Death's Witness (21 page)

Street. Below her feet, as she waited for the bus with the stroller already folded and Kim holding her hand, Julie felt and heard the long subterranean roll and squeal of subway trains entering and leaving the grim underground station. Through the grates on the sidewalk she smelled the electric, charged odor that the trains created.

The crosstown bus was new, bright, and packed. To her surprise, a young Puerto Rican man wearing a crucifix earring stood when he saw her, giving up his seat. She thanked him, genuine gratitude in her voice and smile. Kim, happy and quiet, sat in Julie’s lap. The folded stroller was propped between Julie’s knees.

The fat woman next to Julie and Kim had the
Daily News
open to page five. Julie’s picture—reproduced from the television interview taped on late Friday afternoon, the one Sorrentino’s people hadn’t fully copied for him—occupied at least a quarter of the page. Even Julie, who was usually modest about her looks, thought the picture made her appear calm and beautiful. No one on the bus recognized her.

As the bus sped westward through the green heart of Central Park, she closed her eyes hard as the precinct house, built eighty years ago, emerged to the left. The last time she saw the stone-and-shingle building was on that night in May when she made her nightmare trip to look at the body she had hoped was not her husband’s. In the years before that night she had made this crosstown trip to the West Side of Manhattan so many times that she was
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now able to sense, by the sway of the bus as it made a gradual climbing turn, when it had passed the police barracks.

She decided to leave the bus at Central Park West, the first stop after the passage through the park. She clutched Kim—deli-cious, healthy, clean Kim—to her chest with her right hand and arm as she carried the folded stroller in her left hand toward the door. The driver said, “You have a good afternoon.” Somewhat startled, she answered, “Oh, thank you. You too.” And Kim shouted, “You too.”

Julie loved this part of Manhattan. She took the walk slowly: on
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both sides of her were the aging blocks of handsome apartment buildings from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue, Columbus to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Broadway. She knew from her fifteen years in New York that this was an area of old Jewish families.

The solid buildings fronting West 86th Street included some synagogues, almost indistinguishable from the prewar apartment buildings adjoining them. Elderly Jewish men and women, many with canes, stood in a group on the sidewalk in front of one of the unob-trusive synagogues. They were obviously waiting for other people to emerge, and they looked solemn: what is it, Julie wondered, a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a regular Saturday Sabbath service? The neighborhood and these elderly, somber, steady people gave her a sense of solidity, safety, momentary peace of mind.

Broadway was different, as she knew it would be. It was wilder.

The intersection at Broadway and 86th Street was one of the most frantic crossroads in the world. People crowded the crosswalks, ignoring the rhythm of the
WALK
and
DON’T WALK
signals.

Gypsy cabs hurtled into the intersection, challenging the red lights and the people in the crosswalks. Homeless men and women crowded the benches on the median separating the uptown and downtown traffic on Broadway. With the stroller rolling in front of her, Kim leaning forward and smiling, Julie half-trotted, half-walked through the chaotic intersection.

They were in time for the movie. Long lines of ticket holders stretched from the AMC Loews Cinema at Broadway and 84th D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

Street. But those lines, Julie saw, were for a Jennifer Lopez movie.

There were only a few people—mainly other mothers and their children—waiting in line for a modern, Pixar-style version of
Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs
. It was only two hours earlier that Julie, feeling trapped in her apartment, noticed the listing for
Snow White
in the small, agate type of
The New Yorker
. When she told Kim about the movie, the child had become intense and rapt about it. Julie decided to take her no matter what kind of gauntlet she would have to run.

As it turned out, reaching the movie was much simpler than she imagined, after that breakout through the service entrance of
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her building. And
Snow White
in fact engrossed Julie and her daughter. In the cool dark, for two hours, they were lost: the falsely reassuring movie charmed her now, in stark contrast to how she had felt so many years ago when she saw the first version in California. She was nine then and learning the precariousness of her life with her lost, decaying parents. At the end of the movie, Kim’s bright eyes shined and then, as the lights resurfaced, almost closed from the exhaustion of her day.

