The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “All right, Bonita.” He tried to sound like someone who was already bored and knew he was in for a further waste of time. “What doorman’s on tonight? Eddie?”

  “Eddie.”

  “Tell him to send them on up. Have them wait here. I’ll be back down in a minute.”

  He walked very deliberately up the staircase. When he reached the upstairs hallway, he hurried to the bedroom. What he saw in the mirror was someone very bleary and rumpled. He thrust his chin upward. That helped. He would be strong. He wouldn’t lose his head. He would be…he allowed himself the phrase…a Master of the Universe.

  How should he look? Should he put his jacket and tie back on? He had on a white shirt, the pants of a gray nailhead worsted suit and a pair of black cap-toed shoes. With the tie and the jacket on, he would look terribly Wall Street, terribly conservative. They might resent that. He hurried into the other bedroom, which had become his dressing room, and took a tweed jacket with a plaid design from the closet and slipped it on. Time rolling by, rolling by. Much more casual, relaxed; a man in his own home, completely relaxed. But the soft tweed jacket didn’t go with the hard-finished pants. Besides…a sport jacket…a sport…a young rip who takes wild rides in a sports roadster…He took off the tweed jacket and threw it on the daybed and hurried back to the master bedroom. His jacket and tie were strewn across a stuffed chair. He put on the tie and pulled it up into a tight knot. Time rolling by, rolling by. He put on the jacket and buttoned it. He lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. Wall Street. He went into the bathroom and brushed his hair back. He lifted his chin again. Be strong. A Master of the Universe.

  He rushed back down the hallway, then slowed down as he neared the stairs. He descended with a slow tread and tried to remember to keep himself erect.

  They were standing in the middle of the marble floor, two men and Bonita. How strange it all seemed! The two men stood slightly spread-legged, and Bonita stood seven or eight feet away, as if they were her little flock. His heart was beating at a good clip.

  The larger of the two looked like a great slab of meat with clothes on. His suit jacket sat out from his wrestler’s gut like cardboard. He had a fat swarthy face, a Mediterranean face, to Sherman’s way of thinking. He had a mustache that didn’t go with his hair. The mustache curled down each side of his lips, a style that to a Pierce & Pierce bond salesman immediately said Lower Class. This one stared at Sherman as he came down the stairs, but the other one, the smaller one, didn’t. He was wearing a sport jacket and the sort of brown pants a wife might choose to go with it. He was taking in the entry gallery, like a tourist…the marble, the yew-wood glove chest, the apricot-silk on the walls, the Thomas Hope chairs, Judy’s tens of thousands of hemorrhaging dollars’ worth of perfect little details…The man’s nose was big, and his chin and jaw were weak. He held his head cocked at an angle. He looked as if some terrific force had hit him on one side of his head. Then he turned his cockeyed stare toward Sherman. Sherman was aware of his heartbeat and the sound his shoes made as he walked across the marble. He kept his chin up and made himself smile amiably.

  “Gentlemen, how can I help you?” He looked at the big one when he said it, but it was the little one, the cockeyed one, who answered.

  “Mr. McCoy? I’m Detective Martin, and this is Detective Goldberg.”

  Should he shake hands? Might as well. He held out his hand, and the small one shook it and then the large one. It seemed to embarrass them. They didn’t shake hands very forcefully.

  “We’re investigating an automobile accident involving a personal injury. Maybe you’ve read about it or seen something about it on television.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper, folded once down the middle. He handed it to Sherman. On it was a newspaper clipping, the original story from The City Light. The picture of the tall skinny boy. Parts of the story were underlined in a yellow marker. Bruckner Boulevard. Mercedes-Benz. R. Would his fingers tremble! If he held the paper long enough to read the entire story, they would. He looked up at the two detectives.

  “We saw something about this on television last night, my wife and I.” Should he say he was surprised? Or what a coincidence? It dawned on him, in just these words: I don’t know how to lie. “We thought, Good Lord, we have a Mercedes, and the license number starts with R.” He glanced back down at the clipping and quickly returned it to the small one, Martin.

  “You and a lotta people,” said Martin with a reassuring smile. “We’re trying to check ’em all out.”

  “How many are there?”

  “A lot. We got a lotta officers working on this. My partner and me got a list here with about twenty on it ourselves.”

  Bonita was still standing there, looking on, taking it all in.

  “Well, come on in here,” Sherman said to the one called Martin. He motioned toward the library. “Bonita, do me a favor. If Mrs. McCoy and Campbell come back, tell them I’ll be busy with these gentlemen, in the library.”

  Bonita nodded and retreated toward the kitchen.

  In the library, Sherman went around behind the desk and gestured toward the wing chair and the Sheraton armchair. The little one, Martin, looked all around. Sherman became acutely aware of how much obviously expensive…stuff…was crammed into this one small room…the fabulous clutter…the knickknacks…and when the little detective’s eyes reached the carved frieze, they remained pinned there. He turned toward Sherman with an open, boyish look on his face, as if to say, Not bad! Then he sat down in the armchair, and the big one, Goldberg, sat down in the wing chair. Sherman sat down behind the desk.

