SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  “It’s not about you, Jack. I’m going to pray for the soul of Paul Morse.”

  My silence must have communicated all the bewilderment I felt.

  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” Hogan recited, his delivery impersonal. “That’s the beginning and end of the story. Ever heard it?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Well, don’t try to figure it out now,” he said. “You won’t.”

  “No, I suppose that’s what makes it divine.”

  “What else would you like?”

  “Just something decent out of all this.”

  It was close to midnight. The bells would start soon, and I wanted to get home to my muffling Wooster Street walls.

  “Listen.” Hogan spoke quietly. “God’s grace flows to anyone who sincerely asks. Even Morse.” He laughed. “Maybe even you.”

  I shook my head. “Then your God is a fool.”

  Hogan was silent for a moment.

  “Think so?” He laid his hand ever so lightly on my good arm. “Just come.”

  I looked at the gray stone pile under the trees. The central doors gapped repeatedly as silent figures entered, and I could glimpse, through the transparent vestibule partition, a candlelit interior where statues flickered, their faces seeming alive. I heard the brief plaintive swell of an organ playing “Oh, Holy Night.” Outside, the announcement board gave the theme of the evening’s service in white letters on black: “For unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given.”

  I pushed my good hand deeper into my coat pocket. “No thanks,” I said. “Not me. Not tonight.”

  Hogan jabbed my shoulder. “All right, you dope. It’s your bet.”

  With the snowfall thickening, he turned and walked into the iron-gray church, his silhouette sharpening as the doors opened onto the candlelight, and melting into shadows as they closed.

  59

  For me, the reward came six months after the Crosby Street bust, when Paul Morse went on trial. At the time, I thought of it as his “first” proceeding, with the murder indictment to follow shortly—once the police cleared up what Hogan referred to vaguely as “a few complications.”

  On the third day, the Donkey, appearing live on the stand, detailed the Virgin Sacrifice production methods. (In private, the D.A. had explained the undocumented alien’s legal options. He could cooperate and get a reduced sentence, or he could play dumb and see his family sent back to their fly-blown village in Mexico, while he did hard time for multiple counts of statutory rape.) In the docket, the man was asked if he had ever witnessed Paul Morse engage in any sexual acts with minors.

  He replied, “Well, one day Mr. Sammy, he say to Paul, ‘Look, pal, you got to play like the rest of us. I want to know I can trust you.’ ”

  “And did Mr. Morse tell you what he took that to mean?”

  “He said, ‘I got to do this, man, for sure. Otherwise, they gonna stomp me.’ Then he did it, OK. To a couple girls. He did it real good.”

  “And then?”

  “And, after that, he did it a lot more. He liked it. At the parties, he was the first after me.”

  Paul’s assistant, having cut a deal that spared him prosecution on some two-bit drug charges, was equally helpful. Staring straight ahead, he detailed, in a flat voice, the editing and distribution procedures. He even talked about the aesthetics of teen porn, the combination of realism and fantasy that he and Paul strove for.

  This “J.D. Scratch,” real name Joseph Dempsey, was no longer as cagey and noncommittal as he had been on the day, a few weeks earlier, when Hogan and I went to see him at Paul’s loft in Tribeca. At the time, he was still logging tapes and doing preliminary edits of art-performance footage, as though he expected Paul to return any day. The tattoos on his thin arms made their own little show as he worked. Staying at his task, he refused to focus on my questions about Paul’s activities on the day of the murder.

  “I don’t know, guy,” was all he would say, peering steadily down at the editing panel as if the knobs and levers had just been revealed to him in a vision.

  Before long, Hogan grew impatient. “Let me talk to this jerk alone.”

  I nodded, and he looked down at J.D. “Don’t go away, sweetheart.”

  Hogan walked me over to the door, across a vast stretch of hardwood floor—a square-footage index of the income generated by Paul’s rape-on-tape business, as the Post had dubbed it in their screaming headlines.

  “Twenty minutes,” Hogan said. “Twenty minutes of boot camp.”

