Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  Like me, Bobette wanted a career. She took a bartending course and found a job at Murray’s Shamrock in Williston Park. It took her another ten years, but she finally moved from labor to management, after convincing Murray’s frantic creditors that the joint could actually turn a tidy profit if it were run by someone sober enough to use a cash register. She became half-owner—keeping an eagle eye on the goings-on so no bartender could pour free drinks for his pals. She tossed out the roughnecks and was always on the lookout for known queasers: to get them up and out of the place so they wouldn’t (as they say with such delicacy here on Long Island) blow their chunks all over the bar.

  Bobette watched over her property from a dimly lit table way in the back. This turned out to be a good idea. First of all, she apparently wasn’t the talkative type. She greeted patrons with a friendly enough “Hiya,” but that was it in the conversation department. If she had an opinion on the Yankees or school taxes or the novels of Danielle Steel, she kept it to herself. After the murder, bar patrons who had no idea what she was like created their own Bobette Frisch for the media, murmuring into the Channel 12 mike: “You could see sweetness in her face. But it was, uh, um, a quiet sweetness. What’s happening, that someone like that gets killed?” And: “She was ultra shy. You know? But a wonderful human being.” However, an anonymous Newsday source referred to her as a “major cheapo who wouldn’t let you owe her two bucks,” and someone interviewed in the Post referred to her as Blobette. The blob business is a little unfair. According to the charts, Bobette was not terribly overweight. Her body, unfortunately, resembled a beer keg, stout and compact. Her oval face, framed by light brown hair, might have been pretty, or at least not unappealing, except that she had fleshy folds that ran from either side of her mouth down either side of her chin. Thus her jaw appeared to be attached in the manner of a marionette’s. Patrons of the bar first took to calling her Mrs. Howdy Doody, then inevitably, behind her back, Mrs. Doody.

  Bobette was shrewd about money. By the eighties, she owned three bars and two apartment buildings. Starting at four every morning, she made the rounds in her frost-beige Cadillac Eldorado from Williston Park to Franklin Square to Hicksville and personally picked up each night’s receipts. She collected her monthly rents in person.

  Neither the cops nor my investigator ever found a scintilla of evidence that she was a pushover when it came to guys, or that she might be susceptible to a sweet talker who would con her out of her life savings. On the contrary: She was all business. When queried about her love life, the people who dealt with her drew a total blank. Huh? Wha’? “Bobette” and “sex” did not seem to belong in a single sentence.

  This was her life: She managed her holdings—which included her own modest but pretty two-story colonial on a sixty-by-one-hundred-foot plot in Merrick. Each Tuesday she visited the Mane Event salon and got her hair washed and set in a style Patricia Nixon favored in the 1956 campaign; once a month, she had it cut and colored. Every single Saturday afternoon she went to the movies and, afterward, stopped at Mario’s for a salad and an order of linguine and clam sauce, which she took home with her. She attended mass at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre every Sunday morning at ten-thirty. The local libraries or video rental stores had no record of her.

  Her parents were dead. She had one brother, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a mechanic at a Honda dealership. She had no enemies. She had no friends.

  I cleared my throat and asked the cop: “What makes you think Bobette’s dealings with Norman Torkelson were anything other than business?”

  Since he had successfully ignored me for the last five minutes, I knew Sergeant Samuel Franklin would not enjoy a reminder that he and I were standing within two feet of each other. Sam sucked in his already sunken cheeks. A second later, he took in a mouthful of air and blew up the lower half of his face. Ergo, he could then make a revolting noise at me as he exhaled and yet, technically, be not guilty of making fart sounds at a lawyer.

  Sam was the archetype for all those smug “Think Thin!” pieces that have plagued me since adolescence, the articles that advise you to mimic the behavior of the congenitally lean. “Do natural-born skinnies just lounge around? No, no and no again. They’re always in action! So get going!”

