Death's Witness (11 page)

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good.”

Over the years Klein had learned, to his pleasure and surprise, that many women, no matter who they were, said yes when he asked them to the boat. Klein thought in terms of high-class broads, low-class broads, or just girls. No matter what the class, you never got anywhere unless you asked, and most answered.

You don’t win the lottery without buying a ticket. And you don’t get laid without asking.

So why not try Julie Perini?

After all, she’d been calling him. At first, he had not recognized her name on the message sheet left for him at his office, because he was almost illiterate and read the handwritten name as “Junie Purina,” which meant nothing to him other than the name of a brand of dog food, and he had ignored the message.

Two days later, another message with her name was handed to him. As he stared at it he recognized that it could be Tom Perini’s beautiful wife, whom he had met one night at Perini’s office before the trial started. When he made the connection between the name and the person, he tossed the message slip into the waste basket. Why the hell would he want to talk to her? Did she want money?

But she persisted. “I’m trying to reach Mr. Klein,” she said when Klein took a random call one morning after the girl at the switchboard let one of the lines ring at least seven times without answering.

P A U L B A T I S T A

“You got Mr. Klein.”

“Mr. Klein, this is Julie Perini. Tom’s wife?”

“Yeah, how you doing?”

“Not that bad.”

“Look, I should’ve called you before. I liked your husband.

Good kid. I’m real sorry about what happened to him.”

“Thanks,” she responded and then hesitated.

In the awkward interval, Klein focused on the fact that he had come to fear and despise the telephone. For years he had said everything to everybody over the telephone but he had learned
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that telephones were a minefield. His business and home telephone lines, as well as his cell phones, had wiretaps on them for eighteen months before he was indicted. A tap had also been secretly placed inside his Mercedes to record his conversations with people in the car. By the end, the government had eight hundred hours of his conversations on tape. Many of those tapes were being played now at Fonseca’s trial.

“Actually, Mr. Klein,” Julie finally said, “I wanted to talk to you about Tom.”

“Oh yeah, what about?”

“Nothing much. You knew him. You were with him a lot. I thought you might be able to help.”

“Help with what?”

“Help me.”

“To do what?”

“To find out something.”

Klein knew enough about women to know that this one had something specific on her mind but was playing an inevitable game of coyness and indirection. He also knew enough about telephones. “Listen, honey, you gotta be straight with me. And I gotta be straight with you. I’m not sure I want to talk about Tom.

But I am sure that whatever we got to talk about we ain’t gonna talk about on the phone.”

“Why not?”

“The phone’s got ears. Ears that remember.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“Oh. Then can I come see you? To talk about Tom?”

“You can come see me anytime, but I’m not so certain I want to talk about Tom.”

With a tone of hurt in her voice, she asked him to think about it and left her home and work telephone numbers with him, as well as her cell phone number.

At first he decided to ignore her. But she was persistent, leaving messages with him several times in the next week. Her persistence intrigued him. As he recalled, she was good-looking, a dark-eyed, perfectly balanced face, the slim body, the outline of
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her breasts he recalled as gorgeous, the smart voice. Sy Klein had not spent much time with that kind of woman—a type that was almost an icy ideal for him. And here was this woman, her husband dead, alone, sounding like a lost girl. Who knew why she was calling, really? Stranger things had happened to him with women. You never know what kind of shit you’re gonna step in unless you step.

In several calls Klein told her that he was still thinking, that he wanted to help her, but that he wasn’t certain.
Christ
, he even thought at one point,
the Feds could be behind her, trying to set me up
,
pin me with killing this kid.
He told her again there was “no way”

he’d speak about anything important on any phone. Julie suggested lunch. He had decided that he didn’t simply want to have lunch with her. Lunch would lead nowhere. He deflected her. “I don’t eat lunches anymore.” She suggested meeting him at his office. He said no. There were eavesdropping bugs all over his office, he said, and “besides, a pier’s no place to bring a lady.” She had let that pass.

Finally, when he suggested the boat and a day at sea, she didn’t reject the idea. “That sounds like a big deal. I don’t want to impose that much,” she reacted initially. “I don’t know.”

“It’s the only place I feel safe talking. Out in the open on the deck. On the water with the wind blowing.”

“I can’t imagine anyone but me would be interested in what I’m interested in.”

P A U L B A T I S T A

“Listen, Julie, listen. I’m surprised every day by how interested my friends in the government are in everything I’ve ever said.”

“Well, I have my baby, my job. A whole day, that’s a lot.”

