by Susan Isaacs
But he made an exception for me, largely because I’d once sworn never to make a snide remark about his ladylike furnishings or let on to anyone else in the entire criminal justice system about them. I kept my word. Other than the stink of cigars, living and dead, and the dark ink smears from fingerprint kits, it was an appealing place, and I often dropped by. As comfortable as my own office was, I hated being stuck in one place. If a day went by without a court appearance, I’d find an excuse to go to Terry’s or the library at the Bar Association or even drop by police headquarters on ostensible business and shoot the breeze for a half hour.
At Terry’s, I always took the same spot on the sectional, kicking off my shoes and putting my feet up on the white marble coffee table, a practice he encouraged because it was so distinctly uncouth. “If Mary has a record,” I asked, “how come the cops didn’t ID her when they checked those prints in Bobette’s living room?”
Terry, leaning back in his ivory leather chair, his feet up on his desk, puffed his cigar and said: “Two possibilities.” He took his cigar out of his mouth and examined its length, not without satisfaction.
“I’m paying you seventy-five bucks an hour to be a detective, not to look at your surrogate penis in thoughtful silence.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Lee?”
“Two possibilities,” I snapped. “What are they? Come on. I don’t have all day.”
He shook his head sadly at my lack of civility. “One: If Mary had just one arrest, something could have happened with the paperwork and the prints never made it to the computer.”
“Does that happen often?”
“More than anyone wants to admit.”
“Or …?” I encouraged him.
“‘Or’ what?”
“You said two possibilities.”
“Cute little Holly forgot to run the prints.”
I sat up and put my feet on the floor. “Forgot?”
“Why should she?” Terry asked, still sitting back comfortably, licking the tip of his cigar in the usual way guys lick cigars—i.e., the way a dog licks its genitals. He did not seem in the least perturbed about Holly’s laxity. “If she checks the prints, then she has to go out and find whoever they belong to, haul him in for questioning. It would only cloud up her case.”
“It’s her professional responsibility …” I began. But instead of offering a speech on ethics, I told him to call his friend and see if the FBI check had come up with anything.
“I can’t hurry him,” Terry protested.
“Yes you can. I’m paying you and you’re paying him and I want an answer.”
“You know, when you talk like that, you’re so fucking masculine. It’s a real turnoff, Lee.”
“Good,” I said, and sat back while he made the phone call. Naturally, he gave away nothing as he was talking. A few manly chuckles, inquiries about each other’s wives, and then a lot of uh-huhs and hmms. He reached over, picked up a pad and pen, and made a few notes.
“So?” I said, the second he hung up. “Come on. You’re suppressing a self-satisfied grin. You’re thrilled with yourself.”
“I’m always thrilled with myself.”
“Come on, Terry!”
“Mary Dean has a record.”
“For what?”
“Not shoplifting.”
“So?”
“A long—and I mean long—record for prostitution.”
The record didn’t surprise me. The “long” did.
“How long?”
“Twenty-seven arrests.”
“Gee,” I said. “She’s a real pro.”
“I bet she is.” Terry wore his reflexive lascivious leer, but it was clear he was disappointed in Mary. Hurt, even.
“Do you think Norman knows?” I asked him.
“How could he not?” He furrowed his brow, the way bad actors do on movies of the week, when they want to show they are cogitating. In Terry’s case, however, his brain actually was working. “I bet Norman goes out of his way not to remind her that she was a hooker. You know, treats her like a princess. I guarantee you, that would make her a hundred times more loyal. I mean, I’ll bet he’s set it up so she sees only two choices. Being worshiped and taken care of—or getting twenty bucks a blow job for a bunch of guys in the back of a Dodge Ram.” Every time I start getting completely disgusted with Terry, he comes up with insights like that.
“Where were the arrests?” I asked.
He peered at his notes. “California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico.”
“Did she serve any time?” I asked.
