The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “How did you find his car?”

  “That was simple. He told us he kept it in a garage. So I figured, if you got as much money as this sonofabitch has, you’re gonna keep your car in the nearest garage. So I asked the doorman where’s the nearest parking garage. That’s all. Didn’t even mention McCoy.”

  “And the garage, they just showed you the car?”

  “Yeah, I just flashed the badge, and Davey stood on the other side of him and stared holes in his head. You know, a mean Jew looks a lot meaner than a mean Harp.”

  Goldberg beamed. He took this as a great compliment.

  “The guy says, ‘Which car?’ ” said Goldberg. “Turns out they keep two cars in the garage, the Mercedes and a Mercury station wagon, and it costs $410 a month to keep a car in there. It’s posted on the wall. Eight hundred and twenty dollars a month for two cars. That’s two hundred dollars more than I pay for my whole fucking house in Dix Hills.”

  “So the guy shows you the car?” asked Fitzgibbon.

  “He tells us where it is and says, ‘Help yourself,’ ” said Goldberg. “I get the idea he’s not too crazy about McCoy.”

  “Well, he don’t go outta his way to look out for him,” said Martin. “I asked him if the car was used Tuesday a week ago, in the evening, and he says, Oh sure, he remembers it very well. McCoy takes it out about six and comes back about ten, looking like a mess.”

  “Nice to have people looking out for your interests,” said Goldberg.

  “Alone?” asked Fitzgibbon.

  “That’s what he said,” said Martin.

  “So you feel sure this is the guy.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Okay,” said Fitzgibbon, “then how do we get a case?”

  “We got the start a one now,” said Martin. “We know he was driving his car that night.”

  “Give us twenty more minutes with the fucker and we’ll get the rest,” said Goldberg. “He’s got the bitch coming out a him already.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” said Fitzgibbon, “although you can try. You know, we really ain’t got shit. We got no witnesses. The kid himself is out of it. We don’t even know where it happened. Not only that, the kid comes into the hospital the night it happens, and he don’t say anything about getting hit by a car.”

  A light began to dawn. Kramer broke in: “Maybe he was already gaga.” A radiance emanated from this erstwhile piece a shit. “We know he took a pretty good shot to the head.”

  “Maybe,” said Fitzgibbon, “but that don’t give me anything to move with, and I’m telling you, Abe is gonna wanna move. He was not happy about that demonstration yesterday. WEISS JUSTICE IS WHITE JUSTICE. That was all over the newspapers, and it was on TV.”

  “And it was bullshit,” said Goldberg. “We were there. A couple dozen pickets, half a them the usual nutballs, this Reva Whatsis and her elves, and the rest a them were rubberneckers.”

  “Try telling that to Abe. He saw it on TV, like everybody else.”

  “Well, you know,” said Kramer, “this guy McCoy sounds like somebody we can smoke out maybe.”

  “Smoke out?”

  “Yeah. I’m just thinking out loud now—but maybe by going public with it…”

  “Going public?” said Fitzgibbon. “Are you kidding? With what? The guy gets squirrelly when two cops come to his apartment to question him, and he was driving his car on the night the kid was hit? You know what that adds up to? Nothing.”

  “I said I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “Yeah, well, do me a favor. Don’t think out loud that way in front of Abe. He’s just liable to take you seriously.”

  Reade Street was one of those old streets down near the courthouses and City Hall. It was a narrow street, and the buildings on either side, office buildings and light-industry lofts with cast-iron columns and architraves, kept it in a dismal gloaming, even on a bright spring day like this. Gradually the buildings in this area, which was known as TriBeCa, for “triangle below Canal Street,” were being renovated as offices and apartments, but the area retained an irreducible grime. On the fourth floor of an old cast-iron building, Sherman walked down a corridor with a dingy tile floor.

