Death's Witness (29 page)

“Does the Pope go to Osama bin Laden for confession? I went to Perini because I was, for the first time in my life, in a panic, an absolute panic. Fonseca and one of his old warhorse lawyers from Brooklyn had figured I could finesse this Grand Jury. We weren’t even sure what you people were looking into. You were not even there; it was at least two years ago. Go, Fonseca said, waltz them around, and come back and tell us all about it. In less than ten minutes I wanted to run out of that room. I outsweated Nixon. Clearly Neil knew more about things I was involved in than I knew. He seemed to have a whole picture, much broader than I had.”

“I saw the logs from the wiretaps. The FBI had been stalking you for a year.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“At that point, I thought they had been stalking me for a lifetime. But to get back to your question. I went to Perini and I told him that the proverbial shit had hit the fan, and I pressed him to burn records, shred paper, sow confusion…”

“What did he do?”

“He looked at me as though I had landed from Mars. He said,

‘You probably need to find a lawyer.’ Can you beat that? I told him, ‘Wake up, my friend. Listen to what I’m saying:
you
are in trouble.’ He got this haughty look and said: ‘
You’re
in trouble.’ I said, ‘You’re living in a dream world.’”

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“What happened then?”

“I left his office, flew back to Washington, found a lawyer, and the rest is history. I began to cooperate. And I have become Neil’s sex slave. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

“Did you ever talk to Perini again?”

“I tried to call him once. The day before the first time I went to meet with Neil I wanted to see that one thing was done before I passed into my new sanctified life.”

“What was that?”

“I had done my last Arizona deal with Perini about a month before I visited the Grand Jury for the first time. Tom at the time had more than one-hundred million dollars in his escrow account. Mr. Madrigal wanted it transferred. I called Tom to tell him that one of the silent partners in the deal wanted the funds wired to the Caymans. I started to give him the account numbers, and he hung up.”

“Did the money get transferred?”

“Who knows? I don’t remember. The next day I crossed over into the twilight zone, and I’ve been a protected person ever since.”

“And you’ve told Neil all of this?”

“Except that last. I never wanted him to know that right up until the last minute, even as I was about to renounce my evil ways, I was still fucking around. The groom at the bachelor party.

Neil is a jealous wife.”

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“What do you think Perini did with the money?”

“You don’t understand people and money, do you? He kept it.

I was the one who got it to him, as far as I knew I was the only one he was dealing with from our side, and he cut me off before I could even read the numbers for the wire transfer to him. Obviously he was going to keep it.”

“What do you think happened?”

“What do I think happened? I can’t know for sure but, again, since I know the relationship between people and money better than you do, other people wanted to find ways to get the money
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back. People kill for money, did you know that? Without thinking about it. No moral dilemmas, no thoughts, no introspection. They didn’t teach me that where I went to school, and they sure as hell didn’t teach you that at Mount Holyoke—I always thought that was a sexy name for a woman’s college—and Perini was probably too dense to understand that. Although in his closing moments, whatever they were, he probably got the picture. ‘Maybe,’ he might have said to himself, ‘I shouldn’t have kept that money.’”

“Do you have any idea who killed him?”

“Only guesses, but good ones. The people he took the money from: Madrigal, Irwin, the other money men who were in their group, these are the kinds of men who know how to find the thousands of men born every year who kill other people for money.

Why do you care about Tom Perini?”

“Let me tell you why,” Kiyo said. She clicked off the handheld recorder. “Neil assigned me the project of indicting his wife.”

Hutchinson got that slightly drunk, cocktail-party glitter in his eye.

“You know, I like Neil. He’s got no patience for the things that are supposed to motivate people in his position, with his kind of power: things like patience, discretion, good judgment. Here’s this woman, with a dead husband; she’s as good-looking, as fetching as any young mother can be. So what do you do, you indict her. Makes sense.”

“He thinks she’s obstructed justice.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“That’s something. Neil Steinman
is
justice. Something gets in his way and,
mirabile dictu
, justice is obstructed. Anyhow, I shouldn’t be so judgmental about Neil. Hell, she could have the money. Perini had no visible friends, no partners, no associates.

Only his wife. And the money had to go somewhere. If Madrigal and his boys didn’t get it back, then she has it.”

“It’s quite a nest egg.”

“You know, Kiyo, you’re not listening to the Socratic lessons I’m giving you. It would be better for her, to the extent life has a value greater than money, if she didn’t have it. Remember what
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I told you: people and money. People kill for money.”

* * *

A sharp, clear, late-afternoon autumn breeze blew across Central Park as Kiyo and Hutchinson walked east on 93rd Street toward Madison Avenue. She surprised herself by suggesting that they stop at the neat, schoolhouse-red bookstore at the corner of Madison and 93rd Street. In the lucid late afternoon light, the bright front of the store looked inviting. Hutchinson had the collar of his worn herring-bone coat up: the collar rose into the fringe of his blond, disheveled hair and, in her eyes, he looked like a middle-aged college professor, not a man in the federal witness protection program who was likely to spend at least eighteen months in jail before he turned forty.

