Lily White (17 page)

“Big damn deal. You got a killer backside, right?”

“Backhand.”

“Whatever. And you know I love your sister, but if a tennis ball came flying at her, she’d piss in her pants.”

“More than piss.”

“Right. So you’re very, very unique. Never forget that. You can play tennis and get A’s and crochet like you was born with a hook in your hand. And you’re a good girl too, nice through and through.
And
you’re nobody’s fool. Smart as a whip. Smart enough to know that nothing is ever going to make your father happy.”

“Why not?” Lee asked.

“Because what he wants is to be whatever he’s not. Mr. Joe College.”

“How come he couldn’t get a scholarship? He was smart, wasn’t he?”

“It wasn’t smartness. It was”—Bella touched an area around her solar plexus—“heart. I kept telling him: ‘Lenny, you can be anything you want, Lenny. You’re a brilliant kid, and you got a chance at the brass ring good as anybody’s.’ But he never believed that. He saw the deck stacked against him, with the plutocrats—you know, the haves—raking it in and the working-class getting
dreck.
That’s always true, and don’t you forget it. But now and then a person can make himself an exception. Something inside Lenny went bad, though. Like a disease that ate out the meat from his heart. Still and all, he did make a good business. Right? But he never got his true dreams. To be a big-shot lawyer in a three-piece suit. To be a sport. To be a goy. He got trapped in his own skin.”

“And he didn’t have the heart to fight his way out?” Lee asked softly.

“You got it in a nutshell.”

“So why is he mad at my mother?”

“Because … Maybe you’re too young for me to be talking to you like this, but you know what I always say? ‘What the hell!’ So here’s what I think and I told your grandfather and he for once in his life didn’t say, ‘Bella, you’re nuts.’ Lenny is mad at Sylvia because the girl of his dreams don’t want a furrier.”

“But she keeps trying so hard to make him happy. It’ll never work, will it?”

“I don’t think so, toots.”

“So I have one question.”

“Shoot.”

“If he doesn’t like himself, and he doesn’t like her, and they’ll never be—you know—a fun couple … There’s a fun couple next door, in that big house, up on the hill. But not my mother and father. They’ll always be a pair of losers my father can’t stand.”

“Go on.”

“Don’t losers have loser kids?”

“No! Not on your life, toots.”

“It’s not what I think, Grandma. It’s what Daddy thinks. He’s got me and Robin. But if he had a son like …” The name Jasper Taylor choked her. She couldn’t say it. She had watched her father standing transfixed, adoring, gawking up at Jasper racing along the perimeter of Hart’s Hill’s grounds with a huge kite shaped like a sailboat streaming behind him. Leonard had been so taken up with Jasper that he was oblivious that he had turned the pool backwash lever and that water was gushing out over his kidskin loafers.

And so Lee changed the subject and asked for a vanilla Coke. Thus, she never got to say Jasper’s name to her beloved Grandma Bella, who died of a hot fudge sundae three months later.

Jasper disappeared from Lee’s life the following September, when he went away to prep school, the same school Foster had attended, a prestigious, pedagogically third-rate institution named for an Anglican saint so obscure the Archbishop of Canterbury would not have recognized his name. The next time she saw him was three years later, the summer of 1965, when they were both fifteen. She did not recognize him.

“Jazz!” one of his friends called from the counter of Dante’s Pizza, and Jasper-now-Jazz slid out of his booth and ambled over, barefoot, to help his buddy carry the sodas.

It was his feet that drew Lee’s attention away from the half-plain, half-sausage-mushroom-meatball pie that lay between her and Robin. Naked feet. “Ick!” Lee said. Going sock-less was one thing: In Sylvia’s book even that was tolerable only if accompanied by white duck yachting trousers, a striped boat-neck sweater, and a net income of over one hundred thousand dollars per annum. But a kid who went barefoot, even in his own house, was inviting society’s condemnation and opportunistic infectious disease.

