by Susan Isaacs
“It’s something they cooked up, some scam.”
“Holly, they haven’t connected on this. Norman doesn’t know she’s opened up to me. He sure in hell doesn’t know she’s here.”
“I’ll have to ask Jerry.”
Terrific. Jerry McCloskey, the head of the Homicide Bureau, was so ineffectual that he’d probably want to commission a poll before deciding. “Go ahead,” I told her. “There’s really nothing much to discuss. You have a confession. You have physical evidence to corroborate the confession. Whether it plays to you or not is not a matter of law.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving until you make a decision.” So she went to speak to Jerry McCloskey.
While she was gone, Barbara and I discussed how it never fails to amaze us that even the most assertive people will knuckle under to outrageous behavior. How come it did not occur to Holly to say: “What do you mean you’re not leaving? Get out of my office. I’ll call you when I’m good and ready.” Throughout my legal career, all I had to do was cross my arms and dig in my metaphoric heels. Okay, now and then a lawyer would tell me to take a hike, but if I’d sit there, unmoving, and maybe glance at my watch to let them know how much I resented their obstinence, they’d get up from their desk or pick up the phone and do whatever it was I wanted them to do.
The question neither Barbara nor I addressed was that if we were both such hotshot tough lawyers, how come we so often turned into wimpettes in our personal lives?
Holly returned in about fifteen minutes. “Jerry says okay.”
“Good,” I said, curbing a desire to leap up and shout with joy and do a jig.
“I want it clear that we’re not disposed toward anything approaching leniency,” Holly said to Barbara.
“Pray you get a female judge,” Barbara replied. “Otherwise, you’re going to get leniency up the wazoo.”
“You’re dead if it’s a man, Holly,” I concurred. “Did you check out Sam Franklin?”
“I know! Did you ever see such total mush?”
“Terry Salazar,” I told her. “My investigator. Mr. Hard-Ass.”
“He’s kind of cute,” Holly said.
“If you got to know him, you’d realize he’s the most uncute man in America. Except when he met Mary: She turned him into marshmallow fluff. And the last judge she appeared before, the one in Maryland who granted bail after Mary smiled …”
“A man,” Holly guessed. “Well, wouldn’t you know it!” She laughed brightly. Too brightly.
For God’s sake, I thought. It’s one thing to be relieved that a matter is resolved. But she’s just lost the chance at a big, fat, juicy trial that she was going to win. If this had been my case as an A.D.A., I’d be pretty depressed about that. Okay, she was doing what I wanted her to do, being decent, fair-minded, but Holly had gone for the easy out so damned fast. Barbara didn’t seem troubled by Holly’s cheery mood, but she really wasn’t involved in the case. I had expected at least four or five hours of brawling, though, with Holly pounding her desk a couple of times, telling me that Norman wasn’t off the hook yet, that he might have been an accomplice, or at least an accessory. Holly should have put up a fight, if only to save face, because her judgment had been wrong when I’d tried to get her to listen to my theory that Norman might have been innocent of Bobette’s murder. But here she was, sitting back, yukking it up, having a high old time. Wasn’t she in the least surprised at Mary’s confession? Or at least thoughtful about the case: After all, she had almost sent the wrong person away for life.
She told Barbara she would do serious thinking about a sentence recommendation, which I doubted. Then Barbara left, to allow me to talk about my own client. “When can you spring Norman?” I inquired.
“I don’t know that he can get sprung. We may be holding him as an accessory.”
“Holly, give me a damn break! There is nothing in Mary’s confession that puts him there at the time of the murder, nothing that connects him in any way to the homicide. You know there isn’t a judge around who’s going to keep him in, so why do we have to go through all this?”
“I’ll see,” she said, making a little note to herself. She used a pen with aqua ink. “I would have to have his release approved upstairs.”
“Huber will be thrilled.”
“He’ll be okay.” Holly was chirping again. “Jerry’s been putting tons o’ pressure on us to push those cases through, so they’re going to be real glad we can close the books on this one.”