Terry smiled. “Five suspended sentences. She sure in hell never got a woman judge. What guy would have the heart to put her in jail?” Just as I was starting to step back into my shoes, Terry announced: “One more arrest.”
“What for?”
“Assault.”
“Assault?” My foot remained poised over my shoe. “What? Tell me about it.”
“Eight months ago. In Annapolis, Maryland. Her alias was Marissa Shaw. She beat the hell out of a sixty-year-old woman. A widow. Facial contusions, concussion, two cracked ribs.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Mary claimed the woman attacked her. The judge allowed bail, and guess what?”
“Mary ran.”
“Of course.” Terry leaned back his head and blew a smug stream of smoke toward his ivory ceiling. “She ran.”
It took only a few minutes more to find out the sixty-year-old woman’s name: Carolyn Knowles. I didn’t need a detective to find her; a quick call to 410 Information got me her number. As soon as I heard the click of connection, I signaled Terry to pick up his extension and take notes. She answered my call on the second ring, as if she’d been circling the phone, waiting for someone to call. I explained I had heard about her case from Maryland authorities.
“Are you a policewoman?” she asked. Her voice was overly cultured, her “Are” coming out as “Ah,” and every syllable carefully enunciated. Just for the diction alone, I could see why someone would want to give her a contusion or two.
“No, but I’ve been hired to investigate … Well, to tell you the truth, Ms. Knowles, the woman who assaulted you, the woman who was using the alias …” I paused, hoping she’d think I was looking at my notes and oblige by giving me the name.
And she did. “Marissa Shaw,” she said, her pearly tones making it sound as if Marissa Shaw were someone who’d stopped by for a watercress sandwich and a cup of Darjeeling instead of someone who beat the shit out of her.
“Marissa Shaw is only a collateral part of my investigation. The person I’m really trying to get information on is”—I heard her quick intake of breath—“is known to change his name frequently. However, I can describe him to you. He is six feet, five inches tall—”
“Have you found him?” she gasped.
“I have a pretty good idea of where he is, Ms. Knowles, although right now I’m not at liberty to discuss the matter. Now, as far as you know, was there any connection between … Under what name did you know him?”
“Arthur Berringer,” she said, tenderly, slowly, as if the name still held magic.
“And did he ever give you any indication that he knew this Marissa Shaw?”
“No.” A definite no. “In fact …” She hesitated.
“Anything you can tell me would be deeply appreciated, Ms. Knowles,” I said, as Terry mimicked the male autoerotic gesture that signaled a major jerk-off was in progress.
“He definitely did not know her,” Carolyn Knowles replied. “When it happened, he tried to pull her off and kept saying: ‘Who are you? Stop!’” Her voice rose. “‘Stop!’”
“Where did the attack occur?” I asked.
“In my car. We drove up to my house in my car. I have a LeBaron convertible and the top was down. We just sat there for a moment. Arthur—my fiancé—took my hand.” Then, almost shyly, she added: “We had just come from getting our marriage license.” As she paused to compose her thou
ghts, and probably to keep from crying, I paused too: to reflect that Carolyn Knowles was born to be a mark. Here she was, giving me her entire story—without ever having asked my name. “All of a sudden, from out of nowhere, this woman came and pulled open the door.”
“Driver’s or passenger’s?”
“Passenger. Arthur was driving.”
“And then what happened?” I asked, as delicately as I could.
“She must have unlatched my seat belt. Before I knew what was happening, she pulled me out of the car. I literally was dragged onto the sidewalk.”
It sounded like a series of sniffles, but I knew she was crying silently. “What a horrible thing,” I said.
“Horrible, horrible.”
“But Arthur tried to stop her?”
“Yes, but she was amazingly strong. He came around and tried to hold back her arms or pull her off. He was yelling ‘Stop it!’ and she kept yelling ‘Stop it!’ back to him—that he should stop trying to stop her.”
“Did she give you any indication what the attack was about?”