“Ooky-pukey,” Robin agreed. Despite this comment, she was a much-improved child. The onset of menarche, which signals a period of tribulation for so many young women and their families, had actually calmed her. Some biochemical magic soothed her overstimulated dendrites, and while she was certainly still high-strung, she was no longer an identifiable basket case. “
Barefoot!
”

Jazz’s feet were big, Lee noticed as he passed her table, with some light brown hair on the tops and the toes and black filth on the soles. His calves were hairy, although he was tan and the brown hair had turned gold. Muscular calves. She looked up. Blue-and-green madras Bermuda shorts and a blue golf shirt with an alligator on the breast. An alligator!
Mon dieu.
Lee actually said to herself. (She was at that time traveling with the Shorehaven High School intellectual set, and she let out a fast exhalation, a cross between a snort and a sneer.) His biceps looked predictably strong, but what aroused her interest, to say nothing of her libido, were his forearms. Clear muscular definition. Powerfully developed brachioradialis bulging under the tanned skin. And those curly golden hairs; she sensed she could lift one with the very tips of her fingers and it would spring back. Lee glanced up, but he was standing at the counter, beside his friend, a tall drink of water, kibitzing with Dante, Junior.

“I’m full,” Robin announced.

“No shit, Ajax,” Lee mumbled, her eyes on the forearms.

“I’m going to tell Mommy you said ‘shit,”’ Robin said, with less malice than a realization that her sister’s attention was elsewhere and she wanted it back. Greta had taken one of her rare days off, and her parents had gone to a charity party in a tent somewhere far out on Long Island, at the “cottage” of one of Leonard’s customers—which Lee knew was rich-talk for an estate on the ocean (unless the rich person happened to be referring to the hovel in the woods where his groundskeeper lived in degradation
and squalor). Bred as Lee was by Sylvia and Leonard and molded by Galsworthy’s novels (
The Silver Spoon
had fallen off the shelf at the library and hit Lee on the shoulder as she was browsing—at a time when she should have been studying for her plane geometry regents), her knowledge of upper-middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mores was near-encyclopedic, albeit wildly outdated and next to useless, unless an awareness of the proper livery for footmen is considered a good thing to know.

“I don’t care what you tell Mommy,” Lee told Robin. “Tell her I say ‘shit.’ Tell her I say ‘fuck.’”

At this second, Jazz, passing her on his way back to the table with four paper cups filled with ice and a large bottle of Nedick’s, startled. Then he looked at her and smiled. A lovely smile (although his teeth were slightly crooked from overcrowded conditions and a belief by Ginger that nice families do not send their children to orthodontists). He had a pleasing face too. Its contours had sharpened in a fine, masculine fashion, changing from rounded to rectangular. His strong jaw now joined his face at right angles.

Lee looked up at him. His smile, she could see, was neither a snotty smile nor a lascivious one, the kind a boy gives to the sort of girl who would say “fuck” in Dante’s. It was …

“He heard you say it!” Robin whispered, aghast. “The F curse!”

Lee didn’t deny it, but then, her attention was now focused on his receding back: more specifically, at the angle made by the bulges of muscle that were his buttocks as they tapered into the columnar solidity of his thighs. When he sat in the booth, he chose the seat that faced her. Thank you, she said to the God in Whom she already did not believe. But the boy wasn’t smiling at her anymore, not even looking at her. That was good, though, because it gave her a chance to study him. His friends were rich dipshits, probably private school kids, as was he. But he was different. They made loud, stupid sports talk about someone being
traded to Detroit and pulled long strings of mozzarella cheese from the pizza up into their mouths and made gross sucking noises. He just sat blowing on the slice he’d taken and looking pensive. No, serene. No, sensitive. That was it! He was so far above the morons he was with it wasn’t funny.

“Lee!” Robin whined, demanding her attention. Lee hated this: being stuck with her sister on a weekend. “Lee!” It was an error, staring at the boy, because Robin turned and followed her gaze. “Why are you staring at him?”

And a bigger error to deny it so vehemently. “I am
not
staring at anyone, you infantile ass.”

“You are too!”

“Shut up!” Lee snarled.

Robin fell into shocked silence, not comprehending the intensity of her sister’s response. A second later, she did. “You have a crush on him,” Robin taunted. “I can tell!”

“I do not!” Lee insisted, feeling her face, her neck, turning red, then purple, with mortification. Lee’s throat felt constricted. Her chest tightened. She could barely get out the words because of the terrible feeling she was choking. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you!”

“Ooh, I’m so scared!”

Lee flared her nostrils, which usually caused Robin to at least squirm in her seat, but this time it was a futile gesture. So she narrowed her eyes and glowered at Robin. “I’ll tell Mommy where her three bars of Je Reviens soap went.”

“Yeah?” Robin challenged her, although Lee picked up a quaver behind the resolution. “Where?”

