteen years earlier as a summer clerk in a small firm Sorrentino led, and Fogelman had always had enormous respect for him. He brought about the meeting.

  It was not going well. Stoddard was always laconic, noncommittal, not excitable. Sorrentino knew he wasn’t buying Bill Irwin’s stunning story that one of the Office’s senior prosecutors, Neil Steinman, was on the payroll, through an FBI agent, John McGlynn, of some Latin American overlord known only as P A U L B A T I S T A

  Madrigal. Ted Fogelman, who had accepted Sorrentino’s promise that the information he needed to discuss was too sensitive to be raised at any lower level in the office, looked uncomfortable as he watched Stoddard stare at the falling snow through the uncurtained windows of his office.

  Finally Stoddard said, “Neil Steinman is a career prosecutor, with over fifteen years of service. He has a devoted wife. They take care of a severely handicapped child. Neil Steinman spends two nights each month at homeless shelters in Yonkers helping to feed hundreds of men, women, and children.

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  “And John McGlynn is a veteran with citation after citation from the Army and the FBI for bravery and service. I’m certain there isn’t a single adverse notation in his personnel file.

  “Your client, in contrast, is a lobbyist. He’s in jail because he’s a criminal. A federal magistrate and then a federal judge have decided that he doesn’t qualify for bail because he’s a flight risk.

  He says he had tapes that no one can find now because his girlfriend was killed. The Florida police say they can’t locate any record in any bank in all of Florida that she checked anything out of any safe-deposit box in the month before she died.

  “So please tell me again why you think I should arrange an internal affairs investigation of my people and negotiate with you a deal for your client so that he can testify against them?”

  Sorrentino said, trying to convey the same sense of conviction he would use at the close of what he knew would become a losing argument to a judge, “Every call that Bill Irwin has made out of MCC is monitored. He didn’t know that when he called Tara Weinstein, told her what he wanted, and a day later she was murdered.”

  “What else?”

  “Over a cellular phone Julie Perini makes an appointment to meet with Selig Klein, and six hours later he’s killed. Selig Klein was being monitored by this office. Kiyo Michine meets with Julie Perini, has what we can only assume is a sensitive conversation with her about McGlynn and Steinman, and fifteen minutes later D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  she’s dead on the subway tracks.”

  Bro
oks Stoddard was a sober, deadpan man, not given to wisecracks. But he said, “It sounds to me as though we should be investigating Julie Perini, not Neil Steinman and John McGlynn.”

  In the five seconds of silence before the meeting ended, Sorrentino watched as more snow covered the slate roof of St.

  Andrews Church and the plaza.

  * * *

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  McGlynn saw that Neil Steinman had lost weight over the last several weeks. Always thin and intense, Steinman with his shirt off was gaunt under that layer of dense hair covering every part of his body except his unbearded face, his palms, and the soles of his feet. Steinman wasn’t nearly as agile and fast as he had been when he and McGlynn had started these one-on-one basketball games many months ago. Over the same time McGlynn had put on weight.

  Steinman took the rubber ball and wedged it between his elbow and waist. “Walk with me,” he said, gesturing to the painted key in the area of the basketball court where they were playing. Black teenagers had a game going at the far end of the court. The din was high, the auditorium resonated.

  “Ted Fogelman stopped by my office this afternoon.”

  “What’s up?”

  “He said somebody met with Brooks Stoddard and said his client had information that you and I were involved in nasty things.”

  “Why did he tell you that?”

  “Ted’s a fair guy. He thought we should know, that I deserved a heads-up.”

  “What did Brooksie do?”

  “Threw the lawyer out of his office after telling him that I was a saint and you were a war hero.”

  “Who was the lawyer?”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Who else? Sorrentino.”

  “Did Fogelman say anything else?”

  “That the guy with the information, Sorrentino’s client, was someone named Bill Irwin, who now lives on a government vacation plan at MCC. Do you know this guy?”

  “Could be.”

  Neil Steinman’s heart was beating wildly. He knew that his capacity for tough talk with McGlynn couldn’t last much longer.

  He would soon show unambiguous signs of fear, the verbal tremor in the voice, the physical tremor in the hands. To break 288

  the onslaught of those tremors, he bounced the basketball and took a shot from the top of the key: incredibly, the ball swished through the hoop’s tattered cloth netting.

  * * *

  Neil Steinman was able to control the wild pace of his heart only for a day. It was late in the afternoon and the surly receptionists and secretaries were preparing to leave work for the day at five. Suddenly he heard the switchboard operator say Hugo Brown of the New York Times was on the line. Over the years he’d come to love receiving telephone calls from reporters, seeing his name in print and his picture in newspapers, and even occasionally surfacing on television. He readily reached for the receiver even though he had never heard or seen the name Hugo Brown.

  “I’m doing a story,” Hugo said, “about Tom Perini’s death.”

  “I don’t know if I can help you with that. It’s still under investigation.”

  “Actually, Mr. Steinman, we’ve been doing our own investigation of Perini’s murder. And of you. And of Agent McGlynn. And of a Latin American we know as Mr. Madrigal. There’s also a runner who seems to show up everywhere. We’re investigating who he is. And Kiyo Michine’s murder.”

  Steinman’s hands and voice trembled. “What is this about?”

  “I’d like to set up an appointment to see you about the questions we still have open.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “I’m pretty busy.”

  “I can come down now. You may want to tie up some loose ends for us.”

  “What loose ends?”

  “I have tapes of Kiyo Michine sharing some difficult information she accumulated about you and Mr. McGlynn.”

