Lily White (3 page)

But his urbanity wasn’t entirely superficial; Leonard went to
every Furriers Industry Council meeting and absorbed his tony Manhattan colleagues’ wisdom on everything from remodeling Astrakhan coats to what whiskey to drink (Johnnie Walker Black) and precisely how to order it (“on the rocks, splash of soda—no twist, sweetheart”). He overcame his natural shyness by forcing himself to ask his customers leading questions. (“What are your Thanksgiving plans, Mrs. Fiske?” “No, really, I’d love to hear about your Easter centerpiece, Mrs. Guilfoyle.”) Thus he gathered an enormous amount of data on the folkways of the preeminent stratum of the upper middle class.

Gradually, the young man gained confidence. His customers began to find him charming: “Mrs. Johnston, that seal would clap his flippers if he could see you in his coat! No, seriously. I mean it. You look”—he’d take a deep breath as if to clear his head so he could find the perfect word—“lovely.” At twenty-three, Leonard was almost on top of the world. He had money in his pocket, a firm jaw, a head of lustrous jet-black hair (more than one customer thought of him as a Jewish Robert Taylor), and a developing sense of style. All he needed was a wife.

Early in 1948, Sylvia Bernstein came into Tudor Rose (the fur salon’s new name, which Leonard selected after nights in the library poring over everything from Amy Vanderbilt to
Boutell’s Heraldry
). Leonard checked out her well-cut gray wool suit with its flared-at-the-hips peplum jacket which only the slimmest women could wear successfully, looked into her blue-gray eyes, took in her prominent cheekbones and her sleek, blond-streaked hair and thought, in essence: Hubba hubba! But he acted all business, assuming she’d been recommended to him by one of his more genteel customers. Wait, she had no wedding ring. So she must be one of his customers’ daughters. Ah well, at least she might be good for a red fox chubby. He asked, “May I help you, Miss …?” When she answered, in the most euphonious tones
possible: “Sylvia Bernstein,” he would have fainted, if he hadn’t found himself falling in love.

It wasn’t just her looks. Sylvia had class, Leonard was relieved to discover. All right, people hearing her speak would realize she wasn’t a Vassar girl. But she never, even on the hottest summer day, left the house without wearing gloves. Her apartment building was classy too (Tudor style, no less), with leaded windows in the lobby and a lion stantant on the pediment over the elevator. Not only that: Her mother, at age forty-five, was still a natural blond.

And her father was a judge!

The first time Leonard met the Bernsteins, he could scarcely breathe. That was how emotional he became, wishing that he could have had such parents. They were perfect.

Take Sylvia’s mother. Not only did she cook and clean. If sock-darning were a competitive sport, Eva Bernstein would have had a mantel full of trophies. What a housewife! But there were holes too big for even Eva to repair, and when one of these occurred, she would adopt the sock as her own, wearing it and its non-holey brother over her stocking feet so she could glide through the apartment without running her nylons or disturbing her husband, Judge Bernstein. “Shhh!” she’d warn Sylvia and Sylvia’s younger brother, Victor. “The Judge is taking a nap!” “The judge is reading!” “The Judge is on the phone!”

Judge Arthur Bernstein was more than a pillar of rectitude; he was a five-foot-nine-inch pillar of quietude. In the Queens Domestic Relations Court, where he presided, court stenographers griped that they deserved battle pay, they had to strain so hard to hear his feathery voice. But other than that, there were no complaints. His reputation was neither sterling nor tarnished; he was not unduly harsh with the litigants who appeared before him (although he did seem a little too eager to rule an ex-wife’s petition for support out of order if her ex-husband was represented
by a lawyer with links to the Ronald Goldberger Kew Gardens Democratic Club). However, to colleagues, neighbors, friends, and certainly to Leonard, Arthur Bernstein was nothing but a gentleman. He removed his hat in the presence of a lady. He wore an alpaca coat, used a small but genuine tortoiseshell holder for his Philip Morrises. When expressing gratitude to anyone, he simply nodded—but in such a gracious and dignified way that he made those who vocalized their “thank you”s seem almost vulgar.