“I’ll have a car and driver pick you up and drive you out to the Island. Listen, I can tell you haven’t been too happy lately, I bet you’ve been miserable. Think about a day outside on the water, fishing. Give yourself a break. Have you ever gone deep-sea fishing?”

“Sy, I really do want to talk with you.”

That was the first time she had ever used his first name.

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“Listen, Julie, I don’t bite. The only place I’m gonna talk to you is on a deck chair on my boat, out in the open. In bathing suits. There’s gonna be other people on board. I always have friends. I’ve even got a real live captain. You can relax, we can talk, you might even meet some new people, might even enjoy yourself.”

“I’ll have to think about it.” She paused. “Tom always told me that you were sweet, generous.”

“That was real nice of him.”

“We’ll talk.”

“Sure, Julie.”

A week later, as he cruised off Montauk, he used his cellular telephone—a magnificent, invisible net that he could throw, mag-ically, over the whole world—and learned that Julie had left a message at his office. Standing on the gleaming fiberglass-and-wood prow of
Mack II
he tapped out the number she left, and then he pressed the Send button. The Atlantic was dazzling at noon. The shoreline was at the farthest edge of the north horizon; to the far south, two distant freighters sailed toward Europe, toward the Caribbean, wherever…

“NBC.”

It was her work number. He had forgotten she was with a television station. As with telephones and government agents, he’d developed a hatred for newspapers, radio and television stations, and magazines, and the supercilious people who worked for D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

them. He genuinely hated the sight of his name in print or its sound on television or radio: he was always described, in those blunt descriptive phrases, as the “waterfront trucking magnate,”

the “trucker for organized crime,” or the “benefactor of accused Bronx Congressman Danny Fonseca.”

His first thought was to press the button labeled End and cut off the call but, because he wanted her, he said, “Julie Perini, please.”

There was a pause while his call was put on hold. The invisible net of the cellular system trembled with electronic resonance
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until Julie’s voice finally came through: “Julie Perini.”

“Hi, Julie Perini. Sy Klein.”

“Sy. Thanks for calling. Where are you?”

“Fishing. Off Montauk. Great day.”

“That’s why I wanted you to call. I decided: next Wednesday, if that’s okay.”

“That’s okay. Perfect. You’ll love it. You’ll relax. You need a break. We’ll teach you deep-sea fishing.”

“And we’ll talk?”

“For sure. But we can’t talk for twelve hours, can we?”

“Twelve hours?”

“You’ll love every minute of it. You won’t even notice the time.”

“What should I bring?” Her voice sounded almost childish.

“Bring? Dress simple. Bathing suit, shorts, whatever. Be sure to wear sneakers.”

“Okay,” she said.

He felt exuberant, “Listen, we’ll try to talk again before Wednesday. But if we don’t I’ll have a driver at your place at six.

He’ll be in a Lincoln Town Car—”

“You don’t have to do that. I can drive out.”

“Listen, I always have my friends picked up. The point is to relax. You can even sleep on the way out. Or watch a movie or TV. There’s even a bar. Count on being back by eight, the latest.

And be happy.”

P A U L B A T I S T A

“Thanks, Sy.”

He pressed the End button on his cell phone. One of his friends, Tommy La Greca, was twenty feet away, strapped into an elevated seat, deep-sea fishing, drinking beer. As Klein walked toward him, La Greca said, “You look like somebody just gave you a blow job, baby.”

Klein punched him on the shoulder, playfully. “Better, I got a terrific broad comin’ out next week. Real nice girl.”

* * *

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Cuneo’s Diner was just north of the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, close enough to LaGuardia Airport to resonate with the sound of jets taking off and landing. Klein stopped at Cuneo’s almost every Wednesday night, after the drive back from Shinnecock, for a steak dinner. He also stopped there, as he had for years, for meetings he preferred to have late at night over steaks near a busy airport rather than in his office.

Ken Cuneo, a year younger than Klein, was one of the friends from “way back,” as Klein liked to describe it. They first met in the 1950s when Ken had a run-down coffee-and-donut shop on Little West Twelfth Street under the elevated West Side Highway, now torn down, and next to the Hudson River in Manhattan. Ken had long since left that hole-in-the-wall (his words) and now operated this lavish diner—with wood paneling, at least one hundred tables, and twenty waiters, waitresses, and cooks—in Queens.

