Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  She blinked her big, black and very pretty eyes. “No!” she said. She belonged in Colorado or California, doing something aerobic. She was entirely too cheerful for Long Island. “I wouldn’t play poker with an old pro like you,” she assured. Instantly, I could see, she regretted saying “old,” but it was too late.

  “Old,” I said, “but not yet senile.” Before she could apologize and thus no longer feel she somehow owed me one, I added: “I know you found my client’s fingerprints.”

  “Not just on a door bell or somewhere innocuous. On the tape that was used to tie up all the bank envelopes together. The bank officer did it for her. You can see three of the envelopes in that picture.” Then she added, with much fervor, “Ripped apart.”

  “Torn open,” I said calmly. “Anyway, my client doesn’t deny knowing her. In fact, he was in a business deal with her.”

  “Lee,” Holly said, “he wiped the doorknob and the switch plate of the light near the front door. But he left prints all over the house! On the thermostat in the living room! On the toilet flusher in the bathroom off her bedroom!”

  “That just puts him there on a day between 1890 and the present.”

  Holly flashed me a nauseatingly perky smile, as if to say: Aren’t you cute! But then she added: “You’re forgetting his prints on the Scotch tape. She picked up those envelopes Friday.”

  “So maybe he was waiting in a car right outside the bank. She handed him the envelope and …” Holly’s smile turned into that amused prosecutorial smirk that says: Do you really think a jury is going to believe that:

  “Anything else?” I asked, not allowing myself to show that I would dearly love to wipe that smirk off her face. “Because if this is your case, it’s spectacularly unimpressive.”

  Holly patted her inflated coiffeur. “How about an eyewitness who puts your client at the scene right around the time of the murder?”

  I could practice criminal law for the next hundred years and a remark like that would still get me—whomp!—right in the gut. But over the years, I’d learned to keep my gut to myself. “Define ‘around the time of the murder’ for me,” I suggested.

  Holly leafed through the file, looking for an answer. Sam, I was sure, had the autopsy report memorized. He indicated as much by stopping his cha-cha and leaning forward in his seat. Holly actually glanced up at him, but did not give him permission to speak. Sam and I waited. Finally she announced: “The M.E. says the murder took place between six P.M. Friday and eight A.M. Saturday.”

  “And your eagle-eyed witness says what?” I asked.

  “The witness saw the accused at approximately six-thirty P.M.”

  I gave her what the man in my life refers to as my Barbara Stanwyck Knowing Smile. “Last Friday? Your witness is positive of that?” This is about a third of what I do for a living: smile knowingly as if there is nothing else to do but be amused at the extent of human folly, so the smilee will think: Maybe my case isn’t as good as I thought.

  “Last Friday,” Holly maintained, her eyes bright, her own smile spirited, as if to say, Gee, this litigation stuff is fun! For someone with the last name of Nuñez, no matter how assimilated, you’d think she’d have retained a little Spanish dolor. But she displayed as much tragic sense of life as a drum majorette.

  “And where did the eyewitness see my client?”

  “In the company of the deceased—at her house.”

  Oy. “Was the decedent already deceased at that point in time?” I inquired politely.

  At this juncture, almost any other new assistant in the Homicide Bureau would have peered over at the cop in charge of the case, or at least hesitated. Not Holly. “No. She and the accused were seen walking together on the street, then going up into the deceased’s house.” She paused. “Hand in hand.”

  “First of all, assuming your witness saw Bobette Frisch with a man who is indeed my client—an assumption I, for one, am not about to make. Does that sound like a tête-à-tête that’s going to end up in murder—or dinner? I vote for dinner. Second of all—”

  “It was your client. His car was parked in the driveway of Bobette Frisch’s house. The witness is her tenant. Ms. Frisch rented out a room, bath, and kitchenette in the basement. Torkelson’s car was blocking the tenant’s, and he’d rung the upstairs bell. Ms. Frisch was out, so the tenant waited by the driveway, pacing, having a fit. He couldn’t get his car out and he works nights, something with computers over at Snapple in Valley Stream. He said this was the second time Torkelson—”

  “Or someone else,” I interrupted.

