Lily White (31 page)

“Did she give you any indication what the attack was about?”

A huge sob came across the phone. A moment later, she said “No. She didn’t say a word. Just kept punching me. With her fists, like a man. Then she took my head and”—the cultured voice broke, only to be replaced by a high, confused inflection that sounded like an injured child’s—“banged it against the pavement.”

“Do you remember anything else, Ms. Knowles?”

“No, I passed out. Not for too long, I think, but when I came to, the girl was gone. Arthur was holding me in his arms. When he saw I was … well, not all right, but at least conscious, he said: ‘I’ll run in and call the police and an ambulance.’”

“And did he?”

“Yes.”

I knew the answer to my question, but I had to ask it anyway: “Was he there when the police arrived?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“No.”

“But you saw her?”

“In a lineup. The police found her an hour later near a shopping center about three miles from my house. A fluke, really.
They broadcast the description I’d given—the hair, the heavy, heavy makeup, the cheap sundress, turquoise—and a passing patrol car spotted her. The next day, they brought me from the hospital to the building where the jail is, and I identified her. They thanked me and said the state attorney’s office would contact me before the trial. And then, two days later, a judge let her go on bail!”

“And she took off?” I asked.

“She did indeed.”

“And you never heard from Arthur again?”

“No. I filed a missing persons report. But in my heart of hearts I knew … Arthur must have had some trouble earlier in his life. Things hadn’t gone well. His marriage had failed, his wife was a monster, tormenting him. But there must have been trouble with the police as well, because he could not face them. His last words, just before he went into my house to call them, were: ‘Carolyn. I love you with all my heart. Never doubt that.’”

“And you didn’t?”

“I did not!”

“One final question, Ms. Knowles.”

“What’s your name?” she demanded.

“Lily,” I said quickly. “Did you find anything missing?”

“Missing?”

“Yes.”

“Some jewelry.”

“Such as?”

“Everything I had.”

“And you reported it to the police?”

“Of course. And to the insurance company as well.”

“And did they investigate?”

“What was there to investigate?” she asked. “Marissa Shaw—what do they call that—oh, jumped bail. Even if they
find her, do you think she will still have the pearl choker and the diamond-and-ruby brooch and the diamond ring and the platinum-and-diamond watch and the—”

“The jewelry wasn’t on Marissa Shaw when the police picked her up?”

“No.”

“Did the police think that Arthur Berringer may have had something to do with the disappearance of the jewelry?”

“No!” she boomed. “It was perfectly clear that Marissa Shaw had been in my house. They found her fingerprints in there.” I glanced over at Terry: So Bobette was not the first mark Mary had spied on. “And I
knew
Arthur as I knew myself. Know, as I know myself. And he would never take what is not his.”

“And so you never mentioned him to the police?”

Just as Terry was shaking his head, as in “You’ve gone too far,” Carolyn Knowles slammed down the phone.

“Lee,” Terry said, taking his feet off his desk, “if you were a guy I’d call you a schmuck. How could you ask her that?”

“I’ll tell you how, schmuck. I wanted to find out for sure if Holly had the cops check out the mystery prints—Mary’s prints—near the body. Clearly, they didn’t, or they would have found out the prints were associated with a middle-aged woman who had been viciously assaulted. And I’ll bet in that file down in Annapolis are all the other latents they found when they dusted Carolyn Knowles’s house—the plumber’s, the pizza delivery boy’s, and Norman Torkelson’s. Ergo, schmuck, if I can convince Norman to cooperate, we have priors on Mary Dean that ought to be very convincing to the D.A. And if not to the D.A., then the jury.”

“You don’t have a chance in hell of getting Norman to cooperate,” Terry said. “He’s going to protect that girl.”

“But she’s a known batterer! And it’s the same pattern! She
thinks he’s getting too close to marrying one of his marks, and whomp! She attacks. And not girl stuff—hair pulling and a smack or two. She goes out of control.”

“There are no other marks on Bobette except the ones around her neck.”

“What other marks were necessary? The ones around the neck did the trick. This time, Mary cut out the preliminaries.”

“You just can’t stand to lose, Lee.”

“Not this one. Because Norman Torkelson did not commit this murder.”

