Death's Witness (15 page)

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Steinman had not yet finished. “And now I’ll have to work half the night redoing the affidavit and the warrant so that we can get that fat shit or somebody else to sign it. And then I’ll have to take it to him and persuade him or even Dora to sign it. One more thing for me to worry about.
That’s
fair, don’t you think?”

Her voice was cool and precise. “I’ll work on it and bring another draft in an hour. But you know it isn’t easy to get a search warrant for a lawyer’s, even a dead lawyer’s, files and computers.”

He impatiently waved his right hand at her. “And it isn’t that hard, either, Kiyo. Juice it up if you have to. Sex it up.”

Kiyo turned and left the room, walking with a swift precision and not looking at McGlynn, who stayed behind, leaning against a small conference table. After Steinman rearranged some papers on his cluttered desk, he said, no longer strident, “How did she do?”

“She tried. Hunter was all over her from the minute he read the papers. You know how he gets—he actually asked her how she thought he could sign a search warrant for any and all documents of a dead lawyer and have that comport—he really did say ‘com-port,’ believe it or not—with the Fourth Amendment.”

“He never changes. A goddamn magistrate, a janitor, always talking like Benjamin Cardozo. What did she say?”

“She’s good. She repeated what’s in the affidavit. In that nice way she has. You know, a Jap girl who sounds like a radio announcer. She said all that stuff about Perini working with people who were laundering money, Perini traveling from place to D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

place with bad people, Perini keeping records. Secret off-shore bank accounts.”

“And what did Hunter say?”

“Do better, he said, you got to do better. Show me a case where any judge said you can have a search warrant for all of a lawyer’s records. Come to me with a brief.”

“The ball-breaker. Why did she go to him in the first place?”

“He was the only one available. The other six magistrates were out doing something else. She knew you wanted the thing signed today. She kept on saying the agents want to go in tomorrow
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morning early.”

“And he said?”

“Too bad. He said, ‘I’m not sacrificing fairness for speed.

You’ve got to do better. Do you have any proof that his widow’s going to burn her husband’s files?’”

“The man’s a saint, isn’t he? He should get the Bill of Rights Lifetime Achievement Award from Phil Donahue. Fucking John Roberts Jr. would be proud of him.”

Expressionless, McGlynn stared at Steinman. It was five-fifteen.

McGlynn made a point of leaving the office at five every afternoon; it was already beyond that. He said, “Anything else you want this afternoon?”

Steinman looked haggard. Like McGlynn, Steinman, too, tried to leave the office by five every afternoon. Although he had once been legendary as a lawyer who regularly worked until midnight or later, he had changed just as soon as his seven-year-old daughter and only child, Corinne, was born with cerebral palsy. If Steinman left Foley Square on the uptown subway by five or five-thirty, he was able to reach the train at Grand Central that arrived in White Plains at 6:30. They lived in a huge ramshackle house in an old mixed-race neighborhood. His wife, Heather, who taught English at a Westchester community college, often had early evening classes to accommodate the school’s older, working-class students. By 6:30, Corinne—who weighed fewer than fifty pounds of writhing flesh but was encased by what
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appeared to be tons of braces and tubes—needed to be cleaned and fed and cleaned again.

Neil Steinman over the years had come to see the nightly service he did for his daughter as a religious ritual, his version of his own father’s visits to his Brooklyn shul every morning. Steinman was disturbed whenever the nights came—and there were too many of them—when he had to stay at the office for work and ask whatever glum nurse who happened to have been on duty to stay late with Corinne.

Steinman answered McGlynn: “Not today. Get in early tomor-118

row. Fuck Hunter. I’ll have to stay late and do a new set of papers tonight and you and I will go see Dora early tomorrow morning.

She’ll sign the warrant if I tell her that Perini’s records have information that’ll get this trial over fast.”

“And should I have our people keep an eye on Julie tonight?”

Neil Steinman paused. “Nice-looking, isn’t she?”

“What?”

“I just wondered whether you guys think she’s good-looking.”

