Death's Witness (12 page)

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It was held upright in front of his chest. And then the rifle leveled, quickly.

Klein’s entire body, by powerful instinct, seized itself in an effort to open the door of the Mercedes and grab the pistol in the glove compartment. But Klein barely moved.

The man said, “Mrs. Perini sent you a present.”

“You fuck…” Klein screamed.

11.

It was a hot mid-August morning. Neil Steinman was in the middle of a meeting, in a conference room at St. Andrews Plaza, when a note from John McGlynn was handed to him with the words
Sy Klein was shot dead last night.
Neil Steinman didn’t immediately interrupt the meeting. He was surrounded by the four other lawyers who had been with him through the months of trial that had already passed. He wanted to use this five-day recess to refocus and reenergize these younger lawyers. He folded the message slip and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt.

August was usually the month when Judge Feigley took her four-week vacation. When it became clear that the trial, which began in April, would not be over by the start of August, she’d become increasingly irritated with all the lawyers in the courtroom, including the prosecutors who were still presenting an apparently endless parade of witnesses and documents.

Steinman was concerned that he had become the focus of her glowering ire.

He was also angry with himself and his staff. The trial
was
taking longer than even he had predicted. He knew a key reason why: there were more than fourteen hundred hours of recorded conversations of Congressman Fonseca, Sy Klein, Hutchinson, and others, made over the course of the fifteen months before the indictments, and Steinman had never expected that so many of those conversations would be so important to the government’s D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

case, so tantalizing. Yet he was aggravated with himself and his team for not having been more selective. The fault was not completely his: Judge Feigley had a maddening slow pace, and now, bitter at the loss of her solid month’s vacation in August, she was venting herself with shorter days and longer recesses.

It was at the end of the meeting when he finally said to the younger lawyers in the room, “Somebody killed Selig Klein last night.”

Steinman gazed through steel-rimmed glasses at the other lawyers. They ranged in age from twenty-eight to thirty-three. He
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was vastly more experienced than all of them. Kiyo Michine, a thirty-two-year-old woman, was attractive and articulate but—

Steinman was privately convinced—not tough enough to deal with cases like this. She spoke first: “That’s awful.”

“Only if you’re in his family,” Steinman said. “And maybe not even then.” He stared at her for a reaction, but she continued with that surprised, sympathetic look on her face.

After a pause, Andrew Scotto said, “Doesn’t that give us another problem?” He was, as usual, tentative and unsure of himself: most of his sentences ended with the rising lilt of a question.

“Like a mistrial problem?”

“Not much. Perini was a precedent. After that, how could this be handled any differently by Dora? And we’re lucky. This is the middle of August. If it happened two weeks ago, she would have jumped at the chance for a mistrial because of her vacation. Now it’s too late. Her vacation’s already shot, so to speak.”

Kiyo’s look of concern continued. “What’s going on here?”

“What do you mean?” Steinman asked.

“How did this happen?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“Haven’t we been monitoring him? Listening to him?”

“Sure. What about it? Shit happens, as they say on the T-shirts.”

“This isn’t good.”

“Really? The jerk was lucky to have survived as long as he did.

He lived under a rock for a lot of years. He made lots of enemies.

P A U L B A T I S T A

He was never half as smart as he thought he was. That nonsense with the menu, the number one and the number two orders. He was the kind of thug who thought other people were completely stupid because he was so smart. It was just a matter of time before somebody stepped on him. Maybe he missed a food delivery to the wrong guy.”

“But,” Andrew pressed, “don’t you think we should, like, take the initiative with the judge?”

“We will. You draft a letter to her bringing the incident to her attention. Suggest that she meet with the jurors before the trial
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picks up again to make sure that they haven’t been unduly upset by the demise of Mr. Klein. Leave the letter with her chambers.

It’s Thursday. Christ knows where she’s gone.”

Kiyo said, “Shouldn’t we be doing something else?”

“Like what?”

