Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “How would she know a robber had anything to do with Norman?”

  “That’s true,” I conceded.

  “She didn’t even have, like, a safe or anything. It was in a jewelry box in her closet. A walk-in closet. With built-in shelves for everything. Baskets to pull out for sweaters, and a thing you hung scarves on.”

  “Where’s the jewelry now?”

  “I gave it to Norm. He said it was too hot to sell. He put it in a safety deposit box he has.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In Atlanta.”

  “Why in Atlanta?”

  “Beats me,” Mary said.

  “Didn’t you keep any of it to wear?”

  She screwed up her mouth and shook her head. “He wouldn’t let me. I tried to hide the ruby pin. So gorgeous, I couldn’t believe it. Like a fireworks: fat in the middle, with all those spray lines going out. I stuck it in the bottom of my Tampax box, but he found it. He said it was too … some word that means it would, you know, point the finger at me.”

  “Is that usual for you, Mary? Breaking in and taking jewelry. Something tells me … It doesn’t sound like you.”

  She rested her chin in her hands. The blue dab of facial mask fell off. “It isn’t like me,” she said gratefully.

  “So what made you do it?” I played a hunch. “Did something set you off to want to hurt her in some way?” She took our cups and napkins and stuffed them into the paper bag. “What was it?”

  “Tickets.”

  I remembered her saying that she had gone into Bobette’s house looking for airplane tickets for a honeymoon. It had been such a strong and specific image that it was jarring to me at the time. “You found plane tickets?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For Carolyn Knowles and … What name was Norman using then?”

  “Arthur.”

  “Right. Arthur Berringer. Where were the tickets for?”

  “Paris.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I knew he could go with her. See, he had an Arthur passport. Usually he just has a driver’s license and some credit cards, but for Arthur … for some reason, he got the works.”

  “And you thought he was going to marry her.”

  “He had a weak moment.”

  “Right. So you saved him, in a way. I mean, by beating her up, with him as a witness, he would have to make the choice right there: her or you. And he wouldn’t choose her.” Mary nodded, an agreement and a thank-you. But what I had meant was that Norman would not dare risk dealing with the police, even as a mere witness to a crime. He had too long a record; he would have known that a first-rate cop—like Terry Salazar had been—in two seconds flat could make him as a guy who had done time. “So you ran?”

  “Yes. He was holding her and saying, ‘Carolyn! Darling!’ But he whispered to me, ‘Get out. I’ll meet you back at the apartment.’ Except I was all, like, shook up. I went to the apartment, but it was such an awful place, in someone’s basement, with no rug or anything. So I thought: Well, he’ll be a couple of hours. So I left the jewelry there and went to a shopping center, just to pass the time.”

  “You had Carolyn Knowles’s credit cards?” I asked casually.

  “Yes. I only bought a camisole. Oh, and then I was walking over to a place where they had leather coats—just to look—and that’s where the cops picked me up.”

  “You must have been scared.”

  “Was I ever! I thought: Oh, shit. I’ll be thirty before I get out of jail, what with bopping her and taking her jewelry. I mean, thank goodness I had left all the stuff back at the apartment, but they’d know it was me.”

  “Did they charge you with robbery as well as assault?”

  “Yes. Uh-oh, I thought. That’s what my lawyer thought too. But the judge was such a sweetie. He said: ‘I want your word that if I grant bail, you’ll be back.’ So I said: ‘Oh, Your Honor, I swear I won’t let you down.’”

  “And then you were out of there.”

  Mary winked. “Straight to Baltimore. No bathroom stops, no frozen yogurt stops. Then the first plane out to anywhere. We wound up in Pittsburgh. Not bad.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “No, I mean, Norm made a forty-two-thousand score in less than three weeks. He said she was so easy, he hated to take the money.”

  “And all was well between the two of you?”

  “Fine!” But she looked away, shamed by a memory, and tried to hide her chagrin by staring at a coupon for Joy.

  “What was the problem?”

  “He was so hurt that I hadn’t trusted him.”

