by Susan Isaacs
“After she gave me the money,” Norman said quietly, “I went out to buy champagne. I always do. See, deep down, the marks are afraid I’ll do exactly what I do: grab the money and never look back. Subconsciously, they know that my wanting them … it’s too good to be true.” He grinned. “Well, it is. So if I just pick up and leave, some of them might start getting nervous after an hour or two. I can’t afford second thoughts. I don’t want them calling their bank or a relative or the police. So I go out, buy a bottle of champagne, and bring it back—surprise!—to celebrate. I offer a toast, something like: ‘I love you for you. If it was possible to love you more—which I don’t believe I can—I’d love you for your faith in me.’” Norman’s big head turned up, heavenward, and as he delivered his lines, there was not a single trace of discernible slickness. For that moment, it really did look as if the light of God were shining through Norman Torkelson as well as upon him. “‘I was so down-and-out,”’ he continued his spiel. “‘I thought: All right, I’ll just have to live like this forever. Half a life. I can do it. I’ve got to do it, for my boys’ sake. But then’”—together, Norman and I gulped with emotion—“‘you gave me back my passion.’”
God’s light flicked off. Norman cleaned under the nail of his index finger with the pinkie nail of his other hand. “When I got back with the champagne, she was dead.”
“Did you touch her?”
“No,” he said, glancing up from his nail grooming. “I could see she’d been murdered. Strangled. Her neck …” He leaned forward and, with great feeling, added: “Her face wore the mask of death!” Too loud. One row away, another lawyer—a blight on the profession whom I’d known for years—and his drug-dealer-to-junior-high-school-students client turned to check out Norman’s violation of the unwritten etiquette of the lawyers’ visiting hour: that all business shall be conducted in a mumble. And it wasn’t only that Norman was too loud. His performance was way over the top. His already long face was stretched out by his high seriousness, as if he was playing up the Lincoln resemblance, trying to capture the Gettysburg moment—just after “shall not perish from the earth” and before the applause.
“You’re positive you didn’t touch her mask of death?” I probed. I might have phrased my question less sarcastically, but I’d been up late over at my guy’s house (he had a lousy chest cold) and I was tired—both from lack of sleep and from Norman’s relentless lying. I had to know. I did not relish the prospect of suddenly hearing Holly Nuñez introduce an addendum to the medical examiner’s report that stated (to give you a for instance) that a half pint of Norman’s saliva had collected in Bobette’s cleavage as he drooled with delight while strangling her. “You didn’t touch any part of her after you found her dead?”
Ethically, I felt I was walking a pretty slack tightrope here; it was hard to balance. I needed to gather all the information I could for Norman’s defense, yet some of my questions would inevitably suggest to any person with an IQ higher than that of a Chicken McNugget that just in case he left some trace of himself on the body, he’d better say: Oh, yeah! I did touch her postmortem.
“Oh, yeah, I did touch her,” Norman said. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I was really shaken up. I mean, to walk in with a bottle of champagne and see that. I wanted to be absolutely sure she was dead. She looked dead, but what if she wasn’t? I might have been able to do something.”
“Do you remember what part of her you touched?”
“God, I’m not sure. I guess … her hand or her wrist, maybe, feeling for a pulse. And I guess her face too. You know …” He closed his eyes, I assumed to imagine the scene. “I put my face up close to hers, to see if I could hear her breathing.”
“Do you think you might have touched her neck?” I asked.
“You mean, where she was …” Norman seemed to find swallowing difficult and, with his thumb and index finger, massaged the sides of his Adam’s apple. “… choked?”
Clearly, this thought was distressing to him. As often happens, the girl in me began to fight the lawyer in me. The girl wanted to tell Norman: Never mind. Don’t even think about those big ugly finger marks on Bobette’s throat. So upsetting. However, he wasn’t paying me two hundred fifty bucks an hour for being a girl. “Yes,” I said, “where she was choked.” Then I added: “You can see the marks left by the killer’s fingers in the autopsy photos.”
“Why would I touch her there?” Norman demanded, his voice rising, as if I’d asked the stupidest, most impertinent question he’d ever heard.