  Halfway down the corridor was a plastic plate incised with the names DERSHKIN, BELLAVITA, FISHBEIN & SCHLOSSEL. Sherman opened the door and found himself in a tiny and overpoweringly bright glassed-in vestibule tended by a Latin woman who sat behind a glass partition. He gave his name and asked to see Mr. Killian, and the woman pressed a buzzer. A glass door led to a larger, even brighter space with white walls. The lights overhead were so strong Sherman kept his head down. An orange industrial cord carpet covered the floor. Sherman squinted, trying to avoid the ferocious wattage. Just ahead, on the floor, he could make out the base of a couch. The base was made of white Formica. Pale tan leather cushions were on top of it. Sherman sat down, and his tailbone immediately slid forward. The seat seemed to tilt the wrong way. His shoulder blades hit the back cushions, which rested against a slab of Formica set perpendicular to the base. Gingerly he lifted his head. There was another couch across from him. On it were two men and a woman. One man had on a blue-and-white running suit with two big panels of electric-blue leather in front. The other man wore a trench coat made of some dull, dusty, grainy hide, elephant perhaps, with shoulders cut so wide he seemed gigantic. The woman wore a black leather jacket, also cut very large, black leather pants, and black boots that folded down below the knee like a pirate’s. All three of them were squinting, just as Sherman was. They also kept sliding forward and then twitching and squirming back up, and their leather clothes rustled and squeaked. The Leather People. Jammed together on the couch, they resembled an elephant tormented by flies.

  A man entered the reception area from an inner hallway, a tall thin bald man with bristling eyebrows. He wore a shirt and a tie but no jacket, and he had a revolver in a holster high on his left hip. He gave Sherman the sort of dead smile a doctor might give in a waiting room if he didn’t want to be detained. Then he went back inside.

  Voices from the inner hallway: a man and a woman. The man appeared to be pushing the woman forward. The woman took little steps and looked back at him over her shoulder. The man was tall and slender, probably in his late thirties. He wore a double-breasted navy-blue suit with a pale blue overplaid and a striped shirt with a stiff white collar. The collar had an exaggerated spread, very much a sharpie’s look, to Sherman’s way of thinking. He had a lean face, a delicate face, you might have said, had it not been for his nose, which appeared to have been broken. The woman was young, no more than twenty-five, all breasts, bright red lips, raging hair, and sultry makeup, popping out of a black turtleneck sweater. She wore black pants and teetered atop a pair of black spike-heel shoes.

  At first their voices were muffled. Then the woman’s voice became louder and the man’s became lower. It was the classic case. The man wants to confine matters to a quiet private argument, but the woman decides to play one of her trump cards, which is Making a Scene. There is Making a Scene, and there is Tears. This was Making a Scene. The woman’s voice became louder and louder, and at last the man’s rose, too.

  “But you gotta,” the woman said.

  “But I don’t gotta, Irene.”

  “What am I suppose a do? Rot?”

  “You suppose a pay your bills like everybody else,” he said, mimicking her. “You already beat me for half my fee. And then you keep asking me to do things that could get me disbarred.”

  “You dun care.”

  “It ain’t that I dun care, Irene. It’s that I dun care anymore. You don’t pay your bills. Don’t look at me like that. You’re on your own.”

  “But you gotta! What happens if they rearrest me?”

  “You shoulda thoughta that, Irene. What did I tell you the first time you walked into this office? I told you two things. I told you, ‘Irene, I’m not gonna be your friend. I’m gonna be your lawyer. But I’m gonna do more for you than your friends.’ And I said
, ‘Irene, you know why I do this? I do it for money.’ And then I said, ‘Irene, remember those two things.’ Idd’n’at right? Did’n I say that?”

  “I can’t go back there,” she said. She lowered her heavy Tropical Twilight eyelids and then her whole head. Her lower lip trembled; her head and the raging hair shook, so did her shoulders.

  The Tears.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Irene. Come on!”

  The Tears.

  “All right. Look…I’ll find out if they’re going after you on a 220–31, and I’ll represent you on rearraignment if they are, but that’s it.”

