Death's Witness (34 page)

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Steinman hung up.

* * *

In the months since the mistrial, while they waited for a date for a new trial or for some other developments, Congressman Fonseca took to meeting once every two weeks with Vincent Sorrentino for dinner at Sparks, which was still the Congressman’s favorite restaurant in New York.

“Vinnie, anything new with you?”

“Always, Danny.”

“Any big new clients, or am I the only guy you have with instant name recognition?”

“Who can be bigger than you, Danny?”

The Congressman took another sip of his Scotch and water. “I hear through the grapevine you’ve been talking to a guy named Bill Irwin. Is he a new client?”

“Lawyers are supposed to be able to keep secrets, Danny.”

“You know, I’ve known Bill Irwin a long time. Has he told you much about himself?”

“Bill Irwin? Who’s that?”

“He even once worked with Kate Stark, remember her?”

“Not only am I a lawyer who knows how to keep secrets about clients, Danny, I’m a gallant gentleman who keeps secrets about damsels, too.”

“Well, Vinnie, it’s, you know, what do you call it, a feminist
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age. She keeps no secrets about you.”

“Christ, I hope she’s not ruining my studly reputation.”

“Not a chance, but you should hear the things she says about Bill Irwin.”

“I don’t expect clients to be saints, Danny, except, of course, for you.”

Fonseca smiled. Bright teeth, handsome face, silver hair, silver aviator-style glasses. The benign image as he sat there was totally in contrast to what he said next. “You know, Vinnie, I’m not just a client of yours but a friend, too, and you’ve helped me a lot and
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I want to help you, too. Drop Bill Irwin.”

“What?”

“Get rid of Bill Irwin.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s not good for you to know him.”

“I can’t just walk away from a client.”

“Why not? Is it the money? Take fifty thousand out of the two-fifty he sent you, send the two hundred grand back, and tell everybody you found out you had a conflict of interest.”

Without even asking how the Congressman knew about the wire-transferred fee, Sorrentino said, “I can’t do that.”

“I can’t make you do anything. But I’m your friend, and I’m telling you, you should.”

Sorrentino kept his hands folded in front of him and just waited. The Congressman continued eating and drinking, slowly, happily, and then he said, “And what kind of lady is Julie Perini, Vinnie?”

“Come on, Danny, what the hell is this about?”

“Listen to me, Vinnie. She’s got more than one hundred million dollars of other people’s money. And those other people are trying to find it and they think you know where it is.”

“Who the hell are you working for, Danny?”

“Nobody. I’m just trying to be a mediator, a peacemaker.

That’s what people like me are supposed to do, you said that to the jury. I take care of my constituents. You’re one of them. You’re D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

going to make her life easier, and probably yours too, if you help her see that it would be good for her to give the money back.”

“She doesn’t have one hundred million dollars. As far as I know, she doesn’t have one hundred dollars.”

“She’s beautiful, Vinnie, a real doll. But not so beautiful you should lose your head over her.”

* * *

The houses in Neil Steinman’s White Plains neighborhood were built at the turn of the twentieth century, now more than one
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hundred years ago, and they were big and drafty, most of them, including Steinman’s, somewhat rundown. His house had a wide veranda. In the early dark, after a long drive home on roads that were slick with rain and sleet, particularly the sinuous, attractive, and dangerous stretches of the Bronx River Parkway, Steinman spent a few minutes chipping the thin layer of ice from the steps of the veranda. The wooden planks were rotting at the edges from years of snow, rain, cold, and heat.

His wife was scheduled to teach two classes at the community college. She wouldn’t be home until nine. Now that his daughter was growing, she was more difficult to handle physically. She weighed almost sixty pounds and had no control over her weight or her movements. Picking her up and carrying her was a skill Steinman had had to learn with time. Despite the fact that she had never spoken a word, or stared at her mother or father with any kind of recognition, as though she were two months old, not six years old, her body was beginning to reveal the first inevitable signs of growth and maturity.

Steinman fed and bathed his child. He combed her hair. At seven-thirty, he called his wife at the college to see whether anything had come up there that might delay her until after nine.

Nothing had. He told her to be careful on the sleet-slicked Bronx River Parkway, especially in those beautiful but treacherous stretches where it passed through Scarsdale.

He wheeled his daughter into the small television room just
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off the kitchen. Something about the kinetic movements on the television screen could sometimes, momentarily, attract her attention. Her contorted face as she watched the screen sometimes conveyed something that looked like amusement or concentration.

