Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “And then, like, it might not even be that long, because the lawyer thought he could get me off on appeal.” Mary made it sound so reasonable, so inevitable, that I could see she still had not stopped believing it entirely.

  Barbara was staring at her. “And you believed him?”

  “Norman loves me.” She pressed against the barrier that separated us and asked me: “Didn’t he? Tell her. Didn’t he love me?” I was so sick at heart. Before I could think of something kind to say, Mary slumped backward. “So?” she asked us. “How many years is it going to be?”

  “In this case?” Barbara said. “Actual time? I guess somewhere between eight and twenty years.” She looked to me for confirmation.

  “Mary,” I said, “you can fight this. You can—”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said very calmly. “In jail, out of jail. He’s gone. I’m going to die either way.”

  “No! Listen to me,” I said, so harshly that she flinched and Barbara dropped her pen. “You want to die. You think you’re going to die because there’s no reason to live. When the only man you love suddenly whips around and sticks a knife into you—and then walks away because he’s too sensitive to watch you bleed—you say: ‘Okay. I’m giving up. Let me bleed to death, because I cannot stand the pain. And besides, it’s what he wants. Maybe my dying will somehow make him love me again.’ Screw that! I’ve been there. You can stand the pain. You and I are going to pull that goddamn knife out of your heart. Whatever happens—and I can’t guarantee anything—you’re going to live. You’re going to have a big, ugly scar, but you’re going to live.”

  Mary’s eyes went from me to her lovely high-rise bosom. “You’re just kidding about the ugly scar, aren’t you?” she whispered.

  I didn’t know if it was the worst night of my life, but it was definitely one of my top two. Conned by my own personal con man. I, the one person under no delusions about Norman Torkelson, had been totally bamboozled by him. How he had picked up on what I had wanted! Not love: He knew he couldn’t work that scam with me. I was far too wary of him. And where he was, in jail, what good would my going nuts for him do? No, he wanted me sane. At peak efficiency. Norman knew precisely what I was and what I yearned for: I was an ordinary criminal defense lawyer who desired, from the top of her head to the soles of her not too high suburban heels, to be special. To stand beside justice as her sister. To save an innocent man.

  And so he had set me up to save him. He knew that Mary had been in Bobette’s house, knew her fingerprints were everywhere. He was probably outraged at the shoddy police work. How dare they not even mention a second set of prints! How dare they arrest him without investigating further! (And oh, how he must have hated Mary, blamed her for his arrest because she had stupidly registered his car in the name that led the police straight to his door!) So he set to work, dropping his poison into my ear drop by drop. And when it began to work, when I started to suspect Mary might have been at Bobette’s, he grew so defensive, so protective, that my suspicions had to grow: not only had Mary been there, but she was the killer. Not my client. Not my client, whom I was going to get off!

  And when I built such a brilliant case against her, he could deny it no more. All right, yes, Mary did it. But you can’t do a thing about it. I’m going to take the rap. I, the con artist, the criminal, the moral leper, deserve this one chance to be redeemed. Allow me my humanity.

  How poetic! How noble! How I fell for it! How much like all those piteous marks of his I turned out to be. Norman conned me and sent me out to con Holly Nuñez, and I did not disappoint him. I was so ready to believe him.

  I took him out to dinner, and he ordered prime ribs of beef!

  Forty-five years old: There had been a lot of water under my bridge. I was one street-smart dame, wasn’t I? Who would have believed someone like me could be conned? A con man. Who else?

  Forget my ego: What would this do to my career? Would my partner ever trust my judgment again? For that matter, could I trust Chuckie not to yuck it up with the boys at TJ’s over how I’d been conned? (“Would a fella ever fall for a hoax like that? I ask you?”) And what about Holly and her bosses at the D.A.’s? There wasn’t much love for me in that office, but at least there was universal acceptance that I was a straight arrow. My credibility was my stock in trade. Now that it was shot, what did I have? And when word went around the Bar Association? Who would ever refer another case to me?

