Lily White (53 page)

“Paula, was there a telephone in the house?” Lee asked. They spoke in a small room in the women’s section of the jail, an area referred to as the Waldorf, where inmates charged with highly publicized cases were held. The Waldorf had a common room for meals and TV, a few cells, and a small, square interrogation room, which was used for lawyers’ conferences. It was furnished rather luxuriously for the center, with two chairs that were not nailed down and a couch covered in artificial blue leather. In her blue uniform, Paula seemed part of the furniture.

“A telephone?” Paula repeated, not seeing the point of the question. “Of course we had a telephone.” She counted on her fingers. “Six extensions. No, wait, seven. There’s one in the basement.”

“And Eddie went to work … how often?”

“Six days a week.” Her voice was strong yet sweet, like that of a teacher of early primary grades.

“If I put you on the stand, the prosecutor is going to ask why—in all those years—you didn’t call for help.”

“He said he’d kill me if I talked about our private matters. That’s what he called it all the time: ‘a private matter.’ He’d come home and if he was feeling mean … it was hard to tell from looking at him, because he’s got such a nice face. Friendly. With freckles. People always think freckles are friendly.”

“‘A private matter’?”

“Yes. He’d come in and put down his briefcase and hand me his coat and I’d hang it up. When I came back, if he’d say: ‘Paula, I have a private matter to discuss with you,’ then I knew I was in trouble.”

“And then? He’d start hitting you?”

“No. He’d talk to me, tell me what I did wrong. Like he felt sorry for me and wanted to help me see where I was making a mistake. Then he’d get angry and say I wasn’t paying attention or something. And then he’d yell, and pretty soon he’d start hitting.”

“Did he hit you with his hands?” Lee observed Paula closely, looking for emotion, but could find none; she spoke as if what she was describing had happened to a woman she had never met. Lee knew her expert witnesses could explain this seemingly dispassionate account, this distancing of herself from the horror she had experienced, in order to survive. But come on, Lee thought. Cry a little, for God’s sake. Help me out. Give me some tears for the jury.

“Usually he punched me, but if something was around, he’d use that.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything. A wooden hanger. A pot. A Dust-buster.”

“You have two children, twenty-one and nineteen. Right?” Paula nodded. Lee did not see the instinctive smile most mothers display when their children are mentioned. “Are you on good terms with them?”

“Oh yes. Very good.”

“Did they ever see Eddie beat you?”

Paula’s forehead creased. She touched her ring finger, probably to twirl her wedding ring around, but it was in an envelope in a safe in the correctional center’s basement. “Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“They saw him get angry and shove me. Maybe smack me once or twice. But he was good about keeping his temper around them. He’d wait till after dinner and till I cleaned up. Then he’d say: ‘Excuse me, kids. Mom and I have a private matter to discuss.’”

“But he beat you severely. Don’t you think they heard anything?”

“I hope not. I tried very hard to keep quiet. I didn’t want to frighten them.”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, good morning. My name is Lee White, and I am the lawyer for Paula Urquhart. Mrs. Urquhart is accused of a vicious crime: assault with intent to kill. As the prosecutor has told you, on Sunday morning, February tenth, someone entered the bedroom in the Urquharts’ mansion in Locust Valley and beat Eddie Urquhart so badly that he is now in a coma and not expected to recover. That someone was not a homicidal maniac, not a burglar whom Eddie surprised, but his wife, Paula, whom you see there at the defense table in the pink
shirtwaist. You may be asking yourselves: How come, if we admit to this crime, we’re here pleading not guilty?”

The courtroom was packed. Chuckie, Will and a couple of his partners, Barbara Duberstein and a score of past and present assistant district attorneys sat comfortably, their arms draped on the backs of the wooden benches to display their proprietorship of the halls of justice. They were not there only to root for Lee or the prosecutor, however; this was one of the first invocations of the battered wife defense in the county, and they wanted to see it. Terry Salazar was right behind the defense table, wearing a new suit. He had been foul-mouthed and obnoxious but brilliant. Lee was amazed when he discovered how many people were aware of what Eddie was doing to Paula, and even more amazed at how many Terry had been able to convince to testify.

