Death's Witness

by Paul Batista

  Julie said, “Tom lied to me.”

  Sorrentino told himself to count to five before he responded.

  “About what kinds of things?”

  “Where he spent his time. And how.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Julie.”

  “He traveled to places he never mentioned to me.”

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  “Where?”

  “Mexico City.”

  “Where else?”

  “Miami. The Cayman Islands. Other places.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He lied to me about money.”

  “In what way?”

  “He had much, much more than I ever imagined.”

  “What else?”

  “He did things—what they were exactly I don’t know and may 208

  never know—that led somebody to kill him.”

  “You really don’t think it was just random, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  Staring across the avenue at the outdoor bar of the Stanhope Hotel, crowded with expensive-looking people drinking and eating under the summery awning, Julie said, “No, not any longer. I once thought that. And I also believe he put me in the place where I am now. And Kim. I still grieve for Tom, I still miss his smell, his look, but now I stay locked on the thought that whatever these things were that he did were unfair to us. I never expected anyone to protect me. I learned what a bitch life is from my mother, and I learned that you should never, ever, expect a man to provide what you need. You must provide for yourself. But Tom fooled me: I looked forward to every day with him and felt stable, happy…honest.

  That’s the word. I felt our life had an honest core. That there was no deception, nothing in excess, hard work, good luck, integrity…”

  “Why believe otherwise?”

  “I can’t ignore the things that I’ve seen and heard over the months since he died. And I believe there are people living in this world who know what Tom did and who know why he died and who was responsible for it.”

  Sorrentino said quietly, “That’s a heavy load for you, for anybody, to carry around.”

  “I think about leaving. Sell the apartment and go. But where?

  California? Where do we go? And then how does it look if I leave?”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Maybe you shouldn’t care about how it looks.”

  “But if I leave then I’ll never learn what happened to Tom.”

  “Tom died, Julie. That’s what happened to Tom.” Sorrentino prided himself on his sense that he was a complete realist. He never fed anyone’s fantasies. But now he felt that his hard-learned skill for describing reality might upset, disturb, or alienate Julie. He didn’t want that to happen. He had often thought the expression “falling in love” was strange. What does “fall” mean when you think about love? He was, he knew, falling in love with Julie. He had started at some impossible-to-isolate point in the past to have her name in his 209

  mind almost continuously, to imagine what she was doing, to masturbate at night with her image in his mind before he fell asleep.

  On the bench Julie leaned her right arm against him. Her head drifted to the side in the direction of his shoulder without touching it. It was reassuring, comforting, to touch and be in the presence of this man.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me, Vince, how I know these things?”

  “I’m a lawyer, Julie. But I don’t always ask questions. Sometimes I just wait for answers. And sometimes, even if I want to, I never hear the answers.”

  “I have Tom’s two laptop computers.”

  Kim was leaning against the low, circular stone wall of the fountain. She splashed her hands in the water. She was giggling.

  Dimes, quarters, nickels, and pennies flashed underwater on the bottom of the fountain.

  Sorrentino said, “I’d have thought those were the first things they would have grabbed during the search.”

  “I had an instinct, Vince. I put them in the small storage cage we own in the basement of the building.”

  Sorrentino resisted asking her where the computers were now, or how she had found her way, through their passwords, to the world of information they contained. They sat, leaning ever so slightly against one another, in the autumn afternoon air that glowed from the museum’s buffed stone surfaces and the facades of the Fifth Avenue apartment buildings.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  Suddenly, Kim jumped into Julie’s arms and Julie, always strong and athletic, held her aloft gracefully. They laughed. Julie was grateful to this thoughtful man. The three of them walked uptown, in the deepening, comforting dark, to the bright-red bookstore at Madison Avenue and 93rd Street, and then to Julie’s apartment. It was just dark by the time they reached the lobby.

  * * *

  In the hour and a half of their walk, neither Julie nor Sorrentino had noticed that the same tall blond man, with sandy hair, 210

  a bushy moustache, and the sinewy legs of a long-distance runner, had passed them at four different times. At this hour of the day and this season of the year there were hundreds of runners moving in and around the streets near Central Park. His height, his blond hair, the spare, pleasant features of his face made him look different from most of the runners who lived in New York, but he was not unique enough to have caught their attention. In the dark, as Julie, Sorrentino, and Kim walked through the tasteful lobby of the apartment building, the blond runner stopped across the street and watched as they entered the elevator. He saw the lights go on in Julie Perini’s apartment.

  * * *

  The end came faster and more definitively than Neil Steinman imagined. In the hours after the fat juror delivered his speech, Steinman hoped that something unexpected would happen to cancel the profound surprise of this fat man’s personal convictions. The five alternate jurors had long ago been dismissed for the variety of sometimes complex, sometimes mundane, and sometimes fictitious personal complaints that arose during a very long trial. My mother’s dying. I’m losing my job. My fifteen year-old cat is sick. Sorrentino had even once, in another trial, heard an overweight woman say, I’m dying, my doctor just told me. The judge, a hard, bitter, legendary man, had insisted she bring a letter from her doctor the next day. And she died overnight. The judge had D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  already written out an arrest warrant for her when word came that she was in fact dead.

