The Bonfire of the Vanities (67 page)

And so he did.

When one got right down to it, what difference would it make whether he had the number or not?

The dreadful orange carpet blazed away. Right next to the Formica couch he was slouched upon, it had come loose from the floor where it abutted the wall, and the crinkly metallic fibers frayed out. Sherman stared at the itchy sleaze of it as a way of averting his eyes from the sinister figures on the couch opposite him. He was afraid they would be staring at him and would know who he was. The fact that Killian would make him wait like this sealed it, nailed down the correctness of what he was about to do. This would be his last visit to this place, his last descent into the vulgarity of Favor Banks, contracts, lower-crust fops, and cheap gutter philosophies.

But soon curiosity got the better of him, and he looked at their feet…Two men…One had on a dainty little pair of slip-on shoes with decorative gold chains running across the top. The other wore a pair of snow-white Reebok sneakers. The shoes shuffled a bit as the two men’s tails slid down the couch and they pushed themselves back up with their legs and then slid down again and pushed back and slid down and pushed back. Sherman slid down and pushed back. They slid down and pushed back. Sherman slid down and pushed back. Everything about the place, even the obscene downslope of the couches, proclaimed tastelessness, shiftlessness, vulgarity, and, at bottom, sheer ignorance. The two men were talking in what Sherman took to be Spanish. “
Oy el meemo
,” one of them kept saying, “
Oy el meemo
.” He let his eyes creep up as far as their midsections. Both had on knit shirts and leather jackets; more Leather People. “
Oy el meemo
.” He took the big chance: their faces. Immediately he cast his eyes down again. They were staring right at him! Such cruel looks! Both appeared to be in their early thirties. They had thick black hair coiffed and trimmed, just so, in vulgar but probably expensive hairdos. Both had their hair parted down the center and teased in such a way that the hair seemed to be gushing up in neat black ceremonial fountains. Such twisted expressions as they stared at him!
Did they know?

Now he could hear Killian’s voice.
Tawk. Lawr. Awright
. He consoled himself with the thought that he wouldn’t have to listen to it much longer. The Lion was right. How could he have entrusted his fate to anyone immersed in this sordid milieu? Killian appeared at the doorway from the inner hall. He had his arm around the shoulders of a pudgy and thoroughly dejected little white man who wore a pathetic suit with an especially pathetic vest that popped out in front of his belly.

“What can I tell you, Donald?” Killian was saying. “The law’s like anything else. You get what you pay for. All right?”
The lawr’s like anything else. Yuh gedwudja pay for
. The little man trudged off without even looking at him. Not once had he been in Killian’s presence when the main topic of conversation had not been money—the money due Thomas Killian.

“Ayyyyyy,” said Killian, smiling at Sherman, “I didn’t mean for you to have to wait.” He cast his eyes significantly at the retreating figure of the little man, then shrugged his eyebrows.

As he and Sherman walked down the hallway, beneath the blazing downlighters, to Killian’s office, he said, “Now
that
”—his head nodded back in the general direction of the little man—“is a guy with problems. A fifty-seven-year-old assistant principal, Irish Catholic, wife and family, and he gets picked up on a charge of propositioning a seven-year-old girl. The arresting officer claims he offered her a banana and went on from there.”

Sherman said nothing. Did this insensitive wiseguy fop, with his incessant cynicism, actually think that would make him feel better? A chill went through him. It was as if the pudgy little man’s fate were his own.

“You check out the two guys across from you?”

Sherman braced. Which hell were they trapped in?

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old, both of them, and they’d be on the Forbes Four Hundred list if their business published annual reports. They got
that much money
. They’re Cubans, but they import from Colombia. They’re Mike Bellavita’s clients.”

Sherman’s resentment grew with each wiseguy word. Did the fop really think his breezy survey of the local scene, his detachment, his hard-boiled tone would flatter him, would make him feel superior to the detritus caught in the filthy tide that flows through here? I’m not superior, you oh-so-knowing, oh-so-ignorant fool! I’m one of them! My heart goes out to them! An old Irish child molester…two young Cuban drug dealers with their sad pompous hair—in short, he was learning for himself the truth of the saying “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

In Killian’s office, Sherman took a seat and watched the Irish fop rear back in his desk chair and roll his shoulders about under his double-breasted suit, preening. He resented him even more profoundly. Killian was in excellent spirits. Newspapers were stacked up on his desk.
Team Mercedes: He Hit, She Ran
. But of course! The hottest criminal case in New York was
his
.

