The Bonfire of the Vanities (29 page)

Kramer reached toward the telephone on his desk and said, “Use your phone?”

“Hey, what the fuck, man!”

Kramer pulled his hand back.

“How long I gotta sit here chained up like a fucking animal?”

With that, the man raised his powerful left arm with a terrific clattering. There was a manacle on his wrist, and from the manacle a chain. The other end of the chain was manacled to the leg of the desk. Now the other two, at the other desks, had their arms up in the air, clattering and yammering. All three of them were chained to the desks.

“All I did was
see
the motherfucker whack that sucker, and he was the motherfucker that
whacked
that sucker, and I’m the one you got chained up like a fucking animal, and that motherfucker”—another terrific clatter as he gestured toward a room in the rear with his left hand—“he’s sitting back there watching fucking TV and eating ribs.”

Kramer looked to the back of the room, and sure enough, back there in a locker room was a figure sitting on the edge of a chair lit by the hectic flush of the television set and eating a length of barbecued rib of pork. And he was indeed leaning forward daintily. The sleeve of his jacket was tailored to show a lot of white cuff and gleaming cuff link.

Now all three were yammering.
Fucking ribs…fucking chains!…fucking TV!

But of course! The witnesses. Once Kramer realized that, everything, chains and all, fell into place.

“Yeah, okay, okay,” he said to the man in an impatient fashion, “I’ll take care a you in a minute. I gotta make a phone call.”

Fucking ribs!…shee-uh!…fucking chains!

Kramer called the office, and Gloria, Bernie Fitzgibbon’s secretary, said Milt Lubell wanted to talk to him. Lubell was Abe Weiss’s press secretary. Kramer barely knew Lubell; he couldn’t remember talking to him more than four or five times. Gloria gave him Lubell’s number.

Milt Lubell had worked on the old
New York Mirror
back when Walter Winchell still had his column. He had known the great man ever so slightly and had carried his breathless snap-brim way of talking onward into the last days of the twentieth century.

“Kramer,” he said, “Kramer, Kramer, lemme see, Kramer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I got it. The case of Henry Lamb. Likely to die. What’s it amount to?”

“It’s a piece a shit,” said Kramer.

“Well, I got a query from
The City Light
, some Brit named Fallow. Guy’s got this accent. I thought I was listening to Channel 13. Anyway, he’s reading me a statement from Reverend Bacon about the case of Henry Lamb. That’s all I need. The words of Reverend Reginald Bacon in a British accent. You know Bacon?”

“Yeah,” said Kramer. “I interviewed Henry Lamb’s mother in Bacon’s office.”

“This guy has something from her, too, but mainly it’s Bacon. Lemme see, lemme see, lemme see. It says, uh…blah blah blah, blah blah blah…human life in the Bronx…malfeasance…white middle class…blah blah blah…nuclear magnetic resonance…Goes on about the nuclear magnetic resonance. There’s maybe two a the fucking machines in the whole country, I think…blah blah blah…Lemme see, here it is. He accuses the district attorney of dragging his feet. We won’t go to the trouble of proceeding with the case because the kid is a black youth from the Poe projects and it’s too much trouble.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Well, I know that, and you know that, but I gotta call this Brit back and tell him something.”

A tremendous clatter. “How long I gotta sit here in these chains, man!” The man with the big arms was erupting again. “This is against the law!”

“Hey!” said Kramer, genuinely annoyed. “You wanna get outta here, you’ll knock it off. I can’t fucking hear myself talk.” Then to Lubell: “Sorry, I’m over at the precinct.” He wrapped his hand around his mouth and the mouthpiece of the telephone and said in a low voice: “They got three homicide witnesses over here chained to the fucking desk legs in the Detective Bureau, and they’re going bananas.” He enjoyed the low-level macho jolt of trotting out this little war story for Lubell, even though he didn’t even know the man.

“The desk legs!” said Lubell, with an appreciative note. “Jesus Christ, that I never heard of.”

