Death's Witness (3 page)

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A cop would sardonically answer:
Right, lady, it’s Friday night, lots
of husbands aren’t home yet.

At eleven she switched on the radio. One of the all-news stations broadcast the foreign and national news for five minutes (another suicide bombing in Iraq, at least ten people dead). Then the familiar, almost bored voices of the station’s man-and-woman pair of late-night announcers began a routine run through the local news.

“This just in,” the male voice intoned. “A shooting in Central Park has left one man, apparently a jogger, dead. Police have no information about the identity of the victim. And they have made no arrests.”

And then the well-rehearsed woman’s voice: “We’ll have more for you on this story as soon as we get it.”

The words burst in her mind:
I know.

Somehow she managed to find one of the porters to sit in the apartment while Kim slept. Julie also found the telephone number of the Central Park police precinct. To an indifferent policewoman she said what she knew about the radio broadcast and about her husband’s absence in the park. After keeping Julie on hold, the woman finally said, “Maybe you better get over here.”

Just after midnight Julie took a taxi to the police station in the middle of the 86th Street crossing in Central Park. She had seen this assembly of old-fashioned stone-and-wooden buildings a thousand times on quick bus transits through the park from east D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

to west, west to east. The buildings always had the look, the texture, of run-down riding stables, cobbled English-style roofs, gray walls—a comforting image. Inside, what she found was fluorescent lighting, harsh and unreal, scraped metal desks, and linoleum floors. She kept thinking
I know.
The three policemen who led her to a rear room also seemed to know.

There was a body under a sheet on a steel table. The sheet was blood-stained. A tag was tied to the right foot with a twisted wire.

The older policeman lifted the sheet from the blood-soaked sneakers to the middle of Tom’s overwhelmingly recognizable
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body. She saw the faded, years-old shorts he wore. They bore the word “Columbia” stitched below the left-hand pocket. There was an odor of blood and open wounds in the room. Blood had an odor like freshly turned soil, wet dirt. Julie’s entire body shook.

“Recognize him?”

“Oh my God.”

“Who is he?”

“Let me see his face to be sure.”

“Is this your husband?”

“God, yes.”

“You don’t have to look at his face.”

“I need to be sure. I want to
know
.”

“It won’t help, lady. I’m tellin’ you. It won’t help.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask me.”

A gentler voice said, “Why don’t you come and tell us who you are and who he was?”

My husband who was
, she thought.

* * *

It was almost two in the morning when she returned to her building, delivered there by a police cruiser. She told the porter, Yolanda, that Tom was dead, as simply and bluntly as that—“My husband’s dead”—and the woman’s heavy Mexican face, smiling expansively when Julie opened the door to her apartment,
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became contorted, pained. She asked if she could do anything. Julie said, “No, but thank you for what you’ve done.” Julie instinctively pressed two twenty-dollar bills into her hand.

Then she sat for hours on the floor in a corner of Kim’s bedroom. Her daughter slept soundly and barely stirred. The simple fact of being in Kim’s room kept Julie from crying, and she was afraid to cry, because that might last forever. At four in the morning, however, when the telephone started ringing with reporters leaving messages such as “Hello, hello, this is Candy Roberts of CNN, we need to talk with you about your hus-16

band,” she realized she had to do something. If radio, newspaper, and magazine reporters were trying to reach her in the middle of the night in Manhattan to ask about the murder of the legendary Tom Perini, it was only a short time before they would seek out Lou and Mary.

Tom’s simple, devoted parents still lived on the old street near the closed brick factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, where Tom was born and raised. From time to time through the years, their pictures appeared with Tom’s in magazines and newspapers.

Their number was listed in the Lowell telephone directory. Julie thought for a time that it would be better for
her
if Lou and Mary learned what had happened to Tom from one of the reporters, but then she said, aloud, “I have to do this myself.”

