Lily White (36 page)

Still, it did come as a surprise to discover (as I was dictating a memo to files in
re
Torkelson) that Sandi had fallen madly in love with Mary Dean. “It is worth noting,” I was saying, “that in a conversation with me on May ninth of this year—several days before Mary Dean admitted to having been in Bobette Frisch’s house—Ms. Dean showed a familiarity with the layout and furnishings of the premises that indicated she had spent a considerable amount of time there.” I swiveled around in my chair a few times as I constructed the next sentence and noted that the patent leather on my pumps was looking dull. Then I noted that Sandi was writing with her right hand—her usual practice, but toying with her bangs with her left. God knows why, but she must have curled her bangs; the rest of her hair was straight. It looked as if she had glued a piece of poodle to the top of her forehead. Nervously, over and over, she kept sticking her finger into the center of each curl. “The observations Mary Dean made—about a collection of purple perfume bottles on Ms. Frisch’s dresser, the furnishings of a second bedroom next to Ms. Frisch’s—suggest that far more than the hurried glimpse she has admitted to, she has a detailed knowledge of the house—”

“Because Norman
described
it to her!” Sandi broke in.

In all the years she had worked for me, she had never commented on anything I dictated. In fact, although her transcriptions were astoundingly accurate, I had always felt that while she got the words, she didn’t hear the music. So I was stunned. My mouth may have dropped open in quintessential stupnagel fashion. Not that my reaction mattered to Sandi. Her face was flushed dark red. I could sense her outrage, although with her
strange, upturned smiley mouth and round cheeks, she just looked happy.

“No, it was not something she heard,” I responded slowly. “Mary said something like ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ She
saw
the place. She was in there.”

“He’s a con man!” Sandi insisted, a hysterical screech creeping into her voice. “He made it seem so real it became real to her.”

“Boy, I’m glad you’re not on my jury,” I said. “Anyway, since when have you become a Mary Dean fan?”

Sandi set down her pen and steno pad. “My heart goes out to her. She’s so good. You can see it!” Her lips parted. Her eyes shone. I sensed I was watching something that ought to have been private. “Oh, I know with those kind of clothes you think she’s tawdry. Not a good person. Iwas put off by it at the beginning. But under all the makeup, she’s so innocent.” Sandi placed her palms together as if she were about to pray. “A saint, that’s what she is! You can see it in her eyes.” What I was seeing in Sandi’s eyes was a moist, mad glow. “And she’s been dragged down by that man, dragged into the gutter—”

“Before Mary Dean met that man she had twenty-seven arrests for prostitution, which might lead one to believe the gutter was not exactly terra incognita,” I commented.

I was shaken by Sandi’s outburst. Sure, there’d been plenty of emotion in the office, but it had come from my clients or their wives and girlfriends. Weeping, wailing, fainting, pounding on the desk—or on the client’s head. Once, I billed the Perich brothers, two contractors I was representing for tax fraud, an extra two hundred bucks for a carpet cleaning to remove bloodstains after Frankie hit Billy in the gut and Billy socked Frankie in the face and Frankie had a nosebleed all over my rug. But it was easy to keep a distance from my clients’ craziness. They were
supposed
to go off the wall.

Well, that makes it sound so easy: dealing with people who didn’t feel obliged to keep a stiff upper lip. It wasn’t. Even viewed from the objective distance I had trained myself to maintain, it often exhausted me. So what I needed to protect me from those client storms was tranquillity, peace in the workplace. That’s why I found Sandi’s explosion terribly jarring. Just as I depended on our receptionist to be obtuse, on our associate to try to act cool while walking up the courthouse steps, on Chuckie to be droll, I relied on Sandi to be reassuringly, perpetually dull.

“I’ll tell you what,” I announced. “Take a break. Then you can finish up the paperwork on that Eastern District case, that transportation of stolen property.” I got up. “See you later.” And I bolted.

For about half a minute I considered putting on the sneakers I keep in the trunk of my car and going for a five-mile walk to clear my head. But in the next half minute, I got into the car and headed toward Mary Dean’s. Was she, as Sandi was maintaining, an innocent? Or was she guilty of murder and, perhaps, a con of her own?

