The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Wait a minute,” said Kramer. “Did anybody see all this happen? Was there anybody on the sidewalk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No cars stopped?”

  “Naw. I guess Henry, if he be laying there very long, maybe somebody stop. But nobody stopped.”

  “So now you’re walking up Bruckner Boulevard, back toward the project.”

  “That’s right. And Henry, he be moaning and looking like he’s fixing to pass out, and I say, ‘Henry, you got to go to the hospital.’ So I walk him on back down to Hunts Point Avenue, and we go on across to 161st Street, to the subway stop ov’eh, and I see this taxi, belongs to my man Brill.”

  “Brill?”

  “He’s a fellow that has two cabs.”

  “And he drove you to Lincoln Hospital?”

  “This fellow Curly Kale, he drove. He’s one a Brill’s drivers.”

  “Curly Kale. Is that his real name or is that a nickname?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what they call him, Curly Kale.”

  “And he drove the two of you to the hospital.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did Henry’s condition seem to be on the way to the hospital? That’s when he told you he’d hit his head?”

  “That’s right, but mostly he was talking about his arm. His wrist looked bad.”

  “Was he coherent? Was he in his right mind, the best you could tell?”

  “Like I say, he was moaning a lot and saying how his arm hurt. But he knew where he was. He knew what was happening.”

  “When you reached the hospital, what did you do?”

  “Well, we got out, and I walked with Henry to the door, to the emergency room, and he went in there.”

  “Did you go in with him?”

  “No, I got back in the cab with Curly Kale and I left.”

  “You didn’t stay with Henry?”

  “I figured I couldn’t do no more for him.” Roland cut a glance toward Hayden.

  “How did Henry get home from the hospital?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kramer paused. “All right, Roland, there’s one more thing I want to know. Why haven’t you come forth with this information before now? I mean, here you are with your friend, or your neighbor anyhow—he’s from the same project—and he’s a victim of a hit-and-run accident right in front of your eyes, and the case is on television and all over the newspapers, and we don’t hear a peep outta you until now. Whaddaya say to that?”

  Roland looked at Hayden, who merely nodded yes, and Roland said, “The cops was looking for me.”

  Hayden spoke up. “There was a warrant out for criminal sale, criminal possession, resisting arrest, and a couple of other things, the same charges he was just indicted on.”

  Kramer said to Roland, “So you were protecting yourself. You withheld this information rather than have to talk to the cops.”

  “That’s right.”

  Kramer was giddy with joy. He could already see it taking shape. This Roland was no sweetheart, but he was entirely credible. Get him out of the bodybuilder jersey and the sneakers! Break his hip so he can’t do the Pimp Roll! Bury this business of the Crack King of Evergreen Avenue! Didn’t look good to juries if a major criminal came into court offering testimony in exchange for a misdemeanor plea. But just a cleanup and a trim—that’s all this case needs! All at once Kramer could see it…the drawing…

  He said to Roland, “And you’re telling me the complete truth.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “You’re not adding anything or leaving anything out.”

  “Unh-unh.”

  Kramer went over to Jimmy Caughey’s desk, right beside Roland, and gathered up the pictures. Then he turned to Cecil Hayden.

  “Counselor,” he said, “I’ve gotta talk this over with my superiors. But unless I’m mistaken, I think we got a deal.”

  He saw it before the words were even out of his mouth…the drawing…by the courtroom artist…He could see it as if the TV screen were already right in front of him…Assistant District Attorney Lawrence N. Kramer…on his feet…his forefinger raised…his massive sternocleidomastoid muscles welling out…But how would the artist deal with his skull, where he had lost so much hair? Well, if the drawing did justice to his powerful frame, no one would notice. The courage and the eloquence…that’s what they would see. The whole city of New York would see it. Miss Shelly Thomas would see it.

  19. Donkey Loyalty

  First thing monday morning Kramer and Bernie Fitzgibbon were summoned into Abe Weiss’s office. Milt Lubell was there, too. Kramer could tell that his status had improved over the weekend. Weiss now called him Larry instead of Kramer and didn’t direct every comment about the Lamb case to Bernie, as if he, Kramer, were nothing but Bernie’s foot soldier.

