The Bonfire of the Vanities

  Jimmy Caughey said, “I was just in seeing the captain. You shoulda—”

  “You were? What for?” asked Kramer with just a shade too much curiosity and incipient envy in his voice.

  “Me and Bernie,” said Caughey. “He wanted to know about the Moore case.”

  “Any good?”

  “Piece a shit,” said Caughey. “This fucking guy Moore, he has a big house in Riverdale, and his wife’s mother lives there with ’em, and she’s been giving him a hard time for about thirty-seven fucking years, right? So this guy, he loses his job. He’s working for one a these reinsurance companies, and he’s making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, and now he’s out a work for eight or nine months, and nobody’ll hire him, and he don’t know what the hell to do, right? So one day he’s puttering around out in the garden, and the mother-in-law comes out and says, ‘Well, water seeks its own level.’ That’s a verbatim quote. ‘Water seeks its own level. You oughta get a job as a gardener.’ So this guy, he’s out of his fucking mind, he’s so mad. He goes in and tells his wife, ‘I’ve had it with your mother. I’m gonna get my shotgun and scare her.’ So he goes up to his bedroom, where he keeps this 12-gauge shotgun, and he comes downstairs and heads for the mother-in-law, and he’s gonna scare the shit out of her, and he says, ‘Okay, Gladys,’ and he trips on the rug, and the gun goes off and kills her, and—ba-bing!—Murder Two.”

  “Why was Weiss interested?”

  “Well, the guy’s white, he’s got some money, he lives in a big house in Riverdale. It looks at first like maybe he’s gonna fake an accidental shooting.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Naw. Fucking guy’s one a my boys. He’s your basic Irish who made good, but he’s still a Harp. He’s drowning in remorse. You’d think he’d shot his own mother, he feels so fucking guilty. Right now he’d confess to anything. Bernie could sit him in front of the video camera and clean up every homicide in the Bronx for the past five years. Naw, it’s a piece a shit, but it looked good at first.”

  Kramer and Andriutti contemplated this piece a shit without needing any amplification. Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John’s Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab’s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, “What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.” Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott’s apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy’s grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn’t help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well…impolite!…on the ordinary social level…to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn’t that it was morally wrong…It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.

  Not that they weren’t guilty. One thing Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming, you didn’t waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton, those blue-and-orange vans out there on Walton Avenue. But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.

  Kramer looked at Andriutti and Caughey, sitting there with their mighty thighs akimbo. He felt superior to them. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, and they were both graduates of St. John’s, widely known as the law school for the also-rans of college academic competition. And he was Jewish. Very early in life he had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats. He couldn’t remember if his parents had actually used any such terms or not, but they got the idea across very clearly. To his parents, New York City—New York? hell, the whole U.S., the whole world!—was a drama called The Jews Confront the Goyim, and the goyim were animals. And so what was he doing here with these animals? A Jew in the Homicide Bureau was a rare thing. The Homicide Bureau was the elite corps of the District Attorney’s Office, the D.A.’s Marines, because homicide was the most serious of all crimes. An assistant D.A. in Homicide had to be able to go out on the street to the crime scenes at all hours, night and day, and be a real commando and rub shoulders with the police and know how to confront defendants and witnesses and intimidate them when the time came, and these were likely to be the lowest, grimmest, scurviest defendants and witnesses in the history of criminal justice. For fifty years, at least, maybe longer, Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it. The Irish had given Homicide their stamp. The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back. Andriutti had been right, or half right. Kramer didn’t want to be Italian, but he did want to be Irish, and so did Ray Andriutti, the dumb fuck. Yes, they were animals! The goyim were animals, and Kramer was proud to be among the animals, in the Homicide Bureau.

  Anyway, here they were, the three of them, sitting in this Good Enough for Government Work office at $36,000 to $42,000 a year instead of down at Cravath, Swaine & Moore or some such place at $136,000 to $142,000. They had been born a million miles from Wall Street, meaning the outer boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. To their families, their going to college and becoming lawyers had been the greatest thing since Franklin D. Roosevelt. And so they sat around in the Homicide Bureau talking about this fucking thing and that fucking thing and using don’ts for doesn’ts and naws for no’s, as if they didn’t know any better.

  Here they were…and here he was, and where was he going? What were these cases he was handling? Pieces of shit! Garbage collection…Arthur Rivera. Arthur Rivera and another drug dealer get into an argument over an order of pizza at a social club and pull knives, and Arthur says, “Let’s put the weapons down and fight man to man.” And they do, whereupon Arthur pulls out a second knife and stabs the other fellow in the chest and kills him…Jimmy Dollard. Jimmy Dollard and his closest pal, Otis Blakemore, and three other black guys are drinking and taking cocaine and playing a game called the dozens, in which the idea is to see how outrageously you can insult the other fellow, and Blakemore is doing an inspired number on Jimmy, and Jimmy pulls out a revolver and shoots him through the heart and then collapses on the table, sobbing and saying, “My man! My man Stan! I shot my man Stan!”…And the case of Herbert 92X—

  For an instant the thought of Herbert’s case triggered a vision of the girl with brown lipstick—

  The press couldn’t even see these cases. It was just poor people killing poor people. To prosecute such cases was to be part of the garbage-collection service, necessary and honorable, plodding and anonymous.

