Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  She took the photos home, and after dinner, while Jazz watched the Yankees getting creamed by Cincinnati in the Series, she spread them out on the kitchen table. With a flashlight in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, she bent over them, studying Nicky and the trunk that had been his grave. Not much, she thought, although it might make a good ad for the Continental: Check out our roomy trunk! A few minutes later, she noticed: There was something pale and squiggly in the right-hand corner. What was it? More important, was it what she thought it was? She called the detective sergeant on the case, a guy named Brody. Yeah, he said, it’s rubber gloves. You know it’s after ten o’clock? Lee ignored his question and asked if he’d brought in the gloves to the lab to check for prints. Prints? Brody asked, as if it were a strange new concept. The perpetrator might have used the gloves to put Nicky in the car and simply forgotten them, Lee explained. Gotcha, Brody said wearily. I’m sure the gloves went in. It’s automatic. Good, Lee said. Then let’s not give the killer time to remember he forgot his gloves and skip town—unless you think it was Nicky who kept them there in case he had to perform emergency microsurgery. I’d like the answer by noon tomorrow.

  When Eddie Marcantonio, whose fingerprints were found inside and outside the gloves, was arrested for the murder of Nicky Gaudioso, he claimed that he was a salesman for Sunshine Garden Supplies. While he did collect a check from Sunshine, however, he would not have known a pile of manure from a hot rock. As Detective Sergeant Brody told Lee, his real profession was hit man for the Gambino family. His job required patience and not imagination or intelligence, so Eddie did quite well. He was not the sort who minded spending his working life sitting in a car, waiting hours for one of his subjects to emerge from a dinner of cervelli fritti at Vincente’s restaurant or from a visit to his girlfriend’s. He was patient, looking straight ahead, not listening to the radio, not reading a newspaper, with only his knife or his gun for company. Then he would do what he’d been sent to do: commit murder. Eddie knew, naturally, to try and avoid crowds, but if his business was ever observed, he did not worry. Should the terror of the moment not frighten an eyewitness, the notion of the cruel death that would follow a court appearance to identify Eddie as the killer worked wonders.

  “Eddie didn’t do it!” his lawyer, Chuckie Phalen, announced to Lee. “He uses rubber gloves all the time. In the garden supply business. Doesn’t like dirt getting under his fingernails.” Chuckie wheezed as he spoke. His pallor was almost as bad as Nicky Gaudioso’s.

  “This is your defense?” Lee asked. She neither liked nor disliked Phalen. He was one of the Old Boys, criminal lawyers who considered themselves archliberals in those rare instances when they managed to refrain from calling a female attorney “honey.”

  “Just because he has an Italian last name doesn’t make him Mafia.” Despite his breathing problems, Chuckie spoke with an energy that was rare for an Old Boy on a routine murder case.

  “No,” Lee agreed, already hearing his summation in her mind. She hated to admit it, she had told Jazz the night before, but it wasn’t so terrible working out here—and don’t say I told you so. He’d been thrilled, and his hug had been full of joy. Well, it wasn’t that terrible. Lawyers waited until she finished her sentence before beginning theirs. The cops didn’t pal around with the assistant D.A.’s the way they did in New York, but they were cordial enough. Brody had even shaken her hand when the fingerprints on the gloves proved to be Eddie Marcantonio’s and then, for good measure, patted her on the back and announced: You’re hot shit. “There happen to be three drops of Nicky’s blood on Eddie’s rubber glove,” Lee informed Chuckie Phalen. “That doesn’t exactly paint a picture of Mr. Sunshine Garden Supply planting petunias, does it?”

  “I like your stuff,” Chuckie said. It was, on the surface, a predictable compliment, the old pro patting the rookie on the back, hoping the rookie would feel enough of a personal tie to give his client a break. But Lee sensed it was sincere, and she wanted to smile and give him a warm thank-you, maybe even—after the trial—say something about her liking his stuff. But she could be wrong, he could be setting her up, so she just offered him a slight incline of the head that said: I heard you. “Aah, you think I’m buttering you up. I can tell. That’s okay, I understand. Now listen, sis—”

  “Lee.”

  “Lee, what I have here is a family man. Wife, two kids. A dog, even. So maybe we can talk.”

