The Bonfire of the Vanities (14 page)

Here they were…and here he was, and where was he going? What were these cases he was handling? Pieces of shit! Garbage collection…Arthur Rivera. Arthur Rivera and another drug dealer get into an argument over an order of pizza at a social club and pull knives, and Arthur says, “Let’s put the weapons down and fight man to man.” And they do, whereupon Arthur pulls out a second knife and stabs the other fellow in the chest and kills him…Jimmy Dollard. Jimmy Dollard and his closest pal, Otis Blakemore, and three other black guys are drinking and taking cocaine and playing a game called the dozens, in which the idea is to see how outrageously you can insult the other fellow, and Blakemore is doing an inspired number on Jimmy, and Jimmy pulls out a revolver and shoots him through the heart and then collapses on the table, sobbing and saying, “My man! My man Stan! I shot my man Stan!”…And the case of Herbert 92X—

For an instant the thought of Herbert’s case triggered a vision of the girl with brown lipstick—

The press couldn’t even
see
these cases. It was just poor people killing poor people. To prosecute such cases was to be part of the garbage-collection service, necessary and honorable, plodding and anonymous.

Captain Ahab wasn’t so ridiculous, after all. Press coverage! Ray and Jimmy could laugh all they wanted, but Weiss had made sure the entire city knew his name. Weiss had an election coming up, and the Bronx was 70 percent black and Latin, and he was going to make sure the name Abe Weiss was pumped out to them on every channel that existed. He might not do much else, but he was going to do that.

A telephone rang: Ray’s. “Homicide,” he said. “Andriutti…Bernie’s not here. I think he’s in court…What?…Go over that again?” Long pause. “Well, was he hit by a car or wasn’t he?…Unnh-hunnh…Well, shit, I don’t know. You better talk it over with Bernie. Okay?…Okay.” He hung up and shook his head and looked at Jimmy Caughey. “That was some detective who’s over at Lincoln Hospital. Says they got a likely-to-die, some kid who comes into the emergency room and don’t know whether he slipped in the bathtub and broke his wrist or got hit by a Mercedes-Benz. Or some such shit. Wants to talk to Bernie. So let him fucking talk to Bernie.”

Ray shook his head some more, and Kramer and Caughey nodded sympathetically. The eternal pieces a shit in the Bronx.

Kramer looked at his watch and stood up.

“Well,” he said, “you guys can sit here and fuck-all, if you want, but I gotta go fucking listen to that renowned Middle Eastern scholar Herbert 92X read from the Koran.”

There were thirty-five courtrooms in the Bronx County Building devoted to criminal cases, and each one was known as a “part.” They had been built at a time, the early 1930s, when it was still assumed that the very look of a courtroom should proclaim the gravity and omnipotence of the rule of law. The ceilings were a good fifteen feet high. The walls were paneled throughout in a dark wood. The judge’s bench was a stage with a vast desk. The desk had enough cornices, moldings, panels, pilasters, inlays, and sheer hardwood mass to make you believe that Solomon himself, who was a king, would have found it imposing. The seats in the spectators’ section were separated from the judge’s bench, the jury box, and the tables of the prosecutor, the defendant, and the clerk of the court by a wooden balustrade with an enormous carved top rail, the so-called Bar of Justice. In short, there was nothing whatsoever in the look of the premises to tip off the unwary to the helter-skelter of a criminal court judge’s daily task.

The moment Kramer walked in, he could tell that the day had gotten off to a bad start in Part 60. He had only to look at the judge. Kovitsky was up on the bench, in his black robes, leaning forward with both forearms on his desktop. His chin was down so low it seemed about to touch it. His bony skull and his sharp beak jutted out of the robe at such a low angle he looked like a buzzard. Kramer could see his irises floating and bobbing on the whites of his eyes as he scanned the room and its raggedy collection of humanity. He looked as if he were about to flap his wings and strike. Kramer felt ambivalent about Kovitsky. On one hand, he resented his courtroom tirades, which were often personal and designed to humiliate. On the other hand, Kovitsky was a Jewish warrior, a son of the Masada. Only Kovitsky could have stopped the loudmouths in the prison vans with a gob of spit.

“Where’s Mr. Sonnenberg?” said Kovitsky. There was no response.

