Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  A couple of months after she fell for her husband, Sylvia dropped by the salon on her way to Tailored Woman, to use the bathroom. Leonard introduced her to Mrs. Wriston Brandt, wife of the senior partner in the biggest Wall Street law firm, a man once referred to as “Mr. Trusts and Estates” by the Wall Street Journal. Instead of saying “How do you do,” or, if that was too stuffy, “Hello,” Sylvia had said “Hi.” But the way she said it, all nasally, with that New York intonation. It came out “Hoy.” To his credit, Leonard admitted to himself that he was a terrible snob—and that the only decent pedigree in the entire White household belonged to their new collie, Duchess. But still … “Hoy.”

  Mere weeks after the Mrs. Wriston Brandt incident, Leonard was going over accounts payable with Dolly Young (who had come to New York from Bristol, Massachusetts, to be a Conover model but who failed, not for want of oblique facial planes but for lack of length, being only five feet four). The key point here is that in her entire life, Dolly never said “Hi.” Always “Hello.” She also said “think yew” for “thank you.” In both instances, her speech patterns had to do with regional usage rather than social class. As she and Leonard were looking over the Pincus Notions and Trimmings invoice, Dolly said, “They rob us blind and they don’t even say think yew,” impulsively, Leonard kissed her.

  Thus began an affair that lasted for decades.

  Five

  If I’m right in believing that I’m typical of most American women, then there’s got to be millions of bottles of used-but-once hair conditioner abandoned on the floors of showers and the ledges of bathtubs from Maine to Hawaii. Makeup kits must hold so many unfinished mascara wands that each house in the United States could supply a company of Rockettes. And as for the national glut of rejected moisturizers: Better forgotten in medicine cabinets than tossed onto the country’s landfills where they could trigger an ecological calamity.

  Is this another tirade about how the beauty industry exploits the low self-esteem of American women? Nope, just the opposite. All those social critics: they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. They carry on about the insecurities of American women and completely ignore the extravagant self-confidence we display. Critics! Listen to the female ego. It’s not saying: I loathe myself. No, it’s telling you: I am a mere taupe eye shadow away from gorgeousness. Each of us has a breathtaking creature locked inside. And all we need to break through to infinite desirability is a new brand of thigh cream.

  Take me, for instance. You’d think, having lived forty-five years, I’d have picked up on God’s message: “Lee White, Esq., is not going to be a sex goddess in her lifetime.” But no, I don’t hear it. Nor do the rest of my sister Americans. Because nothing except death can kill that ravishing dame who walks in beauty inside us. If a normal adult female’s just-before-sleep dream is a sweeter, more graceful, poreless version of herself, then what woman does the one-in-a-million true beauty fantasize about? A flatulent, bezitted battle-ax? Right now, you may be tempted to tap me on the shoulder and ask: Hey, what does all this have to do with the Torkelson case? So I’ll tell you: All this is a prelude to Mary Dean walking into my office.

  It didn’t hit me right away that she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen in my life. No, keeping pace with my secretary, Sandi, who was ushering her in, she was just a tall young woman, twenty-two or so, with a ton of makeup on, wearing … The man in my life once told me there was no one in the world more mean-spirited than a New York clothes snob. So I censored my nasty thoughts about her kelly-green suit with forest-green velveteen lapels. I stood to greet her. “Have a seat, Ms. Dean.”

  “Thanks,” she said, speaking with nervous quickness. Instead of realizing that my right hand was extended in order to shake hers, she thrust a tightly stuffed envelope into it.

  “Oh,” I said, taken aback by her nervousness. I’d assumed Norman would have himself a cooler cookie. The envelope, no doubt, contained my retainer: fifteen thousand dollars. Cash, and from the heft of it, probably hundreds. A not unusual method of payment, since many of my clients weren’t interested in check writing—not if the check was going to diminish their own assets. They liked paying by check only if the assets belonged to somebody else. (Soon after we became partners, Chuckie Phalen told me a precautionary tale: One year out of law school, he’d taken a check from some client. When he went to cash it—after the jury had come back with an acquittal—he happened to glance at the name across the top, the person whose account it was: Charles Michael Phalen, Counselor-at-Law.)