  “Or someone else six foot five with a little beaky nose and blue eyes,” Sam burst out. Holly licked her index finger and began lifting off bits of lint from her desk blotter. A meaningless gesture, yet Sam immediately understood he should not have spoken up. “’Scuse me, Holly,” he said, much too fast. Was his voice actually tremulous? At best, it was an octave higher than usual. How the hell did she do that? Twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old, and she was able to make Sam Franklin squeak like a rookie.

  “You know,” I said, hating to interrupt such rich psychological interplay, “about the tall guy your witness saw: You see someone tall one time, and the next time someone large looms over you, you don’t bother looking up. You assume it’s the same tall man. But it could have been anyone tall.”

  “It was Norman Torkelson,” said Holly, cutting me off. “Our witness not only saw them together but called the local precinct and reported Torkelson’s car—and the license plate.” She didn’t even give me a second to comfort myself by thinking: Norman is far too gifted a con man to ever drive a car registered in his name. “It was listed under Robert McNulty, at 54 Homewood Avenue. Apartment 3C,” she reported. “In Mineola.” I couldn’t believe it! What a jerk! “We sent a couple of guys over there Sunday,” she went on, “and there was your client, Norman Torkelson, a.k.a. Robert McNulty, a.k.a. …” She opened the file folder again. I really didn’t want to hear the upcoming recitation, but I had no choice. “… Henry Reuther, a.k.a. Philip Nugent, a.k.a. William Brightman, a.k.a.—”

  “Holly, I’m not telling you he’s never used an alias or been arrested or convicted of fraud. I’m only saying he is not a killer. If it was Norman at Bobette’s, he wouldn’t leave her dead. He’d leave her with a smile on her face and a song in her heart. I’m only saying—”

  “I’m only saying he can plead to second-degree homicide and I’ll recommend twenty-five years.”

  “You know I can’t accept that, Holly,” I said, moving forward in my seat as if ready to stomp out of her office, which of course I had no intention of doing. I’d spend another twenty minutes dickering and come out with twenty.

  Except Holly stared at her watch and an expression of horror passed over her face. She rose. “Take it or leave it,” she said, real fast. Then she added: “Sorry, but I have an urgent appointment and I’m fifteen minutes late.” She stood and quickly fluttered all ten fingers at me. “New acrylics,” she explained. “Do I have to explain? You know how long they take. I mean, forever.”

  “Acrylics?” my partner, Chuckie Phalen, demanded. I’d wandered downstairs and into the courtroom where he was trying his arson case and waiting until the judge—who truly believed the governor was, any second, going to nominate him to run for an opening on the Court of Appeals as a reward for having gone to Harvard Law School—declared a recess. As these recesses happened on the average of every fifteen minutes so the judge could call Albany and demand “Any news yet?” I hadn’t had to wait long.

  “What the hell are acrylics?” Chuckie demanded.

  “Fake nails.”

  Chuckie Phalen, at sixty-eight years old, was one of those second-generation Irish-American males who prefer a night out with the boys to any other human endeavor, so I elaborated: “Artificial fingernails. So she can have long nails that don’t break.”

  “If a guy A.D.A. pulled something like that …”

  Already I regretted complaining to Chucki
e because by nightfall, the quarter of the Nassau County criminal defense bar that hung out at TJ’s Taproom would be snickering over “acrylics” and, to an Old Boy, would recount the story for the ten or twenty years whenever someone brought up the notion that a female performing some role in the courtroom beyond stenography might not be a bad idea. That I and a couple of other women attorneys were somehow absolved of the taint of frivolity in the first degree didn’t make me feel any better. It just meant that for some reason, the boys at TJ’s had declared us members of some neutral, nonthreatening gender that had nothing to do with other girl lawyers.

  Chuckie pushed back his chair from the defense table and stretched out his short legs. Even that minor exertion caused him to breathe hard, and with each breath, I could hear the faint whistle of the emphysema that was killing him. And perched on the edge of the table, I could smell the bitter odor of cigarettes that clung to his dark-gray suit; it commingled with the harsher stench of the cigars he and his pals lit up five nights a week at TJ’s.

  “I hope Holly Nuñez will be a little more flexible,” I mused. “I’d hate to have to go to trial with this guy.”

  “He’s guilty,” Chuckie said, not even bothering to put a question mark at the end of his question.

