Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  What she got instead was Greta Wolff, a thoroughly decent, indefatigable, ever vigilant, utterly humorless martinet from Frankfurt am Main, who served as a perpetual reminder to the entire White family that Sylvia was ineffectual and a liar, that Robin needed constant coddling, that Leonard was master of the house—and a merciless one.

  And that Lee was a born troublemaker.

  Seven

  Believe me, I’m not in favor of coddling criminals. I don’t want my purse snatched or my head bashed in any more than the next dame. But there’s something more than justice we Americans dish out to people who violate our criminal laws. Take Norman Torkelson (or any one of my clients I can’t spring on bail). Once they’re locked up, we don’t just take away their freedom. Nope. We humiliate them.

  You want an example? Take the food. To call it unspeakable is to be kind. Three times a day, the inmates receive mounds and patties and globs of stuff the flat, gray-brown color of those splotches of year-old gum that adhere to city sidewalks.

  A prison food digression: Years ago, when I was still prosecuting, I spent a day interviewing an inmate, a guy named Alfred Dunder, six feet two, three hundred pounds, with front teeth so buck they protruded almost perpendicular to his gums. Facing life without parole, Alfred had decided to cooperate in our investigation of a homicide—i.e., rat on his fellow murderers. Naturally, I wanted him to live long enough to testify, so our meeting had to be secret. He, Sam Franklin, and I sat in a room near the medical unit that was not much bigger than a stall shower. Around one o’clock, Sam’s stomach grumbled, joining mine for a duet. Just then, one of the laughing boys from the sheriff’s office brought in Alfred’s lunch. He slammed down a tray on which was a plate with three different varieties of stuff Nassau County was calling food. Not only did it look revolting; I had to breathe through my mouth so as not to smell it. Alfred, despite his eighty-five IQ, his brain damage from twelve years on smack and PCP and his total lack of empathy for his fellow human beings, picked up my disgust in two seconds flat. “Hey, Missus D.A., wanna—” he sneered at me, “—eat my lunch?”

  But the food is not the most degrading aspect of prison life. If you really want to test-drive your gag reflex, give a look at the toilets in the adolescent men’s cell blocks. Or if you find fear more compelling than nausea, take a peek at the inmates themselves. Well, not at them, since many of them are not at all unattractive; they work out and are well-muscled; some of them have lovely smiles and, despite an occasional missing tooth, appear no more malign than the average gas station attendant. No, the peek should be at their rap sheets. Or at their victims’ statements—often made from hospital beds, sometimes from deathbeds. I’m not objecting that we put malefactors away. Why shouldn’t we? Don’t they deserve incarceration in order to garner the traditional benefits of a prison sentence: rehabilitation and deterrence? (That neither occurs very often is a point that should surprise no one in America.)

  But if nobody is rehabilitated or deterred, something does happen in our jails. Just about everyone who stays in longer than a month comes out a career criminal. Less than four weeks, a first-timer may still be so staggered by what he experiences, and as yet unable to adjust to the brutishness, that he vows: Never again.

  A hard-assed cop like Sam Franklin would say these bad guys are already past redemption when they go in. I don’t buy that. I’ve seen enough eighteen-year-olds go to jail merely stupid or angry or cocky. Two years later, they emerge irreversibly vicious.

  Maybe the food and the toilets and the stink and the total depravity of prison are society’s way of getting even, as in: This is all you deserve, you thieving/murdering/check-kiting/dopedealing bastard. Or the ugliness could be the prison authorities’ expression of their own rage, as in: This is payback for me having to spend my life working in a jungle, keeping you animals under control. Of course, what makes a person want to be a prison guard is another story: One guy, with a round, cheery, freckled face, the kind of guy who leads everybody in another chorus of “Toorra-Loorra-Looral” on St. Patrick’s Day, told me he used to be a Long Island Rail Road conductor, but being a guard paid two thousand bucks a year more. Two thousand extra bucks per annum to spend forty hours a week in hell? I can’t believe it’s the money that drives a man or woman to put on that uniform any more than the need for sex drives a rapist.