  Steinman knew from experience that eleven jurors could sway a holdout, particularly if a judge pressed for a verdict and threatened to throw away the key to the jury room. In Steinman’s experience, people were weak, malleable, anxious to please others around them and to join the instinct of the group. Conversions of the uncommitted had happened many times in the past, Steinman had told his team as they left the courtroom after Judge Feigley urged the defense lawyers to settle for a jury of eleven. Even the 211

  fat man could relent, flip, change his mind after his moment of glory in venting himself. One point is certain, Steinman repeated: the other eleven were prepared to convict.

  That evening Judge Feigley had dismissed the jurors for the day at seven-thirty—a solid three hours later than usual—and told them they would be brought back at eight-thirty the next morning to start day eight of deliberations. By reading the body language of the fat man and the other jurors—they were treating him like a pariah—Steinman could see that pressure was being exerted on him but he could also see that the fat man remained impervious, committed, intransigent.

  During the next long morning as the jury remained out, Steinman sat rigidly at the main prosecution table. Behind him he could hear the easy, lighthearted, clubhouse banter of Vincent Sorrentino, Congressman Fonseca, and the other defendants and their lawyers. The reporters and spectators were more concentrated and noisy than they had been during the earlier days of jury deliberations, sensing that an outcome was near. Steinman knew that Sorrentino, even more experienced in reading jurors than he was, had conf
idence that the fat man would not reverse field and that Judge Feigley ultimately would have to discharge the jury and declare a mistrial. As Steinman told Kiyo Michine in the few words he spoke all morning, he hoped that Judge Feigley would “bend the jurors to her will, force a result.”

  It didn’t happen that way. Instead, just before the lunch break, P A U L B A T I S T A

  a single-page note was handed by Juror Three to one of the marshals. He took it to Judge Feigley in her chambers thirteen floors above the courtroom and, without hesitation, she clutched the note in her right hand, draped her robe over her shoulders, told the marshal to bring the jurors into the courtroom, took the judges’ private elevator down the thirteen floors, and walked to the elevated bench as a courtroom deputy intoned, “All rise.”

  She gave a palms-down gesture signifying that everyone in the courtroom could sit. She then spoke decisively into the microphone, “I have a written note from the foreperson of the jury. The 212

  note states that the jury is hopelessly deadlocked, unable to convict or acquit. I therefore have no alternative but to declare a mistrial, and I do declare a mistrial. I will hold a status conference in precisely one week. At that time the government will advise me whether it intends to retry the defendants. If it does, the new trial will start immediately.”

  Abruptly she rose. In unison the more than one hundred people in the courtroom stood as the courtroom deputy, startled by Judge Feigley’s unusual swiftness, shouted: “All rise.” In the ten seconds she needed to descend from the bench to the door, Vincent Sorrentino registered the fact that she was furious. She refused to say one word to the jury. She didn’t engage in the habitual, long-winded flattery she loved to deliver to jurors about their importance, their sacrifice, their democratic grandeur….This time, not one word, not even a glance.

  When the door closed behind her the courtroom erupted. Sorrentino knew he should not even try to caution the Congressman that his reaction was excessive: tears glistened in Danny Fonseca’s expressive blue eyes as he reached for and embraced Sorrentino.

  Some of the other defendants were whooping, pounding each other’s shoulders, jubilant. It was pointless, Sorrentino knew, to tell these elemental men that this was not a victory but just a reprieve.

  The reporters immediately raced for the doors. The only person left in the roped-off seats reserved for the news organizations was the old, bearded, unkempt, Whitman-esque courtroom artist, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Clint Krislov, who continued, quietly and raptly, to sketch. What?

  Cameras—not television cameras, not even still cameras—had never been allowed in a federal courtroom. Sorrentino could not see the canvas. Through the years he had paid Krislov at least ten thousand dollars for various sketches of himself—cross-examining a witness, exhorting a jury, facing down a judge—that now adorned his office and his apartment.

  As for the jurors, eleven of them looked lost and bewildered, like a group of passengers who had landed in a strange airport. The two deputies who had guided them from courtroom to jury room, 213

  courthouse to hotel, were stalled in hesitation, deprived of the usual instructions from the judge. Only Blimpy was unchanged: dressed in an orange T-shirt that bore the word “Sarasota” in black stencil, he stared at the defense table with the same heavy look he had held throughout the trial. Finally, one of the courtroom deputies said tentatively, “I guess that’s it. I’ll unlock the door to the jury room and you can get your things.”

  Steinman was frozen with fury. Kiyo had stared at him steadily from the moment Judge Feigley swept into the courtroom and through her short statement. She saw the absolute rigidity of his hands as they rested on the table. While the clamor enveloped the courtroom behind them, Steinman continued to sit, as rigid as before, facing forward into the dense blank solidity of the judge’s bench. Kiyo knew him well enough to know that—proud and arrogant as he was—he didn’t want to leave the courtroom while it was still crowded with people. He had to wait until the defendants and their lawyers left. When that happened, he would slip away unnoticed, protected by his entourage of assistants, and then, in one of the windowless conference rooms in the bleak office building next to the courthouse, let loose his rage on her, the other assistants, and the agents. She found herself pleased with his defeat.

