Death's Witness (10 page)

74

“No.”

“Football player,” Benjamin said.

“Well, I’ll be,” Nancy teased, short-breathed.

In the dusk she briefly stared at the man with dark hair. Gloriously handsome, she thought, but no name, no recognition came to her mind. “I knew it wasn’t Joe Montana,” she said, smiling her delirious, expansive smile at Julie. It was the other man who gestured: a wave, a word, a smile. With her attention on Tom, she registered only the other man’s gestures, not his face or appearance. And then, having loomed to their left, the two men—both of them large, vivid, and sweating—were swiftly gone. Suddenly ten paces beyond them, Nancy asked Benjamin, “So, who was that?”

“Tom Perini. Great football player.”

“The name meant something to me,” Nancy told Julie, “but not the same as Paul Newman the night before.”

Julie laughed, and then waited for Nancy, consummate talker, to finish the story. And she did. She and Benjamin decided to end their run at the drinking fountain at the western side of the transverse. They sprinted. In the midst of the sprint, the sound of their running bodies briefly overwhelming the quiet sibilance of the spring trees, they heard a sharp, metallic
bang
.

“What was that?” she asked Benjamin as they came to a stop, breathing heavily, at the fountain.

“A firecracker.”

She said, breathless, “Early for the Fourth of July.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

It was the following morning when they first heard the news about the killing. She immediately recognized Tom’s face on the front page of the
News
, the
Post
, and the
Times
. Benjamin was at the hospital, on a ten-hour Saturday shift.

“Don’t do anything until I get home,” he whispered.

“Why not?”

They argued, but she waited.

They continued to argue that night and all the next day about whether to call the hotline number. Benjamin was stubborn.

He insisted they knew nothing more than the police already
75

knew—Tom Perini had been in the park at night and was now dead. Benjamin was busy. If they called that number, they would spend hours with police, with lawyers (“those shits,” he said), repeating the same noninformation.

“But we know there was somebody else with him,” Nancy had said to Benjamin.

“And so what?”

Benjamin was not only stubborn but abrasive. She was out of work, a lady of leisure. He told her
she
might have time to kill with cops and lawyers. He didn’t have that luxury.

“When I finally called the hotline number, Benjamin was actually more gracious than I expected him to be. I think he was relieved I had summoned him to his duty, so to speak. He even got angry and impatient when no one seemed to answer our call at first.
Hello
,
is there anybody there
?, we felt like saying.”

Julie poured both of them more coffee from the Krups cof-feemaker. “How long did it take?”

“I’m not sure. Four, five days before our favorite Irish cop called.”

“What do you think of him?”

“A creep. He sat in that miserable little office, taking notes. At the end he said ‘Tanks a lot,’ and we left. Strangely enough, Benjamin was annoyed. After all that time arguing with me about how much time this would all take, it ended up taking two hours, including the trip downtown and back. It seemed to him it
P A U L B A T I S T A

should’ve taken more. More time. More effort. Somebody sharper to ask the questions. I think he was insulted that it wasn’t a lawyer. Somehow his pride was hurt.”

Julie felt a series of emotions. Gratitude toward this New York woman for taking her in and speaking so freely, anger with McGlynn and with the government for what she believed was their inept, inattentive, ineffective approach, and fascination with this witness to her husband’s death, this woman who was the last person but one to see him alive.

“You know what struck me as strange?” Nancy was speaking
76

slowly for the first time. She stared at Julie. She had detected a look of precariousness, of possible collapse, in Julie’s fine, small-boned and small-featured face. “They never even tried to show us pictures. Mug shots. We described this guy as best we could, about three inches taller than Tom, full head of blond hair, a bushy moustache. He had that look John Newcombe had, remember him, that tennis player from Australia? In the sixties, before all those rotten, bad-boy tennis players came along?

Before Nastasi and McEnroe? Anyway, McGlynn had no idea who John Newcombe was. He wrote that down, but that was it.”

Nancy leaned forward in her chair toward Julie and placed her hands on both sides of Julie’s delicate neck. She almost touched her forehead to Julie’s. “You poor woman. What’s happened to you is beyond imagining. Your husband was beautiful. When I saw him, he was smiling. Runners never smile. Your beautiful man was smiling.”

Still seated, Julie leaned her forehead into Nancy’s. Julie cried.

Nancy stood and pressed Julie’s head into her stomach, where Julie felt and smelled the clean fabric of Nancy’s blouse and let her body and her mind shake themselves with long shudderings.

9.

Vincent Sorrentino was furious with her. Buddha-like, her oval face smoothly gleaming under a layer of makeup, she softly said again: “I’m totally disinclined, Mr. Sorrentino, to let you stroll down this avenue. Totally disinclined.”

