Death's Witness (2 page)

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This kind of elaborate effort by strangers to see him happened more often to Tom Perini in the past. Men would sit with him at small tables in coffee shops in distant airports, uninvited, and begin talking about football. Two women had followed him, in San Diego, into a men’s room in a hotel, locked the door behind them and stared at him for a full minute before asking him to autograph their forearms with a black felt pen (which he did). Even some judges simply asked to see him in the privacy of chambers to talk about football coaches or teams, not about cases or clients.

But those unexpected, almost comical and sometimes desperate encounters hadn’t happened as often after he turned forty.

Articles about him still appeared in
People
and
Sports Illustrated
: the Massachusetts boy from working-class Italian parents who became the leading pass receiver in Stanford football history; the winner of the Heisman Trophy; and a member of the New York Jets, who, after four celebrated seasons in the pros, abruptly left the game while still physically intact and enrolled at Columbia Law School. After law school, he decided to stay in New York, a city where he’d never been comfortable, instead of taking a barrage of offers from law firms in football-obsessed cities like Dallas and Denver, where he could have had a well-spring of rich cowboy businessmen clients who wanted Tom Perini as their lawyer.

For him, New York was a challenge. He believed he’d have to work harder and learn more to succeed, that his fame as a football player would not only be less of an advantage in New York than D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

in other cities but might even be a disadvantage, and that the kind of work he would do in New York would be more fascinating than he would find anywhere else.

Now, as he sat in his comfortable office with its view of the silver Citicorp Building across Third Avenue, he continued dictating into a cassette letters which were long overdue because he had been spending all day, every day in court for the last four weeks.

He also scrolled through the lines on his laptop, clicking the arrow into an hourglass to open five or six of the more than fifty email messages waiting under the New Mail tab. Most of the
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other messages were for penis enhancement, Viagra, pornography, mortgage loans. He tapped the delete logo repeatedly as the blue highlight line ascended the screen.

Tom knew, because he had been involved in others before, that this criminal trial would take at least another four months to complete. There were fourteen defendants: a group of trucking company owners, union leaders, and one legendary Congressman, all accused of racketeering, bribery, and extortion. Tom’s client, who owned a trucking empire in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, was Selig Klein. In his early seventies, Klein had been introduced to Tom just after he and the other defendants were indicted, in a tremendous burst of publicity six months before the trial actually began. Klein recognized Tom’s name but didn’t know whether Tom played football, baseball, or Scrabble and didn’t “give a flyin’ fuck.”

“I’m an old man,” Klein added, “and I just want you to get me out of this shit, don’t care what it costs. I’m not gonna fuckin’ die in jail.”

Tom liked him from the start.

Dictating quietly into the sleek, hand-held machine, Tom worked for another hour after the call from the lobby. Across Third Avenue the skin of the Citicorp Building absorbed and radiated the glow from the afternoon air. Tom called Julie and told her he was leaving the office and would be home in half an hour.

“Let’s eat in,” she said.

P A U L B A T I S T A

“Fine,” he answered.

Tom didn’t take any work with him. His hands—and this was unusual for him—were free, no briefcase, no folders, no backpack slung over his shoulder and stuffed with papers. He was determined to spend time over the weekend with Julie and their daughter, Kim, who was two and a half. Judge Feigley, an ancient black woman who had been a federal judge since Lyndon Johnson appointed her in 1968, had simply announced that the trial would be suspended until ten on Tuesday morning. Tom was deeply relieved by the reprieve. Some of the intense day-to-day pressure
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was lifted, and he’d be able to work in the quiet sanctuary of his office on Monday, after the free weekend.

In the lobby, cleaning crews were buffing the oval floor’s pink-hued marble and granite, creating gleaming arcs of polish on its surface. Smiling, Tom walked toward the reception desk where Hector stood. Hector was obviously pleased that the famous Tom Perini worked in his building. He stared at Tom, directly and appreciatively, as he would at any other celebrity: at Tom’s curly, glistening black hair, his familiar, handsome face, the dark suit, white shirt, deeply hued tie, and the sleek shoes. “Lookin’ sharp tonight, Mr. Perini. Real sharp.”

