Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Beats me,” said Sorrentino. “It also worries me. You be careful.”

  “All I have to worry about for the next two days is sunstroke.”

  “And get back here by Sunday afternoon, the latest. If Dora comes to court on Tuesday morning and finds you’ve been delayed in the Caribbean, she’ll lock me up.”

  “You know, I remember her when Johnson decided to make her a judge. I’m that fuckin’ old. That was my first term. I was what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I thought she was dense then.

  Nothing’s changed. Now she thinks you’re me.”

  “Right. All dagoes look alike to her.” Sorrentino laughed. “Just 97

  be careful.”

  “Don’t say that: you make me nervous. A lawyer’s supposed to soothe his client. That’s what they’re supposed to teach you at lawyer school, aren’t they? What have I got to be careful about?”

  “Sounds to me as though you’re going to get soothed all weekend in a way I could never match.”

  Smiling, the seizure of anxiety dissipating as though he’d sipped a martini, Congressman Fonseca closed the conversation,

  “I’ll call you when I get there, I promise.”

  He ordered coffee for Kathy and a Bloody Mary for himself.

  They waited for the call for the flight south.

  * * *

  Julie Perini had come to respect Stan Wasserman during the three years she’d worked for him. He was intelligent. He was a realist. There was no cant or exaggeration in his talk or his demeanor. He had no pretenses. An attractive man because of his bold features and despite his baldness, he never showed a trace of the roving eye, the quest for other women, the need for attention that, in her view, drove so many of the men of his age and stature in journalism. He had a devoted family, rare in this business: a wife—and not a young trophy wife but a woman about his own age—and three sons. Their pictures—in schools, on vacations, at home—decorated the walls of his office near the numerous citations he had received, including his certificate after his P A U L B A T I S T A

  year as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard, one of the most cherished prizes in journalism.

  It was Stan Wasserman’s reaction, a look of serious concern, on which she focused as she sat in the taxi on the midday trip uptown to her home. Earlier that morning, he stood behind her and tapped her on the shoulder as she was reading through the out-of-town newspapers she respected: the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Times of London, and Le Figaro— she was fluent in French. She could have done her work, she knew, without reading newspaper stories: they dealt with subjects in far 98

  greater detail than she needed and their subjects were, for the most part, already past history as far as her work was concerned by the time they were in print. It was a point of pride for her, however, to immerse herself in the papers during her first half hour at work. Stan Wasserman respected that. He often spent a few minutes in the morning talking with her about the way the newspapers were dealing with stories on the subjects that NBC

  had broadcast the day before or had neglected.

  But this morning Stan Wasserman wasn’t stopping by to talk about the news from Israel, Iraq, or North Korea. She saw his concerned expression as soon as she glanced brightly up at him over her shoulder. “What is it?” she asked, a look of what now? on her face.

  “Didn’t you see the news?”

  “What?”

  “Selig Klein. He was shot.”

  She stood up, an instinctive reaction, not knowing what else to do. Stan took her by the elbow and walked with her to his office.

  He closed the door. He handed her a copy of the Daily News. She looked at the same headline and the pictures of Klein that Congressman Fonseca saw in the private lounge at JFK.

  Stan Wasserman said, “I’m worried about this.”

  Those words arrested her attention. “Oh Stan,” she said, “this is all so crazy, so crazed. I was supposed to go see him.”

  “See who?”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Klein. I talked with him on the phone yesterday. I was supposed to see him next Wednesday.”

  “Jesus,” he said quietly. His demeanor was always grave, thoughtful. “Who else knew?”

  “How can I know?”

  “Why did you want to see him?”

  “Oh shit, Stan, nothing specific. I wanted to talk with him about Tom. I don’t think anyone is really trying to find out why Tom died or who killed him. I guess I thought he could tell me something, anything. After all, he was with Tom day in and day 99

  out for months. He spent much more time with him than I did.

  Besides, he always seemed gentle in a way, although I have to assume that he was what everybody says: violent, corrupt, petty.”

  “And now dead.”

  Julie sat on the small sofa in Stan Wasserman’s tightly proportioned, neat, windowless office. He said, “I think you should tell the FBI that you made plans to see Klein.”

  She rested her forehead on her spread fingers, “Oh Stan, for what? So that they can make believe they’re taking a note about it?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they don’t give a shit. The people who did what they did to Tom will always walk around on the face of the earth just like everyone else. Nobody will ever find them.”

  Stan waited until she stopped speaking. Quietly he asked her if she wanted him to call McGlynn for her. She shook her head no.

  He then told her he thought she should go home for the day. “You won’t get any work done,” he said. He arranged to have a private car meet her downstairs for the trip uptown to her apartment.

  * * *

  Kim and Elena were not home when she reached the apartment. That put her in a panic. She knew they planned the usual midmorning excursion to the playground in Central Park at East 96th Street, and, in a rush of anxiety, she asked herself: Who else knows they’re at the playground?

