Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  “Don’t hurry,” Stan said. “You’ve already done it.”

  Hogan Blackburn left, slamming the door to Stan’s cubicle.

  Finally Gil, still seated, leg still dangling over the chair’s arm, said, “Beneath that cool blond exterior beats one hell of a temper.

  He talks to me that way all the time.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “Look, Stan, I think I know what really irritated him, and maybe it’s something you can do something about.”

  “What is this? The bad cop–good cop approach?”

  “Listen to me. She said she had decided that she was going to go all over town telling her story to every friend she’s got in the news business about how the police, the FBI, and the United States Attorney’s Office are covering up the facts about her husband’s death.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “She doesn’t have a right to do that?”

  “That ticked him off.”

  “He not only has a low threshold, he has an erratic one.”

  “And she was genuinely strange, you should know that.”

  “I guess we’re all genuinely strange sometimes. That’s part of living out a life.”

  Gil stood. “Maybe you could think about whether there’s something you know, or can remember, about what she knows.

  That might help everybody: you, me, Hogan, her—”

  Stan said, “Gil, why don’t you go put your makeup on? It’s 162

  almost showtime.”

  * * *

  Stan Wasserman’s final surprise from Julie came two days later, on Friday. An article appeared on page three of the Post, its headline reading: “Football Widow Says Feds Flop.” Beneath the blocky black headline was a picture of Julie, taken recently. She looked exuberant, radiant, an image totally out of sync with the words and message the article contained.

  Stan read the article three times, skimming it on the first reading and then bearing down on the words. The article described recent interviews with Julie in which she accused

  “federal agents” of failing to pursue leads about her husband’s killing, ignoring statements by two eyewitnesses who had seen her husband running with a tall blond man shortly before the shooting, and neglecting information that her husband had been stalked two hours before he was killed by a man from Mexico City claiming that his name was “Mr. Perez” and that he was sent by “Mr. Madrigal.”

  And Julie named names in the article. She mentioned a federal agent, John McGlynn, who she claimed buried information he was receiving; Neil Steinman, a “zealot, a man with a grudge,” she said, who had arranged to ransack her home and take away things belonging to Tom such as his trophies, awards, and memorabilia—

  even the Heisman Trophy.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Stan read the article for the third and last time with dismay. He saw in the article references to the United States Attorney’s Office declining comment because there was an “ongoing investigation of the matters referred to by Mrs. Perini, including an investigation of Mrs. Perini herself”; references to Julie as a “reporter for NBC”; and references to unnamed people at NBC having “no comment” on Mrs. Perini or her status or future at the network.

  Alone in his office, Stan Wasserman thought about Julie.

  Focusing on portions of the Post article, he was certain (although he had not yet been told) that events were about to happen in her 163

  life that would cause her pain and that were likely to separate her from him forever. He had not seen her since that Wednesday afternoon when she waved to him, cheerily, as she retrieved her umbrella at the end of her lengthy, closed-door meeting with Cassie Barnes and Gil Thomas. At that point he had assumed that her interview with Gil and Cassie had played itself out without any lasting repercussions.

  On Thursday—obviously the day she sat down with the Post ’s reporters—she had called in sick. When he spoke to her, she sounded energetic, vital, asking him whether he knew if Gil and Cassie were going to be able to use the information she’d given them the day before. Stan deflected her by saying he hadn’t talked to them. And, when she called in sick again on Friday, the day the Post article appeared, she simply left a message on his voice mail.

  * * *

  By five that Friday afternoon NBC issued a press release stating that Julie Perini had requested and been given an inde-terminate leave of absence to pursue other interests. An unpaid leave of absence.

  Ten minutes after the release was issued and brought to Stan Wasserman’s desk by a messenger, Hogan Blackburn called Stan.

  “I want you to get on the horn now and tell her that I don’t want her in this building again. Tell her that her stuff is being put in a P A U L B A T I S T A

  green garbage bag and that the bag’ll be dropped off someday with her doorman.”

  Stan paused. As he leaned over his speakerphone he struggled—with anger, with fear, with a sense of self-loathing—and then he said, his long elegant fingers touching his temples, “I will.”

  “You will what, Stan?”

  “I’ll call and tell her that.”

  “You bet you will,” answered Hogan.

  164

  15.

  Saturday mornings were a special time for Vincent Sorrentino, especially when he was on trial during the week, as he had now been for more than six months. It was on Saturday mornings that he was able to rest in his enormous office and read the articles his staff had clipped for him during the week and watch the videotapes of news programs that had been assembled for him. It was also on Saturday mornings when he was able to touch the stability of his familiar surroundings, after days of distracting car rides to and from downtown Manhattan, where the teeming, dirty courthouses were concentrated, and of the interminable stretches of tedium and bursts of anxiety involved in a long trial. And it was also on Saturday mornings that he could take deep pleasure in his office: it was enormous; it was elegant; it had views from one glass wall of long segments of the East River and, from another glass wall, of extended portions of Central Park. And it was a symbol of his success.