  “They don’t allow dogs in Attica. The wife and kids can visit.”

  “You’re a real softie.”

  “I keep trying.”

  “You want to check with Will on this?”

  “No.”

  “Will is tough but fair.”

  “Good. That’s how I want to be.”

  “So how’s about five to seven?” Chuckie asked, the air creating a whistling sound every time he inhaled.

  “That’s what I’m hoping he’ll get for illegally parking the Continental on county property.” For the first week, she kept saying “city,” and she was only now getting accustomed to glimpses of green outside and being greeted with actual hellos instead of grunts by the unit’s secretaries. “The murder charge is extra. I can offer you something less if he’s willing to discuss who asked him to kill Nicky and send a message.”

  “What message?”

  “The message that this is what happens to guys who talk.”

  “You mean, the you-know-whats in Nicky’s mouth?” Chuckie asked, with such false innocence that Lee couldn’t help it. She threw back her head and laughed.

  But she stopped laughing six months later, in court.

  Chuckie was good, very good. The way he cut into the credibility of her expert witnesses: not with eye-rolling, give-me-a-break mockery or go-for-the-throat attack, but by respectful solicitation of their views, seeking ever more amplification until the experts were drowning in rolling seas of their own jargon. In addition, Chuckie had the New York-Irish equivalent of courtly Southern charm, calling prospective jurors “Ma’am” and “Sir” during voir dire, wheezing to the judge phrases like: “I respectfully submit to Your Honor” and “I would beg the Court’s indulgence.” There was not a hint of blarney. A gentleman, the jury was obviously thinking, and Chuckie’s dignity subsumed the man beside him at the defense table, Eddie Marcantonio—who, after a Chuckie wardrobe consultation—was looking like a deacon of an extremely sincere church.

  But Chuckie’s being good was only half the problem. It was that Lee was not. She could tell it by the way the judge listened to her motions; no matter how reasonable her arguments were, he reacted as if she were being not merely frivolous but sneaky. And the jury. For them, Chuckie was a good show and she was the commercials. They kept tuning out.

  “What’s happening?” Lee demanded of Will. She threw up her hands. Several shreds of coleslaw flew off her plastic fork and landed on his office rug. She reached over and picked them up. “You sat in yesterday. You saw. They’re not with me, and don’t tell me they are.”

  He put down the huge, drippy corned beef and pastrami combo she had been coveting. “I won’t tell you they are, because they’re not.”

  “You could at least be a little less eager to give me the bad news.”

  “No. I’m giving it to you where it has to go: right between the eyes. You’re screwing up.” But he said it with affection.

  In her half year in the D.A.’s Office, she had gone from awe of Will Stewart to having a slight crush on him, then a large crush, then to a realization that what he was, above all else, was a great friend—although in truth the crush never disappeared. Will had grown up less than ten miles from her, in Glen Cove. His parents had worked on one of the great Gold Coast estates, his father as head groom in the stables, his mother as a laundress. The owner of the estate had taken a shine to him and paid for his education at Columbia. Will had gone on to Columbia Law School on scholarship. She found him a fascinating mix, a kid from a blue-collar family who had grown up to be a down-to-earth
working stiff—civil service division. Yet hand in hand with his lack of airs and his nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, he comported himself with the polish of someone born to great wealth. It went far beyond his impeccable clothes and physical grace.

  Time and again, Lee got annoyed with herself for comparing Jazz and Will, but she could not stop. She was dazzled at the differences between two men whose lives had been molded by old money. Jazz, at twenty-seven, was still the bright-eyed, high-spirited preppy who viewed the world as a fun place and Long Island as his own special playground. Will, at thirty-seven, was not the least bit bright-eyed. Lee could not imagine him that way, even as a child. He behaved as if he had seen it all and was faintly amused by it. But only faintly. He had a nice mouth, but it never smiled. She sensed there was sadness behind his elegant and wry facade, but since he played his personal cards so close to his exquisitely-fitting vest, she had no idea what the sadness was—or whether it was simply a romantic notion she had.