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Dropping her handbag on the sofa, clutching only her keys, she quickly left the apartment, took the creaking, agonizingly slow elevator to the lobby, and ran onto 87th Street. She headed west to Central Park and then north on Fifth Avenue, beyond the curved surfaces of the Guggenheim Museum, and then past the collegiate-looking block where the Cooper-Hewitt Museum was lodged, surrounded by an ornate iron fence. It was a humid summer day. The playground swarmed with children and women.

  Even in the crowd she saw Kim immediately, playing in a sand-box, struggling to free a toy from the hands of a boy next to her—

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  the extreme, innate selfishness of children. On a park bench nearby sat Elena, looking beautiful, cool, and kind, talking to a heavy Jamaican woman in a bright multicolored dress.

  Julie decided not to enter the playground. She knew she was in an absolute, obvious, unnerving panic. She didn’t want Kim to have her sweet day disrupted by her mother’s frantic entrance. It was cool in the shade under the enormous trees that fringed the playground.

  The excited, clamorous noises of the children were, even at this short distance, muffled by the trees and grass that surrounded her.

  Self-consciously, she insisted to herself that she relax. She had read, frequently, about meditative breathing. She tried it, tried to focus on the breath itself, its intake and exhalation. The effort, she realized, would not lead to meditation but it would slow her down. It did. She lingered. Try to think slowly, she told herself, almost audibly. The thought on which she focused was that the transverse, the place where her husband’s life ended, was less than a quarter of a mile from where she now stood. Had she been standing on that beautiful May night where she was now standing, and had she known what to listen for, she would have heard the gunshot that killed him. Like Nancy Lichtman, she would have thought it was a firecracker.

  Still clutching her heavy chain of keys, she walked slowly from the playground to the apartment so that
she would be settled and nonchalant when her daughter and Elena returned early in the afternoon.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  * * *

  So much time has passed, Julie wrote in a college-ruled spiral notebook as she waited for Kim and Elena, since I talked with anyone about what has been in my fevered mind in all the time since Tom died. I should start this now: to write, to fix myself, to steady myself. For years, I used to record all of my thoughts on Tom; it was more than enough to speak to him, register events with him. I had no need for friends, for talk on the telephone, for letters, for writing. I should have known that that was not wise in the basic sense, that there was no wisdom in that, for life can be cut off so swiftly. Tom knew that. He used to read to me.

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  Several times he read from Marcus Aurelius, of all people: a line that people should live fully, with gravity and dignity every minute, because you could always be taken from life instantly.

  Oh God, I’m afraid. Let me write down why. I ’ m alone. I was always (I’ve been so reluctant to admit this, as though it’s a character defect) shy, introverted. With Tom I built a world that was always full, but never really involved other people. Kim only intensified that. And now Tom’s death has severed me from everyone, except of course Kim. How do I break thirty-five years of savoring my aloofness? I have to find a way, because aloneness now frightens me.

  Other things frighten me as well: this miserable city. Wild men walk on its streets. The eyes of the people you see on Madison Avenue are seized with greed. The worst events—random murders, disasters—are absorbed so quickly by the callousness of this city that you lose your soul the longer you stay here.

  If you mention the three thousand people who died in two hours at the World Trade Center four miles from this neighborhood, people’s eyes glaze over, wander, as if bored. The real issue they want to talk about is what school you’d want to send your daughter to: Brearley, Spence, Dalton?

  The future frightens me, as does money. It is already costing me more to live than I earn. In fewer than three years, maybe sooner, Tom’s money and the insurance money will be gone, irrevocably. The only safety net I have is whatever ability I have to earn a living in this business that not only has stopped giving me pleasure but never paid well.

  And now I must deal with fears I could never have imagined. My husband was killed, destroyed really, that precious body and life, which will P A U L B A T I S T A

  never come back, and nobody knows who did it. Whoever did it still walks, still lives on this earth. And now this silly man, this man who wanted me on his boat, who probably believed I was going to give him a kiss and a feel and more, is dead, too. And I have no idea why. All I have are fears. Maybe I should take my child and run. Where? France? I speak the language like a native. But I’d starve there even more quickly than I will here.

  Julie heard Elena and Kim at the door, laughing, keys jingling in Elena’s hand. Julie closed the notebook and waited for her bright daughter.

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  * * *

  Danny Fonseca could remember few weekends in his long life when he had been more exhilarated. Everything improved as soon as the long flight south from JFK ended in the grassy airfield on St. Maarten. He and Kathy were sped through customs, since Mr. Madrigal had paved the way for the Congressman. A small, perfectly fashioned boat was waiting at the hot port for the quick passage from St. Maarten to Anguilla, where an English-built Ford, with the driver’s seat on the right, waited for them at the dock.

  Mr. Madrigal’s suite at the Colony Club was brand-new. It was on two levels, in an opulent Moorish style, facing a curved, scimitar-shaped beach and the Caribbean. Waves sparkled on the bright bay, and breezes blew through the open spaces of the rooms. The ceiling fans spread cool air everywhere.

  Kathy immediately shook off the lethargy of the long flight.

