The Bonfire of the Vanities (26 page)

Because Martin and Goldberg were there, Kramer felt the need to quench the histrionics.

“That may well be, Reverend Bacon,” he said, “but so far we don’t have any evidence of a hit-and-run.”

Reverend Bacon gave him his level gaze and then, for the first time, smiled. “You’re going to have all the evidence you need. You’re going to meet Henry Lamb’s mother. I know her very well…see…and you can believe what she says. She’s a member of my church. She’s a hardworking woman, a good woman…see…a good woman. She’s got a good job, down at the Municipal Building, in the Marriage Bureau. Don’t take a nickel of welfare. A good woman with a good son.” Then he pressed a button on his desk and leaned forward and said, “Miss Hadley, show Mrs. Lamb in. Oh, one more thing. Her husband, Henry’s father, was killed six years ago, shot to death, coming home one night, outside the project. Tried to resist a robber.” Reverend Bacon looked at each of the three of them, nodding the whole time.

With this, Martin stood up and stared out the bay window. He stared so intently Kramer thought he must have spotted a burglary in progress, at the very least. Reverend Bacon looked at him, puzzled.

“What kind of trees are they?” Martin asked.

“Which ones, Marty?” asked Goldberg, and he stood up, too.

“Right there,” said Martin, pointing.

Reverend Bacon swiveled around in his chair and looked out the window himself. “Those are sycamore trees,” he said.

“Sycamores,” said Martin, in the contemplative tone of a young naturalist in an arboriculture program. “Look at those trunks. They must go up fifty feet.”

“Trying to reach the light,” said Reverend Bacon. “Trying to find the sun.”

Behind Kramer a pair of huge oak doors opened, and the secretary, Miss Hadley, ushered in a trim black woman, no more than forty, perhaps younger. She wore a businesslike blue skirt and jacket and a white blouse. Her black hair was done in soft waves. She had a thin, almost delicate face and large eyes and the self-possessed look of a teacher or someone else used to meeting the public.

Reverend Bacon stood up and walked around the desk to meet her. Kramer stood up also—and understood Martin’s and the Jewish Shamrock’s sudden interest in the arboreal species. They didn’t want to get trapped into having to stand when the woman came into the room. It had been bad enough having to get up for a hustler like Bacon. Doing it again for some woman from the projects who was part of his setup was taking this thing too far. This way they were already on their feet, studying the sycamore trees, when she came in the room.

“Gentlemen,” said Reverend Bacon, “this is Mrs. Annie Lamb. This is the gentleman from the District Attorney’s Office in the Bronx, Mr. Kramer. And, uh—”

“Detective Martin, and Detective Goldberg,” said Kramer. “They’re in charge of the investigation of your son’s case.”

Mrs. Lamb didn’t step forward to shake hands and she didn’t smile. She nodded ever so slightly. She seemed to be withholding judgment on the three of them.

Very much the shepherd, Reverend Bacon pulled up an armchair for her. Instead of returning to his big swivel chair, he sat on the edge of the desk with an athletic casualness.

Reverend Bacon said to Mrs. Lamb, “I was talking to Mr. Kramer here, and the parking tickets, they’re taken care of.” He looked at Kramer.

“Well, the warrant’s been quashed,” said Kramer. “There’s no more warrant. Now there’s just the tickets, and as far as we’re concerned, we’re not interested in the tickets, anyway.”

Reverend Bacon looked at Mrs. Lamb and smiled and nodded his head a few times, as if to say, “Reverend Bacon delivers.” She just looked at him and pursed her lips.

“Well, Mrs. Lamb,” said Kramer, “Reverend Bacon tells us you have some information for us about what happened to your son.”

Mrs. Lamb looked at Reverend Bacon. He nodded yes and said, “Go ahead. Tell Mr. Kramer what you told me.”

She said, “My son was hit by a car, and the car didn’t stop. It was a hit-and-run. But he got the license number, or he got part of it.”

Her voice was businesslike.

“Wait a minute, Mrs. Lamb,” said Kramer. “If you don’t mind, start at the beginning. When did you first learn about this? When did you first know your son had been injured?”

“When he came home from the hospital with his wrist in this—uh—I don’t know what you call it.”

“A cast?”

“No, it wasn’t a cast. It was more like a splint, only it looked like a big canvas glove.”

