Death's Witness (9 page)

“God,” she whispered aloud, expelling the image of death. “I can’t let myself do this.”

How much, she wondered, did Kim understand? Two weeks after Tom’s death, Julie lay down one afternoon on the floor of Kim’s bedroom as the little girl drew lines and circles on a big
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piece of paper, constantly changing the bright colors. Julie drew some lines on her own sheet of paper. At a moment when Kim was quiet, Julie said, “Kim, have you noticed anything?”

“Mommy, see my paper!”

“I see, sweetie.” Julie touched the side of her daughter’s face and then pulled her daughter’s head gently toward her own so that the girl had to look at her.

“Sweetie, do you know that we won’t see Daddy again?”

Kim’s eyes focused only momentarily on Julie’s eyes. Julie wanted to believe it was in that moment of focus, quiet, and clarity that Kim acknowledged understanding that her father was gone.

Julie groped for the next words. “Your daddy is dead, sweetie.

That means he can’t come back. Ever.”

Kim became fussy. “Show Daddy the picture!” She picked up the sheet of paper.

“Daddy can’t see the picture, sweetie.”

Placing her small hands flat on the floor, Kim lifted herself to her feet. She still held the piece of multicolored paper on which she had been drawing. She ran out of the room. Julie, too, got up from the floor and followed her daughter at a distance.

Kim ran first to her parents’ bedroom. “Daddy!” she shouted.

She opened the door to the closet where she knew her father’s suits and other clothes hung. “Daddy?”

She left the bedroom, still clutching the paper she wanted to show him, and went to the kitchen. “Daddy?” she asked again, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

turning repeatedly and glancing around the kitchen.

Watching her daughter, Julie braced herself against the door-frame. Finally, Kim, crumpling the paper in her hands, ran to her mother, crying, crying, crying.

* * *

Now, in the immense silence of the late night—too late for a child to be put to bed—Julie gently moved her daughter’s soft, pli-able body from her collapsed position onto her back in a sleeping position. Julie rested Kim’s head on a pillow and covered her with a fragrant pink blanket.

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Julie then sat alone in another room for two hours, crying.

8.

“Mrs. Perini? Agent McGlynn.”

It was eleven-thirty in the morning, an hour before Julie was scheduled to start work for a four-hour shift. Elena was in the kitchen with Kim, preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a noontime lunch in the park at the 85th Street playground just off Fifth Avenue and north of the slanting glass-walled Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum. Kim was chattering as Elena spoke to her in precise, well-phrased English. Julie sometimes envied Elena—she wanted to be on that picnic, to spend this clear, sun-drenched day outside with her daughter.

“Hi,” Julie said, feigning pleasantness. “Thanks for calling back.”

“No problem.”

“I was really just calling because I’d expected to hear from you by now. It’s been what? Three weeks? Four?”

“I don’t think it’s been four weeks.” As she listened to McGlynn’s words, the flat tone of voice, the accent straining to sound more formal than he would have sounded in a bar with his Irish buddies, Julie experienced a resurgence of the same contempt she’d felt for him at first. The perfect bureaucrat, McGlynn wanted to defend himself against any suggestion that he was slow or had wasted time.

“Maybe it hasn’t been that long,” Julie said. “I’ve become a little confused about time. It doesn’t matter. What I really wanted to know is whether anything new has happened.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

“We’re working on some leads.”

“You are?”

“Tell me, do
you
have anything new?” he asked.

“How could
I
have anything new?”

She repressed the urge to tell him that she was not Sherlock Holmes or Jack Webb or Inspector Maigret and that he was the one with the responsibility and resources to find her husband’s killer. She controlled herself because she had the uneasy sense that he was her only hope of ever finding that person and that, if she was bitchy or difficult or shrill, he would punish her by doing nothing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to snap. The answer
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is no, nothing. Do you have anything?”

McGlynn paused. “Two people did come forward.”

“Who?”

“A man and his girlfriend. Joggers, runners.”