  What she couldn’t get over is that he seemed made for her. Not the way Jazz was. Taylor made, she called Jazz, the way he cheered her by his very nature, the way his own self-assurance gave her a confidence in herself she had never before had—because why would such a man pick her unless she was, in fact, as wonderful as he kept telling her she was? And of course, the way he made love: Taylor made. Still, once they finished the business of marriage, the routine recounting of their day, the gossip about their extended families, they had very little to talk about.

  But based on their common interests, she and Will Stewart could have sprung from the same egg. They discovered they listened to the same radio shows driving to and from the office. They were passionate about music. Lee gave Will a tape of Fats Waller playing stride piano, which he loved, and he introduced her to one of his favorites, the late-Renaissance composer Frescobaldi, and after she heard it, she told him: I owe you for this. They both cooked and gardened; they enjoyed obscure off-off Broadway plays; they were intensely political, and while she was a Democrat and he a Republican, they were moderates, so their arguments over lunch were more about style than ideology. One weekend, shortly after she had once again taken up the crocheting she had learned from her Grandma Bella, she realized that making afghans was the sole interest she had that Will Stewart did not share, and that his abiding love of the New York Mets—he was at that moment at a game—was not going to be hers, ever.

  Still, however close, theirs was an office friendship, and Will was her boss. Lee set down the plastic platter of tuna salad. “How am I screwing up?” she asked. Her answer was his glance, right at her stomach. She was barely six months pregnant but looked as though she was about to give birth to twin sumo wrestlers. “Being pregnant?”

  “You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You’re not dealing with Manhattan juries anymore. Out here, they don’t like to see women in court trying murder cases. Okay, Huber told you that, you didn’t like it, and you fought him on it. Good. I’m glad you did. But they really don’t want to see pregnant women in court trying a case where she has to talk about a guy’s balls getting whacked off and shoved between his teeth.”

  “But I’m being feminine!” Lee made a sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating her soft silk blouse and small, antique locket. “I don’t fucking shout!”

  “You just did.”

  “I mean in court. I’m polite, nice. You saw how feminine I was yesterday, didn’t you? What the hell else do they want from me?”

  “They want you out of the courtroom and home taking care of your baby.”

  “I don’t have a baby yet!” She rested her hand protectively on her mound of a stomach and felt a friendly kick of acknowledgment. “Look, Will, give it to me straight. Are you telling me I should stay out of court?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because if you did, I’d fight you on it.”

  “I’m telling you that you have to adapt better. You’re not just another lawyer. You’re a pregnant woman in a traditional, middle-American community, and if you want them to approve of you, you need more than a little heart on a gold chain.”

  “What do I need? A gingham pinafore?” She felt weary. Pregnancy exhaustion, trial fatigue, as well as the cosmic weariness that comes with the fear that you have made the wrong choice in life. Maybe she was not good enough for the job, and the whole time in Manhattan she had been flying with Melanie Tucker’s wings.

  “You need to show the jury you’re one of them. The judge too.”

  “I am one of them. There are seven women on the jury, and six of them have kids.”

  “And not one of them spends her days going after a ball-chopping mob guy. So you’ve got to show them what you have in common with them. Not your locket. Your values. You and I both know we have to be strong to stomach what we see in this job, and we help ourselves by keeping an emotional distance by being cynical. Nothing surprises us, nothing gets to us. But there’s a difference between being strong and being tough. You’re not tough. Deep down, you’re shocked by what Eddie Marcantonio did to Nicky. Aren’t you?”

  She did not want to give him the easy answer he was looking for. But when she thought about it, letting him finish his sandwich in silence, she had to answer: “Yes. It’s horrible.”

  “Then let the judge and jury see that. You don’t have to go into a phony feminine swoon. Let them see the person who grew up around here and is appalled to find Mafiosi butchering each other and then—just as bad—driving on the grass in Eisenhower Park to leave the body. Your shock is real, and you’ve got to use everything you have. Use your shock. Use your normal, human response: Yuck! And I’d like to hear one reference during the trial to the fact that you were born and grew up here on the Island, and one more during your summation. More than that would be overkill. Trust me, Lee, I do it all the time. It calms their prejudices: Oh, local kid made good. Not some slick piece of work from the city. One of us. Makes them feel safe.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t thank me. I’m here for more than lunch.”