  “Well, let’s see,” said Martin. “Can you tell us if your car was in use the night this happened?”

  “When exactly was it?” Well—now I’m committed to lying.

  “Tuesday a week ago,” said Martin.

  “I don’t know,” said Sherman, “I’d have to try to figure.”

  “How many people use your car?”

  “Me mostly, sometimes my wife.”

  “You have any children?”

  “I have a daughter, but she’s only six.”

  “Anybody else have access to the car?”

  “No, I guess not, except for the people at the garage.”

  “The garage?” asked Martin. “A parking garage?”

  “Yes.” Why had he mentioned the garage?

  “You leave the car there, with the keys, and they park it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it, the garage?”

  “It’s…near here.” Sherman’s mind began spinning at a furious rate. They suspect the attendants! No, that’s crazy. Dan! He could see the chubby little redheaded troll. He’ll be happy to tell them I took the car out that night! Perhaps he wouldn’t remember or wouldn’t know what night it was. Oh, he’ll know! The way I froze him out—

  “Could we go there and take a look at it?”

  Sherman’s mouth had gone dry. He could feel his lips contracting.

  “The car?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon’s we leave here’s good a time as any, for us.”

  “You mean now? Well, I don’t know…” Sherman felt as if the muscles of his lips were being constricted by a purse string.

  “There’s certain things that’s consistent with an incident like this. If a car don’t have those things, then we keep on going down the list. At this point we’re looking for a car. We don’t have a description of a driver. So—that okay with you?”

  “Well…I don’t know…” No! Let them look at it! There’s nothing for them to find! Or is there? Something I don’t know about, never heard of! But if I say no—they’ll be suspicious! Say yes! But suppose the little redheaded attendant is on!

  “It’s the routine. We look at all the cars.”

  “I know, but, uh, if this, uh, is a routine, then I guess I ought to…follow the routine that I—that’s appropriate to me, to someone with a car in this situation.” His mouth
kept tightening. He saw the two men exchange glances.

  The small one, Martin, had a look of great disappointment on his face. “You want to cooperate, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, this is no big deal. This is part of the routine. We check the cars.”

  “I know, but if there’s a routine—then that’s what I should do, too, follow a routine. Or that would be the logical thing, it seems to me.”

  Sherman was acutely aware of sputtering nonsense, but he hung on to this word routine for dear life. If only he could control the muscles around his mouth—

  “I’m sorry, I don’t get it,” said Martin. “What routine?”

  “Well, you mentioned a routine, your routine, for investigating a case like this. I don’t know how these things work, but there must be a routine for the owner of a car in this situation—I mean, I happen to own a car of a make and a license number—with a license number—and I know there must be a routine. That’s what I’m trying to say. I think that’s what I need to consider. The routine.”

  Martin stood up and started looking at the carved frieze again. His eyes followed it halfway around the room. Then he looked at Sherman with his head at the cockeyed angle. There was a small smile on his lips. Impudent! Chilling!

  “Awright, the routine is—it ain’t nothing complicated. If you wanna cooperate with us, and you don’t mind cooperating with us, then you cooperate with us and we look at the car, and we go on our way. Nothing complicated. Okay? If you don’t wanna cooperate, if you have your reasons for not cooperating, then you don’t cooperate, and then we have to go through channels, and the same thing happens anyway, and so it’s up to you.”

  “Well, it’s just that…” He didn’t know how he was going to end the sentence.

  “When’s the last time you drove your car, Mr. McCoy?” It was the other one, the big one, Goldberg, who was still sitting in the wing chair. For an instant Sherman was grateful for the change of subject.

  “Let me see…Over the weekend, I guess, unless…let me see, have I driven it since then…”

  “How many times you driven it over the past two weeks?”

  “I don’t know exactly…Let me see…”

  He was looking at the great slab of meat in the wing chair, desperately trying to figure out how to lie to these questions—and out of the corner of his eye he could see the smaller one walking toward him, around the side of the desk.

  “How often you usually drive it?” asked Goldberg.

  “It varies.”

  “How many times a week?”

  “As I say, it varies.”

  “It varies. You drive it to work?”

  Sherman stared at the great slab of meat with the mustache. Something grossly insolent about this interrogation. Time to cut it off, assert himself. But what tone to take? These two were connected by an invisible line to a dangerous…Power…that he did not comprehend. What?—

  The small one, Martin, had now come all the way around to his side of the desk. From way down here in his chair, Sherman looked up at Martin, and Martin looked down upon him with his cockeyed expression. At first he looked very sad. Then he smiled a brave smile.

  “Look, Mr. McCoy,” he said, smiling through his sadness, “I’m sure you wanna cooperate, and I don’t wanna see you get hung up on the routine. It’s just that we gotta go over everything in this case very carefully, because the victim, this Mr. Lamb, is in very bad shape. The best information we got is, he’s gonna die. So we’re asking everybody to cooperate, but there’s nothing says you have to. If you want to, you can say nothing at all. You have that right. You understand?”