  The Tears!—victorious even after these many millennia. The woman nodded like a penitent child. She walked out through the blazing waiting room. Her bottom bobbed in a glossy black shimmer. One of the Leather Men looked at Sherman and smiled, man to man, and said, “Ay, caramba.”

  On this alien terrain Sherman felt obliged to smile back.

  The sharpie came into the reception room and said, “Mr. McCoy? I’m Tom Killian.”

  Sherman stood up and shook hands. Killian didn’t shake hands very firmly; Sherman thought of the two detectives. He followed Killian down a hallway with more spotlights.

  Killian’s office was small, modern, and grim. It had no window. But at least it wasn’t bright. Sherman looked at the ceiling. Of the nine recessed spotlights, seven had been unscrewed or allowed to burn out.

  Sherman said, “The lights out there…” He shook his head and didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Killian. “That’s what you get when you fuck your decorator. The guy who leased this place, he brought in this number, and she thought the building was gloomy. She put in, I mean, lights. The woman had watt fever. The place is supposed to remind you of Key Biscayne. That’s what she said.”

  Sherman didn’t hear anything after “fuck your decorator.” As a Master of the Universe, he took a masculine pride in the notion that he could handle all sides of life. But now, like many respectable American males before him, he was discovering that All Sides of Life were colorful mainly when you were in the audience. Fuck your decorator. How could he let any decision affecting his life be made by this sort of person in this sort of atmosphere? He had called in sick—that lamest, weakest, most sniveling of life’s small lies—to Pierce & Pierce; for this itching slum of the legal world.

  Killian motioned toward a chair, a modern chair with a curved chrome frame and Chinese-red upholstery, and Sherman sat down. The back was too low. There was no way to get comfortable. Killian’s chair, behind the desk, didn’t look much better.

  Killian let out a sigh and rolled his eyes again. “You heard me conferring with my client, Miss—” He made a curve in the air with his cupped hand.

  “I did. Yes.”

  “Well, there you had criminal law in its basic form with all the elements.” Well, theh you ed crim’nal lawr in its basic fawuhm wit’allee elements. At first Sherman thought the man was talking this way as further mimicry of the woman who had just left. Then he realized it wasn’t her accent. It was Killian’s own. The starched dandy who sat before him had a New York street accent, full of dropped consonants and tortured vowels. Nevertheless, he had lifted Sherman’s spirits a notch or two by indicating that he knew Sherman was new to the world of criminal law and that he existed on a plateau far above it.

  “What sort of case?” asked Sherman.

  “Drugs. Who else can afford a trial lawyer for eight weeks?” Then, without any transition, he said: “Freddy told me your problem. I also been reading about the case in the tabloids. Freddy’s a great man, but he has too much class to read the tabloids. I read ’em. So whyn’t you tell me what actually happened.”

  To his surprise, once he got started, Sherman found it easy to tell his story in this place, to this man. Like a priest, his confessor, this dandy with a fighter’s nose, was from another order.

  Every now and then a plastic intercom box on Killian’s desk would give an electronic beep, and the receptionist’s faintly Latin voice would say, “Mr. Killian…Mr. Scannesi on 3–0” or “Mr. Rothblatt on 3–1,” and Killian would say, “Tell ’im I’ll call ’im back,” and Sherman would resume. But then the machine beeped, and the voice said, “Mr. Leong on 3–0.”

  “Tell ’im—I’ll take it.” Killian gave his hand a deprecating flap in the air, as if to say, “This is nothing compared to what we’re talking about, but I’ll have to talk to this person for half a second.”

  “Ayyyy, Lee,” said Killian. “Whaddaya whaddaya?…No kiddin’?…Hey, Lee, I was just reading a book about you…Well, not about you but about you Leongs…Would I kid you? Whaddaya think, I want a hatchet in my back?”

  Sherman grew increasingly irritated. At the same time, he was impressed. Apparently Killian was representing one of the defendants in the Chinatown voting scandal.

  Finally Killian hung up and turned to Sherman and said, “So you took the car back to the garage and you exchanged a few words with the attendant and you walked home.” This was no doubt to show that he hadn’t been distracted by the interruption.

