by Sol Stein
*
Thomassy heard the siren, saw the motorcycle in his rearview mirror. The cop motioned him over. Officer, there’s a lady waiting for me in the shower with a bar of blue glycerine soap.
Thomassy rolled the window down. “Was I speeding?”
“No, sir,” the cop said. “Your license plate’s about ready to come off.”
Thomassy stepped out into the drizzle and followed the cop to the back of the car. The license plate hung at an angle by one loose bolt. Thomassy squatted, took a nail file from his wallet, tightened the remaining bolt enough to secure the plate until he could replace the missing bolt.
“Thanks,” he said to the cop.
“That’s okay, Mr. Thomassy. Getting a replacement plate is a real pain in the ass.” The cop mounted his cycle and roared off.
Some people liked being recognized. Last year, when he defended the Morgan woman, he was twice trapped by TV newsmen as he was leaving the courthouse by a rear door. Each time he said “No comment.” And while his face was on the screen that night the reporter’s voice said, “Defense counsel had no comment.” Florence and Joanne both called to say they’d seen him on TV. He’d liked his anonymity as much as his privacy. His house was hidden from the street. He was ready for someone who understood even before he’d met Francine.
*
Inside, not a sound. On the kitchen table was the bar of blue glycerine soap, its cellophane opened like a flower, the soap its centerpiece.
“Where are you?”
No answer.
Nobody in the bathroom.
In the darkened bedroom he could make out Francine wrapped in a bath sheet. Was her face as beautiful to the rest of the world as it seemed to him? He touched her hair.
She woke with a start. “George? Oh, I must have fallen asleep.”
As he lay down beside her she rolled away to the other side of the bed, then pulled the bath sheet after her, and, standing up, wrapped it around her. “First things first.”
After a moment, he got up and stood in the door of the bathroom. She had her back to him. He said, “There’s something about a naked woman brushing her teeth.” As she gargled she threw her head back. His gaze traveled the contours of her body. God’s miracle was skin; in the Met the man-made miracles were of stone. He walked up behind her and with the ends of his fingers touched the indentation on each side of her waist. He looked up. In the mirror, he saw Francine’s breasts, the areolae pinkish brown.
“Your suit is damp,” she said.
“I can remedy that,” he said, not wanting to take his hands away from her waist.
She turned almost the way a ballerina turns to let her partner know her escape is merely to the other side of the stage. She turned the overhead shower on, then stepped into the tub.
“The soap is on the kitchen table,” she said.
“I know,” he answered, hurrying to get it.
*
She dozed for only a few minutes afterward because she had catnapped earlier. As he slept beside her, she remembered his saying a year ago, when it had started, Falling asleep afterward is a compliment to the experience. Nobody falls asleep in a whorehouse.
The skin of her inside thighs still felt his lips. To George love-making was courtesy: You opened the door for another; somehow you would pass through as well. Were the other men she’d known selfish or inexperienced? She opted for inexperience, then thought how many go through their lives without understanding what a woman wants. She wanted to spoon herself against his body but thought that that would wake him. Courtesy was mutual. She abstained, and suddenly felt a rush of profound loss.
In the early months of their involvement with each other, her days were buoyed by exquisite agony: Where was he this very moment, doing what? Her work, which used to be her primary source of excitement, suddenly became an office where time passed until she could hurry to his home and they would, in a great rush, kiss, undress, kiss, hug, glory in each other’s bodies. She lived from evening to evening, from body clasp to body clasp, as if the waterfall of tumultuous orgasms was drowning everything she had been before. The thumping insanity of the first weeks, overcome by irrationality, suffocated her brain. Her father had so drummed into her: Your mind makes you human, your power will be derived from the success of your brain.
In time the carnival stopped. The sheer, crazy, minute-by-minute imagining and longing for the other had receded enough so that she could breathe, enjoy her work again, think of others, behave as if she were dressed and not running around the world naked. Her feeling for Thomassy now had resonance. They had a history together. Were they evolving into something longer range, or was that the trap of every woman’s hope, the cave to which food was brought and where children were born? Francine still couldn’t imagine herself in her mother’s world, being someone’s wife. Was that like being someone’s automobile? What was it she wanted? she asked of her restored sanity.
Planning was hope-chest stuff. Let whatever would happen, happen.
*
The phone rang just as they were finishing dinner. Francine’s instinct was to answer it, her movement toward the phone aborted by the thought that this was still a bachelor’s home. She stopped. Thomassy got it on the third ring.
“Yes,” he said instead of hello to let the caller know this was not the time for a long telephone call.
Francine watched him. He had a way of cradling the phone between his shoulder and his neck so that both of his hands would stay free.
She stood in front of him and mouthed the words, One of your old girl friends?
“Excuse me,” Thomassy said into the phone and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. To Francine he said, “It’s your father. He says it isn’t about you.”
Widmer was saying, “A friend of mine from Washington and I would like to see you rather urgently this evening. Before you say no, it’s truly quite pressing. What’s the matter, George?”