Moving quietly through the dark spaces of the apartment they loved, Julie carried the portable telephone to their bedroom. She closed the door behind her. Tom’s suit was still draped over a chair. The suit bore his smell—the residue of the cologne he wore, the one cigar he smoked each day, the day’s sweat. From a pocket in the suit Tom’s cell phone emitted a beep-beep to signal the presence of stored messages. She checked the bedroom door again to be sure it was shut. No matter what happened in this conversation with Lou and Mary, she didn’t want Kim to hear her.

The digital clock read 4:58. After years of working in factories with morning shifts that began at five-thirty, Lou and Mary, long D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

since retired, were often awake at that hour.

Mary answered after three rings. She was making breakfast in the kitchen of the apartment, the only room with a telephone. It still had a rotary dial.

“Yes?” Mary’s voice was alert, strong, and totally unaware.

“Mom? It’s me...” Julie choked, suddenly unable to speak.

“Julie?
Julie?
What is it?”

Julie decided that, with a husky monotone, she might be able to get the words out. “Mom, I have to tell you something. It’s bad.”

“Julie?” Mary’s voice was controlled, strong, but at this point
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she
knew
, too.

“What, Julie?” Mary urged. “What is it?”

“Tom’s dead. Somebody killed him.”

“Say that again?”

“Tom is dead. Somebody shot him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Mary.”

“My God, Lou will die, too. His father will die.”

Julie was crying now. She held the shaking receiver close enough to her ear to hear Mary say, “I have to go take care of Lou. We’ll get down there. We’ll call. We’ll take care of you...”

And Mary let the receiver drop. Somehow, Julie thought, she would have to make arrangements for Lou and Mary to travel.

They had never been in New York in their lives. They had never flown anywhere. And they were too old to drive themselves from Lowell to New York.

Before dawn Julie drifted toward sleep on a thin exercise mat on the floor of Kim’s room, alongside the crib. She was awakened by Elena just before seven on Saturday morning. Elena helped to lift her from the floor and to half carry her to the living room. Julie clung to her shoulders without speaking or crying. Elena had worked for Tom and Julie for more than a year. She lived with them during the workweek, caring for Kim, and on Friday afternoons she left for the subway trip to Brighton Beach, where she spent the weekends with her parents. When she was still a child, her family
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had left Romania at the end of 1989, three days after Ceausescu and his wife were executed. It was Elena’s mother who woke her to say she heard a radio broadcast at four in the morning that Tom Perini had been murdered. Instinctively Elena made her way back to Manhattan by subway in the dangerous predawn hours. She let herself in to the apartment and found Julie on the floor.

After Elena helped Julie wash her tear-drenched face, they returned together to Kim’s bedroom. They found Kim playfully rattling the side of her crib—this had been her wake-up signal for the last three months. She was smiling extravagantly when Julie
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and Elena came into the room.

“Kim wake up,” the child said of herself, as she had been doing for the last week.

Julie, forcing a smile, lifted her from the crib. “Good morning, sunshine.”

Elena and Julie began Kim’s day with the usual morning rituals. They changed her soaked diaper, gave her a bottle of apple juice, and sat with her on the sofa in the living room as a DVD of
Sesame Street
unrolled the familiar songs, the comforting presence of Bert, Ernie, and Elmo, the miracle of good feeling and hope.

As she went through these motions, Julie’s mind was rigid, locked onto the thought she’d expressed to Elena in that fifteen-minute interval before Kim woke. “I’m numb. I don’t know what to do.” Now, on the sofa, in the beautiful early morning light from the wide windows overlooking the park where her husband had died, she found herself absorbed in thinking about the image of the three of them seated together, the
Sesame Street
DVD

unfolding, forever. Maybe, she hoped, she would never have to do anything other than this again.

And then Kim said, “Daddy?”

Instantly Elena distracted her by joining in the tune Big Bird was singing. Shouting happily, Kim repeated some of the song’s banal words. Julie quietly left for the kitchen, and started a day, a weekend, a week, a time beyond anything she had ever imagined.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

* * *

Saturday began, and ended, with clear, cool weather—the kind of day Tom loved, “football sunshine.” Throughout the day Julie had the sense that the news of Tom Perini’s death had spread everywhere around the world, and she found herself thinking, even fastening on the thought, that she’d never fully recognized how famous her husband was. By mid-morning, messages had arrived from the offices of both senators from New York and the city’s mayor, and flowers from the commissioner of the National Football League.