  It was on this Saturday morning that Sorrentino read the page three article from Friday’s edition of the Post. The article was one of more than a dozen from the last week’s newspapers which one of his assistants—an uncannily beautiful twenty-two-year-old who worked part-time for him while studying at New York Law School, where Sorrentino taught a seminar each semester—had cut from the newspapers and put together for him in a loose-leaf notebook. The first thing Sorrentino noticed under the transparent plastic cover was the image of Julie’s face.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Sorrentino’s memory was profound; it was a mental capacity that served him well as a trial lawyer, an ability to recall names, statements, facts, that enabled him to question, contradict, and torment other people. In the Post article he immediately recognized the name that Julie had mentioned to the Post reporters—Madrigal—

  and where he had first heard that name—from Kate Stark, weeks before, in the hot waning days of summer in East Hampton. That’s what I can’t understand, Kate had ruminated at their late dinner before she took him to her small, cozy room at the Huntting Inn, why Danny Fonseca would be involved with a guy like Madrigal.

  166

  Until he read the Post article, Sorrentino hadn’t concentrated on the name or what connection there might be between Madrigal and Fonseca. Through the years, he’d represented so many well-known people who had come to him with the deepest problems, the worst secrets, that he had long ago learned the habit of focusing only on the problems brought to him, not on peripheral issues. That was how he had treated Kate’s half-drunken, half-bemused references to Madrigal and Fonseca. Fonseca himself had never brought up the name and, in any event, as Sorrentino instinctively knew, Fonseca had a whole constellation of events and people in his life that probably involved more serious conduct than he was now on trial for. Madrigal, whoever he might be, was Fons
eca’s business.

  And yet that name and the connection arrested his attention.

  Tom Perini, Fonseca, Madrigal, Julie…even Sy Klein. His overwhelming instinct was to ignore the connections, since he couldn’t see that concentrating on them would do anything to resolve this long trial. And that was the key objective he now had: to keep accelerating pressure on bringing this trial to an end. He had to avoid distractions that could prolong it or consume away more of his time. His instincts told him that following the path—if there were one—from Madrigal to Fonseca to Perini or to Klein would divert him from the trial’s end.

  Sorrentino’s obsession with closing the trial was a compound of many factors, most of which he would never confess to anyone.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Money was at the core. When the Congressman first approached him, more than two years ago, Sorrentino had felt that primal surge which always drove him when a famous man came to him for help: Sorrentino was fueled by these waves of publicity, fame, respect. From long experience, he sensed that the initial investigations of the Congressman would ripen over the months into an indictment and trial. He could predict with absolute accuracy that it would be the kind of trial that would have photographers, television vans, and reporters on the steps of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan all day, day after day, waiting for Sorrentino’s 167

  afternoon press conferences.

  But he hadn’t projected accurately the numbers of those days.

  When he and the Congressman first met, Sorrentino cut right to the chase: he would need fifty thousand dollars for what he called

  “indictment-avoidance work.” Fonseca appeared to wince—a twinge of his tight, handsome features—but his Italian bravado quickly reasserted itself. “No problem, no problem. Do you want it in cash or checks? “

  “Checks,” answered Sorrentino. “The days of cash to lawyers are long over, Danny, like the days of wine and roses.”

  When Sorrentino also told him that if an indictment did come down he would need more up-front money, the Congressman enigmatically said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, Mary Jo.” (Sorrentino remembered the joke. It’s the summer of 1969. Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne are driving after midnight toward a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard. Mary Jo whispers,

  “I think I might be pregnant, Ted.” Kennedy says, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, Mary Jo.”) Almost overnight Fonseca produced the money, in three separate checks printed with the name “Committee to Preserve Ethics.”

  The envelopes were embossed with his House of Representatives address. Sorrentino spent a total of fifteen hours over the next several months on his pre-indictment work: meeting with prosecutors in what he knew would be a futile effort to talk them out of their investigation; debriefing people who had been called before the P A U L B A T I S T A

  Grand Jury and who were willing to speak to him; and talking to the press, off the record, about why the Congressman was a victim of publicity-hungry prosecutors, especially Neil Steinman.

  None of that effort had stopped the indictment. When it came, it was much broader than Sorrentino expected, naming many more defendants than he predicted and containing more charges: tax evasion, racketeering, extortion, bribery. It carried with it all the publicity he had expected. It was then that he had his next conversation with the Congressman about money. He said he needed two hundred thousand dollars before he would appear at 168

  his arraignment.

  This time Fonseca was shaken. “That’s a lot, Vinnie, you know.”

  “I know, Danny, but this case could take two months, possibly more, to try. Not to mention all the trial preparation time. I don’t want to be distracted thinking about money while I should be thinking about you.”

  “Gee, Vinnie, that’s a lot,” Fonseca repeated. Wide-eyed, he waited for the mercy of Sorrentino radically reducing the number or even saying he was joking.

  But Sorrentino shrugged, a shrug that conveyed it was the money or goodbye.

  A day later the Congressman came to Sorrentino’s office with four envelopes. His bravura had returned. He handed the envelopes to Sorrentino as though he were giving a Christmas tip to the doorman, with a smile and a “thank you” expression.