And compared to Leonard’s parents! Nat the Commie had an articulated opinion on everything, from dialectical materialism to how to grow string beans on the fire escape: “Hey, Lenny, you don’t drown ‘em, you schmendrick. You water ’em every other day!” And Bella, with her demands that he loosen up! Each day as he left for work she made a game of blocking the door. “What d’ya got, an ice cube up your
tuchis,
Lenny? Smile! It don’t cost nothin’.” He’d try to sidestep her and grab for the doorknob, but despite her bulk, she was more agile than he. “Come on, pretend I’m a lady buying a fur. ‘Excuse me, my good man,”’ she’d twitter, giving what was actually a pretty fair imitation of a Vanderbilt voice. “‘I’m looking for something smart in a mouton, fingertiplength.’” Eventually, Bella would start to guffaw at her own performance, doubling over with laughter; that’s when Leonard would make his break for freedom.

In those days, young men did not get their own apartments, so Leonard was doubly grateful to Sylvia: for getting him out of his personal hell in Brooklyn and for giving him a judge and a natural blonde for in-laws. And of course, Sylvia was grateful to him, because at age twenty-two, she had no prospects. The loss of Selwyn Youdelman, a Brooklyn Law School graduate with offices in Kew Gardens, had devastated her parents a year earlier. That the loss was due to his choosing another girl over Sylvia made it more painful to the Bernsteins than if he had merely
died. Sylvia knew that they blamed her for his leaving, that she’d shown off her artistic nature too much, that she’d kept pushing him to go to operas and museums, while all a normal fellow wanted to do was go see
The Bells of St. Mary’s,
for God’s sake, or go for a malted. “I
didn’t
push him!” Sylvia explained tearfully.

“Shhh!” her mother responded. “The Judge is in the bathroom.” Both women took a moment to compose themselves and whisper more quietly.

“He asked me what did I want to do,” Sylvia tried to explain, “so I said I read how they had a Turner exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. He’s this English guy. And Selwyn was the one who said how he loves good pictures and never gets enough of them.”

“That doesn’t mean he actually wants to go into the city on a weekday night! The man is an attorney!” Sour acid rose from Sylvia’s gut and burned the back of her throat. She wanted to throw up. But the Judge was in the bathroom, and even if he finished right away, it would have to air out or she’d never stop vomiting for the rest of her life. She rushed away from her mother, into the bedroom she shared with her brother, flung herself facedown on her bed, and wept—silently.

Unfair! Unfair! She’d bring a date into the apartment, and right away he’d hook his finger over his tie to loosen it, as if he were suffocating. Well, why not? The place was gloomy, airless. The windows were never open, the blinds were always drawn tight, and there was barely enough light—just enough to see the dust sparkles dancing in the living room air. Even before her mother could breathe, “Shhh! The Judge,” the date would get that Lemmeoutta-here look, like he was inside Boris Karloff’s tomb.

But Leonard actually liked her parents! She knew part of it was that they had wall-to-wall carpeting and his parents were, as he explained, working-class people. But even guys who’d been all hepped up because her father was a judge—like Selwyn—were
somehow repelled by the silence in that apartment, by the radio that hadn’t been turned on since FDR died. There was something about the Judge, she realized, that was … not right. And her mother, too, was … not right.

Not right? Wacko was probably closer to the truth, but that would have been too revolutionary a notion for Sylvia. And while Leonard (had he been cross-examined under oath) might have admitted something was not quite right about the Bernsteins, the cryptlike quiet made him feel they were, at the very least, a classy family.

In fact, the first time Sylvia let him put his hand under her skirt, he was thinking: I’m bringing Sleeping Beauty to life. He was thrilled with her. Sitting on her living room couch, her parents inside, sleeping, he wanted to whisper, “Your thighs are as soft as chinchilla.” But he stopped himself because he didn’t want her to get the wrong idea and think he was low class, comparing her to a rodent, or worse, that he thought her thighs were furry, although they did feel a little … fuzzy. So he kept mum, always a good idea in the Bernstein apartment.

Three months later, when Leonard asked for Sylvia’s hand, an idea suddenly popped into his head. He decided that in addition to an engagement ring, he would give his Beauty a silver fox stole that would set off her pale prettiness. Which was too bad, because Beauty
and
her mother had been thinking more in terms of a Breath of Spring mink jacket, if not a full-length coat. Still, a fox stole is better than nothing: Even though he was not a professional man, not even a college graduate, not even a guy with a couple of years at CCNY, Sylvia knew Leonard was the best she could hope for. At least he was nice looking, and he owned a decent business, which was nothing to be ashamed about—even though she was.

