Lily White (49 page)

“Not that second. But the”—Mary made the choking sound again, but softer this time—“finally stopped. And her eyeballs got yucky. Then she shut her eyes and I let her down.” She turned to Sam. “She was very heavy. I couldn’t hold her.”

Before he could make a nasty comment and rattle her, Barbara Duberstein asked: “Mary, remember when we started, how Ms. Nuñez asked you if you were making this statement of your own free will? You said yes, you were.” Mary said yes, quietly and, for her, quite seriously, as if for once she truly comprehended the import of what she was saying. “Did anyone put undue pressure on you to make this statement?”

“No.”

“Did you discuss making this statement with Norman Torkelson?” I asked.

Mary gave a loud, fast laugh. “Are you kidding?”

“Is that a no?”

“Of course it’s a no. He’d kill me if he knew I was doing this!” She happened to glance at Sam as she said this, and shrank back. “I don’t mean, like, really kill,” she explained to him. Almost as if it were beyond Sam’s control, his eyes changed from cold, dead cop eyes to sympathetic eyes, and almost instantly, into the misty eyes of soap opera close-ups. Holly glanced at me as Sam’s face began an unfamiliar journey into softness. I shrugged, as in: What did you expect? Holly shrugged back, as in: Another one bites the dust. Barbara merely looked heavenward and exhaled. “But see,” Mary continued, addressing only Sam Franklin now, “Norman said he should be the one to go to jail. Because he started the whole business and dragged me into it—which isn’t true. I love him. It was my idea we should work together, not his. But he said it would be easier if he went, because he’s been away before.” Still looking at Sam, she explained: “To jail. Away to jail.” He nodded his gratitude for her elucidation—passionate, all-out nodding that might never have stopped if Mary hadn’t started talking again. “See, Norman knew the ropes about jails. But he said, like, it wouldn’t be that long, with time off for good behavior. He told me: Just sit tight. But I can’t! Not now. I didn’t know they”—she turned from Sam to look at Holly—“were going to throw the book at him.” Her beautiful green eyes filled with tears then, and in total disregard of her mascara, Mary began to weep.

“Well,” Holly began when we were back in her office. She had called in a policewoman to baby-sit for Mary while she, Sam, Barbara, and I talked. But Sam had made some excuse about
pressing business at a crime scene in Plainview. The last we saw of him, however, he was no closer to Plainview than Mary’s chair. “I have to admit: You told me so, Lee.”

“So now what?” I asked, crossing my legs, thinking about the inevitable call I would make to my guy to tell him I had no idea how late I’d be and would he be so good as to start thinking creatively about the defrosted chicken breasts in my refrigerator. This was going to be one long day.

“There’s just one little problem,” Holly said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I don’t believe her.” Her voice was effervescent, like one of those bubblehead quiz show dames who think their co-host might be putting over a fast one on them.

“What are you talking about, Holly?”

“It doesn’t play for me.”

I hate hip new uses for old verbs. “It doesn’t matter if it plays for you. It’s not a record, it’s not a movie; it’s a confession in a homicide case.”

“It’s something they cooked up, some scam.”

“Holly, they haven’t connected on this. Norman doesn’t know she’s opened up to me. He sure in hell doesn’t know she’s here.”

“I’ll have to ask Jerry.”

Terrific. Jerry McCloskey, the head of the Homicide Bureau, was so ineffectual that he’d probably want to commission a poll before deciding. “Go ahead,” I told her. “There’s really nothing much to discuss. You have a confession. You have physical evidence to corroborate the confession. Whether it plays to you or not is not a matter of law.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving until you make a decision.” So she went to speak to Jerry McCloskey.

While she was gone, Barbara and I discussed how it never fails to amaze us that even the most assertive people will knuckle
under to outrageous behavior. How come it did not occur to Holly to say: “What do you mean you’re not leaving? Get out of my office. I’ll call you when I’m good and ready.” Throughout my legal career, all I had to do was cross my arms and dig in my metaphoric heels. Okay, now and then a lawyer would tell me to take a hike, but if I’d sit there, unmoving, and maybe glance at my watch to let them know how much I resented their obstinence, they’d get up from their desk or pick up the phone and do whatever it was I wanted them to do.

The question neither Barbara nor I addressed was that if we were both such hotshot tough lawyers, how come we so often turned into wimpettes in our personal lives?

