by Paul Batista
“John McGlynn.”
Sorrentino didn’t skip a beat. “For how long?”
“Three, four years.”
“Do you have tapes of him?”
“Of course.”
“How much did he get?”
“Large amounts. Probably two and a half million a year.”
“Anyone else in New York?”
“Not people whose names I know. He had a team; he used part of the money to fund other people.”
“How did he get directions about what to do?”
“Not from me. My job was to deliver money. The instructions came from other people. One was a small Latin American guy named Mr. Perez.”
“What did Madrigal want McGlynn to do?”
P A U L B A T I S T A
“Be his eyes and ears and give him control and information.
Carry out orders.”
“What kinds of orders?”
“Oh, simple stuff. Killing Tom Perini, that kind of thing.”
The buzzer sounded. A guard knocked on the window in the door. Sorrentino said, “I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”
“Do you get more time?”
“No. I’ll come back as often as I need to. I need to spend the rest of the afternoon arranging a bail hearing so that I can try to get you out of here.”
274
“Try?”
“We’ll get it done.”
“Promise you’ll come back tomorrow.”
“I promise.”
They shook hands as the guard opened the door. Irwin, the confident salesman, suddenly looked altered, frightened, as it finally dawned on him that he was being led away deeper into the prison. The doors would be locked behind him, he realized. For the first time in his life he wouldn’t have his own key.
* * *
Vincent Sorrentino sent a car for her. She ran from the elevator through her lobby, passed a suddenly aroused and boisterous group of reporters on the sidewalk, and plunged into the backseat. The car accelerated the short distance to Fifth Avenue and turned decisively south before any other car had any chance to follow. Twenty-five minutes later, after the swift trip all the way downtown to the memorable point at which Fifth Avenue ends at the monument in Washington Square Park, its winter trees etched against the nineteenth-century streetlamps, the car turned west then south, and brought her to Provence, a French restaurant on a quiet West Village street.
He was waiting for her at the zinc bar. It was luxuriant, the sense she had as the warm martini worked its way through her system. Luxuriant, too, the music: Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
Porter, and around them, other couples—men and women, men and men—enjoying each other’s company, drinking, listening, all of them engulfed in the quiet, intimate surroundings of a beautiful bar and restaurant on a cold night.
They sat at a dark table. There was candlelight. They had a bottle of wine. Julie ate duck breast in a fragrant sauce. Sorrentino had steak frites. He never once mentioned his afternoon encounter with Bill Irwin. She told him she had spent most of her day reading the middle chapters of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Sorrentino wasn’t sure who Johnson was—scientist, politician, doc-275
tor?—or when he had lived, or who Boswell was, for Sorrentino had spent his life fascinated by the daily world around him. But he listened intently to Julie as she spoke.
The bathrooms in Provence were down a long flight of stairs leading to the basement. She said, “Follow me down to the bathroom a minute after I leave.” Her eyes were so alluring in the candlelight that he thought the unimaginable as to what that invitation meant, and he got an erection as he saw her leave: so shapely, so graceful.
The stairway to the basement was lined with photographs of Paris, a city he’d visited only once; in descending order there were pictures of bistros, restaurants, open bridges. No one was at the foot of the stairs, redolent of red wine. He knocked tentatively on the door marked “Femmes.” The door opened, he stepped in, and she locked it behind him. It was large, elegant, there was a table with a vase of flowers. She had her dress off, only a blouse on, and he was far more aroused than he had been when he watched her leave the table. He entered her as she leaned back against the wall, kissing him. It was, he thought, the most perfect, most exhilarating ten minutes of his life. He couldn’t believe he had found this miraculous woman. She loved her own daring. She absorbed all the comforting intimacy this man could provide.
* * *
On Wednesday nights for more than six months Neil Steinman and John McGlynn played one-on-one basketball in the gym of P A U L B A T I S T A
Monsignor Thomas Haynes Junior High School in Yonkers, three blocks from the colossal, depressing race track. The gym had bright yellow walls and the permanent smell of sneakers, sweat, and the ammonia used to clean the floors and bathrooms. They had never let anyone play in their one-on-one games and, by now, none of the other Wednesday night regulars even bothered to ask.
The basketball court was the only place where they felt they could talk about their business, and they always did that while moving, dribbling, shooting, blocking. McGlynn, taller and more powerful than Steinman, was usually outplayed by Steinman, 276
who had sharp elbows, skinny legs, and dense, wiry hair (“Jew hair,” as McGlynn thought of it) all over his body, especially on his back. McGlynn could see Steinman’s back, chest, and arms, just as Steinman could see McGlynn’s sleek, hairless chest, back, and arms, because neither of them wore shirts when they played.
Their distrust of each other was now that deep.
“How can you be fucking sure those are all the tapes Kiyo had?” Steinman asked as he jumped and rose over McGlynn’s head for a field shot. It missed.
Recovering the ball, McGlynn said, “There was nothing in her office. I went through her apartment. I don’t make mistakes.”
“That’s comforting.”
For four hours before they arrived at the gym they had driven slowly around Westchester County in Steinman’s Buick Skylark.