“Investigating, making sure that other people are protected…”

Steinman leaned back in his chair. “Kiyo, Kiyo, what we are doing here is prosecuting. We aren’t his keepers.
You
aren’t his keeper. He’d stolen enough money to hire people to protect himself if he felt he needed it. Who knows, maybe he did it to himself.”

“But,” Kiyo said, “shouldn’t we at least take a look at Klein’s tapes from the last couple of weeks, see who he was talking to, who he was meeting with. Maybe somebody else might get hurt.

Maybe we should volunteer to assign some agents to the other lawyers.”

“Maybe somebody should, Kiyo. But that’s
not
your job.

We’ve got lots of people in this organization to do that job.” He paused, and then pointed at her: “You’ve got a job to do, and that’s to convict these nice people we’ve been living with for so long. If something not nice happens to them, or their lawyers, that’s the risk of the game
they
decided to play. And I want all of you to use this weekend to review the tapes we do have, take out the parts that will bore the jury, and revise those scripts for the next witnesses. You probably won’t have time to D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

sit shivah with Mr. Klein’s grieving widow and children. Let’s get at it.”

* * *

Congressman Fonseca had already passed the baggage check-point leading to Gate 12 at the American Airways terminal at JFK

when he saw the
Daily News
headline. “Fonseca Godfather Slain.”

On the front page were two grainy pictures of Sy Klein. The smaller one was a snapshot, taken a few months ago, of Klein smiling: even in life he was not an appealing-looking man. The
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second, larger one was a portrait of Klein’s body on a stretcher, the profile of his dead face partially visible as the medics began lifting the stretcher that bore his body.

Anxiety swept through the Congressman. His voice quavering, he asked Kathy, the thirty-three-year-old woman he was traveling with for a four-day trip to Anguilla, to buy all the papers.

She did, swiftly and competently, and then guided him to the ornate, fake wooden interior of the airline’s first-class lounge.

They had forty-five minutes before the plane was scheduled to leave. At ten in the morning, the wood-paneled room was empty except for the bright-eyed waiters and waitresses, young people who had learned their brisk, implacable surface manners at training schools modeled on the Reverend Moon’s missions and Ronald McDonald training academies. They recognized and called him “Congressman” when they asked what he and Kathy wanted to drink. Forcing a smile, he gracefully waved them away.

Kathy read him the articles from the
Daily News
and the
Post
.

They were sketchy, hastily written. Knowing what he would want, she took out her cell phone, punched in Sorrentino’s office number, and handed him the phone.

“Did you see the fucking newspapers?” he asked Sorrentino.

“The newspapers?” Sorrentino said. “It’s been all over the news for hours. Where the hell have you been? Where
are
you?”

“At JFK, believe it or not.”

“What?”

P A U L B A T I S T A

“I’m taking a short vacation. As soon as the judge gave us another long weekend, I thought this would be a real good chance to relax. Kathy was nice enough to say she’d come along.”

“And where the fuck are you going?”

“Anguilla.”

“Jesus, Danny, your sense of timing is impeccable.”

“How the fuck did I know somebody would shoot him?”

“I don’t suppose I could persuade you to forget this trip.”

“No way. Maybe I’m safer out of the country.”

“You know you’re going to get your cock in a meat grinder if
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Dora finds out you left her country. That’s a no-no. This time, if she finds out, she’ll take your passport away.”

“If that was really going to bother her, she should have taken away my passport before.”

“And aren’t reporters going to be looking for you? They’ll want to know how you feel about losing your godfather.”

“Have you ever seen Anguilla, Vinnie? Rocks. Nothing but rocks. You need to take a motorboat to get there from St.

Maarten. And I’m staying in the condo of a good friend. Nobody even knows his name.”

“Is there at least a number where
I
can reach you?”

“I’ll call you with it.”

“Please do that, Danny. We may need to talk.”

