Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  His first thought was to press the button labeled End and cut off the call but, because he wanted her, he said, “Julie Perini, please.”

  There was a pause while his call was put on hold. The invisible net of the cellular system trembled with electronic resonance 87

  until Julie’s voice finally came through: “Julie Perini.”

  “Hi, Julie Perini. Sy Klein.”

  “Sy. Thanks for calling. Where are you?”

  “Fishing. Off Montauk. Great day.”

  “That’s why I wanted you to call. I decided: next Wednesday, if that’s okay.”

  “That’s okay. Perfect. You’ll love it. You’ll relax. You need a break. We’ll teach you deep-sea fishing.”

  “And we’ll talk?”

  “For sure. But we can’t talk for twelve hours, can we?”

  “Twelve hours?”

  “You’ll love every minute of it. You won’t even notice the time.”

  “What should I bring?” Her voice sounded almost childish.

  “Bring? Dress simple. Bathing suit, shorts, whatever. Be sure to wear sneakers.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He felt exuberant, “Listen, we’ll try to talk again before Wednesday. But if we don’t I’ll have a driver at your place at six.

  He’ll be in a Lincoln Town Car—”

  “You don’t have to do that. I can drive out.”

  “Listen, I always have my friends picked up. The point is to relax. You can even sleep on the way out. Or watch a movie or TV. There’s even a bar. Count on being back by eight, the latest.

  And be happy.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Thanks, Sy.”

  He pressed the End button on his cell phone. One of his friends, Tommy La Greca, was twenty feet away, strapped into an elevated seat, deep-sea fishing, drinking beer. As Klein walked toward him, La Greca said, “You look like somebody just gave you a blow job, baby.”

  Klein punched him on the shoulder, playfully. “Better, I got a terrific broad comin’ out next week. Real nice girl.”

  * * *

  88

  Cuneo’s Diner was just north of the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, close enough to LaGuardia Airport to resonate with the sound of jets taking off and landing. Klein stopped at Cuneo’s almost every Wednesday night, after the drive back from Shinnecock, for a steak dinner. He also stopped there, as he had for years, for meetings he preferred to have late at night over steaks near a busy airport rather than in his office.

  Ken Cuneo, a year younger than Klein, was one of the friends from “way back,” as Klein liked to describe it. They first met in the 1950s when Ken had a run-down coffee-and-donut shop on Little West Twelfth Street under the elevated West Side Highway, now torn down, and next to the Hudson River in Manhattan. Ken had long since left that hole-in-the-wall (his words) and now operated this lavish diner—with wood paneling, at least one hundred tables, and twenty waiters, waitresses, and cooks—in Queens.

  Ken Cuneo knew more about Klein’s life and business than anyone else did. They had been generous with each other for decades: Klein had lent Cuneo money in the early years; Cuneo (tall, good-looking, Italian, well-preserved) had prospered. Klein and Cuneo often sailed and fished together. They went to Bar Mitzvahs and confirmations for each other’s children and grandchildren (Klein often referred to Cuneo as “you wop,” Cuneo to Klein as “you Jew bastard”), and they helped to entertain each other’s girlfriends.

  Through the years Ken Cuneo also helped Sy Klein in another way: Klein needed multiple ways to generate or conceal D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  difficult-to-trace cash for the envelopes filled with money that he handed to people to make his own business function smoothly.

  The money for the Teamsters leaders made it easier for Klein to operate his business with only a small group of union employees; the money for the businessmen, particularly those from the big newspapers with their voracious need for massive amounts of paper trucked from New Jersey warehouses to their printing plants every morning, had made it possible for Klein to run the largest newsprint supply business in New York; and the money for a variety of other people, such as the real-estate executives 89

  of the Port Authority and the New York State government from which Klein rented his piers, that enabled Klein to get the other things he needed. Cash made things happen.

