Lily White (55 page)

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

He shot me a what-kind-of-stupid-question-is-that look. “To see Mary.”

I realized he’d been in the Visitors Center as an insider, not an outsider, and hadn’t a clue to where it was. “I’ll take you over.” When I had left my house, it had been a sweet suburban spring Friday, but the vast concrete parking lot in East Meadow seemed to draw down all the sun’s heat. We made our way toward the entrance of the Visitors Center slowly, trudging like hikers lost in a malevolent desert. “Do you have any identification on you?” I asked.

“Leave me alone.”

“Norman, they won’t let you see her without your showing a driver’s license or a birth certificate.” He stopped beside an old car, dark green, filthy. In its grime, someone had drawn the opposite of a smiley face: a circle with two dots for eyes and an upside-down U for a mouth. “They’re pretty strict about regulations here,” I explained. “But then, you know that.” He nodded, barely, a single shake of his head. “I’ll be glad to drive you back to your place, although to be perfectly honest, I think the cops were probably over there with a search warrant after they arrested Mary, and if you had a pile of phony ID’s, I can’t guarantee they weren’t seized.”

He considered his options, pressing the top of his beaky little nose, right between his eyes, with his thumb and forefinger. “You can take me there. I’ll change, then I can go get a birth certificate.”

“If you have your choice of a name,” I advised him, having seen in my years in criminal law a pretty fair selection of counterfeit documents from dealers in the area, “get something with Norman Torkelson on it. The guards at the Visitors Center know you by that name. It takes them about a week to forget an inmate your size, so you don’t want to show up being Irving Schwartz—at least not today.”

By the time I dropped him off, he was speaking to me, although not happily. I understand, he told me. You were faced with an ethical issue and you resolved it as best you could. However, he added, I must say that ethics or morality in the larger sense was
not
served by what you did.

On one hand, I thought he was beyond annoying. A con man spouting off on morality? On the other hand, I felt so sad for him. What a loss! Mary had allowed him to do something he had never been able to do before: love a woman. Everything about her had been perfect for him: her beauty, her sweet dopiness, her
larcenous heart. Even her crime had worked for Norman, because it had enabled him to be noble, to offer himself up to save her. What a shock to his system those foreign two emotions—love and self-sacrifice—must have been to a rat like him. But after a while, I thought, he’d gotten used to feeling virtuous. It suited him. I considered it remarkable that this professional slimeball had not once tried to weasel out of taking the punishment that should have been hers.

Now, though, all his goodness had been for nothing. Sure, he was free. And justice had triumphed. But what did he care about justice? The one and only person who had given his life meaning—Mary Dean—was locked up in Building D, waiting to be processed so she could make the trip to Bedford Hills, where she’d stay for the next fifteen to twenty years.

I was not about to be an accessory to a felony and drive him to a date with criminal possession of a forged instrument, so I dropped him in front of the apartment he and Mary had been so happy in. On the spur of the moment, I told him I’d buy him dinner so if he had any questions about Mary’s case I could answer them. He did not seem surprised—or seem anything else, to tell the truth. He was operating on automatic pilot, so in a monotone he said all right and asked what time he should be at my office. I was tempted to blare a trumpet and announce: Hey, I’ve never invited any client out to dinner, ever! But I just said seven-thirty—and make it casual.

Norman showed up in a tie and pin-striped suit, a little more Al Capone than Wall Street. But he seemed to feel Establishment, if not downright lawyerly, in it. With him so dolled up, I scratched plans for the glorified hamburger joint-salad bar I’d planned on and took him to a restaurant in the Garden City Hotel, a place with a great deal of soft light, pink marble, and waiters so terribly worried about your welfare that you fear for their blood pressure.

“I want the best lawyer for Mary,” he told me.

“The one she has is fine.”

“I’m talking about someone with a national reputation.” I noticed that for a guy who would have to fill in a blank after “Occupation” with “Criminal,” Norman had unusually genteel table manners. He had ordered snails and was managing the pincer with masterful dexterity. I wondered if he honestly liked snails or if ordering them was part of his routine, to display to his marks how cultivated he was. “I have the money,” he said. “I can pay for it.”