  When he said, “You understand?” he cocked his head at an extreme angle and smiled an incredulous smile that indicated Sherman would have to be a terrible ingrate, troublemaker, and callous citizen, indeed, if he did not cooperate.

  Then he put both hands on the top of Sherman’s desk and leaned forward until his arms supported the weight of his upper body. This brought his face closer to Sherman’s, although he was still looking down at him.

  “I mean, you know,” he said, “you have the right to an attorney.”

  The way he said attorney, it was as if he was trying to think of every crazy and ridiculous choice a man—a smaller and far more devious man than Sherman McCoy—might have. “You understand, don’t you?”

  Sherman found himself nodding yes in spite of himself. A cold tremor began to spread through his body.

  “I mean, for that matter, if you lacked the funds for an attorney”—he said this with such a comradely smile and such great good humor, it was as if he and Sherman had been pals for years and had their little jokes—“and you wanted an attorney, the state would provide you with one free of charge. If there was any reason you wanted one.”

  Sherman nodded again. He stared at the man’s lopsided face. He felt powerless to act or resist. The man’s message seemed to be: “I don’t need to tell you these things. You’re a substantial citizen, and you’re above them. But if you aren’t…then you must be the kind of germ we have to exterminate.”

  “All I’m saying is, we need your cooperation.”

  Then he swung about and sat on the edge of the desk and looked straight down into Sherman’s face. He’s sitting on the edge of my desk!

  He smiled the warmest smile imaginable and asked softly, “Well, what about it, Mr. McCoy? My partner was asking if you drive your car to work.” He kept smiling.

  The effrontery! The threat! Sitting on my desk! The barbarous insolence!

  “Well, do you?” Smiling his lopsided smile. “You drive it to work?”

  Fear and outrage welled up together. But fear rose higher. “No…I don’t.”

  “Then when do you use it?”

  “On the weekends…Or—whenever it’s convenient…during the day or maybe sometimes at night. I mean not much during the day except when my wife uses it, which is to say, I mean, it’s hard to say.”

  “Could your wife a been using it Tuesday night a week ago?”

  “No! I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “So it might be you use it any time, but you don’t remember.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that—I use the car, I don’t make a note of it, I don’t keep a record. I don’t think that much about it, I guess.”

  “How often do you use it at night?”

  Desperately Sherman tried to calculate the correct answer. If he said often, did that make it more likely he was out driving that night? But if he said seldom—then wouldn’t he be more certain about whether he was driving or not that particular night?

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not a lot—but I guess reasonably often, comparatively.”

  “Not a lot but reasonably often comparatively,” said the little detective in a monotone. By the time he reached comparatively, he was looking at his partner. He turned back and looked down at Sherman once more from his perch on the edge of the desk.

  “Well, let’s get back to the car. Why don’t we go take a look at it. Whaddaya say?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure.”

  “This isn’t a good time.”

  “You got an appointment or something?”

  “I’m—waiting for my wife.”

  “You going out?”

  “I—uhhhhhhhhhhh.” The first-person singular degenerated into a sigh.

  “You going out in the car?” asked Goldberg. “We could take a look at it. Don’t take a second.”

  For an instant Sherman thought of bringing the car from the garage and letting them look at it in front of the building. But suppose they didn’t sit still for that? Suppose they came along—and talked to Dan?

  “I hear you say your wife’s coming home soon?” asked the smaller one. “Maybe we oughta wait and talk to her, too. Maybe she’ll remember if anybody was using the car Tuesday night a week ago.”

  “Well, she—this just isn’t a good time, gentlemen.”

  “Wh
en is a good time?” asked the smaller one.

  “I don’t know. If you can just give me a little time to think about it.”

  “Think about what? When’s a good time? Or if you’re gonna cooperate?”

  “It’s not a question of that. I’m—well, I’m worried about the procedure.”

  “The procedure?”

  “Just how this should be handled. Correctly.”

  “Is the procedure the same as the routine?” The detective peered down at him with an insulting little smile.

  “Procedure…routine…I’m not familiar with the terminology. I suppose it does come out the same.”

  “I’m not familiar with it, either, Mr. McCoy, because there ain’t no such terminology, ain’t no such procedure, ain’t no such routine. You either cooperate in an investigation or you don’t. I thought you wanted to cooperate?”

  “I do, but you’ve narrowed the choices.”

  “What choices?”

  “Well—look. I guess what I should do is, I should…I should talk this over with an attorney.”

  As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he felt he had made a terrible admission.

  “As I told you,” said the little detective, “that’s your right. But why would you wanna talk to an attorney? Why would you wanna go to that trouble and expense?”

  “I just want to make sure I proceed”—immediately he was afraid he would be in trouble for uttering the verb form of procedure—“correctly.”

  The fat one, sitting in the wing chair, spoke up. “Let me ask you something, Mr. McCoy. Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?”

  Sherman grew cold. “Get off my chest?”

  “Because if there is”—a fatherly smile—insolence!—“now is the time to do it, before things go any further and get complicated.”

  “What would I have to get off my chest?” He meant to sound firm, but it came out…bewildered.

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  Sherman stood up and shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any use continuing this right now. I’m gonna have to talk—”