When he left the big house for the garage where his car was parked, Steinman didn’t bother to put on a coat. It was still sleeting. He was chilly. He opened and closed the roll-up door of the garage and made sure that the single window was shut. It was so dark in the familiar garage that he had to put on the one overhead
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light—a bulb hanging from a wire—in order not to stumble over the countless objects that had accumulated in the garage over the seven years they had lived here. He opened the car’s front door far enough so that the interior lights shined. Then he went back to the front of the garage and turned off the ceiling light. If he was going to finish what he had set his mind and will to do, he didn’t want to attract last-minute attention from neighbors who might wonder why a garage light was left on and walk over to turn it off.

He kicked at the rusted tail pipe until it clattered to the floor with the muffler attached to it.

Inside the car, he closed the door and turned off the radio. He revved the old engine: its roar filled the narrow confines of the garage. He revved again and again. Sooner than he expected it the pleasant-smelling, gas-laden fumes made his hands and his feet, and then his head, lighter and lighter. After a time—four minutes? ten?—he could no longer push the gas pedal; he lacked the strength to do that. The engine kept running. At the end, he did have the strength to shift the rearview mirror downward. For a dark, delicious moment, he could see the outlines of his serene face as he died.

21.

Julie felt emotion after emotion as she read and finished, three times, Hugo Brown’s article: “Leading Prosecutor Kills Self; Faced Investigation Over Bribery.” The article was on the top left corner of the front page of the
Times
. Thrill was the emotion she felt as she read the article’s recounting of how Kiyo Michine had left notes, her own tape recordings, and documents in places that Hugo Brown had been able to track. The article also described the long conversation Kiyo Michine had with Julie Perini, just before she was murdered, during which, as Brown put it, Ms. Michine seemed to pull together the strands of the evidence she had been accumulating about Steinman, McGlynn, and others. It was, Brown wrote, as though she were making a closing argument.

Julie also felt shame when she read, in the black-and-white agate type of the
Times
’ newsprint, that Tom Perini, winner of the Heisman Trophy, was killed in all likelihood because, having at first apparently become the convenient conduit through which people with drug-trafficking and weapons-selling businesses allowed immense amounts of their money to pass, he had apparently also convinced himself that he could keep larger and larger portions—

perhaps over one hundred million dollars—of the flow of funds he was helping to transmit from the United States overseas. Someone was quoted in the article as saying that “only an idiot” could have imagined that he would have succeeded at that. “At best Perini was
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naive,” this person said. “He never adequately gauged who it was he was dealing with. These people are not the producers of
Sesame
Street
. They were, and are, very dangerous people.”

And she felt pity and horror and an undeniable sense of satisfaction, too, as she read the hastily written account of Neil Steinman’s suicide the night before. In the hours before his death, Hugo Brown wrote, Steinman had fed, washed, and comforted his dis-abled daughter and set her up in a room far removed from the garage where he asphyxiated himself. He had called his wife, a college teacher, to be sure she would be home on time so that their
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daughter would not spend an inordinately long time alone in her chair but not before he had sufficient time to kill himself in a slow, relatively painless way. When his wife reached the house just before ten, she discovered her husband’s body slumped between the dashboard and the front seat. The engine was still running because Neil Steinman, a methodical man, had filled the tank.

Finally, the article mentioned that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined comment on the
Times
article or as to whether any investigation of Steinman’s and Agent McGlynn’s conduct was under, or would come under, investigation. Agent McGlynn could not be reached for comment.

* * *

Julie, Kim, and Elena went out into the clear, cold spring morning. They walked on the bridle path in Central Park, followed by four reporters and a television-camera van. What Julie felt as she walked through the sparkling late-morning air was a sense of relief.

She believed she knew, at last, why her husband had died and at least some of the truth about who had murdered him. And she felt herself looking forward to Vincent Sorrentino’s nightly visits. He would be with her in about seven hours, they would eat in her apartment, and she wanted to talk with him about her future. She wanted a future—she wanted herself and her daughter to live.

And she needed him as well. Until now, she realized, she had been attracted to Vincent’s decisiveness, his insight into issues she D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

had never had to confront before. And attracted, too, to his looks, the grace with which he walked when he was naked, the beautiful quietude of his voice. What kind of future would the two of them have over the next two weeks, two months, or even years, Julie wondered, and decided that tonight was a good time to raise these questions with him.

* * *

As Vincent Sorrentino opened the left rear door of his Lincoln in front of the brownstone on West 93rd Street and Riverside
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Drive where he had just finished a one-hour meeting, he felt a hand take his elbow and skillfully force him into the car. The other rear door opened at the same time. A blond man with a bushy moustache suddenly materialized in the seat and pulled Sorrentino toward him. The strong man who had pushed Sorrentino into the car stayed right beside him. He, too, wore a suit.

He was dark, a Puerto Rican or Colombian, a man with a dapper, narrow moustache. Small and powerful.

“Tell the guy up front to sit still and just listen,” the blond man said. It was a calm voice.

