Death's Witness (33 page)

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“What’s her number?”

“964–272–1914. She’ll fly to New York to hand you the package.”

“I suppose you have other copies of the tapes somewhere else?”

The answer surprised Sorrentino: “No, I don’t. I made copies for Madrigal and gave them to his people.”

“Who else knows about these tapes?”

“Just you, me, Tara, and Madrigal.”

* * *

From his office later that afternoon Vincent Sorrentino placed a call to Tara Weinstein. There were seven rings, a click, and the recorded voice of a young woman who sounded as though she had been raised in Queens: “You’ve reached 272–1914. Nobody is here to take your call right now. If you leave your name and number at the tone, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

Sorrentino carefully spelled out his last name and left his telephone numbers at the office and his apartment. He was relieved that he was in love with a woman who spoke flawlessly, with no accent, a voice of distinction and calm, not the distracting whine he had just heard.

He was changing from his suit into more casual clothes at eight that night, preparing to go to Julie’s apartment for an hour or two, when his telephone rang. It was a man’s voice. “Is this Mr. Vincent Sorrentino?”

“Speaking.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“This is Detective Bob Jordan, Boca Raton Police Department.”

Sorrentino instantly felt that flush of fear, that animal’s instinct, which had seized him in his car several nights ago when Julie told him that Kiyo Michine had been killed. “What is it, Detective?”

he asked, but he already knew.

“You left a message at four-thirty today for a Ms. Tara Weinstein.”

“I did.”

“She was in her apartment when you called, Mr. Sorrentino.

She had been dead for three hours by then. Mr. Sorrentino, I’d
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like to talk to you.”

There was no way in the world, Sorrentino knew, that the package with the tapes Tara Weinstein had checked out of the safe deposit box would ever be found, and he never asked Detective Jordan about it.

* * *

Kim was asleep when Sorrentino arrived at Julie’s apartment at nine. Elena had left a few minutes earlier. Julie hugged him and said she wanted to make love before he had to leave at eleven so as not to arouse the suspicions of the few reporters and cameramen who still waited on the sidewalk and street in front of her building. Sorrentino luxuriated in her warm breath and presence, and realized again, as he had so often over the past weeks, that he was happy only when he was with her; he was infatuated, a teenager again.

He said he couldn’t make love because he was deeply disturbed and distracted, and he told her about Bill Irwin, McGlynn, the package, Tara Weinstein, and the call he had received from the Boca Raton police. He also said he planned to hire two private security guards to watch over her all day, every day. He told her all these things as they sat in her kitchen, a clean place, with subdued lighting from a canopy over the stove.

Without speaking she led him to the bedroom, holding his hand. “I know you can’t make love tonight, Vince, but please lie down next to me.”

P A U L B A T I S T A

In their clothes, they lay down on her dark bed. In the bedroom’s silence, city noises rose from the streets far below: ambulance sirens, car horns, the downward-falling sibilance of jets passing over Manhattan on their way to landings or departures.

“Vince,” she said in the dark, “I already know about Bill Irwin, I know about Madrigal, I know about McGlynn, I know why Tom was killed. I also know about Steinman.”

“What about him?”

“Kiyo told me, just as she told me everything else, that Steinman now works for McGlynn.”

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He asked quietly, “Did she tell you all this when she saw you the other day?”

“Yes.”

“And then she died. They didn’t let her leave a trace.”

“But
I
heard what she had to say,” Julie said.

“That’s not a trace, Julie, that’s just something you have that can’t be translated into anything tangible. It’s something you carry in your mind, and there are people who have every reason to believe that Kiyo put that information into your mind. And that’s why I want to get security people for you.”

Julie thought that now was the time to tell him she had the tapes of Kiyo’s last conversation, when Kiyo meticulously laid out what she knew about Madrigal, McGlynn, Hutchinson, Irwin, Steinman, Tom, Selig Klein. How, she wondered, had her clean, ardent, light-hearted husband ever gotten involved with those people? The tape was in the basement; and there were copies of it in the attic in Tom’s parent’s home in Massachusetts and a safe deposit box in Miami…The one thing Kiyo didn’t appear to know about was the money; there wasn’t a word about it on the tape—only Julie and the man in Miami knew where it was.

Instead of saying anything about the tapes and the money, Julie burrowed more closely into Sorrentino in the warmth of her bedroom, asked him to stay for the night, told him she didn’t care what the reporters would guess or know or write when he emerged from the building the next morning, and fell asleep.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

During the night Kim woke twice. Each time, Julie gave her a bottle with apple juice and stood near her high windows as she held Kim while the child instinctively drank.

The dark, almost quiet city was beneath her, the oval surfaces of the Guggenheim Museum faintly illuminated, the strings of streetlamps in Central Park, the black surface of the reservoir, the dual towers of a grand old apartment building on Central Park West. Each time, Kim said sleepily that she wanted to be taken into her mother’s bed, and the second time, Julie gave in and brought her there, and Kim slept between her mother and the
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sleeping, dressed Sorrentino.