  Sam never stopped moving. So skinny that you could test your recollection of tenth-grade biology by trying to name each protruding bone on his skeletal frame, Sam burned calories as easily as I stored them. Besides keeping his face in constant motion, he was always tapping his feet, cracking his knuckles, twisting his torso, stretching and flexing his arms. This time he added head swiveling, checking out the acoustical ceiling tile, the floor, the doors along the hallway of the D.A.’s Office. It went beyond his usual hyperkinetics; much of this movement was to avoid looking at me.

  “Don’t the cops investigate homicides anymore?” I asked, using my courtroom voice so he couldn’t pretend not to hear me. Sam, my former friend, drummed his twiglike fingers on the file folder he was clutching; his skin had grown so dry that pale cracks crisscrossed his knuckles. “Come on, Sam.” He kept trying to ignore me. Unfortunately, he was successful. “What’s going on here?” I persisted. “You dust for prints, run them through the computer, come up with some guy who happens to have a criminal record. So you say, ‘Oh, goody, let’s charge this Norman Torkelson with murder. That way, we can all take the weekend off.’”

  “We’re supposed to wait for Ms. Nuñez to discuss this,” Sam said to the dangling frosted globe of a municipal lighting fixture, thus managing to respond to my protest without fully acknowledging my presence. The absent Holly Nuñez was the newest assistant district attorney in the Homicide unit.

  “We’ve been waiting for twenty minutes! She made a ten-thirty appointment.”

  “The secretary said she was in the ladies room,” Sam explained to the lighting fixture.

  “I’ll go find her.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  No answer. The fingers on his left hand were pulling at his pants leg, trying to get it to fall properly over his shoe. It didn’t work. In his baggy navy trousers, he looked like a Weight Watchers lecturer modeling his old clothes to display his eighty-pound loss.

  “Sam, take a long, hard look at Norman’s rap sheet. Do you see anything resembling violent behavior?” His only answer was an I-am-being-incredibly-patient inhalation followed by an exhalation between pursed lips. That pissed me off, which I guess was the point. “Norman Torkelson did not kill Bobette Frisch,” I told him. “Guys like Norman hate women too much to kill them. They don’t want the pain they cause to come to an end.”

  He was not moved by this dandy insight. But then, there was nothing I could say anymore that would move Sam Franklin. The thing of it was, years before, when I first came to the Nassau County D.A.’s from the Manhattan D.A.’s, we’d been buddies. He had recently joined the force after getting a master’s degree in sociology from Adelphi. He’d been handsome back then, with the pulled-tight skin and prominent cheekbones of those Calvin Klein underwear models. He looked absolutely stunning in his blue patrolman’s uniform. Sam had been the arresting officer on a robbery case assigned to me. What a cutie-pie! was my first thought. But my second was: He’s smart. I was impressed—wowed, actually—by his written report. It was so thorough, so cogent, so downright lively (and actually grammatical), I could hardly believe a cop wrote it. Anyway, we hit it off. We both loathed the D.A., loved jazz, enjoyed each other’s humor, and respected each other’s political convictions—the last not exactly a challenge, as we were both a step and a half to the left of Democratic center.

  Also, we discovered we were united in a secret conviction that although we’d both been born and bred on Long Island, we were too big for this burg. Over biweekly melted cheese sandwiches at Bob and Cathie’s Coffee Shop, we could tell each other what we couldn’t say to our colleagues: I coulda been a contender.

  SAM: I coulda been a contender; a social worker evaluat
ing grant applications for the Ford Foundation, but after our fourth kid, my wife was diagnosed manic-depressive and I needed bigger bucks and a better medical plan.

  ME: I coulda been a contender, one of the top litigators in New York. NBC and CNN camera crews would have dropped by my office to hear my analysis every time a celebrity got arrested on a criminal charge. Except my husband let me know, without ever saying a word, that he wanted out of Manhattan—and that our marriage depended on my following him to the suburbs.

  Two big fish in a small pond: That’s how we saw ourselves. Although to be honest, none of the other fish swimming alongside us ever suggested they felt that Sam Franklin and I were in any way exceptional. Still, we offered each other validation: Hey, you could have been great. You have it in you. However, since both of us were busy puffing ourselves up in the other’s company to show how smart we were, how uncomplaining about the hand we’d been dealt, any admission of vulnerability was unthinkable. Thus genuine closeness was impossible. But we put away a lot of melted cheese and white bread together. We probably had crushes on each other. It was a blow when I left the D.A.’s to go into private practice and our friendship died. Abruptly.

