Lily White (61 page)

My door opened. Chuckie Phalen, as he did every evening, stuck in his head to say goodbye before toddling off to TJ’s Taproom. My face must have stopped him. He told me I looked like the wrath of God. When I didn’t give him an argument, he knew something was wrong and came in. I told him what had happened. Both of us could hear the tremor in my voice. What are you going to do? he asked me. I’m meeting Barbara Duberstein. I’ll play it by ear.

Mary looked as if her suicide attempt had been successful. Dead eyes, although still stunningly green and accentuated by
thick black lashes. She did not walk toward us as much as allowed her body to be conveyed by a female corrections officer. The officer was either extraordinarily compassionate or in awe of Mary’s beauty. She escorted her across the huge room not with the usual antagonistic impatience—Come on! Move it!—but with a degree of deference that might have been shown a queen on coronation day. Far from being pushed, Mary was being escorted by the officer: Turn here, good, that’s right, and They’re right over there. Mary was as unaware of the special treatment as she was of the officer herself, even when the woman supported her elbow and helped lower her into her chair.

“Mary,” I said, “I had to ask Barbara to come along. I want to do everything I can for you, but because I was representing Norman, there are some things that need doing that I can’t do.”

“How are you doing, Mary?” Barbara asked.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to me.

I wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for trying to hang herself or for asking me to visit her. “Don’t be sorry. You must have been in a bad way to try what you did.”

She covered her face with her big hands because she started to cry. Still, I could hear: “Norman.”

“What about Norman?” Barbara asked, taking out her fountain pen and a small leather book she always carried. In all the years I’d known her, she had never run out of space in the thing. “I’ll just make a note or two.”

“Tell us about Norman,” I suggested after a minute of watching her cry. Shoulders heaving, she sobbed wholeheartedly, gulping huge, noisy mouthfuls of air.

“He’s gone,” Mary finally said “Gone.” She was hoarse, as would anyone be whose larynx had been compressed by a noose.

“Gone?” I said, relieved. I could ease her anxiety. Norman had called my office Tuesday and Wednesday, alarmed about
her, trying to see if there was a way to get her out of jail, into some fancy mental hospital. He’d sounded very much
not
gone, very much involved. “He didn’t come to see you today?” I was already kicking myself for having been so responsive to her suicide attempt. What a sucker I was! “Is that what got you so upset, Norman’s not showing up today?”

“He didn’t come to see me”—the tears started to flow again—“since last Friday.”

I was stopped cold. “Last Friday?” Either she was lying or confused. Very confused. Or when Norman had called me, yesterday and the day before that … “Are you sure, Mary? Today is Thursday, right?”

“Don’t you think I know what day it is?” she asked, her voice rising, echoing off the walls of the cavernous space. “Don’t you think I’ve been counting every day since he left?”

“All right, then,” I said, trying to soothe her. “Help me understand so I can try and help you. When did Norman leave?”

“Last Friday.”

“And where did he go?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“Atlanta, Georgia,” Mary said. “He has his money there. He was going to go to where he hides the key to his safe-deposit box. Then, Monday, he’d go to the bank.”

“Cayman Islands,” I murmured to Barbara. “But the timetable’s the same.”

“What was the money for?” Barbara inquired. Mary did not answer right away. As far as I knew from Norman, he was going to get money for Barbara’s retainer as well as for the house he was buying near the prison Mary was going to be transferred to. Nevertheless, Mary’s silence spoke to me. It said that Norman had told her to keep quiet. She was torn between that obedience and five-foot-nothing Barbara Duberstein’s natural authority. “Speak up. We have to know what the money was for.”

“He said he needed it to pay a better lawyer.”

“Better than me?” Barbara asked.

“Better than you and …”

“And what?” I prodded her. “Don’t hold back, Mary. Do you mean a lawyer better than Barbara and better than I?”

“‘Better than I,”’ she repeated. “Norman would like that.”

“Norman thought he would find a better lawyer? More aggressive? More
what?
”

“More … better. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“He said he already called some famous lawyer in Texas and the lawyer was probably going to take my case.”