He lingered for a long time in the history section of the store’s warm interior. He took down from the shelf three different biographies of Churchill, and she wondered what kinds of ambitions he once had or even still imagined. She slowly walked toward him and stood near him as he placed one of the Churchill biographies back on the shelf.

“Have you read that?” she asked.

“No.”

“I’m going to buy it for you.”

“You are?” For once, his voice was unadorned. None of the archness, none of the sarcasm, none of the cynicism, none of the worldliness. “Thank you.”

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* * *

Fifteen minutes later, when he unlocked the door to his small room in the Hotel Wales, the west-facing windows absorbing the late sun and diffusing the light through the room, Hutchinson saw that the red message light of his telephone was on. He dropped the thick, hardcover biography on the bed, and dialed the front desk. McGlynn wanted him to call.

He had McGlynn’s number memorized. “You called?” he asked.

“Where you been?”

“Kiyo took me out,” Hutchinson said. And there was a pause.

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He said, “Kiyo. Ms. Michine?”

“Tokyo Rose?”

“You have to learn to respect your superiors, Agent McGlynn.”

“What the hell were you doing with her?”

“I was getting debriefed. By now I’ve been debriefed more in my life than I’ve been fucked.”

“I didn’t know she was detailed to you today.”

Hutchinson said nothing. He wanted to start reading right away, to absorb again the grand, familiar details of Churchill’s life. But the bizarre protocol of being a government witness was that he could never himself end a conversation.

“What you talk about?”

“Tom Perini.”

“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

“What? It’s five-thirty.”

McGlynn hung up: the conversation was over.

* * *

Hutchinson was in the bathroom when he heard the key in the hotel room’s cylinder lock. The inner chain lock had been removed by McGlynn when Hutchinson first arrived in this room months earlier: Hutchinson understood then that he had no access to privacy, no space of his own, since McGlynn, Steinman, and others not only had keys to the room but had also removed Hutchinson’s ability to grab thirty seconds or D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

more of privacy by the removal of the inner chain lock. It just wasn’t there.

“I’m in the bathroom,” he called out.

“Make it quick.”

“Sure.”

“I told you I was coming.”

“Hey, come on in. I’m only taking a shit.”

McGlynn did. Hutchinson was still on the toilet, his pants down on the floor at his feet, his hand on the roll of toilet paper.

Stunned, he looked up at McGlynn when the bathroom door
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swung open.

McGlynn hit the side of Hutchinson’s head with an open, powerful palm. He picked an area just over Hutchinson’s temple and above the hairline so that the bruise he wanted to cause wouldn’t show. Hutchinson fell on his side to the floor, crying. His pants were still around his feet and ankles.

“Don’t wise-ass with me, you piece of shit. Clean yourself up, keep the door open, and come out. Fast. Jesus, you stink.”

Hutchinson cried. He used the hotel’s facecloths and towels to wipe himself and the smears his own shit had left on the outer surfaces of the toilet and the floor when he fell. Finally, when he belted his pants and stood fully, he looked at himself in the mirror. His face was streaked with tears and he could see the edge of the red bruise near his hairline.

When he walked into the room, he saw McGlynn standing next to the television. There were two other men in the room. One he recognized as Mr. Perez, a man with a pencil-thin Latin American mustache. The other man, sinewy and tall, wore summer running clothes even though a chill fall wind was blowing outside.

“Señor Perez,” Hutchinson said. And then, sarcastically, “How is Mr. Madrigal?”

It was a tight room. The Victorian-style furniture was large. It took no effort at all for the man in running clothes to punch Hutchinson in the center of his chest, completely knocking the breath out of him.

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The thought came to Hutchinson that McGlynn or one of these men was going to kill him. The fear made him weak. He sat on the bed.

McGlynn’s voice was calm, “Tell me what you told her.”

And Hutchinson did.

When he finished, McGlynn said, “I don’t ever want to hear you mention Madrigal’s name to anybody.”

Hutchinson said, “I won’t.”

“Say it again.”

“I won’t.”

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McGlynn, Mr. Perez, and the blond runner left.

* * *

Steinman was in the kitchen of his house in Yonkers when the call from McGlynn came. “She’s been seeing Hutchinson.”

“Who’s been seeing Hutchinson?”

“Tokyo Rose.”

“Kiyo?”

“Right.”

“When?”

“Last couple of days.”

“What for?”

“To ask him questions.”

“How do you know?”

“Hutchinson thought he should tell me.”

“What kinds of questions?”

“About Perini.”

“Anything else?”

“He told her about Madrigal.”

“He did
what
?”

“He told her about Madrigal.”

“What did he say?”

“That Perini was on the take from Madrigal, from Irwin. He’s an honest boy. He told her everything he knows.”

Neil Steinman paused. In that pause he gazed into the next D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

room, where his frail, immobilized daughter sat in a small wheelchair. She was alone; she was hopeless. Most of her hair was gone. “Don’t you speak to Kiyo, I’ll talk to her.”

“Good,” McGlynn said. “Hutchinson won’t be seeing her again.”