Ken Cuneo knew more about Klein’s life and business than anyone else did. They had been generous with each other for decades: Klein had lent Cuneo money in the early years; Cuneo (tall, good-looking, Italian, well-preserved) had prospered. Klein and Cuneo often sailed and fished together. They went to Bar Mitzvahs and confirmations for each other’s children and grandchildren (Klein often referred to Cuneo as “you wop,” Cuneo to Klein as “you Jew bastard”), and they helped to entertain each other’s girlfriends.

Through the years Ken Cuneo also helped Sy Klein in another way: Klein needed multiple ways to generate or conceal D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

difficult-to-trace cash for the envelopes filled with money that he handed to people to make his own business function smoothly.

The money for the Teamsters leaders made it easier for Klein to operate his business with only a small group of union employees; the money for the businessmen, particularly those from the big newspapers with their voracious need for massive amounts of paper trucked from New Jersey warehouses to their printing plants every morning, had made it possible for Klein to run the largest newsprint supply business in New York; and the money for a variety of other people, such as the real-estate executives
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of the Port Authority and the New York State government from which Klein rented his piers, that enabled Klein to get the other things he needed. Cash made things happen.

Cuneo’s diner was a deep reservoir of cash. It was no problem for Cuneo to pull together large portions of the cash that Klein needed, and it was no problem for Klein to have his companies generate the simple documents—invoices, bills of lading, shipping receipts—for phantom trucking and delivery services for Cuneo and his other friends. It was also no problem for Klein to make out his companies’ checks to fictitious payees and have Ken arrange to cash them at store-front check-cashing shops in the Bronx and Queens.

Over the years, Klein would call on a Tuesday and tell Ken that he was placing a take-out order for number two on Cuneo’s menu, or number three, or number four, and Ken, when he saw and greeted Klein the next night at the usual time—about 9:30—

would quietly give Klein envelopes with two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand dollars of cash. Sy Klein would then have dinner with his guests and hand them the envelopes as dis-creetly as if he were passing napkins to them.

Over the last three years one of Klein’s regular guests had been Congressman Danny Fonseca. Danny had dinner with Klein usually once every three weeks. The Congressman flew from Washington to LaGuardia on an early evening shuttle and arrived at LaGuardia just in time to join Klein at Cuneo’s. To Ken
P A U L B A T I S T A

Cuneo, the Congressman always looked terrific: silver-haired, the stylish aviator glasses, the dark double-breasted suits. Ken loved having him in his diner, impressed by the fact that the Congressman was always a “number ten” order—ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in each envelope.

Ken also loved the fact that the Congressman was Italian: when they saw each other they exchanged jokes like aging celebrities in a Las Vegas club routine. The only problem with the Congressman’s visits was that they were over quickly. Danny Fonseca needed to be on the last shuttle for the flight back to Washington.

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On the Wednesday night after he spoke with Julie Perini from the blue waters off Montauk, Klein had a quick dinner with Mike O’Hara from the Teamsters. This was the weekly number two order night. Klein had contempt for O’Hara: a heavy, thirty-three-year-old hack who was a bagman for his father, Tim O’Hara, whom Klein had known for years and who was the secretary-treasurer of the Manhattan local. Klein always felt that the father had class—the quick wit, the Irish drawl—and often wondered how the son had turned into the Black Irish goon, complete with a golden neck chain and leather pants, he had become. (Even Klein’s own sons, bad as they were, were not as ridiculous as this kid.) Klein and O’Hara needed to sit and eat together for at least fifteen minutes, but no longer, in order to relay the white envelope quietly. Soon after the envelope transfer, O’Hara got up and left with the usual sick smile, as if he had just gotten away with something. They never shook hands.

Klein finished his coffee after O’Hara left. Ken Cuneo, who had been at the cash register when Klein arrived, was also gone for the night. It was late, the diner was empty except for a few men at the counter who Klein knew were limousine drivers waiting for their late arrivals at LaGuardia, and the night air was sul-try, fetid, heavy—so different from the light-drenched air at sea so many hours earlier.

Outside, Klein heard the rapidly moving traffic on the nearby Grand Central Parkway. Most of the traffic was flowing eastward, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

away from Manhattan. His Mercedes was parked to the left of the diner. There were only six or seven other cars in the parking lot. He could smell the accumulated odor of exhaust fumes, tar, and the incipiently rotting container of garbage under a shed at the rear of the restaurant.

Klein had his keys in his right hand and had already signaled the Mercedes to unlock its front door and turn on its courtesy lights. A thin dark man stepped out of the passenger side of a Cadillac parked five spaces away. Instinctively, Klein sensed trouble. He glanced at the man and saw that he was carrying a rifle.