Authors: Paul Batista
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“He must be charming the pants off them. If they’re wearing pants.”
“Neil doesn’t rely much on charm.”
“Really, did you notice that, too?”
She touched the off switch of the small device. It made a loud click, almost like a weapon, totally out of proportion to its size.
“What’s the matter,” Hutchinson asked, “are you afraid Neil will get mad at us if he hears this?”
“No, I just don’t want to waste tape.”
“My, are we going to be here that long?”
“A little while. There are some things I want to cover.”
“Go ahead. I’ve come to love these sessions, you know.” He laughed, a falsely urbane chuckle that made her uneasy, curious.
Was he gay? she wondered. “The more I tell the same stories the more I believe them.”
“Today I want to cover a few different things,” she said.
“Ah, some variety.”
“Today I want to talk about you and Tom Perini.”
“Dear Lordy,” he rolled his eyes and lifted his hands, palms out, a deliberate effeminate gesture. “I was beginning to think you would never ask.”
Hutchinson wanted to talk.
* * *
Later that night, in her apartment, Kiyo replayed the six tapes D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
several times; she was fascinated each time by what she heard. As the tapes revealed, Hutchinson was in one of his spellbinder moods, and she had refrained from interrupting his flow of words with questions. Replaying the tapes, she made notes of questions she would ask later as she listened again and again to the key segments of Hutchinson’s monologue.
His taped voice said, “I met Perini three or four years ago. By that time I had been taking cash from Bill Irwin to Fonseca for more than a year. It was small stuff, a thousand, twelve hundred dollars, once every three or four weeks. It was easy. Irwin and I’d
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schedule a racquetball game at the Harvard Club in Washington.
We would meet in the locker room, change into our sweats and, carrying our gym bags, go to the racquetball court. Why racquetball? Unlike a squash court, most of which have those little rectangular windows in the door and open galleries on top, a racquetball court is completely closed, because you use all of the walls, the floor, and the ceilings. It’s invisible to the outside world.
There isn’t even a peephole. You close the door and have utter privacy. At some point Irwin would make the switch of cash from his gym bag to mine while we recovered from a point. He played well. We were two prep-school boys who had learned to play well. He went to Exeter. I went to Groton.
“But ultimately the numbers got too big to handle in cash, because the more Fonseca got the more he wanted, and the fun on the racquetball court had to end. Irwin told me he had developed a special relationship with a lawyer in New York who was
‘broad-gauged’ about what a lawyer should be willing to do for a client. He said that in a serious tone. ‘Broad-gauged.’ Irwin was one of these people who assumed that his prerogatives in life were shared by people exactly like him who knew how to deal in money.
“When he told me this broad-gauged lawyer was Tom Perini I did a mental double-take. I was never a football fan—it’s a stupid game—but the Tom Perini I knew about had been one of the big college names in the country when I was in high school. ‘One and
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the same,’ Irwin assured me. He said he would arrange a meeting in New York, the Four Seasons Grill Room, and gave me an insider’s lesson on how to deal with Tom Perini.
“The lesson: don’t be direct with him. By that time Irwin had been dealing with Tom for two years, for other ‘clients’ of Irwin, and they still went through the charade of pretending that Tom was closing real estate transactions in Florida, Arizona, the Bahamas, California, you name it, from his office in New York.
He would park the ‘purchaser’s’ money for two or three weeks in his nontaxable escrow accounts, and then wire-transfer the
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money to accounts designated by Irwin, who pretended to represent the sellers of all that Sun Belt and Caribbean real estate.
Perini even went through the charade of generating sales documents from his word processor. Apparently he needed something tangible to touch, like a football.
“Another part of the lesson on how to deal with Tom. Never mention Madrigal. I knew who Madrigal was, Irwin knew, Danny had heard of him, but there was no need for Tom to know. He wanted to know very little. He was satisfied with knowing what names to put on his computer-generated documents. That was enough for him. I remember saying to Irwin,
‘Can he be that stupid? What’s that old line about Gerald Ford?
