Death's Witness (35 page)

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“Somehow I don’t think there would be a rush to protect me.”

She hesitated. “Please listen to me, Vince. I never intended to keep any of this money. Tom left instructions for me about how to get access to it. He must have had a sense something might happen. I found his ‘message-in-a-bottle,’ if you want to call it that, over Thanksgiving. I wanted to use the money to draw out the people who killed Tom.”

“You can’t fuck around with this any longer, Julie. I’ve never been more frightened in my life. Not even in Vietnam.”

“What am I supposed to do to get the money to them?”

“Give me the routing numbers. I know where to call to have the money wired.”

Quietly, Julie glanced around the large, noisy room. She saw the famous photograph of the American soldier kissing a French girl on a street in Paris at the end of the war. She had read somewhere that the picture was staged, not spontaneous. Julie had thought of living in Paris, of moving to the Florida Keys, or the Maine coast, or Rome, or a hillside in Puerto Rico, of finding a place in the world where she could be secure, balanced, stable.

But she was in New York City, in a public cafeteria.

“Come back to my apartment,” she said. “We can talk. And remember, Vince, I love you.”

“And I love you,” he answered.

As they left the cafeteria, Sorrentino saw the blond man with the bushy moustache seated at one of the steel tables: he was in
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running clothes and drinking a cappuccino. And outside, across the plaza in front of the circular museum, both Julie and Sorrentino saw John McGlynn in the front seat of a blue car. He was staring at them.

* * *

One of the cardinal rules Vincent Sorrentino followed during his long career as a criminal lawyer who represented organized-crime clients (“Gentlemen whose last names end in a vowel,”

Sorrentino said for years when referring to them) was that you
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didn’t travel with them, you didn’t keep them company, you didn’t eat with them, you didn’t attend their daughters’ weddings. Several times over the last few decades other lawyers who reveled in spending time with the heads of the families found themselves repeatedly disqualified from representing those men when they were indicted. If a lawyer was surreptitiously photographed or videotaped with these men, or his voice was caught on the multiple eavesdropping tapes, a judge would inevitably rule, in what became a steady legal incantation, that the lawyer had become “house counsel” to a crime family, disqualified from representing the indicted men with whom they had spent so much time.

Men as smart as Vito Carneglia—miraculously acquitted after a four-week trial in which Vincent Sorrentino had represented him—were never offended by Vincent’s studied standoffishness—

no lunches, no dinners, no visits to strip clubs, no meetings in diners in Queens or Brooklyn. “You don’t need a guy like Sorrentino for a friend,” Vito Carneglia said to his son after the acquittal.

“What the fuck’s the good of palling around with a good lawyer if he can’t help you when you need him?”

Another cardinal rule that had guided Vincent Sorrentino was that you avoided asking men like Vito Carneglia for favors. You didn’t borrow money from them. You didn’t ask them if they could talk to the owner of a downtown club for a break in the cost of renting out the club for your daughter’s sweet-sixteen party.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

You didn’t even ask them for free garbage pickup or a free parking space. Vito loved to do favors for people who had helped him. Favors had to be reciprocated. And Vincent Sorrentino had been too smart ever to ask for a favor.

Within two hours of leaving Julie’s apartment after their long talk in her bedroom—it was eerie to hear the recorded voices of two very intelligent women, talking to one another just before one of them died on the cold subway tracks—Vincent Sorrentino broke both his cardinal rules. He found Vito Carneglia at Rao’s, on First Avenue in East Harlem. As usual, the restaurant was
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crowded with television celebrities, newscasters, writers, two former police commissioners who had started private consulting businesses, and mobsters.

Carneglia himself often said that he “loved” Sorrentino. In the many months since his acquittal, Carneglia called Vincent occasionally, “just to bat the shit around,” he said. Carneglia ended each two-minute conversation by saying, “Vinnie, I hope I never have to see you in the flesh again. You look better on TV anyhow.

