Depraved Indifference (47 page)

A busboy balancing a large tin tray on his shoulder was hovering over the table. On the tray were twelve one-liter carafes of the house red. The busboy plucked one of them off and set it in front of V.T. Then, as he walked away, he seemed to stumble. The tray wobbled, broke loose from his grip, and deposited most of the eleven liters of dark purplish Barbera D'Asti on Conrad Wharton.

After the pandemonium had died down, after the prune-faced old men had been treated to the spectacle of Wharton leaping about like a purple jack-in-the-box, shrieking about lawsuits, pursued by the restaurant's entire staff lavishing apologies, after the busboy had been ostentatiously fired, only then did V.T. manage to get Wharton seated and concentrated on his immediate problem.

“Look, Chip, I can't tell you how sorry I am about this, but all is not lost. There's a place I know on Grand Street, does dry cleaning while you wait. It's quarter of one now. If I take your suit, shirt, and tie up there, they can do them and I can be back here by twenty past. It's only two blocks away. You can sit in the can and read the paper. I'll be back before you know it.”

Wharton grumpily agreed. Not only did he have no choice, not if he still wanted to make that speech, but he began to realize that what was, after all, a fairly minor inconvenience could be parlayed into something far more important, a hook into V.T. Newbury. They went to the men's room; Wharton stripped down to his shoes, socks, and underwear and made himself as comfortable as he could in the single booth. The privacy lock in the door had been removed, leaving a small round hole, so he wadded up some toilet paper and wedged it shut.

As he sat, he thought about the best way to handle payment for this obligation. Maybe a game of squash at the old man's club. Tennis in the country. Sailing? Not until next year, but it was a good thought. Alone for hours on a yacht, he would be able to … These pleasant thoughts jolted to a stop and Wharton let out a short yowl of alarm. There was a brown eye staring at him through the round hole in the door.

“Hi, sugar,” said a low voice. “Are you waitin' for me?”

Wharton shot to his feet as the door was pulled open. He tried to keep it closed, but could get no purchase on the smooth metal. “Excuse me, I'm using this toilet,” he shouted.

“If you are, you shittin' through your damn underpants, man,” said the person who opened the door. She was very tall, and dressed in a canary yellow turtleneck sweater dress cut above the knee and tight as skin. She had strong features, heavily made up, and a huge mane of elaborately curled dyed blond hair. She came toward him, smiling with a wide mouth of glossy violet.

Wharton backed up. “What are you doing here?” he cried, “This is a men's room.” He could back up no farther. The toilet handle was pressing into his buttock and his legs were straddled on either side of the bowl.

“Sugar playing hard to get?” she said. “Well, some like to bust the door down, some like to be coaxed. Come to Momma, son. I ain't got all day.” With that, her hand shot out like a striking cobra, pulled down the waistband of his Jockey shorts, and grabbed a handful. Wharton yelped and threw a clumsy punch at her head, which she easily batted aside with her other hand.

“Oh, rough trade, huh? Listen, fat boy, you mess my hair I'm gonna dance on your head. Now settle down and get your blow job.” She sank to her knees in one practiced motion, and began to haul Wharton by his penis toward her mouth.

“OK, Jerome, that's enough.” The speaker was an immense, hachet-faced, balding man of about fifty. There was a shorter, heavier man behind him. The big man said, “Stand up, Jerome! You,” to Wharton, “put it away, the party's over. Let's go.”

The blond let go of Wharton and stood up. “Goddamn it, Sharkey, what the fuck you doin' this side a town? Vice never come by Little Italy.”

Sharkey grinned. “That would be telling, sweetheart.” To Wharton he snapped, “Hey, Tubby, get your clothes on. Move it!”

Things were moving too fast for Wharton. He decided to exert some control, forgetting for the moment how difficult it is to exert control when one is clad in wine-soaked skivvies. “Just one moment,” he said in a commanding tone. “Are you men police officers?”

Sharkey's eyes widened. “Who the fuck you think we are, Alice?”

“Let me see your identification!” Wharton ordered in the same peremptory tone.

