The Bonfire of the Vanities (17 page)

“Bring in the jury,” said Kovitsky.

A court officer opened the door that led to the jury room. Kramer sat up straight in his chair at the prosecution table. He threw his head back to bring out that powerful neck. The jurors began filing in…three blacks, six Puerto Ricans…Where was she?…There she was, just coming through the door!…Kramer didn’t even try to be subtle about it. He stared right at her. That long lustrous dark brown hair, thick enough to bury your head in, parted in the middle and pulled back to reveal that perfect pure white forehead, those big eyes and luxurious lashes, and those perfectly curved lips…with brown lipstick! Yes! She had it on again! The brown lipstick, the color of caramel, hellish, rebellious, perfectly elegant—

Kramer quickly surveyed the competition. The big clerk, Bruzzielli, had his eyes pinned on her. The three court officers were staring at her so hard Herbert could have taken a walk and they would have never noticed. But Herbert himself was checking her out. Teskowitz was looking at her. Sullivan, the court stenographer, sitting at the stenotype machine, was looking at her. And Kovitsky! Him, too! Kramer had heard stories about Kovitsky. He didn’t seem to be the type—but you never knew.

To get to the jury box she had to file right past the prosecution table. She had on a peach-colored sweater, fluffy, angora or mohair, open up the front, and a ribbon-silk blouse with pink-and-yellow stripes, beneath which Kramer could detect, or thought he could detect, the voluptuous swell of her breasts. She wore a cream-colored gabardine skirt, tight enough to bring out the curve of her thighs.

The hell of it was, practically every man on this side of the Bar of Justice had a fighting chance. Well, not Herbert, but his wispy little lawyer, Teskowitz, did. Even that fat court officer over there, that tub Kaminsky. The number of court officers, defense lawyers, court clerks, assistant district attorneys (oh yes!) and even judges (don’t rule them out!) who have humped (that’s the word!) juicy little jurors in criminal cases—God! if the press ever got hold of that story—but the press never showed up in the courthouse in the Bronx.

First-time jurors in the criminal courts had a way of becoming intoxicated by the romance, the raw voltage, of the evil world they were now getting a box-seat look at, and the young women became the tipsiest of all. To them the defendants were not chow; anything but. They were desperadoes. And these cases were not pieces a shit. They were stark dramas of the billion-footed city. And those with the courage to deal with the desperadoes, wrestle with them, bridle them, were…real men…even a court officer with a four-inch tube of fat riding up over his gunbelt. But who was more manly than a young prosecutor, he who stood not ten feet from the accused, with nothing between the two of them but thin air, and hurled the charges of the People in his teeth?

Now she was in front of Kramer. She looked right back at him. Her expression said nothing, but the look was so frank and forthright! And she wore brown lipstick!

And then she was past him and going through the little gate into the jury box. He couldn’t very well
turn around
and stare at her, but he was tempted. How many of them had gone to the clerk, Bruzzielli, and looked up her address and telephone numbers, at home and at work—as he had? The clerk kept the slips with this information, the so-called ballots, in a box on his desk in the courtroom, so that the court could get hold of jurors quickly to inform them of changes in schedule or whatever. As the prosecutor in the case, he, Kramer, could approach Bruzzielli and ask to see the ballot for the girl with brown lipstick or any other juror with a straight face. So could the defense attorney, Teskowitz. Kovitsky could do it with a reasonably straight face, and of course Bruzzielli himself could take a look anytime he felt like it. As for a court officer like Kaminsky, for him to ask to take a look fell under the category of…a wink and a favor. But hadn’t Kramer already seen Kaminsky huddled with Bruzzielli over by Bruzzielli’s desk, deep in conversation over…something? The thought that even such creatures as the fat Kaminsky were after this…this
flower…
made Kramer more determined than ever. (He would save her from the others.)

Miss Shelly Thomas of Riverdale.

She was from the very best part of Riverdale, a leafy suburb that was geographically part of Westchester County but politically part of the Bronx. There were still plenty of nice places to live in the North Bronx. People in Riverdale generally had money, and they also had their ways of getting off jury duty. They would pull every string that existed before submitting to the prospect of coming down to the South Bronx, to the 44th Precinct, to the island fortress of Gibraltar. The typical Bronx jury was Puerto Rican and black, with a sprinkling of Jews and Italians.