  And Barbara? She had not yet been paid. I asked her—almost begged her—to let me split my retainer from Norman with her. Don’t be ridiculous, she chided me. A right and graceful response. But a case that had looked like a few hours of easy work, watching over some killer desperate to confess, had turned into a misery that was eating up time from the rest of her practice.

  And the worst of my nightmare: My guy. Not just a fine lawyer. There was nothing he did that he did not do well. What would he make of such a screwup? I had no doubt he would show me incredible compassion. He would say: It’s understandable. Don’t give yourself such a hard time. You’re human. It could have happened to me, Lee.

  In my heart I did not believe it could have happened to him. It had happened to me. Now he would know that I was not as good as he’d always sworn to me I was. What we had would never be the same again.

  I had made a pretty good speech to Mary about pulling out the knife. Well, I couldn’t get the thought of that knife out of my head. And I thought about twisting a bedsheet into a rope.

  It was not a good night.

  Holly Nuñez’s young forehead was wrinkled. She squinted as if she was dying to be in a dark room. Basically, she looked like a dame with one hell of a headache, and when she looked at me, she acted as if I was the one who had given it to her. Well, basically that was right. And Barbara’s forehead wasn’t exactly smooth. If she wasn’t acting as if I’d given her a headache, she could not hide the fact that she was under heavy-duty stress. After all, she was the lawyer in a case she never had control of—and never would have.

  “So you’re saying that once Norman allowed himself to be convinced to let you take the rap, he coached you on what to say to Ms. White and me?” Holly was asking.

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “All right,” Holly said. “Tell me what he told you.”

  “Well, see, he told me what happened. Like, he described it. He said if I could see it through his eyes, it would be like seeing it for myself.”

  “So you’re telling me he described the murder of Bobette Frisch to you?”

  “Yes,” said Mary, a little impatiently. Clearly, she did not think much of Holly’s powers of comprehension. But Holly was comprehending, and she knew she had a terrible problem on her hands. She had tried, without any success, to trip Mary up in the hopes that Mary’s story itself was a con, part of a labyrinthine scheme concocted by Norman with the aim of forcing the district attorney to let them both go. But in the end, Holly, Barbara, and I all understood: It was Norman Torkelson alone who had killed Bobette.

  Holly was wearing a pink suit that looked like a major Easter mistake. Or perhaps it looked so awful, so Pepto-Bismolish, because its wearer was not her usual pink-cheeked, pink-lipped perky self. As she interrogated Mary, I could see her trying to figure out how she could manipulate this whole situation so she would not look bad. She couldn’t seem to find a way. To her credit, she hung in there. She was of a new generation of women, one that admitted no obstacles to its upward march. It was not a matter of age so much as temperament: Holly Nuñez wanted to go to the head of the American Dream line. Well, why shouldn’t she, now that the Establishment Wasps had become marginal and the Jews were fast becoming the new Wasps? Except in all her dreams, this was the one career move she hadn’t planned on: humiliation.

  “Tell me how Norman Torkelson described the murder,” Holly ordered Mary.

  “Like he was really tired. And crabby. She had been all over him before they went to the bank. He couldn’t say: ‘Hey, get off of me,
Fatso.’ Could he?”

  “Did they have sex?” Holly asked.

  “No, and that was part of the problem. ’Cause he couldn’t, you know, get it up for her.”

  “You told me in your taped confession that you saw them having sexual relations,” Holly said.

  “Not that day, the day she got killed. The day before. I think. So do you want to hear about how she got killed or not?”

  Considering that Mary’s entire life hung on the slender thread of Holly’s cooperation, I thought she was being a little imprudent. I considered a wink or a hint, but knowing Mary, I said: “Don’t get angry with Holly. She’s the only one who can help you, and if she walks out of here, you’re going to be spending a lot of years in Bedford Hills.”

  “Sorry,” Mary said, her voice still a little hoarse from her suicide attempt. Still she did not begin her account.

  “What’s the matter, Mary?” Barbara asked.

  “Will this get Norman in trouble?” She had stopped her edgy cheek-chewing and was now openly nervous, biting her lower lip.