  As Mary was still standing, I motioned for her to sit. Then I handed over the envelope to Sandi, who left my office to return to her desk, where she would open it and make sure the retainer was inside—not just a wad of cutup newspaper. You’d think I’d have hated practicing law this way, dealing with such overt sleaze-balls. But every time I worked on a nice, clean white-collar criminal matter—sales tax evasion, co-op conversion fraud—a giant yawn arose inside me that the biggest corporate check couldn’t stifle.

  Mary, still jittery, hadn’t taken a seat. She clutched her purse tight against her chest in a pathetically defensive posture, her shoulders and head thrust forward. She stared out the window. It was one of those nasty days in early May, more appropriate to March, rainy, gray, with a low, chill wind that blew down the street and bit at your ankles. I spoke so sweetly I practically cooed: “Please sit down.”

  “Jeez,” she said, alighting on the edge of an armchair in front of my desk. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time.” The backs of her hands were red. Her nails were chewed down so low they sliced into the flesh of her fingers. Then she babbled, a long, agitated apology about how the police had impounded Norman’s car and how the taxi she’d called hadn’t come and how just when she thought she was okay, she discovered the bus she was on was headed to Long Beach. Normally, I would have cut her off as courteously as possible, but suddenly I found myself transfixed by Mary’s looks.

  First of all, I realized her face was a flawless oval. True, the heavy makeup she was wearing was unflattering, chalky, especially against the peachy glow of her neck. Her cheeks were as bright as geraniums. The lipstick she wore, a neon orange, was applied so thickly that when she formed words beginning with b or p it looked as though her lips would meld. Still, I could see that the makeup was not meant to hide serious imperfections. Her skin appeared flawless.

  Mary’s too white face was framed by shiny black curls that spilled over her shoulders. The hairdo was neither the elegant three hundred dollar frenzy of a Manhattan cut nor the sculpted perfection of big Texas hair. To me, it looked like a homey attempt to copy the none-of-that-androgyny-shit-for-me style of a Dolly or a Wynonna. Unlike country music stars, however, Mary’s hair was not tier upon tier of faultless curlicues. In the sodden weather, the tresses on her shoulders had lost their verve and lay limp, wormlike, on her green suit jacket.

  Obviously, she’d chosen the suit color to play up her luminous eyes. Those eyes didn’t need any help. On the contrary, the suit was green overkill. In truth, though, nothing could detract from those eyes, not even the opalescent pistachio shadow that covered her lids and orbital rims up to her brows, not the greasy black pencil liner.

  Now, as to the rest of Mary Dean: Her nose would have been perfect except it had the tiniest indentation at the tip, as if she’d pressed on it throughout childhood, trying to get it to turn up. And her lips: full, but pretty, not those collagen-injected trout-mouths that had become so trendy. And just before she sat, I finally noticed the figure. High-breasted, tiny-waisted, long-legged. An ambulatory Barbie doll.

  Except Mary was human. She was sweating and gave off an odor that was a combination of natural musk, wet wool and cheap perfume—gardenia? jasmine?—that I bet had the word “Jungle” as part of its name. I watched a drop of perspiration slide down her left temple, past her jaw to her chin. It would have dribbled onto her neck, only she wiped it away with the back of her hand. In doing so, she lo
st control of the black patent-leather envelope-purse she’d been hugging to her chest. It dropped to the floor. Bending to pick it up, she cracked her forehead against the edge of my desk. “Aaah!” she cried, a yelp of pain.

  A shudder chattered my teeth and shivered my shoulders, that frisson that comes when you empathize too intensely. For that second, my forehead throbbed in the same spot where she’d hit her head. I buzzed Sandi, requesting a cup of ice, fast. I must have sounded a little desperate because Sandi rushed in with it seconds later. Already a huge red rectangle, like a ledge, was protruding from Mary’s brow. I wrapped the ice in a few tissues and pressed it against the bump. Sandi stood by. “How are you feeling?” I asked Mary after a minute.

  “A little …” Her lovely eyes, floating upward, looked slightly dopey. Tiny black pearls of mascara dotted her lashes.

