by Susan Isaacs
His long leg was stretched out from the booth. His bare, dirty foot—Did rich kids get some guarantee public school kids didn’t, that germs wouldn’t crawl into minuscule cuts and turn gangrenous, leaving them four-toed, unable to wear thongs for the rest of their lives?—extended into the aisle that led to the counter. This boy was Jasper Taylor? He wasn’t that conceited idiot … although his eyes and the shiny brown hair … Yes! Someone had called him Jazz!
“You love Jasper Taylor!” Robin jeered. Too loud. He didn’t hear her words, not consciously anyhow, but his name registered subliminally, and Lee saw his toes stop wiggling for one harrowing second. “You love—”
Lee grabbed her sister’s bony wrist. “Shut up,” she ordered. “Shut up or—” She was so agitated that for once she was at a loss for words. She couldn’t think of any threat dreadful enough to stop Robin.
But Robin stopped herself. The look on her older sister’s face: teeth clenched, mouth twisted downward into an anguished grimace, her brows coming together into a terrified V … “Okay,” Robin soothed Lee. “I won’t say it.” Lee nodded, unable to speak—and also, Robin noticed, unable to withdraw her eyes from the Taylor boy’s face. Lee’s shoulders relaxed slightly, but she was still in the grip of some passion that would not release her, to return to being Lee, regular Lee, the big sister with the easy smile and the wise mouth. “Lee?”
“What?” Lee’s eyes were on the boy as he licked a drop of tomato-tinged olive oil from his chin.
“Is he that good?”
“Yes,” Lee told Robin, when she finally found her voice. “He’s that good.”
Nine
My private investigator, Terry Salazar, had a sweet, raspy tenor, the sort of voice heroin-addicted male blues singers with cult followings have: every word slow, provocative. His is the sound that makes every woman—semi-literate teen punks, Indiana Republicans—fantasize about writhing on rumpled sheets.
“Hello,” I said into the speakerphone.
“Hey, Lee!” I didn’t have to ask: Who is it? “You are fucked,” he gloated.
“Badly?”
“No. Bad.” Terry was a real American man. He guarded against any behavior that might remotely be considered feminine, like saying “please” or using the proper adverbial form. “You’re fucked up the ass bad.” I pushed the button to mute the speaker, lifted the receiver, and listened. “They got Bobette’s tenant, his name is …” Terry paused, and I heard him riffling the pages of the small spiral notebook he kept on each of his cases. “… Eugene Pohl. Eugene got treated to a lineup yesterday afternoon. All five guys were six-three and over—just so you can’t bitch about how long, tall Normie stood out.”
“Was Pohl able to ID Norman?” I asked.
“It wasn’t easy. It took him—-Jesus—at least a tenth of a second.”
Attorneys like me hire ex-Nassau County cops like Terry to do background on a case because of who they know—law enforcement types who never talk to a defense lawyer. But it’s more than contacts: Smart cops know how to conduct an inquiry into a murder case. Terry had been a detective sergeant in Homicide and was a first-class investigator. He did more than just ask questions. Radiating rough charm when he felt it was necessary, he could get an enormous amount of information out of all but the most reticent of witnesses. Women would open up to Terry because they couldn’t bear for him to leave. It wasn’t that he was objectively handsome, but he was unequivocally masculine: A woman can sense when she is in the presence of erectile tissue. Men reacted to his gruff warmth. Although he didn’t brag, they sensed his mastery of traditional male talents: hot-wiring a car, shooting a gun, deceiving his wife. They wanted Terry to approve of them, so they, too, kept talking.
Eugene Pohl, apparently, was one of the few exceptions. “He wouldn’t say a word,” Terry informed me. “What a pussy! You know, the kind who tucks his napkin in his collar so he won’t get soup on his tie.”
“Is he prissy, or is he what people imagine when they hear ‘computer nerd’?”
“Computer nerd.”
“Truly bizarre or just a little nerdy?”
“A big nerdy. Puny, and he’s got a shiny bald dick—head. But, Lee, don’t get your hopes up. He’s definitely not someone you could make the jury believe is more of a killer than your pal Norman Torkelson.”