  Cuneo’s diner was a deep reservoir of cash. It was no problem for Cuneo to pull together large portions of the cash that Klein needed, and it was no problem for Klein to have his companies generate the simple documents—invoices, bills of lading, shipping receipts—for phantom trucking and delivery services for Cuneo and his other friends. It was also no problem for Klein to make out his companies’ checks to fictitious payees and have Ken arrange to cash them at store-front check-cashing shops in the Bronx and Queens.

  Over the years, Klein would call on a Tuesday and tell Ken that he was placing a take-out order for number two on Cuneo’s menu, or number three, or number four, and Ken, when he saw and greeted Klein the next night at the usual time—about 9:30—

  would quietly give Klein envelopes with two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand dollars of cash. Sy Klein would then have dinner with his guests and hand them the envelopes as dis-creetly as if he were passing napkins to them.

  Over the last three years one of Klein’s regular guests had been Congressman Danny Fonseca. Danny had dinner with Klein usually once every three weeks. The Congressman flew from Washington to LaGuardia on an early evening shuttle and arrived at LaGuardia just in time to join Klein at Cuneo’s. To Ken P A U L B A T I S T A

  Cuneo, the Congressman always looked terrific: silver-haired, the stylish aviator glasses, the dark double-breasted suits. Ken loved having him in his diner, impressed by the fact that the Congressman was always a “number ten” order—ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in each envelope.

  Ken also loved the fact that the Congressman was Italian: when they saw each other they exchanged jokes like aging celebrities in a Las Vegas club routine. The only problem with the Congressman’s visits was that they were over quickly. Danny Fonseca needed to be on the last shuttle for the flight back to Washington.

  90

  On the Wednesday night after he spoke with Julie Perini from the blue waters off Montauk, Klein had a quick dinner with Mike O’Hara from the Teamsters. This was the weekly number two order night. Klein had contempt for O’Hara: a heavy, thirty-three-year-old hack who was a bagman for his father, Tim O’Hara, whom Klein had known for years and who was the secretary-treasurer of the Manhattan local. Klein always felt that the father had class—the quick wit, the Irish drawl—and often wondered how the son had turned into the Black Irish goon, complete with a golden neck chain and leather pants, he had become. (Even Klein’s own sons, bad as they were, were not as ridiculous as this kid.) Klein and O’Hara needed to sit and eat together for at least fifteen minutes, but no longer, in order to relay the white envelope quietly. Soon after the envelope transfer, O’Hara got up and left with the usual sick smile, as if he had just gotten away with something. They never shook hands.

  Klein finished his coffee after O’Hara left. Ken Cuneo, who had been at the cash register when Klein arrived, was also gone for the night. It was late, the diner was empty except for a few men at the counter who Klein knew were limousine drivers waiting for their late arrivals at LaGuardia, and the night air was sul-try, fetid, heavy—so different from the light-drenched air at sea so many hours earlier.

  Outside, Klein heard the rapidly moving traffic on the nearby Grand Central Parkway. Most of the traffic was flowing eastward, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  away from Manhattan. His Mercedes was parked to the left of the diner. There were only six or seven other cars in the parking lot. He could smell the accumulated odor of exhaust fumes, tar, and the incipiently rotting container of garbage under a shed at the rear of the restaurant.

  Klein had his keys in hi
s right hand and had already signaled the Mercedes to unlock its front door and turn on its courtesy lights. A thin dark man stepped out of the passenger side of a Cadillac parked five spaces away. Instinctively, Klein sensed trouble. He glanced at the man and saw that he was carrying a rifle.

  91

  It was held upright in front of his chest. And then the rifle leveled, quickly.

  Klein’s entire body, by powerful instinct, seized itself in an effort to open the door of the Mercedes and grab the pistol in the glove compartment. But Klein barely moved.

  The man said, “Mrs. Perini sent you a present.”

  “You fuck…” Klein screamed.

  11.