“Do you know this lawyer’s name?” Barbara asked, putting her pen to the paper. Mary shook her head. “All right, so Norman got the money—”

“That’s what he was going to do!” Mary cried. “I haven’t heard anything from him, not since Friday! That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “He called me. Yesterday, and the day before. He said he’d been with you, that you were going through a bad time. He was looking for ways to help you.”

“He wasn’t with me,” Mary said patiently, the teacher with a slow student.

“He wasn’t here? With you?”

“No. Monday, I knew he’d be at the bank in Atlanta. Then Tuesday, I thought maybe there’s some holiday down there on Monday, a Georgia thing or a South thing, so that’s when he went to the bank. And then, after visiting hours in the morning on Wednesday, I thought: Oh, sweet Jesus, maybe he’s hurt. Or dead. Maybe a bank robber could’ve been there and shot him. That’s when I called you the first time. I was, like, starting to get hysterical. But then, today, I knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked. Mary covered her mouth with her fingertips. A speak-no-evil gesture, and also, I sensed, a signal that
said how humiliated she was to have come before us with no lipstick. It did not take much to distract her, and right then it was Barbara’s rose-colored mouth. Mary had begun longing for makeup, and I took that as a sign of hope, that even if she did not know it, she did want to live. “What did you know, Mary?” I repeated.

“I knew that Norman wasn’t coming back. And that’s why I tried to …” Her fingers slid down to her throat. Her neck was striped with a red burn mark where the twisted bedsheet had throttled her.

“But then why would Norman call me?” I demanded, turning to Barbara. “Why would he say he’d seen her when he hadn’t?”

“Well …” Barbara hesitated, but it was clear she knew and was simply reluctant to have to tell me.

“Don’t hold back,” I told her.

“Because he was conning you.”

“Conning
me?
”

“He got you to think he was here, doing the right thing by her, so you would feel easy about him. He was buying a little extra insurance. Didn’t want you thinking he might be disappearing into the night.”

“But why?” I persisted. “What’s his motive?”

It was Mary, not Barbara, who answered, with a calm voice and dry eyes. “Because he didn’t want anything to get in the way of my pleading guilty. I knew it today. I
knew
it.”

“What did you know?” I demanded.

“Norman conned me too.”

The visitors room seemed so frightening, now that all the dangerous inmates were safely in their cells. Just their odors lingered to prove that they had been there—and would be back. Not the raw smell of gyms or men’s locker rooms: a meaner stink. And it was dangerously quiet. No movement except one officer patrolling the
floor, her shoes making no sound. Another, cleaning his nails with his front teeth, monitored the closed-circuit TV. A prison movie without a sound track.

“How did Norman con you?” I managed to ask.

“He told me …” Mary closed her eyes, unable to bear reality any longer.

“Please, Mary. Tell us.” I was sick. I already knew.

“Norman said you thought I did it. That gave him an idea.”

No. It was worse than that: I didn’t just give Norman an idea. He manipulated me. He made me think that here was a man who had killed, who had led a life without worth, who richly deserved whatever punishment he would get. A defense lawyer’s nightmare, but also a defense lawyer’s dream. The unwinnable case: To be able to turn that around! He must have started planning the moment he was arrested for Bobette’s death.

“Oh, my God,” I said. Barbara reached over and squeezed my hand. It did not reassure me. “Tell me about his idea.”

“That I should say I killed Bobette.”

“Did you kill her?” Barbara asked.

Mary turned to her, insulted, incredulous. “No. Of course not.”

“Who did, then?”

Mary’s liquid emerald eyes took us both in, pitying us for our lack of insight. “Norman killed her.”

“But then why were you willing to say you did it?” I demanded. “Didn’t you know it was a murder charge?”

“Why? ’Cause I love him.”

“He asked you to do this?”

“No! Of course not.” Mary ran her fingers through her hair. It lay oily and lifeless on her shoulders. She lifted a tress and stared at it, not believing it could be hers. “He told me what he was facing. All those years. He said: ‘You can’t wait for me, Mary. It would be like …’” Embarrassed at revealing such intimacy, she
fell into uneasy silence and began to chew the inside of her cheek.

“What did he say?” Barbara asked. “Please, don’t be shy with us. We came here because we care about your welfare.”

