Lily White (8 page)

Mary’s too white face was framed by shiny black curls that spilled over her shoulders. The hairdo was neither the elegant three hundred dollar frenzy of a Manhattan cut nor the sculpted perfection of big Texas hair. To me, it looked like a homey attempt to copy the none-of-that-androgyny-shit-for-me style of a Dolly or a Wynonna. Unlike country music stars, however, Mary’s hair was not tier upon tier of faultless curlicues. In the sodden weather, the tresses on her shoulders had lost their verve and lay limp, wormlike, on her green suit jacket.

Obviously, she’d chosen the suit color to play up her luminous eyes. Those eyes didn’t need any help. On the contrary, the suit was green overkill. In truth, though, nothing could detract from those eyes, not even the opalescent pistachio shadow that covered her lids and orbital rims up to her brows, not the greasy black pencil liner.

Now, as to the rest of Mary Dean: Her nose would have been perfect except it had the tiniest indentation at the tip, as if she’d pressed on it throughout childhood, trying to get it to turn up. And her lips: full, but pretty, not those collagen-injected trout-mouths that had become so trendy. And just before she sat, I finally noticed the figure. High-breasted, tiny-waisted, long-legged. An ambulatory Barbie doll.

Except Mary was human. She was sweating and gave off an odor that was a combination of natural musk, wet wool and cheap perfume—gardenia? jasmine?—that I bet had the word
“Jungle” as part of its name. I watched a drop of perspiration slide down her left temple, past her jaw to her chin. It would have dribbled onto her neck, only she wiped it away with the back of her hand. In doing so, she lost control of the black patent-leather envelope-purse she’d been hugging to her chest. It dropped to the floor. Bending to pick it up, she cracked her forehead against the edge of my desk. “Aaah!” she cried, a yelp of pain.

A shudder chattered my teeth and shivered my shoulders, that frisson that comes when you empathize too intensely. For that second, my forehead throbbed in the same spot where she’d hit her head. I buzzed Sandi, requesting a cup of ice, fast. I must have sounded a little desperate because Sandi rushed in with it seconds later. Already a huge red rectangle, like a ledge, was protruding from Mary’s brow. I wrapped the ice in a few tissues and pressed it against the bump. Sandi stood by. “How are you feeling?” I asked Mary after a minute.

“A little …” Her lovely eyes, floating upward, looked slightly dopey. Tiny black pearls of mascara dotted her lashes.

“You’ll be fine in a minute,” Sandi assured her, too briskly. Sandi’s only other job had been with a malpractice firm. She lived in constant terror of lawsuits. Over the years, I tried to reassure her: No one’s going to sue me, but if they do, I can handle it. Nothing I could say could bring her peace. Besides the usual secretarial chores, she stood eternally vigilant, protecting the two oversophisticated rubes—me and Chuckie—from certain ruin at the hands of the shyster lawyers our scum-bucket clients would hire to sue us.

“I can manage now,” I told Sandi, who clearly did not believe she should leave me alone with a con man’s sweetie who had probably arranged her own subdural hematoma just so she could haul me into court and bring me to utter ruin. “I’m okay, Sandi. Thanks for the ice.” Reluctantly, casting a knowing and hostile
glance at Mary (whose eyes, fortunately, were still swimming in her head), Sandi left.

After a moment, Mary whispered: “Sorry.”

I took off the ice. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Except “fine” came out shakily, in two syllables.

“Are you nauseous?” I asked. “Does your head hurt?”

“No, really, I’m fine,” Mary reassured me, offering me a lovely smile. “Just, you know, getting bonked like that. Wowie!” She laughed at her own clumsiness. An instant later, she burst into sobs.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“It’s not … my head,” she explained, taking a giant hiccup of air. “It’s … Norman.”

“It must be—” I was going to say something objective and mealy-mouthed, like “difficult,” but instead I said: “—awful for you.”

