Death's Witness (16 page)

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After smashing the cell phone, she went back to the spare room. She gathered up the folders with Tom’s credit card receipts and the Federal Express boxes with his two laptops. She stuffed them in a Metropolitan Museum of Art tote bag. She walked down flights of emergency stairs in the core of the building and placed the envelopes, the Federal Express boxes, and the tote bag in the narrow sub-basement storage bin each tenant in the building owned. Most of the bins for other tenants, she noticed, had bottles of wine lying in neatly stacked rows. In her exhausted mind she recalled the title of the Poe story
The Cask of Amontillado
. Wasn’t that the story, she wondered, in which a man had been sealed behind bricks in a basement from which he never emerged?

Julie walked up the many flights of stairs to her apartment, sweating with exhaustion and nervousness on the last several concrete flights, because she was gripped by the image that her daughter had awakened with no one there. As Julie saw, Kim hadn’t stirred.

Arms folded, Julie stood at the windows in her living room.

Dawn was filling the world. Sunlight touched the top stories of the nearby apartment buildings. Uniformed janitors hosed down the sidewalks on Madison Avenue.

And then she went to sleep. It was six-thirty.

* * *

McGlynn had been awake for ten minutes. He sat on the toilet, reading the
Daily News
. He was impressed by the appearance of D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

his own face in a photograph from yesterday’s news conference.

He grabbed the telephone he had installed in the bathroom as though it were a fast ground ball. “Yeah?”

“She was up all night. She made a cell phone call. The lights just went out.”

“Meet me in the Jew’s office in an hour and a half.”

“Christ, I been up all night. I want to go home.”

“See you in an hour and a half.” McGlynn dropped the telephone on the receiver. He was sick of this case and he thought—

fleetingly, smiling at his picture in the
News
—about shooting
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Steinman in his brown-freckled, unhandsome, bespectacled face.

* * *

Danny Fonseca pivoted at the corner of the squash court after lofting the small black ball over his left shoulder toward the center of the front wall. As he bolted on strong legs to the “T” at the court’s center he watched Mario Spina scramble forward to reach the ball as it fell, softly, near the tin fender along the base of the front wall. Instinctively Fonseca knew that Spina would wedge the softest imaginable shot to the seam where the side wall and the front wall met. When Spina had committed himself to that shot, Fonseca raced forward, his squash racket held at a forehand angle by his agile wrist, and smashed the ball to the low right corner of the front wall, just above the tin. The ball sped backward, a “rail shot” in squash players’ lingo, less than an inch from the right wall and no more than a foot above the floor. When Fonseca turned to regain the court’s center, he saw that Spina was already in the right-hand corner, crouching low to reach the shot.

It should have been a point for Fonseca. It was an ideal rail shot. But Spina, stretching, his eyes bulging, hit it. The ball glanced off the right wall, veered toward the left front corner, and fell off the seam where the left wall and front wall met, softly, as though dropped from a child’s hand.

Mario Spina was thirty-four and the squash pro at the New York Athletic Club. Although he was Italian, he looked Pakistani:
P A U L B A T I S T A

short, lithe, agile, and hairy. Fitting that he looked that way, since, for decades, Pakistanis had been the best squash players in the world. Mario Spina had curly black hair and, when he played squash, wore a red sweatband over his forehead. When he made that killer shot, he smiled at Fonseca, who grimaced and said,

“Beautiful, baby, beautiful.”

The Congressman had loved this rich man’s game for many years. He began playing when he launched his political career as a state Assemblyman from Brooklyn. It was during that period when people first started to seek him out and, almost immedi-130

ately, to offer and give him things. One of the early people was Robert Mancuso, who worked for an investment banking firm on Wall Street and who introduced himself to Assemblyman Fonseca in 1964 at a dinner for Italian Americans at the Columbus Club in the East Fifties where two state court judges were being honored. Bobby Mancuso was a member of the New York Athletic Club. He was a sharp dresser, and he introduced the Assemblyman to squash. Bobby’s firm paid the NYAC squash pro for seven months of lessons.

