by Susan Isaacs
“You do?”
“My own experts testify under oath that she could not have picked up the phone and called the cops or a priest or someone for help. They swear there was no way she could have told the truth about what hit her all those times she went to the doctors and the hospital. They say, sure, the kids heard what was going on, and yes, they’re quite damaged, but she did the best she could, protecting them from seeing the worst of it by going upstairs. And you know what? I can’t buy it. There’s a voice inside me saying: No matter what, you have to take responsibility for yourself. It may take everything you’ve got, it may kill you, but ordinary people act with amazing courage every day. And even if she couldn’t stop the abuse for herself, how could she not protect her children from living in that hell?”
“You don’t think the killing was self-defense?”
“I think she did have to get rid of him. I think she could have done it two ways: with a call to a local cab company, saying come and get me—or with an ice skate. I think she hated him. With good reason. He did terrible things to her. He took away joy and he took away hope. She hated what she had become. I have no doubt that she was a victim of a terrible, continuing crime. And if I were on my jury, I’d tell myself: Self-defense? Bullshit! She murdered him in cold blood.”
“How does the jury find the defendant Paula Urquhart on the count of assault in the first degree with intent to kill?”
“The jury finds the defendant not guilty, Your Honor.”
The night after the jury came in, Lee slept for thirteen hours. The second night, she told the nanny to go out, visit her boyfriend, enjoy herself. She sent Kent for a visit with his parents. She sent Val to her parents’ house with five stuffed animals. She knew Robin could be trusted to keep Val happy.
Jazz flew into the house at seven o’clock, a huge bouquet of white roses mixed with white lilies and a bottle of fine red wine to celebrate her victory. When he heard Kent and Val were spending the night away from home, he could not hang up his trench coat fast enough. He raced back into the kitchen, but Lee was not there. When he rushed into the living room and found her sitting at the end of the couch, feet primly on the floor, he said: “Hey, the flowers are still in the kitchen. You forgot to put them in water.”
“I don’t care about the flowers.”
“What’s wrong, honey?” He sat beside her, his brow creased with concern. She knew he was waiting to hear how exhausted she was, or that after all the adrenaline of the trial, she was let down. Lee could feel the warmth of his arm through the sleeve of his suit, so she got up and sat in a chair catercornered to his. “Something’s the matter?” he asked.
“You are having an affair.” He got out the “Wh—” of “What are you talking about” but she cut him off. “On nights that you were supposedly out of town on business, you stayed at the Carlyle. Thirty-five East Seventy-sixth, corner Madison.” It is said that when people are shocked, they look as if they have been hit in the stomach. To Lee, Jazz looked as if he’d been hit in the face. His features went slack and so soft that the bones underneath could have been shattered into smithereens. “But then, I don’t have to give you the address, do I? You found it twenty-two times.” She watched as he tried to come back with something, but he could not find anything to say. He put his head in his hands. His wedding band looked dull in the lamplight, as if it had a film of soap scum over it.
Finally, he spoke through his fingers. “When did you find out?”
She wanted to tell him what a horrible blow it had been, seeing that little shampoo bottle. Twelve days I held it in! You know how they say in stories: She thought her heart would break? Well, my chest hurt on the left side for almost two weeks. A terrible, piercing pain sometimes. It would spread out and it would zing me, in the middle of the day as I was rising to object, in the middle of the night. But I’m too much the trial lawyer to give away my case, she told herself. And with that, she gave away her case. “Who is she?” she cried out, unable to stop herself from showing how little she really knew. He sat there, his head still in his hands, saying nothing. “Damn it, I have a right to know who she is!”
“No, you don’t.” He stood and walked across the room and poured himself a tumbler of vodka. He did not ask if she wanted anything.
“Do you love her?” she demanded of his back.
In his own good time he turned around. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. Then he added: “Yes.”
It was worse than she had thought. In all her imaginings, he always started crying and begged for another chance, that the woman was nothing, stupid, not worth throwing away a beautiful marriage for. Please, Lee, forgive me. “What do you want to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to end the marriage? Or do you want to give her up?”
“I wish I knew what I wanted. I wish I knew what would be the right thing.”
“How could you sleep with me when you’re sleeping with someone else?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” she shouted. “Don’t imagine you fucking your brains out at the Carlyle and stealing teeny bottles of shampoo, you cheap bastard!”
“Oh,” he said. “Is that how you found out?”
She was not going to let him think he had been caught on that one false move. “One of many clues. You didn’t cover your trail very well.” She waited for him to hang his head, or put down his drink and run to her, kneel before her and cry how hurting her seared his soul. But he just sipped his vodka slowly and methodically, as if he were at a boring fraternity party at Colgate, trying to get drunk without getting sick. “I’ll give you till tomorrow morning to make up your mind,” she told him.
He whirled around the liquid in his glass. “I need more time than that, Lee.”
“You don’t have it. I’ve had all the pain I can tolerate. If you don’t choose me by tomorrow, you’ve chosen her.”
At seven-thirty the following morning, Jazz told Lee he wanted to stay with her.