Tom signed out in the log book. “Thanks, Hector, you make a guy feel like he just won the lottery.” His years in sports—the interviews, the lunchtime talks to Rotary Clubs, the visits to inner-city high schools—had engendered in him a constant friendliness, a rare quality in Manhattan which Julie admired but which always made him late. The “Tom Perini schedule,” as she called it, was half an hour later than every other schedule.

“Beautiful night out there,” Hector said as Tom carefully finished his name, autograph-style, in the log book.

“I think I might walk home.”

“Where you live, Mr. Perini, if you don’t mind me askin’?”

“I don’t, Hector. Uptown, 87th and Madison.”

“That’s a nice walk.”

“Thirty blocks or so. Some days it’s the only exercise I get.”

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Tom started toward the revolving door.

“Hey, Mr. Perini,” Hector called.

“What’s up, Hector?”

“Look, I don’t want to bother you. But that guy’s still hangin’

around.”

“Our buddy from Mexico?”

“Right across the avenue. See him?”

“You mean the guy in the shiny suit?”

“That’s my man.”

The dark, birdlike man was standing on the sidewalk at the
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foot of the Citicorp Building across the avenue. Behind him was the cluttered window of a closed discount drugstore. Reflected in that window was the pink-stone and glass surface of the building in which Tom worked. The man wore a double-breasted suit, cut in European style. He carried a black briefcase. He had a thin Latin American moustache.

“Sometimes,” Hector said, “he runs across the street and asks guys comin’ outta here if they’re you.”

“He doesn’t look like my type.”

“Hey,” Hector said, “do me a favor. Let me get you a cab.

Walk some other night. This guy’s sure as shit’s gonna be a pain in the ass, I know it. He’s a fuckin’ nuisance.”

“Thanks, Hector. I’ll let you do that.”

Hector swept through the revolving door and flagged down a taxi for Tom in about five seconds. The car sped north on Third Avenue. Three blocks from the building, Tom turned in the backseat and saw the black-tailored man still staring across Third Avenue, still waiting. But now he was speaking into a cell phone.

* * *

The apartment at 87th and Madison was on the eighteenth floor of a pre-war, twenty-one story building. Julie and Tom had loved it from the day they first saw it. The view swept over the lower, staid buildings on the block between Fifth and Madison. Season after season, Tom and Julie had wide views of
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the northern expanse of Central Park, including the broad, sky-reflecting surface of the reservoir. Even after that deep blue September day years earlier when they had stared at the white wall of smoke and dust streaming eastward from the collapsed World Trade Center, they often told each other they’d live there forever.

When she heard the familiar sound of the front door opening and closing, Julie walked briskly from the kitchen to the hallway.

She slipped her arms under Tom’s suit jacket and around his waist. He was six-two and still weighed two hundred and fifteen
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pounds. His agent had tried several times to persuade him to appear in a centerfold spread for
Playgirl
. He turned the idea down but, years later, when he first met Julie, he mentioned it to her. “Playgirl,” she sometimes still called him, teasing. “Come here, playgirl,” she’d say.

Julie was six inches shorter than Tom. This afternoon her gleaming black hair was pulled away from her face and tied at the back of her head. She raised her face and sweet mouth to kiss him. Since Kim’s birth, she had worked, part-time, as a news writer for NBC. Before she met Tom, she’d never seen a football game. But, addicted to news since the time when she was a lonely twelve-year-old in Oxnard, California, she recognized his name.

But for what? It was only after a Google search that she realized the Tom Perini she had met—a youngish, incredibly good-looking lawyer working at the time in the federal prosecutor’s office—was once one of the most famous college and professional football players in the country.

“Guess what? I’m not working this weekend. The judge didn’t ask for any briefs, letters, anything. She just said, ‘Enjoy the weekend.’”

“See, I told you women make the best judges.”

They walked from the foyer to the living room. The sofa was placed so that it faced the large windows and the high view of Central Park. They lay down side-by-side on the sofa. Playfully, Julie told him Kim had just started her late afternoon nap. They D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

would wake her for dinner, now two hours away, and then put her to bed for the night.

“Want to mess around?” Julie asked.