  She was, as always, exuberant, cheerful, Fonseca’s favorite. He had first met her when, ten years before, his chief aide—

  Hutchinson’s predecessor—hired her as one of the four secretaries in the Washington office. At first sight, Fonseca knew he would have an affair with her, but he hadn’t known how long it would last or how utterly comfortable it would be. Kathy had never been demanding, jealous, spiteful, or hurt. Even when Hutchinson, fours years ago, arranged to transfer her to Senator Rogers’s office because Hutchinson was concerned D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  that a newspaper was developing a story about the Congressman and the secretary, she quietly reassured Fonseca that it would be all right. And it had been.

  In the new room, after the porter left, she had Fonseca sit down in a wicker chair near the window overlooking the palm trees, the beach, and the sea. She gave him a drink, massaged his shoulders, and kissed his neck. Then she led him to the enormous bathroom. A portion of its roof was open to the sky. She knew he wasn’t a brooder and sensed that his unnaturally intense focus on the trial, as well as Klein’s death, and the troubled place and time 103

  he’d reached in life, was dissipating quickly in this new setting.

  Fonseca could be enormously entertaining because he loved pleasure, was generous, and worshiped laughter.

  In the bathroom, the blue sky over them, she saw deep pleasure in his taut, handsome face as they shared the bathtub and as she, ever so gracefully, aroused him with her wet hands and mouth and then, fully in control, moved toward him, took his penis and then covered it with the wet warmth of her vagina as she slipped her legs around his waist in the blue water. Face to face with him, she gazed at the quiet delirium in his eyes as she rocked back and forth.

  By Saturday night, Fonseca, lover of companionship that he was, gave up any pretense of spending a quiet, isolated weekend.

  He befriended the Australian couple who owned the hotel; he had drinks in the afternoon with the English rock star who was staying for the long weekend with a fourteen-year-old French girl who spoke no English; and he roamed on Saturday afternoon along the beach, speaking with the other guests. He wanted to invite the rock star and three other couples to dinner at the restaurant on the bay.

  Kathy said, “Whoa, slugger. Let’s just say hi to everybody there and spend a quiet dinner alone. It’ll be a long trip tomorrow.”

  The Caribbean night was dark. No clouds and no moon. Just before they dressed for dinner they made love again, the second time that day. Fonseca looked subdued, almost spent. As they dressed, he smiled at this generous and generously shaped woman. “Hey, babe,” he said, “maybe we oughta take it easy. I P A U L B A T I S T A

  don’t wanna go out the same way as Nelson Rockefeller yet.”

  “Is there a better way to go?” she asked.

  Kathy led him on the walk from the room along the immaculate sand of the beach to the restaurant. They sat at a table overlooking the water and the beach. They saw sailboats moored in the bay and the small flashlights of other guests as they walked from their rooms to the restaurant.

  It was late during the dinner when she saw Fonseca’s mood deepen. She knew that, after a long evening of drinking (he never really became drunk, simply quiet and, for him, somewhat 104

  moody), he could sometimes drift away from the bright, amiable chatter he had mastered for so many years.

  “Anything wrong, sweetie?” she asked.

  His answer was simple. “I don’t like thinking about going back tomorrow, doll.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about it. Tomorrow’s tomorrow.”

  “You’re right. But I’ve loved it here so much, babe, it’s hard to think about all the shit back there.”

  “So don’t.”

  “What if I told you that I’m afraid?”

  “I’d believe you.”

  “I’m afraid of losing that trial and then having to face that judge. She’ll be the one to sentence me. We’re basically the same generation but worlds apart. She looks at me and sees a wop, and I know that how long I go to jail depends on her only. She’s got a reputa
tion as a big sentencer. That bugs me.”

  “Come on, Danny, relax. Get out of this.”

  “Let me tell you something. I don’t know if I can face it. If I lose, I may just leave. The country. What the hell would I want to spend five, seven, ten years in jail for? At my age? That’s a life sentence. Not what I want to do. What do you think?”

  Kathy rose and walked to his side of the table. She bent over him from behind and embraced his head, smelling the scent of his beautiful white hair. “Hey, Danny, let’s dance.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Fonseca lifted his face to hers and smiled. Suddenly there was a bright vigor in his eyes. They danced.

  * * *

  Reluctantly, she let Elena leave early for the day, by three-thirty.

  Elena spoke exquisite English, and she had long ago bridged the gap that usually separated latter-day servants in New York from the people who employed them. And for that Julie was grateful: this young woman was someone with whom she could talk casually and easily, the dialogue of friends. It was the kind of chatty, open 105

  relationship that bookish Julie had seldom experienced.

  That afternoon, after writing in her notebook, Julie let loose her concerns to Elena, who knew Selig Klein had just been killed.

  Elena listened carefully. She said Julie should take heart: people had disappeared in the Romania in which she was born and there was never an explanation, because it was the government that had been responsible for the disappearances. Like Chile under Pinochet. The prevalence of the missing. But this was a different country. “If you have fear,” Elena said, “at least here you can go to the police. Perhaps you should do that.”

  “I already have, Elena. I speak to them all the time.”

  “But after this?” She made a gesture with her hand meant to refer to Selig Klein, to the headline in the copy of the Post on the dining room table. “Have you gone since this? This is different.