Death's Witness (18 page)

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And they all laughed. Julie laughed, too. The fools never asked about the basement. They obviously didn’t live in prewar buildings in Manhattan that had storage bins in the basements. Her notes and Tom’s computers and receipts were there. They had taken Julie’s own computer: its complex internal mysteries contained little more than revised or rewritten news stories. Tom never used it.

* * *

Just as soon as Julie slammed shut the apartment door Elena emerged with Kim from the bathroom. Kim was still wide-eyed, bewildered, possessed of an expression that Julie had never seen before on her daughter’s face.
What has this done to her?
Julie thought. It was like worrying about a deep physical injury.

Strong Elena, after one look at Julie near the door, had no hesitation about what to do: she embraced Julie and put Julie’s head on her shoulder, and Julie did what Elena knew she would do—

she cried. Through her tears she whispered to Elena, hoping Kim would not hear: “This is like rape. This is rape. This is terrible.”

And Elena, stroking Julie’s hair, kept repeating: “Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.”

* * *

Ultimately, Julie needed three hours to collect herself to the point where this day began to approach the edges of the normal.

P A U L B A T I S T A

She showered at least three separate times; her bowels were loose, tormented; and she was depleted by wrenching, back-to-back sessions on the toilet. After she was emptied and showered for the last time, she lay down again in her bed for an hour. Elena had organized the apartment while Julie underwent her long ordeal in the bathroom; the bed had been remade and was fresh. Julie slept deeply, briefly.

At six that afternoon—almost twelve hours after she had first been wrenched out of sleep by the pounding on the door and the strident male voices in the hall—Vincent Sorrentino walked qui-148

etly through the apartment. He was still in the suit he had worn that day at trial. Except for the men who had roamed through the apartment during the day, Vincent was the first man who had been inside Kim’s home since her father died. Although she normally engaged strangers, Kim held back from Vincent.

Her mother didn’t. Julie had managed to reach Vince shortly after four, when she knew the day’s trial session would be over.

She told him that men had come to her apartment and boxed and taken away all of Tom’s files. From the backseat of his car, as he listened to her, Vincent Sorrentino heard her controlled but frightened voice. He had asked, “Do you want me to stop by?”

“Yes,” she said. “Please.”

Julie had wondered how to greet Vincent when he arrived. As soon as she opened the door for him, she hugged him. His chest was thinner than she had expected. But his large hands were warm, sympathetic, and reassuring as he rubbed her back and shoulders. She led him through the apartment. Some of the car-peting was torn from the steel trolley wheels. There were holes in some places on the walls, particularly in the spare room where the boxes had been and in the hallway leading to the door.

Julie even took Vince into her bedroom. She opened a closet door, almost at random, and noticed for the first time that Tom’s suits had been searched. All his pockets were inside out. His pants, suit jackets, and shirts were piled on the floor of the usually meticulously arranged closet.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Julie said, “I hadn’t noticed this before. They went through his clothes? My God.”

“I’m sorry, Julie. Can I help you hang any of this up?”

“God, no, Vince. Elena will help me with it tomorrow.”

Julie asked him to stay for a few hours. She ordered Chinese food. Elena spread it carefully on the kitchen table. By the time they were eating, Kim had adjusted to Vincent. He sat at the table with his suit jacket and tie removed, turning the pages of a child’s book that made music and produced childlike voices. Vincent imitated some of those sounds. Kim laughed and clapped.

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When Elena finally took Kim, covered with fragments of food, away from the table, Vincent and Julie simply stared at each other. At one point Sorrentino’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pants pocket, glanced at the screen, and saw that it was Kate Stark calling from Washington. He pressed the Decline button.

14.

The near-translucent steel curtains in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, suspended at least fifty feet from ceiling to floor, undulated slightly, sifting the early afternoon sunlight. The vast, richly appointed restaurant was spread out below the elevated table at which Stan Wasserman, Gil Thomas, and Hogan Blackburn sat. Even at twelve-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon, men and women were at the Grill Room bar drinking, laughing, talking.