  “You’ll be fine in a minute,” Sandi assured her, too briskly. Sandi’s only other job had been with a malpractice firm. She lived in constant terror of lawsuits. Over the years, I tried to reassure her: No one’s going to sue me, but if they do, I can handle it. Nothing I could say could bring her peace. Besides the usual secretarial chores, she stood eternally vigilant, protecting the two oversophisticated rubes—me and Chuckie—from certain ruin at the hands of the shyster lawyers our scum-bucket clients would hire to sue us.

  “I can manage now,” I told Sandi, who clearly did not believe she should leave me alone with a con man’s sweetie who had probably arranged her own subdural hematoma just so she could haul me into court and bring me to utter ruin. “I’m okay, Sandi. Thanks for the ice.” Reluctantly, casting a knowing and hostile glance at Mary (whose eyes, fortunately, were still swimming in her head), Sandi left.

  After a moment, Mary whispered: “Sorry.”

  I took off the ice. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Except “fine” came out shakily, in two syllables.

  “Are you nauseous?” I asked. “Does your head hurt?”

  “No, really, I’m fine,” Mary reassured me, offering me a lovely smile. “Just, you know, getting bonked like that. Wowie!” She laughed at her own clumsiness. An instant later, she burst into sobs.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “It’s not … my head,” she explained, taking a giant hiccup of air. “It’s … Norman.”

  “It must be—” I was going to say something objective and mealy-mouthed, like “difficult,” but instead I said: “—awful for you.”

  “He’s in jail for murder. And it’s all my fault.” Her fault? I waited, putting on my Totally Neutral face, an expression of absolute indifference I’ve cultivated so as to do nothing to either encourage or discourage the person sitting across from me. It’s important that I hear it all: the craziness, the bizarre confessions, the monstrous lies that pour forth from that armchair by my desk. Mary took a large, loud gulp of air and went on. “If I hadn’t been premenstrual … I mean, I get food on the brain. All I was thinking about was stuffing myself. How I was going to stop at BK and shove in a Double Whopper with cheese. And onion rings—they’re so salty, I love ’em. I was thinking that I had to remember to buy those teeny Breath Asure things so Norman wouldn’t know I’d been to BK, because he gets super PO’d when I eat junk food. And I was thinking about a vanilla shake too. Even french fries. I’ve never been a big potato person, so you can imagine how bad off I was. So when I left for Motor Vehicle I grabbed the Bob ID instead of the Dan ID. All the names he uses, I get mixed up, even though the last time he tested me I only got one wrong. If I’d’ve used Dan, they wouldn’t have traced the car back to the apartment.”

  “They would have found him, though. His fingerprints were all over Bobette’s place.”

  “But we could’ve gotten away once we knew the old lady was dead. The cops would’ve had to search every house on Long Island. They wouldn’t have found us in time. Instead—” She started to cry again. “—they came and knocked on the door. And I opened it! I didn’t even say ‘Who’s there?’ If I’d’ve done that, Norm could’ve gotten out the back.”

  “When they’re arresting someone on a murder charge, they usually have people staked out in back.” But I didn’t want to make her feel too comfortable. Since I couldn’t get anything much from my client to help in my defense of him, I naturally decided to try Mary. She was feeling horribly guilty. Not for being an accessory before and after the fact to a crime—at best, fraud; at worst, homicide. No, she felt guilty for failing Norman.

  “Take it easy,” I said, and handed her a couple of tissues. (I keep a box in my top desk drawer so I can easily hand a bunch to a weepy client or, more commonly, a nonweepy, sociopathic client’s hysterical family.) “Maybe we’ll be able to do something for Norman.”

  “He told me it was hopeless, that the cops think he did it.”

  “They do. But that’s why we have trial by jury. And that’s why you’ve retained me. Maybe among all of us we can figure something out that will convince the jury that Norman is not guilty.”

  “He is innocent” Mary corrected me, and blew her nose. A too ladylike puff, not the HONK! a good-sized, healthy young woman would naturally produce. “He didn’t do it!”

  “Then help me find something so I can prove it.”

