The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “But suppose the other boy comes forward? I swear to you, there was a second boy, a big powerful fellow.”

  “I believe you. It was a setup. They were gonna take you off. Yeah, he could come forward, but it sounds to me like he has his reasons not to. Judging by this story the mother tells, the kid didn’t mention him, either.”

  “Yes,” said Sherman, “but he could. I swear, I’m beginning to feel as if I should preempt the situation and take the initiative and go to the police with Maria—Mrs. Ruskin—and just tell them exactly what happened. I mean, I don’t know about the law, but I feel morally certain that I did the right thing and that she did the right thing in the situation we were in.”

  “Ayyyyyy!” said Killian. “You Wall Street honchos really are gamblers! Ayyyyyy!! Whaddaya whaddaya!” Killian was grinning. Sherman stared at him in astonishment. Killian must have detected it, because he put on a perfectly serious face. “You got any idea what the D.A.’d do if you just walked in and said, ‘Yeah, it was me and my girlfriend, who lives on Fifth Avenue, in my car’? They’d devour you—de-vour you.”

  “Why?”

  “The case is already a political football, and they got nothing to go on. Reverend Bacon is yelling about it, it’s on TV, The City Light has gone bananas over it, and it’s putting a lot of pressure on Abe Weiss, who has an election coming up. I know Weiss very well. There is no real world to Abe Weiss. There’s only what’s on TV and in the newspapers. But I’ll tell you something else. They wouldn’t give you a break even if no one was watching.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know what you do all day long when you work in the D.A.’s Office? You prosecute people named Tiffany Latour and LeBaron Courtney and Mestaffalah Shabazz and Camilio Rodriguez. You get so you’re dying to get your hands on somebody with something on the ball. And if somebody gives you a couple like you and your friend Mrs. Ruskin—ayyyyyyyy, Biscuit City!”

  The man seemed to have a horrible nostalgic enthusiasm for such a catch.

  “What would happen?”

  “For a start, there’s no way in the world they wouldn’t arrest you, and if I know Weiss, he’d make a big show of it. They might not be able to hold you very long, but it would be extremely unpleasant. That’s guaranteed.”

  Sherman tried to imagine it. He couldn’t. His spirits hit bottom. He let out a big sigh.

  “Now you see why I don’t want you to talk to anybody? You get the picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “But look, I’m not trying to depress you. My job right now is not to defend you but to keep you from even having to be defended. I mean, that’s assuming you decide to have me represent you. I’m not even gonna talk about a fee at this point, because I don’t know what this is gonna involve. If you’re lucky, I’ll find out this is a bullshit case.”

  “How can you find out that?”

  “The head of the Homicide Bureau in the Bronx D.A.’s Office is a guy I started out with up there, Bernie Fitzgibbon.”

  “And he’ll tell you?”

  “I think he will. We’re friends. He’s a Donkey, just like me.”

  “A donkey?”

  “An Irishman.”

  “But is that wise, letting them know I’ve hired a lawyer and I’m worried? Won’t that put ideas in their heads?”

  “Christ, they already”—awready—“got ideas in their head, and they know you’re worried. If you weren’t worried after those two meatballs came to see you, there’d have to be something wrong with you. But I can take care a that. What you oughta start thinking about is your friend Mrs. Ruskin.”

  “That was what Freddy said.”

  “Freddy was right. If I’m gonna take this case, I wanna talk to her, and the sooner the better. You think she’d be willing to make a statement?”

  “A statement?”

  “A sworn statement we could have witnessed.”

  “Before I talked to Freddy, I would have said yes. Now I don’t know. If I try to get her to make a sworn statement, in a legal setting, I don’t know what she’ll do.”

  “Well, one way or another, I’ll want to talk to her. Can you get hold of her? I don’t mind calling her myself, as far as that goes.”

  “No, it would be better if I did it.”

  “One thing is, you don’t want her going around talking, either.” Tawkin tawkin tawkin.

  “Freddy tells me you went to the Yale Law School. When were you there?”