Fonseca, who had played baseball from the time he was seven until he graduated from Queens College, was a natural athlete.

Although he never performed as well as the men who had learned squash in prep schools like Exeter and Choate (names he had never heard until he was first elected to Congress in the 1960s and from which some of the stony, standoffish New England representatives had graduated), Fonseca became a formidable player.

A few years later, when he was appointed to the board of a New York City pension fund to which Bobby Mancuso’s firm wanted to become an advisor, Fonseca remembered those early days on the courts at the NYAC and did what he could to reward Bobby’s firm for those squash lessons and other tokens of Bobby’s respect down through the years. Mancuso’s firm got the contract.

Now, on this hot Friday night at the end of August in this classic building across from Central Park at the corner of Central Park South and Sixth Avenue, Fonseca drew deep pleasure D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

from the game. He and Spina were literally encased in the white rectangular box of the squash court, a world apart. The only access to the court was through a half-size door on the rear wall that closed flush with the wall, forming a part of the seamless interior. They had already been playing for an hour, the ball ricocheting from wall to wall, glancing from the floor,
pop-pop-pop-popping
with beautiful rapidity around the white interior. Fonseca felt separated from the outside world.

That was precisely what he wanted. That afternoon, as the trial approached its end for the day at four, he had almost dropped off
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to sleep but then had been aroused. The witness on the stand was yet another government agent: what made him remarkable was that he was the two-hundredth witness called by the government in the six months of trial. The witness was a government account-ant, who, by using a blow-up of a worksheet, described how he had traced money from Selig Klein’s business into a Mexican bank account in various numbered accounts linked, he testified, to Fonseca.

During the final Friday afternoon break, the Congressman said to Sorrentino, “I got to get the fuck outta here. You don’t need me tonight, do you?”

“What’s the matter, you don’t love me anymore?” Sorrentino answered.

Fonseca’s eyes brightened behind his aviator glasses, “Christ, I’ve spent more time with you than I spent with all my wives put together.”

“And I probably gave you better pussy.”

Fonseca laughed. “Seriously, you don’t need me, do you?”

“No. What’s up?”

“I’m gonna try to play some squash up at the NYAC.”

“Use Steinman’s head for a ball. It’s about the right size.”

From the telephone in the lobby near the courtroom door, Fonseca called Spina and reserved a court for 6:30. He didn’t want to use his cell phone because he didn’t want the FBI to know where he planned to be. By eight Fonseca was exhausted,
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drained, and exhilarated. He drank Gatorade with Spina as they sat, after the games, on the wooden benches near Spina’s office.

When he cooled down, Fonseca took the elevators from the sixth floor where the squash courts were to the eleventh-floor locker room. The club was virtually empty. The Puerto Rican attendants in the locker room, who had been sitting, rose when the Congressman emerged from the elevator. Carrying his protective eyewear and racket in his right hand, Fonseca waved at the boys with his left as he waited for the towels. Usually dour and sullen, the attendants were pleased to see the Congressman.

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They called him “Sir.”

Fonseca took three separate showers in the big, old-fashioned shower room. Between showers he sat in the sauna for ten-minute intervals, his body glistening. He then took a long time to dress.

When he left the locker room, he passed a five-dollar bill to one of the attendants.

Alone, Fonseca had two beers and a light sandwich at the bar in the wood-paneled grill room on the third floor. The three waiters recognized him, even though it had been more than six months since he last visited the club. If they knew that he was on trial for racketeering, fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, they didn’t show it. They were obviously delighted to have the Congressman there again at last and treated him like royalty. As he ate, he watched a baseball game on the large-screen television.