* * *

Just as he had promised, Stan Wasserman arranged to bring Hugo Brown to the meeting. Hugo was an investigative reporter for the
Times
, and Julie had asked Stan to set up the meeting because she had been reading Hugo’s stories for months and had admired his style and the tough articles he wrote about the New York City police. Hugo had concentrated on how the upper echelons of the police department put together false statistics on the decrease in crime. Julie knew that, as a result of those articles, three senior commanders, all with Irish names, had been forced to retire, and Hugo was still following through, still exploring whether the police commissioner or the mayor himself had engineered the phony statistics.

She met Stan and Hugo at an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue just below 79th Street. It was a rainy day at midweek, and the restaurant was almost empty. Stan was warm, open, receptive to Julie. She was grateful to him for setting up the lunch, and Hugo, to her surprise, was a Hispanic man with a full moustache, powerful cleft chin, and the eyes of Che Guevara. He spoke beautifully, with exquisite patience. She had expected someone younger, since she had begun seeing his byline in the
Times
only a year ago. He was her age. He had worked for at least twenty years for various newspapers in San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston, and
P A U L B A T I S T A

had only recently come north. She instinctively liked him, for he had put in hard time in this profession.

Julie and Hugo met six more times over the next five days.

Stan, after bringing them together, withdrew quietly, knowing that Julie had explosive news but not wanting NBC to get it first—

this was his way of retaliating against the people responsible for her firing and making amends to her for that. Stan had delivered her into the hands of a skillful journalist.

Julie and Hugo met in a different place each time. It was in the ornate reading room in the New York Public Library that she first
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shared with him the tapes of her meetings with Kiyo Michine. They sat next to each other in hardback chairs with a tape player between them and earphones connecting the machine to their ears. They listened simultaneously. Hugo listened once to the ninety-minute conversation, and then listened again, furiously taking notes. On their fourth meeting, since she was by then completely confident in him and his intention to finish the story, she gave him copies of the tapes.

Hugo then disappeared for almost four weeks. Several times she left messages for him at the
Times
; he returned none of the calls. She was hurt, confused, betrayed, and even concerned for his safety. She still hadn’t mentioned the tapes to Sorrentino, who was spending most nights at her apartment, and she never mentioned to him that she was meeting with Hugo Brown. Sorrentino detected that she was distracted, anxious; he tried to soothe her.

Then Hugo Brown called her on a snowy afternoon in late March. “The lawyers are taking a look at the article.”

“Where have you been?”

“Talking to everyone I could find who would talk to me. I even found Nancy Lichtman, who doesn’t live with her doctor friend anymore.”

“Hugo, I know I’m not a novice in this business, but I hoped this would happen faster.”

“This is an important story, Julie, certainly the most important I’ve done. Once my editors saw the first draft of the article, the lawyers had tests done on the tapes you gave me.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“Tests?”

“Forensic tests: it turns out Kiyo had given some broadcast interviews during the Fonseca trial, and they wanted to compare the voice on that audiotape, which after all showed her speaking, to the voice on your tape.”

“They’re the same, Hugo.”

“They’re the same.”

“Hugo, tell your editors that I’m losing my patience with the
Times
. There are television stations and networks and newspapers that would take much less time to examine and reexamine this.

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Rupert Murdoch would have had this on every television station in America by now.”

“Trust me, Julie. You’ve helped me develop a rock-hard story.

Give me a little more time.”

“Of course I will, Hugo.”

* * *

That same afternoon, as late-winter snow fell outside on the brick expanse of St. Andrews Plaza between the United States Attorney’s Office and the old Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, Vincent Sorrentino was meeting with Brooks Stoddard, the U.S. Attorney, and Ted Fogelman, the head of the Criminal Division. Together the two of them supervised a staff of several hundred lawyers, federal agents, and others. Ordinarily Stoddard would never have agreed to meet face-to-face with a criminal defense lawyer, even one as famous as Vincent Sorrentino, but Fogelman had worked briefly eighteen years earlier as a summer clerk in a small firm Sorrentino led, and Fogelman had always had enormous respect for him. He brought about the meeting.

It was not going well. Stoddard was always laconic, noncommittal, not excitable. Sorrentino knew he wasn’t buying Bill Irwin’s stunning story that one of the Office’s senior prosecutors, Neil Steinman, was on the payroll, through an FBI agent, John McGlynn, of some Latin American overlord known only as
P A U L B A T I S T A

Madrigal. Ted Fogelman, who had accepted Sorrentino’s promise that the information he needed to discuss was too sensitive to be raised at any lower level in the office, looked uncomfortable as he watched Stoddard stare at the falling snow through the uncurtained windows of his office.