“Anyway,” said Kramer, “where was I? Okay, we got a Mercedes-Benz with a license plate beginning with R. For a start, we don’t even know if we’re talking about a New York State license plate. Okay? That’s for a start. But let’s suppose we are. There’s 2,500 Mercedes registered in New York State with license plates starting with R. Okay, now, the second letter supposedly looks like an E or an F, or maybe a P or a B or an R, some letter with a vertical on the left and some horizontals going off of it. Suppose we go with that. We’re still talking about almost five hundred cars. So whaddaya do? Go after five hundred cars? If you have a witness who can tell you the boy was hit by such a car, maybe you do. But there’s no witness, except for the kid, and he’s in a coma and isn’t coming out. We got no information about a driver. All we have is two people in a car, two white people, a man and a woman, and on top of that the kid’s story don’t add up in the first place.”

“Well, whadda I say? The investigation is continuing?”

“Yeah. The investigation
is
continuing. But unless Martin finds a witness, there’s no case here. Even if the kid was hit by a car, it probably wasn’t the kind of collision that would yield forensic evidence from the car, because the kid don’t have the bodily injuries that are consistent with such a collision—I mean, f’r Chrissake, there are so many fucking ifs in this cockamamie story. If you ask me, it’s a piece a shit. The kid seems like a decent sort, and so does his mother, but between you and me, I think he got in some kind of scrape and made up this bullshit story to tell his mother.”

“Well then, why would he dream up part of a license plate? Why wouldn’t he say he didn’t get the number?”

“How do I know? Why does anybody do anything that they do in this county? You think this guy, this reporter, is actually gonna write something?”

“I don’t know. I’m just gonna say that naturally we’re following the thing closely.”

“Anybody else called you about it?”

“Naw. It sounds like Bacon reached this guy some way.”

“What does Bacon get out of it?”

“Oh, this is one of the hobby horses he rides. The double standard, white justice, blah blah blah. He’s always out to embarrass the Mayor.”

“Well,” said Kramer, “if he can make something out of this piece a shit, then he’s a magician.”

By the time Kramer hung up, the three shackled witnesses were clattering and complaining again. With a heavy heart he realized he was actually going to have to sit down and talk to these three germs and get something coherent out of them about a man named Pimp who shot a man who knew a man who may or may not have known the whereabouts of forty suits. His entire Friday night was going to get shot in the ass, and he would have to shoot dice with Fate and ride the subway back down to Manhattan. He looked back into the locker room once more. That very vision himself, that
Gentleman’s Quarterly
cover boy, the man named Pimp, was still back there, eating ribs and hugely enjoying something on the TV, which lit up his face in tones of first-degree-burn pink and cobalt-therapy blue.

Kramer stepped outside the Detective Bureau and said to Gordon: “Your witnesses are getting kinda restless in there. That one guy wants to wrap his chain around my throat.”

“I had to put the chain on him.”

“I know that. But lemme ask you something. This fellow Pimp, he’s just sitting back there eating ribs. He’s not chained to anything.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about Pimp. He’s not going anywhere. He’s cooling out. He’s contented. This crummy neighborhood is all he knows. I bet he don’t know New York is on the Atlantic Ocean. He’s a home boy. No, he’s not going anywhere. He’s only the perpetrator. But a
wit
ness—hey, baby, if I didn’t put the chain on the witness, you wouldn’t have no-o-o-o-o-body to interview. You’d never see his ass again. A fucking witness’ll cut out for Santo Domingo faster’n you can say off-peak fare.”

Kramer headed back to the Detective Bureau to do his duty and interview the three irate citizens in chains and try to find some order in this latest piece a shit.

Since
The City Light
published no Sunday newspaper, there was only a skeleton crew in the city room on Saturday afternoons. Most of them were wire-copy editors, scavenging through the material that continued to come stuttering and shuddering out of the Associated Press and United Press International machines for items that might be of use for Monday’s edition. There were three reporters in the city room, plus one down at Manhattan Central Police Headquarters, in case there occurred some catastrophe or piece of mayhem so gory that
The City Light
’s readers would still want to lap it up on Monday. There was a lone assistant city editor, who spent most of the afternoon on the telephone, making sales calls on the
City Light
’s WATS line, for a sideline of his, which was selling college fraternity jewelry, wholesale, to fraternity house managers, who sold the stuff, the tie tacks and rings and pledge pins and whatnot, to the brothers at retail and kept the difference for themselves. The boredom and lassitude of these sentinels of the press could scarcely be exaggerated.