  It was a hot mid-August morning. Neil Steinman was in the middle of a meeting, in a conference room at St. Andrews Plaza, when a note from John McGlynn was handed to him with the words Sy Klein was shot dead last night. Neil Steinman didn’t immediately interrupt the meeting. He was surrounded by the four other lawyers who had been with him through the months of trial that had already passed. He wanted to use this five-day recess to refocus and reenergize these younger lawyers. He folded the message slip and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt.

  August was usually the month when Judge Feigley took her four-week vacation. When it became clear that the trial, which began in April, would not be over by the start of August, she’d become increasingly irritated with all the lawyers in the courtroom, including the prosecutors who were still presenting an apparently endless parade of witnesses and documents.

  Steinman was concerned that he had become the focus of her glowering ire.

  He was also angry with himself and his staff. The trial was taking longer than even he had predicted. He knew a key reason why: there were more than fourteen hundred hours of recorded conversations of Congressman Fonseca, Sy Klein, Hutchinson, and others, made over the course of the fifteen months before the indictments, and Steinman had never expected that so many of those conversations would be so important to the government’s D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  case, so tantalizing. Yet he was aggravated with himself and his team for not having been more selective. The fault was not completely his: Judge Feigley had a maddening slow pace, and now, bitter at the loss of her solid month’s vacation in August, she was venting herself with shorter days and longer recesses.

  It was at the end of the meeting when he finally said to the younger lawyers in the room, “Somebody killed Selig Klein last night.”

  Steinman gazed through steel-rimmed glasses at the other lawyers. They ranged in age from twenty-eight to thirty-three. He 93

  was vastly more experienced than all of them. Kiyo Michine, a thirty-two-year-old woman, was attractive and articulate but—

  Steinman was privately convinced—not tough enough to deal with cases like this. She spoke first: “That’s awful.”

  “Only if you’re in his family,” Steinman said. “And maybe not even then.” He stared at her for a reaction, but she continued with that surprised, sympathetic look on her face.

  After a pause, Andrew Scotto said, “Doesn’t that give us another problem?” He was, as usual, tentative and unsure of himself: most of his sentences ended with the rising lilt of a question.

  “Like a mistrial problem?”

  “Not much. Perini was a precedent. After that, how could this be handled any differently by Dora? And we’re lucky. This is the middle of August. If it happened two weeks ago, she would have jumped at the chance for a mistrial because of her vacation. Now it’s too late. Her vacation’s already shot, so to speak.”

  Kiyo’s look of concern continued. “What’s going on here?”

  “What do you mean?” Steinman asked.

  “How did this happen?”

  “What do you mean, how?”

  “Haven’t we been monitoring him? Listening to him?”

  “Sure. What about it? Shit happens, as they say on the T-shirts.”

  “This isn’t good.”

  “Really? The jerk was lucky to have survived as long as he did.

  He lived under a rock for a lot of years. He made lots of enemies.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  He was never half as smart as he thought he was. That nonsense with the menu, the number one and the number two orders. He was the kind of thug who thought other people were completely stupid because he was so smart. It was just a matter of time before somebody stepped on him. Maybe he missed a food delivery to the wrong guy.”

  “But,” Andrew pressed, “don’t you think we should, like, take the initiative with the judge?”

  “We will. You draft a letter to her bringing the incident to her attention. Suggest that she meet with the jurors before the trial 94

  picks up again to make sure that they haven’t been unduly upset by the demise of Mr. Klein. Leave the letter with her chambers.

  It’s Thursday. Christ knows where she’s gone.”

  Kiyo said, “Shouldn’t we be doing something else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Investigating, making sure that other people are protected…”

  Steinman leaned back in his chair. “Kiyo, Kiyo, what we are doing here is prosecuting. We aren’t his keepers. You aren’t his keeper. He’d stolen enough money to hire people to protect himself if he felt he needed it. Who knows, maybe he did it to himself.”

  “But,” Kiyo said, “shouldn’t we at least take a look at Klein’s tapes from the last couple of weeks, see who he was talking to, who he was meeting with. Maybe somebody else might get hurt.