The matter is that your daughter is running her fingers up and down my fly. “Nothing. Go ahead.” To Francine he mouthed Not you.
“Let me give you the address.”
“Hold on,” Thomassy said. “I’ve got a full calendar, Ned. If this is going to take more than an hour or two, I don’t see how I can get involved.”
Widmer wanted to say You are involved. You are a prisoner of your capabilities. You’re the only lawyer around here who could defend a case like this and be sure to win. What he said was, “A client of mine died this morning.”
“You know I’m not into estates and trusts, Ned.”
Widmer felt odd when Thomassy used his nickname. How few people in this country now awaited permission to use your Christian name. Francine had said, What do you expect him to call you? Dad?
“It isn’t anything like that.”
“You’re not saying much.” I’ve got a restless relative of yours here.
“This must be in confidence,” Widmer told him.
“Come on, Ned.”
“Do you know the name Martin Fuller?”
Only a moment elapsed before Thomassy said, “I thought he was dead.”
“He is now.”
“I meant long ago.”
“He was still active at eighty-two.”
“I didn’t see anything in the paper.”
“He burned to death this morning, George. Can you come over to his house as soon as possible so that my friends can have a word with you?”
“I’m too busy. The answer is no.”
Among Widmer’s friends one said I’m afraid I can’t.
“Please,” Widmer said.
“I’ve got to prepare for trial tomorrow. Sorry.”
Without a further word, Archibald Widmer’s Armenian non-son-in-law hung up, and grabbed Francine before she could skitter away. “You know what I do to girls who play games while I’m on the phone?”
*
A half hour later, lying in bed, Francine asked him, “Who did you think was dead?”
“He
is dead.”
“Who?”
“Martin Fuller. Name mean anything to you?”
“Oh my God.”
“You knew him?”
“Everyone in my field knows his work.”
“His brain passed your test.”
“Don’t be facetious. He did what he did better than anyone else in the world.”
“That’s not like being the best lawyer in Westchester County.”
“Oh, George,” she turned to him. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. “What Fuller did was change the balance of power.”
“And I don’t change the balance of anything, according to you.”
She’d intended supplication, saw she’d hurt him worse. “You changed my life when you won my case.”
“But my brain isn’t as good as Fuller’s, is that it?”
“It’s not your brain. It’s that you haven’t used it for important things.”
She couldn’t heal him with platitudes the way the other women always had. This was one of the things he’d had to adjust to, like Radcliffe, which he’d thought of as a place other men’s women went to. And her grasp of what went on behind the news. She read newspapers as if there were five lines for every one he saw. She predicted Beirut. He’d said she got it from her work at the UN. “I got it from my head. I put two and two together instead of reading the ambassador’s instructions.” “You are arrogant,” he said. “I don’t arrogate anything to myself except you,” was her answer. You can’t conquer a country, she’d said once, you can only subdue it temporarily. And he’d thought, you can’t subdue even temporarily a woman who thinks like that. You have to learn to trust yourself to a rare species named Francine who in some matters would always be smarter. In Oswego, women settled in to run things from behind the scenery. At the UN Francine put words into the ambassador’s mouth and said she’d refuse the ambassador’s job if offered because she wasn’t going to be a Charlie McCarthy for anyone.
Francine’s special relish was drafting a reply to an anti-U.S. diatribe by a Soviet client, “one of the monkey states,” as she characterized them. When they’d first met, Thomassy’d told her all the UN gab was useless because it ignored human nature. She’d said, “When a monkey flashes its ass, it’s a sign it doesn’t want to fight. The monkeys at the UN flash their teeth the way other monkeys flash their asses.”
Francine had seemed cerebral and smart aleck to him at first, until the morning she watched him sorting out the junk mail. When Thomassy got letters soliciting funds for blind people, blacks, veterans, orphans, et cetera, he’d throw them into the garbage pail unopened. Francine had accused him of being a heartless bastard. Thomassy said he didn’t throw out the ASPCA envelopes, he sent a check. She said it was monstrous to care about animals and not people. Thomassy told her the other animals don’t destroy members of their own species or torture each other for no direct gain. Criminal lawyers watch other people lie all the time by commission and omission but they can’t lie, not to themselves, not to others. They’ve got too damn many enemies to let themselves get caught. Francine said Thomassy got his clients off because the jails are too full and don’t rehabilitate anyone. Thomassy responded that he got clients off because that was his job. He’d told her he was an advocate for winning and she was a do-gooder who would like to believe in the perfectability of man. “The best proof that you’re wrong,” he’d said, “is that you’ve taken up with me.”
Now, Francine, leaning her head on her hand, said, “Fuller was the only one of my father’s clients I wish he’d taken me to meet. In his—I don’t suppose you’ve read any of his books?”
He was damned if he’d go on the defensive.
“I’m sorry,” Francine said. “No reason for you to have. His great talent is—was.” She stopped a moment only, “Prognosticating Soviet moves with miraculous accuracy.”
