Death's Witness (17 page)

Sorrentino smiled at Kate and said to her, “Danny says he loves you too.”

* * *

An hour later Sorrentino and Kate left Vigdor’s party. They walked, arms around each other’s waists, down the hill from the vast dune where Vigdor’s house dominated that area of the coast.

They heard the fine gravel crunching under their feet and then under the wheels of Sorrentino’s red Porsche. They drove for three miles on the gorgeous, flat roads of East Hampton to Main Street. Kate was staying in The Huntting Inn, a sprawling old building with an attractive restaurant in a latticed, breezy wing.

As they ate, Sorrentino had no doubt that this remarkable-looking, verbally brilliant woman would bring him to her room and expect him to stay the night.

He also had no doubt that she was fascinated by the men he knew—the kind of men with whom she couldn’t have had any contact.

P A U L B A T I S T A

Sorrentino became her pipeline to the underworld (a word she actually used): to men like Vito Carneglia, whom the newspapers always described as the capo of the Gambino crime family and who was acquitted last year after a four-week trial in which Sorrentino had represented him; Gianfranco “Frankie the Bug” Domasso, the head of the Lucchese crime family, now serving seventy-five years in a federal prison after a three-month trial Sorrentino had lost.

Sorrentino had no difficulty with the fact that this woman wanted to probe him as to what these legendary men were like.

In return, she had no difficulty with the fact that his quietly deliv-140

ered answers were evasive, suggestive, and oblique. “As far as I know,” he said as he smiled at her over another glass of red wine,

“the only family that Frankie the Bug is the head of is his own: he’s your typical Italian man who believes in lots of kids. He lives in a split-level in Corona, Queens. There’s a stone angel, with wings, on his front lawn. Admittedly, the house does have big locked gates in front. It does kind of stand out. But his papa trained him how to be a mason, after all.”

Then, as they ate dessert, she began to talk about Sorrentino’s most famous current client, Congressman Fonseca. The restaurant was quieter now. It was almost eleven. The stereo played a tape of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing music by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington—all those lush sounds of another era. Sorrentino didn’t want to talk about Fonseca, but he listened quietly as Kate spoke.

“Like this music,” she said, “Danny is one of those beautiful relics of a simpler time. He believes in taking things in exchange for favors. It’s his job to serve people—for Danny, good politics is getting shares in a company that does business in Brooklyn, then using his influence to send more government contracts to the company, so that all those workers can go on working. That’s what a politician is supposed to do: help people. And where is it written down that a politician can’t get something for doing what helps people? Danny was schooled to do that, and he can’t understand what’s wrong with it.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Sorrentino tried to seem noncommittal, diffident. He thought of a quick line, echoed from Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
:

“Your business, my dear, is the politics of the world. Mine is running a saloon.”

As she wound down on the subject of Fonseca, Kate said,

“That’s why I can’t understand this Madrigal business that Danny’s involved in.”

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t you know?”

Sorrentino shook his head.

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“A banker, supposedly, in Mexico. Danny’s been taking favors from Madrigal. Danny may have become such a compulsive taker that he can no longer differentiate.”

Sorrentino shrugged, smiling, “Like Rick said in
Casablanca
, the politics of the world are not my business.”

Kate Stark gave him a great, blazing blonde smile.

* * *

In her notebook Julie wrote:
What is that line in Yeats I think
about all the time now, especially this horrendous weekend? I know I
don’t remember it exactly. Something about the fever that is in my brain.

He wrote it in that poem, the prayer for his daughter. Those days when I
used to lock myself in my room—what was I then, 14?
—
and recite and
memorize poetry (Yeats, Stevens, Robert Lowell) are long gone. But the
memory of some lines still lasts, to some extent. Is the Yeats line “the great
gloom that is in my mind”?

Hard to be sure. But I know this as I write: Tom’s presence is all
around me; he is the fever in my brain that won’t go away. I need to write
these notes down because there is no one I can talk to now.

Item One: those credit card receipts. I have looked at them and looked
at them. Those are Tom’s signatures. I wish they weren’t. So he didn’t lend
his card to someone else to go Miami. Or Mexico City. But when was he
in those places? I can remember nights here and there in the last three
years when he was in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles…Calls by cell phone,
never at the hotel numbers. But he was always back after a day or two.

P A U L B A T I S T A

Item Two: those bank account statements, dozens of them, stapled
together in a file labeled “Miscellaneous” and then transferred into the
computers. First four hundred thousand dollars, five hundred thousand
dollars, in, and then, a week or two later, out, or almost all out; and then
another million in, and then almost all out. And, over the twelve months
before he died, much bigger amounts, suddenly ninety million, more,
mind-boggling amounts if I’m reading them correctly and, who knows,
maybe I’m not. But nothing showing that all or any of that went out.