Played football without a helmet too many times?’ And then Irwin made the obvious point, ‘Large portions of that escrow money cling to the walls of Perini’s account when the money transfers. If anything ever surfaced, he thought he would have the phony documents he generated to protect himself. Money is the great suspender of disbelief.’
“And then I made arrangements to fly here to meet him. We went to dinner in the West Village. After the preliminary banter I told him that although I had the title of chief of staff to Fonseca I was essentially an independent consultant for him and other people. I invented a thin story about investors in Arizona and New Mexico real estate, South American, and Arab oil, and I flattered him. Flattery, like money, is the other great solvent of these stupid D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
years. I told him Bill Irwin and the business people he represented were impressed by his grasp of the issues and his ability to provide swift, accurate service.
“To his credit he said very little. He gave the impression of being a busy and efficient lawyer who saw me as just another client, valuable precisely to the extent of my ability to pay his fees. You know the line, the one from Shakespeare: Lawyers’ fingers that straight dream on fees? That was fine with me. I never particularly enjoyed the company of jocks, and Tom had that clean, healthy presence of most quality jocks. Even at the Four
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Seasons he attracted a lot of attention. He seemed very humble and tolerant about it.
“By the end of that week I gave him the name and location of a piece of real estate in New Mexico—I called it a health spa—and gave him the name of a seller—Canyon II Associates or some phony name interchangeable with the phony names of lots of companies. And the name of a purchaser, equally phony. And by the end of the week he had over five million dollars in an escrow account, wired from a bank in the Cayman Islands, which I told him he was holding as ‘earnest’ money, a nonrefundable down payment.
“Three weeks later I told him that the deal had collapsed and had him wire the funds, less five hundred thousand dollars, to an account at a bank in San Diego. And so it went. Many times. And he had done the same deals many times before with Irwin. Nice work, don’t you think, Kiyo, if you can get it?”
Kiyo heard her overly literate, precise, tight-sounding voice on the recording: “And do you know who owned the money?” Since Hutchinson’s recorded voice sounded precisely like his voice when he spoke, she recognized that this was a faithful reproduction of herself. There were times she wished she had a different voice.
“Who owns money?” Hutchinson laughed, that same quick, phony, aristocratic laugh. “No one owns money. People have temporary or long-term possession of it, and then it moves.
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Madrigal, I suppose, owned the right to use and move it. And then Tom had possession of it. I wonder where it is now. His wife probably has it, I’ll bet.”
“How did Madrigal get that money? Was it drugs?”
“I have no idea. It wasn’t my business. And I, you know, shared this with Perini. He had no interest either, it was not his business. His business was handling transactions. Money’s the ultimate chimera—Madrigal’s money could have come from drugs, weapons, loans to real estate ventures, garbage, prostitution, fundamentalist preachers, the Vatican. Whatever it was it
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was so massive, so huge, there was so much of it, he was willing to share parts of it with people who helped him. I earned my commissions, Perini kept his escrow hold-backs, everybody was happy.”
“Everybody was happy…” Kiyo replayed Hutchinson’s voice three times as he spoke those words. Something about the lighthearted tone struck her. And then she fast-forwarded the tape to another part of the conversation which had also arrested her sharp attention and which she had replayed at least three times.
It began, as she wrote on her notepad, at the tape recorder’s digital reading of 373.
Her voice. “Why didn’t you ever mention this before?”
His voice. “Are you kidding? I told you about this several times.”
“When?”
“How can I remember when? I’ve talked to you people more than I ever talked to my mother.”
“I never heard it.”
“I mentioned it to Neil, to McGlynn. I’m sure you were there.”
“No. Never.”
“All right. May have been one of those times, there were a few, when you were out of the room, or on vacation, or leading whatever other life you lead…”
Her voice, almost coquettish. “I’m all work, there is no other life.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“That’s what they say about you: a piece of work.”