“You have no idea what I can get a jury to believe,” I snapped back.
I was angry at Terry for having doubts, for expressing them, but, most of all, angry at myself for going along with his questioning my abilities. Even if only for a second, I’d let myself think: This case is too big for me. In all the years I’d known him, Terry had never given me a boost: Hey, you’re going to destroy this guy on the stand! No, he was always negative. And my gut reaction always was: You must be right.
“Terry.”
“What?”
“You really are a mean-spirited jerk. I’d call you misogynistic too, except you’re too ignorant to know what that means.”
“Lee, trust me on this. At most, he’ll sweat a little. But you think he’s going to start twitching on the stand and act real deranged in front of the jury once Holly Nuñez gets done preparing him? What the hell gives with her, anyway? Always so happy. ‘Hi! You must be Terry! Grrreat to meet you, Terry!’”
“She’s a little on the perky side.”
“Doing her must be like fucking a white bread.”
Which meant Terry was powerfully attracted to Holly and would make her his pet project over the next six months. I sighed, regretting the wisdom that comes with age, and switched the phone to the other ear. “Find out what you can about Eugene Pohl,” I said, weary. “At Snapple—and ask around the neighborhood. Maybe someone knows something. Maybe he was trying to make time with Bobette himself, move up from the basement and become master of the house.”
While I doubted this would be my defense strategy, I did not need to hear Terry’s rollicking laugh. “Yeah, right, Lee. They’ll come back with a ‘not guilty’ before the bailiff has time to take the lunch order. What are you going to say? Eugene Pohl was jealous of Norman’s success with Bobette, so he set it up to make it look like Norman—”
As this was an accurate assessment of a strategy that had been flitting around the back of my mind, I slammed down the phone. I was regretting my childishness, when Terry called back to inform me Holly had told him that the discovery material on Torkelson was ready anytime I wanted it. Then he hooted: “Eugene Pohl and Bobette Frisch!” So I banged down the phone again.
The rest of that morning and afternoon, I got bogged down with a couple of other cases, including an unlawful use of scientific material and transportation of stolen property in interstate commerce, a crime I’d never tried before. My client, a secretary, had been fired from a small company in Lynbrook that did pharmaceutical testing. She admitted to me that she had stayed late one night, copied all their results on a new drug for treating hepatitis A, and mailed the secret data to the CEO of Upjohn—just so the Lynbrook people would “realize their systems weren’t secure.” The CEO, no lunkhead, called the FBI. My client was, frankly, nuts, so I spent half the day trying to arrange an appointment for me and her therapist (who concurred with my diagnosis) to try and talk the chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District out of prosecuting.
By the time I came up for air it was after five, so I left a message on Holly’s voice mail that I was walking over. It was gorgeous out! I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, holed up in an office building, the tenderest of spring days, with air that smelled so sweet you regretted the time it took to exhale. The grass around the courthouse was so new, so velvety, you wished you could forget you were an adult and simply roll around for a while on its softness, then lie on your back and let the late-afternoon sun warm your face.
“It’s beautiful out there,” I told Holly. “Makes me want to gambol in the grass.”
In response, she handed me a file that had an ominous heft
to it. Without being invited, I sat and started going through the material. At first glance, there was nothing to send me back outside with a song in my heart.
“Uh, Lee,” Holly said, with regret so phony they’d be able to smell it twenty-four miles west, at the Fulton Fish Market, “I hate to bounce you, but I have tons of stuff I’ve got to do. Could you read it tonight or tomorrow? Then I’ll clear the boards for you whenever you want to talk about it.”
“In a second,” I muttered, looking for something to get outraged about so I could accuse her of bad faith, put her on the defensive, and, with any luck, give her a bad night. Then, I actually found something! Another set of fingerprints—an unknown person’s—all around the first floor of Bobette’s house, including on the coffee table in the living room, right where her body had been found. “These prints!” I gasped. Really gasped. Luckily, the walk over to Holly’s office with balmy May breezes wafting about had triggered my allergies, so my words came out in a giant wheeze, as though the finding had knocked the breath out of me. “There’s somebody else’s prints inches from where the body was found and without any further investigation you still arrest Norman and throw him right in the slammer.”