  But Weiss was looking at Bernie when he said, “I don’t wanna have to futz around with this thing if I don’t have to. Have we got enough to bring in this guy McCoy or not?”

  “We got enough, Abe,” said Fitzgibbon, “but I’m not completely happy with it. We got this character Auburn who identifies McCoy as the guy who was driving the car that hit Lamb, and we got the garage attendant who says McCoy had his car out at the time the thing happened, and Martin and Goldberg found the gypsy cab operator, Brill, who verifies that Auburn used one of his cabs that evening. But they haven’t found the driver, this Curly Kale”—he rolled his eyes and sucked in his breath, as if to say, “These people and their names”—“and I think we oughta talk to him first.”

  “Why?” asked Weiss.

  “Because there’s certain things that don’t make sense, and Auburn’s a fucking lowlife drug dealer who’s out from under his rock. I’d still like to know why Lamb didn’t say anything about being hit by a car when he first went to the hospital. I’d like to know what went on in that cab, and I’d like to know if Auburn actually took the kid to the hospital. I’d like to know a little more about Auburn, too. You know, him and Lamb ain’t the types who go walking over to the Texas Fried Chicken together. I gather Lamb is a kinda good-doing boy, and Auburn’s a player.”

  Kramer felt an odd passion rising in his breast. He wanted to defend the honor of Roland Auburn. Yes! Defend him!

  Weiss waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Loose ends is what that sounds like to me, Bernie. I don’t know why we can’t bring McCoy in and book him and then tie up the loose ends. Everybody takes this ‘we’re investigating’ business to be a stalling tactic.”

  “A couple more days ain’t gonna matter, Abe. McCoy’s not going anywhere, and Auburn certainly ain’t going anywhere.”

  Kramer saw an opening and, buoyed by his new status, plunged in: “We could have a problem there, Bernie. It’s true, Auburn”—he started to say isn’t but switched to ain’t—“ain’t going anywhere, but I think we ought to use him quickly. He probably thinks he’s getting out on bail any minute. We oughta get the guy in front of a grand jury as soon as we can, if we’re gonna use him.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Fitzgibbon. “He ain’t brilliant, but he knows he’s got a choice between three years in jail and no years in jail. He’s not gonna shut up on us.”

  “That’s the deal we made?” asked Weiss. “Auburn gets nothing?”

  “That’s the way it’ll wind up. We got to dismiss the indictment and knock the charge down to misdemeanor possession, misdemeanor sale.”

  “Shit,” said Weiss. “I wish we hadn’ta moved so fast with the sonofabitch. I don’t like to dismiss grand-jury indictments.”

  “Abe,” said Fitzgibbon, smiling, “you said it, I didn’t! All I’m telling you is, take it a little slower. I’d feel a lot better if we had something else to nail down what he says.”

  Kramer couldn’t hold back. “I don’t know—what he says stands up pretty well. He was telling me things he had to be there to know about. He knew the color of the car, the number of doors—he knew it was a sports model. He knew McCoy’s first name.
He heard it as Shuhmun, but I mean, that’s pretty close. There’s no way he could’ve dreamed up all that.”

  “I’m not saying he wasn’t there, Larry, and I’m not saying we don’t use him. We use him. I’m just saying he’s a slimeball and we ought to be careful.”

  Slimeball? This is my witness you’re talking about! “I don’t know, Bernie,” he said. “From what I’ve been able to find out so far, he’s not all that bad a kid. I got hold of a probation report. He’s not a genius, but he’s never been around anybody who’s ever made him use his head. He’s third-generation welfare, his mother was fifteen when he was born, and she’s had two other kids by different fathers, and now she’s living with one of Roland’s buddies, a twenty-year-old kid, just a year older than Roland. He’s moved right in there to the apartment, along with Roland and one of the other two kids. I mean, Jesus Christ, can you imagine? I think I’d have a worse record than him. I doubt that he’s ever known a relative that lived outside the projects.”

  Bernie Fitzgibbons was now smiling at him. Kramer was startled but plowed on.