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Mary announced. She stood in the doorway, blocking entrance to the apartment. Not inviting, but not belligerent either. She was wearing matching shorts and crop top in a peach so vivid it was almost a new color. Her hair, tossed on top of her head, was held in place with a banana clip. As I’d suspected, her complexion without makeup was without blemish. Her skin’s only flaw was a patch of blue, a dried-up piece of facial mask, that was stuck between ear and jaw.

“I wish you would talk to me,” I said. “I’d really like to see things from your point of view.”

“Sorry.” Inside the apartment, a TV was on, a talk show. One guest was shrieking at another, who kept hooting back: “I’m laughing in your face.”

“I bought us cappuccino,” I said, holding up the white paper bag. “One with cinnamon, one without. Which do you want?”

“Uh,” she said.

“Either one’s fine with me.”

“Cinnamon,” she said, standing back so I could walk into the house. “But I don’t have any cookies or anything.”

“I have a couple of biscotti. Those hard cookies.”

“I was always scared I was going to break a tooth on one of those,” Mary said, turning off the TV, clearing off a small round table on the far side of the living room. She had been clipping supermarket coupons. “Then I learned to dunk”—a coupon for Dove soap fell to the floor—“so it’s better, except when you dunk for, like, one second too long. Then it gets all gooky and falls into the coffee.”

We sat across from each other. The atmosphere was companionable, two hausfraus having a kaffeeklatsch. Mary, who was able to sit in shorts and a crop top without even a millimeter of flab showing anywhere, said she wished she and Norman could settle down in one place; there was a coupon-clippers newsletter she was dying to subscribe to, but since they were never in any town longer than three months, it didn’t pay. Since we were getting on so well—she showed me the box in which she kept her coupons filed, a green metal thing decorated with rolling pins and egg beaters—I did not mention I was more than half hoping that her only long-term address would be in care of an upstate maximum-security facility.

“You know who I spoke to?” I asked, taking what I hoped was a casual sip of cappuccino. “Carolyn Knowles. The woman you had that altercation with in Annapolis.”

“Oh,” Mary said, a wispy sound. “Gee.”

“She said you smashed her head against the sidewalk.” Mary stretched out her hands in a gesture that said: I can’t remember
what
happened. “Want to tell me about it?” I asked.

“How did you find out?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“Do the police know?”

“I don’t think so. If they knew the fingerprints at Bobette’s were the same as those made in another instance of an attack on an older woman, they might have a few questions for you.”

Mary toyed with a drip of coffee meandering its way down the Styrofoam cup. “Like what?”

“Like what happened? What set you off down there in Annapolis?”

“She said, ‘Get out of here, you whore.’ She didn’t even know who I was! She kept looking at my dress like it was cheap. It wasn’t!”

I tried to look shocked and distressed. “Tell me about it.”

“I was just hanging around—”

“Her house?”

“Yes. I mean, just checking it out. Norman said it was gorgeous. You should see it, he said. It’s called a landmark! She couldn’t paint it a different color without permission because it was history.”

“Were she and Norman there at the time?”

“No.”

“Where were they?”

“They went for a drive. She had a convertible.” She shook her head. “Why is it that when you
should
have a convertible you can’t afford it, and every time you see a really great car, some old poop-head is driving it?” As I had just recently been wavering between a financially secure old age and buying a BMW 325i ragtop, I merely shrugged. “So I walked around her house. She had gardens. That’s what you call it when rich people have, like, a place for roses and another place for vegetables and another place for tulips or whatever. Not a garden. Gardens, even if it’s all in the same backyard.”

“So you looked at her gardens.”

“Yuck. Lots of little, low things. If you wanted to smell the flowers, you’d have to crawl around on your hands and knees.”

“Did you go inside, Mary?”

She sat up straight, alert. “No.”

“No? You didn’t even try to get in?” She shook her head vehemently. “Mary,” I said, giving her what I hoped looked like an indulgent look. “Come on.”

She came back with a sheepish smile. “It was locked.”

“Did you try the windows?” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a while. “Mary, I’m Norman’s lawyer. You can tell me.”

“I tried.”

“Did you get in?” She nodded, not without a gleam of triumph in her eye. “And found some jewelry?”

“Yes.
So
great.”

“What made you take the jewelry? Weren’t you afraid you’d ruin Norman’s chances of a score with her?”

“How would she know a robber had anything to do with Norman?”