  “I can’t talk to you now. I’m busy, as I said. Give me your number and I’ll call you in a few days to set something up.”

  “There isn’t time for that, Mr. Steinman. If we’re going to talk, it has to be today or tomorrow.”

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  Steinman hung up.

  * * *

  In the months since the mistrial, while they waited for a date for a new trial or for some other developments, Congressman Fonseca took to meeting once every two weeks with Vincent Sorrentino for dinner at Sparks, which was still the Congressman’s favorite restaurant in New York.

  “Vinnie, anything new with you?”

  “Always, Danny.”

  “Any big new clients, or am I the only guy you have with instant name recognition?”

  “Who can be bigger than you, Danny?”

  The Congressman took another sip of his Scotch and water. “I hear through the grapevine you’ve been talking to a guy named Bill Irwin. Is he a new client?”

  “Lawyers are supposed to be able to keep secrets, Danny.”

  “You know, I’ve known Bill Irwin a long time. Has he told you much about himself?”

  “Bill Irwin? Who’s that?”

  “He even once worked with Kate Stark, remember her?”

  “Not only am I a lawyer who knows how to keep secrets about clients, Danny, I’m a gallant gentleman who keeps secrets about damsels, too.”

  “Well, Vinnie, it’s, you know, what do you call it, a feminist P A U L B A T I S T A

  age. She keeps no secrets about you.”

  “Christ, I hope she’s not ruining my studly reputation.”

  “Not a chance, but you should hear the things she says about Bill Irwin.”

  “I don’t expect clients to be saints, Danny, except, of course, for you.”

  Fonseca smiled. Bright teeth, handsome face, silver hair, silver aviator-style glasses. The benign image as he sat there was totally in contrast to what he said next. “You know, Vinnie, I’m not just a client of yours but a friend, too, and you’ve helped me a lot and 290

  I want to help you, too. Drop Bill Irwin.”

  “What?”

  “Get rid of Bill Irwin.”

  “Why should I?”

  “It’s not good for you to know him.”

  “I can’t just walk away from a client.”

  “Why not? Is it the money? Take fifty thousand out of the two-fifty he sent you, send the two hundred grand back, and tell everybody you found out you had a conflict of interest.”

  Without even asking how the Congressman knew about the wire-transferred fee, Sorrentino said, “I can’t do that.”

  “I can’t make you do anything. But I’m your friend, and I’m telling you, you should.”

  Sorrentino kept his hands folded in front of him and just waited. The Congressman continued eating and drinking, slowly, happily, and then he said, “And what kind of lady is Julie Perini, Vinnie?”

  “Come on, Danny, what the hell is this about?”

  “Listen to me, Vinnie. She’s got more than one hundred million dollars of other people’s money. And those other people are trying to find it and they think you know where it is.”

  “Who the hell are you working for, Danny?”

  “Nobody. I’m just trying to be a mediator, a peacemaker.

  That’s what people like me are supposed to do, you said that to the jury. I take care of my constituents. You’re one of them. You’re D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  going to make her life easier, and probably yours too, if you help her see that it would be good for her to give the money back.”

  “She doesn’t have one hundred million dollars. As far as I know, she doesn’t have one hundred dollars.”

  “She’s beautiful, Vinnie, a real doll. But not so beautiful you should lose your head over her.”

  * * *

  The houses in Neil Steinman’s White Plains neighborhood were built at the turn of the twentieth century, now more than one 291

  hundred years ago, and they were big and drafty, most of them, including Steinman’s, somewhat rundown. His house
had a wide veranda. In the early dark, after a long drive home on roads that were slick with rain and sleet, particularly the sinuous, attractive, and dangerous stretches of the Bronx River Parkway, Steinman spent a few minutes chipping the thin layer of ice from the steps of the veranda. The wooden planks were rotting at the edges from years of snow, rain, cold, and heat.

  His wife was scheduled to teach two classes at the community college. She wouldn’t be home until nine. Now that his daughter was growing, she was more difficult to handle physically. She weighed almost sixty pounds and had no control over her weight or her movements. Picking her up and carrying her was a skill Steinman had had to learn with time. Despite the fact that she had never spoken a word, or stared at her mother or father with any kind of recognition, as though she were two months old, not six years old, her body was beginning to reveal the first inevitable signs of growth and maturity.

  Steinman fed and bathed his child. He combed her hair. At seven-thirty, he called his wife at the college to see whether anything had come up there that might delay her until after nine.

  Nothing had. He told her to be careful on the sleet-slicked Bronx River Parkway, especially in those beautiful but treacherous stretches where it passed through Scarsdale.

  He wheeled his daughter into the small television room just P A U L B A T I S T A

  off the kitchen. Something about the kinetic movements on the television screen could sometimes, momentarily, attract her attention. Her contorted face as she watched the screen sometimes conveyed something that looked like amusement or concentration.

  When he left the big house for the garage where his car was parked, Steinman didn’t bother to put on a coat. It was still sleeting. He was chilly. He opened and closed the roll-up door of the garage and made sure that the single window was shut. It was so dark in the familiar garage that he had to put on the one overhead 292

  light—a bulb hanging from a wire—in order not to stumble over the countless objects that had accumulated in the garage over the seven years they had lived here. He opened the car’s front door far enough so that the interior lights shined. Then he went back to the front of the garage and turned off the ceiling light. If he was going to finish what he had set his mind and will to do, he didn’t want to attract last-minute attention from neighbors who might wonder why a garage light was left on and walk over to turn it off.