“I have no idea. But in stressful situations, even the most rational, stiff-upper-lip people can react in strange ways.”
“I don’t know.” Norman exhaled. “I may have reached out and just … I think for a second, I may have put my finger on her throat. Kind of out of pity.”
“Okay,” I said coolly, as if my large intestine wasn’t going to contract into a knot that would take three days to untie. “I’m glad you told me.”
Right. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Those very large thumbprints you saw in the autopsy photos, the ones that make it seem as if some fiend had applied horrific force to the area over the larynx … Those prints were left by the defendant after he found Ms. Frisch dead. They were a gesture of pity and—yes, ladies and gentlemen—love. (Why, you may ask, do I do this sort of work when I could be the Queen of Matrimonial Law and get home at five-thirty, in time to finish the ball fringe on an afghan I’ve been working on for the past eight months, poach a nice sea bass and reread Great Expectations? I really don’t know.)
“I felt sincerely terrible,” Norman was saying. “A terrible, brutal thing to happen to anyone. And I liked Bobette.”
“What kind of a person was she?”
“Smart. Native smarts. She wasn’t educated or anything. But she had a steel-trap mind when it came to money. Knew the rent for every apartment in the buildings she owned, who owed what, and how many more months they had to go on their lease. Never had to write a thing down.”
“Would you say that she was a nice person?”
A small smile of embarrassment passed over Norman’s lips at having to speak ill of the dead, but as I’d already graded him B-minus as a con man, it didn’t surprise me that he was faking it—and poorly. “She wasn’t very nice. In fact … she wasn’t like your typical lady, wanting to be liked. Wanting to be loved, actually. No, she was pretty unusual: going about her business, and if you didn’t like her, it was fine with her.”
“She sounds tough. How come you were able to touch her?” I inquired.
Naturally, Norman didn’t buff his nails against his chest or make any other gesture of smugness, but the fluorescents in the visitors room were too strong not to reveal the flush of pride that colored his forehead. “She was lonely.”
“She was fifty-six years old. Presumably, she’d been lonely for years.”
“But see”—Norman leaned forward, so his chin looked as if it were glued to the white Formica barrier between us—“the ladies I deal with preselect themselves! The fact that they answer my ad in the personals means they’re lonely. Maybe even desperate, because they’re not meeting other men.”
“So this tough cookie was looking for love?”
“Hey, that’s the headline in my ad that she answered! ‘Looking for Love.’ In her letter she said she just wanted companionship, but then she fell for me.”
“Why? I mean, you’re a nice-looking man and all that—”
“That’s okay,” Norman said generously. “Please don’t apologize. You see, I play to their desires and their weaknesses. Bobette wanted love: that was her desire. And she was embarrassed about not having a good education: her weakness. So I quoted poetry to her—‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds.’ That’s Shakespeare. And from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a sonnet: ‘How do I—’”
“I know it,” I told him.
“I showed her a different world. A better, finer world. I took her on nature walks. You know, we’d
go to a wooded area and I’d point out plants and stuff and give her the Latin names—”
“You know the scientific names of plants?”
“Are you kidding? I just use a few names I’ve made up: ‘It is pretty, but it’s a common gorse weed, Bobette, a Rowinda numonica.’ That’s where we were that last day, when that tenant of hers called the cops about my car. On a nature walk.”
“Tell me about the tenant.”
“I don’t know his name,” Norman said.
“Did you ever see him?”
“Yeah. He was foreign. Sort of dark. Not like Indian or anything. Probably from one of those countries that was behind the Iron Curtain. The way he said her name: ‘Miss Frisch.’ As if he had a big gob in his throat. But that’s the way they pronounce things. Guttural.”
“I know.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, trying to look boyish and abashed, not totally succeeding. However, I did feel my heart rise a few millimeters and wished I could find something to say to cheer him. That’s what con men do, even the lousy ones. They bring out the best in you—your sweetness, your concern, your love, your passion—and then, when you’re wafting about on your cloud of goodness, above mere mortal meanness … Whammo! They kick you off so you plummet to earth, headfirst.