But every now and then a rare flower like Miss Shelly Thomas of Riverdale landed in a jury box. What kind of name was that? Thomas was a Waspy name. But there was Danny Thomas, and he was an Arab, a Lebanese or something. Wasps were rare in the Bronx, except for those society types who came up from Manhattan from time to time, in cars with drivers, to do good deeds for the Ghetto Youth. The Big Brother organization, the Episcopal Youth Service, the Daedalus Foundation—these people showed up in Family Court, which was the court for criminals under the age of seventeen. They had these
names…
Farnsworth, Fiske, Phipps, Simpson, Thornton, Frost…and spotless intentions.

No, the chances that Miss Shelly Thomas might be a Wasp were remote. But what was she? During jury selection he had elicited from her the information that she was an art director, which apparently meant some kind of designer, for the Prischker & Bolka advertising agency in Manhattan. To Kramer that suggested an inexpressibly glamorous life. Beautiful creatures scampering back and forth to taped New Wave music in an office with smooth white walls and glass brick…a sort of MTV office…terrific lunches and dinners in restaurants with blond wood, brass, indirect lighting, and frosted glass with chevron patterns on it…baked quail with chanterelles on a bed of sweet potato and a ruff of braised dandelion leaves…He could see it all. She was part of
that life
, those places where the girls with brown lipstick go!…He had both of her telephone numbers, at Prischker & Bolka and at home. Naturally he couldn’t do a thing while the trial was in progress. But afterward…Miss Thomas? This is Lawrence Kramer. I’m—oh! you remember! That’s terrific! Miss Thomas, I’m calling because every so often, after one of these major cases is completed, I like to ascertain what it is exactly that convinced the jury—a sudden stab of doubt…Suppose all that happened was that she lost the case for him? Bronx juries were difficult enough for a prosecutor as it was. They were drawn from the ranks of those who know that in fact the police are capable of lying. Bronx juries entertained a lot of doubts, both reasonable and unreasonable, and black and Puerto Rican defendants who were stone guilty, guilty as sin, did walk out of the fortress free as birds. Fortunately, Herbert 92X had shot a good man, a poor man, a family man from the ghetto. Thank God for that! No juror who lived in the South Bronx was likely to have sympathy for a foul-tempered nut case like Herbert. Only a wild card like Miss Shelly Thomas of Riverdale was likely to have sympathy! A well-educated young white woman, well-to-do, the artistic type, possibly Jewish…She was just the type to turn idealistic on him and refuse to convict Herbert on the grounds that he was black, romantic, and already put upon by Fate. But he had to take that chance. He didn’t intend to let her slip by. He needed her. He needed this particular triumph. In this courtroom he was in the center of the arena. Her eyes had never left him. He knew that. He could feel it. There was already something between them…Larry Kramer and the girl with brown lipstick.

The regulars were amazed that day by the zeal and aggressiveness of Assistant District Attorney Kramer in this nickel-and-dime Bronx manslaughter case.

He started tearing into Herbert’s alibi witnesses.

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Williams, that this ’testimony’ of yours is part of a cash transaction between you and the defendant?”

What the hell had gotten into Kramer? Teskowitz was beginning to get furious. This sonofabitch Kramer was making him look bad! He was tearing up the courtroom as if this piece a shit were the trial of the century.

Kramer was oblivious of the wounded feelings of Teskowitz or Herbert 92X or any of the rest of them. There were only two people in that cavernous mahogany hall, and they were Larry Kramer and the girl with brown lipstick.