“It’s not fair to Norman to have to stay on ice while you’re waiting for your paperwork to go through. That could take weeks.”
“It won’t take weeks, Lee,” Holly said, laughingly. I all but expected her to add: You old silly. “Days at most. I’ll do my best to see to it that it gets moved through channels as fast as humanly possible.” This last offer did not spring from Holly’s usual chipperness. Having been caught prosecuting the wrong person for murder, she wanted to keep the case as quiet as possible. If she locked Norman in the cooler for too long, she knew perfectly well I would have to start making a loud and public fuss. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. But I was reluctant to leave. I told myself that if Holly wasn’t down about not going to trial, I was. Sure, I’d known People vs. Torkelson would be almost impossible to win. That didn’t matter. I needed to try; I needed the fight.
“I can’t believe I won’t have to stay late tonight,” she enthused. “I’m going to call up my boyfriend and say, ‘Hey, let’s have dinner.’ I hope he doesn’t die of shock that I’m actually free.”
But this was a big deal, damn it! Didn’t Holly have any emotion about it? Or was she some new breed of woman, so smart about the ways of the world that nothing got to her? Had she experienced everything—or seen so much on television—that she had no innocence left? No euphoria? No despair? Something important had just happened. Or was “important” just a word in her vocabulary, a tool in prioritizing? For Holly, life seemed to hold no surprises.
“Speak to you tomorrow!” she promised, trying to pry me out of my chair. Then she began leafing through her papers, searching for her next case.
Sam was the one watching over Mary. The policewoman, a cinder block in a blue uniform, was leaning against the wall opposite them, checking out the scaly skin on her elbows, now that it was Department-decreed short-sleeve season. Sam, leaning toward Mary, was saying God knows what into her ear. He was trying to soothe her. But all Mary seemed to hear was some tragic song in her own head. She did not even look Sam’s way. She stared straight ahead, her eyes swollen, ringed black with dissolved eye makeup. But she was no longer crying.
“Mary,” I said softly. I gave Sam a Get-away-I’m-a-lawyer look, but he wouldn’t budge from her side. In fact, I was not her lawyer. And I was not on her side. I was the reason she was about to be fingerprinted, photographed from the front and in profile, and given the baggy blue female inmate’s uniform. “Do you want me to get Barbara back here for you? Or do you want to discuss things with Norman?”
Suddenly Mary came back to life. She seemed to expand in her chair, a parched plant getting water. “I can see him?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. But maybe I can talk them into finding a room for you up here, so you can have a private phone conversation.” She slumped back down. “Barbara is quite good.” I found myself wanting desperately to cheer her up. I gave her an encouraging smile that all but said: Help is right around the corner. Except it wasn’t. What was wrong with me? I had done more than my duty. I had done the right thing. Except I felt like hell. God, how I hate ambivalence—and there’s so damn much of it.
Mary looked down at her gold sandals, which would, in a matter of an hour or so, be replaced by a pair of often-worn, smelly, ill-fitting prison shoes. My heart went out to her. Not because she was a gorgeous-looking girl going into an ugly place. In the whole scheme of things, I told myself, why shouldn’t she be going? She didn’t deserve
my pity. She had committed the ultimate crime. Taking away her gold sandals, her eyeliner, and her freedom would still not make up for the cut-off life of Bobette Frisch.
But what in God’s name had brought Mary Dean to this place? What kind of home had she come from? What sort of family life turns a girl into a hooker at age sixteen? She was so beautiful. She had such a capacity for love. And, okay, she was dumb and coarse and selfish, but as even Sam Franklin had discovered, she was so sweet.
And any chance she might have had for a life was now lost forever.
Twenty
Naturally, Lee had heard stories around the office about Will Stewart’s lady friend, Maria. So upper class that she was called Ma-rye-a, not Ma-ree-a. Maria Parkhurst. Half black, half white. Her father was either a rich Socialist or a surgeon, and her mother a dancer for someone—one person mentioned Martha Graham, another said no, Agnes de Mille, and a third was positive she had been the only black Ziegfeld Girl. Whoever her parents had been, Maria Parkhurst had inherited good looks. “Stunning” seemed to be the adjective favored by the lawyers, while one of the homicide detectives who had been invited to the previous year’s Nassau County District Attorney’s Office picnic preferred “like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“You’ve never met her?” Jazz asked, surprised.