Ed Sharkey had been a vice cop in New York for almost twenty years. Unlike other kinds of police officers, vice cops almost never have to deal with innocent victims of crime. All those with whom they come into contact on the job are involved willingly in some nasty illegal act; all of them are, to use the technical criminal justice term, scumbags. That many vice cops (and Sharkey was no exception) derive a substantial portion of their personal income from shaking down these scumbags does not help their attitude. Thus vice cops do not easily learn patience and forbearance. They are very often angry and disgusted people, and their anger and disgust are directed not so much at the professionals in the vice trade—the pushers and whores—as at the users and Johns, the solid citizens whose lust and hypocrisy make it necessary for vice cops to earn their living in such a degrading fashion.

This explains why, when Wharton asked to see some identification in the commanding tone that worked so well with his frightened subordinates, Ed Sharkey reached out, grabbed Wharton by the front of his T-shirt, yanked him out of the booth, and clouted him across the face twice with a hand having the general dimension and texture of a first-baseman's mitt. Then he punched Wharton in the center of his pot belly. The T-shirt ripped away from the cop's fist and Wharton collapsed to the floor, wheezing and bleeding heavily from the nose.

Sharkey moved in for a few kicks, but his partner put a firm hand on his arm. “Ed, enough,” he said. The big cop's shoulders relaxed and the deep flush passed out of his face. He became all business again.

“Jerome, what'd you do with the john's clothes?” he asked the blond.

“Me? I didn't do shit! He was just like you see when I got in here. Hey, dude is fuckin' crazy anyway. You ever hear of a guy want to run away from a blow job? And it was a house call, like. Dude drives by my walk last night, he says here's twenty, you be such and such place, such and such time, give me good head, you get another twenty. So I come here and the little fucker freaks. And I get busted. Hey, Sharkey, this some kind of entrapment shit?”

Sharkey ignored her and helped his partner heave Wharton up on his wobbly legs. People who graduate from law school usually miss the experience of being hit in the face by a big cop, although there are those who would like it to be made part of the bar examination. It certainly made Conrad Wharton forget about issuing any orders. Instead he whimpered, “Please, I didn't … it was that woman's fault. She attacked me.

Sharkey laughed. “Woman? I don't see any woman here. How about you, Jerome? You see any woman?”

The blond sniffed haughtily. “You're a pig, Sharkey, you know that? You don't let a girl have any secrets.”

The panel on “The Systems Approach to Criminal Justice” was meeting in the Imperial Ballroom, and by ten of two the ornate chamber was nearly filled with prosecuting attorneys and affiliated crime fighters from across the nation. Among them were Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi. A stage at one end of the room was furnished with a cloth-covered table and a podium with microphones. To the left of the stage an easel sign displayed the title of the session, and the panel members had little cards in front of their places with their names on them. Three panel members and a moderator had already taken their seats, which left one empty, the one marked “
CONRAD T. WHARTON
.”

Karp looked around at the crowd. “Big turnout for this bullshit.”

“Yeah, I haven't see so many white males in one room since I graduated from Yale Law. I hope our main speaker isn't late.”

“You nervous?”

“Only about that enormous chandelier suspended over our heads. I hate having shit like that over me. Do you think there's any chance it'll fall?”

“I hope not. Wipe out all these guys it'd set criminal justice back two weeks. Hey, V.T., how's it going?”

Newbury, slightly out of breath, slid himself into the empty seat beside them. He was carrying a white paper dry-cleaner's bag and hangers. “I didn't miss anything yet, I see. You know, I just had the most peculiar experience. I was lunching with Chip Wharton, and he had an unfortunate accident with some wine—”

“How sad!” Marlene exclaimed. “And did you place him in a booth in the men's room and go to get his clothes dry-cleaned?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. But imagine! When I returned, he was gone. I wonder what could have happened to him?”

Karp said, “Maybe he got tired of waiting and came here to speak in his undies, like in a bad dream.”

V.T. said, “Possible, but … look, I do believe that's him now, taking his place behind his little name card.”

“Gosh, V.T., are you sure?” Marlene asked. “It doesn't look much like Wharton to me.”

“I'm prepared to swear to it. Look, he's even wearing the little name tag with the blue speaker's ribbon on it.”

“Oh,
well
, then, I guess you're right. Hey, they're starting.”