During the lunch recess Kramer went back to the office, as did Ray Andriutti and Jimmy Caughey. An assistant district attorney who had a trial going was entitled to lunch for himself and his witnesses courtesy of the State of New York. In practice what this meant was that everybody in the office stood to get a free lunch, and Andriutti and Caughey were first in line. This pathetic little perk of the office was taken very seriously. Bernie Fitzgibbon’s secretary, Gloria Dawson, ordered sandwiches in from the deli. She got one, too. Kramer had a roast-beef sandwich on an onion roll with mustard. The mustard came in a gelatinous sealed plastic envelope that he had to open with his teeth. Ray Andriutti was having a pepperoni hero with everything you could throw into it thrown in, except for two enormous slices of dill pickle that were lying on a piece of waxed paper on his desk. The smell of dill brine filled the room. Kramer watched with disgusted fascination as Andriutti lunged forward, over his desk, so that the pieces and the juices that squirted overboard from the hero would fall on the desk instead of his necktie. He did that with every bite; he lunged over the desk, and bits of food and juice spilled from his maw, as if he were a whale or a tuna. With each lunge his jaw shot past a plastic cup of coffee which was on the desk. The coffee came from the Mr. Coffee. The cup was so full, the coffee bulged with surface tension. All at once, it began to overflow. A viscous yellow creek, no wider than a string, began running down the side of the cup. Andriutti didn’t even notice. When the filthy yellow flow reached the desktop, it created a pool about the size of a Kennedy half-dollar. In no time, it was the size and color of a dollar pancake. Soon the corners of two empty sugar packets were submerged in the muck. Andriutti always loaded his coffee with Cremora powder and sugar until it turned into a heavy sweet sick high-yellow bile. His gaping jaws, with the pepperoni hero stuffed in, kept lunging in front of the cup. The high point of the day! A free lunch!

And it doesn’t get any better, thought Kramer. It was not just young assistant D.A.s like him and Andriutti and Jimmy Caughey. All over Gibraltar, at this moment, from the lowest to the highest, the representatives of the Power in the Bronx were holed up in their offices, shell-backed, hunched over deli sandwiches, ordered in. Around the big conference table in Abe Weiss’s office they were hunched over their deli sandwiches, they being whomever Weiss thought he needed and could get hold of that day in his crusade for publicity. Around the big conference table in the office of the chief administrative judge for the Criminal Division, Louis Mastroiani, they were hunched over their deli sandwiches. Even when this worthy jurist happened to have a great luminary in to visit, even when a United States senator came by, they sat there hunched over their deli sandwiches, the luminary, too. You could ascend to the very top of the criminal justice system in the Bronx and eat deli sandwiches for lunch until the day you retired or died.

And why? Because they, the Power, the Power that ran the Bronx, were terrified! They were terrified to go out into the heart of the Bronx at high noon and have lunch in a restaurant! Terrified! And they ran the place, the Bronx, a borough of 1.1 million souls! The heart of the Bronx was now such a slum there was no longer anything even resembling a businessman’s sit-down restaurant. But even if there were, what judge or D.A. or assistant D.A., what court officer, even packing a .38, would leave Gibraltar at lunchtime to get to it? First there was plain fear. You walked from the Bronx County Building across the Grand Concourse and down the slope of 161st Street to the Criminal Courts Building, a distance of a block and a half, when you had to, but the prudent bearer of the Power kept his wits about him. There were holdups on the crest of the Grand Concourse, this great ornament of the Bronx, at 11:00
A.M.
on nice sunny days. And why not? More wallets and handbags were out on foot in the middle of nice sunny days. You didn’t go beyond the Criminal Courts Building at all. There were assistant D.A.s who had worked in Gibraltar for ten years who couldn’t tell you, on a bet, what was on 162nd Street or 163rd Street, a block off the Grand Concourse. They had never even been to the Bronx Museum of Art on 164th. But suppose you were fearless in that sense. There remained another, subtler fear. You were an alien on the streets of the 44th Precinct, and you knew that at once, every time Fate led you into
their
territory. The looks! The looks! The deadly mistrust! You were not wanted. You were not welcome. Gibraltar and the Power belonged to the Bronx Democratic Party, to the Jews and Italians, specifically, but the streets belonged to the Lockwoods and the Arthur Riveras and the Jimmy Dollards and Otis Blakemores and the Herbert 92X’s.

The thought depressed Kramer. Here they were, himself and Andriutti, the Jew and the Italian, wolfing down their sandwiches, ordered in, inside the fortress, inside the limestone rock. And for what? What did they have to look forward to? How could this setup survive long enough for them to reach the top of the pyramid, even assuming it was worth reaching? Sooner or later the Puerto Ricans and the blacks would pull themselves together politically, and they would seize even Gibraltar and everything in it. And meantime, what would he be doing? He’d be stirring the muck…stirring the muck…until they took the stick away from him.

Just then the telephone rang.

“Hello?”

“Bernie?”

“You got the wrong extension,” said Kramer, “but I don’t think he’s here anyway.”