Finally Stoddard said, “Neil Steinman is a career prosecutor, with over fifteen years of service. He has a devoted wife. They take care of a severely handicapped child. Neil Steinman spends two nights each month at homeless shelters in Yonkers helping to feed hundreds of men, women, and children.

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“And John McGlynn is a veteran with citation after citation from the Army and the FBI for bravery and service. I’m certain there isn’t a single adverse notation in his personnel file.

“Your client, in contrast, is a lobbyist. He’s in jail because he’s a criminal. A federal magistrate and then a federal judge have decided that he doesn’t qualify for bail because he’s a flight risk.

He says he had tapes that no one can find now because his girlfriend was killed. The Florida police say they can’t locate any record in any bank in all of Florida that she checked anything out of any safe-deposit box in the month before she died.

“So please tell me again why you think I should arrange an internal affairs investigation of my people and negotiate with you a deal for your client so that he can testify against them?”

Sorrentino said, trying to convey the same sense of conviction he would use at the close of what he knew would become a losing argument to a judge, “Every call that Bill Irwin has made out of MCC is monitored. He didn’t know that when he called Tara Weinstein, told her what he wanted, and a day later she was murdered.”

“What else?”

“Over a cellular phone Julie Perini makes an appointment to meet with Selig Klein, and six hours later he’s killed. Selig Klein was being monitored by this office. Kiyo Michine meets with Julie Perini, has what we can only assume is a sensitive conversation with her about McGlynn and Steinman, and fifteen minutes later D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

she’s dead on the subway tracks.”

Brooks Stoddard was a sober, deadpan man, not given to wisecracks. But he said, “It sounds to me as though we should be investigating Julie Perini, not Neil Steinman and John McGlynn.”

In the five seconds of silence before the meeting ended, Sorrentino watched as more snow covered the slate roof of St.

Andrews Church and the plaza.

* * *

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McGlynn saw that Neil Steinman had lost weight over the last several weeks. Always thin and intense, Steinman with his shirt off was gaunt under that layer of dense hair covering every part of his body except his unbearded face, his palms, and the soles of his feet. Steinman wasn’t nearly as agile and fast as he had been when he and McGlynn had started these one-on-one basketball games many months ago. Over the same time McGlynn had put on weight.

Steinman took the rubber ball and wedged it between his elbow and waist. “Walk with me,” he said, gesturing to the painted key in the area of the basketball court where they were playing. Black teenagers had a game going at the far end of the court. The din was high, the auditorium resonated.

“Ted Fogelman stopped by my office this afternoon.”

“What’s up?”

“He said somebody met with Brooks Stoddard and said his client had information that you and I were involved in nasty things.”

“Why did he tell you that?”

“Ted’s a fair guy. He thought we should know, that I deserved a heads-up.”

“What did Brooksie do?”

“Threw the lawyer out of his office after telling him that I was a saint and you were a war hero.”

“Who was the lawyer?”

P A U L B A T I S T A

“Who else? Sorrentino.”

“Did Fogelman say anything else?”

“That the guy with the information, Sorrentino’s client, was someone named Bill Irwin, who now lives on a government vacation plan at MCC. Do you know this guy?”

“Could be.”

Neil Steinman’s heart was beating wildly. He knew that his capacity for tough talk with McGlynn couldn’t last much longer.

He would soon show unambiguous signs of fear, the verbal tremor in the voice, the physical tremor in the hands. To break
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the onslaught of those tremors, he bounced the basketball and took a shot from the top of the key: incredibly, the ball swished through the hoop’s tattered cloth netting.

* * *

Neil Steinman was able to control the wild pace of his heart only for a day. It was late in the afternoon and the surly receptionists and secretaries were preparing to leave work for the day at five. Suddenly he heard the switchboard operator say Hugo Brown of the
New York Times
was on the line. Over the years he’d come to love receiving telephone calls from reporters, seeing his name in print and his picture in newspapers, and even occasionally surfacing on television. He readily reached for the receiver even though he had never heard or seen the name Hugo Brown.

“I’m doing a story,” Hugo said, “about Tom Perini’s death.”

“I don’t know if I can help you with that. It’s still under investigation.”

“Actually, Mr. Steinman, we’ve been doing our own investigation of Perini’s murder. And of you. And of Agent McGlynn. And of a Latin American we know as Mr. Madrigal. There’s also a runner who seems to show up everywhere. We’re investigating who he is. And Kiyo Michine’s murder.”

Steinman’s hands and voice trembled. “What is this about?”

“I’d like to set up an appointment to see you about the questions we still have open.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“I’m pretty busy.”

“I can come down now. You may want to tie up some loose ends for us.”

“What loose ends?”

“I have tapes of Kiyo Michine sharing some difficult information she accumulated about you and Mr. McGlynn.”

“I can’t talk to you now. I’m busy, as I said. Give me your number and I’ll call you in a few days to set something up.”

“There isn’t time for that, Mr. Steinman. If we’re going to talk, it has to be today or tomorrow.”