  “Another thing I found out about him, he has some talent. His probation officer showed me some pictures he’s done. They’re really interesting. They’re these whaddayacall’em…”

  “Collages?” said Fitzgibbon.

  “Yeah!” said Kramer. “Collages, with these sort of silver…”

  “Crushed aluminum foil for the skies?”

  “Yeah! You’ve seen ’em! Where’d you see ’em?”

  “I haven’t seen Auburn’s, but I’ve seen a lot like it. It’s jailhouse art.”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “You see it all the time. They do these pictures in jail. These figures, kind of like cartoon figures, right? And then they fill in the background with crushed Reynolds Wrap?”

  “Yeah…”

  “I see that crap all the time. Must be two or three lawyers come in here every year with these tinfoil pictures, telling me I’m keeping Michelangelo behind bars.”

  “Well, that may be,” said Kramer. “But I’d say this kid has some real talent.”

  Fitzgibbon said nothing. He just smiled. And now Kramer knew what the smile was all about. Bernie thought he was trying to light up his witness. Kramer knew all about that—but this was different! Lighting up the witness was a common psychological phenomenon among prosecutors. In a criminal case, your star witness was likely to be from the same milieu as the defendant and might very well have a record himself. He was not likely to be known as a pillar of probity—and yet he was the only star witness you had. At this point you were likely to feel the urge to light him up with the lamp of truth and credibility. But this was not merely a matter of improving his reputation in the eyes of a judge and jury. You felt the urge to sanitize him for yourself. You needed to believe that what you were doing with this person—namely, using him to pack another person off to jail—was not only effective but right. This worm, this germ, this punk, this erstwhile asshole was now your comrade, your point man in the battle of good against evil, and you yourself wanted to believe that a light shone round about this…organism, this former vermin from under the rock, now a put-upon and misunderstood youth.

  He knew all about that—but Roland Auburn was different!

  “All right,” said Abe Weiss, putting an end to the aesthetic debate with another wave of his hand. “It don’t matter. I got to make a decision, and I’ve made a decision. We got enough. We’re bringing McCoy in. We bring him in tomorrow morning, and we make the announcement. Tuesday’s a good day?”

  He looked at Milt Lubell when he said that. Lubell nodded sagely. “Tuesday and Wednesday are the best. Tuesday and Wednesday.” He turned to Bernie Fitzgibbon. “Mondays are lousy. All people do on Mondays is read about sports all day and watch ball games at night.”

  But Fitzgibbon was looking at Weiss. Finally he shrugged and said, “Okay, Abe. I can live with that. But if we’re gonna do it tomorrow, I better call Tommy Killian right now, before he goes into court, to make sure he can produce his man.”

  Weiss motioned toward the small table and the telephone at the end of the room, beyond the conference table, and Fitzgibbon headed down there. While Fitzgibbon was on the telephone, Weiss said, “Where are those pictures, Milt?”

  Milt Lubell dug through a pile of papers in his lap and came up with several pages from a magazine and handed them to Weiss.

  “What’s the name a this magazine, Milt?”

  “Architectural Digest.”

  “Look at this.” The next thing Kramer knew, Weiss was leaning across the desk and handing them to him. He felt tremendously flattered. He studied the pages…the creamiest paper imaginable…lush photographs in color with detail so sharp it made you blink…McCoy’s apartment…A sea of marble led up to a great curved staircase with a dark wood balustrade…Dark wood everywhere and an ornate table with about a truckload of flowers rising up from out of a big vase…It was the hall Martin had been talking about. It looked big enough to put three of Kramer’s $888-a-month ant colony in, and it was only a hall. He had heard that there were people who lived like this in New York…Another room…more dark wood…Must be the living room…So big, there were three or four clumps of heavy furniture in it…the kind of room you walk into, and you turn your voice down to a whisper…Another picture…a close-up of some carved wood, a lustrous reddish-tan wood, all these figures in suits and hats walking this way and that at odd angles in front of buildings…And now Weiss was leaning across his desk and pointing at the picture.