“You know he would have run if we didn’t,” she said. But I could see the notion of the other prints were causing her a mite of concern, although, God knows, no discernible anguish.
“Why would he run? He didn’t kill her.”
“Oh, Lee!” she said, giving me one of those peppy-people smiles that display thirty-two teeth. “Give me a break.”
“Why should I give you a break? Are you giving my client a break and trying to track down those prints?”
“He killed her. He doesn’t deserve a break.”
“How hard did you try?” I demanded, knowing the limited resources of the D.A.’s office. “You’re holding what looks to me a lot like exculpatory evidence, and you let it lie here in the file?” Before she could arrange her face into still another sprightly expression, I said: “I want a copy of those prints.”
“They could be anyone’s,” Holly objected.
“Like whose?”
“I don’t know. The maid’s.”
“Holly, do you know for a fact that she had a maid?” Holly tried to look thoughtfully at her new acrylic nails, but I knew the answer was no. “Maybe they’re the butler’s prints,” I suggested. She started buffing the shell-pink nail of her ring finger with her right thumb. “Did you check Eugene Pohl’s prints, by any chance?”
“They’re not his.”
“I need those prints, Holly.”
“I’ll get them for you.”
“I need them now.”
“Lee, it’s …” She made a big deal of looking at her watch and letting her mouth drop open. “I can’t believe it! I really have to—”
“I’ll wait,” I told her.
Right before lunch the next day, I met Terry at the Love Nest and handed him a copy of the prints. He had pals everywhere, and I was hoping the one he had in the state police could run a thorough computer check.
We stood on the sidewalk. Terry gazed at the exceedingly unlovely Love Nest, Norman’s place of business, with amazement and respect. “He rented this place to take rich women to fuck?” To be a successful seducer in a depressing place like this was no small triumph.
“He must have done his romancing in their places first. After that, who knows? I guess love is blind.”
“‘Love?”’ he demanded, full of pity at my stupidity. “The guy must have had a schlong that went from here to Cleveland.”
Though Norman’s practice was to tell his marks the place was only temporary, till he could get back on his feet, I was still astounded any woman in her right mind would be willing to go inside. The apartment building, a cube of sand-colored brick, wasn’t so bad in itself. Neither was the neighborhood, which appeared largely black and working class. But the site of the building: a mini-slum. Instead of a lawn, there was a packed-down dirt patch that sustained only a few pale-green sickly weeds. The dirt and the front walk were littered with cigarette wrappers that seemed to have blown in from all of Long Island. But that was just small-time litter. There was also a bicycle wheel from which the tire had been removed, a bouquet of pitted aluminum tubes from what once had been a folding chair, old beer cans crushed in the middle.
“Anything else besides the prints?” Terry inquired as he crouched to get a look at the make of the front-door lock. I reached past his shoulder and opened the door. Terry gave me a sour look, but the next second we were in a small hallway, an apartment on either side. On the door to the right, a business card was taped directly under the buzzer: Denton Wylie—the alias Norman had used with Bobette. Centered right beneath the name was printed: INVESTMENT, and under that: “The Newsletter for the Venture Capitalist.” In the lower-right-hand corner was an understated, lowercase “publisher and editor in chief.” Terry eyed the lock on the apartment door. I motioned for him to go ahead; his key ring was so full it would put me on tilt, and sure enough, he got us inside in less than a minute.
The apartment was not as hideous as I’d expected, but that isn’t saying a lot. Terry got busy in the kitchenette peering inside cabinets, looking for whatever it is private investigators hope to find: additional corpses or, more likely, unopened bags of Doritos.
I found a tissue in the pocket of my attaché case and used it to lift the lid of the answering machine that stood on a counter that separated the living room from the kitchenette. As I’d suspected, Norman had ordered Mary to get rid of the incoming message tape, which had her Repo Lady impersonation; it was gone. Terry followed me into the bedroom. “Wow!” I said. We stood silently and gazed at the bed: round and so huge that in order to get to what I assumed was the bathroom, you had to inch sideways, your back pressed against the wall. The bed was covered in a too shiny polyester throw that looked more like a tablecloth than a spread. Not that you’d want to eat off it; from its almost imperceptible odor, you knew it had not been laundered, or even vacuumed, for years. Plus it had a couple of pudendum-shaped stains near the circumference. Still, I understood why Norman had rented the apartment. The bed was as effective as a flashing neon sign advertising: HOT SEX! HOT SEX! THE SEX YOU DREAM ABOUT! HOT SEX!