“Well, anyway, he came home from the hospital with this wrist injury. When was that?”

“That was…three nights ago.”

“What did he say had happened?”

“He didn’t say much. He was in a lot of pain, and he wanted to go to bed. He said something about a car, but I thought he was riding in a car and they had an accident. Like I say, he didn’t want to talk. I think they gave him something at the hospital, for the pain. He just wanted to go to bed. So I told him to go to bed.”

“Did he say who he was with when it happened?”

“No. He wasn’t with anybody. He was by himself.”

“Then he wasn’t in a car.”

“No, he was walking.”

“All right, go ahead. What happened next?”

“The next morning he felt real bad. He tried to lift his head, and he nearly passed out. He felt so bad I didn’t go to work. I called in—I stayed home. That was when he told me a car hit him.”

“How did he say it happened?”

“He was walking across Bruckner Boulevard, and this car hit him, and he fell on his wrist, and he must have hit his head, too, because he has a terrible concussion.” At this point her composure broke. She closed her eyes, and they were full of tears when she opened them.

Kramer waited a moment. “Where on Bruckner Boulevard was this?”

“I don’t know. When he tried to talk, it was too painful for him. He’d open his eyes and shut his eyes. He couldn’t even sit up.”

“But he was by himself, you said. What was he doing on Bruckner Boulevard?”

“I don’t know. There’s a takeout place up there, at 161st Street, the Texas Fried Chicken, and Henry, he likes these things they have there, the chicken nuggets, and so maybe he was going there, but I don’t know.”

“Where did the car hit him? Where on his body?”

“I don’t know that, either. The hospital, maybe they can tell you that.”

Reverend Bacon broke in: “The hospital, they fell down on the job. They didn’t X-ray that young man’s head. They didn’t give him the CAT scan or the nuclear magnetic resonance or any of those other things. That young man comes in with a very serious injury to his head, and they treat his
wrist
and send him home.”

“Well,” said Kramer, “apparently they didn’t know he’d been hit by a car.” He turned to Martin. “ ’S’at right?”

“The emergency-room report don’t mention an automobile,” said Martin.

“The boy had a serious injury to his head!” said Reverend Bacon. “He probably didn’t know half of what he was saying. They’re supposed to figure out those things.”

“Well, let’s don’t get sidetracked on that,” said Kramer.

“He got part of the license plate,” said Mrs. Lamb.

“What’d he tell you?”

“He said it started with R. That was the first letter. The second letter was E or F or P or B or some letter like that. That was what it looked like.”

“What state? New York?”

“What state? I don’t know. I guess New York. He didn’t say it was something else. And he told me the make.”

“What was it?”

“A Mercedes.”

“I see. What color?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Four-door? Two-door?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he say what the driver looked like?”

“He said there was a man and a woman in the car.”

“A man was driving?”

“I guess so. I don’t know.”

“Any description of the man or the woman?”

“They were white.”

“He said they were white? Anything else?”

“No, he just said they were white.”

“That’s all? He didn’t say anything else about them or about the car?”

“No. He could hardly talk.”

“How did he get to the hospital?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

Kramer asked Martin, “Did they say at the hospital?”

“He was a walk-in.”

“He couldn’ta walked from Bruckner Boulevard to Lincoln Hospital with a broken wrist.”

“Walk-in don’t mean he walked all the way there. It just means he walked in the emergency room. He wasn’t carried in. The EMS didn’t bring him. He didn’t come in an ambulance.”

Kramer’s mind was already jumping ahead to trial preparation. All he could see were dead ends. He paused and then shook his head and said, to no one in particular: “That don’t give us very much.”

“Whaddaya mean?” said Bacon. For the first time there was a sharp tone in his voice. “You got the first letter on the license plate, and you got a line on the second letter, and you got the make of the car—how many Mercedeses with a license plate beginning with RE, RF, RB, or RP you think you gonna find?”

“There’s no telling,” said Kramer. “Detective Martin and Detective Goldberg will run that down. But what we need is a witness. Without a witness there’s no case here yet.”

“No case?” said Reverend Bacon. “You got a case and a half seems to me. You got a young man, an outstanding young man, at death’s door. You got a car and a license plate. How much case you need?”

