Lily White (19 page)

“And the Department will send a couple of detectives to Texas and they’ll track the guy down and arrest him for Bobette’s murder. Right?” He had a wolfish smile with very large white teeth. “You’re dreaming.”

The Love Nest offered up nothing more, so we headed down to Bobette’s house to meet Sam Franklin. Holly had said he’d show us whatever we wanted to see, but I knew Sam would make it a miserable and difficult procedure. I followed Terry to Merrick in my own car. He would be destroyed psychologically if he had to ride as a passenger with a woman driving; and I would
not drive with him: He fit the stereotype for cop slobs, and the car was a four-wheel garbage dump of unfolded, coffee-stained maps, oily Roy Rogers napkins, discarded straws and paper-wrapped, petrified gum globs. A vomitous air freshener in the shape of a banana hanging from his rearview mirror only made matters worse.

Sam Franklin’s contempt for me was small potatoes compared to his loathing of Terry Salazar, an ex-cop who now worked for criminals. But Terry and Sam had never liked each other, even in the years when they had shared a desk in Homicide. They were different in every way: Gaunt / husky; introspective / superficial; puritan / libertine; devout evangelical Protestant / aggressively lapsed Catholic.

“Hey, Sammy, how’re they hanging?” Terry inquired. He automatically gave all other men a diminutive ending just to show precisely who was the alpha dog in the pack.

“I have to be out of here in ten minutes,” Sam responded. “You’d better get a move on.”

Sam stood back and let us walk inside. His eyes didn’t leave us for a minute. He was on the verge of protesting as I walked down the two steps from the front hall to the sunken living room over to check out the area between the couch and the coffee table, where Bobette’s body had been found. However, Sam knew that I knew he had no grounds to stop me, so he clamped his jaw shut and refrained from grinding his teeth, aware that the sight of him all riled up not merely would delight Terry but could form the basis for a wicked imitation at old-boy cop gatherings: Sam Franklin Thrown into a Tizzy by Female Lawyer.

The crime scene photos, with their cruel light illuminating Bobette’s body, had given her couch and coffee table the impersonality of furniture in a chain of economy hotels, so I’d expected a house that was as businesslike as Bobette. But it was so
sweet that if the two men hadn’t been there, I might have gotten all teary over the girl-at-heart who’d had the life choked out of her right where I was standing. Instead I swallowed the lump in my throat and perched on the arm of the couch, letting my leg swing back and forth to show them I was just as casual about this house of death as they were.

The couch wasn’t beige, as it had appeared in the photos, but butter yellow, with a profusion of needlepoint pillows, the faultlessly stitched, innocuous ones offered in upscale catalogs: butterflies on a magnolia branch, a white Persian cat, a nosegay of violets, and the fourth, blue letters on a lemon background, which read: “Living well is the best revenge.”

The room was so extravagantly girlish that it could have been conceived by a gay set designer as an
hommage
to old-fashioned femininity. A peach carpet, with a garland of blue and yellow flowers as a border. Yellow-and-pink-checked fabric on two armchairs, ruffled on the edges, so it looked as if Bobette had dressed them in pinafores. A collection of glass and ceramic cats on a side table, none taller than three inches.

“Did she have any cats?” I asked Sam.

“What?” I repeated the question, resisting the temptation to say it slowly, as if he were slow-witted. “We didn’t find any.”

“Are you sure? No litter box? No cat food dish?”

“No.”

“A cat?” Terry asked. “Why would she have a cat?”

I turned back to him. “Why
wouldn’t
she have a cat or two?”

“Because they’re animals. They eat and they shit,” he answered.

“So do you.”

Unfazed, he took out a tape measure to determine the distance between the coffee table and a large picture book lying on the floor:
Fluff Balls: The Wonderful World of Angora Cats.
I wondered if Bobette’s dream of romance had been so intensely cerebral that
anything that would demand care—or even minimal attention—would have been a distraction. Just then an antimacassar in the shape of a valentine on a yellow wing chair caught my eye. Norman must have known, the second he stepped through the front door and saw that lacy heart, that her bank account was his for the asking.