  In any case, what we, as a society, do with our rotten eggs is a topic the man in my life (did I mention he’s a lawyer too?) and I kick around every so often—like whenever there’s a prison riot, or after some guard’s finally prosecuted after sodomizing a hundred or so inmates.

  I say our prisons have become our mad scientists’ labs, in which we create our own monsters. My guy says that my sensibilities are too exquisite for me to be any judge of how the criminal class reacts to revolting accommodations and bad company, since I’d rather die of a ruptured bladder than go to the ladies’ room at Shea Stadium. I say: “See? You said it yourself! Criminal class.” And he says: “There’s always been a criminal class, Lee. It’s a criminology cliché—pickpockets working the crowd at public hangings of other pickpockets.” And I say: “Name one thing we’re doing in America to stop the growth of the violent criminal class we’re perpetually hysterical about. We’re breeding sociopaths as if we had a Department of Agriculture subsidy.” And he pours himself another glass of red and says …

  Forget what he says, because it only goes to show how perverse we must be: two litigators, people who earn their living by arguing, choosing each other.

  But he’s right about me and the ladies’ room at Shea. That’s just the point. If I were thrown into the slammer, I might recoil at the food, retch and heave mightily at the sight of the toilet, but sooner or later, I’d eat. I’d go to the bathroom. And after a time, ingesting and eliminating would simply become another part of my day and I’d have no reaction at all. How come? Well, my guy would say you can get used to anything. Inmates don’t notice it, if they ever did. And I’d say back to him: They don’t notice because their humanity is being ground down. Their senses get duller. Whatever standards of cleanliness and gentility they once possessed get worn away. Ergo, they lose that individual “you”: As you are diminished, you become an undifferentiated member of the herd. You mean less. Human life means less.

  Which brings us back, once more, to Norman Torkelson, who walked into the visitors room looking less of a person than he had the day before. Part of it was the uniform, of course: those angry orange pants and the matching shirt that hung loose, like a maternity blouse. They drained his color and degraded his maleness. As he moved to sit in the molded plastic chair across the barrier from me, he braced his hands on the edges of the seat and, as if infirm or arthritic, slowly lowered himself.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  “Not bad.” His voice came out soft, a little weak, as if he hadn’t had the strength to expand his lungs fully. “You saw Mary,” he said.

  “Yes.” Then, seeing that he was waiting for more, I added: “She was very nice.” That wasn’t quite enough. “And so beautiful!”

  Norman’s face took on a bit of color. His spine straightened, till his posture was erect but nonchalant, displaying a pride of ownership similar to that of the possessor of a new BMW. “She’s as beautiful inside as she is outside,” he assured me.

  “Then you’re a very lucky man.”

  “She talked to you, didn’t she?”

  “About what?” I asked, looking him right in the eye.

  “About my business.” He sighed. “She tried to keep it a secret that she told you everything. That lasted about five seconds.”

  “Mary wants to help you, or help me help you. The last time you and I talked you told me she had nothing to do with your work. I guess it slipped your mind that what she was doing is something lawyers call aiding and abetting.”

  Norman offered me a boyish grin, one side of his mouth breaking into a real smile, the other blasé, only mildly amused. I caught myself sm
iling back as if he’d just said something absolutely delicious.

  “You’d be surprised. Mary’s a good little actress,” he remarked, as I worked on returning my face to its Lee White, Attorney-at-Law, unenchanted expression. “She can put on a whole bunch of different voices. You should hear her. Sweet as sugar in real life, but when she’s calling about repossessing my car—it’s like an icicle in the heart.” He stopped short, made a fist, and started to gnaw on his knuckles. Something was eating at him. “Listen, she doesn’t have any exposure on this, does she?”