* * *

As Congressman Danny Fonseca sat in a blue suit on the black sofa in Sorrentino’s office, the late afternoon light, autumn light, enveloped him. It was November: outside the high office win-245

dows wisps of cold clouds caught the light as the sun passed down to the west over the New Jersey palisades. In the soft light the Congressman looked, Sorrentino thought, almost beatified, but he had in fact become a pain in the ass.

“Did you know this judge, Dick Howard?” Fonseca asked.

“No, never heard about him.”

“He was an old friend of mine. I saw him two weeks ago. He’d just finished up thirty-six fucking months in some federal jail in Indiana somewhere. You know who was there with him?

Schvartzes and spics. Drug dealers. Mexicans. Nicaraguans. Arabs.

The federal prisons aren’t what they were ten years ago. No more tennis courts.”

“Danny, Danny, those are the laws
you
voted for when Reagan and the Bushes ran things. Remember? Get tough on criminals.”

“I never voted for that shit.”

“But you must have known what was coming.”

Fonseca smiled, his silver hair and false teeth momentarily radiant. Then he caught himself, and he said, “I don’t want to go there.”

Sorrentino couldn’t count the times he had talked with the Congressman about plea bargaining, cooperating, compromising.

During the months leading to the trial and all the months of the trial itself, all his efforts to talk about a compromise ended with one irreducible fact of life the Congressman could never accept: Steinman insisted that Fonseca not only plead guilty to at least two serious felony counts of the thirty counts on which he had
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been indicted but that he cooperate in the prosecution of his codefendants, including Sy Klein and others. Repeatedly, the Congressman had said, “I never heard of any fucking deal like that. Is that a deal?”

“It’s not a deal, Danny,” Sorrentino would say. “You’re not in the hallways of Congress anymore. It’s an ultimatum, it’s drop-dead stuff.”

“You tell the fucker to go drop dead, I’m gonna go over his head, I’ve still got friends.”

“Hey, Danny, if you can go over his head, go. I’m just a sim-246

ple country lawyer. All I know how to do is try cases, not fix them.”

Nothing that the Congressman had done had derailed the trial or the onset of the retrial or resulted in any better offer. But Danny Fonseca had deal-making in his veins, the same way a heroin user has heroin in his system: he was addicted to it. “Don’t you think, Vinnie, that you can get a better deal for me now before this retrial?”

“I don’t know, Danny, it’s complicated. On the one side, they’d like to avoid another long trial. But there’s another side, as always. They’ve invested a lot of prestige and time in trying to convict you, they got so close to it that it was only because of one eccentric fat man that you’re still walking, and they can’t leave the arena without you on their shield.”

“What does that mean?”

“The same as always. They will want you to plead guilty and cooperate.”

“Cooperate? What the fuck does that mean?”

“Neil and his friends are in the business of making cases and getting convictions, just like Nathan’s is in the business of making and selling hot dogs. If you can lead them to somebody else, preferably somebody higher in the food chain, then your value increases and the better your deal can get.”

“Higher in the food chain? What do they want me to do, tell stories about Hillary Clinton?”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“That might help.”

“Vinnie, I really don’t know nothing about anybody except me.

I’m the big enchilada. What am I gonna do, cooperate against me?”

Sorrentino was amused as he stared at the dapper Congressman seated in the serene light, for there was a certain level, Sorrentino knew, at which all of his clients thought he was a fool. He asked,

“Why don’t you help them make a case against Mr. Madrigal, just to toss out an example for you?”

So unchanged was the expression on Fonseca’s face that Sorrentino thought his gambit might have been completely off the
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mark, that the Congressman had never heard the name in his life.

Then Fonseca said, “How do you know I know anything about him?” There was anger in his voice.

“Kate Stark.”

“Are you still seeing her?”

“No.”

“Good. You can save yourself a lot of diseases that way.”

“What about Madrigal?”

“Look, Vinnie, he lives in another country. Bin Laden is more likely to visit here than he is.”

“But what about the people around him? He has to have contacts here, people who work for him. Maybe you can make a case against them?”

“Do you know how old I am?”

“Seventy. Seventy-three.”

“About right. And I want to live to be ninety-eight, preferably without spending a day in jail. If I did what you’re suggesting I’d live another six or seven hours.”

“Nobody’s that powerful, Danny.”

“You could be right, I could be wrong, but it’s not your dick that’s gonna be on the cutting board.”

“There’s the witness protection program.”

“Sure, I could become a retired grocer in Kansas, and get a plastic surgery job that makes me look like that guy on TV for Wendy’s, Bob something-or-other.”

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Sorrentino’s smile hid his exasperation. He had now spent more than an hour with the Congressman, in this waning light on a day when Sorrentino had new clients to see, and he had made no progress toward persuading Fonseca that he should think in terms of pleading guilty and resigning his office—for that was Sorrentino’s secret agenda for his client. Sorrentino, moreover, had not been able to penetrate the Congressman’s deft parrying of any discussion about paying any part of Sorrentino’s unpaid legal bill, which was now more than half a million dollars.