Just checking in, though, to make sure you’re all right. Love you, baby. Take care.”

Carneglia weighed over three hundred pounds and was well over six feet tall. He never expressed surprise, not even when Vincent Sorrentino called him to ask where he was eating that night and not even when Sorrentino walked into Rao’s. Carneglia motioned away the man who had been sitting next to him at the circular table and pointed to Sorrentino to sit on his left side—during the trial Carneglia always sat to Sorrentino’s left at the defense table. “This way,” Carneglia would say, “I get to sit on the left hand of God.”

It was a boisterous dinner. At least seven other men were at the table. Sorrentino was reserved but friendly, just as Carneglia would have expected him to be. Carneglia was not much of a drinker, nor was Sorrentino. The other men were. Vincent thought about asking for his favor from Carneglia in the din of the restaurant. And, then, although he lacked experience in asking for favors, he said, “Vito, can you do me a favor? Come on outside
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with me. I wanna talk.”

Limousines and SUVs were triple-parked in front of Rao’s. It was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. Rao’s was a sanctuary from another era. You were more likely to be mugged on the steps of City Hall than you were at night in front of Rao’s.

Carneglia, leaning against the hood of his SUV, had an expression of complete contentment on his face when Vincent Sorrentino asked for the first and only favor of his life. What Carneglia heard was that Sorrentino was involved with a woman and, because of that involvement, Sorrentino had been hijacked,
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taken for a ride, and beaten up. The black-and-blue mark on Vincent’s face was so plain that it had distracted Vito all through the dinner.

“I’ll give you my best muscle, Vinnie. Round the clock. Starting right now and for as long as you want.” Carneglia smiled.

“And I won’t charge you the six hundred an hour you charged me.”

Sorrentino walked with Carneglia again into Rao’s. They each ordered a sambuca with a coffee bean at the bottom of the goblet.

* * *

Vincent Sorrentino waited for the return call from Antonio. It took fifteen minutes, much longer than he’d expected. Antonio had a clipped, polite voice with a Spanish accent. He may have been the dark man in the car. Sorrentino recited aloud a series of numbers Julie had written two nights earlier; he also recited the name and address of a bank in Miami. Antonio read back the numbers. “Thank you, Mr. Sorrentino.”

* * *

Six hours later, as he sat at his desk writing letters, his receptionist spoke on the intercom. “Vince, there are two men out here insisting they have to see you. I’ve said you’re not available. They say you’ve got to see them.”

“I’ll come right out.”

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Sorrentino put on his suit jacket. He walked the thirty feet to the reception area of his office. It was a beautiful place: glass doors, wood paneling, his name in gold lettering on the wall above the mahogany reception desk.

His first instinct when he saw the blond man was to hit him.

But he knew he had more to deliver to this man than a push or a smack on the face. It was the smaller, dark man who approached Sorrentino and said, “We better go inside.”

Sorrentino glanced at Harriet, his receptionist. She was absolutely still. To her he said, “It’s all right, Harriet. I know
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them.”

They walked down the hall to Sorrentino’s office.

Inside the office the blond man closed the door and locked it.

Suddenly the dark man pushed Sorrentino in the chest. “Who the hell do you think you’re fucking with?”

“What do you mean?”

“The numbers were lousy. You gave us numbers that don’t work.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“The fuck you didn’t.”

“I’ll give you the piece of paper she gave me.”

“Just give me the right info.”

Sorrentino tossed around the papers on the surface of the desk.

The men were smiling sarcastically as they watched him. He emptied the contents of his wastebasket on the desk. The paper was there.

“Here it is.”

The blond man took it. “Whose handwriting is this?” He compared Julie’s paper with the numbers and words on another piece of paper—obviously the one on which Antonio had copied what Sorrentino said earlier in the day.

“Where is she now?”

“At home, probably.”

“She needs a visit. You’re coming with us. Call Jerry and tell the girl out front that you’re going to court. Don’t tell either of them that we’re going to her apartment. Stay nice and quiet and be good.”