“He’s in jail for
murder.
And it’s all my fault.” Her fault? I waited, putting on my Totally Neutral face, an expression of absolute indifference I’ve cultivated so as to do nothing to either encourage or discourage the person sitting across from me. It’s important that I hear it all: the craziness, the bizarre confessions, the monstrous lies that pour forth from that armchair by my desk. Mary took a large, loud gulp of air and went on. “If I hadn’t been premenstrual … I mean, I get food on the brain. All I was thinking about was stuffing myself. How I was going to stop at BK and shove in a Double Whopper with cheese. And onion rings—they’re so salty, I love ’em. I was thinking that I had to remember to buy those teeny Breath Asure things so Norman wouldn’t know I’d been to BK, because he gets super PO’d when I eat junk food. And I was thinking about a vanilla shake too. Even french fries. I’ve never been a big potato person, so you can imagine how bad off I was. So when I left for Motor Vehicle I grabbed the Bob ID instead of the Dan ID. All the names he
uses, I get mixed up, even though the last time he tested me I only got one wrong. If I’d’ve used Dan, they wouldn’t have traced the car back to the apartment.”

“They would have found him, though. His fingerprints were all over Bobette’s place.”

“But we could’ve gotten away once we knew the old lady was dead. The cops would’ve had to search every house on Long Island. They wouldn’t have found us in time. Instead—” She started to cry again. “—they came and knocked on the door. And I opened it! I didn’t even say ‘Who’s there?’ If I’d’ve done that, Norm could’ve gotten out the back.”

“When they’re arresting someone on a murder charge, they usually have people staked out in back.” But I didn’t want to make her feel too comfortable. Since I couldn’t get anything much from my client to help in my defense of him, I naturally decided to try Mary. She was feeling horribly guilty. Not for being an accessory before and after the fact to a crime—at best, fraud; at worst, homicide. No, she felt guilty for failing Norman.

“Take it easy,” I said, and handed her a couple of tissues. (I keep a box in my top desk drawer so I can easily hand a bunch to a weepy client or, more commonly, a nonweepy, sociopathic client’s hysterical family.) “Maybe we’ll be able to do something for Norman.”

“He told me it was hopeless, that the cops think he did it.”

“They do. But that’s why we have trial by jury. And that’s why you’ve retained me. Maybe among all of us we can figure something out that will convince the jury that Norman is not guilty.”

“He is
innocent”
Mary corrected me, and blew her nose. A too ladylike puff, not the HONK! a good-sized, healthy young woman would naturally produce. “He didn’t do it!”

“Then help me find something so I can prove it.”

“He left that house
one second
after that witness saw him with
Bobette, and he came right home to me and we were together from then on.
Every minute
until the cops came.”

“What was his relationship with Bobette?” I asked.

She drew up into a prim position, feet and knees together, hands in lap. “He said not to talk about anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because … you know.” I could think of several reasons, the main one being that he did indeed kill Bobette and was worried Mary would unintentionally give it away. If I were Norman, I’d be worried too. I couldn’t tell if Mary was simpleminded or merely so new at grown-up life that she hadn’t learned to lie without chewing the inside of her cheek and turning red. “Norman said: ‘No matter who, keep your lip zipped, and I mean zipped
all the way
up.’”

“Look, I’ve been a lawyer too long to expect him to break down and confess to me—”

“He didn’t do it!”

“Fine. But if I’m going to help him prove that, I need all the information I can get, good or bad. I’d rather learn it from him than get a big surprise from the prosecutor.” Then I added ominously: “She is one scary dame.”

“Oh, God,” Mary whimpered. She began to nibble her thumbnail. Instead of trying to allay her fear, I narrowed my eyes and flared my nostrils. Suddenly I became one scary dame too, which is what I wanted. I didn’t relish going into court with Mary testifying to Norman’s alibi. She’d turn to mush after thirty seconds on cross. Plus I sensed that Holly had one of those solid circumstantial cases that make defense lawyers like me pine for the good old days of being prosecutors—when the world was young and the facts were on our side. So I had to scare Mary into opening up. I also figured talking to her would be better than talking to Norman; with Mary, at least, I had a chance of hearing something resembling the truth. But she remained mum.

“Too bad you can’t help him,” I said, and pushed back my chair, as if I were about to stand to see her out. But she remained where she was, on the edge of her seat. She reached out and grabbed onto the desk, a huge old thing made from a farmhouse table. It looked as though she was trying to drag it toward her.

“If I talk to you,” she asked me, “would you have to tell Norman?”

“Well …” I stalled. It was one of those questions only a chairman of a bar association ethics committee could love: Is an attorney’s ethical obligation of full and complete disclosure of information to a client paramount? Or is counsel duty-bound to cork it if silence is what it costs to buy information that will save said client? “How about this, Mary? Unless it’s a matter of life and death, I won’t say a word to him. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Tell me about Norman and Bobette’s relationship.”

