by Tom Wolfe
“You always make yourself clear, Judge.”
Kovitsky eyed him, apparently trying to decide if there was any insolence in the remark. “All right, then you know that if you pull any more of that arrant bullshit in this courtroom, you’re gonna wish you never laid eyes on Mike Kovitsky!”
He couldn’t just take this, with Killian standing right there, and so he said, “Look, Judge, I have every right—”
Kovitsky broke in: “Every right to do what? Run Abe Weiss’s reelection campaign for him in my courtroom? Bullshit, Mr. Kramer! Tell him to hire a hall, call a press conference. Tell him to go on a talk show, f’r Chrissake.”
Kramer was so angry he couldn’t speak. His face was flaming red. Between his teeth he said, “Is that all, Judge?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heels and started away.
“Mr. Kramer!”
He stopped and turned around. Glowering, Kovitsky motioned him back to the bench. “Mr. Killian has a question, I believe. Or do you want me to listen to him by myself?”
Kramer just clenched his teeth and stared.
“All right, Mr. Killian, go ahead.”
Killian said, “Judge, I am in possession of important evidence that bears not only upon Mr. Kramer’s application concerning bail but upon the validity of the indictment itself.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“I have tapes of conversations between my client and a principal in this case that make it appear highly likely that tainted testimony was presented to the grand jury.”
What the hell was this? Kramer broke in: “Judge, this is nonsense. We have a valid indictment from the grand jury. If Mr. Killian has any quarrel—”
“Just hold it, Mr. Kramer,” said Kovitsky.
“—if he has any quarrel with the grand-jury proceedings, he has the customary avenues—”
“Just hold it. Mr. Killian says he has some evidence—”
“Evidence! This isn’t an evidentiary hearing, Judge! He can’t come walking in here and dispute the grand-jury process, ex post facto! And you can’t—”
“MR. KRAMER!”
The sound of Kovitsky raising his voice sent a growl through the demonstrators, who were all at once rumbling again.
Eyes surfing on the turbulent sea: “Mr. Kramer, you know your problem? You don’t fucking listen, do you! You can’t fucking hear!”
“Judge—”
“SHUDDUP! The court is gonna listen to Mr. Killian’s evidence.”
“Judge—”
“We’re gonna do this in camera.”
“In camera? Why?”
“Mr. Killian says he has some tapes. First we’re gonna listen to ’em in camera.”
“Look, Judge—”
“You don’t wanna go in camera, Mr. Kramer? You afraid you gonna miss your audience?”
Seething, Kramer looked down and shook his head.
Sherman was stranded back at the fence, the bar. Quigley was somewhere behind him, holding the heavy case. But mainly…they were behind him. When would it begin? He kept his eyes fixed on the three figures at the judge’s bench. He didn’t dare let his eyes wander. Then the voices began. They came from behind him in menacing singsongs.
“Your last mile, McCoy!”
“Last supper.”
Then a soft falsetto: “Last breath.”
Somewhere, on either side, were court officers. They were doing nothing to stop it. They’re as frightened as I am!
The same falsetto: “Yo, Sherman, why you squirmin’?”
Squirming. Evidently the others liked that. They began piping up in falsetto, too.
“Sherrr-maaannnn…”
“Squirmin’ Sherman!”
Sniggers and laughter.
Sherman stared at the bench, wherein seemed to reside his only hope. As if in answer to his supplication, the judge now looked toward him and said, “Mr. McCoy, would you step up here a minute?”
A rumble and a chorus of falsettos as he started walking. As he drew near the bench, he heard the assistant district attorney, Kramer, say, “I don’t understand, Judge. What purpose is served by the presence of the defendant?”
The judge said, “It’s his motion and his evidence. Besides, I don’t want him rattling around out here. That okay with you, Mr. Kramer?”
Kramer said nothing. He glared at the judge and then at Sherman.
The judge said, “Mr. McCoy, you’re gonna come with me and Mr. Killian and Mr. Kramer into my chambers.”