  I’d noticed small changes in Sam, but his good company and better cheekbones had kept me from seeing the truth: Five years on the force had turned him from that rarity—a do-gooder with a tough mind—into a right-wing lunkhead. To him, I was suddenly disgraceful. No, wicked. I had gone over to the other side. He stopped saying “Hi!” and took to giving me a fast, hard nod that said: criminal lawyer. He insinuated that the only reason individuals accused of a crime were permitted legal representation was undue pressure from the Pinko-Fruitcake Lobby. One day, I ran into Sam right before lunch. When I suggested we could agree to disagree yet still go to Bob and Cathie’s for number 14s, he stared at me, amazed that I could even dream of such a possibility. So I went back to my office and Xeroxed the Sixth Amendment on my letterhead and mailed it to him. Naturally, he didn’t respond. The next time I saw him, at Mr. Big’s, a bar where a lot of cops hang out, I said, “Hey, Sam? That little section of the Constitution of the United States? Did you read it?”

  Sam said: “It made me want to puke.” The words came out lightly, but that’s because there were about twenty people standing around us. What made me want to puke was I knew he meant it.

  Just before Holly Nuñez herself came into view, her heels came clacking down the hall. I had ten seconds left: I could not appeal to Sam’s sense of guilt, since he no longer had one, so I decided to play to his pride. “Fast work doesn’t mean good work,” I told him. “Twenty bucks I’m going to learn on discovery that your investigation went beyond indifferent—all the way to sloppy.”

  “Bullshit,” Sam began, but he caught himself after the “Bull.” Smiling, knowing I’d gotten to him, I gave Holly a warm greeting, even though I could see she’d just spent nearly thirty minutes setting her hair on hot rollers. Her normally stick-straight hair was pumped up and round, like a beach toy. A peach-colored electrical cord dangled from her tote bag. Dead giveaways. Two seconds later, I understood: the hair exhibition was to show me she could afford to be arrogant because the prosecution was holding all the marbles. I hate it when lawyers pull this sort of cheap trick, and double-hate it when that lawyer is female; it reinforces the stereotype about women being so devoted to playing games that they can’t be relied on to act as adults.

  “Sorry,” Holly said, trying to sound breathless, although it is conceivable that the malodorous cloud of hair spray hovering about her head was causing breathing distress.

  “No problem,” Sam and I responded in an inadvertent duet.

  Holly’s tiny office was a cube with the lowest ceiling the building code allowed, and with three people in it, you had to work to avoid a panic attack. Plus the place was just plain ugly. Whichever subanthropoidal Republican bureaucrat had chosen the wall color from a paint chip probably thought he was choosing off-white, but the color turned out corpse-yellow. As there were no funds in the county budget to clean the windows, one wall was a rectangular painting of the gray residue of foul weather and pollution. Holly had done her best to liven up the space in predictable Don’t-worry-that-I’ll-cut-your-balls-off-with-a-pinking-shears-because-as-you-can-see-I-am-not-threatening female litigator tradition. She’d hung a couple of framed museum posters—a Cassatt mother and child and a Renoir ballerina—and set an oxblood vase filled with silk delphiniums and hydrangeas on her desk. But the truth was, the only place less inviting than an assistant D.A.’s office was a men’s cell in Building D of the correctional center.

  “What have you got, Holly?” I asked. Sam presented his folder to Holly. Like that of a knight handing over his sword to his liege lady, his action made it clear who was in charge. Since this definitely wasn’t Sam’s modus operandi—he usually held forth as if he were senior partner to any assistant D.A. he was working with—I figured there had been a power struggle. The amazing thing was that Holly had won a fight against Sam Franklin that all the big, hairy-chested, street-smart, politically connected assistants routinely lost.