“Strictly business,” she declared, with finality.

“Then how come she was found dead in a nightgown and negligee?”

“Maybe the murderer changed her clothes after he killed her!” she suggested, pleased with herself. For the first time, she allowed herself to wriggle back into the big armchair, lean back, and cross her legs. Her shoes were designed not for an unseasonably cold May morning but for a gala midsummer bash: Two narrow straps of gold just beyond her toes and another around her ankle were all that held them on. The heels were high gold daggers.

“The murderer didn’t change her clothes,” I said. “The autopsy would have indicated that Bobette had been moved postmortem. How come she was in her nightgown?” Mary chewed the inside of her cheek a little more, a buying-time mannerism I knew I would never grow to love. She could have said: Norman left before she changed out of her regular stuff. Or: She got into a
sexy nightgown because her boyfriend—
the guy who killed her
—was coming over. I explained: “Norman was seen at her place at six-thirty in the evening. You said he left immediately after the man who is the witness saw him. So say that was at six forty-five.” Mary inched forward. “From Merrick to your apartment … Fifteen, twenty minutes? Sometime around seven—daylight-saving time—so it was still light outside, this lifelong spinster puts on a sexy negligee?”

“But he was with me the whole …” She sputtered to a halt. She didn’t know what to say. Even if I spent weeks preparing her testimony, she’d be a lousy witness. Forget street smarts: She lacked the confidence to utter a simple declarative sentence and leave it alone. “I should say he was with me the whole time, shouldn’t I?”

“If that’s the truth,” I said. “But I’d like to keep you off the stand. You seem to get a little nervous when you’re under the gun.”

“You said it!” she agreed.

“So you can see why I need to know more about what was going on. I need something I can use to trip up the D.A.”

“Right.”

“So let’s talk about Norman and Bobette—honestly.”

Mary uncrossed her legs, blinked her lashes and opened her eyes wide. “Okay.”

“You’re telling me what went on between Norman and Bobette was strictly a business deal. If I know that’s nonsense, can you imagine what Holly Nuñez, the assistant D.A., knows? She’s had a whole squad of homicide cops investigating Norman Torkelson. Now, was he conning Bobette Frisch?” A little-girl shrug, head to the side. Her mannerisms were overly cutesy for such a tall woman. For such a beauty. Either she’d bloomed quite late in adolescence or her mother had been petite and revoltingly winsome. “That’s a yes, he was conning her?”

“Uh … yes. But he wasn’t having sex with her.”

Right. “Really?”

“Really. I mean, he told me he
never
had sex with them, even before he met me. He said lonely women …” She wasn’t so naive that she didn’t know what Norman did was reprehensible. But it didn’t seem to appall her; at that moment, she was just slightly unsure of how to present it. “Lonely women …”

“Say it straight.”

“Lonely women … I
can’t
say it. I can’t think of the word. It means ‘can’t get enough.’”

“Insatiable?”

“That’s it!” she squealed. “Hey, you and Norman should play Scrabble!”

“‘Lonely women are insatiable …’” I prompted her.

“So if you start having sex, they’ll milk you dry. I mean, if he was doing them, do you think he’d have time for me?”

“So he never goes near them?” I asked.

“He
cuddles
them,” she explained serenely, the way Norman must have explained it to her: I know this sounds incredible, Mary, my angel, but it is the truth, and (he’d offer her a sad little shrug here) that’s what I’m stuck with. “He holds them and gives them back rubs. Sometimes he’ll kiss them, but a cheek kiss or a forehead kiss. Not a kiss kiss.”

The drizzle turned to downpour. Raindrops smacked against the windowpane and were driven down diagonal paths by a sharp wind. At the same moment, Mary and I peered down at her feet, naked except for the flimsy gold shoes. They were not just big feet, but spread out, like a hod carrier’s—if the hod carrier had given himself a pedicure with coral polish.

“How did Norman meet Bobette?” I asked.

“The usual way.”

“You agreed to help me help Norman, Ms. Dean.”

“Mary.”

“Mary, I want to know everything you know.”

“Okay. But I forgot what you just asked me.”

“Where did he and Bobette meet?”