by Susan Isaacs
“I don’t buy it!” she said angrily. “He was using his power and position to get a boy—”
“Grow up, Lily. He didn’t seduce me. I seduced him. Not that he wasn’t open to seduction.”
“You were still a kid.”
“I was. And he was very good to me. Not a great lover, but you’re not looking for finesse at fifteen. And a decent man. Not a warm man, not a friendly man, but decent. He paid for college, even after I told him I’d found someone else.”
“Who was that?”
“No one. A lot of different guys. I didn’t want to be stuck with a forty-eight-year-old man who had never worked for a living except to catalogue his wine collection and who had a wife and two really stinky, obnoxious kids. He offered to pay for graduate school, too, by the way.”
“You must have been something.”
“I was. His white dream come true.”
“Your parents …?”
“They didn’t have a clue. They still don’t.”
“I didn’t have a clue.”
“I know. I’m good at what I do. I’m sorry I have to do it. But by the time it was no longer necessary—in terms of cultural acceptance of men living an openly gay lifestyle—I was stuck in a suburban subculture where if I came out …” He paused to collect his thoughts. “Not completely stuck. I could have left, gone to the city. It was my choice not to. I like it here.”
“So do I.”
“But there are drawbacks. You can understand, being a woman who works in what is largely a man’s sphere: You have to be twice as good as any man to get anything close to equal credit.”
“That is a drawback.”
“As a black man, twice as good isn’t enough. I have to be four times as good. I really believe that. I’ve lived that. And I knew that, practicing law on Long Island, being in the D.A.’s Office, dealing with the cops and all, if I came out, four times as good wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to be eight times as good as any white lawyer. And you know what? I’m just not that good.”
“Yes you are.”
“Thank you. But not eight times. A flash of sheer brilliance once or twice a year, yes, but nothing I could sustain.”
Lee glanced down at her sandwich. It was probably cold. She took a bite. Cold but good. “What about Maria?” she asked.
“She’s a professional educator in a private girls’ school. She’s a lesbian. She lives with a woman. We met at a gay Valentine’s Day party in the city one of my friends threw. She’s wonderfully intelligent, cultured, attractive, and black. The minute we looked at each other, we knew.”
“The perfect couple.”
“The perfect black couple. ‘Aren’t they stunning together? Aren’t they nice? And so well-spoken!’”
“So you don’t really love her?”
“No, but I like her enormously. She’s an amazing person.”
“And last night?”
“What? Oh, New Year’s Eve. I was home. Alone. I stuffed a Cornish hen and opened a split of champagne and had a party.”
“You don’t have anyone in particular?”
“I have someone in particular. Unfortunately, he has someone in particular, someone he’s been living with for ten years, so I suppose that makes me his little bonbon on the side. I have a studio in the city. We see each other one or two nights a week. Usually one.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s an architect. Very arty. Long, flowing hair, quivering nostrils. I can laugh about him when I’m not with him.”
“Thank you for telling me, Will.” He nodded and got busy putting their lunch in the plastic bag it had come in. She had not finished her sandwich but decided it would be churlish to stick her hand in the bag and grab it back. “I know you felt you had to say something because you sensed I had a crush on you and you didn’t want it to ruin the friendship.” He looked at her, almost boyishly embarrassed at being caught. “Well, I had—or have—a crush. I’ll get over it. And thank you for valuing our friendship so much. I realize what a risk you took.”
“Lee.”
“What?”
“I know you. It was never a risk.”
On February 29, 1981, the Honorable Anthony J. Paterno of Nassau County’s Domestic Relations Court ruled, in the matter of Taylor v. White, that inasmuch as both parties agree that Ms. Lee White will be the custodial parent, all issues arising from the pending litigation are rendered moot and that custody of Valerie Belinda Taylor, an infant, will be with the child’s mother. So Ordered. Submit Judgment.