Sorrentino’s face was no more than eighteen inches from Judge Feigley’s. He knew his fury with her was laid bare in his own expression. She enjoyed his struggle. She had waited for him to pose only two or three questions to Hutchinson before she held up her large right hand and announced, “Sidebar, ladies and gentlemen. All of you lawyers come up here.”

More than a dozen lawyers moved forward to her massive, ornate bench. As Hutchinson continued to sit in the witness stand on the right side of the bench, she lowered herself to the alternate witness stand on the left side. The court reporter, balancing his machine, leaned into the center of the group gathered around Judge Feigley, Sorrentino, and Steinman. Every voice was kept low, since the jurors were not supposed to hear. The voices around the judge were sibilant, straining for audibility so that the court reporter could take down all that was said.

To everyone else in the courtroom—and there were at least two hundred people crowding it, since everyone wanted to learn the surprise story about the football-player-turned-lawyer and the government’s chief witness against Congressman Danny Fonseca—the huddled group of Judge Feigley, the lawyers, and the struggling
P A U L B A T I S T A

court reporter looked bizarre, laughable, a parody of the picture on a Dutch Masters cigar box.

“You’re killing my case, Judge,” Sorrentino whispered in the huddle.

No reaction from Judge Feigley. She stared at him. He continued, “There is no way that what Hutchinson said to Perini is covered by the attorney-client privilege. Hutchinson’s lawyer was Mr. Cerf. And what Hutchinson said to Perini is vital. What if he told Perini that Danny Fonseca was clean as snow, chaste as ice?

That would totally undercut what he’s saying now.”

78

Neil Steinman had the urge to speak. Judge Feigley sensed that and raised her hand toward him, signaling silence. “Now, now, Mr. Sorrentino, I’m not gonna let you satisfy every whim you have. You’ve been at this witness for days. I’ve given you broad latitude, broad latitude indeed. These jurors will wither on the vine unless we move this case forward.”

Vincent Sorrentino went back at her. “Just so the record is clear, Your Honor, you’re telling me I can’t ask this witness questions about Mr. Perini because that’s covered by the attorney-client privilege or because the jurors are going to turn into raisins?”

Passive-faced, Judge Feigley didn’t respond. Steinman rolled his eyes and gave a quick, derisive laugh. He was convinced that Sorrentino’s ego and temper were so touchy that he had once again antagonized this prideful judge.

Wanting to end the silence, recognizing his mistake, Sorrentino said quickly, “There’s more to it, Judge. What if my friend Mr. Steinman here knew that his star witness had spilled his guts to Mr. Perini? What if Mr. Steinman knew that? Mr. Steinman must have known that. In all those hours he’s spent with this witness,
that
subject must have come up. He had an obligation to come forward and tell us that, because that could be information useful to the defense—it could tend to show that the Congressman was not guilty.”

Judge Feigley was speaking in her low, murmurous voice even before Sorrentino had finished. “You are flailing all around, Mr.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Sorrentino. Flailing. And it’s not a pretty sight. All these what ifs, what if that, what if this. One of my problems with you is what I’ll call your seat of the pants. You improvise as you go along. You don’t do your homework. Mr. Perini was with you for weeks. You could have found out from him what he knew about this witness.

You could have hired investigators, you could have probed. You could have put some flesh on these what ifs—”

“Excuse me, Your Honor, are you seriously telling me that I should have had the vision to ask Mr. Perini, out of the blue, whether he had met Mr. Hutchinson? Or hired an investigator to
79

do that?”

Quietly she said, “Don’t interrupt me, Mr. Sorrentino. I think you’ve made your record so that the ladies and gentlemen upstairs can know what your grievance with me is on the day you have to take your appeal.” She paused. “If that day ever comes.”

“I don’t want an appeal. I want an acquittal,” Vincent Sorrentino said.

“We all like manna to fall from heaven, Mr. Sorrentino. But more often all you get is rain. Why don’t you move on to some other area with this witness. If you have another area.”

She rose, massively, and returned to her chair at the center of the bench. As if the trial had been in suspended animation, she announced vigorously into the microphone, her voice resonating in the courtroom, “The objection is sustained.”

As he walked back to the podium and glanced at the crowd of spectators, Sorrentino saw a group of reporters, intense surprise on their faces, leave the courtroom. Even the jurors, Sorrentino felt, usually unreadable, appeared surprised, disappointed that they would not hear what went on between Hutchinson and Tom Perini.

10.

Every Wednesday morning in the spring, summer, and fall for the last ten years, Selig Klein drove from his split-level, thirteen-room house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to the Shinnecock Canal in Southampton. At four in the morning—always dark, no matter what season—only one or two other cars also sped east along the Long Island Expressway. For Klein, his Mercedes-Benz was a powerful pleasure machine as it consumed the road and the distance. He felt its balance and force as he drove the eighty miles in slightly more than an hour, the vast country fields of the East End gradually opening up, beautiful, still, and misty, as dawn came.

