The Bonfire of the Vanities (53 page)

“Yeah, well, what’s he got to do with the Lamb case?”

“He says he was with Henry Lamb when he was hit by the car. He took him to the hospital. He can give you a description of the driver. He wants to make a deal.”

Daniel Torres, the fat assistant district attorney from the Supreme Court Bureau, arrived at Kramer’s office with his ten-year-old son in tow and a ditch down the middle of his forehead. He was furious, in a soft fat way, about having to show up at the island fortress on a Saturday morning. He looked even more of a blob than he had the last time Kramer had seen him, which had been in Kovitsky’s courtroom. He wore a plaid sport shirt, a jacket that didn’t have a prayer of closing around his great soft belly, and a pair of slacks from the Linebacker Shop, for the stocky man, in Fresh Meadow that made his underbelly protrude beneath his belt like South America. A glandular case, thought Kramer. His son, on the other hand, was slender and dark with fine features, the shy and sensitive type, by the looks of him. He was carrying a paperback book and a baseball glove. After a quick, bored inspection of the office, he sat in Jimmy Caughey’s chair and began reading the book.

Torres said, “Wouldn’t you know the Yankees’d be on the road”—he motioned toward Yankee Stadium, just down the hill, with his head—“on the Saturday”
—Saddy—
“I gotta come over here? This is my weekend with…” Now he motioned his head toward his son. “…and I promised him I’d take him to the ball game, and I promised my ex-wife I’d go to Kiel’s on Springfield Boulevard and get some shrubs and take them to the house, and how I’m gonna get from here over to Springfield Boulevard and then over to Maspeth and then back to Shea in time for the game, I don’t know. Don’t even ask me why I said I’d take the shrubs over to the house.” He shook his head.

Kramer felt embarrassed for the boy, who appeared to be deep into the book. The title was
Woman in the Dunes
. As best as Kramer could make out from the cover, the author’s name was Kobo Abé. Feeling curious and sympathetic, he walked over to the boy and said in the warmest Dutch-uncle manner possible, “Whaddaya reading?”

The boy looked up like a deer caught in a pair of high beams. “It’s a story,” he said. Or that was what his lips said. His eyes said, “Please, please, let me return to the sanctuary of my book.”

Kramer detected that, but he felt obliged to round out his hospitality.

“What’s it about?”

“Japan.” Pleading.

“Japan? What about Japan?”

“It’s about a man who gets trapped in some sand dunes.” A very soft voice, pleading, pleading, pleading.

Judging by its abstract cover and dense print, this was not a child’s book. Kramer, student of the human heart, got an impression of a bright, withdrawn boy, the product of Torres’s Jewish half, who probably looked like his mother and was already estranged from his father. For an instant he thought of his own little son. He tried to imagine having to drag him over here to Gibraltar some Saturday nine or ten years from now. It depressed him profoundly.

“Well, whaddaya know about Mr. Auburn, Danny?” he asked Torres. “What’s this Crack King of Evergreen Avenue business?”

“It’s a piece a—” Torres stopped short for the boy’s sake. “It’s a joke, is what it is. Auburn’s—you know, just the usual kid from off the block. This is his third drug arrest. The detective who arrested him called him the Crack King of Evergreen Avenue. He was being sarcastic. Evergreen Avenue is about five blocks long. I don’t even know how Weiss got hold of it. When I saw that press release, I about—I couldn’t believe it. Thank God, nobody paid any attention to it.” Torres looked at his watch. “When are they gonna get here?”

“They should be here pretty soon,” said Kramer. “Everything’s slower over at Rikers Island on Saturday. How did they happen to catch him?”

“Well, that’s a screwy thing,” said Torres. “They really caught him twice, but this kid has very big—a lotta nerve, or else he’s very stupid, I don’t know which. About a month ago this undercover cop made a purchase from Auburn and another kid and announced they were under arrest, and so forth, and Auburn told him, ‘If you want me, mother—you’re gonna have to shoot me,’ and he started running. I talked to the cop, Officer Iannucci. He said if the kid hadn’t been black, in a black neighborhood, he would’ve shot him or shot at him, anyhow. A week ago he brought him in, the same cop.”

“What’s he looking at if he’s convicted of a sale?”

“Two to four, maybe.”

“You know anything about his lawyer, this Hayden?”

“Yeah. He’s a black guy.”

“Really?” Kramer started to say, “He didn’t sound black,” but thought better of it. “You don’t see too many black guys in Legal Aid.”