  “He left that house one second after that witness saw him with Bobette, and he came right home to me and we were together from then on. Every minute until the cops came.”

  “What was his relationship with Bobette?” I asked.

  She drew up into a prim position, feet and knees together, hands in lap. “He said not to talk about anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … you know.” I could think of several reasons, the main one being that he did indeed kill Bobette and was worried Mary would unintentionally give it away. If I were Norman, I’d be worried too. I couldn’t tell if Mary was simpleminded or merely so new at grown-up life that she hadn’t learned to lie without chewing the inside of her cheek and turning red. “Norman said: ‘No matter who, keep your lip zipped, and I mean zipped all the way up.’”

  “Look, I’ve been a lawyer too long to expect him to break down and confess to me—”

  “He didn’t do it!”

  “Fine. But if I’m going to help him prove that, I need all the information I can get, good or bad. I’d rather learn it from him than get a big surprise from the prosecutor.” Then I added ominously: “She is one scary dame.”

  “Oh, God,” Mary whimpered. She began to nibble her thumbnail. Instead of trying to allay her fear, I narrowed my eyes and flared my nostrils. Suddenly I became one scary dame too, which is what I wanted. I didn’t relish going into court with Mary testifying to Norman’s alibi. She’d turn to mush after thirty seconds on cross. Plus I sensed that Holly had one of those solid circumstantial cases that make defense lawyers like me pine for the good old days of being prosecutors—when the world was young and the facts were on our side. So I had to scare Mary into opening up. I also figured talking to her would be better than talking to Norman; with Mary, at least, I had a chance of hearing something resembling the truth. But she remained mum.

  “Too bad you can’t help him,” I said, and pushed back my chair, as if I were about to stand to see her out. But she remained where she was, on the edge of her seat. She reached out and grabbed onto the desk, a huge old thing made from a farmhouse table. It looked as though she was trying to drag it toward her.

  “If I talk to you,” she asked me, “would you have to tell Norman?”

  “Well …” I stalled. It was one of those questions only a chairman of a bar association ethics committee could love: Is an attorney’s ethical obligation of full and complete disclosure of information to a client paramount? Or is counsel duty-bound to cork it if silence is what it costs to buy information that will save said client? “How about this, Mary? Unless it’s a matter of life and death, I won’t say a word to him. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me about Norman a
nd Bobette’s relationship.”

  “Strictly business,” she declared, with finality.

  “Then how come she was found dead in a nightgown and negligee?”

  “Maybe the murderer changed her clothes after he killed her!” she suggested, pleased with herself. For the first time, she allowed herself to wriggle back into the big armchair, lean back, and cross her legs. Her shoes were designed not for an unseasonably cold May morning but for a gala midsummer bash: Two narrow straps of gold just beyond her toes and another around her ankle were all that held them on. The heels were high gold daggers.

  “The murderer didn’t change her clothes,” I said. “The autopsy would have indicated that Bobette had been moved postmortem. How come she was in her nightgown?” Mary chewed the inside of her cheek a little more, a buying-time mannerism I knew I would never grow to love. She could have said: Norman left before she changed out of her regular stuff. Or: She got into a sexy nightgown because her boyfriend—the guy who killed her—was coming over. I explained: “Norman was seen at her place at six-thirty in the evening. You said he left immediately after the man who is the witness saw him. So say that was at six forty-five.” Mary inched forward. “From Merrick to your apartment … Fifteen, twenty minutes? Sometime around seven—daylight-saving time—so it was still light outside, this lifelong spinster puts on a sexy negligee?”

  “But he was with me the whole …” She sputtered to a halt. She didn’t know what to say. Even if I spent weeks preparing her testimony, she’d be a lousy witness. Forget street smarts: She lacked the confidence to utter a simple declarative sentence and leave it alone. “I should say he was with me the whole time, shouldn’t I?”

  “If that’s the truth,” I said. “But I’d like to keep you off the stand. You seem to get a little nervous when you’re under the gun.”

  “You said it!” she agreed.

  “So you can see why I need to know more about what was going on. I need something I can use to trip up the D.A.”