Selig Klein was on his boat, the
Mack II
, by five-thirty on those Wednesday mornings. The man he called Captain Kidd—a forty-five-year-old Montauk native named Bill Driscoll—was always there before Klein.
Mack II
was a seventy-foot-long yacht with room enough to sleep twelve people, sleek, and meticulously crafted. It was the love of Klein’s life. He needed Captain Kidd to pilot it, although over the last ten years Klein had learned the esoteric craft of sailing. But Captain Kidd was the expert and Klein not only liked him but liked the idea of having a captain on his payroll.

Captain Kidd cost about as much on a one-day basis as a union truck driver. Besides, Klein was able to fish and pay attention to the friends he invited for his weekly excursions into the Atlantic beyond sight of the Long Island shoreline. Sometimes he and Captain Kidd sailed alone, but not often.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Early morning, as they eased gradually through the Shinnecock Canal south to the Atlantic, was the part of the day Klein loved, the water widening, dawn broadening, the bracing smell of the salt water. Even the heady odor of the diesel fuel, dispersing swiftly in the ocean air, pleased him. And so did the enormous power of the faultless engine. The engine and the boat were
his,
more than anything else, more than the two hundred trucks and trailers he owned, more than the fancy offices his thirty-eight-year-old, noisy daughter had designed for him on the Hudson River pier where his company operated its main business, more
81

than his annoying family. The boat separated him from those things he wanted to put at a distance, his seventy-three-year-old wife, brassy as their daughter, and his marijuana-smoking adult sons who had offices at the pier and were the running joke of the hundreds of people who worked for him.

The
Mack II
not only separated Klein from all those annoying, distracting people and daily events, it also put him in touch with the people he did like. Captain Kidd was only one of them, and only a recent addition at that. Klein had friends, despised by his wife Naomi, who had been in his life for years, back to the early fifties when he was still driving trucks out of Manhattan for the long-defunct Yale and Hemingway trucking companies. Among them were other drivers from that era, some of whom later worked for Klein in no-show office jobs, union shop stewards who later became “secretary-treasurers” for the Teamster and Long-shoremen’s locals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and former cooks who later owned diners and restaurants. He tried to have at least two or three of these friends with him on the boat each Wednesday as guests.

But not every Wednesday. There were many Wednesdays when he wanted a girl with him. “Nice girls,” as he called them.

Decades earlier, when he was still driving trucks himself in Eisen-hower’s hypocritical years, girls of any kind were hard to come by. He worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, had Naomi and three kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and, despite the fact that he
P A U L B A T I S T A

made good money, had a hard time finding nice girls and an even harder time taking them anywhere. In that era the girls who worked in the front offices were snooty and stingy. He had no doubt they were more generous with his bosses than they were with him.

Then, miraculously, everything changed. Girls changed. And so did Klein. By 1959 he managed to buy two used trucks. He knew the printing companies that needed paper delivered and he knew that the way to keep his trucks moving all the time, day and night, every day, was to pay cash to the executives who worked
82

for the printing companies. Klein’s company grew. By the early sixties he had eighteen trucks, two depots, and a network of routes and customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The more cash he had to spread around the more money he made. Cash was fer-tilizer on seeds.

It was not just that the girls came with the money, although Klein knew to a dead certainty that the money helped. It always had, everywhere, and always would. It was also true that the times had changed. The stingy girls in the front office were transformed, by 1966, to married, divorced, or separated women who wanted sex and good times. He was already in his late thirties by then, overwhelmed by his good luck. He binged on women, young, middle-aged, Jewish, black, Italian, any variety. He no longer even made a pretense of keeping secrets from Naomi. She found out, called him a “dirty fuck,” and continued buying anything she wanted—clothes, furniture for their new house in Bay Ridge and the apartment in West Palm Beach. She actually treated him better than in the past because she ignored him, rather than badg-ered him. Cash helped with her, too, Klein saw.

In 1976, Klein bought his first boat, which he kept moored in a marina not far from LaGuardia Airport and used infrequently.

Later, he bought
Mack II
for almost two million dollars and decided to moor it in Shinnecock, where there was more space and greater access to the sea. Through the late seventies, the eighties, and the nineties, the spread of herpes and then AIDS, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

not age, had restrained him. But the elegant boat he owned seemed to attract women who were more sophisticated, more daring in some ways than the women who had earlier converged on his life. Something about the yacht made the women he invited more attentive, more sensual. And Viagra restored him at the right times to the reliable, potent passions of his twenties and thirties. There were Wednesdays on the boat, after a day of sea, fishing, drinking, and sex, when Klein loved life so much that, as the
Mack II
cruised slowly back into the Shinnecock locks, the summer air darkening, he’d say aloud, “This shit is too fuckin’