Bitter Bronx (13 page)

Other law firms hoped to hire them away. But these shadow men—Hector and Paul—were loyal to Marla. They volunteered to squire Irene around—took her ice-skating at the Chelsea Piers, visited Ellis Island and the sculpted debris of the World Trade Center, went to Brighton Beach, where Irene wandered on the boardwalk and performed a few tricks with a little gang of Russian acrobats.

She dressed like a cowgirl in leather pants. And she slipped into some kind of life on Central Park West. Marla gave her a generous allowance, like she did with Candice and Lollie Jr. And she held on to one of her father's last rituals, a Sunday brunch at home. Her daughters had opted out of that ritual—they wouldn't
dream
of spending Sunday mornings with their own mother and Grandma Lollie. But at least Lollie didn't hide in her room. She played the martyr and sat with Irene.

Lollie would eat in silence for ten minutes. Irene had impeccable manners; she never licked her fingers, the way Lollie did. It was always Irene who broke the ice. She would talk about the alcoholic movie stars she had met at Rhineland Manor; Marla had never heard of a single one—Marisa Endicott, Gracie Chance . . .

“Oh, Gracie had a fling with Leonardo DiCaprio—Leo was the love of her life. They just happened to bump into each other on the set of
Titanic
.”

Lollie came out from behind the little church she had made of her fingers. “I saw that film eleven times. I know every actor and actress by heart. There was no such creature as Gracie Chance in
Titanic
.”

Irene plucked on the leather frills of her cowgirl coat. “She was Kate Winslet's body double. If you look hard enough, you can find her hands and feet.”

“That's a lie,” Lollie said, munching on some Russian coffee cake. She arched her neck like the homecoming queen at Ohio State—she considered everything after that her great fall; marriage, children, grandchildren meant very little. She reminded Marla of some brittle, half-mad bird of prey.

“Look at her! Your sister is seething. She cannot listen to the truth. I nearly died delivering her. She was seventeen pounds. I ought to be in the
Guinness Book of Records
. It's a miracle I survived that birth.”

“Stop that,” Marla said. “Stop that right now. Irene wasn't seventeen pounds.”

“And how would you know, Miss Smarty-Pants? Were you in the delivery room with me? The nurse fainted. I had to push and push. I ruptured a million blood vessels. My face was splattered with her rotten blood.”

Irene laughed and cut into the lox. “Mummy, I wish I had never come out.”

“Don't call me that. It's disgusting. I'm not your mummy. I never was. You were a monster I had to expel from my loins. I never recovered, and I never will.”

Lollie hurled her napkin at Little Sister and left the table. Marla clutched Irene's hand.

“We have a crazy mother. We always did. I don't know how Daddy put up with her . . . I do know. He never listened to more than
half
of what she had to say.”

“But I could be the crazy one. Otherwise they wouldn't have locked me up.”

“No one locked you up,” Marla said, in a frenzied whisper. “Daddy stole you from us.”

2.

M
arla was suspicious of all the savage tales she heard, that Irene had been ungovernable as a child, had beaten Marla senseless with one of Lollie's shoes—or was it a hairbrush?—when she was three and a half. And they had to get rid of the little demon and put her in a gilded jail. It was like Franz Kafka on Central Park West, morbid doings behind a respectable screen. Marla didn't believe a word of it. She traversed the huge apartment, which wrapped around two corners, with its terra-cotta façade, and landed in Lollie's bedroom. Marla didn't even bother to knock. She didn't have to be polite with the homecoming queen.

Lollie had a panoramic view of the park, with the reservoir like a huge, oval emerald in the blazing sun. It was her widow's quarters, her fiefdom, with a sunken alcove where Lollie could dream in her facial masks and pretty herself without a purpose. But Marla shouldn't have been so cruel. She lived a monstrous life, shielding murderers and swindlers, defying prosecutors and ripping out the threads of their elaborate tales. “The girl has the biggest pair of balls in Manhattan.” That's what the district attorney's men said about Marla Silk.

