by Susan Isaacs
“Right.”
“So let’s talk about Norman and Bobette—honestly.”
Mary uncrossed her legs, blinked her lashes and opened her eyes wide. “Okay.”
“You’re telling me what went on between Norman and Bobette was strictly a business deal. If I know that’s nonsense, can you imagine what Holly Nuñez, the assistant D.A., knows? She’s had a whole squad of homicide cops investigating Norman Torkelson. Now, was he conning Bobette Frisch?” A little-girl shrug, head to the side. Her mannerisms were overly cutesy for such a tall woman. For such a beauty. Either she’d bloomed quite late in adolescence or her mother had been petite and revoltingly winsome. “That’s a yes, he was conning her?”
“Uh … yes. But he wasn’t having sex with her.”
Right. “Really?”
“Really. I mean, he told me he never had sex with them, even before he met me. He said lonely women …” She wasn’t so naive that she didn’t know what Norman did was reprehensible. But it didn’t seem to appall her; at that moment, she was just slightly unsure of how to present it. “Lonely women …”
“Say it straight.”
“Lonely women … I can’t say it. I can’t think of the word. It means ‘can’t get enough.’”
“Insatiable?”
“That’s it!” she squealed. “Hey, you and Norman should play Scrabble!”
“‘Lonely women are insatiable …’” I prompted her.
“So if you start having sex, they’ll milk you dry. I mean, if he was doing them, do you think he’d have time for me?”
“So he never goes near them?” I asked.
“He cuddles them,” she explained serenely, the way Norman must have explained it to her: I know this sounds incredible, Mary, my angel, but it is the truth, and (he’d offer her a sad little shrug here) that’s what I’m stuck with. “He holds them and gives them back rubs. Sometimes he’ll kiss them, but a cheek kiss or a forehead kiss. Not a kiss kiss.”
The drizzle turned to downpour. Raindrops smacked against the windowpane and were driven down diagonal paths by a sharp wind. At the same moment, Mary and I peered down at her feet, naked except for the flimsy gold shoes. They were not just big feet, but spread out, like a hod carrier’s—if the hod carrier had given himself a pedicure with coral polish.
“How did Norman meet Bobette?” I asked.
“The usual way.”
“You agreed to help me help Norman, Ms. Dean.”
“Mary.”
“Mary, I want to know everything you know.”
“Okay. But I forgot what you just asked me.”
“Where did he and Bobette meet?”
“Right! Um, through the personals. In Newsday.”
“His ad or hers?”
“Oh, his. We use the same ad in every city, except with a different beginning. Like, we used ‘Heart of my Heart’ in Louisville and ‘True Love is Precious Gift’ in Scranton.”
“On Long Island?”
“‘Looking for Love.’ Norm says if any cops or private detectives are tracking him, they’re not going to read the whole ad, but … You know what his motto is?”
“What?”
“You can’t be too careful!” She proclaimed it with pride, throwing back her shoulders, holding her head high, the way a titan of industry’s wife would reveal the slogan for a multi-million dollar advertising campaign for her husband’s corporation.
“What else did the ad say? The part that was always the same.”
“‘DWM’—that’s divorced white man … Maybe the M is for male. Anyhow, ‘DWM, thirty-five, handsome, tall Yale graduate, business executive, wants the real thing.’” Mary burst into a rich laugh. “Norman says: ‘They don’t know my real thing is their money’ Let’s see … the real thing. Oh, ‘You must enjoy Shakespeare’s sonnets, beautiful music, travel, and long, romantic walks. Don’t want dates. Want a relationship. Please respond with long letter and picture. Help me. I have a hole in my heart.’”
She waited expectantly, so I said: “I bet it worked like a charm.”
My acknowledgment of Norman’s literary gift seemed to please her. She smiled benevolently. “So then we, like, hang out and wait for the mail.”
“Do you get a lot of it?”
“A ton! You wouldn’t believe it. Then he makes a pitcher of martinis and I cut up teensy little cheese cubes and we read them and put them into piles.”
“Such as.”
