Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “I’m begging you,” Jazz said, following Lee into the bathroom. “Please, just put it on hold for a year or two.”

  “We agreed—”

  “Don’t you want to spend time with Val?”

  “Don’t you? What kind of question is that?”

  “You’re the mother.” She squeezed the toothpaste too hard, and a strand of aqua paste squiggled onto her hand. “I know it’s not fair, but for thousands of years, mothers are the ones who stay home. I’m not saying give it up. I’m saying put it—”

  “—on hold. Well, the answer is no. N-o. I know my being away all day is not a perfect solution, but I can’t help it. I hired a great nanny. You said she was great.” What Jazz actually had said was that the nanny, a woman from Iowa named Cherry Berkemeyer, was “a dream,” and he had sounded so much like Leonard at his trendy worst that Lee had felt something fairly close to nausea.

  “It’s not just Val. We have responsibility for Kent now. You’re the one who wanted to take him on.”

  “We were the ones who agreed to take him on, and if you’d like, I can quote back that conversation verbatim.” She brushed her teeth with such force that her gums began to bleed. She wished she could put her hand right in the middle of his chest and shove Jazz out of the bathroom. Instead she rinsed her mouth as discreetly as she could. “And when I hired Cherry, it was with the clear understanding that Kent is part of the package, even though he’s away all day. When he comes home, he’s hers as much as Val is.”

  “What if Cherry leaves?”

  “She was at her last job for seven years. We’re paying her the national debt. Where is she going?” Jazz shrugged and turned to leave the bathroom. He was wearing pajamas that had his initials on the breast pocket. “Jazz,” Lee said.

  “What?” he said, exhaling slowly to show his patience.

  “You’re not the man I married.” Before he could say that she was not the woman either, she continued. “You’ve become a middle-aged Jewish furrier. What the hell has happened to you? Wanting me to stay home … where I belong! Where is the man I went to law school with, the man who was so proud of me—of what I did?”

  “I was proud of you then. I admired your drive, your guts. But I think it would take a hundred times more courage to quit and not do the knee-jerk feminist thing and abandon your kids to someone else to raise.”

  She flung her toothbrush onto the counter. “Then let me make a suggestion. If you don’t want your child abandoned to a perfectly competent and very nice woman, then you stay home. Quit the fur biz. I’ll stay with the D.A.’s another year, then I’ll go into private practice. Who knows, maybe we can even afford to keep the house. In any case, I’ll make something we can live on, if not here, then someplace else that isn’t a hellhole. Okay?”

  “No,” Jazz said very quietly. “It’s not okay. But I see I have no say in the matter, do I?”

  “In terms of my work, no. In terms of your own, yes.”

  “Then I’m sorry if I upset you.” He turned and walked back into the bedroom.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” Lee replied to his retreating back.

  “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree,” Jazz called out as he kicked off his slippers and lifted the blanket.

  “I guess so.” Lee looked into the vanity mirror, feeling there was something more she had to do in the bathroom. But she could not think what.

  The next day she returned to work.

  Nineteen

  Before Norman Torkelson and Mary Dean came into my life, I had tried fifty or sixty murder cases. So did I know what went on in killers’ heads in the days and weeks following a murder? Not a clue. Elation? Maybe. Anguish? Could be. Or did they simply revert to regular life, thinking: Hmm, I’ve got to buy more oatmeal, or: Gosh, I’d better get to the bathroom, because Seinfeld will be on in two minutes? After more than twenty years as a prosecutor and a defender, all I knew was that killers keep their crimes to themselves. Except for the random teenage sociopath who brags to his friends, hardly anyone admits to murder.

  An example: Take those times when the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that X shot Y right between the eyes. Overwhelming means nothing: X will deny it. What? Me kill Y? Outrageous! If there are actual eyewitnesses—an entire order of nuns willing to testify that, yes, they saw X come over and whack out Y (who at the moment of his death was on his knees, saying his rosary)—then X will have to admit, Okay, I did it. But he will swear on a stack of Bibles that it was in self-defense.

