Free Death's Witness by Paul Batista Page A

valuable life’s work.
    And now she felt the encroachment of other old demons from her childhood and early adult years: the station paid reasonably well, but Tom’s death had plunged her back into that recurring sense of precariousness about money she had felt as a bookish girl in Southern California, where her father, who owned a series of car dealerships in the sixties and seventies, passed from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, surfacing in small city after small city with names such P A U L B A T I S T A
    as Mr. Al’s Dodge, Kensington Buick, Suburban Datsun.
    As for Tom, he had always produced enough money so that, as a couple with no extravagant tastes, they lived well. Tom, however, born to working-class Italian parents, had not accumulated a fortune. His four years in professional football were not long and he had been under a contract worth about $1 million for each of the years. Although taxes consumed almost half of those payments, and his agent’s fees another fifteen percent, it had been sufficient for him in those years. And what remained of it was enough to put him through Columbia Law School and to buy the 56
    apartment they loved.
    But, as far as Julie knew, there was no fortune. He left in the top drawer of his bureau at the apartment, in a box which once held a new tie, a four-page will leaving all of his assets to Julie and making her the trustee of $100,000 to be spent on his parents’
    care if they outlived him. In the weeks since his death she had located only his business operating account, which had less than eighty thousand dollars, and two small retirement accounts. She knew that, ultimately, she would have to look for other accounts for Kim’s sake and her own. She imagined, and hoped, that there were other accounts, but she hadn’t yet found the stamina or will to search for them.
    Several weeks after returning to NBC, she expanded her time each day to four hours, from one in the afternoon to five, the portion of the day when Elena was able to care for Kim by herself, to focus on the minute-by-minute requirements of play, cleaning, and attention the child required. There were times when Julie missed Kim so intensely she daydreamed about her daughter while she composed a news piece on her computer.
    Stan Wasserman’s practice was to circulate batches of information through the computer system to his pool of writers, randomly assigning material to each of them. As she daydreamed about her daughter, Julie suddenly found herself reviewing that day’s material on what had come to be known as the Danny Fonseca Marathon—the trial that would last forever.
    D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
    Julie opened a secure AP subject line on her computer. She inhaled sharply when she saw her husband’s name. “The government’s key witness disclosed a surprise today at the racketeering trial of Congressman Daniel Fonseca in federal court in Manhattan. He once hired legendary football star Tom Perini as his lawyer.”
    Julie looked again at the words on the computer’s bright screen. Her daydreams evaporated. She and Tom had talked almost daily about his work. Of the two of them, he was the doer, the actor. His days, she believed, were crowded with events he 57
    helped to shape. And in particular he talked to her about the complexities his work involved: twisted motives, conflicts of interests, shifts of allegiance, characters like Sy Klein, the silvery Congressman Fonseca, the thoughtful, resourceful Vincent Sorrentino.
    And yet she couldn’t remember that he had ever mentioned Hutchinson, the blond, WASP, well-spoken chief assistant to a classic machine politician, a self-seeking, latter-day version of Nixon’s John Dean.
    Other sentences in the wire copy struck her. Sorrentino—the handsome man she had admired so much in the months since he worked his miracles for her after Tom’s killing—was quoted as saying that if Tom Perini had once represented the government’s key witness and the prosecution had not