  I gave the knuckle on my index finger a quick, companionable chew. “Well, in your, um, what Mary called the Love Nest … Isn’t that where she left a message about repossessing the car that Bobette was supposed to overhear?” Norman nodded. “If the cops somehow find out about the Love Nest and get a search warrant, they’ll seize the tape from the answering machine. That would implicate her.”

  “Shit! Listen, do me a favor. They have one lousy pay phone for the whole cell block here. Make a call for me. Just tell Mary to go over—make sure she’s not being followed—and get the tape and deep-six it.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t tell anyone to destroy evidence.”

  I knew he’d be on the phone with her the second he could, saying: Rip it up, stomp on it, burn it. I couldn’t stop him, but there’s never a percentage in violating the canon of ethics for a criminal client. First of all, the law is a noble institution, if you’ll pardon my mush, and lawyers should respect it. I’d much rather think of myself as a cog in the wheel of justice than as a scum bucket for hire. Besides, even if a client were to pay you a fortune to play a little dirty or simply to look the other way, you can’t trust him not to turn around and rat on you—big time—the minute it’s to his advantage.

  “Norman, I understand that part of your business is protecting yourself and the people you work with. But I’m your lawyer. To the extent you keep me in the dark—like not telling me about Mary—you’re making yourself vulnerable to attacks by the prosecution. If you’re open with me, then I can anticipate their attacks and be prepared to fight back.”

  “What do you want me to do? Confess to a murder I didn’t commit?”

  “Of course not. But if you’re going to tell me something, don’t con me. If you’d rather not talk about it, just say so and I’ll move on.” I realized that my chances of getting Norman Torkelson to be candid were as great as my ever getting my upper arms firm enough that I’d be able to wear a strapless gown. But a girl’s got to try.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Bobette. You said there was no sex the evening of the murder.”

  “That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “Mary seems to believe you never had sex with your marks.” I looked straight at him.

  Norman leaned back his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and laughed. “What else am I supposed to tell her? Why hurt her? It’s not fun; it’s work: I have to make bells ring for ladies who may never have known that bells exist. Believe me, I don’t push it, but I can’t do business without it.”

  “How long were you having sex with Bobette?”

  “For nine days. It’s nine days with everybody. That’s the ideal time: when they’re starting to feel sure of you and before any doubts arise. I tried to make it shorter—”

  “The time between beginning to have sex and the actual sting?”

  “Precisely. Nine is the magic number.”

  “Do you have any set time you wait before initiating sex?”

  “Oh, no,” said Norman, a little surprised that I wasn’t appreciating the subtleties of his operation. “That depends on the lady. I will say, even if it looks as though she doesn’t have that much in the asset department, if I’m going to bother to take what she has, I wait at least two weeks before sex. You know, so she feels secure that she has a relationship.”

  “Women like that,” I observed. “Relationships, I mean.”

  “Absolutely,” said Norman. “They want to be cared about as a human being. That’s what I give them. That, and then the sex. But what I said to Mary is a hundred percent true: It doesn’t mean anything.” He brought his chair back down on all four legs, and by the time he did, he wasn’t laughing anymore. “She’s had such a rough life.”

  “Mary?”

  “Yeah. I met her, she was nineteen years old. She’d been out of the house from the time she was sixteen. Her parents beat her. Her old lady would bop her over the head with a broomstick until she was unconscious. The man she married—to get away from her family—he wasn’t much better, so she ran out on him. Then she married an older man, but he died. His children screwed her out of everything. And she really loved him. When I met her, she was working as a chambermaid in a motel outside Phoenix. You wouldn’t believe it! Her hands were bright red—almost purple—and all swollen from an allergy to the cleaning stuff. And in nineteen years, not one single person had ever behaved decently toward her.” Norman looked down at the floor for a minute, then back at me, perplexed. “I don’t get it,” he said, so choked up his voice gurgled on the “get.” “How could someone not want to do wonderful things for Mary?”

  “Did you always have someone working with you?” I asked. “Making the call about the repossession, that sort of thing?”