So he said it again, this time in an amazing baritone that nailed every syllable into the back wall and startled all newcomers to the courtroom of Judge Myron Kovitsky: “
WHERE IS MIS-TER SON-NEN-BERG!
”

Except for two little boys and a little girl, who were running between the benches and playing tag, the spectators froze. One by one they congratulated themselves. No matter how miserable their fates, at least they had not fallen so low as to be Mr. Sonnenberg, that miserable insect, whoever he was.

That miserable insect was a lawyer, and Kramer knew the nature of his offense, which was that his absence was impeding the shoveling of the chow into the gullet of the criminal justice system, Part 60. In each part, the day began with the so-called calendar session, during which the judge dealt with motions and pleas in a variety of cases, perhaps as many as a dozen in a morning. Kramer had to laugh every time he saw a television show with a courtroom scene. They always showed a trial in progress. A trial! Who the hell dreamed up these goddamned shows? Every year there were 7,000 felony indictments in the Bronx and the capacity for 650 trials, at the most. The judges had to dispose of the other 6,350 cases in either of two ways. They could dismiss a case or they could let the defendant plead guilty to a reduced charge in return for not forcing the court to go through a trial. Dismissing cases was a hazardous way to go about reducing the backlog, even for a grotesque cynic. Every time a felony case was thrown out, somebody, such as the victim or his family, was likely to yell, and the press was only too happy to attack judges who let the malefactors go free. That left the plea bargains, which were the business of the calendar sessions. So the calendar sessions were the very alimentary canal of the criminal justice system in the Bronx.

Every week the clerk of each part turned in a scorecard to Louis Mastroiani, chief administrative judge for the criminal division, Supreme Court, Bronx County. The scorecard showed how many cases the judge in that part had on his docket and how many he had disposed of that week, through plea bargains, dismissals, and trials. On the wall of the courtroom, over the judge’s head, it said
IN GOD WE TRUST
. On the scorecard, however, it said
CASE BACKLOG ANALYSIS
, and a judge’s effectiveness was rated almost entirely according to
CASE BACKLOG ANALYSIS
.

Practically all cases were called for 9:30 a.m. If the clerk called a case, and the defendant was not present or his lawyer was not present or if any of a dozen other things occurred to make it impossible to shove this case a little farther through the funnel, the principals in the next case would be on hand, presumably, ready to step forward. So the spectators’ section was dotted with little clumps of people, none of them spectators in any sporting sense. There were defendants and their lawyers, defendants and their pals, defendants and their families. The three small children came slithering out from between two benches, ran toward the back of the courtroom, giggling, and disappeared behind the last bench. A woman turned her head and scowled at them and didn’t bother to go fetch them. Now Kramer recognized the trio. They were Herbert 92X’s children. Not that he found this at all remarkable; there were children in the courtrooms every day. The courts were a form of day-care center in the Bronx. Playing tag in Part 60 during Daddy’s motions, pleas, trials, and sentencings was just a part of growing up.

Kovitsky turned toward the clerk of the court, who sat at a table below the judge’s bench and off to the side. The clerk was a bull-necked Italian named Charles Bruzzielli. He had his jacket off. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt with the collar open and his necktie at half-mast. You could see the top of his T-shirt. The tie had a huge Windsor knot.

“Is that Mr…” Kovitsky looked down at a piece of paper on his desk, then at Bruzzielli. “…Lockwood?”

Bruzzielli nodded yes, and Kovitsky looked straight ahead at a slender figure who had walked from the spectators’ benches up to the bar.

“Mr. Lockwood,” said Kovitsky, “where’s your attorney? Where’s Mr. Sonnenberg?”

“I ’unno,” said the figure.

He was barely audible. He was no more than nineteen or twenty. He had dark skin. He was so thin there was no sign of shoulders under his black thermal jacket. He wore black stovepipe jeans and a pair of huge white sneakers that closed with Velcro tabs rather than shoelaces.

Kovitsky stared at him a moment, then said, “All right, Mr. Lockwood, you take a seat. If and when Mr. Sonnenberg deigns to favor us with his presence, we’ll call your case again.”