Late that afternoon, when he had gone to pick up Val and Kent, it occurred to Lee that she had never even asked herself whether she wanted to stay with him.
Twenty-one
There were gaps in my education. Take Spanish. For example, I can to this day have a conversation in Spanish, as long as no complex ideas intrude and it stays in the present tense. I can even quote several key lines of dialogue from La casa de Bernarda Alba. However, it took five years of visiting the Nassau County Correctional Center before I realized that a sign I’d thought was a rather menacing warning aimed discriminately at Latino inmates, EL VATO, was the result of someone’s pinching the E and the R from the elevator sign in Building C.
Another gap? I had taken Psych 1, to say nothing of Criminal Law, but I hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to deal with a client who refuses to get out of jail. So I just said: “Norman, you can’t stay here anymore.”
“Go to hell,” he growled at me. He couldn’t say much more because he was busy scuffling with two correction officers, who were trying to turn him over to me for the short walk through the door and out to the parking lot and freedom. Being six foot five, Norman was much taller than either of them, but as they were built along the lines of corrida bulls, his progress from the Return Uniforms Here window to the exit door, where I was waiting, was fairly swift. “You’re making a terrible mistake!” he cried to his escorts, trying to pull his arms out of their powerful grips.
“Get your ass outta here,” the beefier one of them grunted, displaying not the slightest intellectual curiosity about why an inmate would be so intent on remaining on the premises.
“Listen,” Norman gasped at them, breathless from his struggle. He was not more than five feet from where I was standing, and getting closer, “I killed Bobette Frisch! Don’t let me out.” The smaller of the officers—but a guy who could lead the running of the bulls in Pamplona—seemed to hesitate.
“Check the paperwork,” I advised the cop. “They want him out
of here. Someone else confessed. They arrested her. He’s trying to protect her.”
“I choked Bobette to death!” Norman stretched out his fingers to demonstrate strangulation, but as his arms were so tightly held so far apart, he could not get his point across. “It was me. I did it.”
“The one they arrested is his girlfriend,” I explained. Unimpressed by Norman’s gallantry, the guards heaved him in my direction.
The fluorescent lights in the jail are pretty strong, so I’m not sure that there is a physiological reason why every person who is released squeezes shut his eyes momentarily, as if to keep them from getting scorched by the sun’s fierceness. Norman stood outside the closed door of the Center, using his hand as a visor. His red and white checked shirt and gray slacks—the clothes he’d been wearing at the time of his arrest—were now too big for him. Seamed with stiff creases from being folded into a plastic bag, the shirt and slacks looked shabby as well, as if they had contracted some nasty fabric infection that was out of control in the Clothing Storage Room.
I don’t know what I expected for getting Norman out of jail and the murder charges against him dropped. Certainly not a thank you, as what I had done was explicitly against his wishes. Not a physical attack either, because the one thing I felt confident about was that Norman did not express his anger in a violent way. I figured I’d hear a big-time chewing out, really nasty, with bellowing and maybe some fist-banging on the trunk of someone’s car, a diatribe that would end with one of the guards in the parking lot strolling over and threatening to arrest him for first-degree harassment.
What I did not expect was to be ignored. Once Norman got used to the sunlight, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away. “Norman.” I tried to catch up with him, but with his long legs, he was taking two steps for my one. So it was not until he stopped, apparently confounded by the number and ugliness of the jail’s pale, bloodless brick buildings, that I was able to apologize. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This was not what you wanted—”
“Quite the opposite.” Because he was so tall, it was easy for him to pretend I wasn’t there. He kept his head high and moved it back and forth, trying to home in on some elusive target.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
He shot me a what-kind-of-stupid-question-is-that look. “To see Mary.”
I realized he’d been in the Visitors Center as an insider, not an outsider, and hadn’t a clue to where it was. “I’ll take you over.” When I had left my house, it had been a sweet suburban spring Friday, but the vast concrete parking lot in East Meadow seemed to draw down all the sun’s heat. We made our way toward the entrance of the Visitors Center slowly, trudging like hikers lost in a malevolent desert. “Do you have any identification on you?” I asked.
“Leave me alone.”
“Norman, they won’t let you see her without your showing a driver’s license or a birth certificate.” He stopped beside an old car, dark green, filthy. In its grime, someone had drawn the opposite of a smiley face: a circle with two dots for eyes and an upside-down U for a mouth. “They’re pretty strict about regulations here,” I explained. “But then, you know that.” He nodded, barely, a single shake of his head. “I’ll be glad to drive you back to your place, although to be perfectly honest, I think the cops were probably over there with a search warrant after they arrested Mary, and if you had a pile of phony ID’s, I can’t guarantee they weren’t seized.”
He considered his options, pressing the top of his beaky little nose, right between his eyes, with his thumb and forefinger. “You can take me there. I’ll change, then I can go get a birth certificate.”
“If you have your choice of a name,” I advised him, having seen in my years in criminal law a pretty fair selection of counterfeit documents from dealers in the area, “get something with Norman Torkelson on it. The guards at the Visitors Center know you by that name. It takes them about a week to forget an inmate your size, so you don’t want to show up being Irving Schwartz—at least not today.”