Well, he was about to lose it. How should he tell him? He wanted to just
let him have it
. But the words came out with some semblance of tact.

“I hope you realize,” said Sherman, “I’m very unhappy about what happened yesterday.”

“Ayyyyyy, who wouldn’t be? It was outrageous, even for Weiss.”

“I don’t think you understand. I’m not talking about what I was subjected to, per se, I’m talking about the fact that you—”

He was interrupted by the voice of the receptionist coming over the intercom on Killian’s desk: “Neil Flannagan of the
Daily News
on 3–0.”

Killian leaned forward in his chair. “Tell him I’ll call him back. No, wait a minute. Tell him I’ll call him back in thirty minutes. If he’s out of the office, then he should call me back in thirty minutes.” To Sherman: “Sorry.”

Sherman paused, looked balefully at the fop, and said, “I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about—”

Killian broke in: “I don’t mean that we’re only gonna be talking for thirty minutes.”
Tawkin
. “The whole day is yours if you want it and we need it. But I wanna talk to this guy Flannagan, from the
News
. He’s gonna be our antidote…to the venom.”

“Well, that’s fine,” said Sherman as flatly as possible, “but we’ve got a problem. You assured me you had your special ‘contacts’ in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. You told me you had a ‘contract’ with this man Fitzgibbon. I seem to recall quite a dissertation on something called the ‘Favor Bank.’ Now, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. For all I know, you may have as keen a legal mind—”

The voice on the intercom: “Peter Fallow of
The City Light
on 3–0.”

“Get his number. Tell him I’ll call him back.” To Sherman: “Speak of the venom. The head snake checks in.”

Sherman’s heart shuddered in palpitation, then recovered.

“Go ahead. You were saying.”

“I’m not doubting your legal judgment, but you made these assurances to me, and naïvely I went ahead and…” He paused to choose the correct word.

Killian jumped in: “You were double-crossed, Sherman.
I
was double-crossed. Bernie Fitzgibbon was double-crossed. What Weiss did was unconscionable. You
do…not…do…
what he did. You
do not do it
.”

“Nevertheless, he did it, and after you told me—”

“I know what it was like. It was like being thrown in a cesspool. But Bernie was not totally unsuccessful. Weiss wanted to do worse. You gotta understand that. The sonofabitch wanted to arrest you
in your home
! He wanted a
Park Avenue arrest
! He’s crazy, crazy, crazy! And you know what he woulda done if he had his way? He woulda had the cops put handcuffs on you in your own home, then take you to a precinct house and let you get a whiff of the pens there for a while and then they put you in a van with wire mesh over the windows, with a buncha these animals, and
then
take you to Central Booking and let you go through what you went through. That’s what he wanted.”

“Nevertheless—”

“Mr. Killian, Irv Stone of Channel 1 on 3–2. This is the third time he’s called.”

“Get his number and tell him I’ll call him back.” To Sherman: “Today I gotta talk to these people even though I got nothing to tell them. Just to keep the lines open. Tomorrow we start to turn things around.”

“Turn things around,” said Sherman in what was meant as bitter irony. The fop didn’t notice. The fop’s excitement over such attention from the press was written all over his face. Out of my ignominy, his own cheap glory.

So he tried it again. “Turn things around, all right,” he said.

Killian smiled. “Mr. McCoy, I do believe you doubt me. Well, I got news for you. In fact, I got a lotta news for you.” He pressed the intercom button. “Hey, Nina. Ask Quigley to come in here. Tell him Mr. McCoy is here.” To Sherman: “Ed Quigley is our investigator, the guy I told you about, the guy who used to be in Major Cases.”

A tall bald man appeared in the doorway. It was the same man Sherman had seen in the blazing reception room on his first visit. He carried a revolver in a holster high on his left hip. He wore a white shirt but no tie. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing a pair of huge wrists and hands. His left hand held a manila envelope. He was the sort of tall angular raw-boned man who looks more powerful and menacing at fifty than he did at twenty-five. His shoulders were wide but had a degenerate slouch. His eyes seemed to have sunk deep into the occipital craters.

“Ed,” said Killian, “this is Mr. McCoy.”

Sherman nodded morosely.

“Pleased to meet you,” said the man. He gave Sherman the same dead smile he had given him the first time.

Killian said, “You got the picture?”