  Captain Ahab wasn’t so ridiculous, after all. Press coverage! Ray and Jimmy could laugh all they wanted, but Weiss had made sure the entire city knew his name. Weiss had an election coming up, and the Bronx was 70 percent black and Latin, and he was going to make sure the name Abe Weiss was pumped out to them on every channel that existed. He might not do much else, but he was going to do that.

  A telephone rang: Ray’s. “Homicide,” he said. “Andriutti…Bernie’s not here. I think he’s in court…What?…Go over that again?” Long pause. “Well, was he hit by a car or wasn’t he?…Unnh-hunnh…Well, shit, I don’t know. You better talk it over with Bernie. Okay?…Okay.” He hung up and s
hook his head and looked at Jimmy Caughey. “That was some detective who’s over at Lincoln Hospital. Says they got a likely-to-die, some kid who comes into the emergency room and don’t know whether he slipped in the bathtub and broke his wrist or got hit by a Mercedes-Benz. Or some such shit. Wants to talk to Bernie. So let him fucking talk to Bernie.”

  Ray shook his head some more, and Kramer and Caughey nodded sympathetically. The eternal pieces a shit in the Bronx.

  Kramer looked at his watch and stood up.

  “Well,” he said, “you guys can sit here and fuck-all, if you want, but I gotta go fucking listen to that renowned Middle Eastern scholar Herbert 92X read from the Koran.”

  There were thirty-five courtrooms in the Bronx County Building devoted to criminal cases, and each one was known as a “part.” They had been built at a time, the early 1930s, when it was still assumed that the very look of a courtroom should proclaim the gravity and omnipotence of the rule of law. The ceilings were a good fifteen feet high. The walls were paneled throughout in a dark wood. The judge’s bench was a stage with a vast desk. The desk had enough cornices, moldings, panels, pilasters, inlays, and sheer hardwood mass to make you believe that Solomon himself, who was a king, would have found it imposing. The seats in the spectators’ section were separated from the judge’s bench, the jury box, and the tables of the prosecutor, the defendant, and the clerk of the court by a wooden balustrade with an enormous carved top rail, the so-called Bar of Justice. In short, there was nothing whatsoever in the look of the premises to tip off the unwary to the helter-skelter of a criminal court judge’s daily task.

  The moment Kramer walked in, he could tell that the day had gotten off to a bad start in Part 60. He had only to look at the judge. Kovitsky was up on the bench, in his black robes, leaning forward with both forearms on his desktop. His chin was down so low it seemed about to touch it. His bony skull and his sharp beak jutted out of the robe at such a low angle he looked like a buzzard. Kramer could see his irises floating and bobbing on the whites of his eyes as he scanned the room and its raggedy collection of humanity. He looked as if he were about to flap his wings and strike. Kramer felt ambivalent about Kovitsky. On one hand, he resented his courtroom tirades, which were often personal and designed to humiliate. On the other hand, Kovitsky was a Jewish warrior, a son of the Masada. Only Kovitsky could have stopped the loudmouths in the prison vans with a gob of spit.

  “Where’s Mr. Sonnenberg?” said Kovitsky. There was no response.

  So he said it again, this time in an amazing baritone that nailed every syllable into the back wall and startled all newcomers to the courtroom of Judge Myron Kovitsky: “WHERE IS MIS-TER SON-NEN-BERG!”

  Except for two little boys and a little girl, who were running between the benches and playing tag, the spectators froze. One by one they congratulated themselves. No matter how miserable their fates, at least they had not fallen so low as to be Mr. Sonnenberg, that miserable insect, whoever he was.

  That miserable insect was a lawyer, and Kramer knew the nature of his offense, which was that his absence was impeding the shoveling of the chow into the gullet of the criminal justice system, Part 60. In each part, the day began with the so-called calendar session, during which the judge dealt with motions and pleas in a variety of cases, perhaps as many as a dozen in a morning. Kramer had to laugh every time he saw a television show with a courtroom scene. They always showed a trial in progress. A trial! Who the hell dreamed up these goddamned shows? Every year there were 7,000 felony indictments in the Bronx and the capacity for 650 trials, at the most. The judges had to dispose of the other 6,350 cases in either of two ways. They could dismiss a case or they could let the defendant plead guilty to a reduced charge in return for not forcing the court to go through a trial. Dismissing cases was a hazardous way to go about reducing the backlog, even for a grotesque cynic. Every time a felony case was thrown out, somebody, such as the victim or his family, was likely to yell, and the press was only too happy to attack judges who let the malefactors go free. That left the plea bargains, which were the business of the calendar sessions. So the calendar sessions were the very alimentary canal of the criminal justice system in the Bronx.

  Every week the clerk of each part turned in a scorecard to Louis Mastroiani, chief administrative judge for the criminal division, Supreme Court, Bronx County. The scorecard showed how many cases the judge in that part had on his docket and how many he had disposed of that week, through plea bargains, dismissals, and trials. On the wall of the courtroom, over the judge’s head, it said IN GOD WE TRUST. On the scorecard, however, it said CASE BACKLOG ANALYSIS, and a judge’s effectiveness was rated almost entirely according to CASE BACKLOG ANALYSIS.