  “If he’s not, then there’s a guy with his size-giant fingers who made some nasty marks on one Bobette Frisch’s neck. Oh, and that same guy seems to have left his prints everywhere in her house, including on the Scotch tape that was tying together all the bank envelopes with the forty-eight thousand bucks she’d withdrawn earlier that day.” I glanced down. A run had formed near the toe of my black panty hose and was working its way past my shoe, over my instep, so I could add to the pleasure of my day by having to run into Bloomingdale’s and buy five more pair, one of which I’d leave in my glove compartment, one in my attaché case, and three in my office, and yet the next time I had a run, as if by witchcraft, the parity hose would have vanished and once again I’d be back at the Bloomingdale’s hosiery counter, where I know the saleslady by name: Dorothy. “If I could put Norman on the stand, he could probably con a jury into thinking he won the Nobel Prize for goodness. But he has a record.”

  “A long one,” Chuckie wheezed, knowing without being told.

  “The longest. And he was pulling the marriage con.”

  “Aw, no.” Chuckie shook his small head with great sadness. I tried to imagine Chuckie sitting beside Norman at a defense table. He was short, and slight to the point of being tiny. If there were a class play for sixty-eight-year-olds, Chuckie Phalen would be cast as a leprechaun. “You can’t put a fella like that on the stand.” He glanced up at me. His eyes were eclipsed by cataracts. “Did he actually marry them?”

  “No. Just proposed, as far as I can tell. I haven’t read the whole printout, because there aren’t enough hours in a day. But he tells them he came from an upper-class family, went to Yale, the family lost its money, but he made it back in ‘investments.’ Except then his wife took him to the cleaners, got custody of his kids, and now he’s down on his luck. Your heart would break from reading some of the witness reports.”

  “My heart? In Phalen and White, Attorneys-at-Law,” he said, just as the bailiff shuffled back into the courtroom, “there’s only one heart capable of breakage. It ain’t mine, Lee.”

  And on the subject of hearts, the next morning in the visitors’ center, I watched Norman Torkelson react to the news about an eyewitness who not only could place him at the crime scene at an hour when the homicide, according to the medical examiner, might have occurred, but also called the local precinct to complain about his car, thereby giving the cops a record of his license plate number. He pressed his hand against his chest. “But the car wasn’t registered in my name!” he declared.

  “It was registered to Robert McNulty, the same name you used for your apartment.”

  “It couldn’t have been!” he replied, angry that I would accuse him of such rank amateurism. “I sent Mary over to Motor Vehicles with ID for …” He thought for a minute. “Daniel Stevenson. I distinctly remember that. I told her, ‘Take the Dan ID and—’”

  “Maybe she just grabbed the wrong papers.”

  Norman’s face flushed red, then deepened to a fierce purple. Just as I was about to leap up and call a guard over—Hey! Get this guy to the infirmary, fast!—he regained his composure. The dark cast receded, the hands relaxed as he crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s not that she’s unintelligent,” he said quietly. “People think that, but they’re wrong. It’s just … Mary’s an innocent. She doesn’t get it.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s why …” His face colored. Pink this time. “I love her,” he said softly. “You should see her. Then you’d understand …”

  “And Bobette?” I asked.

  “Business,” he said crisply. “Nothing going on there. Strictly dollars and cents.”

  “You know, I’ve seen your record, read some of the complaints against you. You might want to consider being more direct with me. I need all the help I can get, and the D.A.’s Office is not in a generous mood when it comes to …” I paused for effect. Hokey, but I knew it would work. “… homicide.”

  “How can I impress upon you that this was strictly a business deal? We didn’t have sexual relations.”

  Of course, the problem with most professional criminals is that you never know if they’re lying. The smarter ones, however, tend to be straight when it is in their best interests to tell the truth. With con men, this generalization does not always apply. The pleasure of the lie might be headier than the joy of freedom. “If you did have sex,” I said, “there may be evidence of it. A person can wipe door handles clean and still leave fingerprints. And he can leave body fluids, if not semen then saliva, or a hair or two with roots on them and—”

  “No sex,” Norman said. His tone was harsh, as if he were a teacher and I an incorrigible, the worst student. “No sex!” He waved the guard over to take him back to his cell. “No sex!”