  “You know,” Lee said to her witness that afternoon in court, Detective-Sergeant Brody, “when I was growing up here”—she would have sworn the twelve jurors and two alternates sat up straighter—“we used to go to Eisenhower Park and run in the wooded area all the time. Wasn’t it a terrible risk that some child would find Nicky Gaudioso’s Lincoln Continental?” She wrapped her arms protectively on her pregnant belly. “And if they opened the trunk …” She closed her eyes, and thought of one particular close-up of Nicky’s face, and a genuine shudder passed through her.

  Use everything you have, Will Stewart had said. Chuckie Phalen lost People v. Marcantonio.

  Lee was due to give birth on June 21, 1977, and since by the weekend following the trial she needed either Jazz or a derrick to pull her out of a chair, she began her maternity leave. In truth, her only regret in leaving the office was not being able to see Will every day. While she liked some of her colleagues and the cops she dealt with, the camaraderie she had felt in Manhattan, that elation that filled her at ten-thirty at night when some Homicide detective came in carrying a couple of six-packs and everyone gathered around to shoot the shit, did not come to pass in the Nassau County D.A.’s. No, this was the suburbs. Lawyers worked hard and went home to their wives to discuss whether to invest in an underground sprinkler system, while they waited for the charcoal to heat up so they could grill their marinated chicken thighs and vegetable kebabs.

  Jazz called her almost hourly. Anything yet? Nothing, just Braxton Hicks contractions, she reported. They had been to natural childbirth classes and took comfort that by breathing properly and knowing what would happen, they would be in control. She did not feel in control. There was so much pressure on her bladder that if she sneezed or laughed she wet her pants. Not that she was laughing much. The start of the tenth month of pregnancy is not a good time to begin asking oneself: Have I made a mistake?

&nb
sp; She never felt that way at night, when Jazz came flying through the door, all smiles and kisses, telling her to stop it, she did not look like a manatee; she was still a fantastic piece of ass. As they watched TV together, he would massage her feet and ankles on their brand-new cushy couch, and she would think: This is what love is.

  But days were different. She had too much time to think. It bothered her a little that she, an ex-radical, had gotten co-opted into the system without even a peep from her conscience. Living in a rose-covered cottage and leafing through books of afghan patterns. Working for the government. If her conscience was not sticking it to her, then shouldn’t her pride be giving her the business? Had her beliefs in her college years been that shallow? Or was she being too hard on herself? Was the lawyer who stood up and said “Lee White for the People, Your Honor” indeed the woman the Cornell revolutionary once dreamed of becoming?

  What bothered her even more during those endless daylight hours was Jazz. When he was not with her, she wondered: Who is he? She had fallen in love first with a barefoot boy in a pizza parlor and, second, with a man utterly at ease with himself. How she had marveled at his simple acceptance of the fact that the world was his oyster and, then, at his invitation to come join him on the half-shell and spend her life with him. Come on, the invitation read. You don’t have to prove yourself all the time. You don’t have to push. You’re with me. We’re in like Flynn. More in, because Flynn is an arriviste and you and I, babe, belong.

  “Don’t you think,” Lee asked Robin, “that Mom and Dad won?”

  “Won what?”

  “Won the war with us. We’ve become everything they wanted us to be.”

  Robin bit her rose petal of a lower lip. Her work at the day care center was voluntary, and she had stopped going in afternoons in order to be with Lee. When Robin announced her decision, Lee had been first appalled, then fearful of wounding her sister by explaining her need for privacy. After that she became angry, because she always had to tread softly where Robin was concerned; any serious obstacle to what sensitive Robin wanted might catapult her back into the darkness of drugs. But in the end, Lee found herself grateful for her sister’s company. She was lonely, and frightened about going into labor alone. She had a recurring daydream of experiencing a fierce contraction and running for the phone to call Jazz and the obstetrician but stumbling, crashing to the floor, striking her head or breaking both legs, and lying, helpless, screaming out in pain for hours—and having the baby come out stillborn. So she felt safe with her sister in the house. Also, she found it fun to have a friend to talk to, especially a nonlawyer who was smart but who didn’t always have a smart rejoinder.