Not one of the statements has Tom’s name on it. They are statements
from the Cayman Islands, Panama, Ireland, the Seychelles, Liechtenstein.

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They have numbers on them. How did they get to Tom? It is easy to understand them—the amount of money in, the amount out, and then the huge
amounts in, nothing out—but why did he have them? Why didn’t he tell
me about them?

And then Item Three: the man just outside the lobby this morning. He
looked guilt-ridden when he spoke to me, and I was upset with myself for
having been rude to him at first. When he asked, “Ain’t you Julie Perini?”

I did what every stupid New Yorker does when a black man speaks. I got
snooty: “Please?” I made sure that our doorman stayed nearby, ready to
act to protect precious me.

It turned out that this tall black man was polite, earnest, and kind. He
told me that he was sorry that he had let all these months go by but that he
had seen Tom’s picture—and even mine, God help me—on television the last
few nights and he wanted to tell me that he had been the security guard in
Tom’s office building. His name was Hector. He had seen Tom the night “it
happened.” He had been brooding for months over “something funny.”

“
What is it?” I asked him.

“
A weird-looking dude was there, looking for Tom, waiting for him.

Tom talked to him on the intercom from the lobby and then he told me to
get rid of him.”

“
Who was he?”

“
Mr. Perez. Funny: he said he was from Mexico City.”

“
Did anything happen?”

“Tom told me to get him off the intercom. I did. This Perez guy said
he wanted me to call Mr. Perini again and just say he was there from Mr.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Madrigal. I told him to fuck off.

“
He went across the street and he waited for Tom. He didn’t know
what Tom looked like. He stopped some short, ugly dudes who work in the
building who no way was Tom to ask them if they was Tom.
”

“
Tell me more,” I said.

“
When Tom came down I said, ‘Look, Mr. Perini, let me get you a cab,
that dude’s still waiting.’ Tom said, ‘Fine.’ I got him a cab and away he
went. The dude waited for another fifteen minutes. And then he wasn’t
there anymore.”

“
Did you ever see him again?”

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“
Never.”

“
Did you ever tell anybody?”

“
Sure. Few days later some cops without uniforms come over to me and
ask about your husband. I told them what I told you. I remember his name,
Perez, and the name he said, Madrigal, and I give it to them. I tell them
this dude told Tom he was from Mexico and wanted to see him. That Tom
asked me to kick him out. And that he waited for Tom for a long time.”

“
What did they say?”

“
Not much
.
They listened.
”

“
Then
?”

“
Then they left. They got my name and number and say they might
call me again. Never happened. I never heard from them.
”

A measure of how off I am is what happened next. I was so grateful to
this tall, kind man I reached for my wallet and found a twenty-dollar bill
that I handed to him. He was not even tempted. He shook his head; he then
disarmed me and made me feel totally off base when he said: “Hey, Mrs.

Perini, I told you this because I thought I should. Not for money.”

I was so ashamed of myself, yet so grateful, I was barely able to thank
him. I asked him for his name: Hector Lopez. Still works in Tom’s building. I came back upstairs, hugged Kim, and double-bolted the doors. And
now, as Kim naps, I write this.…

* * *

Fewer than nine hours after Julie wrote these notes, she was wrenched upward from a profound sleep. It was sixty-thirty in
P A U L B A T I S T A

the morning. Monday. Men’s hands pounded on the apartment door. At the same time, the doorbell whirred incessantly, on-and-off, on-and-off. Still drenched in sleep, she fixed her mind on the fact that she couldn’t recall a time when the doorbell had ever rung without the doorman from the lobby calling first on the intercom, announcing a visitor.
Get to the door
,
get to the door
, she thought.

Draping a robe over her shoulders, she slipped on a pair of old flat shoes and cinched the robe tightly at her waist. Trotting from the bedroom to the apartment door, she caught herself, fear
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totally replacing her unfocused drowsiness. She thought of her daughter, moved instinctively in the direction of Kim’s room, and stopped. Fists continued pounding on the door, and now there were male voices, calling her name. “Mrs. Perini, Mrs. Perini, Mrs. Perini.”

And then she heard a voice on the other side of the door:

“Federal agents. Open up. Or the door will come down now.”

She approached the door. She looked through the small, circular peephole into a world of horror: there were at least eight men in the hall, where her name resonated…
Mrs. Perini, Mrs.

Perini
…She unbolted the door.