And on this particular Saturday afternoon there was also Peter Fallow.

Fallow, by contrast, was fervor personified. Of the various cubicles around the edges of the city room, his was the only one in use. He was perched on the edge of his chair with the telephone at his ear and a Biro in his hand. He was so keyed up, his excitement cut through today’s hangover with something approaching clarity.

On his desk was a telephone directory for Nassau County, which was on Long Island. A great hefty thing, it was, this directory. He had never heard of Nassau County, although he now reckoned he must have passed through it during the weekend when he had managed to inspire St. John’s superior at the museum, Virgil Gooch III—the Yanks loved to string Roman numerals after their sons’ names—to invite him to his ludicrously grand house by the ocean in East Hampton, Long Island. There was no second invitation, but…ah, well, ah, well…As for the town of Hewlett, which was in the county of Nassau, its existence on the face of the earth was news to him, but somewhere in the town of Hewlett a telephone was ringing, and he desperately wanted it to be answered. Finally, after seven rings, it was.

“Hello?” Out of breath.

“Mr. Rifkind?”

“Yes…” Out of breath and wary.

“This is Peter Fallow of the New York
City Light
.”

“Don’t want any.”

“Excuse me? I do hope you’ll forgive me for ringing you up on a Saturday afternoon.”

“You hope wrong. I subscribed to the
Times
once. Actually got it about once a week.”

“No, no, no, I’m not—”

“Either somebody swiped it from the front door before I left the house or it was soaking wet or it was never delivered.”

“No, I’m a journalist, Mr. Rifkind. I
write
for
The City Light
.”

He finally managed to establish this fact to Mr. Rifkind’s satisfaction.

“Well, okay,” said Mr. Rifkind, “go ahead. I was just out in the driveway having a few beers and making a
FOR SALE
sign to put up in the window of my car. You’re not by any chance in the market for a 1981 Thunderbird.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Fallow with a chortle, as if Mr. Rifkind were one of the great Saturday-afternoon wits of his experience. “Actually, I’m calling to inquire about one of your students, a young Mr. Henry Lamb.”

“Henry Lamb. Doesn’t ring a bell. What’s he done?”

“Oh, he hasn’t
done
anything. He’s been seriously injured.” He proceeded to lay out the facts of the case, stacking them rather heavily toward the Albert Vogel-Reverend Bacon theory of the incident. “I was told he was a student in your English class.”

“Who told you that?”

“His mother. I had quite a long talk with her. She’s a very nice woman and very upset, as you can imagine.”

“Henry Lamb…Oh yes, I know who you mean. Well, that’s too bad.”

“What I would like to find out, Mr. Rifkind, is what kind of student Henry Lamb is.”

“What
kind?
”

“Well, would you say he was an
outstanding
student?”

“Where are you from, Mr.—I’m sorry, tell me your name again?”

“Fallow.”

“Mr. Fallow. I gather you’re not from New York.”

“That’s true.”

“Then there’s no reason why you should know anything about Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School in the Bronx. At Ruppert we use comparative terms, but
outstanding
isn’t one of them. The range runs more from cooperative to life-threatening.” Mr. Rifkind began to chuckle. “F’r Chrissake, don’t say I said that.”

“Well, how would you describe Henry Lamb?”

“Cooperative. He’s a nice fellow. Never gives
me
any trouble.”

“Would you describe him as a good student?”

“
Good
doesn’t work too well at Ruppert, either. It’s more ‘Does he attend class or doesn’t he?’ ”

“Did Henry Lamb attend class?”

“As I recall, yes. He’s usually there. He’s very dependable. He’s a nice kid, as nice as they come.”

“Was there any part of the curriculum he was particularly good—or, let me say, adept at, anything he did better than anything else?”

“Not particularly.”

“No?”

“It’s difficult to explain, Mr. Fallow. As the saying goes, ‘
Ex nihilo ni-hil fit
.’ There’s not a great range of activities in these classes, and so it’s hard to compare performances. These boys and girls—sometimes their minds are in the classroom, and sometimes they’re not.”

“What about Henry Lamb?”

“He’s a nice fellow. He’s polite, he pays attention, he doesn’t give me any trouble. He tries to learn.”

“Well, he must have some abilities. His mother told me he was considering going to college.”