Twenty-three
Prisons are harrowing places. At night, amid the snores and sleep screams of fellow inmates, I don’t know anyone who’s so strong that she wouldn’t think, even for a moment: I would be better off dead. And the days aren’t a hell of a lot better. With no sharp objects, no pills, no tall buildings from which to jump, no car exhaust to inhale, the inevitable jailhouse means to the end is hanging. So Mary Dean was not exceptional. Suicide attempts are so common in jails that most places have a super-sharp blade called a 911 tool, which cuts through the bed-sheets inmates use to hang themselves. The guards are so accustomed to these incidents they refer to them casually as “hang-ups.” If there is no damage—I’m not talking emotional here, I’m talking if the inmate can breathe and walk—he or she is expected to be in line when the next meal rolls around.
There was no way I could be casual about it. That Thursday, right after Barbara Duberstein’s call, I sat at my desk, shaking inside. What had gone wrong? Mary had not been pushed into confessing, had she? She had jumped. She had insisted, damn it! But had she insisted because I’d manipulated her into insisting? I tried to soothe myself by thinking she had to have known what she was getting into: Between the assault charge in Maryland and her various arrests for prostitution, she was no stranger to the inside of a cell. There were no surprises here for her. Were there? No, Norman had been innocent and she was guilty. Justice had been served. I had done what I had to do, period.
My serenity lasted about three seconds. Sooner or later, most criminal lawyers come across a client who tries to kill himself. And you have to be either stupid or a first-class putz if you don’t ask yourself: Could I have done anything at all to stop it? Your heart is a stone if an incident like that doesn’t summon up a time in your own life when you felt death might be preferable to the pain of living. But what made me tremble so was that of all the people who had sat in that armchair on the other side of my desk, Mary was the most likely to want to live. Sweet and stupid and blissfully amoral, delighted by her own beauty, by flamboyant dresses and ten-cents-off coupons for Niagara Spray Starch, madly in love with Norman, Mary was all loud colors and bright sunshine. Of course, I knew she wouldn’t thrive in jail. No one would. But to try to hang herself?
My door opened. Chuckie Phalen, as he did every evening, stuck in his head to say goodbye before toddling off to TJ’s Taproom. My face must have stopped him. He told me I looked like the wrath of God. When I didn’t give him an argument, he knew something was wrong and came in. I told him what had happened. Both of us could hear the tremor in my voice. What are you going to do? he asked me. I’m meeting Barbara Duberstein. I’ll play it by ear.
Mary looked as if her suicide attempt had been successful. Dead eyes, although still stunningly green and accentuated by thick black lashes. She did not walk toward us as much as allowed her body to be conveyed by a female corrections officer. The officer was either extraordinarily compassionate or in awe of Mary’s beauty. She escorted her across the huge room not with the usual antagonistic impatience—Come on! Move it!—but with a degree of deference that might have been shown a queen on coronation day. Far from being pushed, Mary was being escorted by the officer: Turn here, good, that’s right, and They’re right over there. Mary was as unaware of the special treatment as she was of the officer herself, even when the woman supported her elbow and helped lower her into her chair.
“Mary,” I said, “I had to ask Barbara to come along.
I want to do everything I can for you, but because I was representing Norman, there are some things that need doing that I can’t do.”
“How are you doing, Mary?” Barbara asked.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to me.
I wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for trying to hang herself or for asking me to visit her. “Don’t be sorry. You must have been in a bad way to try what you did.”
She covered her face with her big hands because she started to cry. Still, I could hear: “Norman.”
“What about Norman?” Barbara asked, taking out her fountain pen and a small leather book she always carried. In all the years I’d known her, she had never run out of space in the thing. “I’ll just make a note or two.”
“Tell us about Norman,” I suggested after a minute of watching her cry. Shoulders heaving, she sobbed wholeheartedly, gulping huge, noisy mouthfuls of air.
“He’s gone,” Mary finally said “Gone.” She was hoarse, as would anyone be whose larynx had been compressed by a noose.