“That’s not true. There’s quite a few. A lot of them need the job. You know, these young black lawyers have a rough time. The law schools graduate them, but there aren’t any slots. Downtown—it’s pathetic. They’re always talking about it, but they don’t hire black lawyers, that’s the truth of the matter. So they go into Legal Aid or the 18b pool. Some a them scuffle along with a rinky-dink criminal practice. But the big-time black wiseguys, the drug dealers, they don’t want a black lawyer representing them. The small-timers don’t, either. One time I was in the pens, and this black lawyer from the 18b comes in looking for the client he’s been assigned, and he starts yelling out his name. You know the way they yell out the names in the pens. Anyway, the guy he’s been assigned is black, and he comes walking over to the bars, and he looks this guy in the eye and he says, ‘Get lost, mother—I want a Jew.’ I swear! He says, ‘Get lost, mother—I want a Jew.’ Hayden seems pretty sharp, but I haven’t seen a lot of him.”

Torres looked at his watch again, and then he looked at the floor in the corner. In no time his thoughts were somewhere out of the room and out of Gibraltar. Kiel’s nursery? The Mets? His ex-marriage? His son was off in Japan with the man trapped in the dunes. Only Kramer was right there in the room. He was keyed up. He was aware of the stillness of the island fortress on this sunny Saturday in June. If only this character, Auburn, turned out to be the real goods, if only he wasn’t too much of the usual mindless player, trying to get some stupid game over on everybody, trying to trim the world, bawling into the void from behind the wire mesh…

Pretty soon Kramer could hear people walking down the hall outside. He opened the door, and there were Martin and Goldberg and, between them, a powerfully built young black man in a turtleneck jersey with his hands behind his back. Bringing up the rear was a short, chunky black man in a pale gray suit. That would be Cecil Hayden.

Even with his hands behind his back Roland Auburn managed to do the Pimp Roll. He was no more than five feet seven or eight, but very muscular. His pectorals, deltoids, and trapezii bulged with mass and sharp definition. Kramer, the atrophied one, felt a jolt of envy. To say that the fellow was aware of his terrific build was putting it mildly. The turtleneck jersey fit him like a skin. He had a gold chain around his neck. He wore tight black pants and white Reebok sneakers that looked as if they had just come out of the box. His brown face was square, hard, and impassive. He had short hair and a narrow mustache lining his upper lip.

Kramer wondered why Martin had cuffed his hands behind his back. It was more humiliating than having them cuffed in front. It made a man feel more helpless and vulnerable. He could
feel
the danger of falling. He would fall like a tree, without being able to protect his head. Since they wanted Roland Auburn’s cooperation, Kramer thought Martin would have taken the man on the easy route—or did he think there was actually some danger of this bulked-up rock making a run for it? Or was the Martin way invariably the hard way?

The entourage came crowding into the little office. The introductions were an awkward shuffle. Torres, as the assistant district attorney in charge of the prisoner’s drug case, knew Cecil Hayden, but he didn’t know Martin, Goldberg, or the prisoner. Hayden didn’t know Kramer, and Kramer didn’t know the prisoner, and what should they call the prisoner, anyway? His real status was that of punk arrested on a drug charge, but at this moment, technically, he was a citizen who had come forth to assist the authorities in a felony investigation. Martin solved the nomenclature problem by referring to Roland Auburn frequently and in a bored manner as “Roland.”

“Okay, Roland, let’s see. Where we gonna put you?”

He looked around the office with its clutter of dilapidated furniture. Calling a prisoner by his first name was a standard way of removing any pretensions of dignity and social insulation he might still be clinging to. Martin was going to put the carcass of Roland Auburn wherever he felt like. He paused, stared at Kramer, then cast a dubious glance toward Torres’s son. It was clear that he didn’t think he should be in the room. The boy was no longer reading his book. He was slouched back in the chair with his head hung low, staring. He had shrunk. There was nothing left but an enormous pair of eyes staring at Roland Auburn.

For everybody else in the room, perhaps even Auburn himself, this was just a routine procedure, a black defendant being brought into an assistant district attorney’s office for a negotiation, a little round of plea bargaining. But this sad, sensitive, bookish little boy would never forget what he was now looking at, a black man with his hands shackled behind his back in his daddy’s office building on a sunny Saturday before the Mets’ game.

Kramer said to Torres, “Dan, I think maybe we’re gonna need that chair.” He looked toward Torres’s son. “Maybe he’d like to sit in there, in Bernie Fitzgibbon’s office. There’s nobody in there.”