We did a walk-through, Sam leading. Whenever we stopped, Sam stood legs apart, hands open and resting lightly on hips, as if any second he’d have to reach for his service revolver to prevent us from committing some felonious act. His eyes flitted from me to Terry and back to me, vigilant, as we looked around. What was there to see? Pot holders in the kitchen: one covered with daisies; another, a mitt, in the shape of a tabby cat. In the downstairs bathroom, a matching turquoise rug and toilet seat cover, each with an embroidered fleur-de-lis in the center; and a satin wrapper for an extra roll of toilet paper, in the shape of a Victorian bonnet.

Oh, and her bedroom! Entirely lavender: carpet, walls, bed linens. The floor-length curtains were tied back with a braided tassel of pale lavender and deep purple. On the wall were lavender-matted botanical prints of purple flowers: lilacs, irises, and lavender. The room was romantic—and erotic. Many women would shy away from such a baring of their soul’s desire. Not Bobette, although maybe that was because she lived such a solitary life that she felt certain no one could ever discern, by a mere glance around her room, her sexual nature. At last, when Norman came along, she was thrilled to show him, because he was precisely what she’d been praying for all her life.

Sam, Terry, and I stood by the bed, a four-poster with a lace canopy, perfectly made. No sign of lovemaking. Terry checked the drawers of the nightstands. “Zilch,” he reported.

“Did you take anything from the drawers?” I asked Sam.

“It should all be in your discovery material,” he spat out, as if
the question were so outrageous, so disgusting, that it nauseated him to answer.

“There is nothing in the material that refers to items taken from her nightstands,” I said. “Therefore, I am assuming your answer is no, you did not take anything you did not record in the report. Naturally, I will ask Holly Nuñez to check up on this, since I cannot get an answer from you.” Sam contemplated actually giving me a response—“no”—for a second, but decided against such humiliation. He crossed his arms and beat out a slow, jazzy rhythm on his elbows, as if he were all alone, listening to Coltrane. “You got a positive ID from the tenant, Eugene Pohl?” There was no sign Sam was hearing anything other than “Trane’s Blues.” “Answer me, Sam, or I’m going after your ass!”

“Yes.” The word was almost a hiss.

“And from the guy at the bank?”

“Which guy at the bank?” Sam asked innocently.

I thought fast. A teller doesn’t simply hand over forty-eight thousand dollars. “The bank officer Bobette dealt with. And the guard near the door. They didn’t see my client with her, did they?”

“No,” he exhaled, telling me more about the status of Holly’s case than I thought I would ever get.

“Your case is a fairy tale,” I told him. “Right from the beginning, it was easier to sit back in your chair and tell yourself stories than it was to get out and investigate.” I banged my fist against one of the bed’s posts for emphasis, as if there were an invisible jury just off to my left. “No one else claims to have seen Norman Torkelson with Bobette except the tenant, and you know and I know—and the jury sure as hell is going to know—that Eugene Pohl is one very strange bird.”

Then, before Terry could mouth off and thus once again antagonize Sam and thus dissipate the tiny cloud of uncertainty I’d
managed to float, I grabbed him by the sleeve and yanked him out of Bobette Frisch’s girlish dream of love.

Later that day, while Terry was around and about, checking the set of mystery prints that had appeared all over Bobette’s house and trying to discover if anyone had charged anything to Bobette’s missing credit cards, I went to court for the arraignment of a new client, a guy accused of selling counterfeit Donna Karan everything—shoes, suits, belts, sweaters, nightgowns. I was hoping he’d have an overpowering obsession, so I could at least play around with pleading insanity, but he was annoyingly sane and wanted to barter down part of his legal fee by trading my time for a new wardrobe: “I swear to Christ, Mrs. White. Would I stick you of all people with the fake Donnas? These are
real,
the ones I knocked off from. I’m talking six-ply cashmere.” After the arraignment, I dropped in to watch a few minutes of Chuckie’s arson trial, then, overcome by an irresistible impulse, spent my lunch hour in Bloomingdale’s and wound up with a white cashmere shawl.