Native to the Upper West Side (his parents, almost ninety, still lived on West End Avenue), Stan Wasserman was always uncomfortable in settings like this: these expensive places struck him as artificial, unworldly, and unfair. At fifty-seven, he had long ago passed beyond the radical tendencies of his youth: when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the sixties he had rebelled against the complacency he saw around him and eschewed the trappings to which virtually all of his classmates felt an entitlement. And in his early years in journalism he deliberately sought out newspapers and magazines that were offbeat, new, and radical:
Ramparts,
the
Village Voice
in its early years,
Evergreen Review
. Although he had crossed over by 1969 to the institutions that dominated the news—he had written briefly for the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
before joining CBS

and then NBC—he still retained a quiet disdain for the aristocratic pretensions of those institutions. Settings like the Four Seasons always aroused that disdain.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Gil Thomas, thirty-three, and Hogan Blackburn, fifty, didn’t share Stan Wasserman’s uneasiness. A late riser, Gil started most of his days in the Grill Room. It was there that he discussed with Hogan Blackburn, the executive producer of NBC’s nightly news programs, the assignments Gil wanted for the day. Gil was one of the two or three young men at NBC

who had already been designated, even if privately, for the most conspicuous news positions at the station. He was already anchoring

early

evening

weekend

broadcasts.

Sleek,

immensely attractive, he was one of the fixtures of the Grill
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Room. Together, he and Hogan accumulated a weekly lunch tab at the Four Seasons of more than a thousand dollars. This was one of those rare days when they had persuaded diligent, thoughtful Stan Wasserman—dressed in a somewhat worn, workmanlike blue blazer and regimental red and black tie—to have lunch with them: “a working lunch,” as Gil had described it when he invited Stan that morning.

“She called in sick yesterday,” Stan answered Hogan, who sat facing him as the main course was cleared and the tablecloth cleaned with stylish curved scoops. “When she called this morning she left a message that she might be in by the middle of the afternoon, definitely tomorrow.”

Even as he spoke, Stan had a puzzled expression on his strong features: Hogan Blackburn had never once mentioned Julie Perini’s name to him. Sensing that the long, desultory talk over the last hour had finally found its focus, a focus he immediately disliked, Stan decided to let one of the other men take the next step in the conversation.

Hogan did. “It’s one of those goddamn funny twists of life that we have this remarkable story—the dead football hero who launders money—and his wife works in our very midst. Don’t you see it’s a hell of an opportunity for us?”

Calmly, Stan stared at Hogan’s face and registered for the thou-sandth time that Hogan was himself as smooth-looking and attractive as any of the anchormen he controlled. And then, saying
P A U L B A T I S T A

nothing, he shifted his gaze to the tall, translucent curtains. They shifted slightly, sunlight cascading through them.

Gil Thomas, seated at Stan’s left, remarked, “People from the papers have gotten wind of the fact that the apartment was raided by the feds yesterday, tons of boxes rolled out.”

Stan said, “I heard about that. She’s had a hell of a time.”

“Did she tell you that’s why she hasn’t been in?” Hogan asked.

“No.”

“What’s she like?” Gil said.

“Hard to know. She’s not your average East Side Mommy. She
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has more talent than she shows. I used to think she wasn’t overly bright. That, I now believe, was because when I inherited her four or five years ago she was living for, and in the shadow of, her husband. Then, as time passed, I saw she had a capacity for real work, she expected no favors, and was one of the least Jappy and self-absorbed women in this business. She actually reads newspapers. Isn’t that a miracle?”

Hogan flashed his boyish Robert Redford smile at him. “You like her, huh?”

“No. I admire her. Basically she’s conducted herself with grace under pressure.” Hogan recognized, but Gil did not, Stan’s reference to Hemingway’s definition of courage.

“Did you,” Gil asked, pausing tentatively as waiters hovered over the table pouring coffee, “know her husband?”

“Not really. I met him five or six times. He seemed shy. He was very attentive to her. At first I thought it was phony—a man like that must have had opportunities with ten thousand women, but it was clear he loved her.”

Hogan asked, as he sipped black coffee, “What did you think of him?”

“To be honest?”

“Sure.”

“I felt a little awkward around him, a little diminished.

Remember, I’ve spent most of my time with politicians, most of whom are clowns, and it’s easy to feel superior to a clown. With D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Tom it was different. He looked and conducted himself like a genuine sports hero, someone who had done well a thing that was very difficult to do…I felt a little foolish around him, I admired him, and, of course, I found myself in the ambiguous position of being the boss of this hero’s wife.”

Still sipping his coffee and smiling, Hogan knew that Stan didn’t like or respect him, and never had. Although they were virtual contemporaries, they had arrived at different and unequal places in the same business. Hogan was born to wealth in Massachusetts, where his family had owned a small-town newspaper for
153

generations; had cruised through Princeton; and had started in television sports journalism. Moodier, more intelligent, Jewish, Stan had reached his limit in the field. Hogan could still reasonably expect to travel further.

“Do you think he was a big-time criminal? Perini, I mean?”

“I have no idea. If he was, he didn’t flaunt it. They lived pretty modestly. I can’t think of a party they ever went to, except Saturday-afternoon birthday parties for their daughter and her friends.”