In the NYAC’s clubby, run-down lobby, the Congressman retrieved from the main desk the keys to the car he had parked in the garage across Sixth Avenue. After he passed through the revolving door a club doorman asked if he wanted a cab. Fonseca shook his head, smiled, and dangled his car keys. In the dusk the doorman recognized him. “How are you, Congressman?”

“Fine,” Fonseca answered, and then stopped. A man in a business suit approached him from the corner of the sidewalk on Central Park South. Fear harrowed him. Fonseca instinctively stepped closer to the doorman.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“Can I talk to you, sir?”

Fonseca had been approached hundreds of thousands of times in his life. He felt foolish at his initial, frightened reaction. He knew it was an instinct generated by what happened to Klein. “What can I do for ya?” It was a rehearsed line Fonseca had used for years.

“My name is Castronovo. Dick. Special Agent with the FBI.”

“What’s up?”

“Can we talk in private?”

“This doorman is my friend, aren’t you, Julio?” Fonseca read the doorman’s name on the plastic tag on his chest. Julio was
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wide-eyed, silent. “Besides,” Fonseca smiled, “doormen don’t hear anything and don’t remember anything. We can talk here, right in front of Julio.”

“It really would be better if we had a private word.”

Fonseca became abrupt, feigning anger. “Say whatever you want, but right here.”

“All right, all right. I’m really not supposed to be doing this, it’s just that I’m concerned for you. I’ve been looking into the Klein case…Perini, too…a few other things. We’ve really got nothing hard to go on, nothing we could arrest anybody with yet, but we feel that some not-too-nice guys are on the hunt, and we’re concerned for you.”

In the heat, as they stood in the soft downward glow of light from the awning over the entrance to the club, Fonseca gazed at the man. There was no doubt in Fonseca’s mind that he was in fact an agent: the close-cropped hair, the narrow eyes with perfect vision, the inexpensive suit, the beginnings of a beer paunch.

“Speak to me in English, will ya? What’re you trying to say?”

“Just that we’re concerned for you. We’ve been looking at Marcello. We’re just concerned for you.” Marcello, who was the secretary-treasurer of a Teamsters local, was one of the defendants on trial with Fonseca. He was a quiet man who greeted Fonseca every morning by asking, in the same rote tone, “And how are you today, sir?” He and Vincent Sorrentino always called him the Milkman. Marcello the Milkman.

P A U L B A T I S T A

“I don’t understand,” Fonseca said, quietly.

“Look, just man-to-man, I’m concerned for you. The people I work for don’t have enough yet to do anything…official…but I thought, man-to-man, I should talk to you.”

“That’s great. I appreciate it. But what the fuck do you want me to do?”

“Just watch yourself. Just take care. And if you feel you want our help, if you think we can help you, we can. All you have to do is talk to us.” He held a business card in his hand.

Fonseca waited and then smiled. “You know how I want you
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to help me? As in, right now?”

“How?” There was a boyish eagerness in Castronovo’s voice.

“By getting the fuck outta my face.”

Castronovo looked genuinely offended. “Sir, I just tried to help.”

“Let Julio here hail a cab. You get in. You drive away. And then, when I feel safe from
you
, I’ll leave this nice little well-lit spot I’ve got for myself.”

“No problem, sir. You’ll remember me. Castronovo. It’s not a hard name to forget if your name’s Fonseca. And when you think we can help you call me.” He held his business card toward Fonseca, who didn’t reach out to take it. Castronovo let it drop to the sidewalk.

On a signal from Fonseca, Julio stepped out onto Central Park South, hailed a taxi, opened the door, and slammed it behind Castronovo. Fonseca watched the yellow car as it sped east past the row of elegant hotels with huge, light-filled banners on Central Park South. Afraid and confused, he picked up Castronovo’s card and then walked quickly from the NYAC’s entrance to the parking garage. He forgot to say goodbye to Julio. The Congressman told himself he’d have to be especially nice to him when he came back to the NYAC. After all, the man might live and vote in his district.

13.