“No.” Lee craned her head, looking over her colleagues spread out on blankets on the sand at a private club in Atlantic Beach, a low-key, relatively proletarian club the office had taken over for the day. She spotted someone tall and brown in a lime-green playsuit at the volleyball net, but when the woman turned around, Lee realized it was Wanda, the law librarian, who looked like Louis Armstrong with a wig. “Maria lives in the city, so she’s not about to drop into the office. And Will is so close-mouthed about his life he’ll only tell you something if you ask. Right around Easter, when he went to Greece, I asked him if he was going alone. He looked at me like I was asking him to see his privates, but he finally said no, he was going with Maria. ‘My friend Maria.’ Ha! Like they were going to take separate rooms.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s the assistant headmistress at a girls’ school in the city. The Barton School. She teaches history there. It’s supposed to be very exclusive, very—”
“It is,” Jazz informed her as he returned Woodleigh Huber’s wave and exhaled a small but patient sigh as Huber, his white hair rigid in its pompadour despite a brisk ocean breeze, jogged through the sand to greet him. “I guess my old man’s party credentials are still okay.”
Lee smiled at him. Why not? After the three months of discord following Valerie’s birth, Jazz had gone out of his way to be a good and generous husband. Generous in gifts: a ruby ring for Christmas, a big Ford station wagon for her birthday. Part of her was mortified, feeling they were presents for a completely different kind of woman, someone decorative, useless. Certainly they were not presents people still in their twenties should be giving each other. Yet another part could not take her eyes off the sizzling red sparkle on her finger—and cried “Hot damn!” at the classic wood side panels of the wagon, grabbed the key, and went for a ride.
But forget largesse: Jazz had grown generous in understanding. He told Lee he was trying not to view each night she worked late as a personal affront. And as for having asked her to quit work, well, he’d done a lot of thinking about how his mother had stayed at home—and how thoroughly she’d neglected all four of her children. He had been wrong about pressuring her not to go back to the D.A.’s, and he was really snowed by the way she was handling it all. He hoped she would accept his apology.
Added to Jazz’s reawakened good nature was the fact that he was now more attractive than ever. The sleek, self-satisfied sheen of young wealth that Lee found profoundly unappealing was being tempered by the loss of his boyish softness, the emergence of sharper, more manly features. To her and, evidently, to the female lawyers and the secretaries on the beach who trekked across the sand in Woodleigh Huber’s wake in order to be introduced.
Of course, a woman’s having a winner for a husband does not mean her heart freezes in the presence of other men. When Lee finally spotted Will and Maria on the wood steps that led to the beach, she was chagrined at the insistent thump-thump-thump in her chest. Thump! Will’s here! In white shorts, no less—wow, does he have great legs!—and a yellow shirt, with a blue sweater tied with casual perfection around his broad shoulders. He looked as if he had stepped out of the pages of one of the debonair men’s magazines Jazz read but had neither the guts nor the panache to emulate. Thump, too, because of the woman beside him.
An exasperated thump, because Maria really was as advertised. A knockout. No, more. She looked like someone wonderful to know. White pedal pushers, simple white shirt, a plain straw hat, holding Will’s arm with practiced intimacy. A warm smile. Will waved. Lee waved back.
“That’s got to be him,” Jazz said.
“Who else?” she replied, smiling.
“And her,” he added. “Holy shit!”
Lee behaved as if she were amused by her husband’s reaction to Maria Parkhurst. But it is hard to be truly amused at the sight of one’s husband googly-eyed over a six-foot-tall, amber-colored, hollow-cheeked beauty, especially when that beauty is on the arm of your great pal, your boss, the second man you think of as, somehow, yours.