  I went out and strolled a couple of blocks to the Odeon and had a gin and tonic, sitting alone at the dim end of the bar, away from the afternoon sunlight leaking through the Venetian blinds. It was a slow lunch day, so the bartender chatted with me about the Jeff Koons show at Sonnabend—huge color photos of the artist joyfully screwing his Italian porn-star wife. “A cathartic celebration of pure sexuality,” as one critic wrote.

  “Fun smut” was the bartender’s more succinct formulation. “Big bucks.”

  When I got back to the loft, Mr. Scratch did not mind talking anymore. With his arms wrapped across his abdomen, he seemed almost eager to share his recollections. He told us, for instance, how upset his boss had been after reading an e-mail from Amanda one evening.

  “Paul looked really worried,” the young man explained. “ ‘That crazy bitch is messing with me,’ he said. ‘She’s all flipped out because she saw one of our videos, stuff she doesn’t get at all. Stuff she hates. If I know her, she’ll blab all over town.’ ”

  With a little prompting, J.D. went on to tell us that he had been sent out for supplies all morning on May fourth, dragging himself from one specialty shop to the next. He was pale, and he would not look at Hogan.

  “There’s something else,” I said. From my breast pocket I drew out a picture of Melissa, a birthday-party shot that Angela had e-mailed to me the previous summer in Venice. “Did you ever meet this girl?”

  “Oh, her,” J.D. said.

  “She was here?”

  “No.” He dropped his eyes. “But Paul talked about her all the time. Used her picture as his screensaver. You know how he is.”

  “All too well.”

  “Her mother did turn up once, though.”

  “Angela? When?”

  “Back before Thanksgiving sometime. She was yelling at Paul, saying he was trying to whore out her daughter.”

  “What did Paul do?”

  “Grabbed her wrists when she clawed at him. Kept telling her nothing had happened, nothing at all. Then she got real icy, man, after he let go. I was scared. When she asked to use the bathroom, I thought maybe she’d come back with a knife she’d picked up along the way.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Back there, down the hall past the kitchen. Paul has a big knife set in a wooden block right there on the counter. I mean, if you’d seen the look in her eyes…”

  Hogan peered down the hall. “Past those bookshelves?”

  “Yeah, man,” Scratch said. “But I wasn’t worried she’d hit him with a book.”

  “So what did she do?”

  “Pissed and left, like a cat marking her territory. Shouted goodbye, you prick, and screw you.”

  At Paul’s trial, I had a similar aim, rather more discreetly expressed.

  When I gave my testimony, a few days after Mr. Scratch, I was acutely aware of the bank of faces in the jury box to my left. The eyes of the seven women and five men seemed to reach out in unison. They were looking to me for answers, poor souls. Like clients waiting to be persuaded to buy a piece of art that initially appalls them.

  The prosecutor led me, step by step, from my first acquaintance with Paul to the Crosby Street sting I had executed with Hogan. Near the end, he held up an image by a very famous Japanese photographer. It showed a schoolgirl in a short white dress. Barefoot, leaning back on a bank of earth, she pressed her knees together with her feet braced wide apart. The look s
he directed at the viewer from under her thick bangs seemed at once vulnerable and coy. Between her thighs gleamed a tiny triangle of white panties.

  “Is this one of the pictures you discussed in your so-called Balthus Club sessions with Mr. Morse?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Would you, in your professional judgment, say that it fairly represents the type of material you perused in those meetings?”

  “I would.”

  “And how many such images do you estimate that you and Paul Morse examined together?”

  “Probably a thousand.”

  He walked to the prosecution table and picked up another photograph that had previously been entered into evidence, out of sight of the jury. He held up a shot of a girl, an American woman photographer’s own young daughter, beautifully naked and sprawled in the mud.

  “Was this photo also discussed?”

  “We didn’t say much. We just looked.”

  The prosecutor had both photographs passed from hand to hand among the jurors for closer inspection. By the time he got to the Virgin Sacrifice videotapes, his point had long since been established. Nonetheless, several party episodes were played for the jury in a closed, tightly guarded side room.

