Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  Julie didn’t leave the building on Saturday or Sunday. Whenever Kim napped—which was not often—Julie spoke with Elena about what to say to Kim. Elena said, “Let’s be normal, please, until we know what to do.”

  Julie was jarred by the fact that Kim became fussy about not being taken outside (“Kim go park,” she often said, a child’s command rather than a request), but only a few times mentioned the word “Daddy” throughout the weekend since Tom often spent Saturdays and Sundays at his office. Julie also found herself, until early on Sunday morning, gripped by a question that kept forming in her mind: What do you to do to bury a person?

  She’d never done that before.

  There was an answer to that question, and for that answer Julie was grateful. Vincent Sorrentino, the lawyer leading the defense at the trial that had so absorbed Tom, sent an email which Elena retrieved. In it, Sorrentino wrote that he could imagine Julie’s grief P A U L B A T I S T A

  and confusion. His own wife had died of cancer two years ago.

  “Sadly,” Sorrentino’s email said, “I know about burying people we have loved for years.” Because he had come to know Tom so well over the last few months, he wrote that, if she needed his help, he had a sense of what Tom might want. And he wanted, the email said, “to do everything possible to honor Tom and help you.”

  Even in what Tom had always called the backbiting, vicious world of the best-known criminal lawyers in the country, Tom had, in his usual open, unwary way, called Vincent Sorrentino

  “the Master, my mentor,” although they were united by nothing 20

  more than the months they’d spent together preparing for the trial and sharing the defense table.

  Tom had introduced Julie to Sorrentino twice. Vincent Sorrentino’s mild, deferential demeanor surprised her. In these quiet dinner meetings she never heard or saw the intense, beautifully phrased presence she had so often witnessed in Sorrentino’s many television appearances. Moreover, Tom, boy-like, almost in wonder, let Julie know Sorrentino had followed a completely different path in life from virtually every lawyer Tom ever met.

  Raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in the fifties and sixties, Sorrentino was drafted into the Army in 1968, when he graduated from high school and decided not to go to college. In 1969 he spent a year in the infantry in Vietnam. Discharged in the early 1970s, he enrolled at CCNY and, while working during the days in a stockroom in the garment district in Manhattan, attended lowly, working-class St. John’s University Law School at night.

  Tom once told Julie he had never met another Vietnam veteran among the lawyers of Sorrentino’s age and vintage. All the rest of them, as go-getter young men with deferments or fabricated letters from doctors, had managed to avoid the draft in the late sixties and early seventies. Maybe it was Vietnam that had endowed Sorrentino as a young man with the confidence and grace he displayed now, so many years later.

  When Elena finished reading Sorrentino’s email to Julie, she wrote out in longhand a message to Sorrentino in which she said, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Tom admired you so much” and “I had no idea you knew him so well. What you’ve planned is what he would have wanted, as I do. Thanks with all my heart. I’ll repay you someday.” Elena typed the note on the laptop keyboard and touched the Send symbol. Sorrentino’s message instantly came back. “Repayment is your letting me help.”

  On Monday morning, an overcast day, Julie left the apartment building for the first time in daylight since she and Kim on Friday afternoon visited the small butcher shop on Madison Avenue between 87th and 88th streets. Julie was alone as she stepped from 21

  the elevator. She was too numb to be disturbed or angry with the cameramen who were waiting on the sidewalk outside the lobby as she trotted quickly to the car Sorrentino had provided and was driven downtown to the funeral mass at Saint Paul the Apostle at Ninth Avenue and 59th Street.

  Hundreds of people filled the cathedral-sized interior. Television camera crews were outside, including a large contingent from NBC, where she worked. In the front pews were people Julie recognized but had never met: Frank Gifford, his face unnaturally tanned, who from time to time had broadcast football games with Tom as a guest over the last fifteen years; Bryant Gumbel, smooth, sleek, slightly overweight; Joe Namath, his cheeks deeply lined, smiling at everyone; Barbara Walters, who had interviewed Tom five or six times; and Vincent Sorrentino, at the rear of the church, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and black tie, and with gray hair and the blackest eyebrows over deep-set, observant eyes.