“Jerry, take it easy.” Jerry, who had been swearing and clum-sily trying to unfasten his seat belt, glanced into the backseat through the rearview mirror, and became motionless.

“Tell Jerry to take his gun out, barrel-first, and hand it back to me,” the blond man said in the same calm tone. “And don’t tell me he doesn’t have one. I’ll look, and I’ll get very angry at everybody if I find one.”

“Jerry,” Sorrentino said. Jerry passed the gun to the backseat.

“Jerry,” the dark man said, “we’re going to take a nice drive up the highway to the GW Bridge, and then into Fort Lee. Then we’re going to drive down Boulevard East to Weehawken and then back through the tunnel.” There was a slight Spanish accent to the voice, one that Sorrentino couldn’t precisely place. “That should give us a nice chance to talk with the boss.”

Jerry began to drive through the clear spring day. The city had
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been washed by last night’s sleet and rain. There were buds on the trees in Central Park, incipient leaves.

Over the next hour, the dark man carried the message. “We had thought we were going to hear back after your dinner at Sparks that you was going to understand how important it is to give us a hand in getting back what belongs to us. But we didn’t hear nothing from you.”

“I don’t know anything about any money.”

“But, Mr. Sorrentino, you do, we told you that Mrs. Perini has it.”

“I don’t know anything about that.” Sorrentino was nervous.

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In the short silence that followed that sentence he used two words he didn’t believe he had ever said before: “I swear.”

“You know, Mr. Sorrentino, if you think about it we’re really not asking much from you. You can help us, you can help her, and you can help yourself. Everybody wins. The money didn’t belong to her husband. Now she has it. And it doesn’t belong to her, either. It belongs to somebody else. All you have to do is tell her how important it is that she does what she needs to do to get it back to us.”

“Listen, guys, I don’t know her well enough to even ask her about that.”

The blond man slapped Sorrentino across the right cheek. He fell sideways against the dark man, feeling a completely unfamiliar sensation pass through his head and body, the mixed senses of sudden fear and pain. The car was at mid-span, in light traffic, on the George Washington Bridge. To the left the entire West Side, from Washington Heights to the vacant space where the World Trade Center towers once stood, was laid out in intricate, dazzling detail.

“My friend don’t like it when people lie to us, Mr. Sorrentino.”

They drove in silence for a time, long enough for Sorrentino to continue to feel the hot flesh where the powerful slap had been delivered and to know that the slap would leave a black-and-blue mark for several days, a token. He had represented and known violent men for years, he had spent time in their presence, but he had D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

never been hit, not once. It hurt his pride and his self-esteem and it caused him pain he hadn’t experienced since his year in Vietnam.

Finally the dark man said, “Before this ride is over, Mr. Sorrentino, we want to hear you say you’ll help us. We want you to really mean it.”

“How do you think I can help you?”

“She knows what information to give so that the money can be wired to where we want it. Ask her for that information. When you get it, call this number, give your name, say you want to place an order. Wait two minutes and a guy named Antonio will call
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you at your office. Give him the bank numbers she gave you. And everybody will be happy.”

The dark man handed him a typed number on a small slip of paper, on which was also typed the name Antonio. Sorrentino folded the paper and placed it in his wallet in the same compartment fold in which he had been carrying a recent snapshot of Julie and Kim.

“You know, Mr. Sorrentino, we still haven’t heard you say something very simple: will you help us?”

“Sure,” Sorrentino said. To his left he looked beyond the dark man over the edge of the New Jersey Palisades: sunlight on the Hudson River, the grandeur of the Upper West Side, the tower of Riverside Church, the shining triangular roof structure at the height of the Citicorp Building, the glowing gigantic needle at the top of the Empire State Building.

“You have to say that with sincerity, Mr. Sorrentino,” the blond man said calmly. “You have to mean it. Because if you don’t, we’re going to kill Mrs. Perini’s daughter, give her three or four days after that to understand us, and then we’ll kill her. If we don’t get our money, then she won’t. Capeesh?”

“I understand.”

It was the dark man next. “And don’t even think of going for help to your friends at the FBI, the DEA, the Justice Department.

We have many, many more friends than you do. We’ll find out right away, and then we’ll stop being nice and polite.”

P A U L B A T I S T A

* * *

Vincent Sorrentino didn’t want to have dinner with Julie in her apartment that night. Elena would be there, as would Kim. If Elena heard what he had to say, she would be terrified, as he was in those moments later in his unsettled day when he focused again and again on the two intent, deranged men and the sun-drenched, hours-long ride. He asked Julie to meet him in the most public restaurant he knew: the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Guggenheim Museum, one block from her apartment. It would be filled with tourists, many of them speaking Spanish,
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German, and French. There was noise, movement, activity.