“I’ve heard,” Hogan said, “that he was not that good a lawyer.

At least other lawyers have told me that.”

“It ain’t necessarily so. Remember, next to ours, it may be the cattiest profession ever created.”

Hogan laughed. Gil was staring at him. And then Hogan said:

“Could you work on her?”

“Come again?”

“Come on, Stan, don’t be coy. We know from Cassie that when she tried, weeks ago, to talk to Julie—about the trial, something interesting but not too interesting—Julie said no and you said no way, I can’t get her to help. But this is different now. Gil and I agree this has the dimensions of a major, major story and we have this incredible resource available to us. We want you to help in tapping it.”

“Incredible? Not a bad word. Incredible.”

Finished with his coffee, Hogan was leaning backwards, gazing through narrowed eyes at Stan. “What’s incredible?”

P A U L B A T I S T A

“Have you two thought this through? What do you expect her to say? Yes, friends and colleagues, my husband was the key man in an international drug, money laundering, or weapons ring, or all of the above. And of course I’m so grateful for my forty-six-thousand-dollar-a-year salary that here’s all the information you need—”

Hogan said steadily, boring into the stream of Stan’s words,

“We won’t know what she has to say until we ask—”

Stan interrupted him: “Or, friends and colleagues, my husband was a saint. Some evil forces are now trying to implicate
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him in a fantasy. Hogan, I just don’t think you’ve thought this through.”

“Look, Stan, we’d be foolish not to press the advantage we have here.”

“We don’t have an advantage. The woman’s not stupid. She knows lawyers, and those lawyers will focus her attention on other concerns. What other things is the government going to do now that they’ve done this? Examine her bank accounts, find out how much money she has and how she spends it? How could she safely say anything to us?”

“Maybe we could help her, develop her husband’s side, explore other alternatives.”

“That doesn’t work, Hogan, and you know it.”

Hogan paused and leaned forward, pushing his cup and saucer away. “I guess there’s another dimension to this, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe as an institution we should be more concerned. Deal with this in a different way. Here we have an important employee—a person who writes the news, a person we implicitly ask the public to trust—closely connected with what appears to be a major investigation by the United States government. Maybe we should put her on a leave of absence. Unpaid. After all, we don’t want to compromise the integrity of our institution.”

Stan controlled himself, again fixing his gaze not on Hogan Blackburn but on the lovely, light-shifting steel curtains. Hogan D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

knew Stan Wasserman well enough to know that he wouldn’t respond immediately. Hogan signaled in the air for the waiter to bring the check. Stan saw that lunch had cost one hundred and eighty-seven dollars.

* * *

It was now the fourth time that she had replayed the videotape of Tuesday evening’s eleven o’clock news. It was already one-thirty on Wednesday morning, as she saw in the orange digital lights of the sleek black VCR. When she pressed the remote-155

control button she heard the distinctive “tap” as the tape rewound, and then the equally distinctive but different “tap” as she pressed the play button.

Steinman’s face emerged against a background of buff-colored law books: the curly, slightly thinning hair; the wire-rimmed glasses; that Groucho Marx expression always striving to appear sincere. And she heard his words, as he responded to what she knew was an orchestrated question from Gil Thomas: “I want to stress that the material we obtained from Mr. Perini’s files could be of very high value in an ongoing criminal investigation. And that investigation touches only on some of the issues that are involved in the ongoing Fonseca trial. There is a possibility of superseding indictments or other indictments.”

Gil Thomas, off-screen, asked, “And could Tom Perini be an unindicted co-conspirator in those others charges?”

“I can’t comment on that. But it would not be the first time in the history of the world that an absent person figured promi-nently in a criminal trial.”

Using the remote, Julie sped forward briefly: because she had replayed this sequence of the news so often she automatically sensed, as though at a rehearsal, where the next scene was. Vincent Sorrentino’s face—angry-looking, combative—loomed into focus.

“You know what Mr. Steinman isn’t telling you, don’t you?

That anything he got from Tom Perini’s files can’t be used at this trial. Legally it can’t. And there’s the problem, can’t you see it?

P A U L B A T I S T A

Mr. Steinman’s spent months prosecuting an innocent man, Congressman Fonseca, on bribery charges that he can’t prove. His real case is somewhere else, maybe locked away in the conduct of a man or men he can’t pursue, but he can’t let go of this endless, stupid case against the Congressman.”

* * *

Although it was late and she was exhausted, Julie felt the sleep-destroying anxiety that had settled in the core of her mind as she watched these two men exchange their views about her husband.