“That’s true,” I conceded.

“She didn’t even have, like, a safe or anything. It was in a jewelry box in her closet. A walk-in closet. With built-in shelves for everything. Baskets to pull out for sweaters, and a thing you hung scarves on.”

“Where’s the jewelry now?”

“I gave it to Norm. He said it was too hot to sell. He put it in a safety deposit box he has.”

“Where is that?”

“In Atlanta.”

“Why in Atlanta?”

“Beats me,” Mary said.

“Didn’t you keep any of it to wear?”

She screwed up her mouth and shook her head. “He wouldn’t let me. I tried to hide the ruby pin. So gorgeous, I couldn’t believe it. Like a fireworks: fat in the middle, with all those spray lines going out. I stuck it in the bottom of my Tampax box, but he found it. He said it was too … some word that means it would, you know, point the finger at me.”

“Is that usual for you, Mary? Breaking in and taking jewelry. Something tells me … It doesn’t sound like you.”

She rested her chin in her hands. The blue dab of facial mask fell off. “It isn’t like me,” she said gratefully.

“So what made you do it?” I played a hunch. “Did something set you off to want to hurt her in some way?” She took our cups and napkins and stuffed them into the paper bag. “What was it?”

“Tickets.”

I remembered her saying that she had gone into Bobette’s house looking for airplane tickets for a honeymoon. It had been such a strong and specific image that it was jarring to me at the time. “You found plane tickets?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“For Carolyn Knowles and … What name was Norman using then?”

“Arthur.”

“Right. Arthur Berringer. Where were the tickets for?”

“Paris.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I knew he could go with her. See, he had an Arthur passport. Usually he just has a driver’s license and some credit cards, but for Arthur … for some reason, he got the works.”

“And you thought he was going to marry her.”

“He had a weak moment.”

“Right. So you saved him, in a way. I mean, by beating her up, with him as a witness, he would have to make the choice right there: her or you. And he wouldn’t choose her.” Mary nodded,
an agreement and a thank-you. But what I had meant was that Norman would not dare risk dealing with the police, even as a mere witness to a crime. He had too long a record; he would have known that a first-rate cop—like Terry Salazar had been—in two seconds flat could make him as a guy who had done time. “So you ran?”

“Yes. He was holding her and saying, ‘Carolyn! Darling!’ But he whispered to me, ‘Get out. I’ll meet you back at the apartment.’ Except I was all, like, shook up. I went to the apartment, but it was such an awful place, in someone’s basement, with no rug or anything. So I thought: Well, he’ll be a couple of hours. So I left the jewelry there and went to a shopping center, just to pass the time.”

“You had Carolyn Knowles’s credit cards?” I asked casually.

“Yes. I only bought a camisole. Oh, and then I was walking over to a place where they had leather coats—just to look—and that’s where the cops picked me up.”

“You must have been scared.”

“Was I ever! I thought: Oh, shit. I’ll be thirty before I get out of jail, what with bopping her and taking her jewelry. I mean, thank goodness I had left all the stuff back at the apartment, but they’d know it was me.”

“Did they charge you with robbery as well as assault?”

“Yes. Uh-oh, I thought. That’s what my lawyer thought too. But the judge was such a sweetie. He said: ‘I want your word that if I grant bail, you’ll be back.’ So I said: ‘Oh, Your Honor, I swear I won’t let you down.’”

“And then you were out of there.”

Mary winked. “Straight to Baltimore. No bathroom stops, no frozen yogurt stops. Then the first plane out to anywhere. We wound up in Pittsburgh. Not bad.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“No, I mean, Norm made a forty-two-thousand score in less
than three weeks. He said she was so easy, he hated to take the money.”

“And all was well between the two of you?”

“Fine!” But she looked away, shamed by a memory, and tried to hide her chagrin by staring at a coupon for Joy.

“What was the problem?”

“He was so hurt that I hadn’t trusted him.”

When we first started seeing so much of each other, the man in my life and I recognized that such an alliance of two trial lawyers could be problematical. Unless we invited a judge along to hand down rulings on the almost daily basis we saw each other, our friendship could become one endless litigation, the first thing in the day one of us would say to the other being: Now, about the issue you raised on January fifteenth last. Let me enumerate the reasons why you were so pathetically misguided, to say nothing of lamentably wrong.