“Yeah, Ollie,” said Torres, “whyn’t you go in there until we get through.” Kramer wondered if Torres had really named his son Oliver. Oliver Torres.

Without a word the boy stood up and gathered his book and his baseball glove and headed for the other door, to Bernie Fitzgibbon’s office, but he couldn’t resist one last look at the manacled black man. Roland Auburn stared back at him with no expression at all. He was closer to the boy’s age than to Kramer’s. For all of his muscles, he wasn’t much more than a boy himself.

“Okay, Roland,” said Martin, “I’m gonna take these offa you, and you’re gonna sit’n’at chair there and be a good fellow, right?”

Roland Auburn said nothing, just turned his back slightly to present Martin his shackled hands so he could unlock the handcuffs.

“Ayyyyyy, don’t worry, Marty,” said Cecil Hayden, “my client’s here because he wants to
walk
out of this place, without looking over his shoulder.”

Kramer couldn’t believe it. Hayden was already calling the Irish Doberman by his nickname, Marty, and he had just met him. Hayden was one of those bouncy little fellows whose breeze is so warm and confident you’d have to be in a very bad mood to take offense. He was pulling off the difficult trick of showing his client he was sticking up for his rights and dignity without angering the Irish Cop contingent.

Roland Auburn sat down and started to rub his wrists but then stopped. He didn’t want to give Martin and Goldberg the satisfaction of knowing the handcuffs had hurt. Goldberg had walked around behind the chair and was settling his hulk onto the edge of Ray Andriutti’s desk. He had a notebook and a ballpoint pen, for taking notes on the interview. Martin moved around to the other side of Jimmy Caughey’s desk and sat on the edge over there. The prisoner was now between the two of them and would have to turn to see either one of them head on. Torres sat down in Ray Andriutti’s chair, Hayden sat down in Kramer’s, and Kramer, who was running the show, remained standing. Roland Auburn was now sitting back in Jimmy Caughey’s chair with his knees akimbo and his forearms on the armrests, cracking his knuckles, looking straight at Kramer. His face was a mask. He didn’t even blink. Kramer thought of the phrase that kept turning up in the probation reports on these young black male defendants: “lacking in affect.” Apparently that meant they were deficient in ordinary feelings. They didn’t feel guilt, shame, remorse, fear, or sympathy for others. But whenever it fell to Kramer’s lot to talk to these people, he had the feeling it was something else. They pulled down a curtain. They shut him off from what was behind the unblinking surface of their eyes. They didn’t let him see so much as an eighth of an inch of what they thought of him and the Power and their own lives. He had wondered before and he wondered now: Who are these people? (These people, whose fates I determine every day…)

Kramer looked at Hayden and said, “Counselor…”
Counselor
. He didn’t know quite what to call the man. Hayden had called him “Larry” on the telephone, from the word go, but he hadn’t called him anything in this room, and Kramer didn’t want to call him “Cecil,” for fear of appearing either too chummy or disrespectful in front of Roland. “Counselor, you’ve explained to your client what we’re doing here, right?”

“Oh, sure,” said Hayden. “He understands.”

Now Kramer looked at Roland. “Mr. Auburn…”
Mr. Auburn
. Kramer figured Martin and Goldberg would forgive him. The usual procedure, when an assistant D.A. was questioning a defendant, was to start off with the respectful Mister, just to set things up, and then switch to the first name after things got going. “Mr. Auburn, I think you already know Mr. Torres here. He’s the assistant district attorney handling the case you’ve been arrested and indicted on, the sale charge. Okay? And I’m handling the Henry Lamb case. Now, we can’t promise you anything, but if you help us, then we’ll help you. It’s as simple as that. But you gotta be truthful. You gotta be completely truthful. Otherwise, you’re just jerking everybody around, and it’s not gonna be good for you. You understand?”

Roland looked at his lawyer, Cecil Hayden, and Hayden just nodded yes, as if to say, “Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

Roland turned back and looked at Kramer and said, very deadpan: “Unh-hunh.”

“Okay,” said Kramer. “What I’m interested in is what happened to Henry Lamb the night he was hurt. I want you to tell me what you know.”

Still slouched back in Jimmy Caughey’s chair, Roland said, “Where you want me to start?”

“Well…at the beginning. How’d you happen to be with Henry Lamb that night?”

Roland said, “I was standing on the sidewalk, fixing to go down to 161st Street, down to the takeout, the Texas Fried Chicken, and I see Henry walking by.” He stopped.