Then he gave three loud raps with his gavel and said to the room, “The court will now convene with the attorney for the People and the counsel for the defense in camera. In my absence the proper decorum WILL BE MAINTAINED in this room. Do I make myself clear?”
The rumble of the demonstrators rose to a low angry boil, but Kovitsky chose to ignore it and got up and descended the stairs of the dais. The clerk got up from his table to join him. Killian gave Sherman a wink, then headed back toward the spectator section. The judge, the clerk, the judge’s law secretary, and Kramer headed toward a door in the paneled wall to one side of the dais. Killian returned, carrying the heavy case. He paused and motioned for Sherman to follow Kovitsky. The court officer, with a huge tube of fat rolling over his gun belt, brought up the rear.
The door led into a room that belied everything that the courtroom itself and the swell term chambers had suggested to Sherman. The “chambers” were, in fact, a single room, a single very sad room. It was small, dirty, bare, run-down, painted Good Enough for Government Work cream, except that the paint was missing in splotches here and there and peeling off in miserable curls in other places. The only generous notes were the extraordinarily high ceiling and a window eight or nine feet high that flooded the room with light. The judge sat down at a beat-up metal desk. The clerk sat at another one. Kramer, Killian, and Sherman sat in some heavy and ancient round-backed wooden chairs, the sort known as banker’s chairs. Kovitsky’s law secretary and the fat court officer stood up against the wall. A tall man came in carrying the portable stenotype machine that court stenographers use. How odd!—the man was so well dressed. He wore a lovat tweed jacket, a white button-down shirt, as flawless as Rawlie’s, an ancient madder necktie, black flannel trousers, and half-brogue shoes. He looked like a Yale professor with an independent income and tenure.
“Mr. Sullivan,” said Kovitsky, “you better bring your chair in here, too.”
Mr. Sullivan went out, then returned with a small wooden chair, sat down, fiddled with his machine, looked at Kovitsky, and nodded.
Then Kovitsky said, “Now, Mr. Killian, you state that you are in possession of information having a material and substantial bearing on the grand-jury proceedings in this case.”
“That’s correct, Judge,” said Killian.
“All right,” said Kovitsky. “I want to hear what you have to say, but I must warn you, this motion better not be frivolous.”
“It’s not frivolous, Judge.”
“Because if it is, I’m gonna take a very dim view of it, as dim a view as I’ve ever taken of anything in my years on the bench, and that would be very dim, indeed. Do I make myself clear?”
“You certainly do, Judge.”
“All right. Now, you’re prepared to submit your information at this time?”
“I am.”
“Then go ahead.”
“Three days ago, Judge, I received a telephone call from Maria Ruskin, the widow of Mr. Arthur Ruskin, asking if she could talk to Mr. McCoy here. According to my best information—and according to news reports—Mrs. Ruskin has testified before the grand jury in the case.”
Kovitsky said to Kramer, “Is that correct?”
Kramer said, “She gave testimony yesterday.”
The judge said to Killian, “All right, go ahead.”
“So I set up a meeting between Mrs. Ruskin and Mr. McCoy, and at my urging Mr. McCoy wore a concealed recording device to this meeting in order to have a verifiable record of that conversation
. The meeting was in an apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street that Mrs. Ruskin apparently keeps for…uh, private meetings…and a taped recording of that meeting was obtained. I have that tape with me, and I think the court should be aware of what’s on that tape.”
“Wait a minute, Judge,” said Kramer. “Is he saying that his client went to see Mrs. Ruskin wired?”
“I take it that’s the case,” said the judge. “Is that right, Mr. Killian?”
“That’s correct, Judge,” said Killian.
“Well, I want to register an objection, Judge,” said Kramer, “and I would like for the record to so state. This isn’t the time to consider this motion, and besides that, there’s no way of checking on the authenticity of this tape Mr. Killian purports to have.”
“First we’re gonna listen to the tape, Mr. Kramer, and see what’s on it. We’ll see if it warrants further consideration, prima facie, and then we’ll worry about the other questions. That meet with your approval?”
“No, Judge, I don’t see how you can—”
The judge, testily: “Play the tape, Counselor.”