“Nice. Sure. A really nice piece of ass.”

Steinman waved at him, trying to act like one of the boys. “Go home. Have somebody keep an eye on her.”

“Shouldn’t be hard to arrange. There’ll be volunteers.”

* * *

Late that night, after Julie stroked Kim to sleep, she started a long voyage backwards into her husband’s life. Because she was lithe and strong, she easily spread the twenty transfile boxes around on the floor of the spare room. They had been stacked, untouched, in three high columns along one of the walls in the weeks after they were removed from Tom’s office. Spread out now in orderly rows on the floor, all their lids on securely, they had a neat, uniform look.

Tom was a scrupulous worker. The interior of virtually all of the transfiles held rows on rows of organized folders that had labels, usually with the typed names of his clients, along the upper D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

edges. Even the boxes containing bulky memorabilia of Tom’s life—bronze footballs, trophies, the framed degrees from Stanford and Columbia—were packed neatly by the moving company Vincent Sorrentino had hired to move the contents of Tom’s office, the record of his life, to the apartment.

Randomly, Julie began with the transfile nearest the door of the spare room. It was already eleven. The night quiet was dense in the apartment and, since it was midweek, the city was unusually quiet as well. A perfect night for reading: she had the spiral notebook in which she had started making her private entries in
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the last few days, she had a handful of sharpened pencils, she had expandable folders in which she could put whatever papers she decided she wanted to hide, and she had a cup of coffee and two of those “no-doze” pills that she had rarely taken in college and managed to find that afternoon in the old-fashioned pharmacy at 88th Street and Park Avenue.

As she saw when she roamed, paper by paper, through the contents of the first four boxes, Tom had led thousands of hours of his working life about which she’d never heard and about which she knew nothing. The separateness of Tom’s daily life from hers was what struck her as she expanded her reading. She believed they had always talked to each other about everything.

This was one level of her life with Tom that was the acutest loss: he and she made the effort, at the end of each day, to recount the day’s happenings—Kim’s new words, shopping, telephone conversations, visits to doctors, all the interlocking pieces of each day’s events. They were reciprocal oral diarists, and they recorded the events of the days in their words to each other.

Now, however, as she continued through each folder, she recognized that a life is always essentially private, that only a person who lives a life can know all that happens in that life. There were cases, clients, and people whose names she had never heard Tom mention.

But there was nothing that surprised her as she passed from eleven on that Tuesday night through two on Wednesday morning
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before taking her first break. Tom’s work generated enormous reams of paper: hundreds of letters to clients, other lawyers, and judges; transcripts of trial testimony; briefs and copies of decisions.

Julie had a sense that she could, with enough time, reassemble all the separate pieces of paper in Tom’s files and develop a day-by-day chronology of his life. She also knew McGlynn and his friends could do that as well.

During her first nighttime break, Julie brewed more coffee, took another no-doze pill, washed her face, and looked in on Kim, who slept soundly. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking the
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too-bitter coffee, she tried to force her mind in two directions: first, to think through her conversation, late in the afternoon, with Vincent Sorrentino and, second, to evaluate what she had already seen in Tom’s papers before she began the next stage of her nighttime quest.

The conversation with Vincent had stemmed from a short, dis-jointed talk with Stan Wasserman, who called her less than an hour after she left the office. He sounded somewhat weary in the conversation. As she spoke to Stan, she was seized by the thought that he was beginning to view her as a distracted, troublesome employee (
Good God
, she thought briefly during her conversation with him,
if I lose this job then where does my free fall end?
). When she explained that what forced her to leave the office earlier that day was the letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Stan said swiftly, “Do you want to read it to me?”

She read it to him.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said after an interval of thought. “Most people would call a lawyer after getting something like that. It is, after all, the U.S. Justice Department writing to you.

Not Bernie the Attorney. Have you called anyone?”

“Not every lawyer knows the answer to every question.”

“I know, Julie, but have you called one?”

“I’m expecting a call from a lawyer Tom used to work with.”

“Has he called back yet? Or she?”