Quigley took a piece of paper out of the envelope and handed it to Killian, and Killian handed it to Sherman.

“This is a Xerox, but it took—I’m not even gonna tell you what it took to get this picture. You recognize him?”

A profile and a head-on picture of a black man, with numbers. Square features, a powerful neck.

Sherman sighed. “It looks like him. The other boy, the big one, the one who said, ‘Yo! Need some help?’ ”

“He’s a lowlife named Roland Auburn. Lives in the Poe projects. Right now he’s on Rikers Island awaiting disposition of his fourth drug indictment. Obviously he’s cutting a deal with the D.A. in return for testimony against you.”

“And lying.”

“That does not in any way violate the principles that have governed Mr. Roland Auburn’s life thus far,” said Killian.

“How did you find this out?”

Killian smiled and gestured toward Quigley. “Ed has many friends among our men in blue, and many of our finest owe him favors.”

Quigley merely pursed his lips slightly.

Sherman said, “Has he ever been arrested for robbery—or the sort of thing he tried to pull on me?”

“You mean highway robbery?” Killian chuckled at what he had just said. “I never thoughta that before. That’s what it is, highway robbery. Right, Ed?”

“I guess so.”

“Not that we know of,” said Killian, “but we intend to find out a whole lot more about the sonofabitch. Prison inmates are notorious for what they’ll testify to—and this is Weiss’s whole fucking case! This is what he brought you in on!”

Killian shook his head, with apparent disgust, and kept shaking it. Sherman found himself genuinely grateful. It was the first hint of heartfelt absolution anyone had offered.

“All right, so that’s one thing,” said Killian. Then to Ed: “Now tell him about Mrs. Ruskin.”

Sherman looked up at Quigley, and Quigley said, “She’s gone to Italy. I traced her as far as a house she rented on Lake Como. It’s some kinda resort in Lombardy.”

“That’s right,” said Sherman. “She’d just come back from there the night all this happened.”

“Yeah, well, a couple a days ago,” said Quigley, “she left there in a car with some young guy named Filippo. That’s all I know, ‘Filippo.’ You got any idea who that might be? Early or mid-twenties, slender, medium height. Lotta hair. Punk clothes. Nice-looking kid, or so my man told me.”

Sherman sighed. “It’s some artist she knows. Filippo Charazza or Charizzi.”

“You know of any other place in Italy she might go?”

Sherman shook his head. “How did you find out all this?”

Quigley looked at Killian, and Killian said, “Tell him.”

“Wasn’t too hard,” said Quigley. Proud to be onstage, he couldn’t resist a smile. “Most a these people have Globexpress. You know, the credit card. There’s a woman—a person I deal with in the accounting office on Duane Street. They got a computer network feeds in from all over the world. I give her a hundred dollars per item. Not too bad for five minutes’ work. Sure enough, this Maria Ruskin has two charges three days ago in stores in this town, Como. Clothing stores. So I call up a guy we use in Rome, and he calls up one of the stores and says he’s from Globexpress and gives them her account number and says they need to send her a telegram for ‘account clarification.’ They don’t give a shit. They give him the address where they delivered the merchandise, and he goes down to Como and checks it all.” Quigley shrugged, as if to say, “Piece a cake for a guy like me.”

Noting that Sherman was properly impressed, Killian said, “So now we got a line on both our players. We know who their witness is, and we’ll find your friend Mrs. Ruskin. And we’ll get her back here, even if Ed has to bring her back in a box with air holes in it. Don’t look shocked. I know you give her the benefit of the doubt, but by objective standards she does not exactly qualify as your friend. You’re in the biggest jam of your life, and she’s your way out, and she’s off in Italy with a nice-looking fellow named Filippo. Ayyyyyyyyy, whaddaya whaddaya?”

Sherman smiled in spite of himself. His vanity was such, however, that he immediately assumed that there was an innocuous explanation.

After Quigley had left, Killian said: “Ed Quigley is the best. There is no better private investigator in the business. He…will…do
…anything
. He’s your basic hardcore New York Hell’s Kitchen Irishman. The kids Ed ran with all became hoodlums or cops. The ones that became cops were the ones that the Church got a hook into, the ones that cooked a little bit from guilt. But they all like the same things. They all like to butt heads and loosen people’s teeth. The only difference is, if you are a cop, you can do it legally with the priest nodding over you and looking the other way at the same time. Ed was a hell of a cop. He was a fucking reign of terror.”