  Four

  S-E-X.

  It is as good a way as any to return to the marriage of Lee’s parents. So let’s spell it out. The first letter, S: for svelte. Before Lee’s birth, Sylvia had a model’s figure—that is, she had a large, finely shaped head that sat atop a long neck, which arose from a body that had as many curves as the average flagpole. Besides being thin, Sylvia was one of those born-chic people who can put on the plainest white shirt, fold back the cuffs, lift the collar, and—voilà—look as though she’d been done by Monsieur Dior. But in the weeks postpartum, it became clear that her outline had softened. Her chemistry had changed, her cell walls losing a bit of their resilience, and even though she’d gained only ten pounds, her pre-pregnancy waist had thickened. Her hips became almost curvy. Not just that: Her bosom swelled from what her mother-in-law, Bella, referred to as “a coupla fried eggs” to two noticeable bumps beneath her cashmere sweater set. Note the cashmere.

  Tudor Rose Furs was a gold mine. By the late forties and early fifties, soldiers and sailors, back in civilian jobs, were celebrating the peace and reveling in a booming economy. They wanted to make up for lost time. How better to show the stuff they were made of than to buy a fur coat for the little woman? (Or a fur boa for the little woman’s competition?) By 1951, Leonard and Sylvia were able to buy their first house, a luxury, luxury ranch, as the real estate agent solemnly described it.

  Just over four miles north and ten miles east of Forest Hills, their house might have inhabited another galaxy. For the son of a Commie and the daughter of a not-dishonest judge, Great Neck was so profoundly luxurious that the Whites kept saying to each other: “I want to pinch myself.” Their house, the agent assured them, had all the latest features. Not all: But on its over-half-an-acre plot, it did have a stone fireplace that opened onto both the living room and the den, a finished basement, with built-in cedar storage bins that doubled as seating, and, behind louvered doors right off the kitchen, a laundry center.

  “I want to pin
ch myself,” Sylvia admitted to Leonard as she ran her hand over the chilly white porcelain of the dryer. Leonard’s hand cupped her buttock and gave it a fast pinch. The male in him loved the feel of her newer, rounder, more ample ass, even as the snob yearned for the prepregnant Sylvia, whose hollow cheeks and fleshless flanks announced: No sloppy lower-middle-class excess here. He couldn’t get over his disappointment that she had let herself lose that sucked-in-cheek, snooty look he’d prized. She still looked like Lauren Bacall’s twin sister, but a twin who couldn’t lay off the halvah.

  And another thing. Once they got past the thrill of home ownership and finished with the business of the marriage—should the master bathroom have gray or peach tiles? could they afford to go to France on vacation? and if so, should they leave Lily with his parents or her parents?—he had nothing to say to Sylvia. Nor did she seem to think she owed him any talk. He could understand her lack of conversational ability because he was aware of her background: Nobody said anything at the Bernsteins’ for fear of disturbing the Judge. But he could not forget that article he’d seen in Collier’s written by a Ph.D. psychologist. “Are You Married to Your Best Friend?” That title was a slap in the face.

  Would a best friend just shrug—she’d shrugged!—when he’d taken her out to a French restaurant and ordered wine and confided his dream of opening a store in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, away from the fur district, and have it so elegant that only the most silk-stocking types would feel comfortable going in? Of course, once they were customers, everyone would want to go. Although the rude-crude types would be told they had to make an appointment. Not that he didn’t want their business. Frankly, they bought at least double what tightwad rich Christians did, but—see, Sylvia?—he wanted them to feel they were trespassing. They would have more respect for the store that way. Not store. Salon. And wait till those Christian ladies walked in the front door! They would love it, with skinny Frenchmen for salesmen who would say “May I help you?” in French. He’d even looked it up in the Forest Hills branch of the Queens Borough Public Library: “Puis-je vous aider?” although he didn’t dare to try to say it himself, being smart enough to realize the first word was probably not pronounced “Poo is-gee.” But of course Leonard would insist the salesmen switch to English if he saw the customer getting scared. Fear was bad, he explained. Intimidation, on the other hand, was good, because then the customer and her husband would order an even better garment, just to prove they could afford to buy in such classy surroundings.