“Did you ever have any encounters with this tenant before?”
“A couple of times. I pulled my car behind his crappy Hyundai and he had a fit.”
“What kind of a fit? Yelling? Carrying on?” I was thinking: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you’ve seen Mr. Whosis on the witness stand. You’ve seen his hair-trigger temper. You’ve seen his clear bias against my client. No, strike that. His hatred of Norman Torkelson. His is the only testimony linking my client to that house on the day of the murder. But as His Honor will charge you, a witness’s demeanor must be taken into account …
“No carrying on. Just had on a pissed-off expression. He kept saying: ‘Damn it!’ over and over. ‘Dommit!”’ Norman mimicked. “‘Dommit! Dommit! Dommit!’”
Later, back in my office, I repeated “‘Dommit! Dommit! Dommit!”’ when I called my guy and told him about the morning’s events and checked up on how he was feeling. “Any relief yet?”
“Well,” he said, “my fever’s gone down, but I’m still feeling pretty crummy. But you know us guys. Lousy patients.”
“Want me to come over for lunch? Bring you something?”
“No. I’ll be okay. So what do you think?”
“About what?”
“About your client, Norman.”
“What do you think?” I asked, having revered his gut reactions in criminal cases for … God, nearly twenty years. “Is he guilty?”
“Lee, what do you think?” I got that low feeling, when first your stomach drops, then everything else seems to give in to the pull of gravity and falls as low as it can go.
“You tell me. What do you think?”
And my main man said: “Guilty as hell.”
Eight
Greta Wolff, the housekeeper, clanged pots together and hummed a little ditty from Der fliegende Holländer. Not a hummer by nature, and far too deliberate to be a pot clanger, she was trying to drown out the sounds of Leonard and Sylvia’s warfare upstairs so that Robin would eat her dinner. Ten-year-old Lee sat at the kitchen table also, but Greta did not concern herself about her. Lee would abandon a meal only if the house blew up and the ceiling collapsed onto her plate.
“I ask you just one thing, goddamn it to hell!” Leonard was raging. Some combination of materials in the house—stone and wood and the wool of their bedroom rug—had synergized and created a trumpet effect, so despite Leonard’s deep-voiced fury, his tone descended to the kitchen as a nasal whaa-whaa. Greta stirred something vigorously. Lee suspected it was water. But the metal spoon clanging against the stockpot was merely an annoyance, not a distraction. “Be a mother to those kids. Is that too much to demand?”
“I was under so much pressure. I had too much to do—”
But he wouldn’t let her finish. “I get a call from the school—”
“Sweetheart, Leonard, please, please keep it down,” Sylvia shrieked.
Without realizing it, Lee brought her finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she hushed.
“The goddamn door is closed,” Leonard was hollering. “Now listen: I get a call from the school—”
“I know! I admit it. I made a mistake.”
“Shut up and listen when I talk to you! ‘Mr. White, we hate to bother you at your place of business, but Mrs. White was supposed to pick up Robin. Her temperature’s over one hundred.’ Over one hundred! ‘And she’s complaining of a sore throat and earache.’”
“Don’t be mad,” Sylvia pleaded. She’s going to cry, Lee thought.
She glanced over to her sister. Robin, now seven, was repeatedly plunging the tines of her fork into the liver and onions Greta had made for dinner. Apparently Robin hoped that by making enough holes, she would render the meat so porous it would lose its materiality and become invisible.
But on second glance, Lee observed Robin’s head pulled, turtlelike, between her knobby shoulders, as if the confrontation upstairs was an attack on her, each word a bashing. The girl’s white skin had turned ashen, her breathing rapid and shallow. Sensitive: That was the word for Robin, with family friends and Leonard’s employees courteously omitting the “hyper-.” If Lee’s little sister had been a fictional character, she would have been the pretty princess who detected the pea while lying atop fifty mattresses—notwithstanding that before any consciousness of the legume, she probably would have been weeping and wheezing from an acrophobic attack.