  “Get a loada that,” he said. “ ‘Wall Street,’ it’s called, by Wing Wong or some goddamned person, ‘Hong Kong’s master wood carver.’ Iddn’at what it says there? It’s on the wall of ‘the library.’ I like that.”

  Now Kramer could see what Martin had been talking about. ‘The library’…The Wasps…Thirty-eight…only six years older than he was…They were left all this money by their parents, and they lived in Fairyland. Well, this one was heading for a collision with the real world.

  Fitzgibbon returned from the other end of the room.

  “You talk to Tommy?” asked Weiss.

  “Yeah. He’ll have his man ready.”

  “Take a look at this,” said Weiss, motioning toward the magazine pages. Kramer handed them to Fitzgibbon. “McCoy’s apartment,” said Weiss.

  Fitzgibbon took a quick look at the pictures and handed them back to Kramer.

  “You ever seen anything like it?” asked Weiss. “His wife was the decorator. Am I right, Milt?”

  “Yeah, she’s one a these social decorators,” said Lubell, “one a these rich women who decorate places for other rich women. They run articles about them in New York magazine.”

  Weiss kept looking at Fitzgibbon, but Fitzgibbon said nothing. Then Weiss opened his eyes wide in a look of revelation. “Can you picture it, Bernie?”

  “Picture what?”

  “Well, here’s the way I see it,” said Weiss. “What I think would be a good idea, to stop all this bullshit about white justice and Johannesbronx and all that crap, is we arrest him in his apartment. I think that would be a hell of a thing. You wanna tell the people of this borough that the law is no respecter of persons, you arrest a guy from Park Avenue the same way you arrest José García or Tyrone Smith. You go into their fucking apartment, am I right?”

  “Yeah,” said Fitzgibbon, “because they ain’t coming in any other way.”

  “That’s not the point. We have an obligation to the people of this borough. This office is being held up to them in a very bad light, and this’ll put an end to that.”

  “Isn’t that kinda rough, taking a guy in his home to make a point?”

  “There’s no wonderful way to get arrested, Bernie.”

  “Well, we can’t do that,” said Fitzgibbon.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I just told Tommy we wouldn’t do it that way. I told him he could surrender McCoy himself.”

  “Well, I’m so
rry, but you shouldna done that, Bernie. We can’t guarantee anybody we’ll give his client special treatment. You know that.”

  “I don’t know that, Abe. I gave him my word.”

  Kramer looked at Weiss. Kramer knew the Donkey had now dug in, but did Weiss? Apparently not.

  “Look, Bernie, you just tell Tommy I overruled you, okay? You can blame it on me. I’ll take all the heat for it. We’ll make it up to Tommy.”

  “Negative,” said Fitzgibbon. “You’re not gonna have to take the heat, Abe, because it’s not gonna happen. I gave Tommy my word. It’s a contract.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes you just gotta—”

  “Oongots, Abe, it’s a contract.”

  Kramer kept his eyes on Weiss. Bernie’s repetition of the word contract had gotten to him. Kramer could see it. Weiss had come to a dead stop. Now he knew he was up against that obstinate Irish code of loyalty. Silently Kramer begged Weiss to throw his subordinate aside. Donkey loyalty! It was obscene! Why should he, Kramer, have to suffer for the sake of the fraternal solidarity of the Irish? A highly publicized arrest of this Wall Street investment banker in his apartment—it happened to be a brilliant idea! Demonstrate the evenhandedness of justice in the Bronx—absolutely! Assistant District Attorney Lawrence Kramer—the Times, the News, the Post, The City Light, Channel 1, and the rest of them would know his name by heart soon enough! Why should Abe Weiss cave in to the code of these Harps? And yet he knew he would. He could see it in his face. It wasn’t just Bernie Fitzgibbon’s black Irish toughness, either. It was also that word contract. That cut straight to the soul of every lifer in this business. At the Favor Bank all due bills had to be redeemed. That was the law of the criminal-justice system, and Abe Weiss was nothing if not a creature of the system.

  “Well, shit, Bernie,” said Weiss, “whudja do that for? F’r Chrissake…”

  The standoff was over.

  “Believe me, Abe, you’re gonna look better this way. They can’t say you gave in to the passions of the crowd.”