  When we first started seeing so much of each other, the man in my life and I recognized that such an alliance of two trial lawyers could be problematical. Unless we invited a judge along to hand down rulings on the almost daily basis we saw each other, our friendship could become one endless litigation, the first thing in the day one of us would say to the other being: Now, about the issue you raised on January fifteenth last. Let me enumerate the reasons why you were so pathetically misguided, to say nothing of lamentably wrong.

  So we made a pact to listen to each other: really sit and hear, without structuring a response. We’d each get five minutes or whatever to state our case and after we’d both spoken, we’d work together to find a solution. This worked pretty well, except for occasional moments. Like when he threw a fit because I’d planned a vacation without consulting him. Without inviting him, to be perfectly honest, but it truly had not occurred to me that he would want to go to Disneyland. Or when I took one of the many, many jars of his mother’s heinous corn relish that, like his mother, seemed threatening to take over my pantry, my dinner table, and my life, and threw it—at him.

  Our other resolution was not to talk too much law, on the theory that, inevitably, my neighbors would report a strange smell and the medical examiner would rule that our deaths were simultaneous, due to acute boredom. So while we kept each other up to speed on our more interesting or troublesome cases, we usually spent our evenings doing normal-people things: watching TV, listening to music, reading, talking about life outside the law.

  But that night, I was so upset about the Torkelson case I couldn’t have talked about it even if I had wanted to. I made a lovely salmon tandoori style and basmati rice and couldn’t eat a thing. Believe me, I had never been one to lose my appetite when under stress. With me, one small worry equals one thousand calories. And I was worried, big time. I couldn’t distract myself. I picked up the novel I was reading and kept reading the same paragraph over and over; I tried crocheting but kept dropping stitches. I felt as if I had a tuning fork inside me, and its barely discernible, relentless hum was agitating every cell in my body.

  “Lee? Where did you hide those oat bran pretzels?” my guy called out. He had just come in from the garage, where he was sanding an antique music stand he’d bought at a yard sale. Then I entered the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. I opened the pantry door and handed him the pretzels, which, naturally, were right in the front, at eye level.

  “Torkelson case?”

  “Yes, but I’m so … I don’t know. I can’t talk about it.” If he had tried to pull it out of me, I might have spilled everything, but he said he understood, and was off like a shot, back to his sandpaper. So I spent the evening leafing through old copies of Gourmet magazine from 1987, when I had a subscription, looking at recipes I would never try. Then he left to go back to his house, and I spent the night in bed, staring out into the dark.

  Could Mary Dean have killed Bobette? She had a pattern of moving against women she perceived as rivals for Norman. There were strong parallels between her behavior at Carolyn Knowles’s and Bobette Frisch’s houses: breaking in, stealing. Were there others in this category? Or were these two so wellheeled and Norman so weary of the con that they presented a special danger that his other marks hadn’t? If Terry’s analysis was right, Norman, in Mary’s eyes, was not merely the love of her life
. He had taken her, a whore, and bestowed upon her coupon-clipping respectability. More, he gave her a home. He became her family. Wouldn’t she do anything to preserve what she had with him?

  The problem was, all the evidence—from fingerprints at the crime scene to marks on Bobette’s neck to the probable time frame of the murder—pointed to Norman as much as it did to Mary. So which one of them had killed her? Was he covering up for her? Was her insistence on his innocence a cover-up for her knowledge of his guilt?

  The next morning, first thing, I was knocking on Mary’s door, sure I would have to pound away for a half hour before she would wake up and hear me. But she opened it on the third knock. “Hi,” she said, and a moment later, reluctantly, she invited me in. Seeing that the goodwill I had established the day before had dissipated, I regretted not bringing more cappuccino.

  The ironing board was set up in the middle of the living room and she was working on a pile of laundry: sheets and pillowcases, Norman’s shirts, her clothes. She saw me staring at a pair of his undershorts that was on the board. For an instant, her manner eased, her mouth moved toward a smile as she picked up the iron. “He says not to bother, but ironing makes things so much softer. Doesn’t it?” I nodded enthusiastic agreement. She ran the iron over the hems of the legs of the shorts, shooting small bursts of steam. It was an elaborate appliance, loaded with gauges and dials. Before her lips could part into a genuine smile, she remembered something. “How come you were asking me all those questions about Carolyn in Annapolis?”

