SoHo Sins (34 page)

“Charm tends to get its way in this world, especially with men. Even fake tough guys like you.”

Hogan stopped the bottle halfway to his lips and lowered it again without drinking. “It’s Christmas, pal. So I’m not going to break your face for that.”

I waited for him to laugh, but he didn’t.

Hogan took the long delayed swig, a deep one. “Look, just forget the cockamamie what-ifs here. I know what’s eating you.” He stared me square in the face. “Me sleeping with Angela means nothing.”

“No, not to me.” I studied the last of my beer. “But what about you?”

He smiled. “Since when do you worry about me, Jack?”

The waitress came back with Hogan’s change, and he handed her a fat tip. She looked very happy. “Merry Christmas, guys,” she said.

Hogan waited, eyeing my nearly empty glass.

“And if you’re wrong about Paul?” I asked.

“Tough break.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Hogan regarded me evenly, without blinking. “Don’t go pussy-boy on me now. I was afraid you might be in over your head.”

I tried to muster some evidence to the contrary, but my mind was numb.

“Why? Because I want to be sure?” I asked finally. “Really certain, before the cell door closes on Paul?”

“Sure, certain—that’s schoolteacher talk, Jack. I live in the real world.”

“Do you?” I said. “Are you sure?”

Hogan, scratching at the label of his empty bottle, made me wait.

“Look,” he said, “how wrong could we be really? Nobody’s innocent here. The way I see it, there’s enough crap in anybody’s file to justify a capital charge. In mine, for sure; in yours. And we’re choirboys compared to Paul Morse.”

“I suppose. But I don’t feel very virtuous.”

“That’s what saves you.”

“Does it?”

“Someday maybe.”

I drained the last of my beer, preparing to leave. In a few hours, Missy would be opening her presents.

“You know,” I said, “Paul really thought I was his friend.”

“Same old Jack. A fine chum to all, even murderers and sickos.”

Hogan stood and pulled on his topcoat. We nodded good night to the bartender, his ex-fighter’s body a dark bulk against the white Christmas lights strung over the shelves of bottles behind him. I put some extra bills on the table for the waitress.

“You’re always trying to be some kind of badass, Jack, but you always end up pretty square.”

“Do I?”

“If you didn’t I’d deck you.”

I buttoned my coat and drew my leather gloves out of the pockets.

“Maybe that’s just what I need, Hogan.”

“To bring you to your senses?”

“No, to help me sleep at night.”

Outside, in the light snow, Hogan told me that he wanted to attend midnight mass.

“You gave me some things to think about,” he said. “Church is good for that.”

We walked east along Prince Street, past the old brick hulk that housed the downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum. On the upper floors, all the lights were out. No one was working late that holiday night. We crossed Broadway and then the poorly lit Crosby Street, passing beyond Lafayette into what were once the upper reaches of the Italian section.

Lately, some real estate agents had taken to calling the district Nolita, for “north of Little Italy.” True to Sammy’s description, the immigrant enclave had receded, and the narrow streets were now dotted with hipster lounges and hole-in-the-wall storefronts selling one-off items by designers fresh out of Parsons and FIT.

“At least some things never change,” Hogan said, lifting his chin sharply.

Glancing up, I saw a plain stone cross on the roof of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the emblem hovering stark above the street signs and building tops. We skirted the slush at Mulberry Street and came to an undulating brick wall and the high, wide-spreading trees of the churchyard. It was quiet on the sidewalk under the branches, and we were sheltered briefly from the snow twisting down in large flakes past the streetlights. Across the street at Mekong, a few drinkers clustered at the darkened bar. Next door, plastic buckets of cut flowers shone brightly in a fluorescent glow under the canopy of a Korean deli that never closed. Hogan and I, like two workmen after a double shift, walked on without speaking.

When a car passed, splashing slush onto the bottom of my black cashmere coat, I cursed.

“Hey, life is rough,” Hogan said. “Take that rag to your Park Avenue cleaners.”

I looked down at the spatter. “One thing after another. Don’t you ever get fed up?”

“What did you expect, Flash, peace on earth for your efforts?”

“Maybe. For one night anyhow.”

“Good friggin’ luck with that, brother.”

We walked on.

“Somehow,” I said, “I thought I’d feel a lot better about the idea of Paul in a prison upstate.”

“Don’t worry. You did your part, now the State of New York will do its.”

“Which is what?”

“Punishment. A few decades’ worth.”

“Is that what they teach you in church?”

Hogan stopped, his hands deep in his pockets.

“Maybe that perv will straighten out, but I doubt it. You think you’re going to improve a Paul Morse?”

“Maybe he’ll improve me.” I shook a few flakes from my collar. “Just the sickening thought of him.”

We trudged through the snow again, swaying slightly. Our heads were lowered, and I couldn’t see Hogan’s face when he spoke.

“Get real,” he said. “Cops don’t make people honest, any more than priests make them holy or doctors make them immortal.”

“What’s that leave?”

“Duty.”

He must have known I was lost.

“The whole idea,” Hogan said, “is just to keep everybody alive long enough to die of natural causes, and straight enough to stop screwing each other over.”

“Great. I’m deeply inspired.”

“That’s the deal.”

“Anyhow, I did what I could. For Missy’s sake.”

Hogan hunched his shoulders against the night’s cold.

“Sure, big guy,” he said. “We’re like the last knights of Christendom, you and me.”

The snow fell lightly on us, around us, between us.

At Mott Street, we turned left and walked half a block to the church’s black iron gate. We stopped, and I said goodbye to Hogan as a few last-minute supplicants passed through the gate to the forecourt.

“Sure you don’t want to come in?” he asked.

“It wouldn’t do me any good.”

“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.

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 she 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.