  “The late seventies,” said Killian.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “It was okay. Nobody there knew what the fuck I was talking about.” Tawkin. “You might as well be from Afghanistan as Sunnyside, Queens. But I liked it. It’s a nice place. It’s easy, as law schools go. They don’t try to bury you in details. They give you the scholarly view, the overview. You get the grand design. They’re very good at giving you that. Yale is terrific for anything you wanna do, so long as it don’t involve people with sneakers, guns, dope, lust, or sloth.”

  17. The Favor Bank

  Over the intercom came the secretary’s voice: “I got Irv Stone on the line, from Channel 1.” Without a word to Bernie Fitzgibbon, Milt Lubell, or Kramer, Abe Weiss stopped in the middle of a sentence and picked up the telephone. Without a hello or any other preliminary remark, he said into the mouthpiece: “Whadda I gotta do with you guys?” It was the voice of a tired and disappointed parent. “You’re supposed to be a news organization in the most important city in the country. Right? And what’s the most serious problem in the most important city in the country? Drugs. And what’s the worst of the drugs? Crack. Am I right? And we bring in grand-jury indictments against three of the biggest crack dealers in the Bronx, and whadda you guys do? Nothing…Lemme finish. We bring all three a them into Central Booking at ten o’clock in the morning, and where are you guys? Nowhere…Wait a minute, my ass!” No longer the saddened parent. Now the irate neighbor on the floor below. “You got no excuse, Irv! You guys are lazy. You’re afraid you’re gonna miss a meal at the Côte Basque. One day you’re gonna wake up—what?…Don’t gimme that, Irv! The only thing wrong with those crack dealers is, they’re black and they’re from the Bronx! Whaddaya want, Vanderbilt, Astor, and—and—and—and—and Wriston?” He didn’t seem too sure about Wriston. “One day you’re gonna wake up and realize you’re out of it. This is America up here in the Bronx, Irv, modern-day America! And there’s black people in modern-day America, whether you know it or not! Manhattan’s an offshore boutique! This is America! This is the laboratory of human relations! This is the experiment in urban living!…Whaddaya mean, how about the Lamb case? What’s’at gotta do with this? Big deal, you covered a story in the Bronx. Whaddaya got, a quota!”

  He hung up. No goodbye. He turned to Fitzgibbon, who sat to one side of the district attorney’s enormous desk. Kramer and Lubell sat on either side of Fitzgibbon. Weiss put his hands up in the air, as if he were holding a medicine ball over his head.

  “They’re screaming about crack every night, and we bring in indictments against three major dealers, and he’s telling me there’s no story in it, it’s routine stuff.”

  Kramer found himself shaking his head, to indicate how saddened he was by the obstinacy of television newsmen. Weiss’s press secretary, Milt Lubell, a skinny little man with a grizzly gray beard and big eyes, swiveled his head in a state of advanced disbelief. Only Bernie Fitzgibbon took this news without the slightest locomotor reaction.

  “You see?” said Weiss. He jerked his thumb toward the telephone without looking at it. “I try to talk to this guy about drug indictments, and he throws the Lamb case in my face.”

  The district attorney looked extremely angry. But then, every time Kramer had laid eyes on him he had looked angry. Weiss was about forty-eight. He had a full head of light brown hair, a narrow face, and a strong, lean jaw with a scar on one side. There was nothing wrong with that. Abe Weiss was one of a long line of New York district attorneys whose careers had been based o
n appearing on television and announcing the latest paralyzing wallop to the solar plexus of crime in the seething metropolis. Weiss, the good Captain Ahab, might be the object of jokes. But he was wired in to the Power, and the Power flowed through him, and his office, with its paneled walls and outsized old wooden furniture and its American flag on a stand, was a command post of the Power, and Kramer tingled with the excitement of being called in on a summit meeting like this.

  “Some way,” said Weiss, “we gotta get out in fronta this case. Right now I’m stuck in a position where all I can do is react. You musta seen this coming, Bernie, and you didn’t warn me. Kramer here talked to Bacon a week ago, it musta been.”