A huge sob came across the phone. A moment later, she said “No. She didn’t say a word. Just kept punching me. With her fists, like a man. Then she took my head and”—the cultured voice broke, only to be replaced by a high, confused inflection that sounded like an injured child’s—“banged it against the pavement.”
“Do you remember anything else, Ms. Knowles?”
“No, I passed out. Not for too long, I think, but when I came to, the girl was gone. Arthur was holding me in his arms. When he saw I was … well, not all right, but at least conscious, he said: ‘I’ll run in and call the police and an ambulance.’”
“And did he?”
“Yes.”
I knew the answer to my question, but I had to ask it anyway: “Was he there when the police arrived?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“No.”
“But you saw her?”
“In a lineup. The police found her an hour later near a shopping center about three miles from my house. A fluke, really. They broadcast the description I’d given—the hair, the heavy, heavy makeup, the cheap sundress, turquoise—and a passing patrol car spotted her. The next day, they brought me from the hospital to the building where the jail is, and I identified her. They thanked me and said the state attorney’s office would contact me before the trial. And then, two days later, a judge let her go on bail!”
“And she took off?” I asked.
“She did indeed.”
“And you never heard from Arthur again?”
“No. I filed a missing persons report. But in my heart of hearts I knew … Arthur must have had some trouble earlier in his life. Things hadn’t gone well. His marriage had failed, his wife was a monster, tormenting him. But there must have been trouble with the police as well, because he could not face them. His last words, just before he went into my house to call them, were: ‘Carolyn. I love you with all my heart. Never doubt that.’”
“And you didn’t?”
“I did not!”
“One final question, Ms. Knowles.”
“What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Lily,” I said quickly. “Did you find anything missing?”
“Missing?”
“Yes.”
“Some jewelry.”
“Such as?”
“Everything I had.”
“And you reported it to the police?”
“Of course. And to the insurance company as well.”
“And did they investigate?”
“What was there to investigate?” she asked. “Marissa Shaw—what do they call that—oh, jumped bail. Even if they find her, do you think she will still have the pearl choker and the diamond-and-ruby brooch and the diamond ring and the platinum-and-diamond watch and the—”
“The jewelry wasn’t on Marissa Shaw when the police picked her up?”
“No.”
“Did the police think that Arthur Berringer may have had something to do with the disappearance of the jewelry?”
“No!” she boomed. “It was perfectly clear that Marissa Shaw had been in my house. They found her fingerprints in there.” I glanced over at Terry: So Bobette was not the first mark Mary had spied on. “And I knew Arthur as I knew myself. Know, as I know myself. And he would never take what is not his.”
“And so you never mentioned him to the police?”
Just as Terry was shaking his head, as in “You’ve gone too far,” Carolyn Knowles slammed down the phone.
“Lee,” Terry said, taking his feet off his desk, “if you were a guy I’d call you a schmuck. How could you ask her that?”
“I’ll tell you how, schmuck. I wanted to find out for sure if Holly had the cops check out the mystery prints—Mary’s prints—near the body. Clearly, they didn’t, or they would have found out the prints were associated with a middle-aged woman who had been viciously assaulted. And I’ll bet in that file down in Annapolis are all the other latents they found when they dusted Carolyn Knowles’s house—the plumber’s, the pizza delivery boy’s, and Norman Torkelson’s. Ergo, schmuck, if I can convince Norman to cooperate, we have priors on Mary Dean that ought to be very convincing to the D.A. And if not to the D.A., then the jury.”
“You don’t have a chance in hell of getting Norman to cooperate,” Terry said. “He’s going to protect that girl.”
“But she’s a known batterer! And it’s the same pattern! She thinks he’s getting too close to marrying one of his marks, and whomp! She attacks. And not girl stuff—hair pulling and a smack or two. She goes out of control.”
“There are no other marks on Bobette except the ones around her neck.”
“What other marks were necessary? The ones around the neck did the trick. This time, Mary cut out the preliminaries.”