  Intentionally, Julie diverted her gaze from the people in the pews as she made her long walk down the church’s central aisle.

  The only light came from the immense stained-glass windows.

  Julie’s knees felt watery. She heard a choir chanting in Latin.

  Tom had not been religious. Julie was not even Catholic. And yet Sorrentino’s suggestion for a funeral Mass, some of it in Latin, seemed somehow right to her, especially at this moment.

  Mary and Lou sat beside her in the first pew. The absolute soreness of Julie’s mind was still so profound that she didn’t know P A U L B A T I S T A

  how they had made the trip from Lowell to Manhattan or where they were staying. She assumed it was Vincent Sorrentino’s generous wizardry. She embraced them. She had always loved them because Tom loved them. They couldn’t speak.

  As the ceremony began, with Tom’s coffin less than five feet from them, draped in the most delicate shroud, Julie sensed that Lou couldn’t keep his silence. When the priest intoned Introibo ad altare Dei, Lou shuddered. His face twisted into a wrinkled, agonized mask as he stared at his son’s coffin. And then he screamed—a wail, resonating fearfully through the interior of the 22

  church. Mary draped her arms around his shoulders and hugged the trembling old man while the ritual of the Mass unfolded. Julie broke down, too.

  After the Mass she rode in the limousine with her husband’s body to LaGuardia and made the short flight to Boston, where she joined the car caravan to Lowell. It was raining there. She traveled that distance without speaking. Saint Ignatius Cemetery in Lowell, spread over a low, coal-colored hill near abandoned brick factory buildings, depressed her more than she expected.

  Tom was buried here because Vincent Sorrentino felt that would be most fitting, and she had tacitly agreed.

  Where else in the world would be better? New York? Tom had never really felt that the city was his home, although he loved the sanctuary of their apartment. And someone in the city had killed him. Southern California, where she was raised? That made no sense. She hadn’t returned there after she left, at seventeen, for Wellesley on a scholarship. Her own parents, now deeply ensnared in their alcoholism, hadn’t even tried to reach her. She was long past hating them.

  In one of his emails Sorrentino wrote that he’d often heard Tom mention Lowell and his parents’ rootedness there. Lowell, then, was the right place: depressing old Lowell. Dimly, she realized that there were many people lining the streets to the ceme-tery. The workday was over as the wet funeral caravan passed through Lowell’s outskirts into the heart of the factory town. Tom D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  was the most famous, the most celebrated native of this decayed city in more than a century. In late afternoon, the coffin was rolled from the rear of the Colavita Funeral Home hearse, an aging Cadillac, and lowered to the ground alongside the open grave. A local priest, who looked upset and grieving himself—Julie didn’t know him but someone whispered that he was one of Tom’s classmates when they were in parochial school together—shook holy water over the already wet coffin and prayed in a heavily accented Massachusetts voice: “Hail, Mary, full of grace…”

  In the damp, late afternoon light, as rivulets of filthy water 23

  streamed into the opened soil, Lou couldn’t be controlled. While his only child’s coffin was lowered on ropes to the bottom of the grave, Lou roared out: “Tom-mee, Tom-mee, Tom-mee.” Three men led him away. Cameras from tel
evision stations and newspapers dwelled on the old man, his face buried in his hands, as he was guided to a black car. Vincent Sorrentino was one of the men who helped.

  Later that night, Julie made her way back to New York and into a world in which her husband no longer lived.

  4.

  “Now we won’t have any more outbursts, Mr. Sorrentino.”

  Judge Feigley sat at the head of a long table in her chambers, a room whose walls were lined uniformly with the crisp, brown and black binders of law books. Seniority had brought her not only the largest courtroom in the building but the most desirable set of offices as well. Seated with her at the conference table were the fifteen lawyers still involved in what was known as the Fonseca trial. Daniel Fonseca was the Congressman represented by Vincent Sorrentino.