Lockwood turned around and began walking back to the spectators’ benches. He had the same pumping swagger that practically every young defendant in the Bronx affected, the Pimp Roll. Such stupid self-destructive macho egos, thought Kramer. They never failed to show up with the black jackets and the sneakers and the Pimp Roll. They never failed to look every inch the young felon before judges, juries, probation officers, court psychiatrists, before every single soul who had any say in whether or not they went to prison or for how long. Lockwood pimp-rolled to a bench in the rear of the spectators’ section and sat down next to two more boys in black thermal jackets. These were no doubt his buddies, his comrades. The defendant’s comrades always arrived in court in
their
shiny black thermal jackets and go-to-hell sneakers. That was very bright, too. That immediately established the fact that the defendant was not a poor defenseless victim of life in the ghetto but part of a pack of remorseless young felons of the sort who liked to knock down old ladies with Lucite canes on the Grand Concourse and steal their handbags. The whole pack entered the courtroom full of juice, bulging with steel muscles and hard-jawed defiance, ready to defend the honor and, if necessary, the hides of their buddies against the System. But soon a stupefying tide of tedium and confusion rolled over them all. They were primed for action. They were not primed for what the day required, which was waiting while something they never heard of, a calendar session, swamped them in a lot of shine-on language, such as “deigns to favor us with his presence.”

Kramer walked past the bar and headed over to the clerk’s table. Three other assistant D.A.s stood there, looking on and waiting their turns before the judge.

The clerk said, “The People versus Albert and Marilyn Krin—”

He hesitated and looked down at the papers before him. He looked at a young woman standing three or four feet away, an assistant district attorney named Patti Stullieri, and he said in a stage whisper, “What the hell is this?”

Kramer looked over his shoulder. The document said, “Albert and Marilyn Krnkka.”

“Kri-nick-a,” said Patti Stullieri.

“Albert and Marilyn Kri-nick-a!” he declaimed. “Indictment number 3-2-8-1.” Then to Patti Stullieri: “Jesus, what the hell kind of name is that?”

“It’s Yugoslav.”

“
Yu
goslav. It looks like somebody’s fingers got caught in a fucking typewriter.”

From the rear of the spectators’ section a couple came marching up to the great railing and leaned forward. The man, Albert Krnkka, smiled in a bright-eyed fashion and seemed to want to engage the attention of Judge Kovitsky. Albert Krnkka was a tall, gangling man with a five-inch goatee but no mustache at all and long blond hair like an old-fashioned rock musician’s. He had a bony nose, a long neck, and an Adam’s apple that seemed to move up and down a foot when he swallowed. He wore a teal-green shirt with an outsized collar and, in place of buttons, a zipper that ran diagonally from his left shoulder to the right side of his waist. Beside him was his wife. Marilyn Krnkka was a black-haired woman with a thin, delicate face. Her eyes were two slits. She kept compressing her lips and grimacing.

Everyone, Judge Kovitsky, the clerk, Patti Stullieri, even Kramer himself, looked toward the Krnkkas, expecting their lawyer to come forward or come in through the side door or materialize in some fashion. But there was no lawyer.

Furious, Kovitsky turned toward Bruzzielli and said, “Who’s representing these people?”

“I think Marvin Sunshine,” said Bruzzielli.

“Well, where is he? I saw him back there a few minutes ago. What’s gotten into all these characters?”

Bruzzielli gave him the Primordial Shrug and rolled his eyes, as if the whole thing pained him tremendously but there was nothing he could do about it.

Kovitsky’s head was now down very low. His irises were floating like destroyers on a lake of white. But before he could launch into a blistering discourse on delinquent lawyers, a voice spoke up from the bar.

“Your Honor! Your Honor! Hey, Judge!”

It was Albert Krnkka. He was waving his right hand, trying to get Kovitsky’s attention. His arms were thin, but his wrists and his hands were huge. His mouth hung open in a half smile that was supposed to convince the judge that he was a reasonable man. In fact, he looked, every inch of him, like one of those wild tall rawboned men whose metabolisms operate at triple speed and who, more than any other people on earth, are prone to explosions.

“Hey, Judge! Look.”

Kovitsky stared, amazed by this performance. “Hey, Judge! Look. Two weeks ago she told us two to six, right?”

When Albert Krnkka said “two to six,” he raised both hands up in the air and stuck out two fingers on each hand, like a
v
for victory or a peace sign, and flailed them in the air, as if he were beating a pair of invisible aerial drums in time to the phrase “two to six.”

“Mr. Krnkka,” said Kovitsky, rather softly for him.

“And now she’s coming in ’ere wit’ three to nine,” said Albert Krnkka. “We awready said, ‘Okay, two to six’ ”—once again he raised his hands and the pair of v’s and beat the air in time to “two to six”—“and she’s coming in ’ere wit’ three to nine. Two to six”—he beat the air—“two to six—”