  Practically all cases were called for 9:30 a.m. If the clerk called a case, and the defendant was not present or his lawyer was not present or if any of a dozen other things occurred to make it impossible to shove this case a little farther through the funnel, the principals in the next case would be on hand, presumably, ready to step forward. So the spectators’ section was dotted with little clumps of people, none of them spectators in any sporting sense. There were defendants and their lawyers, defendants and their pals, defendants and their families. The three small children came slithering out from between two benches, ran toward the back of the courtroom, giggling, and disappeared behind the last bench. A woman turned her head and scowled at them and didn’t bother to go fetch them. Now Kramer recognized the trio. They were Herbert 92X’s children. Not that he found this at all remarkable; there were children in the courtrooms every day. The courts were a form of day-care center in the Bronx. Playing tag in Part 60 during Daddy’s motions, pleas, trials, and sentencings was just a part of growing up.

  Kovitsky turned toward the clerk of the court, who sat at a table below the judge’s bench and off to the side. The clerk was a bull-necked Italian named Charles Bruzzielli. He had his jacket off. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt with the collar open and his necktie at half-mast. You could see the top of his T-shirt. The tie had a huge Windsor knot.

  “Is that Mr…” Kovitsky looked down at a piece of paper on his desk, then at Bruzzielli. “…Lockwood?”

  Bruzzielli nodded yes, and Kovitsky looked straight ahead at a slender figure who had walked from the spectators’ benches up to the bar.

  “Mr. Lockwood,” said Kovitsky, “where’s your attorney? Where’s Mr. Sonnenberg?”

  “I ’unno,” said the figure.

  He was barely audible. He was no more than nineteen or twenty. He had dark skin. He was so thin there was no sign of shoulders under his black thermal jacket. He wore black stovepipe jeans and a pair of huge white sneakers that closed with Velcro tabs rather than shoelaces.

  Kovitsky stared at him a moment, then said, “All right, Mr. Lockwood, you take a seat. If and when Mr. Sonnenberg deigns to favor us with his presence, we’ll call your case again.”

  Lockwood turned around and began walking back to the spectators’ benches. He had the same pumping swagger that practically every young defendant in the Bronx affected, the Pimp Roll. Such stupid self-destructive macho egos, thought Kramer. They never failed to show up with the black jackets and the sneakers and the Pimp Roll. They never failed to look every inch the young felon before judges, juries, probation officers, court psychiatrists, before every single soul who had any say in whether or not they went to prison or for how long. Lockwood pimp-rolled to a bench in the rear of the spectators’ section and sat down next to two more boys in black thermal jackets. These were no doubt his buddies, his comrades. The defendant’s comrades always arrived in court in their shiny black thermal jackets and go-to-hell sneakers. That was very bright, too. That immediately established the fact that the defendant was not a poor defenseless victim of life in the ghetto but part of a pack of remorseless young felons of the sort who liked to knock down old ladies with Lucite canes on the Grand Concourse and steal their handbags. The whole pack entered the courtroom full of juice, bulging with st
eel muscles and hard-jawed defiance, ready to defend the honor and, if necessary, the hides of their buddies against the System. But soon a stupefying tide of tedium and confusion rolled over them all. They were primed for action. They were not primed for what the day required, which was waiting while something they never heard of, a calendar session, swamped them in a lot of shine-on language, such as “deigns to favor us with his presence.”

  Kramer walked past the bar and headed over to the clerk’s table. Three other assistant D.A.s stood there, looking on and waiting their turns before the judge.

  The clerk said, “The People versus Albert and Marilyn Krin—”

  He hesitated and looked down at the papers before him. He looked at a young woman standing three or four feet away, an assistant district attorney named Patti Stullieri, and he said in a stage whisper, “What the hell is this?”

  Kramer looked over his shoulder. The document said, “Albert and Marilyn Krnkka.”

  “Kri-nick-a,” said Patti Stullieri.

  “Albert and Marilyn Kri-nick-a!” he declaimed. “Indictment number 3-2-8-1.” Then to Patti Stullieri: “Jesus, what the hell kind of name is that?”

  “It’s Yugoslav.”

  “Yugoslav. It looks like somebody’s fingers got caught in a fucking typewriter.”

  From the rear of the spectators’ section a couple came marching up to the great railing and leaned forward. The man, Albert Krnkka, smiled in a bright-eyed fashion and seemed to want to engage the attention of Judge Kovitsky. Albert Krnkka was a tall, gangling man with a five-inch goatee but no mustache at all and long blond hair like an old-fashioned rock musician’s. He had a bony nose, a long neck, and an Adam’s apple that seemed to move up and down a foot when he swallowed. He wore a teal-green shirt with an outsized collar and, in place of buttons, a zipper that ran diagonally from his left shoulder to the right side of his waist. Beside him was his wife. Marilyn Krnkka was a black-haired woman with a thin, delicate face. Her eyes were two slits. She kept compressing her lips and grimacing.