It was Elena, twenty-five, sad, and capable, who stopped the
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building doorman from buzzing the apartment and the building porters from bringing flowers to the apartment. It was also Elena who disconnected the plugs to the telephones and shut off the cell phones, including Tom’s, which had rung many times in his suit pocket. Elena told Julie that the police had set up barricades on the sidewalk in front of the building, that television vans were parked on 87th Street between Madison and Fifth, and that dozens of people were on a vigil, either mourning Tom or waiting for Julie to emerge.

Julie didn’t leave the building on Saturday or Sunday. Whenever Kim napped—which was not often—Julie spoke with Elena about what to say to Kim. Elena said, “Let’s be normal, please, until we know what to do.”

Julie was jarred by the fact that Kim became fussy about not being taken outside (“Kim go park,” she often said, a child’s command rather than a request), but only a few times mentioned the word “Daddy” throughout the weekend since Tom often spent Saturdays and Sundays at his office. Julie also found herself, until early on Sunday morning, gripped by a question that kept forming in her mind:
What do you to do to bury a person?

She’d never done that before.

There was an answer to that question, and for that answer Julie was grateful. Vincent Sorrentino, the lawyer leading the defense at the trial that had so absorbed Tom, sent an email which Elena retrieved. In it, Sorrentino wrote that he could imagine Julie’s grief
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and confusion. His own wife had died of cancer two years ago.

“Sadly,” Sorrentino’s email said, “I know about burying people we have loved for years.” Because he had come to know Tom so well over the last few months, he wrote that, if she needed his help, he had a sense of what Tom might want. And he wanted, the email said, “to do everything possible to honor Tom and help you.”

Even in what Tom had always called the backbiting, vicious world of the best-known criminal lawyers in the country, Tom had, in his usual open, unwary way, called Vincent Sorrentino

“the Master, my mentor,” although they were united by nothing
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more than the months they’d spent together preparing for the trial and sharing the defense table.

Tom had introduced Julie to Sorrentino twice. Vincent Sorrentino’s mild, deferential demeanor surprised her. In these quiet dinner meetings she never heard or saw the intense, beautifully phrased presence she had so often witnessed in Sorrentino’s many television appearances. Moreover, Tom, boy-like, almost in wonder, let Julie know Sorrentino had followed a completely different path in life from virtually every lawyer Tom ever met.

Raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in the fifties and sixties, Sorrentino was drafted into the Army in 1968, when he graduated from high school and decided not to go to college. In 1969 he spent a year in the infantry in Vietnam. Discharged in the early 1970s, he enrolled at CCNY and, while working during the days in a stockroom in the garment district in Manhattan, attended lowly, working-class St. John’s University Law School at night.

Tom once told Julie he had never met another Vietnam veteran among the lawyers of Sorrentino’s age and vintage. All the rest of them, as go-getter young men with deferments or fabricated letters from doctors, had managed to avoid the draft in the late sixties and early seventies. Maybe it was Vietnam that had endowed Sorrentino as a young man with the confidence and grace he displayed now, so many years later.

When Elena finished reading Sorrentino’s email to Julie, she wrote out in longhand a message to Sorrentino in which she said, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“Tom admired you so much” and “I had no idea you knew him so well. What you’ve planned is what he would have wanted, as I do. Thanks with all my heart. I’ll repay you someday.” Elena typed the note on the laptop keyboard and touched the Send symbol. Sorrentino’s message instantly came back. “Repayment is your letting me help.”

On Monday morning, an overcast day, Julie left the apartment building for the first time in daylight since she and Kim on Friday afternoon visited the small butcher shop on Madison Avenue between 87th and 88th streets. Julie was alone as she stepped from
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