  Since I hadn’t slept more than an hour, I couldn’t come up with a decent answer. However, a lawyer has to appear—if not actually be—unbowed and uncowed at all times. I had learned to throw questions back on the questioner. “Why do you think I was asking them?”

  “You think, like, because I beat up Carolyn maybe I”—she set down the iron but continued holding the hem of the shorts flat—“did, you know, the same thing to fatso Bobette.”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “Except the report, the autopsy report … Didn’t it say she wasn’t beat up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I didn’t! The report proves it.”

  “You didn’t beat her up. I believe you.” Mary, apparently feeling vindicated, took up her iron again. “Did you kill her?” I asked.

  “What?” She stood there motionless, then slowly raised the iron off Norman’s shorts and stared, stupidly, at its flat, shiny surface.

  “Did you kill Bobette?” Drawn into the mirrored depths of the iron, she did not seem to have heard me. So I repeated the question once more, slower and louder.

  “No! Of course not. Are you totally nuts?”

  “Okay, I just wanted to know.” Mary was either incensed or frightened. Whatever it was, she was so overcome by emotion that she could not do what she clearly wanted to do: throw the iron at me. “The reason I asked is that you seem so positive Norman didn’t kill Bobette.”

  “I am positive!” Mary set down the iron and made a quick cross over her left breast. “I swear to God, my mother’s life to die! Norman couldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Well, there are only two sets of fingerprints there, yours and his. And the marks on her throat … they were made by someone with big hands.”

  We both looked at the large, long-fingered hand holding down the hem of the shorts. “But I didn’t touch her,” Mary said. “I was never in the same room with her, ever. Do you think I could strangle somebody?”

  “It’s not what I think that matters. It’s what the authorities think, and they think Norman strangled her. But you say Norman couldn’t do it. I wish I could convince Holly Nuñez of that. She knows he has no history of violence, but she still won’t believe me.”

  “It was someone else!” I made a motion halfway between a nod and a shrug and got up to go. “I didn’t do it. Norman didn’t do it.”

  “Even if that’s true, it looks as if he’s going to go to jail for the crime.”

  “For how long?”

  “If we’re lucky? Twenty years.”

  She braced both hands on the ironing board. “No,” she whispered. “I hear people get out … much sooner than that.”

  “Not these days. Especially not with his record.” Her white face went from porcelain to sickly pale. “He didn’t tell you how long?” She managed to shake her head once: No. “I’m sorry, Mary,” I told her.

  And I was.

  Chuckie was the social butterfly of our firm, sitting on the secretaries’ desks and passing the time of day, taking out our associate and paralegal for a Welcome to Phalen & White drink at TJ’s, dropping into my office to talk about a case or simply to shoot the breeze if he got bored. So he knew something was up when I walked into his office and closed the door behind me. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just thought I’d say hi.”

  “Good!” he said. “Take a load off your feet.”

  “You’re trying to sound hearty and it’s not working.”

  “Well, missy, you’re trying to sound jaunty but you’re not Irish and you never will be and it’s not working. What’s up?”

  “It’s Torkelson. Torkelson’s girlfriend, actually. Mary, the one I told you about.”

  He turned off his oxygen machine. “Hate that damn hum it makes. Can’t hear myself think with it on. Talk to me. I’m your partner.”

  “I’m losing sleep. My stomach … Don’t ask.”

  “You keep having doubts that Norman actually did it?” I think Chuckie may have been surprised that I was still in such a twit over Norman’s possible innocence, but he’s got the gift smart trial lawyers have. The unreadable face. Not quite a poker face. It’s an expression somewhere between mild amusement and serenity—easy, pleasant, giving away nothing.

  “I can’t be at peace with myself if I have to go to trial on this one.”