Terry sidled along between bed and wall to go and check the bathroom. When he came back, unedified, he plopped down and patted the mattress beside him. “Have a seat.”
“And get gonorrhea from that bedspread?” I leaned against the wall, slightly off to the side so that our knees wouldn’t touch in the confined space. “Let me brief you on the discovery material.” Terry reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out his notebook and a pen. I continued: “Their witness list has the usual cops, scientific experts. No DNA guy. That sounds as though they didn’t find any of his skin cells under her nails or anything during the autopsy.”
“Let me see the autopsy report,” Terry said. Sandi, my secretary, had made copies of almost the entire discovery material for him. I took a fat manila folder from my attaché case and handed it to him. He’d been in Homicide for nine years and knew what to look for better than I did. “It says he didn’t fuck her,” he said after a few minutes’ reading. “Poor bitch’s last day on earth, and she didn’t get laid.”
“She ate a chocolate bar. She still had chocolate all over her mouth.”
“I know you think that’s as good as getting laid, but it’s not.”
He went back to the report. I watched him read. Terry looked like a cop, with a too flat hairstyle, slightly too tight blue suit—half an inch too much sock showing—and the kind of mustache that went out of fashion in 1973. He had quit the force three years earlier when he turned forty-one, the day his pension vested, and gone to work as head of security at a fairly upscale shopping center in Greenvale. But despite the big paycheck, the thrill of dealing with stolen Volvos and teenagers walking out of the Gap wearing three pairs of jeans palled after a few weeks. He stuck it out for a year, th
en opened his own agency, with himself as sole employee. My partner, Chuckie, and I threw what business we could his way, and within six months, Terry was thriving. He hired two other ex-cops to work for him. They were pretty good. Terry was terrific.
“Amazing,” he said. “She gives him forty-eight thousand bucks. He gives her no sex.”
“Nice work if you can get it.”
“Listen, you got a block of cement like Bobette around, who can blame the guy? So listen, Lee, I don’t see anything in the discovery material that’ll hurt your little Normie any more than he’s already hurt, except for the strangling itself: the size of the hands and the strength of the perpetrator.” Terry was right. I couldn’t stop the medical examiner from saying “very big hands” and “powerful,” and the jury would look over at six-foot-five-inch, two-hundred-pound Norman Torkelson sitting at the defense table, his hands folded in his lap, and think: That’s our boy. “Anything else in here I should worry about?” Terry asked. “Any nasty surprises?”
“Bobette’s wallet appears to be missing.”
“Maybe she left it in one of her bars or someplace,” Terry said, for once not insisting on the worst-case scenario. But then I glanced over at him and saw he was not really paying attention. He was stroking the bedspread with his thumb, clearly thinking of all that was possible on a round bed. When you looked at his face in repose—past his bad tie, his mustache, and especially past his misogyny—you could understand how appealing he could be. Part Portuguese, part Irish, and part Italian, he had the long, lean, rugged face of an Iberian peasant farmer, soft blue Irish eyes, and a helmet of dark gladiator curls that he blew-dry into submission every day. However, although he was, on these rare occasions, a treat to look at, I wasn’t paying him seventy-five dollars an hour and thirty-five cents a mile to contemplate the possibilities of a round bed and look dreamy.
“Terry, write this down.” He peered up, slightly dazed at being summoned back to reality. “Check with your pals at MasterCard, Visa, and Amex. See if there were any Bobette Frisch charges starting with the Friday of the murder. Can you do that today?” He nodded and then, seeing that I was waiting for something, jotted a word or two in his notebook. “With any luck,” I said, “somebody in San Antonio charged a thousand dollars’ worth of chewing tobacco the day after Norman was arrested.”