Killian reached into the case and took out the big tape machine and placed it on Kovitsky’s desk. Then he inserted a cassette. The cassette was exceedingly small. Somehow this secret miniature cartridge seemed as devious and sordid as the enterprise itself.
“How many voices are on this tape?” asked Kovitsky.
“Just two, Judge,” said Killian. “Mr. McCoy’s and Mrs. Ruskin’s.”
“So it’ll be clear enough to Mr. Sullivan what we’re hearing?”
“It should be,” said Killian. “No, I’m sorry, Judge, I forgot. At the beginning of the tape you’re gonna hear Mr. McCoy talking to the driver of the car that took him to the building where he met Mrs. Ruskin. And at the end you’ll hear him talking to the driver again.”
“Who is this driver?”
“He’s a driver for the car service that Mr. McCoy hired. I didn’t want to edit the tape in any way.”
“Unh-hunh. Well, go ahead and play it.”
Killian turned on the machine, and all you could hear at first was background noise, a low steamy rush of sound with occasional traffic noises, including the braying horn of a fire engine. Then a half-mumbled exchange with the driver. It was all so devious, wasn’t it? A wave of shame rolled over him. They would play it to the end! The stenographer would record it all, every last sniveling word as he tried to dance away from Maria and deny the obvious, which was that he was a deceitful bastard who had come to her apartment wired up. How much of it would come through in the words alone? Enough; he was vile.
Now the muffled deceitful tape recorder broadcast the sound of the buzzer in the door of the town house, the click-click-click of the electric lock and—or was it his imagination?—the groan of the stairs as he trudged up. Then a door opening…and Maria’s gay, unsuspecting voice: “Boo!…Scare yuh?” And the perfidious actor’s casual response in a voice he scarcely recognized: “Not really. Lately I’ve been scared by experts.” He cut a glance this way and that. The other men in the room had their heads down, staring at the floor or at the machine on the judge’s desk. Then he caught the fat court officer looking straight at him. What must he be thinking? And what about the others, with their eyes averted? But of course! They didn’t have to look at him, because they were already deep inside the cavity, rooting about as they pleased, all straining to hear the words of his deceitful bad acting. The long fingers of the stenographer danced about on his delicate little machine. Sherman felt a paralyzing sadness. So heavy…couldn’t move. In this sad moldering little room were seven other men, seven other organisms, hundreds of pounds of tissue and bone, breathing, pumping blood, burning calories, processing nutrients, filtering out contaminants and toxins, transmitting neural impulses, seven warm grisly unpleasant animals rooting about, for pay, in the entirely public cavity he used to think of as his soul.
Kramer was dying to look at McCoy, but decided to be cool and professional. What does a rat look like when he’s listening to himself being a rat in a room full of people who know he’s a rat—going wired to see his girlfriend? Unconsciously, but profoundly, Kramer was relieved. Sherman McCoy, this Wasp, this Wall Street aristocrat, this socialite, this Yale man, was as much a rat as any of the drug dealers he had wired up to go rat out their species. No, McCoy was more of a rat. One doper didn’t expect much from another. But in these upper reaches, upon these pinnacles of propriety and moralism, up in this stratosphere ruled by the pale thin-lipped Wasps, honor, presumably, was not a word to be trifled with. Yet backed to the wall, they turned rat just as quickly as any lowlife. This was a relief, because he had been troubled by what Bernie Fitzgibbon had said. Suppose the case had not, in fact, been investigated carefully enough? Maria Ruskin had corroborated Roland’s story before the grand jury, but in his heart he knew he had pushed her pretty hard. He had put her in a small tight box so fast she might have—
He preferred not to finish the thought.
The knowledge that McCoy was at bottom nothing but a rat with a better résumé put his mind at rest. McCoy was caught in this particular mess because it was his natural milieu, the filthy nest of his defective character.