  We three lawyers glanced at each other. She was still protecting him. “Let’s put it this way,” I suggested. “What kind of trouble can you get him in? What do you think the odds are that Norman is hanging around here, waiting for the police to come?”

  “He’s out of here,” Mary said quietly.

  “And do you think he’s going to take risks that could lead to an arrest, knowing that with you facing twenty years in jail, the only sane thing for you to do would be to tell the truth? Do you think he’s going to allow himself to get caught once he becomes a murder suspect again? His fingerprints are in the computer. If he got picked up, he’d be back here in a day or two. He’s going to lie low for a long time. So you tell me, do you think you can get Norman in trouble, even if you wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “Then please tell Holly everything he told you,” Barbara told her.

  “Where was I?” Mary asked.

  “His not getting it up,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, right. He couldn’t get it up, and all the way to the bank she kept saying things like: ‘Maybe I’m making a mistake. Maybe I’m buying a pig in a poke.’ On account of his not being able to.”

  “Did he ever have that trouble before?” Holly asked, a question I sensed was posed not for prosecutorial reasons but because she was dying to know.

  “Not with me!”

  “With Bobette?”

  “I don’t know. See, he didn’t know that I knew about him doing it with her. I don’t think there was any problem, because if it happened before, she wouldn’t have gone to the bank at all, would she? Anyways, she was making these crummy remarks. And then she took a real long time at the bank, and he could see through the window this guy in a suit was talking to her. Norman was, like, pissed. Because of the pig in a poke thing and because marks never talk to anyone in their banks or anything. I’ll tell you why. Norman says they don’t want to be stopped. Deep down, they know, but they really don’t want to, if you get my drift.”

  “Did he know what the man in the bank was saying to Bobette?” Holly inquired. I had never gotten to the point of reading the bank officer’s account in the discovery material, but I was sure she already knew the answer.

  “Not then, ’cause Norman was outside. But later. They got home and Bobette wanted to try again. Norman made some excuse about being real tired and also so excited that she was giving him this opportunity to start his life all over again. That’s when she says the guy in the bank told her: Hey, this is an awful lot of money, and she told him it was an investment and he made some remark about being careful. About how there are con men all over the place! So Norman starts to laugh it off, and she just walks away.”

  “And then what?” Holly asked.

  “She came back. She was stuffing her yap with a Snickers and saying: ‘Maybe you are a con man,’ with Snicker goo all over her mouth, and her teeth were, like, brown. Like teasing him, but he knew it wasn’t only teasing. So he said that’s where he made his mistake.”

  “Killing her?”

  “No. Taking the bank envelopes with the money. He said if he’d left them there and walked out, insulted that she was saying he was a con man, she would have come running after him. But he took them. And she tried to grab them back.”

  “And?” Barbara said.

  “And so they sort of started fighting, and she was pretty strong so he stopped her.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “By choking her.” All three of us looked at Mary’s hands at the same moment. Big, yes. But not as big as Norman’s. With tapering, feminine fingers. Mary thought we were looking at her bitten nails and folded her arms so her hands were hidden.

  “When you described the murder,” Holly said, “you talked about Bobette’s tongue sticking out, about how heavy she was. A lot of detail. It made it seem as though you’d gone through it.”

  “I did. Not in real life. But like when I played Norman’s ex-wife, or Ms. McDonald from Pinnacle Collections. We rehearsed. A lot. Norman said I had to do it over and over until it didn’t just sound good: It had to feel natural. And that’s what we did with the Bobette business. Over and over. He gave me the story and he played Bobette. You know, like he pretended to be scared when he saw me, and he’s so good, I really believe he’s scared. And then we moved around our place like it was her place—going into her living room. It was so real. Like when Norman was saying, ‘Please, please, I’ll give you anything you want. I can get money,’ I was so mad at her. But it was him! Except it felt like it was her.” A nervous spasm made her head quiver. “A couple of times, like the night I tried … you know, with the sheet. I got this real oogy feeling. Like I had done it. Except it was worse, because I remembered I did it. Except I really didn’t. Norman did.”

  “Well,” I said, “do you think Norman feels oogy about it?”