  She opened the folder as if she couldn’t wait to read it. Such damn chipperness: Except for her sparkly dark eyes and her name, however, there was nothing about her to indicate she was Hispanic. Still, I knew the Nuñez was legit because my partner, Chuckie Phalen, had gotten into a fight with her for speaking Spanish. She was in the Robbery Unit then and meandered over to the defense table and kept making comments to Chuckie’s client in Spanish before court convened. Naturally the client was delighted to have someone speaking his language in this dread, alien place, began talking a blue streak. “Shut your trap!” Chuckie had boomed at him. Then he turned to Holly and threatened her with everything except death. “I was only saying it was a nice day,” Holly chirped. “Yeah,” the client agreed. “A nice day.” The client wound up with five to seven in Sing Sing.

  After five minutes with the folder, it was clear that for all her eager-beaverness, Holly was either a slow or a very thorough reader. Sam kept busy moving his feet around as if following diagrams for variations of the cha-cha; his seated dance got faster and faster.

  One of the blessings of middle age is that while you do need reading glasses, your long-range vision improves. So I had no trouble making out the papers that covered Holly’s desk. (Any criminal lawyer worth his/her salt learns how to read upside down.) A couple of subpoena forms, a fax from the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York regarding jurisdiction over a bank robbery/homicide—and the first of the Horchow spring issues. It featured a wicker basket overflowing with pastel gloves. I felt that simultaneous rush of yearning and giddiness mail order catalogs induce, and was actually rubbing the suede of a celadon size seven between my mental fingers when I spotted a couple of Polaroids stuck under a corner of the telephone. The first crime scene photos, made so the investigators have something to work with while the lab develops the actual photos, which have a much clearer resolution. The Polaroids were face-up, but I had a hunch the body was Bobette’s. I reached across Holly’s desk, and since neither Holly nor Sam slapped my hand, I picked up the pictures and checked out the information on the backs: “Bobette Frances Frisch, DOB Oct 26, 1940.”

  Bobette was wearing one of those lavender peignoir and nightgown sets meant for new brides. At least I’ve always assumed that’s whom they were for, since who else but a honey-mooner has the leisure to manipulate seventeen layers of chiffon in order to urinate? She lay on dark carpet, blue or purple, the kind with wavy lines cut in so it looks as if it had been plowed. The nightclothes were bunched up around her waist. Her heavy hips were pinched inward to accommodate the tight space between the dark wood leg of a coffee table and the couch from which she’d probably fallen. Three tan bank envelopes lay nearby on the carpet, near her thigh, ripped open.

  In the cruel light of the camera’s flash, Bobette’s bare legs and hips were, literally, dead white, except for a slight shadow of pubic ha
ir. I’d been a prosecutor and a defense lawyer for too many years to be horrified by any but the most brutal crime scene photos. (Also, I think we women lawyers train ourselves not to flinch, so our more swinish male colleagues won’t think we’re weak and, therefore, worthy of the contempt in which they would dearly love to hold us. I have no idea why we’re perpetually fighting this stereotype and proving how tough we are. It would be a great pretrial ploy to convince opposing counsel that we are prime wusses before going into court and trouncing them.)

  Anyway, back to Bobette. Her peignoir set formed a lavender puddle around the upper part of her body, so if you squinted and ignored the blackened bruises on her neck …“Strangled?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Holly muttered, not looking up from her reading.

  “But not raped?” I continued hopefully. They weren’t talking. “It looks as if the nightgown worked its way up when she fell off the couch. I don’t see any indications of bruises on the lower extremities.” Holly read on and Sam remained silent, so I couldn’t tell if they were holding back on playing a sexual assault card or if there really hadn’t been any sexual attack. Still, with imprints of large fingers on Bobette’s neck visible even in the photograph, I couldn’t pretend that the injuries which led to her death were self-inflicted.

  “I can’t cut you any slack on this one, Lee,” Holly finally said. She closed the folder. “We’ve got too much.”

  “Give me a for instance,” I said lightly. She looked dubious, the mark of a novice, because any experienced prosecutor would be glad to show you she’s holding all the cards. In order to get you to plead your client guilty, she’ll be up front with you about all the damaging information, especially if it’s incontestable, like physical evidence. “Are you playing poker with me, Holly?” I asked.