Terry Salazar shook his head sadly and, not without warmth, said: “Schmuck.”

I
t was certainly not that browbeater Professor Blumenthal and his torts that finally captured Lee’s imagination. Nor was it the charismatic Nestor P. Von Hassel, who unraveled the tangles of corporate law not only for the secretary of commerce but for the hosts of the
Today
show and, thus, for all America. It was not even Kevin McTeague, the Errol Flynn of evidence, with his flowing ebony hair and his swashbuckling presentation of the Excited Utterance exception to the Hearsay Rule. No, in the first semester of her second year at NYU Law School, the one who really made Lee a lawyer was Professor Lucille Poole.

She was a sallow-skinned woman with hair dyed shoe-polish black. Her nose was so long and pointy that, had it been orange, people would have thought she’d snatched it off a snowman. If Sylvia had ever seen the professor, she would have been too sickened to mock her; Professor Poole’s wardrobe consisted solely of
cheap, shapeless black dresses, as if her clothes were handme-downs from working-class Italian widows.

Upon seeing her, people thought: Ah, with those looks, she must be a charmer. Hardly. Each semester, Professor Poole brought nearly every student in her Criminal Law classes to the brink of nervous collapse by lecturing in a double-time monotone. In fact, there was nothing she did not say too flat and too fast: “Swiss on my burger, please,” in the cafeteria came out like Swzzbr, plis. Her introductory “Since my time is limited, I assume Your Honors are familiar with the facts and the prior proceedings in this case,” to the entire bench of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, became a mere whir of sound. And if you said hello to her in the corridors of the law school, you were never certain if the reply you heard was her reciprocal greeting or simply a rush of air passing over a crack in the wall.

However, despite Professor Poole’s next-to-unintelligible speech and her lack of anything that might be construed as a personality, she routinely won the appeals she argued on the issue of police coercion of prisoners. Some of her colleagues muttered that her success was due to her briefs; her writing was so simple a third grader could understand it. Others claimed she won so often because she was a woman in a man’s field, or because she was so ugly the appellate judges pitied her. A few asserted it was because she was a manipulator, forcing judges to strain to understand her jabber, thereby capturing their complete attention. What these carpers seemed unable to acknowledge was that while all the above was true, Lucille Poole, that black crow, stood before the bench with the fire of legal brilliance burning within her.

“MsWhi,” Professor Poole called out as she entered the suite, the words hurtling past lips that were puckered like a long-forgotten prune. “Good point you made about the statute of limitations in noncapital offenses.”

Lee, working at a table in the Regina and Stanley Farbman International Center for Criminal Justice—a two-room suite in a fleabag hotel on West Twenty-second Street—did not hear the entire sentence. What came through was “G’ point” and “statute of.” So, with a reasonable degree of confidence, Lee replied: “Thank you,” and suppressed the shiver of pleasure that passed through her. This was the work Lee loved best, so much better than the dry, dead stuff at law school. Here she was, exposing the system’s stupidity, duplicity, and cruelty where it really counted: in matters of crime and punishment. The real thing, where a person’s life or liberty was at stake. To hell with trusts and estates. Screw copyrights. Fuck corporations.
This
is what was important. And how she loved it! “Thank you very much.”

“Welc.”

The suite resembled Professor Poole: unattractive and cheerless. What had been a living room was now crammed with four collapsible bridge tables, bowing under the weight of books and papers, and dark-brown filing cabinets that resembled upright coffins. In the adjoining room, a plywood bed board resting upon the mattress of a double bed formed the giant desk where the professor, hunched over, did her writing and ate what she ate every single lunch and dinner (and, for all anyone knew, breakfast as well)—ground beef. The rich, fatty scent of hamburger or meat loaf sandwich or meatball hero was always in the air at the Regina and Stanley Farbman International Center for Criminal Justice.

To Lee’s surprise, Lucille Poole took a folding chair from another bridge table and sat beside her. “Wha’ doing?” she inquired. Lee lifted the yellow legal pad she had been scribbling on, but before she could launch on a spiel about the exercise of reasonable prosecutorial diligence in
New York
v.
Wu,
the professor added: “Not Wu. Summer.”