None of her liaisons ever lasted more than a couple of weeks. Perhaps Marla, and not her mother, was the half-mad bird of prey. Lollie lay in bed reading one of the Modern Library classics she'd kept from Ohio State. From the fatness of the book, Marla figured it was Tolstoy.

“Mother, you have to stop
landing
on Irene.”

Lollie glanced up from her book and hurled off her glasses with a sweep of her hand; she didn't want anyone, including her daughter, to know that she couldn't decipher a word without her reading glasses.

“Then she shouldn't lie about actresses who don't even exist. Gracie Chance, indeed.”

Irene was a casualty of some civil war Marla still didn't understand.

“But she isn't the only liar in this house.”

“Marla, don't speak in riddles. I'll have one of my migraines, and it will be your fault if I collapse.”

“I suppose Irene's some vagabond I brought back from the Bronx.”

“Oh, she's a vagabond, all right—a little, scheming vagabond. She seduced your father with her big brown eyes. He was attracted to her from the moment she was born. I was covered with blood and he cooed at her. It was almost fatal, a borderline case.”

“Mother, do you have to be so damn melodramatic? I don't—”

“I wasn't the only one with jealous fits. You couldn't bear Irene and her big eyes.”

“I don't believe you,” Marla said, but why was she shivering? She never panicked in court. Marla could outstare judges and juries, could drive hostile witnesses half-insane, and now she shivered in Lollie's bedroom, with that enormous emerald eye outside the window.

“She hit you with one of my stiletto heels—again and again. She broke my best pair of shoes, the little bitch. Your skull was on fire. I told you how to play dead. And Irene stopped talking.”

“Mummy, I don't understand.”

“She turned mute—she had murder in her eyes.”

Marla flared up with anger, could have slapped Lollie. “Shame on you,” she said. “Having a four-year-old girl as an accomplice.”

“You were almost five.”

The doctors came, Lollie said. They examined Irene—one of them was an ancient wizard who had studied with Freud. The wizard recommended Rhineland Manor. He had a practice there. “It was his neck of the woods.”

“And we never visited Irene?”

“Oh, you went once—but you had a crying fit. Mortimer had to drive you home.”

“And she fell out of our lives.”

Marla was more confused than ever.
She
had driven out Irene, she was the culprit, even if her skull had been on fire.

“Mummy, and you never missed her?”

“Miss her? She tore up my insides, rooted in me with that bullet of a head. I was just as bloody, even after she left the womb. We would have croaked. That's how much your father loved her.”

3.

M
arla grew more and more morose. Counselors and tutors looked after her girls. Roland Bourne was about to retire. Marla was the new motor of the firm. Once or twice a week she slept on the futon in her office. The tradition of Sunday brunches died, just like that. Marla's Indians, Hector and Paul, looked after Irene, when they didn't have to dig up dirt for Bregman, Bourne & Silk. There wasn't another pair of shadow men remotely like them. The DA's prize witnesses—angelic women without a blemish—became whores under their scrutiny. No one was safe on the stand. Manhattan politicians tempted Marla with a judge's robe. But she had little desire to sit behind a bench like some fanciful hawk. She would have lost the real aroma of the courtroom.

Marla seethed. Hostility was like a perfume—her Chanel N
^o
19. She shopped at Saks and was
unbreakable
in her Louboutins, her herringbone blazer, pin-striped pants, and blood-red scarf-tie. But where did all the anger come from? Was it the brittleness of her life? A dead father, absent daughters, an ex-husband who seemed to have disappeared, a sister with whom she had so little in common, and a mother who'd been crowned at college?

She had a short affair with her shrink. Marla was angrier than ever. She kept having problems with her paralegals. Either they were lazy and corrupt or they kept hitting on her partners at Bregman, Bourne & Silk. And the ones who were devoted to Marla would leave the firm once they found a husband. She couldn't survive in court without some paralegal to conjure up all of her notes and files on a computer screen, like a girl with a magic wand.

So Marla had to shop. She scoured the best agencies. And one afternoon a paralegal appeared at Marla's desk wearing Louboutins, a blood-red scarf-tie, and Chanel N
^o
19. The girl looked
curiously
familiar. Marla had never seen Little Sister in an Armani suit.