  God only knows what those twelve good fellow citizens thought of me by the time court returned to open session, but I didn’t much care, as long as they convicted Paul Morse.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen, is what Amanda Oliver made the mistake of discovering,” the prosecutor said. “This is what she objected to before her untimely demise.”

  The jurors looked at him stoically, unblinkingly, like medical students at a dissection. From time to time, a face turned quickly away, then turned back.

  But all this artistry—the photographers’, the Donkey’s, Hogan’s, the D.A.’s, my own—was nothing compared to the skill displayed by Melissa.

  On the stand, not quite thirteen yet, she was utterly collected and dispassionate. The prosecutor had instructed Angela to dress her in a simple black jumper and white blouse. Looking demure and child-serious, with her crossed legs invisible behind the oak skirt-guard, Melissa told the jurors how Paul had befriended her, sharing her interest in new clothing styles and asking almost immediately to be introduced to her mother. He easily won that harried woman’s confidence, Missy insinuated, with his admiration for Anegla’s sculpture project and his kind attentiveness to her daughter.

  As she spoke, Melissa was a perfect young lady, the epitome of Bradford School poise. Only her hair, long and luxuriant, caressing her shoulders like tireless fingers, gave a hint of what might have enticed a pervert.

  But, as much as all the evidence combined, it was Paul’s reaction to Missy’s testimony that sank his case. Confronted with her account, needled by the D.A., he flared up in the witness box.

  “The lying little witch,” he said. “Don’t you see? She’s using me to hide how she made off with Amanda’s computer.” His eyes seemed to change color as he spoke. “She’s covering for someone else. Maybe for herself, for all I know.”

  “Just what do you know, I wonder,” the D.A. said. He picked up a clear plastic bag, holding a corner with two fingers. “Could you tell us, for example, what this peculiar item might be?” He turned slowly, so that each juror could see the oddly shaped metal object dangling from his fingers in a zip-top bag.

  “A vibrator,” Paul said, in a strangled whisper.

  “Speak up, please,” the judge instructed.

  “A sex toy,” Paul said more distinctly. “An electric vibrator.”

  “I see,” the prosecutor said in a measured tone. “A rather unusually shaped implement, isn’t it, Mr. Morse? Much more bulbous, here and there, than one would expect?”

  Paul lowered his head. “It has a special use.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It’s an anal vibrator.”

  “I see.” The D.A. stepped back from the stand. “ ‘Anal’ meaning to be inserted in the rectum. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And during the police raid on Crosby Street, this charming device was found resting on a couch between you and the twelve-year-old Miss Melissa Oliver? Bearing your fingerprints?”

  “She jammed it into my hands,” Paul shouted. “She said, ‘Take this. Hide it.’ She wanted my prints on it. She suckered me.”

  The prosecutor, unfazed, returned to the table and, with his back to Paul, asked almost casually, “And can you deny that a gun belonging to Amanda Oliver, the girl’s stepmother, was later found in your residence?”

  “No, but I had no idea. Maybe Melissa’s mother brought it there. Who knows? Maybe she was going to shoot me.”

  “Really, Mr. Morse?” the prosecutor intoned, wheeling slowly, his sharp profile displayed to the jury as he addressed the defendant. “Why on earth would she want to do that?”

  Paul recoiled from the question, as if from a whip.

  “She’s pure evil,” he exploded. “So is her daughter. The two of them, torturing men for sick fun.”

  If the jury had harbored any doubt about Paul’s instability, his cruelty, his capacity to inflict harm on innocents, their uncertainty vanished in that instant—with that one imprudent outburst against Angela and her calm, blank-faced daughter. The two sat side-by-side in the visitors’ section, prim and unblinking.

  Who would want to harbor any terrible thoughts about Melissa? The jurors looked at her furtively. From their reactions, it was clear that she gave them, gave us all, mental respite. And why not? I, for one, had already had enough terrible thoughts for one lifetime.

  The prosecutor’s summary was sober and compelling.