“I don’t really know what to think about this, Vinnie. You don’t want to hear this but I liked Sy. He was a fighter, a sur-vivor—”

“Survivor? Only up to a point, Danny. Not all the way. He didn’t die in bed, surrounded by family and friends.”

“He got softer in the last few years. Gentler. Five, ten years ago he always had at least one of his drivers around, usually two.”

“He didn’t strike me as a gentle soul.”

“He did develop a special affection for you.” As always, the Congressman found it comforting to speak to Sorrentino. That was the reason he had placed this call—to steady himself. “What do you think’s happening?”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“Beats me,” said Sorrentino. “It also worries me.
You
be careful.”

“All I have to worry about for the next two days is sunstroke.”

“And get back here by Sunday afternoon, the latest. If Dora comes to court on Tuesday morning and finds you’ve been delayed in the Caribbean, she’ll lock
me
up.”

“You know, I remember her when Johnson decided to make her a judge. I’m that fuckin’ old. That was my first term. I was what? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I thought she was dense then.

Nothing’s changed. Now she thinks you’re me.”

“Right. All dagoes look alike to her.” Sorrentino laughed. “Just
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be careful.”

“Don’t say that: you make me nervous. A lawyer’s supposed to soothe his client. That’s what they’re supposed to teach you at lawyer school, aren’t they? What have I got to be careful about?”

“Sounds to me as though you’re going to get soothed all weekend in a way I could never match.”

Smiling, the seizure of anxiety dissipating as though he’d sipped a martini, Congressman Fonseca closed the conversation,

“I’ll call you when I get there, I promise.”

He ordered coffee for Kathy and a Bloody Mary for himself.

They waited for the call for the flight south.

* * *

Julie Perini had come to respect Stan Wasserman during the three years she’d worked for him. He was intelligent. He was a realist. There was no cant or exaggeration in his talk or his demeanor. He had no pretenses. An attractive man because of his bold features and despite his baldness, he never showed a trace of the roving eye, the quest for other women, the need for attention that, in her view, drove so many of the men of his age and stature in journalism. He had a devoted family, rare in this business: a wife—and not a young trophy wife but a woman about his own age—and three sons. Their pictures—in schools, on vacations, at home—decorated the walls of his office near the numerous citations he had received, including his certificate after his
P A U L B A T I S T A

year as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard, one of the most cherished prizes in journalism.

It was Stan Wasserman’s reaction, a look of serious concern, on which she focused as she sat in the taxi on the midday trip uptown to her home. Earlier that morning, he stood behind her and tapped her on the shoulder as she was reading through the out-of-town newspapers she respected: the
Washington Post
, the
International Herald Tribune
, the
Times of London
, and
Le Figaro
— she was fluent in French. She could have done her work, she knew, without reading newspaper stories: they dealt with subjects in far
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greater detail than she needed and their subjects were, for the most part, already past history as far as her work was concerned by the time they were in print. It was a point of pride for her, however, to immerse herself in the papers during her first half hour at work. Stan Wasserman respected that. He often spent a few minutes in the morning talking with her about the way the newspapers were dealing with stories on the subjects that NBC

had broadcast the day before or had neglected.

But this morning Stan Wasserman wasn’t stopping by to talk about the news from Israel, Iraq, or North Korea. She saw his concerned expression as soon as she glanced brightly up at him over her shoulder. “What is it?” she asked, a look of
what now
? on her face.

“Didn’t you see the news?”

“What?”

“Selig Klein. He was shot.”

She stood up, an instinctive reaction, not knowing what else to do. Stan took her by the elbow and walked with her to his office.

He closed the door. He handed her a copy of the
Daily News
. She looked at the same headline and the pictures of Klein that Congressman Fonseca saw in the private lounge at JFK.

Stan Wasserman said, “I’m worried about this.”

Those words arrested her attention. “Oh Stan,” she said, “this is all so crazy, so crazed. I was supposed to go see him.”

“See who?”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S