  “Not at the beginning,” he murmured, clearly not liking the subject, wishing we could continue the Ode to Mary Dean. “I didn’t want anyone getting messed up in this. I did okay working alone. You know, I had to relate the story of the car repossession myself, and that’s not as credible”—he hesitated for an instant to check if I’d noted the “credible” and was appropriately impressed by his vocabulary—“as someone else calling up and putting the squeeze on me. But then I became involved with someone about ten years ago. She was the one who pushed me to be a part of it.” Paled as he was by his uniform, pasty from prison food, fluorescent light, and recycled air, he didn’t look as if he could attract anyone to a life of crime, much less get women to open their hearts and their savings accounts to him. At our first meeting, the dark hair on his forearms had been appealing. No, more than that: erotic. Now he looked like a dying animal, its sickly skin shining through its thinning pelt.

  “What happened with her?” I asked.

  He shrugged, not wanting to answer. I waited. “Nothing. It didn’t work out,” he said finally.

  “Any others?”

  “Any others … what?”

  “Did you work with any other woman besides this one and Mary?” He shifted in his seat but didn’t answer. “Norman, I’m not your mother trying to pry out information about your girlfriends. I have to worry that on the off chance a story about this case goes out on the wire services or on some cable news program, someone will recognize your name or M.O. and be willing to give information. It wouldn’t be a plus if the government put a witness on the stand who could recite the details of your business practices.”

  “I used different names with them.”

  “‘Them’ meaning your lady friends, your accomplices—not just your marks.”

  “Right.”

  “So they don’t know Norman Torkelson or Denton Wylie or … What name did you use for renting your apartment?”

  “Robert McNulty. No, I never use the same name twice.” Of course, once caught he was officially stuck with Norman Torkelson, since he had a record with fingerprints attachéd. Whether Norman was his true name or not I didn’t know, but it was the one he was using when he was first booked in 1978 for possession of a forged instrument, having tried to cash a check from a checkbook he’d filched after a night of love with one Lorraine Krumholz, age forty-two, in West Quoddy Head, Maine. He was then eighteen.

  “You must have a good memory, with all those names,” I said.

  “You know the old saying”—he smiled—“that a liar has to have a good memory. I have a great memory.”

  “Then do you remember receiving the forty-eight thousand that Bobette wit
hdrew from her bank?” He didn’t answer. “I don’t have to tell you about the attorney-client privilege, do I? Whatever you tell me stays with me.” I knew this was not exactly a major news item to him, and sure enough, he nodded. “And I’m not trying to find out how much cash you have so I can squeeze more money out of you. Remember, we both signed the retainer agreement.”

  “Bobette gave me the money.”

  “And then what?”

  “I thanked her for her faith in me. Then I left.”

  “You never saw her again.” Wearily, as if I was becoming stupefyingly boring, Norman shook his head: That’s right—I never saw her again. “You know why I ask you that, Norman?”

  “No,” he muttered.

  “Because if for any reason you came back to the apartment and, say, found her dead or dying, there might be some physical evidence of your presence postmortem that could link you to the crime. I hate to keep harping on it, but this is a murder charge, and the D.A. doesn’t seem inclined to let me bargain this down to, say, manslaughter.”

  “I didn’t kill her!”

  “Then all the more reason that we may go to trial, and if we do, I don’t want their serologist finding—um—let’s say some of your skin cells under her fingernails, on the chance she tried to grab on to you for emotional support as she lay dying … if you happened to come upon her after she’d been attacked.”

  “There’s none of my skin under her nails,” he said sullenly.

  “Good. I need that kind of information. The worst damage you can do to your case is to let me be surprised. I hate surprises. All criminal lawyers do.” I tried to look him straight in the eye—in his lovely, limpid blue eyes, to be accurate—but he was staring over at the platform where the guards in charge of the closed-circuit TV monitors are stationed. “Do you have anything more to say on the subject, or should we move on?”