By the time I dropped him off, he was speaking to me, although not happily. I understand, he told me. You were faced with an ethical issue and you resolved it as best you could. However, he added, I must say that ethics or morality in the larger sense was not served by what you did.
On one hand, I thought he was beyond annoying. A con man spouting off on morality? On the other hand, I felt so sad for him. What a loss! Mary had allowed him to do something he had never been able to do before: love a woman. Everything about her had been perfect for him: her beauty, her sweet dopiness, her larcenous heart. Even her crime had worked for Norman, because it had enabled him to be noble, to offer himself up to save her. What a shock to his system those foreign two emotions—love and self-sacrifice—must have been to a rat like him. But after a while, I thought, he’d gotten used to feeling virtuous. It suited him. I considered it remarkable that this professional slimeball had not once tried to weasel out of taking the punishment that should have been hers.
Now, though, all his goodness had been for nothing. Sure, he was free. And justice had triumphed. But what did he care about justice? The one and only person who had given his life meaning—Mary Dean—was locked up in Building D, waiting to be processed so she could make the trip to Bedford Hills, where she’d stay for the next fifteen to twenty years.
I was not about to be an accessory to a felony and drive him to a date with criminal possession of a forged instrument, so I dropped him in front of the apartment he and Mary had been so happy in. On the spur of the moment, I told him I’d buy him dinner so if he had any questions about Mary’s case I could answer them. He did not seem surprised—or seem anything else, to tell the truth. He was operating on automatic pilot, so in a monotone he said all right and asked what time he should be at my office. I was tempted to blare a trumpet and announce: Hey, I’ve never invited any client out to dinner, ever! But I just said seven-thirty—and make it casual.
Norman showed up in a tie and pin-striped suit, a little more Al Capone than Wall Street. But he seemed to feel Establishment, if not downright lawyerly, in it. With him so dolled up, I scratched plans for the glorified hamburger joint-salad bar I’d planned on and took him to a restaurant in the Garden City Hotel, a place with a great deal of soft light, pink marble, and waiters so terribly worried about your welfare that you fear for their blood pressure.
“I want the best lawyer for Mary,” he told me.
“The one she has is fine.”
“I’m talking about someone with a national reputation.” I noticed that for a guy who would have to fill in a blank after “Occupation” with “Criminal,” Norman had unusually genteel table manners. He had ordered snails and was managing the pincer with masterful dexterity. I wondered if he honestly liked snails or if ordering them was part of his routine, to display to his marks how cultivated he was. “I have the money,” he said. “I can pay for it.”
“Look,” I told him, setting down my salad fork. “You can get anyone you want. And I’m sure with all the time Mary is facing, it’s tempting to imagine a prince on a white steed coming in and, abracadabra, making everything all right. The problem is this: She won’t be having a trial, so you don’t need someone who has the reputation of mesmerizing juries. And there are no complicated issues, so you don’t need a brilliant legal mind.”
“But if someone can convince a judge—”
“Do you know someone who can do it better than Barbara Duberstein, the lawyer she has now? I don’t. She’s been practicing here for ten years. She’s good and the judges like her, and even more, they trust her. You want my opinion? You’re much better off with good local counsel than with some city slicker the sentencing judge knows has been brought in just to bamboozle him.”
“How much will this cost?” Norman asked. Two middle-aged women at another table—considerably more middle-aged than I—were watching him. I thought I saw longing in their eyes. “Not that cost matters.”
“I’m not su
re. You can check with Ms. Duberstein.”
“A rough estimate.”
“A couple of thousand.”
He seemed surprised. “That’s like nothing.” He looked around, and he caught the gaze of the two women on him. He seemed more saddened than pleased: He didn’t want the game anymore. He only wanted Mary. “Isn’t there some way, with, say, a six-figure number, that we can find a judge—”
“No.”
“I know that’s what you’re supposed to tell me—”
“I have no doubt that you know all the fine points of what I’m supposed to tell you. So I’ll save my breath. But it might be useful for you to know that from my experience practicing here—as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer—that your six-figure bribe will buy you a ticket back into the slammer. Now, I may be wrong. There may be a State Supreme Court justice sitting in Nassau County who can be or has been bought. I honestly don’t know of any. And I don’t know any lawyer here who would be willing to try and negotiate that kind of a purchase.” While this was not strict truth—I had my suspicions about one or two of my fellow members of the bar—it was true enough to tell someone like Norman.
We were well into our entrée—prime rib for him, monkfish for me—when I started wondering why he had been asking how much Mary’s lawyer would charge. “What happened to the forty-eight thousand you got from Bobette?” I asked, knowing that these days, the more intrusive a question, the more people seem willing to answer it.
“I sent most of it down to the place where I keep my money. That’s why I needed to know what sort of expenses I’ll be incurring with Mary’s defense … or representation, to be more accurate.”
“Atlanta?” I inquired, vaguely remembering something Mary had said. Norman laughed too heartily. Then he seemed embarrassed. I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d caught him in a phony laugh or if some memory was making him uncomfortable. “Do people in your business now have Atlanta accounts the way they used to have numbered Swiss accounts?”