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As instantaneously as ambushes had started when he was in Vietnam, three of Carneglia’s men rushed out of the inner bathroom in Vincent Sorrentino’s office and pointed rifles at the two men standing next to Sorrentino. Agile, strong, Vincent dashed to his left, toward safety. Before the blond man or the dark man could react, Carneglia’s three men were beating them with their rifles. Blood, as Vincent Sorrentino remembered from Vietnam, could be propelled at the speed of light. Almost immediately, blood was even splattered on the tall windows of his office.

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When the two men were motionless on the floor, Sorrentino himself pulled up their pants legs and saw their ankle holsters and pistols. He felt their necks; they were still alive, just as he wanted.

He called 911 and had Carneglia’s three men—all of them retired New York City police detectives—wait with him until the police and emergency medical teams arrived. Sorrentino explained that for the last week people had attempted to extort money from him and, remembering that Detectives Polletti, Primo, and Cruz had set up a security agency after they retired, he had hired them to provide him round-the-clock security. It turned out they did great work—the retired detectives were all in the right place at the right time. Two hours later he repeated the same story to the two assistant District Attorneys and two current detectives who interviewed him downtown in the Frank Hogan Building at 100

Centre Street. The beaten men who had tried to fleece and hurt Vincent Sorrentino would survive. Then, as one of the two deferential lawyers said, “We’ll have a long talk with them.”

“When you find out who these guys are, let me know, will you?” Sorrentino asked.

The other young lawyer said, “We can assign a police detail to look after you, Mr. Sorrentino,”

“Thanks. But I’d rather spend my own money on Polletti, Primo, and Cruz than the taxpayers’ money.”

* * *

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Vincent Sorrentino knew it was late at the airport hotel in Los Angeles. He stood at a public phone booth at the corner of 62nd Street and Lexington Avenue. At his back was an all-night diner where, even at ten at night, all the small tables were in use. Across the street, a colorful Korean deli displayed hundreds of flowers for sale. An inscrutable Korean—he could have been thirty or seventy years old—used a small knife to scrape at the stems of the flowers.

“Vince?” Julie said.

“Julie.”

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“Vince, are you all right?”

“Our friends are in the hospital, under arrest. The
Times
just came out on the street with the story about two not yet identified men who tried to attack me in my office as part of some plot to shake down or intimidate one of America’s leading criminal trial lawyers. It so happened that the lawyer had round-the-clock bodyguards. Although the attackers are alert and recovering from a pitched battle in the lawyer’s office, they haven’t spoken and the police do not yet know who they are. Fingerprint and DNA sam-plings are being run to try to establish their identity.”

“But, Vince, are
you
all right?”

“I am, Julie. Not a scratch on me. And I still have my guardian angels watching over me.”

“My passport and her birth certificate will be ready tomorrow.

We’ll fly on Friday morning.”

“How is Kim?”

“Right now, she’s sleeping. It’s been hard for her. Disorienting.”

“Kids adapt, my love.”

“She misses you. I miss you.”

“I miss both of you. It won’t be long. We have to let the dust settle.”

Julie paused. “Are you sure, Vince, that you’ll follow us?”

“Julie, I love you. I’ve outgrown the life I’ve been living. I want to be with you. And with Kim. We talked this through.

Please don’t doubt me.”

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“I’m worried that in the few months we’ll need for all this insanity to go away you’ll change your mind.”

“You can’t doubt me now, sweetie.”

“I don’t, Vince. I really don’t.”