At four-thirty, when they entered the crowded lobby, Julie noticed two things. Outside there was still a great deal of light.

Broadway shined beyond the theater’s glass doors. And she saw Stan Wasserman. He was with his lanky, intelligent-looking twelve-year-old son at the popcorn counter.

She felt a rush of blood, she was confused, and she was completely focused on him, on the left profile of his face. It was like running into a lover soon after he had rejected her. When he had called to tell her she was fired, she wanted to scream, “Please don’t do this, take it back,” but she controlled herself with an icy, terse indifference. She detected the quivering nervousness in his voice, the wavering tone so unlike the deliberate, methodical way in which he normally spoke.

It was she who had cut off the conversation with the words,

“You have a good weekend, too, Stan.”

Dressed now in chinos and a worn Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows, Stan Wasserman appeared
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glum, heavy-lidded. Julie had an urge to speak to him. She was in conflict about him: she was angry with him since she felt he’d become a hatchet-man, used by other people and irretrievably weak; she respected him because he had been steady, sympathetic and, until now, loyal to her; and she felt sorry for him because he had ambitions which he would never fulfill and had lost his sense of direction in the world. At the popcorn stand, with his son who bore such an absurd resemblance to his father, Stan Wasserman, in Julie’s eyes and mind, looked pathetic.

Briskly Julie pushed through the glass door onto Broadway. She
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submerged herself and Kim in the vast, bright, colorful stream of people on the sidewalk. She moved quickly, the stroller speeding in front of her. She looked strong and swift.

* * *

Two men, dressed casually in the weekend clothes of subur-banites, followed her. They kept her in sight as she walked in the limpid late afternoon light all the way across town, through Central Park, and to her apartment building.

Two days earlier, at a meeting in the shabby but ornate lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, they had been instructed by Mr. Perez and a man they knew only as the runner to learn more about her habits. They didn’t ask, but they assumed that at some point they would also be instructed to kill her. They also noticed, because they were trained to observe, that Mr. Perez and the runner walked casually away from them to a well-built man who, carrying a slender book of poetry, wore a corduroy sport jacket with greenish academic-style patches on the elbows.

* * *

The long Saturday afternoon became, for Sorrentino, a long uneasy night. Kate Stark called his office at three-thirty from the UN Plaza. “Come right over,” she said. “The view is terrific.”

When he said he would be there in half an hour, forty-five minutes, she responded, “Why so long?” She sounded aggravated.

D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

He said, “I just need to button down a thing or two.”

“And I’ll unbutton all my clothes,” she said. “Hurry up!”

He walked. It was an act of peevish rebelliousness at the somewhat cloying urgency he heard in her voice. He had seen her twice since the weekend party in East Hampton. Both of those times were in Washington, in her expensive and stylish apartment in Georgetown. Both times he’d become uneasy about her and her surroundings.
Her
interest in him appeared to grow.

The room, on the nineteenth floor overlooking the timeless
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UN Building and the East River, was filled with the crisp early autumn light of the glorious afternoon. Kate was naked, except for black pumps. They embraced. She lightly bit his lips and ear-lobes. She was effusive. “God, how I’ve missed you.”

“Me too,” he whispered.

She had just taken a line of cocaine, he knew, since its keen force was in her eyes and her movements. By now he knew her well enough to know that there was no stopping the power of her willfulness. He struggled to overcome the sense that he was doing things that he didn’t want to do. But there were other things he certainly wanted her to do, cocaine or not. Soon they made love on the sofa near the row of exposed, undraped windows overlooking the glittering waters of the East River. As he stretched over her naked back, her tan, lightly sun-freckled skin glistening below him, her face buried in the sofa’s fabric, her mouth groaning, he almost laughed aloud as he thought, Not bad for a guy who thinks he’s somewhere else. That was what the force of her intimidating attractiveness did to him.

