Death's Witness (30 page)

248

“Danny,” Vincent Sorrentino said, “I don’t live your life, I don’t know who or what you know, but you must know by now the kinds of things the Government is interested in prosecuting people for.

That’s why I brought up Madrigal. If not him, then maybe you know something or someone else. Maybe, if you can give up something or somebody important, I can approach Steinman and work out a deal for you, have you plead guilty to a misdemeanor, you resign, maybe only a couple of months in jail.”

“Sure, Vinnie, I’m always interested in a deal.”

“But you’ve got to give me something to work with. Otherwise, we’ll be back on trial in two months, and, you know what, Danny, I can’t go through that again, not without getting paid the money I’m owed plus at least another five-hundred thousand.”

Fonseca’s face looked as angry as a good-natured, tanned face could look. He was hearing what he didn’t want to hear—Sorrentino again asking for money—and he said, “I could talk, Vinnie, about Tom Perini.”

Sorrentino looked out the window. He could see in the beautiful distance the yellow and yellow-red leaves of Central Park.

“They don’t want to hear about Tom Perini. He’s dead.”

“Well, I could talk to them about his wife.”

Julie
, Sorrentino thought.
Julie?
“I don’t want to hear about her.”

“Why?”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“There is no way I could arrange a deal for you that would turn on your giving her up.”

“Why so?”

“That’s really my business, Danny.”

249

19.

The restaurant where Julie ate with Sorrentino was gorgeous, close, and warm. Outside the old windows overlooking the corner of Madison Avenue and 92nd Street she could see the cold November wind drive gusts of leaves back and forth through the light from the streetlamps.

“She said she got my number from Nancy Lichtman, a woman I saw many months ago. She was the one who, with her boyfriend, saw Tom running just before it happened. I never heard another word from Nancy, or about her, until Kiyo called me yesterday. I had a strange feeling that Nancy, who I felt was a warm person, could become a friend of mine. I never had any special ability to attract or keep friends, and now I feel like Scar-let Sister Mary.”

Sorrentino thought the obvious thing for him to say was that he was her friend, but he didn’t like saying obvious things unless he was in court, on television, or in some other public setting.

Instead, he said, “It wouldn’t be unusual for Nancy to have been told the FBI felt she shouldn’t speak to you. And it wouldn’t be that unusual for Nancy to have passed your home telephone number to Kiyo. People tend to do what they’re asked to do, particularly if they’re called by the U.S. Attorney’s Office or the FBI.”

“I did leave my number with Nancy, because I really wanted her to—what?—help me and befriend me.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Sorrentino searched her face for some feature or detail that was less than perfect, for something in the structure of that face as a whole that was not in balance. Everything was. He stared down at that perfect face each time he made love to her. Perfect, too, was her voice: none of the fast New York staccato he had heard all his life, from men and women, none of that garment-center inflection of New York business-speak, and none of that younger-woman sentence structure in which the end of each declarative sentence had the inflection of an upward-rising question. She spoke slowly, distinction in each word.

251

“What did Kiyo say?” he asked.

“That she wanted to see me.”

“And what else?”

“That there would be nothing official about our talk. She thought, she said, there might be a way she could help me.”

“I don’t have to tell you how unusual that is.”

“I know.” She smiled. “What isn’t in my life?”

“Me.”

The waiter, a vivid actor-type, cleared the appetizer plates, and Sorrentino poured more wine into Julie’s bowl-like glass; the red liquid had at its core a reflected spear of light from the tall candle on the table. Sorrentino drank only water.

“She also said she’s talked a great deal with Hutchinson lately.

That Hutchinson claims to have known Tom well.”

“Julie, I could be wrong, but I think you should stay away from her. How did you leave it with her?”

“That I’d have to think about it. I said I had no reason to trust her.”

A white-haired man approached Sorrentino and touched his shoulder. Sorrentino recognized him and stood, graceful and assured in his movements. Julie smiled without rising, her face turned upward. Sorrentino introduced him—a name that didn’t register with Julie—and said, “This is Julie Perini.” That registered.

The man’s look was one of sudden surprise, even awe.

Julie thought ruefully:
I’m a celebrity.

P A U L B A T I S T A

* * *

After they finished dinner they crossed Madison Avenue in the cold air and walked to Julie’s apartment. Elena was reading, Kim had just fallen asleep, and Sorrentino was already familiar enough with the apartment’s rooms, this space, to know the closet in which to hang his overcoat. Elena swiftly slipped her book into her knapsack, told Julie that Kim had fallen asleep without any fuss, and said good-night, calling him “Mr. Sorrento.” She had a long subway trip to Brooklyn on a cold night ahead of her.