Nobody would hear them.

Walking quickly down the stone ramp that led to the glass doors of the cafeteria, Julie looked confident, happy, and free. She attracted attention. Men and women glanced at her wherever she went, not necessarily because they recognized her but because she was the kind of person whose physical presence and vitality people noticed.

He was standing just behind the glass door. When she pushed through, she gave him a chaste kiss and then, as she leaned slightly backwards to look at him, she saw the mark on his face.

“Vince, what happened?”

“I stumbled.”

“Did you put ice on it?”

“I did. It’ll clear up in a few days.”

Julie was in a high mood, and the bruise on Sorrentino’s cheek didn’t distract her for long. As they collected their food from the cafeteria-style line, she whispered to him: “What did you think of the article in the
Times
?”

“I was happy for you, Julie.”

They found chairs at a table in a corner of the noisy, modernistic cafeteria. “All I’ve wanted for the last year, Vince, is to get some sense of resolution about Tom’s death. I had suspicions but no real sense of what Kiyo and Hugo would find.”

Sorrentino’s uneasiness made it difficult for him to look at her.

Instead, he glanced around the large room. Its walls were deco-D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

rated with reproductions of famous photographs. “I disliked Neil Steinman,” he said, “but I never would have thought he’d get involved in what he seems to have been involved in. And I never thought a guy like him would kill himself.”

“Kiyo told me she thought he was capable of anything.”

“I guess so. All that business about sleeping with the homeless, caring for his daughter, avenging the public’s interest—apparently none of that meant a thing when large amounts of cash came near him.”

“That’s what Hugo Brown told me,” Julie said. “He had a
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source who said that Steinman got several hundred thousand dollars in cash over the last three years. He didn’t put the amount in the article because he said he couldn’t verify it.”

“You know, until recently I didn’t even know Neil had a wife or a sick child. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I hear that he was collecting cash from people who wanted him to steer investigations away from them and give them information. Information is important, money is important, and some people will do anything to have both.”

Julie ate a plain bagel with lox, capers, and tomatoes—a pungent meal. She had taken a half bottle of white wine and was sipping slowly from her wineglass.

“You know, Julie,” Sorrentino said quietly, “you never once mentioned to me that you had those tapes of your conversation with Kiyo.”

“I know.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not.”

“I was surprised, even hurt, when I read about that this morning.”

“I don’t mean to hurt you, Vince. I’d never do that. I think I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the tapes, and I did it. I found a responsible journalist who could gather more details than I could, or you could, or the government would care to.”

“You could have trusted me.”

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She put down her wineglass. “Vince, I do trust you. But until I got to know you, Vince, to love you, trust had become a very difficult issue for me. I became secretive after Tom died. I didn’t consciously think that I couldn’t trust you about the tapes, it just never occurred to me to share them with you. Please don’t be angry.”

Sorrentino stared at her. “And, Julie, you never mentioned you were dealing with the
Times
. You must have had more than one or two meetings.”

“I wasn’t certain until the end that there would actually be an article. I guess I didn’t want to give you a sense that I could try to
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get something done that was important, and then fail at it. I think Hugo Brown was getting a lot of resistance from his own editors. As it happened, it took Steinman’s killing himself to break the logjam.”

Vincent Sorrentino felt himself sweating in the cool cafeteria, and Julie, who had stopped eating and drinking, detected the sweat, the strain, in her lover’s face and voice. He said, “Julie, I need to tell you the truth, too. The bruise on my face didn’t come from a fall. A man hit me. He had pushed his way into my car with a friend. They say you have access to millions of dollars.

They want me to arrange to have you give them the routing numbers for wire transfers of the money from you to them.”

She lifted her wineglass to drink because her mouth was suddenly dry. She realized her hand was trembling so much that Vince would see it if she completed the movement of raising the glass to her lips. She put the glass down. “These are the people, Vince, who murdered my husband. If I had one dollar or one billion, why would I give it to them?”

“It’s not your money, Julie.”

“And it’s not theirs.”

“So what? They want to make it theirs.”

“What did you say to them?” she asked.

“That I would talk to you about it.”

“Didn’t you tell them you didn’t know what they were talking about?”

“I did. That’s when one of them hit me.”

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“I’m sorry, Vince. It’s dangerous to know me. Didn’t they say Lord Byron was mad, bad, and dangerous to know? You could say that about me, too.”

Three loud children ran near their table. Their frazzled, well-dressed parents came to retrieve them. They spoke French.

“Julie,” Sorrentino said, “forget the Lord Byron shit. These are dangerous people. Listen to me. They said they would kill Kim if you didn’t give them what they want.”

“Nobody is going to hurt my daughter.”

“I could go to the FBI. There are ways to arrange protection.”