After all the mayhem in the hallway, the first man to enter the apartment surprised her. He had the bland, blond, earnest style of a Jehovah’s Witness and said, as though mildly entreating her to convert, “Mrs. Perini, we’re agents of the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, and the FBI.”

Clutching the robe’s knot at her waist, Julie just stared at him and the team of men looming behind him. She was wide-eyed, not able to speak.

He continued, “My name is Agent Martin. We are here to take things, things designated in this warrant…” He handed her a single sheet of paper. Her hand trembling, her mind fixated on the concept that this had to be a dream, she took the paper. It had the blocky, black words “Search Warrant” in the upper right-hand corner.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Sorrentino had used those words, followed, as she recalled, by the word “Nazi.” The mild man, after an interval, said, “We’ll do our best not to disturb you.”

Speechless, Julie turned from him and stumbled to Kim’s room. She heard behind her the team of men enter the apartment. Before she opened the door to Kim’s room, she glanced, her eyes wild, in their direction: they had handcarts and four-wheeled dollies. The iron wheels of the equipment scratched the floors. There were at least six men, all in business suits. They had holsters with pistols in them.

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Kim was awake, standing on her mattress and holding the lowered bar of her crib. There was an enormous smile on her face when she saw her mother. Still more a baby than a small child, she rattled the bar. Julie put on a brave face, said, “Hello, sunshine pumpkin,” and picked her up. As she held her to her chest, she looked at the crumpled piece of paper in her hand. Without reading every word on the partially preprinted, partially typewrit-ten page, she absorbed that it was a warrant directing federal agents to locate and seize all “documents, computers, and computer records maintained, created, or held by Thomas R. Perini, or his agents, including Julie Perini, including without limitation all correspondence, bank records, deposit slips, notes, or memo-randa located in the premises known as 17 East 87th Street, New York, New York 10128, Apartment 18E.” The sheet of paper bore a distinctive signature: “Doris D. Feigley, Senior United States District Judge.”

By eleven-thirty the methodical, deliberate men had finished their work of stacking and removing the transfiles spread on the floor of the spare room. The leader painstakingly prepared short descriptions of the objects on the handcarts on a form labeled Search Warrant Inventory. He counted the boxes, put labels 1

through 47 on the separate boxes, photographed each of them separately, and estimated the number of separate file folders in each box. He even ordered one of his people to put Tom’s trophies on the top of some of the boxes and photograph them outside the
P A U L B A T I S T A

boxes. The inventory sheet said about them: “Sports trophies, athletic memorabilia.” They even took the Heisman Trophy.

In the course of the five-hour ransacking of her apartment Julie ran through emotion after emotion: anger, fear, hate, resignation, combativeness, stupor. At one point she screamed, “Why are you taking his trophies?” At another point, as she listlessly trailed behind two agents who roamed through her bedroom, looked under her bed, pushed the shower curtain back in her bathroom, and then opened the doors to the cabinets in her kitchen, she said, in a flat tone that sounded more helpful than sarcastic, “Why
146

don’t you do this right? Take a look in the oven. You might find a head in there.” The men ignored her.

As for Kim, she alternated between crying and wide-eyed curiosity. In her sleeping smock, she walked through the apartment, essentially following her mother in her round-and-round wanderings but sometimes moving away on her own. At another point she wailed in tears when one of the men opened a toy chest in her room.

When Elena arrived for work as usual at seven-thirty, she instinctively recognized what was happening. She said nothing.

Acknowledging Julie with her eyes, Elena immediately took Kim into her arms and carried her to the bathroom that she and Kim used. She closed the door and bathed Kim.

Still dressed only in her bathrobe, emotionally drained, Julie gazed flatly as the last of the file boxes was wheeled on a hand truck from the spare room to the hallway. After all of his men had stepped into the hallway, the mild, deferential leader of the group approached Julie, holding the inventory list in his hand.

He had the demeanor and mannerisms of a clerk who had just delivered furniture and wanted to leave a receipt and get a tip.

Julie’s fury rose in her as she watched him approach.

“Sorry to inconvenience you,” he said, “but would you initial this copy of the list?”

“Initial? Initial my ass!” she screamed.

“I’m just doing my job, Mrs. Perini.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“You fucking little Nazi. Just doing
your
job! What kind of lousy job do you have?”

He stared at her, expressionless except for the faintest smile.

Quietly he said, “You shouldn’t act this way, Mrs. Perini.”

“Get out,” she screamed. “Get out, get out, get out.”

The man retreated backward, on little steps. She saw that the faint smile on his lips had changed to an expression of deliberate scorn. And she heard the male laughter, derisive laughter, construction-worker laughter, in the hallway. She stepped into the doorway and shouted: “You are
all creeps
.”