  “That’s just the point, Abe,” said Fitzgibbon. “That’s—”

  Weiss pushed a button on his desk, and Fitzgibbon stopped talking, because obviously the district attorney’s mind had departed the immediate vicinity. He was looking at a television screen on the other side of the room. Bulging from the stately paneled wall, like a high-tech goiter, was a bank of four television sets and stacks of steely boxes with steely knobs and black glass dials and green-diode lights in a nest of electrical cords. Rows of videocassettes stretched across the shelves behind the television sets, where books had once been. If Abe Weiss or anything concerning Abe Weiss or anything concerning crime and punishment in the Bronx was on television, Abe Weiss wanted it on tape. One of the sets flared to life. Just the picture; no sound. A cloth banner filled the screen…JOHANNE X BRONX: WEISS JUSTICE IS APARTHEID JUSTICE…Then came a cluster of angry faces, white and black, shot from below so that they looked like an overwhelming mob.

  “F’r Chrissake, who the hell’s that?” asked Weiss.

  “That’s Channel 7,” said Milt Lubell.

  Kramer looked at Lubell. “But they weren’t even there, Channel 7. There was only Channel 1.” He said it in a low voice, to indicate he was daring to talk only to the district attorney’s press secretary. He wasn’t presuming to jump into the general conversation.

  “You didn’t see this?” said Lubell. “This was last night. After I ran it, the rest of them got hot for the story. So they had another demonstration last night.”

  “You’re kidding!” said Kramer.

  “Ran on five or six channels. Smart move.”

  Weiss pushed another button on his desk, and a second screen came on. On the first screen heads continued to flare up and vanish, flare up and vanish. On the second, three male musicians with bony faces and huge Adam’s apples and one woman…in a dark and smoky back alley…MTV…A whirring sound…The musicians split up into vibrating stripes. The videocassette kicks in. A moon-faced young man with a microphone under his chin…out in front of the Poe projects…The usual pack of teenagers are cutting up in the background.

  “Mort Selden, Channel 5,” said Weiss.

  “Right,” said Milt Lubell.

  Weiss hit another button. A third screen lit up. The musicians were back on the smoky street. The woman had dark lips…like Shelly Thomas’s…the most exquisite yearning came over Kramer…The musicians turned into jittery stripes again. A man with Latin features…

  “Roberto Olvidado,” said Lubell.

  The man held a microphone in the face of an angry black woman. In no time there were three sets of heads flaring and vanishing, flaring and vanishing, casting their toxic-wave glow upon the carved wood.

  Weiss said to Fitzgibbon: “You realize that’s all that was on the news last night, the Lamb case? And all Milt’s done all morning is take calls from reporters and these goddamned people wanting to know what we’re doing.”

  “But that’s ridiculous, Abe,” said Fitzgibbon. “What are we supposed to do? We’re prosecutors, and the cops haven’t even made an arrest yet.”

  “Bacon’s cute,” said Lubell. “He’s cute. Oh, he’s a cutie. He says the cops have talked to the kid’s mother and we’ve talked to the kid’s mother, and for some bullshit reason we’re conspiring to do nothing. We don’t care about black people in the projects.”

  All at once Weiss turned a baleful eye upon Kramer, and Kramer braced.

  “Kramer, I want you to tell me something. Did you really tell the kid’s mother that her information was useless?”

  “No, sir, I certainly did not!” Kramer realized that his answer sounded a bit too frantic. “The only thing I said was, I said that what her son said to her was hearsay, in terms of a prosecution, and what we really needed was witnesses, and she should let us know immediately if she heard of anyone who saw what happened. That’s all I said. I didn’t say what she told me was useless at all. Just the opposite. I thanked her for it. I don’t know how anybody could twist it around like that.”

  And all the while he was thinking: Why did I have to play it so cool with the woman? To impress Martin and Goldberg, so they wouldn’t think I was being soft! So they would regard me as properly Irish! Why couldn’t I have been a good sympathetic Jew? Now look at the fix I’m in…He wondered if Weiss would throw him off the case.

  But Weiss just nodded ruefully and said, “Yeah, I know…But just remember, you can’t always be logical with…” He decided not to finish the sentence. He shifted his gaze to Fitzgibbon. “Bacon can say any goddamned thing he wants to, and I have to sit here and say, ‘My hands are tied.’ ”

  “I hope you realize, Abe, these demonstrations are pure bullshit. A dozen of Bacon’s boys and another coupla dozen of the usual fruitcakes, the Monolithic Socialist Labor Party, whatever. Right, Larry?”