“Garbage: Too young, living with family, student, low-pay job like waitressing. Or if she has kids or any family she has to take care of—unless it’s a total vegetable relative. Then there’s Too Pretty. We don’t want someone who’s using the personals just because she’s bored with the guys she already has; she wouldn’t be desperate enough. Too Smart: like doctors, lawyers. We watch out for real good vocabulary. Norm says: ‘If I have to look up the words she uses in a dictionary, she’s too smart for me.’ Or a couple of times: women cops! We put the letters from Yale grads on the Too Smart pile too, because Norm could slip up and they’d know it. But you wouldn’t believe their letters! They really oughta give a course there: How to Get a Guy. Then there are the Iffys: medium-paying jobs, but there’s maybe a pension, or she might have put a lot in the bank. You know, like nurses, teachers. And then”—she paused to run the tip of her tongue across her upper lip; her voice grew husky—“there’s Pay Dirt.”
I wanted to take a hot bath, scrub off what I was hearing with a loofah and anti-bacterial soap. It wasn’t so much the sordidness of what Mary was saying but the sheer pleasure with which she rolled around in the dirt. The mockery, the cruelty, the exultation. I buzzed Sandi and asked for a ginger tea to allay what I knew was incipient nausea. (Sandi and I had a beverage pact. Each time I buzzed her for something to drink, she got a day where she could leave fifteen minutes early. What else could a feminist, knee-jerk-liberal employer do? Naturally, I made the deal knowing that she is an obsessive-compulsive worker; in the six years she’d been with me, she’d left early twice.) “Who gets on the Pay Dirt pile?” I asked.
“Anyone with a fancy address. Norman does his homework and really knows where the rich neighborhoods are in each city we go to. Anyone who has a business. Like Bobette. Anyone who’s been to Europe or on one of those cross-country tours. That’s why he puts in about loving travel; if they’ve actually done it, it can spell m-o-n-e-y.”
Mary told me that while there was no variation in the ads, Norman’s responses to the letters he received were tailored to each woman. A little flattery here (“Fifty-one isn’t old!”), a little bridled lust there (“I could not keep my eyes from that exquisite curve where your hand meets your wrist. Excuse me. I don’t mean to be overstepping the bounds. But I hope you’ll forgive it if I say you look like you combine elegance and emotion, which is a very interesting combination, I must say”). From her wallet, she drew out copies of the photos he sent to them when he wrote them back. There were two. One in a suit and tie, sitting on the edge of a mahogany desk, his arms crossed across his chest, a Mona Lisa smile on his lips—what a Business Week centerfold might look like. The other in corduroys and a plaid shirt, a lock of his hair tumbling over his brow, his sleeves rolled up above his elbow, leaning against a tree in the middle of an autumn forest. Norman would decide from the tone of a woman’s letter which photo to send.
“And then?” I asked.
Mary clapped her hands together, gleeful. “Well, a half hour before the first date, I go to the cocktail lounge or restaurant—Norman says, if they sound like they don’t want to drink, meet them for lunch. It’s what’s called an expense of doing business. But some of these fatsos, they can order three courses, so no dinners. One of them once—”
“You work with Norman?” I asked, amazed that she had any active role in a confidence game. She struck me as someone who could get flustered inserting her card into an automatic teller machine.
“Sure.”
“I didn’t realize he had a business partner
. You were saying that you show up about a half hour before he gets there. To make sure it isn’t a setup?”
“Yes!” she said, delighted with my powers of deduction. “Norman says: ‘You’ve got to cover your a-s-s in this business.’” Especially with a rap sheet like his, I thought. Where did he find this girl? Yes, I know: woman. But Mary was barely into her twenties. True, she didn’t have it all, but she had a lot. Movie star beautiful—if she’d invest in a chisel and chip away those layers of makeup. A sweetie-pie manner. Well, until she spoke about Norman’s crimes. Then something sexual, a throaty intensity I didn’t want to hear, crept into her tone.
“On the first date, Norm lets the woman do the talking. I mean, you’d think they’d know they should draw the man out, but he said their talking is the key. They’re desperate to talk, and he’s such a great listener. You know why?”
She waited, so I asked, “Why?”