  So now that Mary Dean had actually offered me that uncommon gift, a confession—I killed Bobette Frisch—I wasn’t about to throw it away. Forget about telling Norman. He would only fire me. And if he had half the brains I credited him with, he’d have his new lawyer start proceedings to keep me from talking about the case—if not to shut me up permanently, then at least to hassle me until Norman could get Mary out of harm’s way. Or Norman would simply shove aside everyone in line at the jail pay phone, call Holly Nuñez, and claim that Mary was confessing to save him. Don’t believe a word she says! I did it. And Holly would respond: Not to worry, Norman. I believe you.

  So sitting there with Mary in the furnished apartment she and Norman had shared, I knew my only course of action was to keep her from talking to him. I sensed that with this case, considering all the webs a con artist could spin, any fancy footwork on my part would be counterproductive. Simple, direct action was best. So I invited Mary to come with me to talk to the assistant district attorney in charge of the case.

  “You mean now?” Mary inquired, bending over to unplug a vacuum, one of those low, expensive chrome models fitted with tools for cleaning venetian blinds and upholstery. Too sleek to have come with the apartment. I wondered if she and Norman schlepped it from city to city on their travels or if they sprang for a new one in each place they stopped for a scam. “You really think I should?”

  “You’re the one who has to make that decision,” I said, sounding like any proper, mealy-mouthed lawyer. Come on, I was thinking. Let’s get this thing rolling! But my words came out as soft and sugary as cotton candy. “If what you tell me is true, Mary, that you want to help Norman, then …”

  “I’ll go,” she said quietly.

  “I’m glad,” I told her. Mary wheeled the vacuum into a utility closet crammed with an awesome array of mops, brooms, brushes, spray cans, bottles of scary-colored cleaning liquids and two pairs of rubber gloves. “Just get on a pair of shoes. I’ll call a colleague of mine. A lawyer. I can’t represent you, because I’m Norman’s lawyer, but I’ll stick by you and this woman will see you through it. We’ll stop by her office, then go on to the D.A.’s. I’ll drive you down there.” I did not tell her to bring her toothbrush while she was at it; there was no point in putting her good intentions to the test.

  Mary peered down at her denim minidress. “Is this okay to wear to the D.A.’s?” It was a mistake for me even to think about it, because in that microsecond, she was off to her bedroom closet, going through the rack, no easy task, since the clothes were packed in so tight, hangers were just an impediment. She eased out a black dress, only to reject it as “too evening-y, don’t you think?” Then came three green dresses: olive, emerald, and bottle green. After a conversation longer than the ones I usually have to explain every single nuance of the plea bargaining process, we agreed the olive was best for such a serious occasion.

  I was half expecting her to consult with me on her choice of shoes and bag. When she didn’t and, instead, hopped into a pair of gold sandals, I found myself let down. Why? I suppose because I didn’t want to face having to see Mary face the music. Yet that was precisely what I’d been working toward: fairness, justice, whatever you want to call it. The killer should be the one punished for the crime of murder. No matter what kind of louse Norman was, it was wrong for him to pay for what Mary had done. Walking over to the telephone, though, I felt low, that logy premenstrual feeling. Just moving the three feet was almost beyond my capacity; I
was slogging through a substance thicker than mere air.

  While Mary put on makeup, I called Holly and announced I was bringing someone in to see her on urgent business. Before she could tell me she didn’t have time for me, I hung up. I watched Mary at the bathroom sink, a magnifying mirror in one hand and a mascara wand in the other. Time trudged forward. It was taking so long, as if she were coating one lash at a time and letting it dry before starting the next. For all I knew, she was. When at last she picked up a blush brush I said: “It’s better if you look a little pale, Mary.”

