Death's Witness Read Free Page A

make the best judges.”
    They walked from the foyer to the living room. The sofa was placed so that it faced the large windows and the high view of Central Park. They lay down side-by-side on the sofa. Playfully, Julie told him Kim had just started her late afternoon nap. They D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
    would wake her for dinner, now two hours away, and then put her to bed for the night.
    “Want to mess around?” Julie asked.
    Tom loved her, and her playfulness. “Not the right time of day,” he answered, kissing her delicate ear, “and besides, my mind is on food, not sex. It happens that way to older guys.” Pungent meat sauce with garlic, tomatoes, and thyme was cooking slowly in the kitchen. Its aroma filled the apartment, as did the light from the sun, slowly falling, radiant, behind the lush trees in the park.

11
    As always, Julie was interested in his work and asked about the trial. He’d given her a daily narrative. Now he talked about Judge Feigley, a massive woman, famous in her own right, known to the lawyers at the prosecution table and the defense lawyers as Dumb Dora. Tom complained, briefly, that the judge, despite her background as a young civil rights lawyer in the sixties, had become the kind of judge prosecutors loved on their cases. She let everything in, ruled in the government’s favor on all the small, killing details which, as they accumulated, built a mosaic for the jury pointing toward guilt, and was a classic hanging judge at sentencing time. Tom told Julie how relieved he was, “a kid let out of school,” when the judge blandly announced that the trial would be in recess until the next Tuesday.
    As she later recalled again and again, it was Julie who suggested that Tom go for a run in Central Park. “Dinner won’t be ready for a while,” she said. “It’ll be a good way to break with work and start the weekend.”
    Julie was right. After years of training, Tom’s body still craved physical effort: running, weight-lifting, biking, anything that brought a drenching sweat to his skin, including sex with his firm, shapely wife. Work—especially the kind of time-consuming work he now did—often interfered with his love of exercise. Julie, a squash player for years, naturally fleet, coordinated, and graceful, always urged him to run when he could. Tom was never able to play squash with her because her speed and agility on a small P A U L B A T I S T A
    court were greater than his.
    Changing quickly, wanting to finish the run before it became completely dark, Tom put on a sweatshirt, faded running shorts with the blue word “Columbia” sewn into the fabric, and an old pair of running shoes. They once had that high-tech look Tom disdained, but by now, after hundreds of hours of pounding on the roadways of Central Park, they were worn into the battered, almost flattened look and feel he preferred.
    Before he left the apartment he slipped into Kim’s bedroom.
    She still slept in a crib, although one side was permanently down.

12
    Shades drawn, the room was near-dark. The scent of the room was beguiling. His clean daughter slept on her side. She had the light skin and black hair of Julie’s family. Her breathing was deep. It was regular. It was vital. And it was miraculously scented as he leaned as close to her face and lips as he could without touching her.
    “Be back in about forty-five minutes,” he whispered to Julie as he left the apartment. “I love you,” he said. He patted her rear.
    “You’ve got a great ass.”
    3.
    Julie Perini had never been touched directly by death before. Her distant mother and father were still living in California, none of her few close friends had died, she had never known any of her grandparents, and her daughter’s life had just started.
    On Friday night she waited for Tom for more than two hours before Kim emerged, crying and sweaty, from her nap. The anxiety in Julie’s body, a sense of sickness, grew steadily as she played briefly with