And a pair of sling-backs. Also, I bought a lip gloss and with it, for an extra $16.95, got one of those giant, useless makeup kits with circlets of cosmetics in colors designed for cheap hookers—not cheap hookers’ legal counsel: hues like Papaya Sunset and Teal Twilight. So by the time I was in the elevator going back to my office, I was, naturally, giving myself a hard time, thinking that if I’d been a man I would have spent the hour and a half at the Bar Association library, looking up arcane case law. Or I would have invited some big-firm lawyer out to lunch so the next time one of his firm’s hotshot corporate clients got picked up for statutory rape or vehicular homicide, “Lee White!” would leap to mind. Of course, being a lawyer, I sprang to my own defense, and as I was opening my office door, I was already arguing: So if I were a male lawyer, instead of Bloomingdale’s I’d
wind up at the Wiz, looking for a longer telephone cord, but instead I’d walk out with a Pentium computer with speakers the size of Mount McKinley and a quad-speed CD-ROM player, and therefore, wasn’t my foray into cashmere relatively innocuous? Of course, a still, small voice inside began a siren song of a new computer, but I didn’t hear it because as I walked inside, there in the reception area was Mary Dean.

“Hi!” she said brightly. She wore a red dress with polka dots the size of silver dollars. Its material was of some cheap synthetic so stiff it made crinkly noises when she moved. Her country-music hair was piled on top of her head and held by a big red plastic barrette in the shape of a bow. She was no less beautiful than she had been on her last visit. “Hope you don’t mind that I dropped in.”

“I’d prefer it if you’d call first,” I said, demonstrating that the assertiveness-awareness seminar at the Women’s Bar Association had not been a complete waste of time. Then I cast what I hoped was a withering glance at the receptionist who had allowed Mary to stay. She was the granddaughter of a guy in one of my partner Chuckie’s poker games, a young woman with the spiritless serenity of a cloistered nun in a washed-up order.

“The reason I came back,” Mary explained, after I closed my office door and we were both seated, “is that I remember something else.”

“I see.”

“You said it’s
all
important, to help Norman.”

“Anything you remember,” I said. “You never know what will be helpful.”

“I want to help!” She made a terrible gurgling noise. For a second, I thought she was choking, then I realized it was a sob. I felt for the box of tissues, pulled out a couple, and held them out to her across the desk. But her hands were covering her face so I put them back until she could see them. “I miss him so much,”
she wept, although it was difficult to hear through the tears and her hands. “It’s like … without him … Oh, please! Get him out of that place!”

“I’m trying. And anything you can tell me … Sometimes the smallest detail can mean a lot.”

She composed herself, wiping away her tears with her knuckles. She noticed the streaks of mascara on them, and I handed her the tissues. She wiped her fingers, then blotted the black smudges under her eyes, making tiny, dainty dabs, so as not to pull at the delicate skin. “You know how I told you I called up when Norman had a mark at the Love Nest, saying I was from the Pinnacle Collections Agency? You know, about repossessing his car.”

“Right,” I said briskly. Mary’s voice was shaky, and I didn’t want her to start bawling again. To be perfectly truthful, it was less out of compassion than from a desire to get rid of her; I sensed that she was about to tell me everything she knew about Norman, an encyclopedia’s worth, and that would put a healthy bite into what was the not overly large retainer I’d charged him. “What else do you have to tell me?”

“I do other things too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, if he thinks the mark isn’t feeling sorry enough for him, I call up and”—she smiled at some memory—“pretend I’m the ex-wife.”

“Do you put that message on his answering machine as well?”

“No. Norman says more than one message on the machine would be, like, too obvious. No, I call up and scream my bloody head off: ‘Norman, you fucking bastard!”’ Mary squawked, clearly taking pleasure in her own performance. This voice, unlike the low-pitched, tough Repo Lady voice, was high, but not an ineffectual squeak. It was rough, mean, like an emery board
abrading skin. “‘I’m gonna make sure you’re ruined. I’m gonna make sure you’re so goddamn, pathetic broke you’ll
never
get back on your feet again.’” Her pale skin took on an exhilarated flush from the tantrum. “Anyhow, I just keep screaming like the worst bitch in the world!”

“And you’re so loud he holds the phone away from his ear, and the mark hears it.”

“Yes! You know, you make me think, like, there’s hope,” Mary said. “You’re so smart. As smart as Norman! I feel like, gee, you can handle this.”

“Do you play any other roles?”

She laughed. “Doesn’t roles always make you think of
rolls:
Like hamburger rolls—or those little curvy ones? They’re in the dairy case, and they’re triangles, and you roll them up and—”

“Right. But let’s talk about acting roles.”

“Well, I play his divorce lawyer’s secretary. Like, ‘Mr. Powers’s office calling for Mr. Whatever-name-Norman’s-using.’ We arrange a time, and when the phone rings, he’s busy someplace and asks the mark to get it and take a message.”