But eventually the long afternoon and night weighed on him, almost becoming suffocating. She was impatient at dinner. She wanted to be active, to move, to circulate among people, to get out of the Upper East Side. The cocaine she continued to take in the restaurant bathroom gave her a darting, overblown drive. Distracted himself, shunning the cocaine which she urged him to take to the men’s room, he had the sense all during dinner that he
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was spending too much of himself, of his time and his money for too little pleasure or comfort.

Kate’s mood escalated when they arrived at the party at DeNiro’s restaurant in TriBeCa. Even on the drive downtown—

down the FDR, beyond the UN, past the Waterside Apartments and the Water Club on the edge of the East River, and then west on Houston Street, through the Bowery where the derelicts pressed against the window of the car as it waited at the long Houston Street traffic lights—her tempo quickened. That was because she inhaled ever so slight quantities of cocaine as she sat
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near him in the backseat. She waved and smiled and made flirtatious faces at the derelicts as they pressed their faces to the closed windows.

Sorrentino’s mood became surly. At one point, as they sat stalled in traffic on West Broadway, he said, “You know, if I get arrested with that shit in my car, the law enforcement establishment on the East Coast will have a party.”

The comment and his abrupt tone didn’t register with her. She smiled as though he had just uttered an amusing joke.

The entrance to the restaurant was on Warren Street. Sorrentino remembered Warren Street and the whole area now called TriBeCa when not long ago it consisted of nothing but small sewing factories and warehouses and was never called TriBeCa by anyone. A decade earlier it was desolate on Saturday nights. Now, on this beautiful Saturday night in early fall, it was packed with restless people moving among restaurants, bars, clubs. It was the kind of area where you needed credentials to move freely into the most active restaurants: Kate insisted that the car stop as close as possible to the restaurant entrance where three bouncers—all muscular Beach Boy types with Mohawk haircuts and earrings—sifted the crowds for those who were welcome and those who were not. Most were not.

The restaurant, in the cavernous ground-floor space that until a year ago had been a warehouse for a Korean export-import company Sorrentino once represented, was cool, vast, and mir-D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S

rored. Kate was in her element. As Sorrentino could see, she took visible, swift hits from entering a space filled with famous people.

The contacts enlarged her, invigorated her, made her as alert, eloquent, and intent as the cocaine did. Sorrentino had seen this swelling of bright, talkative intensity in her at Vigdor’s party, when they first met, but this was beyond that. It was a function of the people here: Christie Brinkley, Robert DeNiro, Norman Mailer, Derek Jeter.

Although it was almost eleven when they arrived, Sorrentino began to have a sense that the night would run for hours, proba-179

bly until early daylight. Waves of other people continued to arrive.

The high tin ceilings and widely spaced walls enhanced all the already loud sounds: the talk, music, laughter, the clinking glasses.

He had real difficulty hearing the conversations in which Kate tried to involve him. The sounds of the M-16s, mortars, and artillery in Vietnam so many years earlier had steadily impaired his hearing, so that he had difficulty separating words from the background noises of parties and music. After a certain point he stopped listening and only smiled. He also drank, rare for him. He had two Amstels and then, wanting to survive the night without an outburst, two martinis. Alcohol had always slowed him down. His ears and brain buzzed with the spreading impact of the liquor.

Kate continued to take hits of the cocaine. That was what her frequent passages to the bathroom were all about. He saw the effects of cocaine infusions sharpening her as the night continued, even as the liquor he drank weighed him down. During one of her trips to the bathroom, he became involved in the kind of desultory, surface conversation he hated. Straining to hear, he was speaking with a hawk-nosed young man who said he wrote music for the movies. When the man, holding a bottle of Bud-weiser, asked Sorrentino what he did, Sorrentino answered, “I’m a drug lord.” The man had no reaction. He continued to hold his bottle of beer and smile.

Then Sorrentino added, “And I’ve just decided I don’t want to spend any more time, ever, with the woman I’m with.”