“Look,” I told him, setting down my salad fork. “You can get anyone you want. And I’m sure with all the time Mary is facing, it’s tempting to imagine a prince on a white steed coming in and, abracadabra, making everything all right. The problem is this: She won’t be having a trial, so you don’t need someone who has the reputation of mesmerizing juries. And there are no complicated issues, so you don’t need a brilliant legal mind.”

“But if someone can convince a judge—”

“Do you know someone who can do it better than Barbara Duberstein, the lawyer she has now? I don’t. She’s been practicing here for ten years. She’s good and the judges like her, and even more, they trust her. You want my opinion? You’re much better off with good local counsel than with some city slicker the sentencing judge knows has been brought in just to bamboozle him.”

“How much will this cost?” Norman asked. Two middle-aged women at another table—considerably more middle-aged than I—were watching him. I thought I saw longing in their eyes. “Not that cost matters.”

“I’m not sure. You can check with Ms. Duberstein.”

“A rough estimate.”

“A couple of thousand.”

He seemed surprised. “That’s like nothing.” He looked around, and he caught the gaze of the two women on him. He seemed more saddened than pleased: He didn’t want the game anymore. He only wanted Mary. “Isn’t there some way, with, say, a six-figure number, that we can find a judge—”

“No.”

“I know that’s what you’re supposed to tell me—”

“I have no doubt that you know all the fine points of what I’m supposed to tell you. So I’ll save my breath. But it might be useful for you to know that from my experience practicing here—as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer—that your six-figure bribe will buy you a ticket back into the slammer. Now, I may be wrong. There may be a State Supreme Court justice sitting in Nassau County who can be or has been bought. I honestly don’t know of any. And I don’t know any lawyer here who would be willing to try and negotiate that kind of a purchase.” While this was not strict truth—I had my suspicions about one or two of my fellow members of the bar—it was true enough to tell someone like Norman.

We were well into our entrée—prime rib for him, monkfish for me—when I started wondering why he had been asking how much Mary’s lawyer would charge. “What happened to the forty-eight thousand you got from Bobette?” I asked, knowing that these days, the more intrusive a question, the more people seem willing to answer it.

“I sent most of it down to the place where I keep my money. That’s why I needed to know what sort of expenses I’ll be incurring with Mary’s defense … or representation, to be more accurate.”

“Atlanta?” I inquired, vaguely remembering something Mary had said. Norman laughed too heartily. Then he seemed embarrassed. I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d caught him in a phony
laugh or if some memory was making him uncomfortable. “Do people in your business now have Atlanta accounts the way they used to have numbered Swiss accounts?”

“Atlanta is just something I made up for Mary,” he admitted. “I have to go to Grand Cayman Island.” The Caymans were in the Caribbean, not far from Jamaica, and had become a center for international funny money. I was surprised, because most con men I knew were spenders, not savers. Their lives were a never-ending cycle of scam and squander and scam again.

“Are you going to spend any time down there?” I asked. Not that I was curious, but even if we passed on dessert, we still had to finish our petits pois with mint and get the check. I was afraid of running out of conversation. “Don’t you want to relax, get a little sun?”

“I can’t afford that luxury. I want to see Mary again tomorrow. I’ll see if I can get a flight out on Sunday and do business first thing Monday and get back here by midday to visit.” He sighed and got lost in playing hockey with his fork and a pea. His goal seemed to be a curlicue of carrot, but before he got there he looked up. “Is there any chance of bail?”

“No, Norman. Try to understand: she isn’t awaiting trial. She’s confessed to a murder, and she’ll be sentenced by the end of next week. Early the following week, she’ll be off to Bedford Hills.”

“I’m taking out a fair amount of money,” he told me. “I’m buying a house.”

“A house?”

“Yes. Up there, not far from the prison. I’ve already talked to a real estate broker in Katonah. She says she has a lot in my price range. A modest little house. That’s all I need, because it will just be I. I’m viewing it as an investment. When Mary gets out, we can sell it and go to someplace warm.”

“What are you going to do in Katonah?” I asked.