“What did they say?” Julie’s voice trembled with a rush of anxiety and excitement.

McGlynn spoke slowly. “They say they think they saw your husband. Running. In the park. They recognized him.”

“And?”

“It was dark.”

“I know that. Is that all they said?”

“He was with another runner.”

“Who?”

“Did your husband have somebody he used to run with? Lots of guys do. It keeps them motivated, or so I hear.”

“No. I never knew of Tom running with anyone else.”

“Did he ever call anyone about running? Any appointments, like?”

“Never,” Julie answered. She saw Kim suddenly begin to run on her short legs from the kitchen toward her. Julie held up her hand like a traffic cop and, in mime, gestured to Elena to pick Kim up and keep her away. “Who saw him?”

“Like I said. Some guy and his girlfriend.”

“Please, Mr. McGlynn. You’re making this difficult for me.

P A U L B A T I S T A

What else, for God’s sake, what else?”

“Not much, Mrs. Perini. They weren’t running in the same direction.”

“Who wasn’t?”

“The man and the woman. They were going in the opposite direction. Opposite from your husband and the other guy. They came toward your husband and the other guy, and then passed.”

“What did they see? They must have seen something.”

“Not much, really. The boyfriend said to her, ‘Hey, do you recognize him?’ So they both got a quick look at your husband. Not
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really at the other guy. She said they just focused on the famous Tom Perini. They—this couple—they’d seen Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward jogging, slowly, I guess, the night before, and they talked about how that made back-to-back nights as far as the celebs were concerned. Paul Newman one night and Tom Perini the next.”

“They must have seen more.”

“Nothing more, really. And then they passed. It was getting dark. It was already dark, really. Hard to see. They ran on. And then they heard what sounded like a firecracker. Bang. That’s it—

just one
bang
. And they kept on running. Away. In the opposite direction.”

Julie was focused, intense. “When did you talk to them?”

“About a week ago. The guy’s a doctor. He didn’t want to come forward. He thought it would take too much time. He decided they didn’t really know anything anyway. She nagged him, is my guess. She thought they should call the cops. And so they did.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re witnesses.”

“What?”

“Like I said, they’re witnesses.”

“What?” she repeated, in exactly the same tone.

“They’re witnesses. Confidential informants. At this stage I can’t give you their names, if that’s what you’re asking.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

She recognized his single-mindedness, his rigidity. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

“It isn’t much to go on. It means very little, almost squat.”

“Tell me again: what did they say he looked like?”

“Who, your husband?”

“No, of course not. The other runner.”

“Just that he wore running gear—short pants, tank top.”

“That’s it, then?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Who are they? Please tell me their names, please.”

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“Calm down, Julie. Like I said, I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”

She clenched her teeth:
Julie? Who is this prick to call me Julie?

Finally she said, “I don’t think you’re being fair to me. I want to know who they are. If you won’t tell me, I have ways of going over you.”

His answer was surprisingly restrained. “Do whatever you feel you need to do, Julie. I’m just trying to be your friend. I’ve told you too much already—which really isn’t fair, since you haven’t really told me anything.”

She wavered, uncertain whether to beg or continue in the supercilious, falsely aristocratic tone she had used, her Judi Dench imitation. And then she went with her instincts, saying firmly,

“Don’t sweetie-pie me. I want to know who they are.”

“I’ll talk to you in a few days,” McGlynn said, surprising her by hanging up. For a minute she stood near her sun-filled kitchen windows, the receiver in her hand, the telephone giving off that annoying clicking sound when no one is on the other end. She stared at Elena and Kim as her daughter’s glistening hair was being combed.

* * *

Five days later Julie received an email from Stan Wasserman.

The names you wanted are Benjamin Berry and Nancy Lichtman. They
live at 7 West 95th Street, Apartment 4-E. Their number’s in the phone
book. I have now used up, completely, all of my chits with the powers that
be. This message will
now
self-destruct.

P A U L B A T I S T A

Julie emailed a reply:
You’re my hero
. And then she added,
I’ve
already hit delete. Vaporized.