“Gone?” I said, relieved. I could ease her anxiety. Norman had called my office Tuesday and Wednesday, alarmed about her, trying to see if there was a way to get her out of jail, into some fancy mental hospital. He’d sounded very much not gone, very much involved. “He didn’t come to see you today?” I was already kicking myself for having been so responsive to her suicide attempt. What a sucker I was! “Is that what got you so upset, Norman’s not showing up today?”
“He didn’t come to see me”—the tears started to flow again—“since last Friday.”
I was stopped cold. “Last Friday?” Either she was lying or confused. Very confused. Or when Norman had called me, yesterday and the day before that … “Are you sure, Mary? Today is Thursday, right?”
“Don’t you think I know what day it is?” she asked, her voice rising, echoing off the walls of the cavernous space. “Don’t you think I’ve been counting every day since he left?”
“All right, then,” I said, trying to soothe her. “Help me understand so I can try and help you. When did Norman leave?”
“Last Friday.”
“And where did he go?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“Atlanta, Georgia,” Mary said. “He has his money there. He was going to go to where he hides the key to his safe-deposit box. Then, Monday, he’d go to the bank.”
“Cayman Islands,” I murmured to Barbara. “But the timetable’s the same.”
“What was the money for?” Barbara inquired. Mary did not answer right away. As far as I knew from Norman, he was going to get money for Barbara’s retainer as well as for the house he was buying near the prison Mary was going to be transferred to. Nevertheless, Mary’s silence spoke to me. It said that Norman had told her to keep quiet. She was torn between that obedience and five-foot-nothing Barbara Duberstein’s natural authority. “Speak up. We have to know what the money was for.”
“He said he needed it to pay a better lawyer.”
“Better than me?” Barbara asked.
“Better than you and …”
“And what?” I prodded her. “Don’t hold back, Mary. Do you mean a lawyer better than Barbara and better than I?”
“‘Better than I,”’ she repeated. “Norman would like that.”
“Norman thought he would find a better lawyer? More aggressive? More what?”
“More … better. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“He said he already called some famous lawyer in Texas and the lawyer was probably going to take my case.”
“Do you know this lawyer’s name?” Barbara asked, putting her pen to the paper. Mary shook her head. “All right, so Norman got the money—”
“That’s what he was going to do!” Mary cried. “I haven’t heard anything from him, not since Friday! That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “He called me. Yesterday, and the day before. He said he’d been with you, that you were going through a bad time. He was looking for ways to help you.”
“He wasn’t with me,” Mary said patiently, the teacher with a slow student.
“He wasn’t here? With you?”
“No. Monday, I knew he’d be at the bank in Atlanta. Then Tuesday, I thought maybe there’s some holiday down there on Monday, a Georgia thing or a South thing, so that’s when he went to the bank. And then, after visiting hours in the morning on Wednesday, I thought: Oh, sweet Jesus, maybe he’s hurt. Or dead. Maybe a bank robber could’ve been there and shot him. That’s when I called you the first time. I was, like, starting to get hysterical. But then, today, I knew.”
“Knew what?” I asked. Mary covered her mouth with her fingertips. A speak-no-evil gesture, and also, I sensed, a signal that said how humiliated she was to have come before us with no lipstick. It did not take much to distract her, and right then it was Barbara’s rose-colored mouth. Mary had begun longing for makeup, and I took that as a sign of hope, that even if she did not know it, she did want to live. “What did you know, Mary?” I repeated.
“I knew that Norman wasn’t coming back. And that’s why I tried to …” Her fingers slid down to her throat. Her neck was striped with a red burn mark where the twisted bedsheet had throttled her.
“But then why would Norman call me?” I demanded, turning to Barbara. “Why would he say he’d seen her when he hadn’t?”
“Well …” Barbara hesitated, but it was clear she knew and was simply reluctant to have to tell me.
“Don’t hold back,” I told her.
“Because he was conning you.”
“Conning me?”