  That two hundred fifty thousand dollars had been it. As the trial entered and passed its third and fourth months, Sorrentino’s 3 a.m. fears of financial freefall surfaced every night, disrupting his sleep. At that point he knew from long experience that the government’s case was not over, not even close. He told the Congressman about his concern. “Danny,” he simply said in the cafeteria of the federal courthouse during a lunch of tuna salad sandwiches and coffee one afternoon, “you need to get me more money.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  This time Fonseca didn’t wince. He said flatly, “Jesus, Vinnie, that’s a problem. I ain’t got more now. But I’ll try to get it for you.”

  It never came. Sorrentino didn’t resent the Congressman, since he knew that he, not Fonseca, was to blame for having grossly mispredicted the length of the trial. This was one of the chief risks of his trade. There were years when Sorrentino earned two million dollars, but never in a year when he had a long trial.

  Sorrentino made big money, when he made it, by taking two-hundred-thousand-dollar retainers from rich men usually 169

  involved in organized crime, the securities industry, or investment banking and then negotiating a plea without a trial. None of those retainers was refundable—if he resolved a case in two hours, the money was his. There was one year when he collected a one-hundred-thousand-dollar retainer and then reached a settlement after one hour of work. Those were “big hits,” and Sorrentino was one of the three or four heaviest hitters in New York.

  But a long criminal trial—and Fonseca’s was now the longest in which he had been involved—consumed him emotionally and financially. People in new trouble didn’t come to him because everybody knew he was thoroughly engaged, and so there was no fresh infusion of funds. And withdrawing from a criminal case was never a realistic possibility. A judge would have to approve it and no judge would allow a lawyer to withdraw simply because he was no longer being paid by his client, particularly if the lawyer had been paid big dollars before the trial started. And there was an old adage experienced criminal lawyers learned early on; your first check from a criminal client is your last. It was like a death dance, this involvement. It ended only when the trial ended.

  As he stared through his high windows—the sky a vast pristine blue over the brilliant glass and stone of the glittering city—he sensed that this trial had an on-rushing end, at last. The government’s case needed only a dozen more witnesses. Without telling anyone, he had firmly decided he would put on no defense case.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  When the government rested, he too would rest and persuade the other lawyers on the defense side to rest as well. He was the leader in a conformist profession. As for the Congressman’s bravado that he wanted to testify—after all, he insisted, he had won dozens of elections over the decades by persuading people to like him—Sorrentino knew the Congressman would accept Sorrentino’s direction as if it were a blessing from the Pope. “I’m not going to put you on the stand, Danny. Save your speeches for the next election.”

  Yet he still hinted to Judge Feigley and Steinman that his 170

  defense case would involve at least fifteen witnesses, including the Congressman himself. This was a ploy. As much as he liked the old man, Sorrentino knew that Steinman would smear the Congressman on the wall, for Fonseca was not clear thinking; talked in circles when he was not speaking in his salty, clipped way in private or from a prepared text; and had committed innumerable petty chicaneries that would be fair game on cross-examination to tear away at his credibility. He had an illegitimate daughter, now twenty. He had been reprimanded by the House of Representatives twice over the last fifteen years…The daisy chain of the Congressman’s years of petty
failings would become a python wrapping itself around him.

  But the chief problem with mounting a defense was time, and for Sorrentino time meant money. This case had to end; he had to turn to other cases; and he had to resurface in the world of availability to take on new clients and fees. Sorrentino had made vast sums of money, particularly over the last ten years. He was always scrupulous, however, about paying taxes, since he knew that government lawyers, anxious to nail him and take him down, would pounce on him if he cheated on taxes. That meant that the ten million he had collected was less than four million in his pocket. And he always had expensive tastes. The office rent alone was fifteen thousand dollars each month. He had the big house in New Canaan, which he barely visited in the years since Helen died. His rented apartment on East 72nd Street and Park Avenue cost five thousand dollars a month.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  And he still had his driver and the new Lincoln Continental in which he was chauffeured around town.

  And he needed money for women. Sorrentino was from the old school, as he described it. He paid for expensive dinners. He paid for entertainment. He bought presents for women because his instincts and background told him that was the right thing to do. Even with a woman like Kate Stark—a self-proclaimed feminist much younger than he was and showy about her own moneyed success—he paid. In fact, Kate was due in at three-thirty that afternoon from Washington for a night with him. He had insisted 171

  on paying for her shuttle tickets and for her room at the UN Plaza Hotel.

  By his own quick calculation Sorrentino computed that he would easily spend over a thousand dollars this weekend. That night they were going to a private party at a restaurant in TriBeCa owned by Robert DeNiro, who once had Sorrentino play several scenes as a judge of uncertain integrity in one of his movies. But, before that, there would be the flowers he was having delivered to her room at the UN Plaza; dinner at Boulud restaurant on East 77th Street; and then, after the party, drinks, probably somewhere in SoHo. In addition, he was paying Jerry overtime to drive them around the city all weekend.