SoHo Sins (35 page)

“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.”

The star witness looked a bit surprised, briefly, as she pulled on her coat.

“Whatever,” she said. There was something diffident, almost apologetic, in her manner. “I had to say something up there.”

And then, with a few quick, long-legged steps, Melissa was on her way down the green corridor, back to the Bradford School, back to her Wooster Street loft—that stylish SoHo refuge from which Angela was now increasingly absent, tending Philip regularly as he submitted to a hospice routine of clean bed linens and morning sponge baths.

The medical staff was surprised at how quickly, how completely, my friend faded after that. The flesh of Philip’s arms and legs collapsed against the bone, leaving his limbs like long depleted tubes; his impossibly thin neck protruded from a chest sunken above a popped belly. By then, he probably had no idea where—or who—he might be anymore. At least he was spared the small horror of knowing his fate, or outliving his money.

The last time I saw Philip alive, he looked at me wonderingly, his whole face a plea. His expensive flannels and gabardines had been hung pointlessly in a closet; he was dressed in cotton pajamas, striped pale blue and white. I stared into his eyes for a while—or, rather, let him stare wildly into mine. I had come aching for one last glimpse of the old Philip, dreaming that we might somehow joke about the old days, like the night Claudia danced on the bar at the Stockyard.

Instead, he rasped and mumbled to me repeatedly, “What am I worth?” as though I were Carl Marks with laptop in hand.

Each time I responded, “All your accounts are in order, Philip. Everything paid in advance.”

He nodded vigorously, clutching my arm with more force than his shrunken limbs should have permitted.

Yet a few minutes later, he started drifting into sleep, surrounded by a chorus of impersonal beeping machines. I thought about the financial data that used to pour constantly into my friend via his computer screens. Now everything was flowing out: heart rate, temperature, brain activity, breathing. Philip himself had become little more than a stream of information, a sad message.

There was no more for me to say or do. Rising from the bedside chair, I touched his fragile shoulder, spoke his name once—a last time—and left.

Later, I found myself, to my great surprise, prominently named in Philip’s will—not as a beneficiary but as Melissa’s legal guardian in the event of Angela’s death or “permanent maternal incapacity.” I wondered how such a phrase, and such a peculiar thought, had come into Philip’s head. But, or course, quite a number of bizarre ideas passed through his mind as his dementia grew.

By the time the trial ended, Philip, skeletal and hairless, had forgotten Claudia as though she never existed: it was his last gift to his mistress. She was free to go. The girl, making her farewell visit, wept in Angela’s arms. To comfort her, the older woman used a word in Italian that she heard from Philip’s lips during one of his feverish monologues. It was his favorite teasing endearment when he and Claudia were first together, passionately and in secret, while Mandy was still alive. The girl wailed once and fled.

From then on, only the two former spouses remained in the room. Philip’s mutterings were mostly nonsense by that point, or reduced to sharp howls of fear. The nurses stopped by briefly for linen changes, morphine shots, and thrice-daily vital signs. Otherwise, Angela kept her vigil alone, at all hours, for five desolate months. It was then, I suppose, that my feelings for her deepened beyond the bounds of reason or law.

At the end, like many a dying man, Philip tried to strip himself naked, convulsing in the bed and tugging at his pajama bottoms as though he wished, in the final instant, to lay bare the now shriveled source of his grief. The sounds he made, for the most part no longer human, occasionally coalesced into a word or phrase. Most were banal or incomprehensible: “snow cold,” a monotonous “night, night, night.” Only one outburst stayed with Angela afterwards, chiming in her mind and letters for years to come.