At the podium, the moderator, a chubby, balding person wearing a serious suit and a little mustache, made greeting noises, a little joke, and then introduced the first speaker, the distinguished lawyer and administrator, and a great pioneer in criminal-justice-systems development, Conrad T. Wharton. Consulting an index card, he then described Wharton's career in glowing terms. There was a brief round of applause, the moderator sat down, and the speaker marched up to the podium. He adjusted the microphone and put a thin sheaf of paper on the podium. He smiled and began to read his speech. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “it is a great honor to be able to speakable shit you here buggy today. For years the crimanix whorehouse rat turds butt fucker justice system has been plagued by the simple inabilititty cunt face asshole to evaluate its suckass cocksucker in prickassing cases.”

Since it was an after-lunch meeting, perhaps the audience was a little slow on the uptake. But a few minutes into the speech there were murmurs and nervous laughter. A few minutes later the murmurs grew angry and the shouts began. People started to walk out.

“Hey, where's Guma?” Marlene asked. “He should be here to see this.”

“No,” V.T. said. “Like all great directors he never attends opening night. Actually, I think he's paying off the troops. And he's got to spring Jerome.”

The place was emptying fast. The panelists and the moderator were standing about, flapping jaws and wondering what to do.

“Want to go?” Karp asked.

“I don't know,” said Marlene. “Dirty Warren is really wailing. Maybe I'll stay and see what happens. You?”

“Got to go see Bloom.”

“Oh-ho! Give him one from me too.”

“I will. You coming, V.T.?”

“No, I think I'll stay for the peroration. I never realized the systems approach was so interesting.”

Sanford Bloom's day had started off quite well and had gone precipitously downhill from there. At nine that morning he had met with the New York State Attorney General and some important people from Justice in Washington. He had managed to let them know he was available for higher office, and they had appeared to consider this seriously. At noon he had given the welcome and keynote address to an appreciative audience of IAPA members at the Waldorf, which had been received, he had noted, with much more than perfunctory applause.

In the afternoon, however, things had started to come unglued. First there was an hysterical call from Wharton, in which he claimed to have been assaulted by a transvestite prostitute while dressed in his underwear in the men's room of an Italian restaurant, and then to have been beaten and arrested by the police. He was calling from the precinct cells.

Saying he would arrange for a lawyer, Bloom had cut the conversation short. He found it very disturbing to think that Wharton was anything but completely in charge. The man knew all the secrets. Then the courthouse reporter from the
Post
called, asking questions about some disturbance during a session down at the Waldorf. Wharton had apparently gone crazy and started shouting obscenities at the audience. Bloom had put the reporter off until later, but could not do the same with the president of the IAPA, who had called in a fury to denounce Wharton as a disgrace to the profession. Bloom was confused. How could Wharton deliver an obscene speech when he was being arrested on a sex offense? He got rid of the president by promising a full investigation and a meeting the next afternoon. Then he took two aspirins and a Gelusel.

But the worst call was from Arthur Bingham Roberts. John Evans had called Roberts that morning in a blind panic, with a story about how Karp knew all about the typewriter and the translator, and what should he do, what should he do? Roberts had told him to stonewall, and he was advising Bloom to do the same. There was no direct evidence proving collusion between defense and prosecution to obstruct justice by throwing the case. As long as they kept that in mind, and kept their heads, Karp could do nothing.

Good advice, but still hard for Bloom to take, since he knew there was direct evidence. He had just accumulated a few more feet of it while Roberts was talking. By the time Roberts had said good-bye, Bloom's forehead was covered by a thin sheen of sweat. The first thing he did after hanging up the phone was to remove the tapes for the last two months from the locked cabinet where he kept them, shove them in his briefcase, and lock the briefcase. The next thing was to pick up the phone.

He needed somebody to fix this, and he was not a fixer. He preferred to stay above the messy fray, at what he called “the policy level.” When his secretary came on, he snapped, “Get me Wharton's private line.” The phone rang twice before he realized what he was doing. Wharton wasn't there, of course. Wharton was in jail on a sex charge. He slammed the receiver down. I'm losing my mind, he thought. This can't be happening.