* * *

Vincent Sorrentino sat at the counter in the diner. He ordered coffee and a slice of carrot cake. Mounted at each end of the long, clear counter was a modern plasma television screen tuned to CNN. A news report was broadcast from the front of his apart-308

ment building. “Was it a mob hit gone awry? Vincent Sorrentino, probably the most famous trial lawyer in the country and a frequent guest commentator here on CNN, appears to have gone into seclusion tonight after police arrested two men at his Manhattan office. Although the attackers’ identities are unknown and their motives are unclear, police say they are investigating a number of leads. The men who were seized at the famed lawyer’s office carried guns, law enforcement officials disclosed. Sorrentino, when seen earlier today, appeared to have bruises on his face and blood on his clothing. We’ll have more details for you as this story unfolds.”

Behind the reporter were filmed scenes of Larry King and Vincent during an interview that must have taken place two years earlier, when Sorrentino’s hair was not as gray.

No one at the quiet, comfortable counter noticed that the man drinking coffee was the same man whose image was on the screen.

22.

Articles about her continued to appear, and from time to time she would read them in her apartment in Rome. Early on, some were written by Hugo Brown, but the later articles usually appeared as sidebars in
New York
and
People
. They were all essentially the same: she and her daughter had left New York. Her former employer, NBC News, had no information as to where she now lived. One of the short articles simply said that “Julie Perini and her daughter have been swallowed up by the world.”

The Justice Department, she read, had once been interested only in speaking to her. But, according to another of the increasingly infrequent articles, the Justice Department had too many other commitments to waste any of its “assets” on locating a woman who must have simply decided to live somewhere else in the world. She was not, after all, a native of New York City.

As for the New York City Police, they had no interest in Mrs.

Perini either. She was not a missing person, since it was clear she had left voluntarily, according to an article in
New York
. There was no evidence of foul play. There were, a police lieutenant told
People
, too many hard-to-find people who might turn up as “floaters”

in the Hudson River for the local police to be concerned about a well-known woman who had decided to leave the city.

Not long after Julie’s disappearance, Vincent Sorrentino, who loved the cool and soothing quiet of television studios, sat across the desk from Larry King. They were talking about a twenty-year-old
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cheerleader who, on a celebratory trip to Aruba, had vanished. Vincent spoke about the differences between criminal investigations in the United States and in Aruba. “We can be like Nazi Germany in tracking down criminals. In Aruba, where the laws are derived from the Dutch, they may think offers of chocolate bars are the way to catch criminals. If, of course, there are any in this case. This young lady may have just decided to disappear. There are billions of people in this world. Not all of them want to show up on a Google search with their addresses, telephone numbers, and family trees.”

Leaning forward with his thin shoulders straining under the fab-310

ric of his striped shirt and suspenders, Larry King asked him what next big case loomed for him. Vincent Sorrentino said, “I’ve been doing this fascinating business for more than thirty years now, Larry.

My plan is to retire and travel, and enjoy the fruits of the world.”

“Really? You, America’s greatest lawyer.”

“I don’t know about that, Larry, but thanks.”

“They’ll have to carry me out of here with my mike clutched in my cold dead hands,” King said.

Vincent, who knew King well, reached over the gleaming table and pulled the old-fashioned, corncob-shaped microphone away from Larry. They laughed and shook hands.

* * *

At the age of seven, Pia Rosselli was a bright, active girl who spoke Italian fluently, knew some German, and could still express herself in English. She was thriving in the private school in Rome. From time to time she asked about her father, who had died in a car crash in the Adirondacks in America when she was only one.

Pia’s mother Angela had beautiful red hair. Angela Rosselli, fluent in Italian, French, and English, spent her time translating Italian novels into English under the name Ellen J. M. Banfield.

She worked from one of the three terraces of her apartment in Rome, on the upper floor of an elegant apartment building. Vatican City shimmered in the near distance.

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The translations sold reasonably well in the United States, Canada, and England. She was always described in the books as a “retired teacher of English and Italian living in New Mexico.”

She never met any of the Italian men and women whose sometimes quirky books she translated. Her email address was a wire-less connection under the screen name “Translations for Life.”

She never met or spoke to any of the editors or publishers. Her royalties were paid directly to six charities for abandoned children in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. From time to time readers of the translations—which were always well-reviewed—