  Maybe we should volunteer to assign some agents to the other lawyers.”

  “Maybe somebody should, Kiyo. But that’s not your job.

  We’ve got lots of people in this organization to do that job.” He paused, and then pointed at her: “You’ve got a job to do, and that’s to convict these nice people we’ve been living with for so long. If something not nice happens to them, or their lawyers, that’s the risk of the game they decided to play. And I want all of you to use this weekend to review the tapes we do have, take out the parts that will bore the jury, and revise those scripts for the next witnesses. You probably won’t have time to D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  sit shivah with Mr. Klein’s grieving widow and children. Let’s get at it.”

  * * *

  Congressman Fonseca had already passed the baggage check-point leading to Gate 12 at the American Airways terminal at JFK

  when he saw the Daily News headline. “Fonseca Godfather Slain.”

  On the front page were two grainy pictures of Sy Klein. The smaller one was a snapshot, taken a few months ago, of Klein smiling: even in life he was not an appealing-looking man. The 95

  second, larger one was a portrait of Klein’s body on a stretcher, the profile of his dead face partially visible as the medics began lifting the stretcher that bore his body.

  Anxiety swept through the Congressman. His voice quavering, he asked Kathy, the thirty-three-year-old woman he was traveling with for a four-day trip to Anguilla, to buy all the papers.

  She did, swiftly and competently, and then guided him to the ornate, fake wooden interior of the airline’s first-class lounge.

  They had forty-five minutes before the plane was scheduled to leave. At ten in the morning, the wood-paneled room was empty except for the bright-eyed waiters and waitresses, young people who had learned their brisk, implacable surface manners at training schools modeled on the Reverend Moon’s missions and Ronald McDonald training academies. They recognized and called him “Congressman” when they asked what he and Kathy wanted to drink. Forcing a smile, he gracefully waved them away.

  Kathy read him the articles from the Daily News and the Post.

  They were sketchy, hastily written. Knowing what he would want, she took out her cell phone, punched in Sorrentino’s office number, and handed him the phone.

  “Did you see the fucking newspapers?” he asked Sorrentino.

  “The newspapers?” Sorrentino said. “It�
��s been all over the news for hours. Where the hell have you been? Where are you?”

  “At JFK, believe it or not.”

  “What?”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “I’m taking a short vacation. As soon as the judge gave us another long weekend, I thought this would be a real good chance to relax. Kathy was nice enough to say she’d come along.”

  “And where the fuck are you going?”

  “Anguilla.”

  “Jesus, Danny, your sense of timing is impeccable.”

  “How the fuck did I know somebody would shoot him?”

  “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to forget this trip.”

  “No way. Maybe I’m safer out of the country.”

  “You know you’re going to get your cock in a meat grinder if 96

  Dora finds out you left her country. That’s a no-no. This time, if she finds out, she’ll take your passport away.”

  “If that was really going to bother her, she should have taken away my passport before.”

  “And aren’t reporters going to be looking for you? They’ll want to know how you feel about losing your godfather.”

  “Have you ever seen Anguilla, Vinnie? Rocks. Nothing but rocks. You need to take a motorboat to get there from St.

  Maarten. And I’m staying in the condo of a good friend. Nobody even knows his name.”

  “Is there at least a number where I can reach you?”

  “I’ll call you with it.”

  “Please do that, Danny. We may need to talk.”

  “I don’t really know what to think about this, Vinnie. You don’t want to hear this but I liked Sy. He was a fighter, a sur-vivor—”

  “Survivor? Only up to a point, Danny. Not all the way. He didn’t die in bed, surrounded by family and friends.”

  “He got softer in the last few years. Gentler. Five, ten years ago he always had at least one of his drivers around, usually two.”

  “He didn’t strike me as a gentle soul.”

  “He did develop a special affection for you.” As always, the Congressman found it comforting to speak to Sorrentino. That was the reason he had placed this call—to steady himself. “What do you think’s happening?”