Tom loved her, and her playfulness. “Not the right time of day,” he answered, kissing her delicate ear, “and besides, my mind is on food, not sex. It happens that way to older guys.” Pungent meat sauce with garlic, tomatoes, and thyme was cooking slowly in the kitchen. Its aroma filled the apartment, as did the light from the sun, slowly falling, radiant, behind the lush trees in the park.

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As always, Julie was interested in his work and asked about the trial. He’d given her a daily narrative. Now he talked about Judge Feigley, a massive woman, famous in her own right, known to the lawyers at the prosecution table and the defense lawyers as Dumb Dora. Tom complained, briefly, that the judge, despite her background as a young civil rights lawyer in the sixties, had become the kind of judge prosecutors loved on their cases. She let everything in, ruled in the government’s favor on all the small, killing details which, as they accumulated, built a mosaic for the jury pointing toward guilt, and was a classic hanging judge at sentencing time. Tom told Julie how relieved he was, “a kid let out of school,” when the judge blandly announced that the trial would be in recess until the next Tuesday.

As she later recalled again and again, it was Julie who suggested that Tom go for a run in Central Park. “Dinner won’t be ready for a while,” she said. “It’ll be a good way to break with work and start the weekend.”

Julie was right. After years of training, Tom’s body still craved physical effort: running, weight-lifting, biking, anything that brought a drenching sweat to his skin, including sex with his firm, shapely wife. Work—especially the kind of time-consuming work he now did—often interfered with his love of exercise. Julie, a squash player for years, naturally fleet, coordinated, and graceful, always urged him to run when he could. Tom was never able to play squash with her because her speed and agility on a small
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court were greater than his.

Changing quickly, wanting to finish the run before it became completely dark, Tom put on a sweatshirt, faded running shorts with the blue word “Columbia” sewn into the fabric, and an old pair of running shoes. They once had that high-tech look Tom disdained, but by now, after hundreds of hours of pounding on the roadways of Central Park, they were worn into the battered, almost flattened look and feel he preferred.

Before he left the apartment he slipped into Kim’s bedroom.

She still slept in a crib, although one side was permanently down.

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Shades drawn, the room was near-dark. The scent of the room was beguiling. His clean daughter slept on her side. She had the light skin and black hair of Julie’s family. Her breathing was deep. It was regular. It was vital. And it was miraculously scented as he leaned as close to her face and lips as he could without touching her.

“Be back in about forty-five minutes,” he whispered to Julie as he left the apartment. “I love you,” he said. He patted her rear.

“You’ve got a great ass.”

3.

Julie Perini had never been touched directly by death before. Her distant mother and father were still living in California, none of her few close friends had died, she had never known any of her grandparents, and her daughter’s life had just started.

On Friday night she waited for Tom for more than two hours before Kim emerged, crying and sweaty, from her nap. The anxiety in Julie’s body, a sense of sickness, grew steadily as she played briefly with Kim, washed her, and tried to settle her into bed by nine-fifteen. Tom never carried any kind of identification when he ran—his face was still readily recognizable in this city of well-known people—but he did put quarters in a wristband he wore, enough for a telephone call and a bus ride. He refused to carry his cell phone when he ran. “Nothing,” he told her, “is more annoying than the sight of some New Yorker pretending to run and talking into a cell phone at the same time. Me, I can barely chew gum and run.”

Kim at last settled into sleep shortly before ten. Because her father so frequently worked late at night, she didn’t ask where he was or mention his name. By ten-thirty, Julie was walking from room to room in the apartment.
Where’s Tom?
He must have twisted an ankle, seen an old friend, helped another runner who had tripped. She looked repeatedly from their high windows at the northern expanses of Central Park. Rows of lights in the park traced the mile-long outline of the reservoir and, in the rest of the
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park, the intricate patterns of footpaths and roadways. Glistening jewels on a black cloth.

The spacious, elegant views of the park at night didn’t calm or reassure her. The feverish words
I know what happened
kept coming into her mind, almost audibly. She called his office: no answer. She called his cell phone: maybe this once he’d taken it.

She heard it ringing in the pocket of his suit. Since she wanted to believe he’d come back and didn’t want him to think she had pan-icked, she decided she’d wait until midnight to call the police.

And what would she say?
My husband went out and he’s not home yet.