  All his efforts at control, his hysteria about directing other people and events, had collapsed, broken on the rock of one fat, bland-looking, grotesque man.

  P A U L B A T I S T A

  It was not until she turned on the television for the local news program at six that Julie learned the trial was over. She saw Steinman’s televised face—somewhat overexposed, angry, intense, loom on the screen. Deft with her television equipment, she immediately hit the right buttons to record the broadcast, and she listened to this hateful, bushy-haired man reading a statement and sounding sincere, convincing, and persuasive:

  “Today’s result was only a temporary setback. As we have said, it is our conviction that eleven jurors would have found each of these defendants guilty of all of the acts of racketeering, corrup-214

  tion, and tax evasion with which they were charged. We are convinced that this result is attributable to the presence of only one juror who—for reasons totally unrelated to this case—refused to join the overwhelming consensus of all the others.

  “We will not let one person veto the achievement of justice.

  These defendants will be retried. We will decide in the next few days whether to retry them on the same indictment or whether we will seek from a Grand Jury a new indictment naming them and others in a more far-ranging conspiracy involving other crimes as well. As we have indicated in the past, we have recently developed important new information that sheds new light on the intricate, illegal dealings of these defendants and others.

  “So the message that the Department of Justice wants to convey at this stage is the following: the people involved in this case who violated the law, corrupted the political system, dealt in illicit money, will be punished. This prosecution will not be deterred or derailed by a fluke, which is what caused today’s result.”

  Behind Julie, Kim was in her high chair, unusually loud. Elena had left for the night. She was on one of her once-weekly visits to Brighton Beach. Julie found she could pay no attention to her daughter until she finished watching and recording the scene on television, because she sensed what was coming. Finally a reporter’s voice rang out, “What about Tom Perini?”

  Steinman answered, Kiyo standing just behind his left shoulder: “Unfortunately it is not possible to send a dead man to jail.”

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  “Does that mean he would have been indicted if he were still alive?”

  “Suffice it to say that any new indictment and trial will make his role clear. And then the jury will decide how to dispose of the living defendants.”

  The scene then dissolved to Gil Thomas, speaking in the newsroom, live. “Our sources this afternoon tell us that the Heisman Trophy winner was the key ‘play-maker’ who helped to execute some very elaborate financial strategies. Not the quarterback or the coach, our sources say, but the wide receiver, as he was when 215

  he played football, the man who carried the ball and executed the plans of others. The player who made the touchdowns. But, our sources tell us, instead of a victory dance in the end zone, Perini may have kept the ball and taken the goal post, too.” A pause.

  “This is Gil Thomas. Back to you, Jeff.”

  * * *

  With the recorder and the television abruptly turned off, Julie had that deep-down, difficult, all-but-uncontrollable urge to cry.

  But her alert and aware daughter still fussed in the high chair, her food smeared over the tray that held her dishes, her attention fixed on Julie. “Concentrate on her,” Julie said to herself almost audibly. “This is the here and now.” She lifted Kim from the high chair, sponged her face and hands clean, and read to her for half an hour from a gr
oup of Yeats poems in a yellowed paperback anthology she had bought in college. They were the later poems Yeats wrote. The rhythm of the words soothed her and appeared to soothe Kim as well. Later Julie washed Kim in the bathtub, and, finally at nine-thirty, swayed the girl to sleep.

  For the next three hours Julie wrote in her black-and-white bound composition books, which she stored in the basement cage.

  17.

  Kiyo Michine was a quiet but decisive woman. Raised in a very small Japanese neighborhood in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her father—a methodical and precise man—was a book-keeper at Smith College, she had acquired what she knew was a rare, incongruous demeanor.

  She was educated in grammar and high school by high-minded Protestant ladies who were well-spoken, categorical in their views of what was right and wrong, and confident about their places in the world. Miss Briggs, Mrs. Cornell, Mrs. Allen—these trim, kempt women, for the most part wives of Smith professors, introduced her to Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop. Kiyo absorbed the dry, civilized writing of these women and the style of her teachers at an early age, and they had found in her the perfect young student. Seemingly literate at birth, attentive, as trim as her teachers were, Kiyo found herself a favored person in a solid world.

  In her years of college at Mount Holyoke and law school at the University of Chicago, she was seriously tempted to change the inner core of precision, rectitude, and calm she had learned from her earliest teachers. She was tolerant of the wild, sexually active behavior of many of the women who were in her college and law-school classes, and she had many friends among them, but she had never abandoned the reserve she associated with those teachers of her youth and the clean, church-steepled towns of western Massachusetts.

  D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

  Not even Manhattan, where she had lived for six years since graduating from Chicago, had changed her. She became even more tolerant; her friends were many and diverse. She had three affairs. She lived in a tidy, book-lined, one-bedroom apartment on Horatio Street in the West Village. Since the apartment was on a high floor above low-lying buildings, the sense that her living room gave was that of a sun-drenched, bookish parlor on Main Street in Northampton.