Well! Three years later, when Lee was born, things had certainly changed! But more about that when the time comes.

B
obette Frisch stood apart from my client’s usual victims. Most of Norman Torkelson’s women lay somewhere between vulnerable and defenseless. Not Bobette. Starting out in Brooklyn, a venue not known for fragile females, she moved due east to Queens in the early sixties when she was about twenty. She worked as a waitress at a tavern in Flushing called the Dew Drop Inn. A couple of years later, when the crowd got meaner and the barkeeper took to tucking a hammer behind the Wild Turkey for protection, she moved east again, this time into Nassau County.

Like me, Bobette wanted a career. She took a bartending course and found a job at Murray’s Shamrock in Williston Park. It took her another ten years, but she finally moved from labor to management, after convincing Murray’s frantic creditors that the joint could actually turn a tidy profit if it were run by someone sober enough to use a cash register. She became
half-owner—keeping an eagle eye on the goings-on so no bartender could pour free drinks for his pals. She tossed out the roughnecks and was always on the lookout for known queasers: to get them up and out of the place so they wouldn’t (as they say with such delicacy here on Long Island) blow their chunks all over the bar.

Bobette watched over her property from a dimly lit table way in the back. This turned out to be a good idea. First of all, she apparently wasn’t the talkative type. She greeted patrons with a friendly enough “Hiya,” but that was it in the conversation department. If she had an opinion on the Yankees or school taxes or the novels of Danielle Steel, she kept it to herself. After the murder, bar patrons who had no idea what she was like created their own Bobette Frisch for the media, murmuring into the Channel 12 mike: “You could see sweetness in her face. But it was, uh, um, a quiet sweetness. What’s happening, that someone like that gets killed?” And: “She was ultra shy. You know? But a wonderful human being.” However, an anonymous
Newsday
source referred to her as a “major cheapo who wouldn’t let you owe her two bucks,” and someone interviewed in the
Post
referred to her as Blobette. The blob business is a little unfair. According to the charts, Bobette was not terribly overweight. Her body, unfortunately, resembled a beer keg, stout and compact. Her oval face, framed by light brown hair, might have been pretty, or at least not unappealing, except that she had fleshy folds that ran from either side of her mouth down either side of her chin. Thus her jaw appeared to be attached in the manner of a marionette’s. Patrons of the bar first took to calling her Mrs. Howdy Doody, then inevitably, behind her back, Mrs. Doody.

Bobette was shrewd about money. By the eighties, she owned three bars and two apartment buildings. Starting at four every morning, she made the rounds in her frost-beige Cadillac Eldorado from Williston Park to Franklin Square to Hicksville and
personally picked up each night’s receipts. She collected her monthly rents in person.

Neither the cops nor my investigator ever found a scintilla of evidence that she was a pushover when it came to guys, or that she might be susceptible to a sweet talker who would con her out of her life savings. On the contrary: She was all business. When queried about her love life, the people who dealt with her drew a total blank. Huh? Wha’? “Bobette” and “sex” did not seem to belong in a single sentence.

This was her life: She managed her holdings—which included her own modest but pretty two-story colonial on a sixty-by-one-hundred-foot plot in Merrick. Each Tuesday she visited the Mane Event salon and got her hair washed and set in a style Patricia Nixon favored in the 1956 campaign; once a month, she had it cut and colored. Every single Saturday afternoon she went to the movies and, afterward, stopped at Mario’s for a salad and an order of linguine and clam sauce, which she took home with her. She attended mass at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre every Sunday morning at ten-thirty. The local libraries or video rental stores had no record of her.

Her parents were dead. She had one brother, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a mechanic at a Honda dealership. She had no enemies. She had no friends.

I cleared my throat and asked the cop: “What makes you think Bobette’s dealings with Norman Torkelson were anything other than business?”

Since he had successfully ignored me for the last five minutes, I knew Sergeant Samuel Franklin would not enjoy a reminder that he and I were standing within two feet of each other. Sam sucked in his already sunken cheeks. A second later, he took in a mouthful of air and blew up the lower half of his face. Ergo, he could then make a revolting noise at me as he
exhaled and yet, technically, be not guilty of making fart sounds at a lawyer.