“Visit Mary in Bedford Hills every day I can.” He patted his
mouth with his napkin, a little too daintily for my taste. “I won’t try to con you. At this stage of my life, what do you think I’m going to do? Get a nine-to-five job? Do you think I’m like all of you”—he swooped his hand around, indicating everyone else in the restaurant—“needing someplace to go to, something to do every single day? I’ve always enjoyed my leisure. Reading the financial pages, watching a little TV, working out. I like to read. I read an enormous amount of books. If I told anyone I talked to for more than five minutes that I didn’t go to college, they wouldn’t believe me.” He was waiting for me to confirm this was true, so I nodded. “In any case, I have the wherewithal. I can live pretty nicely on what I’ve got socked away.”

“You’re a rarity,” I told him.

He knew what I meant. “You mean most men working the con—I hope you’ll pardon my language—piss it away.”

“That’s right.”

“Not me. I have plenty for now, and I’ll have a nice chunk left for Florida or wherever we wind up.”

I signaled to the waiter for the check. “What about the con?” I asked.

“What about it?”

“You sound like you’re thinking of retiring.”

“Let me tell you something,” Norman said, leaning forward, looking me straight in the eye. “I didn’t do it just for money. You must know that. I used to love it. The travel, the setup, playing out the game. And the ladies: All you legal types and all the shrinks think it’s just because I want to fuck them or, more to the point, fuck them over, if you’ll excuse the vernacular. You’re right in that the money is incidental, although I made a pretty penny. What you don’t get is that every single time, it was a thrill. A
thrill.
I got to fall in love over and over again. You have no idea. What a rush!” He sat back. “But then I met Mary. And sure, we moved around, I did the con. She even assisted me. But
from the second I saw her, I knew the game was over for me. I could never fall in love again with one of my marks. Because this time I was truly and forever in love.” He folded his napkin and put it beside his plate. “I lost my gift. I was hardly able to go through the motions. I can’t believe how I pulled it off with the last few ladies. Especially with a smart cookie like Bobette. She must have been so desperate.” He shook his head. “Poor, pathetic thing.”

Having gotten Norman off, I didn’t shout “Whee!” and run around, giddy and gay. But I did feel relieved. Except just when I thought I was finished with the Torkelson case, I started getting calls from Mary Dean. I refused to accept them, telling Sandi, my secretary, to refer them to Barbara Duberstein. That should have been that, but Sandi was still unhinged on the subject. She would not let go of the idea that Mary was an innocent. Please, she begged me,
please
speak to her. I told her Mary might indeed be innocent of a great many things, but the crime of murder was not one of them. Mary called twice Wednesday morning and once Wednesday afternoon.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Norman called too. Mary was in a bad way, he reported. Very upset. Not depressed. Angry. She was being irrational, screaming. They had to haul her out of the visitors room and put her in Administrative Lock-in. She kept begging Norman to get her out. He knew he couldn’t do that, he said to me, but was there anything—anything at all—he could do? Could he get her into some mental hospital? A private one would be fine. He had the money. I told him that Mary had already said she would plead guilty to murder. If she wanted to change her mind and plead not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, he’d have to get in touch with Barbara. But I suggested that given Mary’s videotaped confession, I didn’t think it likely that kind of defense would succeed. It sounded, though, as
if Norman was so deeply disturbed by Mary’s behavior that he’d half conned himself into believing she might still wind up in a sanitarium with a rose garden.

By Mary’s third phone call that afternoon, my secretary was in such a froth of distress over Mary and fury at me that I suggested she go home. She told me she didn’t want to. I told her I wanted her to—and not to come back the following day if the pressures of the job were getting to her. Vacation time was due her, and what a beautiful time of year to get away.

Naturally, she was in the office before I was Thursday morning. But she left of her own accord before lunch. She had tears in her eyes: I can’t take it, she said. If you could only hear that girl’s voice. She’s so sweet, so truly innocent, so …

The thought of getting away was beginning to appeal to me. My guy, the lawyer, was about to sum up in a trial in federal court, and was therefore unavailable, to say nothing of useless in terms of human companionship. I called my daughter, who is studying acting (and slinging hash in a restaurant in Tribeca) and asked if she was interested in a long, luxurious, and free weekend at a spa in the Berkshires. Usually she jumped at anything preceded by the word “free.” But she actually had an acting job starting the following Monday, two scenes in a cable TV movie being shot on Staten Island, and she had to prepare. So I decided to settle for an evening in the city and called an old friend of mine at the Manhattan D.A.’s. We agreed on a restaurant in Little Italy.