The press was there too, as were everybody’s relatives, from the judge’s incredibly fecund extended Italian family, which took up three rows, to Eddie and Paula Urquhart’s—sitting on separate sides of the courtroom—to Lee’s. Ginger and Fos fit right in, but Sylvia, Leonard, Robin, and Jazz were so glaringly attractive, so fashionably turned out, that they might have been VIP’s in the first row for Thierry Mugler’s latest collection. Lee made sure not to glance in their direction so as not to align herself with the overprivileged and, by doing so, alienate the jury. However, even without looking, she could feel, hanging heavily in the air, her mother’s disapproval of her gray dress with white collar and cuffs. The few remaining seats were taken by courtroom buffs, including a retired mailman who watched all Lee’s trials. When he took his seat, the mailman had pointed to his lapel: a white carnation. “White,” he had called out, and winked.

“We’re here because for twenty years of their twenty-two-year marriage, Eddie Urquhart beat this woman, sometimes once a week. Not shoved, not smacked, not even hit. Beat her with his
fists, with broomsticks, with a lamp. The first time that he broke her nose and cheekbone, he did it by hitting her full force in the face with a telephone. Not just once, but over and over again.” Lee stopped and took a deep breath. Oxygen, fuel so she could be propelled onward to talk about something so revolting she could hardly bear it. She, not Paula, would be the one to show the judge and jury the terrible toll of Eddie Urquhart’s violence, since nothing—not even Lee’s not very veiled suggestion that it was all right to show some emotion—could wipe the pleasant expression from Paula’s face. She prayed that by the end of the trial, the jury would understand that this was one of the cruelest scars of all.

“The first question that came to my mind when I heard about this case was this: How come she didn’t call the police if it was so bad? Eddie was a successful businessman, and he worked every day but Sunday. Paula had a phone. For a while, before he took it away, she even had a car. If she was too proud or too fearful to call the police, she could have taken her children, escaped. She could have told one of the emergency room doctors bandaging her fractured ribs: My husband did this to me. She could have called her brother or her sister and cried: Help me! Hide me! And if she was totally desperate, she could have armed herself, and the next time Eddie brutalized her, she could have shot him in self-defense. If she had done that, she would not be in this courtroom today. Well, in order to find her not guilty, you’ll have to understand in your hearts just why Paula could not cry out for help, why she had to wait and strike at her husband the only time when he was not her personal terrorist, her very own torturer: when he was asleep.”

Lee outlined for the jury the witnesses who would testify to Eddie’s brutality: the frighteningly polite Urquhart children and an oil-burner serviceman. Paula was the perfect housewife, with a list of repairmen and a file of their bills. Every one of those people
had been contacted by Terry. Only one had observed friendly-faced, freckled Eddie out of control, but the man could tell how Eddie had banged Paula’s head against a wall near the thermostat six times. Then, moving the length of the jury box, Lee summarized the testimony her expert witnesses would give. “You will hear, ladies and gentlemen, that Paula was a prisoner of terror. The one reality in her life was that this all-powerful man would hurt her if he was displeased. It was not a fear: It was fact. He inflicted terrible pain on this woman two and three and four times a month. And he was displeased so easily. If a shirt button was loose, she got punched in the mouth so hard she lost three teeth. When she dared to serve him a steak that he said was overcooked, he broke a bottle of wine over her head. It took two hours in the emergency room for them to get all the pieces of glass out of her scalp. She told the doctor she and Eddie had been having a drink in a bar and somehow she got hit when two men began to fight. If those were the punishments for the crimes of a loose shirt button and a well-done steak, can you imagine how she feared the punishment for telling the truth? The lawyer for the District Attorney’s Office is going to try and make it sound easy. ‘Dial 911. What was the big deal?’ By the end of this trial, you will understand with terrible clarity what the big deal was.”

After her opening, Jazz kissed her and said: “There are no words.” Then he found one: “Amazing.” Robin echoed “Amazing,” and Sylvia and Leonard held back for a moment before embracing her, as if waiting for permission. They were not just proud, she sensed, but a little frightened of her.

“Good opening,” Chuckie said, and pinched her cheek.

“A-plus, Whitey!” the mailman called out.

“I can’t believe it,” Barbara Duberstein said. “Me, buying this defense. But you got me.”

Will waited for her by the water fountain. He seemed both amused and pleased by the fuss over her. She left the others and
approached him. He had such grace, such stature, that he made everyone else in the hall outside the courtroom appear dim. “Well?”