“I apologize. What more can I say?” Sylvia asked. But of course she thought of more. “Lists. You say I have nothing to do, but—”
“You don’t cook!” It galled him. Last Memorial Day, they’d gone to the annual Shorehaven Estates Beach Blast and he’d overheard Ginger Taylor telling two women that after she and Fos saw that foreign film at the Manhasset Cinema, La Dolce Vita, she had bought an Italian cookbook. Ginger had them doubled over with laughter: You can’t believe the things I can do to spaghetti! The three of them were like Blonde, Blonder, and Blondest. All of them with beautiful, throaty laughs. And so perfectly got up for the Beach Blast. Dungarees cut off like Bermuda shorts, and sleeveless blouses. Sylvia had on a green linen trouser suit and an enormous straw hat and was pathetically overdressed. And all their neighbors had known exactly what they weren’t, probably because of the way Sylvia looked. Shoes with a grosgrain bow and little heels, for Christ sake, for a party where you know you’re going to stand in the sand! Makeup! None of them wore makeup—except red lipstick. Oh, God, the red lipstick with the streaky blonde hair! True, most of the neighbors had nodded or waved or even said Hi, but the Whites wound up at a big round table for ten—except the only people sitting with them were a couple in their sixties named Turtletaub, and Frank and Louise Petullo from Harbor Road, the same Petullo the New York Times had informed him was Frankie “Salami” Petullo, the reputed brains behind the underworld’s takeover of the sand and cement industry. Leonard had wanted to run, flee the horror, but he had to sit there making conversation with Beaky Turtletaub, who kept pushing for an offer of a silver fox wholesale.
“Tell me what you do!” Leonard yelled at the top of his lungs. “You don’t clean! You don’t—”
“How can I? You’re always giving me lists. Get new garbage cans. Get a pegboard for the garage for your tools. Why? You never use tools. You bought that power drill set for fifty-four dollars and never once—”
“Shut the hell up!”
“Did someone tell you Foster Taylor has a pegboard and a power drill in his garage—”
“I’m warning you.” Anger grabbed Leonard by the throat, squeezing his voice higher and higher until it was such a terrible, shrill cry that Robin had to cover her ears. “No more, Sylvia!”
“Leonard, just listen—”
“Shut up, or I’m leavi
ng and not coming back!”
Lee’s gut went into a sudden, agonizing spasm. She would always endure this pain in times of severe stress. However, unlike her more high-strung sister (hands over ears, chin aquiver, eyes swimming in unshed tears), Lee could take it on the chin—or in the gut—without falling apart. It was not that her suffering was any less intense than Robin’s. The awful contraction just above and to the right of her navel hurt so that she could not catch her breath. However—except for once in her life—Lee had the strength to endure pain. While this may not have been the style of heroines in books—victimized beauties, or stouthearts who are allowed only moral courage, not physical valor or derring-do—this was Lee White. A hearty girl. A stand-up dame.
“They’ll get over it, Robin,” she said. Robin’s hands, clapped over her ears, shook so badly her head bobbed up and down. Lee then tried a diversion. “Hey, Rob, you know next-door’s new puppies?” Lee was referring, of course, to Ginger Taylor’s latest brood of basenjis, but everyone in the house, even Woofer, the new weimaraner they had gotten after Duchess died, seemed to pick up on the waspishness that the name Taylor roused in Leonard, so they avoided mentioning it.
“So listen,” Lee went on “Guess who got one of the puppies?”
“Who?” Robin hiccuped.
“Cathy Foti, in sixth grade. Her parents bought one from Mrs. Whatsis!” Robin blinked, and tears began to spill. Lee tried harder. “Those puppies! So adorable—okay, not when they’re pooping. They got into Mommy’s herb garden yesterday. Mommy had to pull out all her parsley. Anyway, Cathy’s mother picked her up at school, and the puppy was in the car. You should have seen it!” Lee massaged Woofer’s belly with the toe of her saddle shoe to soften the pain of her betrayal. “Teeny-weeny wrinkles in its little doggy forehead. Oh, and the itty-bitty curly tail.”