“Irene,” she growled, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“The agency sent me, Sis.”

“What agency?”

“Falconer, the one you always use.”

The agency had tricked Marla, sending her own little sister without a note of warning. “Did you give them your real name?”

“Yes, Irene Silk of Central Park West.”

It was like some fable out of a picture book, where the strangest things were suddenly familiar. Marla didn't believe a word.

“And how the hell did you become a paralegal? You didn't even have a high school diploma.”

“I have one now,” Little Sister said. “My little nieces helped me on their Macs. And I took courses online to help me with my paralegal studies.”

“Who paid for it? I never received the bill.”

“Oh,” Irene said, purring in her pin-striped pants, “Mummy and the girls chipped in.”

“And no one bothered to tell me?” Marla said, wallowing in her best courtroom manner. She could have been that
invisible
actress, Gracie Chance.

“It was meant to be a big surprise,” Irene said, showing off her pointy red shoes.

“Well, Sis, will you hire me?”

Marla didn't have much of a choice.

“You'll have a two-week trial period, like every other paralegal I've considered.”

That would be the end of it. Little Sister could never survive all the traps and snares. It was like stumbling around in a dark forest. Marla would give Irene a tiny bonus and send her away. Her paralegals had to juggle thirty, forty tasks, anticipate Marla's moves with no more than the blink of an eye. They had to assist Marla in the courtroom, hover around, visible and invisible at the same time.

Little Sister must have trained at a magician's college. She conjured up whatever legal precedent Marla required for a particular case, prepared her briefs, often knew more about her clients than Marla did, and how to soften a hostile witness for the kill. Prosecutors began to fear the paralegal in the pointy red shoes. And there was an odd metamorphosis. All that rough masculinity of a recluse fled from her face. She wore lipstick, polished her nails; she had the feline quality of a silver fox. She wasn't allowed to utter a word in open court, but judges watched her whisper in Marla's ear. And a minute later, Marla went for the throat.

“Ah, Mrs. Singleton, didn't you say in your last deposition that you'd
never
met the accused before the eleventh of March? And now, suddenly, you talk of ‘a casual Christmas dinner' at Cipriani's and ‘chance encounters' at the King Cole Bar well before March. I wonder how much
chance
there was in these encounters?”

It irked Marla, because the King Cole had once been her favorite haunt; it was where she prowled for men like a hunter in chalk stripes. And she didn't like the prosecution's star witness prowling where she herself had prowled. Marla's client was a billionaire who couldn't keep out of a trouble—Marcellus Bloom. A chemist and pharmaceutical king with a wife and five devoted children in Westchester, he would black out in Manhattan hotel rooms after slapping some woman he had hired to be slapped—there was never any sexual abuse, just a curious, contained violence. And vultures took advantage of his
addiction
, vultures like Mrs. Singleton. She had high-society status, hung around with politicians and art patrons, but was a con artist who soaked billionaires.

One of her predators lured Marcellus into a hotel room, let him perform his little tricks—he slapped Mrs. Singleton's accomplice a couple of times before he fell into his usual coma—and he woke up with an army of detectives and dusters in his room. Singleton herself had called the cops. Suddenly the
victim
had a whole catalogue of bruises. Marcellus was led out of the hotel in handcuffs. The
Daily News
called him Dr. Jekyll. The district attorney's men were like a band of lost children. This was going to be their biggest case of the year—Marcellus Bloom caught battering a high-society housewife while Singleton worked behind the scenes like a puppeteer. She needed the
terror
of criminal court to shake some money out of Marcellus. But Marla's shadow men had dug a little deeper than the district attorney. And Irene had all the bits and pieces of the scam on her computer screen.

Marla broke Mrs. Singleton after five or six questions, revealed her whole extortion racket and her little stable of high-society housewives. The prosecutors were stunned as they watched all their hard work melt away. The judge was furious.

“I'd like to see counsel at sidebar.”

Marla approached the bench with the prosecution team.