Kate Stark: even the name arrested Vincent Sorrentino’s attention. A name like an expletive: waspish, blunt, unusual. She was so attractive, so elegantly turned out, that staring at her bordered on the unavoidable. How old was she? Sorrentino tried to gauge it: thirty-five, thirty-eight, even forty-two? He felt flawlessly healthy, yet half his life, in fact, far more than half, was over, and his wife Helen was only fifty-one when cancer came and swept her away to death within four months of the day of the diagnosis.

It was too exquisite a day, Sorrentino thought, and Kate Stark was too beautiful a presence, to allow thoughts of age, loss, and death to shadow his mind. He decided he would press to know her. She was plainly unattached, it was a late Saturday afternoon, they were at a vast house on the beach in East Hampton, and a party was just beginning. All he had to do, he instinctively believed, was start a conversation with her. What were the chances that she would be aloof, distant? Not much, experience had taught him. Women liked him. Even Julie Perini—about whom he was so uncharacteristically sensitive and tentative even though he carried her image and her presence in his mind’s eye almost continuously—liked him. She had even held his hand toward the end of the short dinner they had the night after she called him to read Neil Steinman’s letter. He wanted to be with Julie but something about her hurt and her fear made
P A U L B A T I S T A

him hesitate. Julie had kissed his cheek when she left him in the lobby of her building after that dinner.

Kate Stark was not aloof or distant. Vincent Sorrentino was not tentative or sensitive or cautious about her. Arriving at Richard Vigdor’s house with a group of people from Washington (they were flown in one of Vigdor’s helicopters from LaGuardia to the East Hampton airport), Kate strolled among the fifty or so guests on Vigdor’s terrace, at his pool, in his kitchen, and in his huge living spaces, and then she circled back to Sorrentino. Vigdor, one of Sorrentino’s clients, a magazine publisher who had started with pornography in
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the early 1970s and then moved into game, computer, and Internet magazines, had already told Sorrentino about Kate. She was never married, was once a chief aide to a California Senator, and now owned a political consulting firm in Washington. “Gorgeous, you’ll like her,” Vigdor told Sorrentino when he pressed him to spend the weekend at the seaside house in East Hampton.

And here she was now, so close to him on the sun-drenched terrace that he could detect the refreshing, cleansing scent on her breath of the gin and tonic she carried. She said, “So this is how America’s most famous trial lawyer relaxes on a Saturday?”

He met her frank gaze. “The same way Washington’s most legendary consultant does. What a coincidence.”

He liked what he said even as he was speaking, but, at the same time, it was difficult to avoid the impact of her remarkable face. It was also difficult to avoid looking at the outline of her breasts: she was wearing a jumpsuit that wrapped itself tightly but tastefully around all the full proportions of her body. She was not a small woman. She wore slender, expensive shoes with slight heels that made her almost as tall as Sorrentino. The physical presence she created, effortlessly, made it difficult to be with her at the same time that it made it impossible to leave her. She was the rare woman who could give a man a hard-on just by standing near him.

As the long afternoon and evening unfolded, she made it clear she wanted Sorrentino to be with her for the night. At first, they D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

spent time moving from conversation to conversation. Kate knew more people than Sorrentino. Vigdor spent money lavishly and gathered at this party people who were well-known politicians, writers, actors, and journalists, and Kate appeared to know and be recognized by everyone. In contrast, Sorrentino was recognized by many people, since several of his criminal trials had been broadcast live on
Court TV
and other networks, and his acquittals were more legendary than his losses, but he simply didn’t personally know most of the people at Vigdor’s party. Kate Stark was soon introducing him. “Of course you know Vincent Sorrentino,
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lawyer
extraordinaire
?”