Julie brewed tea for them, and they sat for a long time—forty-252

five minutes, an hour, even longer?—on the sofa in the living room. The radio played classical music: the nighttime announcer’s austere, quiet voice said it was the music of Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki. In time Julie was leaning against his chest in the warm room. “I want you to stay again tonight.”

“I think I can manage that.”

* * *

Sorrentino left early in the morning before Elena arrived or Kim woke. Julie drank coffee and, in her bathrobe, looked down at a steep angle from her living room windows to the street. She saw him, far below, emerge from under the green awning at the building’s entrance and slip into a taxi. He was agile.

And he was now her lover, she thought. She had been married to Tom for ten years and in that time had no lovers other than Tom.

Not even a man she had kissed even casually, not a man with whom she had flirted, not a man she’d allowed to touch her hand, or her elbow, or her shoulder, for anything more than a chaste second.

Over the past many months she had wondered when she would have another lover—for she knew it had to happen and she wanted it to happen—or who that lover would be, or what would happen.

Now she had answers. Vincent Sorrentino was a warm, adept lover, different from Tom. Her husband was an athlete. He was always careful and considerate of her but there was a level at which he was absorbed in his own performance. Sorrentino didn’t D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

sweat as much, didn’t exert himself as much, but he watched her, gazed at her, appeared to want to understand what was happening to her. His body was well-constructed, it was slim, and it wasn’t muscular. Her husband had been muscular, even bulky. After listening to be sure Kim was still asleep, Julie parted the front of her bathrobe and, as she thought about the two times Vincent Sorrentino had made love to her during the night, she stroked the beautifully aroused swell of her clitoris.

* * *

253

Vincent Sorrentino was a teenager in the fifties and early sixties; he came of age in an era when young people had crushes.

Instinctively he had despised that word and never used it. But privately he knew what it meant—not being able to take your mind off a girl who attracted you. You walked around all day thinking about her, and when you woke up at night you thought about her and couldn’t fall back to sleep. You went places—school rooms, street corners, coffee shops, basketball games—hoping to see her there and to have her see you. Even decades later, he could remember the names of the girls he had crushes on: Angela Valenti, Francine Augemma, Mary Villani.

And now, as he made his way through the beautiful streets of early-morning Manhattan and charted his course through the day, he knew he had a complete crush on Julie Perini.

* * *

The subway station at Lexington Avenue and 86th Street was cold for an early December afternoon. There was freezing rain outside and that rain had also seeped underground to drench the station platform. Kiyo Michine, wearing a trim, tan raincoat that was too light for this weather, was chilled to her core. She often felt there was something about her natural body chemistry that not even all those cold winters in western Massachusetts during her childhood and college years at Mount Holyoke, or the law school years in Chicago, had ever conditioned her to live comfortably in dismal northern
P A U L B A T I S T A

weather like this. In a few months, she thought, she would take her talents and her life to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Miami.

The downtown number 6 train was running sporadically. In her impatient effort to keep warm, she moved around the platform, buying a copy of
The New Yorker
at the underground news-stand, sitting briefly on a bench to glance at the magazine’s pen-and-ink cartoons, pacing from the far southern end of the platform to the northern end, where she stopped and decided to stand stoically. She breathed deeply, regularly. She wanted to manage her impatience, she wanted to see the headlights of the
254

subterranean train as it finally approached.

Kiyo still stood stoically when, at last, the long-delayed train raced toward the station. She knew that in fifteen seconds she would be inside the warm subway car for the trip downtown.

Then, even though it would still be early afternoon, she was going home to her wonderful apartment at 2 Horatio Street to write down her notes about her fascinating, hours-long, just-finished talk with Julie Perini.

The train’s engineer was a friendly-looking, gray-haired black man. She was so close to the train and to him as the train screeched into the station that she could see his features. So fascinated was she by the intent, confident expression on his face as the train eased toward its stopping point that she felt, but couldn’t react to, the immensely powerful hands that threw her onto the tracks just in front of the wheels of the first car.

Those wheels crushed her.

The blond man who had picked her up and thrown her as if she were a doll quickly walked through a nearby rusted metal door with the words “Service—Do Not Enter,” climbed an empty flight of service stairs, emerged onto 87th Street, and began a leisurely jog to Central Park.

* * *

By four in the afternoon on the day Kiyo Michine was killed, two New York City detectives were in the lobby of Julie’s building.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

When the doorman buzzed her apartment she quietly said,

“Bobby, ask them to wait for a second, and I’ll be right down.”

Kim was napping, and she told Elena she would be in the lobby for a few minutes.

Julie believed she had learned much about dealing with the police over the last few months and, when these two men—one Italian and one Latino—asked if they could speak with her in some place more private than the lobby of her building, she immediately said, “No.”

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.