“Look,” said Kramer, hoping that an ultra-patient, slightly condescending tone would take care of the implied rebuke. “Let me explain something to you. Let’s assume we identify the car tomorrow. Okay? Let’s assume the car is registered in the state of New York, and there’s only one Mercedes with a license number that begins with R. Now we’ve got a car. But we got no driver.”

“Yeah, but you can—”

“Just because somebody owns a car doesn’t mean”—as soon as it slipped out, Kramer hoped the
doesn’t
would blow by undetected—“he was driving it at a particular time.”

“But you can question that man.”

“That’s true, and we would. But unless he says, ‘Sure, I was involved in such-and-such a hit-and-run accident,’ we’re back where we started.”

Reverend Bacon shook his head. “I don’t see that.”

“The problem is, we don’t have a witness. We not only don’t have anybody to tell us where this thing happened, we don’t even have anybody who can tell us he was hit by any car at all.”

“You got Henry Lamb himself!”

Kramer raised his hands from his lap and shrugged gently, so as not to overemphasize the fact that Mrs. Lamb’s son would probably never be able to bear witness to anything again.

“You got what he told his mother. He told her himself.”

“It gives us a lead, but it’s hearsay.”

“It’s what he told his
mother
.”

“You may accept it as the truth, and I may accept it as the truth, but it’s not admissible in a court of law.”

“That don’t make sense to me.”

“Well, that’s the law. But in all candor I ought to bring out something else. Apparently when he came into the emergency room three nights ago, he didn’t say anything about being hit by a car. That don’t help matters any.”
Don’t
. He got it right that time.

“He had a concussion…and a broken wrist…Probably a lot of things he didn’t say.”

“Well, was he thinking any more clearly the next morning? You could make that argument, too.”

“
Who’s
making that argument?” said Reverend Bacon. “
You
’re making that argument?”

“I’m not making any argument. I’m just trying to show you that without a witness there’s a lot of problems.”

“Well, you can find the car, can’t you? You can interrogate the owner. You can check that car for evidence, can’t you?”

“Sure,” said Kramer. “As I told you, they’re gonna run that down.” He nodded toward Martin and Goldberg. “They’ll try to find witnesses, too. But I don’t think a car would yield much evidence. If a car hit him, it must’ve grazed him. He has some bruises, but he don’t have the kind of bodily injuries you’d have from being really
hit
by a car.”

“Say
if
a car hit him?”

“This case is fulla ifs, Reverend Bacon. If we find a car and an owner, and if the owner says, ‘Yeah, I hit this young man the other night, and I didn’t stop, and I didn’t report it,’ then we got a case. Otherwise, we got a lot of problems.”

“Unh-hunh,” said Reverend Bacon. “So it might be you can’t spend a whole lot a time on this case, being as it has so many problems?”

“That’s not true. This case will get as much attention as any other case.”

“You say be candid. Well, I’m going to be candid. Henry Lamb is not a prominent citizen, and he’s not the son of a prominent citizen, but he’s a fine young man all the same…see…He’s about to graduate from high school. He didn’t drop out. He was—he’s thinking about going to college. Never been in trouble. But he’s from the Edgar Allan Poe projects. The Edgar Allan Poe projects. He’s a young black man from the projects. Now, let’s turn this thing around for a minute. Suppose Henry Lamb was a young white man and he lived on Park Avenue, and he was about to go to Yale, and he was struck down on Park Avenue by a black man and a black woman in a…a…Pontiac Firebird instead of a Mercedes…see…And that boy told his mother what Henry Lamb told his mother. You mean to tell me you wouldn’t
have a case
? Instead of talking about problems, you’d be turning that information inside out and counting the stitches.”

Martin came rumbling to life. “We’d do the same thing we’re doing right now. We been trying to find Mrs. Lamb here for two days. When did we find out about a license number? You heard it. I’ve worked Park Avenue and I’ve worked Bruckner Boulevard. It don’t make any difference.”

Martin’s voice was so calm and definite, and his stare was so implacable, so mule-like, so stone Irish, it seemed to jolt Reverend Bacon for a moment. He tried to outstare the little Irishman, without success. Then he smiled slightly and said, “You can tell me that, because I’m a minister, and I want to believe that justice is blind…see…I want to believe it. But you best not be going out on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx trying to tell people that. You best not be informing them about these blessings, because they already know the truth. They discover it the hard way.”