“He will.”

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Then Julie was silent for such a long time that Stan Wasserman said, “Julie?” as if to make sure that the line wasn’t disconnected.

“Stan?”

“What, Julie?”

“After I saw this letter, I was waiting for you.”

“I know. I was out. You were gone when I got back.”

“I wanted to talk to you about the piece Gil did last night. The one about Tom.”

“I think we should talk about that some other time, later. I think you have to deal with what’s in your hands right now.”

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“But we have to talk, later, about Gil. And about that story on Tom.”

“Sure, but later.”

Not long after her disquieting conversation with Stan Wasserman, Julie’s cell phone rang. A secretary announced,

“Mr. Sorrentino calling,” and put Julie on hold momentarily.

Then Vincent Sorrentino said, “Julie, what can I do for you?

How do you feel?”

It was a warm tone. He had often fantasized about her. Now, he hoped, she was calling just to hear the sound of his voice.

Enough time had passed since Tom’s death that he thought he’d gather the nerve—he felt like a teenager about this—to ask her to dinner.

“I really hate to bother you,” she said, “but I have something here, and I thought maybe you could give me a name, a recommendation, for a lawyer to talk to?”

“It would help if you tell me what it’s about. I want to help.”

“I got a letter from Neil Steinman this morning. Hand-delivered.”

“You did?”

“It said Steinman wants me to turn over all of Tom’s files to him.”

“Where are the files?”

“Here. In my house.”

“Does the letter say why Steinman wants them?”

“Yes.”

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“Do you want to read the letter to me?”

Just as she had done earlier with Stan Wasserman, she read the letter out loud again. As she later thought, with a sense of school-girl chagrin, she was like a little girl responding to an authorita-tive adult.

“Julie, I wish I could help you with this. It’s an unusual letter; it’s a difficult request.”

“Why?”

“If I tell you to ignore it—and you can ignore it if you want to—

and Mr. Steinman learns that I’ve told you to ignore it, I’ll have
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questions to answer. If I tell you to do what he wants, I can’t know where that will lead, since I don’t know what’s in Tom’s papers or his computers.”

Julie felt utterly isolated. “There are thousands of pages. I don’t know what’s in them. And there are two laptops. I can guess, but I’m not even sure I know what the passwords are. I don’t want to just give them up.”

“Julie, the letter’s not an order. But if you ignore it they can probably go get a search warrant and take what they want.”

“You mean just come into my home?”

“Welcome to America, Julie.”

Although those last words were delivered in a quiet tone, Vincent instantly regretted using them. Years of practicing law had taught him that most people, including most lawyers, had no concept of the government’s power and how deeply it could reach into people’s lives. The cynicism of government lawyers and judges about their power had bred a level of cynicism in Sorrentino, too, and one shock technique he had developed in dealing with clients was to tell them, bluntly, the scope of what the government could do to them: arrest ordinary tax evaders in handcuffs in the presence of their wives and children; close securities and other businesses completely and immediately; get orders stopping indicted but not-yet-tried men and women from paying their living expenses; and persuade their friends and relatives to become witnesses against them. “Welcome to America” was something Vincent Sorrentino D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

often said to people who didn’t appear to gauge adequately what they faced in their dealings with the government, a way of arresting attention.

He had struggled internally for weeks with the idea of calling Julie Perini. He knew that his motives were not simply those of a generous friend wanting to lighten the life and mood of a lonely woman whose husband had died. So he regretted using the flip-pant words with Julie as soon as he said them.

He said, “Julie, I shouldn’t have put it that way. I don’t think they’ll just come barging into your house with a search warrant.

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What’s more likely is that they’ll send you a Grand Jury subpoena.

That means you’ll have time to speak to me, so that I can help to find you a lawyer, and then you’ll have time to take the documents to the government, instead of their coming to break down your door. That’s the difference between a search warrant, which gives them the power to act like Nazis with the midnight knock, and the more gentlemanly pace of a Grand Jury subpoena.”

“Tom, I think, had once mentioned that to me.”