  “Norman?” Mary said. She almost smiled. Then she shook her head: No.

  Before Holly was willing to sign off on the case, she had the police lab make prints of Mary’s hand. It took two days, but they finally determined the hands were too small and the fingers too thin to have strangled Bobette Frisch. By that time, I was a wreck, so exhausted from saying “I’m sorry,” so ashamed of the whole Torkelson mess, that I was taking refuge in extralegal fantasies: Start a catering business featuring home-cooked meals harassed working women could pass off as their own: Gee, Mom, that was great meat loaf! Or open a little storefront wool-market-cum-crocheting school and blanket Long Island in afghans. I had fantasies of my daughter striking it so big in a television series that she’d say: You’ve worked long and hard enough, Ma. It’s time for you to retire and enjoy life. But Barbara and I had a conference call with Holly, who finally conceded, albeit grudgingly, that we had a deal. Mary would go free. A warrant would be issued for Norman Torkelson, wanted for murder. And once again, for only the fiftieth time, I apologized.

  Holly called me back an hour later. “I’m sorry, Lee,” she began.

  “What?”

  “Woodleigh Huber won’t let her go.”

  “What?”

  “He says he doesn’t believe her recantation. He thinks she’s guilty.”

  “That’s impossible. The hand prints! Did you—”

  “He says it’s a judgment call. He says the lab is wrong. It’s his duty to stand firm.”

  I told her I would be down in her office in a few minutes. I hung up the phone, thinking: This case will never be over. And just moments before, I had been at the bank and withdrawn a thousand dollars to give to Mary so she could take some time and think about what to do with her life. I had a feeling that given the choice between hustling and dental hygienist school, she would go for hustling every time. Still, I had already called my across-the-street neighbor who owned a few franchise beauty parlors; he agreed that if she would go for her hairdresser’s license, he’d hire her as a shampoo girl so she could have a foot in the door. In my mind,
I was already assuring her that I’d pay for beauty school tuition.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked Jerry McCloskey, who was head of the Homicide unit and Woodleigh Huber’s chief toady. “We had a deal.” I did not yell at him. He was wringing his hands, and I could see he was being pulled between Holly and Huber. What amazed me was that he was even considering Holly’s position. And that Holly, legs crossed, arms crossed, and determined as hell, was still on my side. “We made a deal,” I told Jerry.

  “Calm down, Lee.”

  “You’ve known me for years, Jerry. This is calm for me. Now, off the record, what is this about?” McCloskey peered around his office as if he suspected I’d hidden a camera crew. “I said off the record.”

  “The Boss was fair with you, Lee. No partisan crap, no nothing. You got your guy off fair and square. But this time … No. She did it. And the Boss feels used. You have one success, and now—”

  I cut him off. “Look, I apologized. I was conned. You were conned. But worst of all, Mary Dean was conned, and she’s facing twenty years for murder. For the life of me, I don’t understand why.”

  I thought this was between me and McCloskey, but Holly spoke up. “The ‘why’ is that Woodleigh Huber can’t admit he was conned. He’d rather have her rot in jail than come out and say he made a mistake. There’s an election coming up in less than a year.”

  “Holly!” McCloskey practically gasped.

  “Oh, stop jerking us off, Jerry,” she said. I truly did a double take. Her words, of course, were delivered with their usual happy gee-whizness, but she was standing tough—for me. “That woman was the victim of a clever and vicious criminal. You and the Boss should have some humanity, for heaven’s sake!” She was making my argument, so I sat back and let her.

  “This ‘victim,”’ he shot back, “besides being a hooker, has a record for assault.”

  “This victim has been used and abused by men for years,” Holly retorted. I thought she might be stretching things a little. Maybe Mary was a victim, but she’d also been a pretty willing accomplice. Still, I was Mary Dean’s advocate, not Woodleigh Huber’s. Holly went on: “You and the Boss are sure flying the old male flag. ‘A hooker!’ She’s twenty-two years old! Are you going to sacrifice her to the Boss’s political ambitions?” Holly uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “Come on, Jerry. This doesn’t have to happen.”