They played the tapes McGlynn had taken from Kiyo Michine’s apartment. On them she had recorded, as if they were a detailed written journal, all that she had learned about McGlynn, Steinman, drug-running, weapons sales, Hutchinson, Madrigal, money. Listening to the words on the tapes had completely unnerved—unmanned—Steinman. That quiet spectacle had only deepened McGlynn’s contempt.
On the old court, amid the sound of scuffing sneakers, that contempt was reinforced by the acrid odor rising to McGlynn’s nostrils from Steinman’s sweat and hair.
“How did the little cunt get that far?” Steinman asked.
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“She worked for you, buddy. You were the guy at the station.
The train pulled out before you fuckin’ bothered to notice. Me, I’m just a lowly ticket agent. You were the stationmaster.”
There was a tone in McGlynn’s voice that Steinman, over time, had come to fear. His first instinct was to say to McGlynn,
“You fucking got me into this,” but he let it go.
McGlynn had been trained tough—something bred in him in his boyhood in the Bronx, engraved even more deeply during a four-year tour of duty as an MP in the Army, and polished by five years as a New York City cop before he finally graduated from 277
college, enrolled in law school at night, and landed a job as an FBI agent in 1985. He had appeared at first to Steinman to be a routine FBI agent, reasonably bright, deferential, obedient. In time, as Steinman saw, the training in toughness had ended in lunacy, and Steinman knew that the tapes McGlynn had taken from Kiyo’s apartment and the two handguns he always kept nearby were in the beaten-up, plastic gym bag just feet from where they bounced, shot, and tossed the smelly basketball.
“She had to have given this stuff to somebody else,” Steinman said.
“Who knows? She was a lightweight. She liked secrets. She was careful. Maybe she thought this was just a school exercise, and she
’d graduate to something else. She didn’t know who she was fuckin’ with.”
Steinman shot. The ball dropped through the net without causing any perceptible movement. He said: “She was too far along.
She had to have given something to somebody, Julie Perini, Hutchinson…”
“She had a boyfriend.”
“She did?”
“There were rubbers in her apartment bathroom.”
“Do you know who?”
“He didn’t leave a business card. Her address book with names was on her when she tripped and fell down in front of the train.”
P A U L B A T I S T A
“Why don’t you get the police to give you that?”
“They already did. I have it.”
“Where is it?”
“In my bag.”
“Let me see it.”
“Not until I decide,” McGlynn said. “I want to look at it some more. Your name’s in it.”
Steinman had stopped dribbling and shooting. He had a white towel draped around his neck, and he felt sick; he wanted to leave this court, this world. “Of course it is,” he said. “She worked for 278
me. She had to be able to reach me.”
“Tom Perini’s name, with his home number and his cell number.”
“There had to be names of lots of lawyers. She dealt with lawyers all the time.”
“No. This was her personal book. She kept business numbers, names, and addresses in her computer at the office. You and Perini are the only two lawyers she had in her personal book.”
“So what?”
“I want to think about that.”
* * *
Even Sorrentino, who had repeatedly witnessed the changes prison made in the faces, bodies, and movements of men he had represented, was taken aback by Bill Irwin’s expression, stance, and demeanor after only two days at MCC. When Sorrentino was escorted into the lawyer’s conference room by a massive black guard who wore an earring in his left ear, Irwin’s eyes moved rapidly, focused but erratic, as though waiting for a slap or a reprimand. Sorrentino thought he detected a tremor in Irwin’s neck and head. He was a lawyer, not a doctor, and he decided not to ask Irwin how he felt or how he had been treated. Irwin, too, knew he had only a few minutes with his lawyer and he asked, “Did you get the money?”
“I did.” A quarter of a million dollars had been wired into Sorrentino’s bank account. “I’ve arranged a bail hearing for tomorrow.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“Will you get me out?”
“The United States Attorney’s Office is going to oppose releasing you. In most cases they agree to let out people who fit your profile in exchange for bail, pledging property, the surrender of your passport, wearing an ankle bracelet.”
“What’s the problem with me?”
“The prosecutor I’m dealing with tells me they’ve decided you’re a flight risk, a danger to the community.”
“Danger? I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.”
“I’m sure you haven’t. But saying you’re dangerous is their 279
way of making you worry you might not get out of here, and making you think about ways to help them.”
“I got that point as soon as they arrested me. I want to help them. Christ, I’m in a fucking cell with an open toilet and a Colombian.”
“Has anything happened, Bill?”
“He’s a fucking Colombian.”
“Look, Bill, the law actually favors releasing people before trial.”
“Then why not me?”
“The guy I’m dealing with didn’t say anything specific.”
“Who are you dealing with?”
“A young assistant named Lazarus. I never met with him before. I did tell him, of course, that you wanted me to talk about a deal.”
“What did he say?”
“The usual. Come to us and make a proffer, tell us what your client has to offer us.”