Up close, however, Maria was not beautiful, merely fabulous, with almond-shaped hazel eyes and full lips that thrust forward slightly, as if in a kiss. Lee was nervous that Jazz, smitten by Maria, might act foolish, but his manner was perfect and his patter above reproach. She should have known better than to doubt Jazz’s social skills, she later reprimanded herself. She did note, however, that he was aiming an inordinate number of four- and five-syllable words at the headmistress when shorter ones would have done fine. Their discussion was fairly straightforward and—so as not to affront Will’s Republican sensibilities—innocuous about what the G.O.P. campaign strategy might be against Jimmy Carter. Such purposely inoffensive conversation did not require “eventuate” and “dissimilitude” on Jazz’s part.
Fortunately, he calmed down later, reverting to short, friendly words, as the four of them made their way to tables set up on an awninged patio where an early dinner was being served. “How long have you two known each other?” he asked Will and Maria. Lee wanted to pat him on the back: Good work! Will, not surprisingly, remained mum.
Maria answered: “It seems forever, doesn’t it?” Will managed to incline his head: Yes, it does. “Let me think. Twelve years, I believe.” Her elocution was so perfect it made everyone else sound as if they were talking through huge globs of mashed potatoes. Upper class, but brisk, not with elongated, isn’t-life-too-too-tedious vowels. Every word she uttered sounded perfect. And to make it worse, Lee thought—as she stood beside Maria, feeling excessively squat—the woman was nice. Maria disengaged her arm from Will’s, turned away from the men, and focused on Lee. “I’m so glad to have the chance to meet you. Will is enormously fond of you.”
Lee was about to say, The feeling is mutual, but felt that would be too corny, so she settled for: “Thank you,” even though she knew she should have come up with a more graceful response, considering the company she was in.
Maria, meanwhile, was peering along the length of the buffet table. Lee assumed she would turn up her nose at the plebeian food—hot dogs, burgers and a vat of chili—but Maria grabbed a plate. “He used to feel terribly isolated.” She plopped two hot dogs onto buns, added sauerkraut and mustard, then helped herself to a hamburger. Why did Will feel isolated? That’s what Lee was dying to ask. Because beneath his savoir faire he was shy? “How do you think chili will look on my shirt?” Maria asked. “Oh, what the hell: I’ll chance it.” Isolated because he was a black working in a largely white world? “Could you pass me a spoonful of those chopped onions, please? Thanks. Oh, look! German potato salad! You know, you’re his first friend in that office. I’m not talking about the usual collegia
l relationships. You’re a real friend.”
Lee was so thrilled to hear that her feelings about Will were returned and so grateful that the formidable Maria had chosen to be cordial that it was only near midnight, leaving Val’s room after watching her sleep for about fifteen minutes, then searching for an antacid to combat the effects of the chili, that she realized Maria and Will were perfectly matched. Together they dazzled. Together they were interesting, substantive, articulate. Both were decent and courteous well past the point of genuine kindness. And neither gave the slightest hint of what he or she was really feeling.
“Wait,” Lee said as she climbed into bed. “Don’t go to sleep yet. Tell me what you think about Will Stewart and Maria.”
“I think she should buy a sable coat. She’d look magnificent.”
“She looks magnificent without it.” Lee did not even wait for the loyal, husbandly You look magnificent too. “Do you think they’re in love?”
Jazz kept his teeth together, but she could tell by his flaring nostrils that he was stifling a yawn. “I can’t tell.”
“What do you think?” she insisted.
“I think she’s awesome.”
“But does he?”
Jazz turned over onto his side to face her, acknowledging that sleep was not to be his until the conversation was finished. “I can’t tell. For two people who aren’t all that demonstrative, they’re very affectionate with each other. Holding hands, giving each other private looks when they think no one is watching. I guess they’re in love.”
“So why don’t they get married?”
“I don’t know. He works out here and she works in the city.”
“Come on! That’s twenty-five, thirty miles. And they spend a lot of time together. Weekends. She has a house somewhere up in Connecticut, and he’s always going there. And vacations too.” Then she added, in a voice she could hear was too emotional, “They’re going on a photographic safari in Kenya in September!”