“You just can’t stand to lose, Lee.”
“Not this one. Because Norman Torkelson did not commit this murder.”
Terry Salazar shook his head sadly and, not without warmth, said: “Schmuck.”
Fourteen
It was certainly not that browbeater Professor Blumenthal and his torts that finally captured Lee’s imagination. Nor was it the charismatic Nestor P. Von Hassel, who unraveled the tangles of corporate law not only for the secretary of commerce but for the hosts of the Today show and, thus, for all America. It was not even Kevin McTeague, the Errol Flynn of evidence, with his flowing ebony hair and his swashbuckling presentation of the Excited Utterance exception to the Hearsay Rule. No, in the first semester of her second year at NYU Law School, the one who really made Lee a lawyer was Professor Lucille Poole.
She was a sallow-skinned woman with hair dyed shoe-polish black. Her nose was so long and pointy that, had it been orange, people would have thought she’d snatched it off a snowman. If Sylvia had ever seen the professor, she would have been too sickened to mock her; Professor Poole’s wardrobe consisted solely of cheap, shapeless black dresses, as if her clothes were handme-downs from working-class Italian widows.
Upon seeing her, people thought: Ah, with those looks, she must be a charmer. Hardly. Each semester, Professor Poole brought nearly every student in her Criminal Law classes to the brink of nervous collapse by lecturing in a double-time monotone. In fact, there was nothing she did not say too flat and too fast: “Swiss on my burger, please,” in the cafeteria came out like Swzzbr, plis. Her introductory “Since my time is limited, I assume Your Honors are familiar with the facts and the prior proceedings in this case,” to the entire bench of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, became a mere whir of sound. And if you said hello to her in the corridors of the law school, you were never certain if the reply you heard was her reciprocal greeting or simply a rush of air passing over a crack in the wall.
However, despite Professor Poole’s next-to-unintelligible speech and her lack of anything that might be construed as a personality, she routinely won the app
eals she argued on the issue of police coercion of prisoners. Some of her colleagues muttered that her success was due to her briefs; her writing was so simple a third grader could understand it. Others claimed she won so often because she was a woman in a man’s field, or because she was so ugly the appellate judges pitied her. A few asserted it was because she was a manipulator, forcing judges to strain to understand her jabber, thereby capturing their complete attention. What these carpers seemed unable to acknowledge was that while all the above was true, Lucille Poole, that black crow, stood before the bench with the fire of legal brilliance burning within her.
“MsWhi,” Professor Poole called out as she entered the suite, the words hurtling past lips that were puckered like a long-forgotten prune. “Good point you made about the statute of limitations in noncapital offenses.”
Lee, working at a table in the Regina and Stanley Farbman International Center for Criminal Justice—a two-room suite in a fleabag hotel on West Twenty-second Street—did not hear the entire sentence. What came through was “G’ point” and “statute of.” So, with a reasonable degree of confidence, Lee replied: “Thank you,” and suppressed the shiver of pleasure that passed through her. This was the work Lee loved best, so much better than the dry, dead stuff at law school. Here she was, exposing the system’s stupidity, duplicity, and cruelty where it really counted: in matters of crime and punishment. The real thing, where a person’s life or liberty was at stake. To hell with trusts and estates. Screw copyrights. Fuck corporations. This is what was important. And how she loved it! “Thank you very much.”
“Welc.”
The suite resembled Professor Poole: unattractive and cheerless. What had been a living room was now crammed with four collapsible bridge tables, bowing under the weight of books and papers, and dark-brown filing cabinets that resembled upright coffins. In the adjoining room, a plywood bed board resting upon the mattress of a double bed formed the giant desk where the professor, hunched over, did her writing and ate what she ate every single lunch and dinner (and, for all anyone knew, breakfast as well)—ground beef. The rich, fatty scent of hamburger or meat loaf sandwich or meatball hero was always in the air at the Regina and Stanley Farbman International Center for Criminal Justice.