“Over to Erica Johanson’s for a slumber party, that’s where. And if Mommy finds out …”

“You tell her that and I’ll tell her you’re madly in love with Jasper Taylor!”

“What?” Lee demanded, confused.

“With Jasper Taylor.”

“Next-door’s kid? Are you kidding? That’s who he is?”

“That’s him. Pizza boy.”

Lee stared at the boy two booths down. “That’s …?” Even before Robin nodded triumphantly, she knew it was true. Well, he had been away at school someplace. She hadn’t seen him since … God, it must have been elementary school. He’d changed so much.

His long leg was stretched out from the booth. His bare, dirty foot—Did rich kids get some guarantee public school kids didn’t, that germs wouldn’t crawl into minuscule cuts and turn gangrenous, leaving them four-toed, unable to wear thongs for the rest of their lives?—extended into the aisle that led to the counter. This boy was Jasper Taylor? He wasn’t that conceited idiot … although his eyes and the shiny brown hair … Yes! Someone had called him Jazz!

“You love Jasper Taylor!” Robin jeered. Too loud. He didn’t hear her words, not consciously anyhow, but his name registered subliminally, and Lee saw his toes stop wiggling for one harrowing second. “You love—”

Lee grabbed her sister’s bony wrist. “Shut up,” she ordered. “Shut up or—” She was so agitated that for once she was at a loss for words. She couldn’t think of any threat dreadful enough to stop Robin.

But Robin stopped herself. The look on her older sister’s face: teeth clenched, mouth twisted downward into an anguished grimace, her brows coming together into a terrified V … “Okay,” Robin soothed Lee. “I won’t say it.” Lee nodded, unable to speak—and also, Robin noticed, unable to withdraw her eyes from the Taylor boy’s face. Lee’s shoulders relaxed slightly, but she was still in the grip of some passion that would not release her, to return to being Lee, regular Lee, the big sister with the easy smile and the wise mouth. “Lee?”

“What?” Lee’s eyes were on the boy as he licked a drop of tomato-tinged olive oil from his chin.

“Is he
that
good?”

“Yes,” Lee told Robin, when she finally found her voice. “He’s that good.”

M
y private investigator, Terry Salazar, had a sweet, raspy tenor, the sort of voice heroin-addicted male blues singers with cult followings have: every word slow, provocative. His is the sound that makes every woman—semi-literate teen punks, Indiana Republicans—fantasize about writhing on rumpled sheets.

“Hello,” I said into the speakerphone.

“Hey, Lee!” I didn’t have to ask: Who is it? “You are fucked,” he gloated.

“Badly?”

“No. Bad.” Terry was a real American man. He guarded against any behavior that might remotely be considered feminine, like saying “please” or using the proper adverbial form. “You’re fucked up the ass bad.” I pushed the button to mute the speaker, lifted the receiver, and listened. “They got Bobette’s tenant, his name is …” Terry paused, and I heard him riffling
the pages of the small spiral notebook he kept on each of his cases. “… Eugene Pohl. Eugene got treated to a lineup yesterday afternoon. All five guys were six-three and over—just so you can’t bitch about how long, tall Normie stood out.”

“Was Pohl able to ID Norman?” I asked.

“It wasn’t easy. It took him—-Jesus—at least a tenth of a second.”

Attorneys like me hire ex-Nassau County cops like Terry to do background on a case because of who they know—law enforcement types who never talk to a defense lawyer. But it’s more than contacts: Smart cops know how to conduct an inquiry into a murder case. Terry had been a detective sergeant in Homicide and was a first-class investigator. He did more than just ask questions. Radiating rough charm when he felt it was necessary, he could get an enormous amount of information out of all but the most reticent of witnesses. Women would open up to Terry because they couldn’t bear for him to leave. It wasn’t that he was objectively handsome, but he was unequivocally masculine: A woman can sense when she is in the presence of erectile tissue. Men reacted to his gruff warmth. Although he didn’t brag, they sensed his mastery of traditional male talents: hot-wiring a car, shooting a gun, deceiving his wife. They wanted Terry to approve of them, so they, too, kept talking.

Eugene Pohl, apparently, was one of the few exceptions. “He wouldn’t say a word,” Terry informed me. “What a pussy! You know, the kind who tucks his napkin in his collar so he won’t get soup on his tie.”

“Is he prissy, or is he what people imagine when they hear ‘computer nerd’?”