Having reassured himself of the rightness of his cause, Kramer treated himself to some positive resentment of this big pseudoaristocrat who now sat only a few feet from him filling up the room with his rat aroma. As he listened to the two voices on the tape, the aristocratic honk of McCoy, the Southern Girl drawl of Maria Ruskin, it didn’t take too much imagination to figure out what was going on. The pauses, the breathing, the rustling about—McCoy, the rat, had taken this gorgeous foxy creature into his arms…And this apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street where they were meeting—these people on the Upper East Side had apartments just for their pleasures!—while he still searched his brain (and his pockets) for some place to accommodate the yearnings of Miss Shelly Thomas. The Beauty and the Rat talked on…. There was a pause while she left the room to fix him a drink and a scraping noise as he apparently touched his hidden microphone. The Rat. The voices resumed, and then she said, “There’s a lotta people’d like to hear this conversation.”
Not even Kovitsky could resist looking up and around the room at that one, but Kramer refused to oblige him with a smile.
Maria Ruskin’s voice droned on. Now she was whining about her marriage. Where the hell was this tape supposed to be leading? The woman’s complaints were boring. She had married an old man. What the hell did she expect? Idly he wondered—he could see her, as if she were right here in the room. The languorous way she crossed her legs, the little smile, the way she looked at you sometimes—
All at once he was jerked alert: “A man from the Bronx District Attorney’s Office came around to see me today, with two detectives.” Then: “A pompous little bastard.”
Whuh—he was stunned. A scalding tide rose up in his neck and face. Somehow it was the little that wounded him most. Such a contemptuous dismissal—and him with his mighty sternocleidomastoids—he lifted his eyes to search out the faces of the others, ready to laugh defensively if anyone else happened to look up and smile at such outrageousness. But no one looked up, least of all McCoy, whom he would have gladly throttled.
“He kept throwing his head back and doing something weird with his neck, like this, and looking at me through these little slits for eyes. What a creep.”
His face was now scarlet, aflame, boiling with anger and, worse than anger, dismay. Someone in the room made a sound that might be a cough and might be a laugh. He didn’t have enough heart to investigate. Bitch! said his mind, consciously. But his nervous system said, Wanton destroyer of my fondest hopes! In this little room full of people he was suffering the pangs of men whose egos lose their virginity—as happens when they overhear for the first time a beautiful woman’s undiluted, full-strength opinion of their masculine selves.
What came next was worse.
“He made it real simpl
e, Sherman,” said the voice on the tape. “He said if I would testify against you and corroborate the other witness, he’d give me immunity. If I didn’t, then I’d be treated as an accomplice, and they’d charge me with these…felonies.”
And then:
“He even gave me these Xeroxes of stories in the newspapers. He practically drew me a map. These were the correct stories, and these were the ones you concocted. I’m supposed to agree with the correct stories. If I say what actually happened, I go to prison.”
The lying bitch! He had put her in the box, of course—but he hadn’t drawn her any map!—hadn’t instructed her as to what to say—hadn’t warned her away from the truth—
He blurted out: “Judge!”
Kovitsky held up his hand, palm outward, and the tape wound on.
Sherman was startled by the assistant district attorney’s voice. The judge immediately shut him up. Sherman was braced for what he knew was coming next.
Maria’s voice: “Just come here.”
He could feel that moment all over again, that moment and that horrible wrestling match…“Sherman, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with your back?”…But that was just the start…His own voice, his own cheap lying voice: “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you, how much I’ve needed you.” And Maria: “Well…here I am.” Then the dreadful telltale rustling—and he could smell her breath all over again and feel her hands on his back.
“Sherman…What’s this on your back?”
The words filled the room in a gush of shame. He wanted to drop through the floor. He slumped back into his chair and let his chin fall onto his chest. “Sherman, what is this?”…Her rising voice, his wretched denials, the thrashing about, her breathless gasps and shrieks…“And a wire, Sherman!”…“You’re—hurting me!”…“Sherman—you rotten, dishonest bastard!”
Too true, Maria! Too horribly true!
Kramer listened to it in a red haze of mortification. The Bitch and the Rat—their tête-à-tête had degenerated into some sort of sordid ratbitch fight. Pompous little bastard. Creep. Something weird with his neck. She had scorned him, humiliated him, undercut him, slandered him—opening him up to a charge of subornation to perjury.