  “I apologize, Your Honor,” Sorrentino said, “but the attitude of the government lawyers is, to me at least—and I’ve been doing this kind of work for a long, long time—incredible.”

  “I’ve been in this business a long time, too, Mr. Sorrentino. A little bit longer than you, in fact.” Although she had lived in New York since she was thirty, Judge Feigley’s voice still bore that rich, rhythmic accent of the Georgia town where she was raised. She was a young, relatively inexperienced lawyer at the NAACP

  when Lyndon Johnson made her a federal judge. It was a lifetime appointment and she had every intention of holding it for life.

  She was now in her eighties. “And I don’t believe that the U.S.

  Attorney’s position is incredible. It may not be right. It may be.

  But it’s not incredible.”

  Sorrentino leaned forward and folded his hands on the table, like a Catholic schoolboy, turning his head to the right in the direction D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  of the judge. “Let me just say it again, Your Honor. You have to declare a mistrial. Think about the impact on the jury. They were staring at Mr. Perini for weeks. They all knew him. Who didn’t?

  And now he won’t be there anymore. And he’s not missing for any conventional reason. He was murdered, that’s why he’s not there, and murdered sensationally. It’s still incredible to me that the government would not agree to a mistrial. Incredible.”

  “Saying something’s incredible, Mr. Sorrentino, even ten times, won’t win any arguments here.”

  “Your Honor has to focus on just how unprecedented this is. A 25

  defense lawyer in a major trial is killed. And nobody knows why.

  It doesn’t happen every day, Judge. The prejudicial effect on the jury—it’s got to be real and deep. Under these circumstances, how can the defendants possibly get a fair trial?”

  “Why not, Judge?” Neil Steinman, forty-one, the head of the team of four government lawyers prosecuting the case, sat on the edge of his chair. Neil Steinman disliked Sorrentino intensely.

  “Mr. Sorrentino is still giving no reasons. Just his impressions and opinions. Just slogans. I could make an argument that Perini’s death disposes the jury in favor of the defendants.” Steinman paused to let that concept sink in. “This is a major trial. My office has devoted years of investigation and resources to this matter.

  Declaring a mistrial is a serious step.”

  “I know that, Mr. Steinman. That’s why I asked for this conference, today, in chambers. So far neither side—not the prosecution, not the defense—has been particularly helpful in resolving the problem that got us all here. The squabbling between you and Mr. Sorrentino has got to end.”

  Both Neil Steinman and Vincent Sorrentino knew Judge Feigley enjoyed reprimanding lawyers, treating them like aggressive schoolchildren. Sorrentino was in one of the tasteful, expensive suits always mentioned in the newspaper and magazine articles about him. They weren’t the peak-shouldered, Italian-made suits so many other criminal defense lawyers favored. Instead, his suits were tailored in London. They had subtle, conservative colors, soft P A U L B A T I S T A

  shoulders. When he graduated from St. John’s Law School in the late seventies, no white-shoe Manhattan law firm would touch him. After all, he was a first-generation Italian American from Brooklyn with degrees from CCNY and a law school he attended at night. But he had long ago heard the expression “Dress British, think Yiddish” and believed it somehow captured the essence of the street-smart, persuasive lawyer he trained himself to become.

  From the outset he knew, too, that it was no advantage to be an Italian lawyer in the federal courts, where the vast majority of judges were either veterans of the big WASP firms or of the huge 26

  midtown Jewish firms. He knew it was an advantage that, as many people said and wrote, he was the kind of Italian who resembled Marcello Mastroianni rather than Dean Martin. The suits he wore were useful in countering the negative impressions and resonances a name like Sorrentino tended to create.

  Now Vincent Sorrentino held his half-frame glasses at their centerpiece and decided to stare at Steinman. Silence in this setting could sometimes be golden.

  “Let me ask this question,” Judge Feigley said. “Do all the defendants join in Mr. Sorrentino’s request for a mistrial?”