“He probably did. That’s one of the bedrock rules of our line of business.” He paused. “You and Tom seemed to have such a wonderful life together. He talked about you all the time. He was different from all the other famous men I’ve known. Not ashamed to show his devotion and love.”

For a moment Julie’s fevered mind replayed the words she had heard from Brooks Stoddard and Gil Thomas on television hours earlier, just before she began her search through Tom’s boxes of papers. “It’s nice of you to say that, Vinnie. I appreciate that and everything else.”

He paused again. This time he whispered, barely audibly,

“Where are Tom’s computers?”

“In a box.”

“Julie, all I want to say is this, since people could be listening on your line. And if they are, let me say I’m now a lawyer giving legal advice to a client. And listen to me: computers can be the hidden snakes in the jungle.”

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Julie immediately understood him. “You’re a dear friend, Vincent. And I always listen to my lawyers.”

Vincent Sorrentino paused again, almost nervous at what he was quietly persuading himself to say. “Can I come to see you tomorrow? The Judge always stops at four. I’d like to take you out for a bite to eat.”

He held his breath, nervously. He was certain she’d demur, say no. She said, “Can you please do that, Vincent?”

“I’ll be at your building at six.”

“I’ll ask Elena to stay with Kim. Thanks.”

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* * *

Before she went to the spare room for her second shift of reading, she tried to focus on what she’d seen so far in those orderly documents. Passages from a life: although most of the neat folders contained papers relating to Tom’s business, he had also taken the time to have his personal papers filed in the same orderly settings. There were his college acceptance letters: Yale, Duke, Cornell, Stanford; old newspaper clippings, cleanly cut out, copied, and preserved, chronologically, by one of Tom’s secretaries.

There were also thick folders with fan letters he received from strangers all over the country, together with copies of Tom’s replies to many of those letters. They spanned almost twenty years. She always admired that stream of modesty and care in his public personality. His innocuous short notes to these hundreds of people reflected that modesty, that care. Although he never mentioned these letters to her, they were there and he had obviously taken the time and effort, not long ago, to have his secretary pull together these pieces of papers and organize them.

And, as she sat in the harshly lit kitchen, Julie tried to focus on the reason she had started this voyage back into the paper records of Tom’s life, a life she believed she knew so well, so intimately. “Evidence of crimes,” Steinman’s awful letter had said, a statement that had been transformed yesterday from Steinman’s lawyer-like words into the much more arresting widely broadcast D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

words of Gil Thomas. What evidence? What crimes? She tried to divorce herself from her love for her husband and take a different and skeptical view of what she’d seen in these papers. Nothing, except daily markings that Tom had created of his life as he lived it. And yet here were officials of the federal government writing a letter to her saying, in flat English, that these files of her husband contained “evidence of crimes.” The image of Steinman’s serious face fixed itself in her mind, exactly as she had seen it the night before on that wrenching broadcast Gil prepared.
This
glum, serious man
, she thought,
has said that my husband had evidence
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of crimes, was himself involved in crimes…

* * *

Dawn began at least forty-five minutes before the sun actually rose. Just before five, Julie opened a bedroom window overlooking 87th Street. The pavement was gray; the lozenge shapes of parked cars lined both sides of the street. It was a no-man’s land.

She was lightheaded from lack of sleep and her concentration.

The gathering day, the end of black night, gave her a bleak feeling. She set herself a limit of another fifteen minutes among the file boxes. She recognized she could never finish them all in one long rush and would have to sleep, even if for only half an hour, before Kim woke and another hot day set in.

It was then that she found the file containing Tom’s American Express and other credit card receipts. Her sore mind, numb with exhaustion, became alert when she saw receipts from three restaurants in Miami on three separate dates ten months ago. Tom never mentioned Miami to her. After all those sports years in city after city, Tom had come to hate travel, often told her that he avoided it whenever he could. Miami?

The receipts were arranged in photocopies, four to a page, in chronological order. Rapidly she flipped through the pages.

