Authors: Paul Batista
Sorrentino hit the ground stunned. Weighed down by the gear on his back—his M-16, food rations, extra cartridge clips—he had trouble regaining his feet. He was deafened by the thunder of everything: the rotors, the gunshots, the screams. When he managed to stand in the soft Vietnamese soil, he looked straight at the soldier beside him just as a bullet passed through the nineteen-year-old man’s head with the sound of a large blade smacking and slicing a melon. Sorrentino screamed and shit in his pants. That was fear.
Later in life he witnessed another kind of fear. Early in his legal career he was sometimes fascinated by the men he represented: mob enforcers—men who killed on orders, who knew whatever they needed to know about how to knife or shoot other human beings. He thought then that they had a courage he didn’t have—
the courage to be brutal and deadly—and that he had a different type of courage in order to deal with them. In time, as his practice D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
and reputation grew, he no longer dealt with the goons who did the killings, but with their bosses, men who had graduated from the ranks and were no longer involved in hands-on brutality. He no longer thought they had courage, and he no longer wondered too often about whether he had courage in dealing with them.
Eventually, over the last four or five years, as his practice continued to evolve, he no longer represented even the men at the top of the murderous echelons. He represented people like Congressman Fonseca, and courage wasn’t an issue at all.
But now he was afraid, for he knew that fear was the strange
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emotion he felt in his secure, warm car. Here was a woman whose husband had been murdered. Sorrentino had so much experience that he had no doubt that Perini was taken out in an assassination by a hired killer, even though he had sometimes suggested to Julie that Tom might have been a victim of this dangerous city’s random violence. And then that old clown, Selig Klein, was shot in the chest and face at the diner near LaGuardia a few hours after arranging to see Julie Perini. Anyone with the right equipment—
equipment you could buy at Radio Shack—could have pulled that cellular call out of the air over Long Island and known exactly when Julie expected to see Klein.
And now this, a young, talented Assistant U.S. Attorney, involved in the most publicized trial of the year, was thrown onto subway tracks minutes after spending time with Julie Perini. In less than half an hour, millions of people would see Vincent Sorrentino on television walk into Julie Perini’s apartment building. The people who had stalked Tom Perini, Selig Klein, and Kiyo Michine would see that Vincent Sorrentino was someone else whose life had become aligned with Julie Perini’s. For a moment, Sorrentino’s mind fastened on the impulse to tell his driver to leave the FDR at the 42nd Street exit and take him to his office instead of Julie’s apartment, and have his secretary call her to say he had an emergency telephone conference with a judge. He could then spend time thinking about what he wanted to do, or not do.
But Sorrentino said nothing to the driver. The car continued
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uptown on the FDR in the rain. Outside, above the black river, the lights of the huge bridges—the Queensborough, the Triboro—fixed those structures in black space. On the surface of the river, he watched barges and other heavy craft make their difficult headway against the rain, wind, fog, and the tide.
* * *
McGlynn was in Kiyo’s apartment one hour after she died.
She was as neat, he noticed, about her surroundings as she had been about her clothes and her own appearance. It was a one-260
bedroom apartment, with a small living room overlooking, through casement windows, the low buildings of the West Village.
There were white curtains, beige walls, books perfectly arranged, a white kitchen. Even on a midweek afternoon with sleet, fog, and rain outside, the apartment was filled with attractive light.
In her bedroom was a desk. There were books of poetry on the surface of the desk. He opened the drawers, and in them were the things he expected to find. There were notebooks with labels on them, microcassettes with her tiny handwriting on the surface, ruled index cards, chronologically arranged and with her calli-graphic handwriting. All of these things he put into the two briefcases he was carrying.
McGlynn knew he had all the time in the world, since Kiyo was not coming back and it would take the New York City police hours to make arrangements to enter her apartment. He hadn’t needed to make arrangements. He knew how to open almost any door with a file and credit card. He looked through every bookcase and book and satisfied himself that this small, neat apartment contained no information other than what he had already located in her desk.
Then, since he had always been intrigued by what he thought of as her shapely Asian ass, and by the fact that she never seemed to have a boyfriend, McGlynn decided to look through the other objects of her life: her clothes, her kitchen cabinets, her refrigerator, her bathroom cabinets. She didn’t drink, she kept small D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
amounts of food, she had no pornographic tapes or books, she had no pictures of lovers, and she harbored no clothes or toothbrushes or razors for men. But she did have a box of condoms in her bathroom cabinet, as well as tubes of contraceptive foam. Half of the condoms were gone, and some of the tubes of contraceptive jelly were not in the box. The little cunt, McGlynn thought, she kept it from me but gave it out to somebody else. He lay down on the floor by her bed, opened his pants, and masturbated.
* * *
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There was an eerie serenity in Julie’s apartment. Kim played quietly in the living room, Elena was on the floor near Kim, reading Primo Levi’s
Periodic Table
, and Julie was listening to National Public Radio in the kitchen as she cooked pasta and an aromatic red sauce. She was listening to the sophisticated male and female voices of the evening news announcers: they provided, somehow, a reassuring sound.