“And did you tell him?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“First, there is no way that I’m going to negotiate with a twenty-eight-year-old Assistant U.S. Attorney when you tell me that you’ve got a national network of federal agents on the payroll of Mr. Madrigal. Second, Bill, I can’t begin to negotiate unless P A U L B A T I S T A
I really know I’ve got something to support it. My credibility and yours would go down the toilet without the tapes, and you haven’t told me yet how I’m going to get them.”
For the first time in this encounter, Bill Irwin looked relaxed, for he was a man who liked to put events and people in motion.
“I’ve already arranged that. I have a lady friend in Boca Raton, Tara Weinstein. She has the tapes in a package in a safe deposit box. She doesn’t know what’s in the package. I had to wait in a line for three hours yesterday before I could call her. I asked her to get the package and wait for a call from you.”
280
“What’s her number?”
“964–272–1914. She’ll fly to New York to hand you the package.”
“I suppose you have other copies of the tapes somewhere else?”
The answer surprised Sorrentino: “No, I don’t. I made copies for Madrigal and gave them to his people.”
“Who else knows about these tapes?”
“Just you, me, Tara, and Madrigal.”
* * *
From his office later that afternoon Vincent Sorrentino placed a call to Tara Weinstein. There were seven rings, a click, and the recorded voice of a young woman who sounded as though she had been raised in Queens: “You’ve reached 272–1914. Nobody is here to take your call right now. If you leave your name and number at the tone, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
Sorrentino carefully spelled out his last name and left his telephone numbers at the office and his apartment. He was relieved that he was in love with a woman who spoke flawlessly, with no accent, a voice of distinction and calm, not the distracting whine he had just heard.
He was changing from his suit into more casual clothes at eight that night, preparing to go to Julie’s apartment for an hour or two, when his telephone rang. It was a man’s voice. “Is this Mr. Vincent Sorrentino?”
“Speaking.”
D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
“This is Detective Bob Jordan, Boca Raton Police Department.”
Sorrentino instantly felt that flush of fear, that animal’s instinct, which had seized him in his car several nights ago when Julie told him that Kiyo Michine had been killed. “What is it, Detective?”
he asked, but he already knew.
“You left a message at four-thirty today for a Ms. Tara Weinstein.”
“I did.”
“She was in her apartment when you called, Mr. Sorrentino.
She had been dead for three hours by then. Mr. Sorrentino, I’d 281
like to talk to you.”
There was no way in the world, Sorrentino knew, that the package with the tapes Tara Weinstein had checked out of the safe deposit box would ever be found, and he never asked Detective Jordan about it.
* * *
Kim was asleep when Sorrentino arrived at Julie’s apartment at nine. Elena had left a few minutes earlier. Julie hugged him and said she wanted to make love before he had to leave at eleven so as not to arouse the suspicions of the few reporters and cameramen who still waited on the sidewalk and street in front of her building. Sorrentino luxuriated in her warm breath and presence, and realized again, as he had so often over the past weeks, that he was happy only when he was with her; he was infatuated, a teenager again.
He said he couldn’t make love because he was deeply disturbed and distracted, and he told her about Bill Irwin, McGlynn, the package, Tara Weinstein, and the call he had received from the Boca Raton police. He also said he planned to hire two private security guards to watch over her all day, every day. He told her all these things as they sat in her kitchen, a clean place, with subdued lighting f
rom a canopy over the stove.
Without speaking she led him to the bedroom, holding his hand. “I know you can’t make love tonight, Vince, but please lie down next to me.”
P A U L B A T I S T A
In their clothes, they lay down on her dark bed. In the bedroom’s silence, city noises rose from the streets far below: ambulance sirens, car horns, the downward-falling sibilance of jets passing over Manhattan on their way to landings or departures.
“Vince,” she said in the dark, “I already know about Bill Irwin, I know about Madrigal, I know about McGlynn, I know why Tom was killed. I also know about Steinman.”
“What about him?”
“Kiyo told me, just as she told me everything else, that Steinman now works for McGlynn.”
282
He asked quietly, “Did she tell you all this when she saw you the other day?”
“Yes.”
“And then she died. They didn’t let her leave a trace.”
“But I heard what she had to say,” Julie said.
“That’s not a trace, Julie, that’s just something you have that can’t be translated into anything tangible. It’s something you carry in your mind, and there are people who have every reason to believe that Kiyo put that information into your mind. And that’s why I want to get security people for you.”
Julie thought that now was the time to tell him she had the tapes of Kiyo’s last conversation, when Kiyo meticulously laid out what she knew about Madrigal, McGlynn, Hutchinson, Irwin, Steinman, Tom, Selig Klein. How, she wondered, had her clean, ardent, light-hearted husband ever gotten involved with those people? The tape was in the basement; and there were copies of it in the attic in Tom’s parent’s home in Massachusetts and a safe deposit box in Miami…The one thing Kiyo didn’t appear to know about was the money; there wasn’t a word about it on the tape—only Julie and the man in Miami knew where it was.
Instead of saying anything about the tapes and the money, Julie burrowed more closely into Sorrentino in the warmth of her bedroom, asked him to stay for the night, told him she didn’t care what the reporters would guess or know or write when he emerged from the building the next morning, and fell asleep.