  “The night I was there, yeah,” said Kramer. But something told him not to play down the importance of the demonstrations. So he motioned toward the television screens and said, “But I tell you, it looks like there was a much bigger crowd last night.”

  “Well, sure,” said Lubell. “It’s the old self-fulfilling prophecy. Once it’s on TV and all over the newspapers, people figure it’s important. They figure they got to get excited about it. The old self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “Anyway,” said Weiss, “what’s the situation? What about this guy McCoy? Whadda we got on him? These two cops—what are their names?”

  “Martin and Goldberg,” said Fitzgibbon.

  “They say this is the guy, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re good men?”

  “Martin’s got a lot of experience,” said Fitzgibbon. “But he’s not infallible. Just because this guy got so worked up, that don’t necessarily mean he did anything.”

  “Park Avenue,” said Weiss. “His old man ran Dunning Sponget & Leach. Milt found his name in a couple of social columns, and his wife’s an interior decorator.” Weiss sank back in his chair and smiled, the way one smiles over impossible dreams. “That sure would put an end to this shit about white justice.”

  “Abe,” said the Irish cold shower, Fitzgibbon, “we got zip on the guy so far.”

  “Is there any way we can bring him in for questioning? We know he was driving his car the night the thing happened.”

  “He’s got a lawyer now, Abe. Tommy Killian, in fact.”

  “Tommy? I wonder how the hell he found Tommy. How do you know that?”

  “Tommy called me up. Said he represented the guy. Wanted to know why the cops were asking him questions.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said the guy’s car matches the description of the car they’re looking for. So they’re trying to check it out.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said they got a bullshit description based on hearsay.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said we also got a kid in the hospital likely to die, and the cops are investigating with the information they have.”

  “What’s the kid’s situation? Any change in his condition?”

  “Naw…He’s still in a coma, in the intensive-care unit. He’s living on tubes.”

  “Any chance he’ll regain consciousness?”

  “From what they told me, it can happen, but
it don’t mean anything. They can drift in, but they drift right back out. Besides, he can’t talk. He’s breathing from a tube down his throat.”

  “But maybe he can point,” said Weiss.

  “Point?”

  “Yeah. I got an idea.” A far-off look; the distant gaze of inspiration. “We take a picture of McCoy over to the hospital. Milt found one in one a these magazines.”

  Weiss handed Bernie Fitzgibbon a page out of some kind of social weekly called W. The page was mostly pictures of grinning people. The men had on tuxedos. The women were all teeth and gaunt faces. Kramer leaned over to have a look. One picture had been circled by a red marker. A man and a woman, both grinning, in evening dress. Look at them. The Wasps. The man had a narrow pointed nose. His head was thrown back, which brought out his big patrician chin. Such a confident…arrogant?…smile…The woman looked Wasp, too, but in a different way. She had that tight, neat, proper, composed look that immediately makes you wonder what’s wrong with what you’re wearing or what you just said. The caption said Sherman and Judy McCoy. They were at some sort of charity event. Here on floor 6M of the island fortress, when you heard a name like Sherman McCoy, you naturally assumed the person was black. But these were the originals, the Wasps. Kramer hardly ever saw them except in this form, in pictures, and the pictures showed him bland, stiff-necked aliens with pointed noses whom God, in His perversity, had favored with so much. This was no longer a conscious thought, in words, however; by now it was a reflex.

  Weiss was saying, “We take this picture of McCoy and three or four other people, three or four other white guys, over there and we put ’em by his bed. He comes to, and he points to McCoy’s picture…He keeps pointing…”

  Bernie Fitzgibbon looked at Weiss as if he were waiting for a clue, a tip, that this was only a little joke.

  “Maybe it’s worth a try,” said Weiss.

  “Who’s gonna witness all this?” said Fitzgibbon.

  “A nurse, a doctor, whoever’s there. Then we go over and take a proper dying declaration.”

  Fitzgibbon said, “Proper? How? I don’t believe what I’m hearing, Abe. Some poor gork with a tube down his throat pointing at a picture? That would never stand up.”