Holly returned in about fifteen minutes. “Jerry says okay.”

“Good,” I said, curbing a desire to leap up and shout with joy and do a jig.

“I want it clear that we’re not disposed toward anything approaching leniency,” Holly said to Barbara.

“Pray you get a female judge,” Barbara replied. “Otherwise, you’re going to get leniency up the wazoo.”

“You’re dead if it’s a man, Holly,” I concurred. “Did you check out Sam Franklin?”

“I know! Did you ever see such total mush?”

“Terry Salazar,” I told her. “My investigator. Mr. Hard-Ass.”

“He’s kind of cute,” Holly said.

“If you got to know him, you’d realize he’s the most uncute man in America. Except when he met Mary: She turned him into marshmallow fluff. And the last judge she appeared before, the one in Maryland who granted bail after Mary smiled …”

“A man,” Holly guessed. “Well, wouldn’t you know it!” She laughed brightly. Too brightly.

For God’s sake, I thought. It’s one thing to be relieved that a matter is resolved. But she’s just lost the chance at a big, fat, juicy trial that she was going to win. If this had been my case as an
A.D.A., I’d be pretty depressed about that. Okay, she was doing what I wanted her to do, being decent, fair-minded, but Holly had gone for the easy out so damned fast. Barbara didn’t seem troubled by Holly’s cheery mood, but she really wasn’t involved in the case. I had expected at least four or five hours of brawling, though, with Holly pounding her desk a couple of times, telling me that Norman wasn’t off the hook yet, that he might have been an accomplice, or at least an accessory. Holly should have put up a fight, if only to save face, because her judgment had been wrong when I’d tried to get her to listen to my theory that Norman might have been innocent of Bobette’s murder. But here she was, sitting back, yukking it up, having a high old time. Wasn’t she in the least surprised at Mary’s confession? Or at least thoughtful about the case: After all, she had almost sent the wrong person away for life.

She told Barbara she would do serious thinking about a sentence recommendation, which I doubted. Then Barbara left, to allow me to talk about my own client. “When can you spring Norman?” I inquired.

“I don’t know that he can get sprung. We may be holding him as an accessory.”

“Holly, give me a damn break! There is nothing in Mary’s confession that puts him there at the time of the murder, nothing that connects him in any way to the homicide. You know there isn’t a judge around who’s going to keep him in, so why do we have to go through all this?”

“I’ll see,” she said, making a little note to herself. She used a pen with aqua ink. “I would have to have his release approved upstairs.”

“Huber will be thrilled.”

“He’ll be okay.” Holly was chirping again. “Jerry’s been putting tons o’ pressure on us to push those cases through, so they’re going to be
real
glad we can close the books on this one.”

“It’s not fair to Norman to have to stay on ice while you’re waiting for your paperwork to go through. That could take weeks.”

“It won’t take weeks, Lee,” Holly said, laughingly. I all but expected her to add: You old silly. “Days at most. I’ll do my best to see to it that it gets moved through channels as fast as humanly possible.” This last offer did not spring from Holly’s usual chipperness. Having been caught prosecuting the wrong person for murder, she wanted to keep the case as quiet as possible. If she locked Norman in the cooler for too long, she knew perfectly well I would have to start making a loud and public fuss. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. But I was reluctant to leave. I told myself that if Holly wasn’t down about not going to trial, I was. Sure, I’d known
People
vs.
Torkelson
would be almost impossible to win. That didn’t matter. I needed to try; I needed the fight.

“I can’t believe I won’t have to stay late tonight,” she enthused. “I’m going to call up my boyfriend and say, ‘Hey, let’s have dinner.’ I hope he doesn’t die of shock that I’m actually free.”

But this was a big deal, damn it! Didn’t Holly have any emotion about it? Or was she some new breed of woman, so smart about the ways of the world that nothing got to her? Had she experienced everything—or seen so much on television—that she had no innocence left? No euphoria? No despair? Something important had just happened. Or was “important” just a word in her vocabulary, a tool in prioritizing? For Holly, life seemed to hold no surprises.

“Speak to you tomorrow!” she promised, trying to pry me out of my chair. Then she began leafing through her papers, searching for her next case.