  I had met Barbara Duberstein in the Mommy Room—these days apparently called the Mommy-Daddy Room—on the first day of our children’s nursery school. A five-foot-tall powerhouse—her husband called her The Little Engine That Could—she had just started at Hofstra Law School. We hit it off, getting into a fairly emotional discussion about the Eleventh Amendment and the limits on the jurisdiction of the Federal judiciary, while her son and my daughter watched the class guinea pig move its bowels—an apparently enthralling experience. She was now a single practitioner in Mineola with a solid general practice, doing everything from wills to matrimonials to an occasional criminal case. She was smart and savvy, one of the rising stars of the County’s G.O.P., and I wanted her for Mary because I knew she had clout, in case clout would be called for.

  But I knew, and so did Barbara, that clout couldn’t do much for a client who wanted only one thing: to confess to murder. She tried getting Holly to agree to use immunity, in which we could go in for a single interview and nothing Mary would say could be used against her. But as we figured, Holly wasn’t giving out anything, not to someone who is determined to confess to a homicide the D.A. already thinks has been solved. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Barbara asked Mary. Once we get there, you won’t be able to take it back. And Mary replied: Let’s get it over with.

  Mary was staring at Holly’s perfect oval pale-pink acrylic nails. Understandable. Nail-staring was definitely less distressing than looking into the lens of the video camera looking down at her, taping her confession. Earlier, she had tried to alleviate the awfulness of this brown, plastic-wood room by making goo-goo eyes at Sam Franklin, who was sitting on Holly’s side of the table in the D.A.’s small conference room. But he had regarded Mary with such indifference that, wounded, she had turned away. It was strange sitting in that windowless, airless room: three women lawyers with shoulder pads, an about-to-confess killer in a halter-top dress, and a cop who kept looking from one of us to another, as if fearful of contracting estrogen poisoning.

  Holly, unlike Mary, was not checking out nails. No, it only looked that way. For the last hour, she had been studying Mary’s powerful-looking hands and long, strong fingers. “What happened when you choked her?” Holly was asking. “Did she die right away?”

  “No,” she said. “Not right away.” At first, I had been furious with Mary. What a birdbrain, that she would be more interested in an assistant district attorney’s manicure than in the fact the A.D.A. was going to send her for many years to a place where lack of emery boards would be the least of her problems. But then I saw how Mary was sitting: bolt upright, her hands clutching the brown metal arms of her chair, fingers curved rigidly, like claws, toes curled tight in the open sandals. All I could think of was that her posture was that of a condemned woman strapped into the electric chair, waiting for the juice.

  “Tell me about it,” Holly prompted. “The choking.” Her usual cheerleader’s perkiness was absent, but she couldn’t fight her nature. Congenitally buoyant she was: chin up, shoulders back. Her hands, fingers loosely laced, rested on the edge of the table, but every once in a while they would flutter, as if seeking the crepe-paper pom-poms they were born to wave. From a professional point of view, I had to admit, she was handling the interview with the right balance of skepticism and encouragement. For Mary’s sake, I was relieved Holly was prosecuting, and not one of Woodleigh Huber’s other new assistants in the Homicide unit, two guys my partner, Chuckie, and I referred to as Venom and Spite. Holly, for once not looking as if she had something better to do, was making Mary go over her account again and again, each time seeking more detail. She got everything out of Mary that I had, and more: like the fact that Mary had been stalking Bobette and Norman for three days prior to the murder, peering into the windows of Bobette’s house. Once, the day before, she had watched them as they made love on the couch in the living room.

  “I’m waiting,” Holly said. “I need you to tell me about it.”

  “You mean the neck thing?” Mary asked.

  “You bet. The strangulation,” Holly responded, a little too brightly for my taste.

  “I don’t know. I was, like, in this daze. But she kept trying to pull my hands off of her. Grabbing me here …” She lifted her right hand and brought it over, gingerly massaging her left wrist.

  “She was grabbing you around your wrists,” Holly said for the record. “Is that right?”

  “Yes, she was trying to pull my hands away. She kept doing it, but I was stronger and she kept getting … you know.” Mary looked away from Holly’s nails, embarrassed.

  “No, I don’t know. Please tell me.”

  “She was getting weaker. So then she started making these noises.” Mary croaked four times, brief, staccato froggy sounds. “I mean, it was awful, but not really like choking. More like she was trying to tell me something but couldn’t.”