  It was Sorrentino—a comfortable veteran of hours upon hours on Court TV, CNN, and MSNBC , one of Larry King’s favorite guests anytime a legal story or scandal was the night’s subject—

  who always took the lead. “Judge, we talked about it before we came in. We all do.”

  “Mr. Sorrentino, these ladies and gentlemen are all experienced attorneys. Why can’t they speak for themselves?”

  Sorrentino leaned back in his chair and tapped his glasses on the edge of the table. “I’m just trying to be helpful to the Court.

  Nobody’s stopping them.” He waved an uplifted hand to the other lawyers, as though freeing them to speak.

  “Any of you ladies and gentlemen disagree?” Judge Feigley asked.

  Jennifer Kellman, the youngest lawyer at the table, said: “It so happens that we all agree with Mr. Sorrentino, Your Honor. At least on this one.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Judge Feigley liked the gentle flippancy of the woman’s words.

  She appeared to smile and said, “There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”

  Except for Sorrentino and Steinman, the other lawyers in the room laughed. Vincent Sorrentino thought, and he had often said, that judges believe they are the greatest comedians in the world because lawyers are the greatest sycophants in the world.

  As the laughter subsided, Steinman, an intense man, was speaking steadily in the direction of the judge. “I can’t tell you, Judge, how strenuously my office opposes a mistrial. The waste of 27

  resources would be overwhelming. There are certainly less drastic ways of dealing with the problems raised by Mr. Perini’s death.

  Mr. Sorrentino and his co-counsel are using this as a ploy. The defendants now know a large part of the government’s evidence.

  They have seen our trial strategy. They know who all our witnesses are. A mistrial will give them an opportunity to regroup their case by the time a new trial begins, which may be months away.”

  Sorrentino saw that Judge Feigley was listening intently to Steinman. Sorrentino also knew that Steinman hated him, and he met that hatred with contempt. That’s right, Neil, I make fifteen times more than your eighty grand a year, and I always will, because you’re a stiff, uptight asshole.

  Sorrentino also enjoyed watching the kind of obvious tension Neil Steinman was under. He had led this investigation from the beginning, this was his first trial in three years, and he was attempting to position himself to succeed the United States Attorney, a woman who was about to be nominated to a federal judgeship.

  Steinman’s chances of getting the appointment weren’t great, since he was a technician with no political instincts or connections.

  Moreover, the other likely candidate for U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, his supervisor, was a more experienced lawyer. And he was a product of an old-li
ne Wall Street law firm whom the big boys at the bar associations favored over Queens-born, Brooklyn Law School–educated Neil Steinman. The P A U L B A T I S T A

  loss of this trial—either through an outright defeat or a mistrial—

  would take him out of the running completely.

  And, as Sorrentino privately recognized, the trial had been going well for the government. Extremely well, in fact.

  Before Steinman could continue, Vincent Sorrentino said, “I don’t know what this fancy talk about less drastic alternatives means, Judge. This is not a law school course or a seminar. Except by a mistrial, how do you deal with the effect on the jury of the unexplained killing of a lawyer they’ve lived with day in and day out, for weeks? The simple fact that the jurors will focus on this 28

  event will distract them from the trial itself. They can’t concentrate on what’s happening in the courtroom.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Sorrentino. That might be good for your client.” Judge Feigley was legendary for loose, enigmatic talk. She smiled impassively at Sorrentino.

  As soon as he heard Judge Feigley’s words, he moved abruptly forward, waving his half-frame glasses. “I have to object to that, Your Honor.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Sorrentino. The jury’s not here. And the newspapers are downstairs.”

  “With all due respect, Judge, your comment shows you are biased in the government’s favor—”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Sorrentino.” Since she loved this role of reprimand, she was much more animated than usual. “I haven’t formed any judgments about the merits of this case. You know that. I’m not going to tolerate your trying to distract me from the already difficult issue of whether I should let this case go forward.”