Sam was the one watching over Mary. The policewoman, a cinder block in a blue uniform, was leaning against the wall opposite them, checking out the scaly skin on her elbows, now that it
was Department-decreed short-sleeve season. Sam, leaning toward Mary, was saying God knows what into her ear. He was trying to soothe her. But all Mary seemed to hear was some tragic song in her own head. She did not even look Sam’s way. She stared straight ahead, her eyes swollen, ringed black with dissolved eye makeup. But she was no longer crying.

“Mary,” I said softly. I gave Sam a Get-away-I’m-a-lawyer look, but he wouldn’t budge from her side. In fact, I was not her lawyer. And I was not on her side. I was the reason she was about to be fingerprinted, photographed from the front and in profile, and given the baggy blue female inmate’s uniform. “Do you want me to get Barbara back here for you? Or do you want to discuss things with Norman?”

Suddenly Mary came back to life. She seemed to expand in her chair, a parched plant getting water. “I can see him?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. But maybe I can talk them into finding a room for you up here, so you can have a private phone conversation.” She slumped back down. “Barbara is quite good.” I found myself wanting desperately to cheer her up. I gave her an encouraging smile that all but said: Help is right around the corner. Except it wasn’t. What was wrong with me? I had done more than my duty. I had done the right thing. Except I felt like hell. God, how I hate ambivalence—and there’s so damn much of it.

Mary looked down at her gold sandals, which would, in a matter of an hour or so, be replaced by a pair of often-worn, smelly, ill-fitting prison shoes. My heart went out to her. Not because she was a gorgeous-looking girl going into an ugly place. In the whole scheme of things, I told myself, why shouldn’t she be going? She didn’t deserve my pity. She had committed the ultimate crime. Taking away her gold sandals, her eyeliner, and her freedom would still not make up for the cut-off life of Bobette Frisch.

But what in God’s name had brought Mary Dean to this place? What kind of home had she come from? What sort of family life turns a girl into a hooker at age sixteen? She was so beautiful. She had such a capacity for love. And, okay, she was dumb and coarse and selfish, but as even Sam Franklin had discovered, she was so sweet.

And any chance she might have had for a life was now lost forever.

N
aturally, Lee had heard stories around the office about Will Stewart’s lady friend, Maria. So upper class that she was called Ma-rye-a, not Ma-ree-a. Maria Parkhurst. Half black, half white. Her father was either a rich Socialist or a surgeon, and her mother a dancer for someone—one person mentioned Martha Graham, another said no, Agnes de Mille, and a third was positive she had been the only black Ziegfeld Girl. Whoever her parents had been, Maria Parkhurst had inherited good looks. “Stunning” seemed to be the adjective favored by the lawyers, while one of the homicide detectives who had been invited to the previous year’s Nassau County District Attorney’s Office picnic preferred “like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“You’ve never met her?” Jazz asked, surprised.

“No.” Lee craned her head, looking over her colleagues spread out on blankets on the sand at a private club in Atlantic Beach, a low-key, relatively proletarian club the office had taken over for
the day. She spotted someone tall and brown in a lime-green playsuit at the volleyball net, but when the woman turned around, Lee realized it was Wanda, the law librarian, who looked like Louis Armstrong with a wig. “Maria lives in the city, so she’s not about to drop into the office. And Will is so close-mouthed about his life he’ll only tell you something if you ask. Right around Easter, when he went to Greece, I asked him if he was going alone. He looked at me like I was asking him to see his privates, but he finally said no, he was going with Maria. ‘My friend Maria.’ Ha! Like they were going to take separate rooms.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s the assistant headmistress at a girls’ school in the city. The Barton School. She teaches history there. It’s supposed to be very exclusive, very—”

“It is,” Jazz informed her as he returned Woodleigh Huber’s wave and exhaled a small but patient sigh as Huber, his white hair rigid in its pompadour despite a brisk ocean breeze, jogged through the sand to greet him. “I guess my old man’s party credentials are still okay.”

Lee smiled at him. Why not? After the three months of discord following Valerie’s birth, Jazz had gone out of his way to be a good and generous husband. Generous in gifts: a ruby ring for Christmas, a big Ford station wagon for her birthday. Part of her was mortified, feeling they were presents for a completely different kind of woman, someone decorative, useless. Certainly they were not presents people still in their twenties should be giving each other. Yet another part could not take her eyes off the sizzling red sparkle on her finger—and cried “Hot damn!” at the classic wood side panels of the wagon, grabbed the key, and went for a ride.