Lee’s heart fluttered, then throbbed. A summer job offer? The
chance to be Lucille Poole’s research assistant! To help draft the reply brief for the Quinones case, which would be argued—Lee swallowed hard—before the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the fall. For just an instant, she could hear Chief Justice Burger saying “Interesting point,” and Professor Poole, for once, speaking slowly enough for all to hear: “Credit where credit is due. My student assistant, Lee White, came up with that.” Her name in the Court record
before she was even out of law school.
And Jazz would probably do something wonderful, like putting that page of the transcript in a silver frame as her Christmas gift. Although, in truth, she’d rather have an engagement ring, but that appeared too much to hope for. He loved her. He had told her that. But he had said not one single word about the future beyond suggesting they get tickets to
The Ritz
for sometime in the spring. Could it be possible that he would just love her forever without ever asking her to marry him? She could be seventy-two, still without a ring on her ropy-veined left hand. No, worse: On her thirtieth or fortieth birthday—whenever she’d finally get up the courage—she would confront Jazz and ask him if he was ever going to marry her. Looking surprised and, worse, pained, he would explain that while he really and truly loved her, and the last thing in the world he wanted to do was hurt her, she—how could he put it without seeming like a total bastard?—she wasn’t what he imagined when he thought of a wife. He would probably do better with … not a lawyer. You know, someone less challenging. More traditional. More—don’t take this the wrong way—feminine. A teacher or something.

“I don’t have any summer plans,” Lee told Professor Poole. “I want to stay in New York.” She was going to add something about wanting to be with her boyfriend but decided that might make Professor Poole think her frivolous, not the solemn sort who would work eighteen hours a day in mortal combat with Injustice.

“I cannot use you as a research assistant,” Professor Poole announced. The awful thing was, every word was clear. Lee hugged the legal pad against her chest, close, like a teddy bear. What was she seeing in her mentor’s eyes? Pity? “Not an academic, y’know.” Not sorrow. Disdain?

“Oh,” was all Lee could think to say. Not the rapid-fire response one might expect from a prospective litigator, but an understandable one, as she was concentrating on holding back a cascade of tears.

“Not that you haven’t w …”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not that you have not worked hard this entire semester,” Professor Poole said, pronouncing each word as if it were a separate sentence.

“Uh-huh,” Lee replied.

“You’re dedicated … to put in the hours.” So? “But your talent … not in scholarship.” What are you talking about? I have an A-minus average! I made
Law Review.
Where the fuck else does my talent lie? “It lies in being fast on your feet,” Professor Poole went on. That means I’m shallow. Unoriginal. Unimaginative. “You were born to be a criminal lawyer.”

“But not to argue before the Supreme Court?”

“You might. Never know. Solid student. If a case should bring you before the Court … Few lawyers could deny themselves …” Lee waited. “But you aren’t …” Professor Poole’s voice evaporated.

“A legal scholar.”

“… good trial lawyer. Do you know how rare …?”

“So this summer?” Lee was so ashamed. No, humiliated. No. She wanted to quit law school. She wished she could get married. “Do you have any suggestions, Professor Poole?” Lee inquired, her manner as casual as a customer asking a drugstore clerk for advice on choosing a lipstick. “I’d like something
challenging.” She wanted to add: you egomaniacal hag, letting me work nights, weekends. Sending me down to pick up your fucking bacon-mushroom-Swiss burgers because you think the delivery guy takes too long and they get cold.

“Yes.” Something Lee could not hear, and then: “… Manhattan District Attorney’s office.”

“What?”

Professor Poole rose. “A good lawyer … argue both sides. Manhattan D.A. … best place … I’ll … phone call.”

Since Lee could not come up with another response, she said: “Thank you.”

“That is, if you want … If you have other …”

“Your calling would be great,” Lee answered. “I appreciate it.” Oh, God, she thought, what the hell am I doing?

“… like it,” Professor Poole said.

In fact, Lee loved it. By the end of her third week in the Rackets Bureau, she was working six days a week on the prosecution of one Howard “Howie the Hose” Fogelman for extortion: to wit, threatening seven kosher butchers on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with firebombing unless their stores carried the Gan Eden brand of knockwurst.