* * *

Nancy Lichtman had the large, expressive mouth and bright eyes Julie associated with Carly Simon. She was warm, vivid, and talkative, totally unlike the nagging-woman image McGlynn’s description had created in Julie’s mind. Julie had no difficulty reaching her, because Nancy Lichtman’s name was in fact in the Manhattan telephone directory. She took Julie’s mid-morning call
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as though hearing from a long-lost college friend, inviting Julie to her apartment for coffee that same afternoon. She was a graphic designer “between jobs” and her friend Benjamin, a resident at Mount Sinai, wouldn’t be in until midnight.

Nancy was a talker. In the white, newly renovated kitchen of her West Side apartment, she told Julie she’d been annoyed with Benjamin for days because he’d resisted going to the police. She was concerned he was becoming, like every doctor she knew, narrow, self-focused, and cold. They weren’t married. They had lived together for three years. She was older than Benjamin. “Why,”

Nancy asked with a broad smile, unexpectedly shifting the subject,

“do Jewish men want to be called by their full, Biblical names?”

Julie didn’t know the answer but said, to amuse Nancy, “It has something to do with circumcision, I think, the need to keep it all whenever they can.”

Ultimately, after Nancy told him she would go to the police by herself, Benjamin had “caved.” When they finally approached the police, through a telephone call to a hotline number established for any information about Tom’s murder, the police didn’t react immediately. She and Benjamin were asked to give their names, their address, and their telephone number, and then five days later they received a call from McGlynn, who asked them to come down to his office at St. Andrews Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Benjamin complained, “See, look at the time this has already taken, and they don’t even give a fuck.”

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

As she sat in the kitchen sipping coffee, Julie was fascinated by the wide-eyed, eager, subject-shifting way in which Nancy Lichtman spoke. A little off-the-wall, but warm, Julie thought, as Nancy mixed her personal history with a description of what she and Benjamin had narrated to McGlynn in his cramped, windowless office. She told McGlynn she and Benjamin were daily runners.

In winter, they preferred dawn runs in Central Park. In the other seasons, late afternoon or early evening runs.

That
evening was the warmest of the season so far. They started late. They entered Central Park from 85th Street on the
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Upper West Side. They disagreed at the start about which direction to take. Benjamin wanted to run north, to the upper limits of the park at Central Park North. (“Can you believe it?” Nancy exclaimed to Julie. “Central Park North. How many people, white people, do you think, even know there is a Central Park
North
?”) Nancy wanted to run south. Dusk was coming on, and if they headed north they would be on the hills in the upper forested area of the park at night. That was not a chance she wanted to take. If they ran south, she’d feel safer. Fewer trees, more people, more open spaces, more vitality. Benjamin relented: they ran south to the 72nd Street transverse that crossed the park from west to east. Then they turned gradually north on the eastside road that passed the Boat Basin, the rear of the Metropolitan Museum from 79th Street to 84th Street, and the Engineers’ Gate at 90th Street. Finally, they reached the transverse, the paved roadway closed to traffic, that dissected the park from east to west below the northernmost rim of the park where the steep hills were and where, at night, the terrain looked like a jungle, “complete with wild animals,” Nancy Lichtman said.

By the time they turned into the roadway it was almost night.

These lengthy, sweating, rhythmic runs kept them at their clos-est, and the night had been ideal for running—warm, humid. The liquid darkness and their bodies’ motion seemed to merge, as though they were swimming in an ocean at night or “having great sex,” Nancy said. Although the transverse was empty, she
P A U L B A T I S T A

had no sense of the kind of fear that made her, at the outset, argue with Benjamin about avoiding the far northern regions of the park. She knew, in any event, that they were bound to encounter other runners somewhere along the transverse on the first good night of the spring.

She saw two runners approaching them: two strong white men. Benjamin immediately recognized Tom.

“Do you know him?” Benjamin asked.

“Who?”

“The dark one.”