Mary allowed herself to be persuaded. “He said if I waited, it would be like leaving a beautiful flower in the desert to die. He wouldn’t let me. He didn’t even want me to visit him in jail. He said: ‘Let’s end it now, because otherwise it’ll be agony.’ But I couldn’t. How could I leave the one man in the world God meant for me? That’s when I started to think about what he was telling me, about how people with long records get life, and how he was so sorry he had a record ’cause people who really haven’t done anything much get off easy. I thought: Hey, it wouldn’t be that bad for me, not like it would for him. And I knew he would wait for me. So I told him.”

“Told him what?” Barbara asked.

“Told him I’d take the fall. And he said: ‘Not on your life!’ But I begged him. I said, ‘Please, let me do this for you, Norman. I mean, I don’t really have a record. Not a bad one, anyway. Not like yours.’ And finally he said let him think about it. He’s a very deep thinker, so it took him a couple of days, but he figured it out. With all his money, he was going to get this very famous lawyer from Texas. He’s never lost a case. He’s always on TV, Norman says, on all the news shows. And even if he lost, you know, if the jury said I was guilty, if it’s the first time you ever did anything, like a violent crime, you don’t go to prison long. Like, your sentence can sound long, but you don’t
stay
long.”

“Did Norman tell you how much time you’d be away for?” I asked.

“He said the lawyer—the Texas lawyer—told him four years tops. But see, with this lawyer, even if he did lose, it wouldn’t be more than two.”

“Two years?” Barbara and I said together.

“And then, like, it might not even be
that
long, because the lawyer thought he could get me off on appeal.” Mary made it sound so reasonable, so inevitable, that I could see she still had not stopped believing it entirely.

Barbara was staring at her. “And you believed him?”

“Norman loves me.” She pressed against the barrier that separated us and asked me: “Didn’t he? Tell her. Didn’t he love me?” I was so sick at heart. Before I could think of something kind to say, Mary slumped backward. “So?” she asked us. “How many years is it going to be?”

“In this case?” Barbara said. “Actual time? I guess somewhere between eight and twenty years.” She looked to me for confirmation.

“Mary,” I said, “you can fight this. You can—”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said very calmly. “In jail, out of jail. He’s gone. I’m going to die either way.”

“No! Listen to me,” I said, so harshly that she flinched and Barbara dropped her pen. “You want to die. You think you’re going to die because there’s no reason to live. When the only man you love suddenly whips around and sticks a knife into you—and then walks away because he’s too sensitive to watch you bleed—you say: ‘Okay. I’m giving up. Let me bleed to death, because I cannot stand the pain. And besides, it’s what he wants. Maybe my dying will somehow make him love me again.’ Screw that! I’ve been there. You
can
stand the pain. You and I are going to pull that goddamn knife out of your heart. Whatever happens—and I can’t guarantee anything—you’re going to live. You’re going to have a big, ugly scar, but you’re going to live.”

Mary’s eyes went from me to her lovely high-rise bosom. “You’re just kidding about the ugly scar, aren’t you?” she whispered.

I didn’t know if it was the worst night of my life, but it was definitely one of my top two. Conned by my own personal con man.
I, the one person under no delusions about Norman Torkelson, had been totally bamboozled by him. How he had picked up on what I had wanted! Not love: He knew he couldn’t work that scam with me. I was far too wary of him. And where he was, in jail, what good would my going nuts for him do? No, he wanted me sane. At peak efficiency. Norman knew precisely what I was and what I yearned for: I was an ordinary criminal defense lawyer who desired, from the top of her head to the soles of her not too high suburban heels, to be special. To stand beside justice as her sister. To save an innocent man.

And so he had set me up to save him. He knew that Mary had been in Bobette’s house, knew her fingerprints were everywhere. He was probably outraged at the shoddy police work. How dare they not even mention a second set of prints! How dare they arrest him without investigating further! (And oh, how he must have hated Mary, blamed her for his arrest because she had stupidly registered his car in the name that led the police straight to his door!) So he set to work, dropping his poison into my ear drop by drop. And when it began to work, when I started to suspect Mary might have been at Bobette’s, he grew so defensive, so protective, that my suspicions had to grow: not only had Mary been there, but
she
was the killer. Not my client. Not my client, whom I was going to get off!