“Because he really does listen. Never forgets a thing. Never mixes up one with the other, even if he’s working two at the same time, which he hardly ever does now. He says he used to do it when he was in his twenties but it knocked him out, the traveling back and forth and having to write double love letters and make double good-night-I-love-you and good-morning-I-love-you phone calls.” She paused and cocked her head to the side. “Is this helping you?”
“It may.” If I’d been a male lawyer, I probably would have delighted in her sitting across from me in that green suit, with coral toenails shining up at me. My partner, Chuckie, would have told her: You’re a bright spot on such a dreary day, dear. But Mary was a blight on my landscape. I love my country lawyer’s office, with its blue-and-white toile couch, and framed photos of the Long Island coast—real beauties—that my guy took; they hang on the wall next to my diplomas. True, I’m stuck in one of those awful modern suburban office buildings, white brick and tinted glass, its upper floors occupied by doctors and lawyers, its lower by upscale podiatrists and marginal software companies. But inside I’d made it comforting. With her garish kelly-green suit, Mary was jarring.
Why, you might ask, having comfortably chatted up multiple murderers and wife-batterers sitting in that very same blue-and-white-checked arm chair, did I so object to Mary Dean? I don’t know—except to say that her girlish pride in Norman’s cruelty to women had a rough sexual side that she didn’t bother to hide. Forget hide: she flaunted it. What was with this dame that she was putting on this kind of show? “Tell me about the con,” I said.
“Well, nothing on the first date,” she said, sitting back in her chair, getting comfortable. “That’s just to capture them. That’s not the word, is it?”
“Captivate.”
“Right!” She massaged the calf of her right leg in a way that, to a man, would be a come-on, but to a premenopausal woman was merely discomforting. Her mind wasn’t on me, though. It was on Norman and the titillation of the con, and that made her every move self-aware, sensual. “So the next time, if things go okay, they’re giving him dinner at their place. That’s ’cause he talked about how down in the dumps he’s gotten with TV dinners or eating out, and ninety-nine percent of the time they pick up on that. So he brings French wine and they talk and he tells about his divorce a little.”
“Is this a real divorce?” I asked, wishing she’d stop feeling up her leg.
“Of course not!” Mary chuckled, amused, as if I’d made a dreadful faux pas. “He’s never been married.” Then her amusement faded. “We’re supposed to be married, though. June first. A June wedding.”
I didn’t want to hear about how she was the first woman he had ever loved and how she was banking on me to get him off. “What does he tell his marks about a divorce?” I asked.
“That he’d built up a great little business. An investment advisory newsletter. See, that way they start asking him advice about their stocks and money stuff and he gets a fast idea of what they have and how much they know. But that he’d put his business in his wife’s name and she won’t give it back to him. The business is useless without him, but his wife let it go bust. He tells them she was from a rich family, so it didn’t matter to her. She just wanted to hurt him.” She lifted a limp lock of hair from her shoulder and began spooling it between her index fingers, as if rolling a pin curl.
“And he did this with Bobette? She made him dinner?”
“Yes. Yankee pot roast. Norm said it was really yucky pot roast. Then he told her about the business and showed her pictures of his kids. Boy pictures from a wallet he lifted in a mall in Chicago. He’s not a pickpocket or anything, but if someone’s buying stuff and leaves a wallet on the counter, he’ll take it, ’cause he sometimes finds good family pictures. This last one was excellent. It had a few pictures of the same two boys, so he kept one for his wallet and had the others blown up and put in picture frames. They look so real.”
“He doesn’t use the credit cards he takes?”
“No. He says it’s too risky. But he uses the ID, just not in the state he lifted it.”
“So he showed her the boy pictures.” She nodded too hard. I realized that it was a gimmick, to show off her bobbing curls. “Any reason why not girl pictures?” I, mother of a daughter, asked.
“Name one woman in the world who’d want a stepdaughter! A stepson isn’t so bad, and these are two cute boys. One’s in a Little League uniform. Norman named one Joey and the other Whatever-name-Norman’s-using, junior.”
“What does he do after that?” I pressed on.
“Nothing till the third date. That’s at the Love Nest.”
“What’s the Love Nest?”