When Sorrentino walked into the apartment, he was still fearful; he was also edgy, because he had been crowded and even jos-tled by the shouting reporters and cameramen on the sidewalk in front of Julie’s building. Kim looked up happily at him, because he ordinarily brought small presents for her and would hold her aloft, gently rocking her from side to side. This time he carried no gift for her, but he did pick her up, and she giggled. Elena stood with Levi’s book in her hand, a finger marking her page. She had come to like Sorrentino and gave him a demure, attractive smile.
He nodded to her.
Out of sight of Kim and Elena, he kissed Julie on the forehead.
She accepted the kiss, then wrapped her arms around his waist because the kiss was not enough for her. He said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”
Julie answered, “I’m really fine. Just hold me.”
It was a wonderful hug. For him, it embraced the scent of her washed hair, her skin, and a mild perfume she wore that stayed in the fabric of his clothes after they spent time together. The
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embrace brought to her the scent of his cologne and a faint, oddly pleasant aroma of cigar smoke. And, for both of them, the embrace also merged somehow with the warm atmosphere of cooking in the kitchen.
“What happened between you and Kiyo, Julie?” Sorrentino’s voice was quiet.
“God, it’s difficult to remember now. What’s happened since has simply shattered it all for me. I remember she wanted to tell me that Hutchinson could help us to understand the relationship between Tom and Madrigal, and understand how Madrigal could
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have had a role in arranging to hurt Tom. But that something had happened on ‘her end’ to divert people from drawing the right linkages, although Hutchinson had always been there, ready, willing and able to draw a road map.”
“What did she mean by ‘her end’?”
“The people she works with.”
Sorrentino was still holding her. Their faces were so close that he could smell her sweet breath and see that the faintest imaginable line was starting to form between her dark eyebrows. “What did you tell her?”
“That I hated McGlynn from the minute I saw him. She rolled her eyes when I said that—her way of expressing agreement, understanding. Vince, she had absolutely black, beautiful eyes.”
“Julie, she was a striking young person.”
“She was warm, direct, and honest. I can’t believe that she was alive six hours ago and dead now.”
“Are you all right? Do you want a drink? Can you get Valium, something like that?”
“I don’t need any of that, Vince. It’s sick to say it but I’m becoming a pro at dealing with this kind of thing.” She paused.
“What I need is for you to stay for supper with us, play with Kim, hold my hand…”
“And then I’ll have to leave.”
“Of course. We can’t have the newspapers say that the legendary Vincent Sorrentino arrived at five in the afternoon to D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
comfort and counsel Julie Perini and then stayed until ten the next morning. I want less publicity, not more.”
For the next three hours, they finished preparing supper, ate slowly, had several glasses of wine, played with Kim, and spoke to Elena. At nine Vincent Sorrentino left and, in the lobby and on the sidewalk, pushed his way through reporters, microphones, and cameras to his car. He didn’t say a word.
* * *
Julie Perini never told Vincent Sorrentino that she had
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recorded, on a hidden tape machine, every word of her conversation with Kiyo. Nor had she told Kiyo that she was doing that.
And Julie Perini hadn’t told Vincent Sorrentino—a man she loved—how startling the things were that Kiyo Michine said to her. Julie was certain now that she knew who had killed her husband, why he had been killed, and what her husband had done that led to his death. She didn’t want anybody to know for now that she had the tape, because she wanted to think about how to use it to destroy the people who had destroyed Tom.
And there was something else she hadn’t told Vincent Sorrentino: what she had learned on her recent visit to Tom’s parents and what she had done four days later.
She arrived in Lowell early on Thanksgiving afternoon. Sparse snow was falling. The triple-decker house with a flat roof in which Tom had been raised needed paint: it was a gray structure humbled even more by a gray day. The old street was lined with identical apartment buildings. Old cars were parked solidly end-to-end on each side of the street. Snow was gathering only on the cold steel surfaces of the vehicles. It melted to a mess on the sidewalks and streets.
Julie was exhausted as she carried Kim and all the equipment children require up the three flights of stairs. Inside the apartment Lou and Mary embraced Julie and hesitated with Kim, who looked tired, bewildered, and uncertain. She had seen her grandparents only three or four times in her short life, and not at all since Tom’s
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funeral. Lou, who looked as though he had advanced rapidly from seventy to ninety, held back from Kim. Mary drew her out with small toys and candy she had bought at a Duane Reade drugstore.
As they prepared dinner and ate, Julie’s bone-chilling sense of fear and isolation—bred on the long, lonely drive on Route 95
from New York to Massachusetts—melted. The old furniture and wallpaper of this apartment began to feel familiar and comfortable: Mary was, as always, easy to talk with, and even Lou emerged mentally every once in a while to engage Julie and Kim before he retreated into whatever thoughts he had, that internal
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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.”
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“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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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,
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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.