  “Look, over the years you’ve tried—what?—two or three cases where you were convinced one of your clients was innocent. I agree it’s a big burden, but it’s nothing you haven’t been able to handle in the past.”

  “But this is different. What if Norman didn’t do it but he wants to go to jail for it, to protect Mary? Sure, he’ll go to trial, because what does he have to lose? I could conceivably get him off. But the more I look at the case against her, the more persuasive it is.”

  “Lay it out for me.”

  “Do you have time?”

  “Lee, cut the gracious lady act. Give me your case against Mary.”

  So I went over all the Carolyn Knowles business, how Mary had robbed her, beat her up. “The details in Bobette’s case appear to be the same. A robbery and attack on an older woman who was a real threat, someone she was convinced Norman was going to marry.”

  “Was he?”

  “I’m not sure. On one hand, I’m convinced he is genuinely, madly in love with Mary. On the other hand, he wants out of what he’s doing—the con. But it’s not as if he could get some other job to support them. A confidence man doesn’t suddenly become a shoe salesman, does he? He doesn’t say: Gee, I think I’ll go get a master’s in social work and begin a whole new career. And my guess is, Mary is too scattered or dumb or something to hold a regular job. The only way she could support Norman would be if she started turning tricks again. But that’s why she loves him and is so full of gratitude: He gave her Tupperware.”

  “Any physical evidence that she was inside the house—beyond her own admission to you?”

  “Fingerprints. That’s how we found out about her record.” Chuckie’s mouth turned down; his expression turned sour. He didn’t like the “we.” Like me, he used Terry Salazar because he was a first-rate investigator, but he didn’t approve of Terry’s ways. “Fingerprints all over the house, including the site of the murder. And there’s the stuff she bought with Bobette’s credit cards. She showed us an expensive dress. She hadn’t worn it yet; it may have still had the tag.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and uncrossed his arms. “Y
ou’re not there yet.”

  “Listen. In all his years of criminal activity, there was never one single instance of Norman Torkelson committing any act of violence. On the contrary: In all the witness reports I’ve read, the marks talk about what a gentleman he was, how sensitive. Now, Mary, on the other hand …”

  “So she knocked somebody’s head against the sidewalk a couple of times. That’s not a pattern of violence. It’s a single incident. Come on, Lee. You know the assistant in the case …”

  “Holly Nuñez.”

  “Holly Nuñez isn’t going to drop charges against Norman and haul this sweet, beautiful creature before the grand jury and say: ‘She once hit a rich old lady. You can hand up the indictment, ladies and gentlemen.’ Forget it, Lee.”

  “I can’t. I keep thinking of him spending the rest of his life in jail—”

  “For a crime he may have committed.”

  “But what if he didn’t?”

  “Then at least he’ll spend the rest of his life feeling that he performed a single act that was fine and brave.”

  “But is that justice?” I demanded. “Is it?”

  “You’re in the justice business now?”

  “I’m a lawyer!”

  And for the first time in all the years I’d known him, my partner laughed at me. Not with me. At me.

  Sixteen

  Students rarely live in luxury. Still, for a girl from a rich family, Lee had spent a considerable part of her adult life in wretched circumstances, beginning with the student-radical dump she shared with Flip Mullen. Her next year at Cornell, it was an apartment designated as off-campus housing but that, objectively, was a tenement so mouse-infested that when she and her roommates stopped talking or turned off their tape deck, they could hear a glee club of squeaks. She laughed about it, but in her heart the squalor frightened her and she wished someone would come and take care of her. No one did.

  In her first year at law school, her dormitory room was clean enough; it even had a window overlooking Washington Square Park. But the woman next door had an illegal hot plate, and when she was not reading cases, she experimented with the cuisines of obscure ethnic groups, all of which had garlic as their principal ingredient. Complaining to the woman directly resulted in a raised middle finger and a fortnight of curried fish. The dean of student life promised a remedy but in the end did nothing, perhaps fearing that all the ethnic groups represented on the hot plate would take offense and, armed to the teeth, hold a sit-in on law school property.