“A little furnished place we take. Not for us. We have our own place. The Love Nest’s for him and the mark. See, Norman always used to use one place with his girlfriends and the marks, but then the girlfriends used to have to get out whenever the marks were coming over. And they’d have to hide a big suitcase or a Hefty bag filled with all their stuff in the car trunk, so the mark wouldn’t get wise. When I started working with Norm, that’s what I had to do.” She smiled and blushed like a happy bride. “But then he said he couldn’t take me having to live like that, so the last few times, we got a cheap place for the Love Nest. He tells them it’s till he gets back on his feet. He worried it might be too crummy and would turn them off, but … Do I have to say it? Nothing turns them off.”
“Where is this Love Nest?” I asked.
“In Manhasset. It’s not all that bad, except the toilet seat has a big chip on the side and it looks like—you know—caked-on poo.”
“When does he use the Love Nest?”
“Not too often, but he has to show he has a place. And so I can call about repossessing his car.” I waited. “See,” she went on, “we have this thing. He goes to the bathroom at exactly nine twenty-five. That’s when I call and leave a message on his answering machine, except the volume is way up: ‘Mr. Whatever-name, this is Ms. McDonald, calling on behalf of Pinnacle Collections Agency”’ Mary’s voice took on a clipped edge that was annoyed, almost angry. “‘Listen, unless you can come up with the money for your car, it is going to be forfeited as per your former wife’s judgment against you. We’ve been more than patient, Mr. Whatever-name.’”
Usually I’m pretty good at figuring out scams, but this one took me a minute, and I needed help. “The mark hears the message and …”
“Norman acts all embarrassed. But then he pretends to open up to her. He shows her a picture of his car. A Jaguar XJS convertible. Sometimes a Mercedes E320. We go out for test drives, and I take a picture of him with the top down.”
Then I had it. “So the mark thinks he is in love with this car.”
“Yes. Well, he does love cars. Really and truly. Anyway, he cries when he talks about his car. He tells them it symbolizes the whole divorce, everything he’s lost.”
“And so to make him happy, she knows she has to ante up thirty or forty thousand to get back his car for him?”
“Oh, they cost more than forty!” She smiled
at my ignorance. “Buy them back or help him buy it back. But that doesn’t happen that night or anything. I mean, he just keeps seeing them all the time. By the beginning of the third week, he says he wishes he was in a position to get serious with her. By the end of that week, she’s ready to go to the bank. But he holds off. He says: ‘I absolutely will not allow any such thing.’”
“So how long does it take before he lets himself be convinced?”
“Another two weeks.” I must have shown surprise that it took that long, because she explained. “That way, they fall so hopelessly in love that when he gets the money and goes to get the car, they don’t—you know—get it. He calls to say he’s tied up with the paperwork and then—bingo! We’re out of there. Meanwhile …” I think she understood that good taste would preclude a delighted grin, but it kept trying to break through. Her eyes sparkled. “They wait for days before they figure it out and call the cops.”
I said: “I guess you know that with a marriage con, a lot of marks never call the cops at all. They’re too humiliated.”
“Too in love!” she said brightly. “They can’t believe that he’d run off because he’s such a great actor. I mean, I tell him I think he half falls for each one of those turkeys, ’cause otherwise he couldn’t convince them that it was so real.” Her voice softened and grew silky. “I’ve never met a woman who didn’t love him. I mean, even if they meet him for just a second. The lady in the Chinese laundry. The ticket lady at the movies.” She eyed me as if she expected me to wave my hand in the air and shout: Me too! When I didn’t oblige, she added: “It’s like he has a magic wand. I remember something I read, like from a fairy tale. Or maybe from a paperback: ‘She was powerless to resist him.’ I mean, there’s no woman alive who can resist Norman. There are some men like that. With me, I fell in two seconds. He could have just tossed me aside after that night.”
“But he didn’t.”
“He said he never knew what love meant till he met me.” The gleam in her eyes turned to moisture. A single tear was detained by a mascara roadblock. Maybe this particular tear wasn’t out of adoration, though, but out of fear. Mary’s features froze as if she’d been on film and the final credits were meant to roll over that expression. Maybe she realized how brutal the con was, how it showed the depths of Norman’s hatred of women. Did she honestly believe her beauty exempted her? Or did she sense that she, too, was Norman’s victim? Had she been secretly afraid he would use her and then sneak out on her one night?