Over the course of the hours, as they drank, ate, and even started to hold hands, Kate obviously liked everything she saw Vincent Sorrentino do and say. And she loved the style. It was the sure-footedness, the perfectly calibrated words, the aura of the man in whom politicians and gangsters confided their deepest secrets, and the intrigue he conveyed, as when Vigdor searched him out just as a spectacular sunset spread long, eastward-pointing shadows over the East Hampton beach that encircled the mansion.

“Believe it or not,” Vigdor said to Sorrentino as Kate, sipping another gin and tonic, listened, “Danny Fonseca found out you’re here. He says your cell phone isn’t working. You probably didn’t pay the bill, he said. He’s holding for you.”

“Is he? Where’s the phone?”

“I’ll have one of the waiters bring it to you. Wait over there, it’s quieter.” Vigdor waved toward a corner of the terrace, well away from the Mexican mariachi band he had flown in from New York for the night’s party.

“Can I sit over there with you?” Kate asked as they waited for the cordless telephone. “Over there” was next to him, on the arm of a chair.

“Absolutely, Kate.”

Sorrentino was flattered. He took her hand and led her to the lounge chairs on the edge of the terrace. Some people were watching them, two just-met beautiful adults holding hands.

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When the telephone arrived he pulled the antenna out a little further to hear Fonseca’s gravelly, distinct voice. As Fonseca talked, Sorrentino held the portable receiver to his left ear with his left hand and, with his right, touched Kate’s fingers. Fonseca spoke to Sorrentino with a strangely focused precision. Although Sorrentino genuinely liked the Congressman, he would sometimes become impatient with the looseness of his words, the enigmatic expletives, the rambling stories, the nightclub style of quick jokes and one-liners. But now Fonseca was clear and concise as he described his encounter the night before on the steps of the New
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York Athletic Club.

Kate listened raptly as Sorrentino finally spoke to Fonseca.

“You, my friend, have just been treated to one of the more insidious little tricks that the powers that be have developed. They try to break down the unity of defendants in a big case by sending a stalking horse to pull one of the group away, to make him feel that he’s at risk from one of his codefendants.”

Sipping her gin and tonic, Kate watched Sorrentino as he paused, listening again to the Congressman. Then she heard Sorrentino say, “It works, sometimes. They hope that the guy who’s been targeted by his newfound friends will cooperate. Suddenly he’s no longer in league with the defendants, works out a deal, leaves the reservation, and becomes a witness.”

Sorrentino paused again, listening. Kate squeezed his hand, playfully. “I hear you, but I don’t want you to worry. But I am going to call Steinman on this, catch him up short. He can’t just send FBI agents around to play mind-fuck with my clients.”

Sorrentino listened for another two minutes as Fonseca, who was obviously at a confused midpoint between bravado and concern, continued to speak. After several drinks, Sorrentino was not as fixed and clear as he usually was. While listening to this old man, he gazed at Kate, at the broad brick terrace, at the Atlantic, darkening, beautiful, and at the dozens of people in their summer clothes. Sorrentino felt relaxed and happy. Finally, wanting to wind down the conversation, he said, “Look at it this way. I think what happened last night is D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

good news. Steinman is so worried about his case, he’s looking for something to break it his way. So he uses a pretty cheap trick.”

Sensing that the conversation was virtually over, Kate blurted out, “Tell Danny I love him.”

Sorrentino looked surprised. “Danny, Kate Stark says she loves you.”

Sorrentino heard Fonseca say, “What?”

“Kate Stark is sitting here with me, and she says she loves you.

I didn’t know you knew her.”

Even though he knew Sorrentino was not on speakerphone,
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Danny Fonseca whispered, “What the hell are you doing with her, you lucky son of a bitch? You never told me
you
knew her.”

Speaking to both of them—Kate at his right and Fonseca one hundred twenty miles to the west—Sorrentino said, “Sure, I’ve known her for a long time. About two hours.”

Fonseca said quietly so that only Sorrentino could hear, “That is the most fabulous fuckin’ body I’ve ever seen. And when you get to the right spot it’s like dipping it into a barrel of honey.”