There were four receipts from four different hotels in Mexico City—eighteen months ago, nine months ago, even five weeks before he died. Mexico City?

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Julie closed the file, feeling as though she had uncovered a cache of private pornography. She knew, with alarm, that it was the kind of file for which she had bought special folders and two bulky Federal Express boxes just large enough for Tom’s two laptops and the long-unused cell phone he had left in his suit-jacket the night he left for his last run. She put the credit card files in the folders. She tied the shoelace straps that enclosed the folders.

And then, for the first time in months, she picked up Tom’s cell phone. She inserted the recharging cord into the hole. Drinking
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still more coffee, she waited half an hour, watching the early morning CNN program. Catastrophes, she thought, were the staple of the world.

When Tom’s cell phone musically came to life, aroused from its months of somnolence, the screen displayed the words “34

Missed Calls.” She realized she had been automatically paying his cell phone bills when they were forwarded to her apartment. She guessed at his access code. It was 3636—a code he used often on their joint bank accounts and the keypad to the security system in the apartment. The number on his helmet and game shirt at Stanford was 36.

As she methodically passed through the voice mail messages—

the first ten or so were ones to which he had not listened in the last three days of his life (and two were the raspy voice of the now-dead Selig Klein)—there were only three other names she recognized. One unfamiliar name—Richard Dobyns—had left messages saying it was urgent that he call. The voice had a Brooklyn accent—thirty million people, she ruefully thought, lived in Brooklyn, all with Brooklyn accents. There was no callback number. When she checked the list of names and numbers Tom had recorded for speed-dial, there was no Dobyns.

Vincent Sorrentino left two messages, one on the day before Tom died, the other on the day of his death. Sorrentino’s voice was the voice of a friend: “Tom, let’s sit down sometime on Monday to talk about next week.”

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Using the star key on the small pad, she then passed into the realm of the unknown—voices left after the moment of his death.

There was a man’s Caribbean-accented voice on Saturday morning: “Mr. Jackson here, Mr. Perini. It’s about eleven-thirty in the morning on Saturday here. Some of the T-bills expire on Monday.

Let me know what you want to do. Have a good weekend.”

T-bills? Julie pressed the keypad’s source for names. There were three entries for Jackson, two with international codes, one with an entry for a Miami area code. She used her own cell phone to dial the Miami number. A pre-recorded voice, speak-127

ing in Spanish, answered, “Banco Almaraez.” That was followed by words she could loosely translate as hours of operation. She said nothing.

She wrote down Jackson’s numbers on the reverse side of a grocery-bill receipt and, instinctively sensing that she would want access to the numbers again, folded it into the small sleeve of her credit-card folder.

Several of the other voices were women’s. Julie never considered herself jealous, at least in her adult years. As a teenager she’d silently witness her mother’s repeatedly well-founded jealousy of her father and women propel her deeper into booze, not away from her husband. She knew Tom had female clients; she assumed they were businesswomen. Most left only their first names: Karen, Joanna, even Kim. Nothing suggestive, sensual, or delinquent in any of the tones or words. Some of the calls, as the week after Tom’s death passed, were from credit card companies asking about late payments. And finally, within a few weeks of Tom’s death, the messages ceased.

Julie retrieved her notebook and wrote down the fifty or so names and telephone numbers stored in the memory of Tom’s cell phone. She also listened again to all the messages Tom had not heard and copied out what was said and when it was said. She wrote down, too, all the telephone numbers displayed in the “Messages Received,” “Missed Messages,” and “Dialed Numbers” of the call log. She saw that for months Tom called Mr. Jackson, at
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the international and Miami numbers, more than he dialed anyone other than Julie herself.

Once the work of writing the cell phone information was done, she took a wooden cutting board out of its kitchen cabinet and a hammer from a tool box. She went into the bathroom in her bedroom, the farthest place in the apartment from Kim’s bedroom. She hammered Tom’s cell phone into such small shards, fragments, and pieces that, separating them carefully, she was able to flush them down the toilet in ten consecutive flushes with no risk of clogging the drain.