“Astrology?” There he went.
“You study judges. He studied Soviet leaders. He knew how each one’s mind works. You do the same thing except…”
“I get punks off. He saved the world.”
“What did my father want?”
“Me.”
“To get some punk off or save the world?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take me with you.”
“You’re crazy. Besides, I turned him down.”
Francine threw his robe around herself and went to the phone to call her father.
“He’s not home,” Thomassy yelled after her. “Please don’t mix in my business.”
“What goes on in the world,” Francine shouted at him, “is my business, donkey.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leona Fuller called from the back bedroom, where Detective Cooper had insisted on interviewing her in private. “Ned Widmer, please come in here.”
Leona said, “He wants to know how much insurance there was on Martin’s life.”
“Is that relevant?” Widmer asked Cooper.
“We’re trying to establish a motive for someone mixing gas in with the kerosene. Who benefits?”
“We’ve been protected for a long time,” Leona Fuller said, “but not now, and not from the police.” She turned to Cooper. “I believe there is about four hundred thousand in two or three policies, does that sound correct, Ned?”
“Approximately.”
“If you have no children,” Cooper said, turning his back to Widmer, “why so much insurance?”
“If we had children, they’d be grown. My husband took the insurance out at least thirty-five years ago. That wouldn’t be much per year if something had happened to him then and I lived till, say, now. After all those years of paying premiums, he refused to discontinue any of it. He wanted me to have a good time, he said. He also wanted there to be enough for me to get help in organizing his leftovers.”
Widmer intervened. “She means his manuscripts, letters, and so forth. It could take several years to get them all in order for turning over to the university. Did you find that any of the individuals you interviewed upstairs had anything resembling a motive?”
Cooper shook his head.
“Then perhaps we can all be left in peace now?”
“Just as soon as I put the cuffs on one of the ones upstairs and take him to the lock-up.”
“Which one? Why?”
Cooper glanced at his notepad. “Edward Porter. Possession of two ounces of marijuana. We found it in his room.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Mrs. Fuller, “I told him to be careful about that tobacco of his.”
“Maybe you better advise your client,” Cooper said, “that if she knew about his use—that stuff ain’t tobacco—in her house and didn’t inform the police, she could be charged. I don’t want to have to charge the bereaved.”
After Cooper left the room, Widmer tried to calm Leona. He patted her good hand. She sat, shaking her head, as if, under this crude barrage, her loss was first coming home.
Cooper stuck his head in the door. “Oh, Mrs. Fuller, did the Porter kid cut the lawn for you?”
“He’s not a kid. Yes, he kindly did the lawn from time to time since our gardener moved away. He’s a sweet and helpful young man.”
“He had access to the five-gallon can of gas in the garage?” Cooper asked.
Leona glanced at Widmer. “Anyone could have access. We didn’t lock the garage door ever.”
Widmer hurried upstairs in time to see Cooper formally charge Edward Porter with possession.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ed said.
Cooper held the handcuffs out. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back or I’ll put them there for you.”
Ed looked at them as if they were some strange object never seen before. “No,” he repeated.
“Yes,” said the detective. He spun Ed around, and with two quick movements slipped the cuffs on and locked them with a click.
Widmer realized that for all of his years practicing the law he had never seen a man arrested before.
“I
want a lawyer,” Ed said, trying in the absence of hands to shake his hair away from his eyes. “Somebody who knows how to handle these people.”
Perry and Randall were standing in the open doorway. It was to them that Widmer said, “George Thomassy is expensive and unwilling. We’ll have to think of someone else.”
“I don’t care about the expense, dammit,” Ed said. “This charge is ridiculous. They didn’t have a search warrant. I want someone who can get the charge thrown out at the arraignment.”
Widmer thought This young man knows how the law works.
They heard the distant phone ringing, once, twice. Randall hurried to get it, returned, said to Widmer, “Ned, it’s your daughter.”
He couldn’t imagine how she knew where he was.
“I made George tell me,” she explained. “He’s willing to listen now.”
“How did you convince him?”
“I’ll go into that some other time. Here he is.”
He told Thomassy about the marijuana charge, then said, “What I’m really concerned about, George, is that this is just a pretext arrest to hold him until they can press another charge.”
“What kind of charge?”
Widmer hesitated. His purpose was to enlist George. Therefore he said, “I think they’re thinking this might possibly involve murder.”
Marijuana didn’t interest Thomassy. He got kids off all the time just to get it across to the cops to stop wasting time on victimless crime. Murder interested him if the dead man was someone whose brain interested Francine.
“Tell me where to go,” Thomassy said.
“I’ll have to find out,” Widmer replied, putting the phone down. On the way upstairs, he passed the bathroom from which the acrid smell of burning still seeped.
*
The village justice was hearing a case in which the owner of a ’79 Ford wagon was claiming under oath that this evening was the first time in his life that he had been within the precincts of the village, that he had never lent his car to a member of his family or anyone else, and he had no idea how an officer had put a ticket on his car if it had never been there.