“A great opening. Really. You’re on your way.”

“But not there yet. Did you see juror—”

“Number four?” Will asked. “With his mouth all screwed up, like he’s saying ‘Give me a break. Had to save her own life by cracking his head open with an ice skate while the poor guy was asleep. Ha!’ Number four’s a rough one, Lee. You’re going to have to fight for his soul.” But he said it with spirit, indicating it would be a good fight, one that would be worth something whether she won or lost.

“Any advice?” she asked.

He thought for a moment. “It’s just a case. You’ve tried hundreds. Don’t blow this up too much. Don’t think this is going to make or break your career. If you lose, people will know you did a fine job, and you’ll get some referrals. If you win, you’ll get a lot of nice phone calls and a few more referrals but you won’t make the cover of
Time.
” She nodded, knowing objectively that he was right although not quite believing it. Then she began to go over the pros and cons of a particular line of questioning she was thinking of using with the government’s expert on domestic violence—all the while wishing that instead of telling her it had been a great opening, Will had hugged her.

Nothing could have prepared her. She was so exhausted after the first week of trial that she wished she could have hired someone to brush her teeth for her. On Sunday morning, she sat at the kitchen table beside Kent, showing him how to hull strawberries. His hands and arms were covered with red juice. Val, in her high chair, was throwing slices of apple about in a spiteful manner, as if she had saved her entire quota of Terrible Twos egregious behavior for this hour.

Jazz had come in minutes before and was unpacking groceries, humming a sappy old song. He seemed so happy that she did not feel too guilty that she was not paying attention to him. She turned from Val—clutching the last apple slice in her hand, debating whether to fling it or eat it—to Kent. Now he had crushed strawberries in his hair. “How about a shower, kiddo?” she asked him.

“No.”

“And a shampoo.”

“No.”

“New soap, new shampoo.”

Kent considered her offer and decided to yield to temptation. Whenever they went on vacation, Lee saved the complimentary toiletries the hotels gave out, knowing that nothing made Kent happier than his own new cake of soap. She decided to go along with him to make sure he did not transfer strawberries to the wallpaper as he climbed the stairs. “You’ll watch Val, Jazz?”

“Sure,” he said. Lee glanced up at the clock. Nearly eleven. She was trying not to think about the trial. But it was at nearly that very hour, on another Sunday, that Paula Urquhart told herself that if she did not act soon, Eddie would be waking up.

Lee found a cake of soap—The Breakers, Palm Beach—where they had spent a week the previous winter watching rain on the ocean. But although there were four bottles of hair conditioner left in the box she kept in the linen closet, there was no shampoo. “Here,” she said to Kent. “You start your shower and I’ll go find shampoo.”

“I’ll wait,” he said, clearly thinking she was trying to pull a fast one. She laughed at his suspicious expression and walked into the bedroom, to Jazz’s closet. Stretching to reach the top shelf, she got down his travel kit. Beside the mini-can of Gillette Foamy and the smallest bottle of Tylenol was a miniature bottle of shampoo from a hotel. She sighed, relieved. Confrontation
averted. She zipped up his case and returned it to the shelf. “See?” she said to Kent. “Would I kid you about new shampoo?” She glanced at the bottle. Hotel Carlyle. New York. New York? Why would Jazz have shampoo from a New York hotel?

“Give me it!” Kent was irate at her holding back. Lee checked it again, thinking she had misread it. Hotel Carlyle. New York. Kent grabbed it from her hand and went to shower.

All right, maybe the Carlyle was part of some chain and Jazz had really gotten the shampoo in Toronto, where he had gone for some big fur fashion show. Or it could have been from when they’d traveled out West and stayed in Portland for a long weekend to spend time with his sister Irene.

But in her heart she knew how the shampoo had got from the Hotel Carlyle into her husband’s overnight kit.

The prosecutor waited until Jazz had been asleep for nearly an hour. Around midnight, she got out of bed. He did not stir. Methodically, she went through his closet. In a pocket in his camera bag, she found one of the miniature books sold at the counters of bookstores: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Sonnets from the Portuguese.
The tiny red ribbon bookmark was placed on what Lee knew to be the most over-quoted poem in the English language: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” She searched, heart pounding, but found no inscription, no “To JT with love from Whomever.” Careful. They were being careful. She realized the sappy song he had been humming that morning was “Secret Love.”