“He got you to think he was here, doing the right thing by her, so you would feel easy about him. He was buying a little extra insurance. Didn’t want you thinking he might be disappearing into the night.”
“But why?” I persisted. “What’s his motive?”
It was Mary, not Barbara, who answered, with a calm voice and dry eyes. “Because he didn’t want anything to get in the way of my pleading guilty. I knew it today. I knew it.”
“What did you know?” I demanded.
“Norman conned me too.”
The visitors room seemed so frightening, now that all the dangerous inmates were safely in their cells. Just their odors lingered to prove that they had been there—and would be back. Not the raw smell of gyms or men’s locker rooms: a meaner stink. And it was dangerously quiet. No movement except one officer patrolling the floor, her shoes making no sound. Another, cleaning his nails with his front teeth, monitored the closed-circuit TV. A prison movie without a sound track.
“How did Norman con you?” I managed to ask.
“He told me …” Mary closed her eyes, unable to bear reality any longer.
“Please, Mary. Tell us.” I was sick. I already knew.
“Norman said you thought I did it. That gave him an idea.”
No. It was worse than that: I didn’t just give Norman an idea. He manipulated me. He made me think that here was a man who had killed, who had led a life without worth, who richly deserved whatever punishment he would get. A defense lawyer’s nightmare, but also a defense lawyer’s dream. The unwinnable case: To be able to turn that around! He must have started planning the moment he was arrested for Bobette’s death.
“Oh, my God,” I said. Barbara reached over and squeezed my hand. It did not reassure me. “Tell me about his idea.”
“That I should say I killed Bobette.”
“Did you kill her?” Barbara asked.
Mary turned to her, insulted, incredulous. “No. Of course not.”
“Who did, then?”
Mary’s liquid emerald eyes took us both in, pitying us for our lack of insight. “Norman killed her.”
“But then why were you willing to say you did it?” I demanded. “Didn’t you know it was a murder charge?”
“Why? ’Cause I love him.”
“He asked you to do this?”
“No! Of co
urse not.” Mary ran her fingers through her hair. It lay oily and lifeless on her shoulders. She lifted a tress and stared at it, not believing it could be hers. “He told me what he was facing. All those years. He said: ‘You can’t wait for me, Mary. It would be like …’” Embarrassed at revealing such intimacy, she fell into uneasy silence and began to chew the inside of her cheek.
“What did he say?” Barbara asked. “Please, don’t be shy with us. We came here because we care about your welfare.”
Mary allowed herself to be persuaded. “He said if I waited, it would be like leaving a beautiful flower in the desert to die. He wouldn’t let me. He didn’t even want me to visit him in jail. He said: ‘Let’s end it now, because otherwise it’ll be agony.’ But I couldn’t. How could I leave the one man in the world God meant for me? That’s when I started to think about what he was telling me, about how people with long records get life, and how he was so sorry he had a record ’cause people who really haven’t done anything much get off easy. I thought: Hey, it wouldn’t be that bad for me, not like it would for him. And I knew he would wait for me. So I told him.”
“Told him what?” Barbara asked.
“Told him I’d take the fall. And he said: ‘Not on your life!’ But I begged him. I said, ‘Please, let me do this for you, Norman. I mean, I don’t really have a record. Not a bad one, anyway. Not like yours.’ And finally he said let him think about it. He’s a very deep thinker, so it took him a couple of days, but he figured it out. With all his money, he was going to get this very famous lawyer from Texas. He’s never lost a case. He’s always on TV, Norman says, on all the news shows. And even if he lost, you know, if the jury said I was guilty, if it’s the first time you ever did anything, like a violent crime, you don’t go to prison long. Like, your sentence can sound long, but you don’t stay long.”
“Did Norman tell you how much time you’d be away for?” I asked.
“He said the lawyer—the Texas lawyer—told him four years tops. But see, with this lawyer, even if he did lose, it wouldn’t be more than two.”
“Two years?” Barbara and I said together.