  Sherman kept going, concluding with the visit of the two detectives, Martin and Goldberg, to his apartment.

  Killian leaned forward and said, “Awright. The first thing you gotta understand is, from now on, you gotta keep your mouth shut. You understand? You got nothing to gain, nothing, by talking about this”—tawkin—“to anybody, I don’t care who it is. All that’s gonna happen is, you’re gonna get jerked around some more like you did by these two cops.”

  “What should I have done? They were in the building. They knew I was upstairs. If I refused to talk to them, that would be like a clear indication I had something to hide.”

  “All you hadda do was tell them, ‘Gentlemen, it’s nice to meet you, you’re conducting an investigation, I have absolutely no experience in this area, so I’m gonna turn you over to my attorney, good evening, don’t let the doorknob hit you in the back on your way out.’ ”

  “But even that—”

  “It’s better’n what happened, right? As a matter of fact, they woulda probably figured, Well, here’s this Park Avenue swell who’s too busy or too above-it-all to talk to characters like us. He’s got people who do things like that for him. It wouldn’t’ve prejudiced your case at all, probably. From now on, it sure as hell won’t.” He started chuckling. “The guy actually read your rights to you, hunh? I wish I coulda seen it. The dumb fuck probably lives in a two-family in Massapequa, and he’s sitting there in an apartment on Park Avenue in the Seventies, and he’s gotta inform you that if you are unable to afford a lawyer, the state will provide you one. He’s gotta read you the whole thing.”

  Sherman was chilled by the man’s detached amusement. “All right,” he said, “but what does it mean?”

  “It means they’re trying to get evidence for a criminal charge.”

  “What kind?”

  “What kinda evidence or what kinda charge?”

  “What kind of charge.”

  “They have several possibilities. Assuming Lamb don’t die”—don’t—“there’s reckless endangerment.”

  “Is that the same as reckless driving?”

  “No, it’s a felony. It’s a fairly serious felony. Or if they really want to get hard-nosed about it, they could work on a theory of assault with a dangerous weapon, meaning the car. If Lamb dies, that creates two more possibilities. Manslaughter is one, and criminally negligent homicide is the other, although all the time I was in the D.A.’s office up there I never heard a charging anybody with criminally negligent homicide unless there was drunk driving involved. On top a that they got leaving the scene of an accident and failure to report an accident. Both felonies.”

  “But since I wasn’t driving the car at the time this fellow was hit, can they bring any of these charges against me?”

  “Before we get to that, let me explain something to you. Maybe they can’t bring charges against anybody.”


  “They can’t?” Sherman felt his entire nervous system quicken at this first sign of hope.

  “You looked your car over pretty carefully, right? No dents? No blood? No tissue? No broken glass? Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s pretty obvious the kid wasn’t hit very hard. The emergency room treated him for a broken wrist and let him go. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The fact of the matter is, you don’t even know if your car hit him, do you.”

  “Well, I did hear something.”

  “With all the shit that was going on at that moment, that coulda been anything. You heard something. You didn’t see anything. You don’t really know, do you?”

  “Well…that’s true.”

  “You beginning to see why I don’t want you to talk to anybody?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I mean anybody. Okay? Now. Here’s another thing. Maybe it wasn’t your car that hit him. Did that possibility ever occur to you? Maybe it wasn’t any car. You don’t know. And they don’t know, the cops don’t know. These stories in the newspaper are very strange. Here’s this big case, supposedly, but nobody knows where this cockamamie hit’n’run’s supposed’ve taken place. Bruckner Boulevard. Bruckner Boulevard’s five miles long! They got no witnesses. What the kid told his mother is hearsay. It don’t”—don’t—“mean a thing. They have no description of a driver. Even if they could establish that it was your car that hit him—they can’t arrest a car. One a the garage attendants coulda loaned it to his sister-in-law’s nephew so he could go up to Fordham Road to kiss his girlfriend good night. They don’t know. And you don’t know. As a matter of fact, stranger things have happened.”