She heard herself reproduced on the tape, a nervous laugh.
Before she could speak, Hutchinson said:
“I told Neil in fact that this business with Perini was more complex than any of the chickenshit stuff involving Fonseca, that deadhead Klein, or any of the other goons he had indicted. That the real case was much more important than the playlet he was performing in the courtroom.”
“When did you tell him?”
“I can’t really remember. Early on. He told me that he already
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had his case built around Fonseca taking money from Klein and bestowing favors on Klein and the other idiots. He said he wanted a simple case. I said the other train—the train with Madrigal, Irwin, Perini, me—had to be bigger, much bigger. Certainly the money involved was bigger, hugely, immensely bigger. He told me, in that polite way he has, to mind my own fucking business.
He’d get around to it, he said, in his own good time. I was going to be spending lots of time, he said, vindicating and avenging the interests of our wonderful government and the heroic, post-9/11
people of the United States of America.”
Kiyo rewound the tape cassette; it whirred swiftly backward as she wrote, on a yellow slip of paper, the date and Hutchinson’s name. After she popped the tape out of the recorder and secured the yellow paper around it with a rubber band, she stared from her high window at the dark, late-night streets of the West Village.
“Why,” she ultimately wrote in the same small notebook in which she had been sketching out more questions to ask Hutchinson,
“didn’t N.S. tell me that Perini, a lawyer representing a major defendant in a major case, could have been indicted for tax fraud, wire fraud, money-laundering, God knows what else?”
Then, remembering how Sorrentino in cross-examining Hutchinson months before had stumbled onto at least one meeting between Hutchinson and Perini, she also wrote, “Next time start by asking H. why he went to Perini for legal advice. And then probe him, since I now know that that could not have been the reason
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Hutchinson went to Perini after his first Grand Jury appearance.”
That was typical of her. Kiyo needed the packaged symmetry of a place to start and a place to stop.
* * *
The narrow, foul-smelling magazine and cigarette store just south of 90th Street on Madison Avenue was owned by two Pales-tinian brothers who knew Julie by name. She had always been an avid buyer of newspapers, magazines, and tabloid-sized periodicals such as the
New York Review of Books
and the
Times Literary
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Supplement
. Until Tom’s death the brothers expected to see her every Thursday afternoon at four, because she knew that was when the store received its large weekly infusion of new magazines and papers. She would stack them in her daughter’s carriage and then walk the block and a half to her apartment with her little girl. Before Tom’s death they knew that she was a journalist, a reader, and the wife of a very famous man. After his death—which they never mentioned to her—they knew that she bought fewer magazines and that she had the grave, distracted appearance of a woman who had suffered punishing losses, a look they had seen in the faces of many women in Beirut before they left in 1987.
Both brothers were behind the counter on Thursday afternoon when Julie barged into the store and asked, “Did you get
New York
yet?” It was not like her to ask for anything. For years she had methodically searched out and collected the magazines and newspapers she wanted herself.
“Sure, we must,” Saddam said in English before speaking in Arabic to his brother Jabril, who, with a knife, cut the taut plastic cord that bound a heavy package of new magazines. The cord snapped and Jabril pulled a freshly printed copy of
New York
from the middle of the stack.
Usually polite, Julie said nothing to either brother and bought nothing else. She had that rapt, urgent look they saw on the faces of well-dressed men quickly, furtively buying hardcore pornography.
Saddam tried to catch her attention as he handed over her D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
change, but she never looked at his face. With her shoulder Julie pushed at the glass door and ran out to Madison Avenue, where, as Saddam saw, she stopped on the sidewalk, stared at the cover, and then riffled through the pages.
On
New York’s
cover she saw the stylish magazine artwork and the title of the cover story:
Cash, Trophies and Murder in the
Park
. Those words were superimposed over a faint but still distinct photograph of Tom, smiling. Below the headline and Tom’s picture was an image of the Heisman Trophy falling from a pedestal into a basket of cash, mainly hundred-dollar bills. At
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