  “You and I are everyday people,” he told the jury members near the end. “We work hard, we do our jobs, we raise our families and protect them. But there are other people—self-styled ‘artists’ like Mr. Morse—who pride themselves on being different from us. On being exceptional. And they think, some of them, that this frees them from the rules you and I and our families all live by.”

  His tone was mild, in deliberate contrast to Paul’s.

  “Now, don’t misunderstand me, respected jurors—art is very important. Artists are different from us, in many positive, constructive ways. When these ‘free spirits’ display the products of their dreams, showing us things we’ve never seen before, we all benefit. And the freedom to make art, even unpopular art, even art that shocks us, is one of the most important rights our society provides. Surely, as they so wisely argue, tired and outdated social norms must occasionally be challenged.

  “So I would never ask you to condemn Paul Morse because he chooses to look at ‘sophisticated’ pictures, filthy as they may be.”

  He paused.

  “Not even because he himself makes lewd photographs or revolting videos, would I ask you to convict this man. No, that is an artist’s privilege, however distasteful.”

  He stepped close to the rail of the jury box.

  “But there are limits. Sometimes in their desire to ‘critique,’ to ‘subvert,’ to ‘transgress’—terms you have heard from certain scholars and critics called by the defense—artists go too far. They lose all ethical restraint. Then, one day, reality intervenes like a hammer—like a judge’s gavel.”

  An old-school Columbia Law man, the prosecutor was fond of his literary flourishes and grace notes. They probably played well to the curators and art writers in the galley, some of whom had been called to give expert testimony, and all of whom would tie themselves in knots trying to preserve Paul’s artistic liberty without condoning his crimes.

  Fortunately, the D.A.—seasoned and cunning—also knew how to bring his message home to the folks who really mattered, the jurors.

  “But blood is not a fiction, my friends,” he told them. “This case—first, last, and exclusively—is about how Paul Morse makes his Virgin Sacrifice tapes. You can’t murder a woman and call it art. You can’t assault a man on the street and say, ‘It’s art.’ And to state what I hope is
obvious to each and every one of you, you can’t lure underage girls into having sex on videotape in the name of ‘artistic freedom.’ You can’t walk away from the terrible pain and suffering you’ve caused. Forget what Mr. Morse thinks and feels and imagines. What he does is heinous. It is not art—and not harmless. It is rape. It is abuse. It is deviant and violent assault. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, your job today, your solemn duty, is to say, loud and clear, that there are some things a civilized society does not tolerate.”

  Thereafter, the prosecutor spoke with a savvy tinge of regret, mixing tones of pity and fairness. Methodically, he went through the list of charges that the state had amassed against “the self-aggrandizing Mr. Morse.” At last, he put aside his notes and addressed the jurors face to face, eye to eye.

  “What is Mr. Morse’s defense,” he asked, “his version of the events? That he was manipulated by a child—a schoolgirl—and by her mother.”

  He shook his head.

  “You have met this girl. You have heard from her mother. Mr. Morse’s tale is ludicrous on its face, the last desperate ploy of a sociopath. Whether he believes it or not, I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t care—and neither should you. His beliefs are not at issue here.

  “But what Paul Morse has done is clear. He is absolutely and indisputably guilty of the revolting charges against him. The judge will instruct you that the law and common sense are to be your guides in determining a verdict. I ask only, on behalf of the state of New York and the innocents each of us has the moral and legal obligation to defend, that you apply them both fairly—consistent with what you know in your hearts to be right.”

  From that point on, everything seemed preordained.

  Following two days of deliberation, the jury delivered a verdict of guilty on all seventeen counts of sexual congress with a minor, production and distribution of obscene materials, and interstate human trafficking. Weeks later, the judge put the sentence at twenty-five years, with the possibility of parole in fifteen. The outcome, the district attorney later told Hogan and me, seemed about right.

  “Good work,” Hogan said to Melissa, when we encountered her in the hallway after the sentencing. “Morse is rotten as sin, and you nailed him.”