  “Were you saying anything to her?” Sam asked.

  Mary turned to me and Barbara. We signaled it was all right to answer his question, so she turned back to him. Her expression eased: a man. The enemy, hostile, but still a man. “No,” Mary told him, “I didn’t say a thing.” He and Holly sensed what I sensed, that this was a lie. He waited, fiddling with the clip of his photo ID on his breast pocket. “I may have said something about her getting out of Norman’s life,” Mary finally conceded.

  “Be more specific,” Holly ordered.

  “That, like, Norman was in love with me and was going to marry me and the only reason he said he would marry her was for her money because she was …” She lowered her head and mumbled something.

  “Talk a little louder,” Barbara prompted her.

  “She was a fat pig,” Mary said defiantly, staring right into the glass eye of the video cam.

  “Did she die right then?” Holly asked. Naturally, she knew from reading the autopsy report pretty much how death had occurred. She was trying to make sure that Mary’s account concurred with the objective findings.

  “Not that second. But the”—Mary made the choking sound again, but softer this time—“finally stopped. And her eyeballs got yucky. Then she shut her eyes and I let her down.” She turned to Sam. “She was very heavy. I couldn’t hold her.”

  Before he could make a nasty comment and rattle her, Barbara Duberstein asked: “Mary, remember when we started, how Ms. Nuñez asked you if you were making this statement of your own free will? You said yes, you were.” Mary said yes, quietly and, for her, quite seriously, as if for once she truly comprehended the import of what she was saying. “Did anyone put undue pressure on you to make this statement?”

  “No.”

  “Did you discuss making this statement with Norman Torkelson?” I asked.

  Mary gave a loud, fast laugh. “Are you kidding?”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Of course it’s a no. He’d kill me if he knew I was doing this!” She happened to glance at Sam as she said this, and shrank back. “I don’t mean, like, really kill,” she explained to him. Almost as if it were beyond Sam’s control, his eyes changed from cold, dead cop eyes to sympathetic eyes, and almost instantly, into the misty eyes of soap opera close-ups. Holly glanced at me as Sam’s face began an unfamiliar journey into softness. I shrugged, as in: What did you expect? Holly shrugged back, as in: Another one bites the dust. Barbara merely looked heavenward and exhaled. “But see,” Mary continued, addressing only Sam Franklin now, “Norman said he sho
uld be the one to go to jail. Because he started the whole business and dragged me into it—which isn’t true. I love him. It was my idea we should work together, not his. But he said it would be easier if he went, because he’s been away before.” Still looking at Sam, she explained: “To jail. Away to jail.” He nodded his gratitude for her elucidation—passionate, all-out nodding that might never have stopped if Mary hadn’t started talking again. “See, Norman knew the ropes about jails. But he said, like, it wouldn’t be that long, with time off for good behavior. He told me: Just sit tight. But I can’t! Not now. I didn’t know they”—she turned from Sam to look at Holly—“were going to throw the book at him.” Her beautiful green eyes filled with tears then, and in total disregard of her mascara, Mary began to weep.

  “Well,” Holly began when we were back in her office. She had called in a policewoman to baby-sit for Mary while she, Sam, Barbara, and I talked. But Sam had made some excuse about pressing business at a crime scene in Plainview. The last we saw of him, however, he was no closer to Plainview than Mary’s chair. “I have to admit: You told me so, Lee.”

  “So now what?” I asked, crossing my legs, thinking about the inevitable call I would make to my guy to tell him I had no idea how late I’d be and would he be so good as to start thinking creatively about the defrosted chicken breasts in my refrigerator. This was going to be one long day.

  “There’s just one little problem,” Holly said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I don’t believe her.” Her voice was effervescent, like one of those bubblehead quiz show dames who think their co-host might be putting over a fast one on them.

  “What are you talking about, Holly?”

  “It doesn’t play for me.”

  I hate hip new uses for old verbs. “It doesn’t matter if it plays for you. It’s not a record, it’s not a movie; it’s a confession in a homicide case.”