Lily White (2 page)

“Fingerprints?” he repeated. I studied him as he mulled that one over, rubbing his big chin with his big-boned hand. For my money, anything over six feet in a man is wasted on height, but a
lot of women do delight in leaning against something the size of a Plymouth Voyager. It makes them feel protected, petite—and it probably makes them anticipate a sex organ larger than the average totem pole. Sadly, I thought about the utter joy that would light up some two-hundred-fifty-pound lonelyheart when Norman would beseech her: Lean on me, darling.

“You’re wondering how they found you?” I asked. Norman shrugged, which meant he was dying to know. So was I. “You didn’t give Bobette your real name?”

“Only because I was afraid her lawyer might want to do a credit check. Need I tell you how long that can take?”

“What name did you give her?”

“Denton Wylie.”

“Ever use that name before?” He shook his head, not without a touch of pride. Less industrious con men have a roster of about ten names, or they stick with some variation on their actual initials: Jimmy Dellacroce on one scam, John Doughtery on the next, and so forth. The pros take on a new name each time. It makes life harder for the cops. But my guess is it must make a con man feel clean, as if rising from a pure stream after being baptized by total immersion. “Did you have your phone listed under Denton Wylie?”

“No.”

“The place you’re living?”

“No.”

“What name are you using there?” He hesitated, and before he could make up something new, I added: “I’ve got to figure out how the cops got to you.”

“Robert McNulty,” he admitted reluctantly.

“And your address?”

“I gave it to your secretary when I made my call.”

“The real one. If I have to send out an investigator, you’re going to go broke fast if he winds up checking out the address of
a vacant lot.” He took one of those shaky deep breaths made up of small, nervous inhalations. “Norman, you’ve got to give me something to work with.”

“Fifty-four Homewood Avenue—in Mineola. It’s an apartment.” I waited. “Apartment 3-C.”

“Do you work alone?”

“Of course,” he responded. He sounded so utterly convincing. I figured he was lying through his teeth. He was. “I live with someone,” he said after a half minute. (Try sitting in the inmates’ visiting room with your lawyer eyeballing you, and you’ll see how oppressive thirty seconds of silence can be.) “She’s just … I love her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mary. She’s the sweetest, most innocent person in the world.”

“Mary what?”

“Mary Dean. We live together. I swear to you, Miss White, by everything I hold holy, I work alone. Mary doesn’t even know …” He covered his face with his hands and rubbed his forehead with his fingertips, hard, almost brutally, as if applying counter pressure on a terrific headache.

Well, why shouldn’t he have a headache? It was too early to know how much evidence the cops really had, but Sam Franklin, the Homicide sergeant in charge of the case, offered me a hint a half hour later, when I suggested it might be possible that the police had acted too fast and that Norman Torkelson, although admittedly having a rap sheet that could circle the globe sixteen times, might not have choked Ms. Frisch to death and a murderer could (at that very moment) be running amok on Long Island. “Whoever did it could kill again!” I said passionately into the phone.

“I don’t have time for your act today, Lee,” Sam said, which suggested he had already been assured by an assistant D.A. in
the Homicide Bureau that this was a good case. Then he hung up the phone disdainfully, not bothering (as he usually did) to slam it down. So I had to revise my estimate. Not a good case: a great case.

But I should begin at the beginning. I should—

I
n truth, Lee White, B.A., Cornell University, J.D., New York University School of Law, did not have a clue as to where the beginning really was. She might have told you it was the moment J. J. O’Shaughnessy (a retired lawyer devoting his golden years to twirling wisps of hair that grew from his ears while watching Court TV in the Dominican Village retirement home in Amityville, Long Island) referred an old client, Norman Torkelson, to his poker buddy Chuckie Phalen; Chuckie, busy trying a first-degree arson case, passed Norman over to his law partner, Lee.

Or if Lee was in a rare reflective mood—let’s say sitting with her gentleman (a lawyer himself) before a roaring fire—she’d muse: It must have begun the summer after my second year in law school, when I was interning in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Do you know, that was the first time in my life that I ever had an abstract thought! It sneaked right up and bit me on the ass. The
gentleman, amused, would chuckle. Lee would go on: All of a sudden—ka-boom!—I comprehended the beauty of the criminal justice system, its balance, and that a person accused of a crime is also entitled to a defense—
must
have one—even if he is utter scum and guilty as hell.

But Lee White, like most people, had no idea where the real beginning really began. So to commence:

Let us start with the White business. Had she been a premature baby, her last name would have been Weiss. Two weeks before her birth day, her father, Leonard, took off from work to go to court and change the family’s surname to White so that the son he was anticipating could flash his birth certificate anywhere in America and not be challenged.

Although now White, Leonard and his wife, Sylvia, did not abandon the old-world custom of naming a baby for a dead and inevitably boring relative. Leonard and Sylvia called their surprise daughter Lily Rose, after Sylvia’s maternal grandmother, Leah Rivka Mutterperl, a woman who became distraught upon realizing, on her second day aboard the S.S.
Polonia,
bound for Ellis Island, that she had left her false teeth on a washstand in a hovel in a shtetl about sixty miles due south of Cracow three weeks earlier and who never again was able to regain her equanimity.

Before Weiss and White, the family’s name had actually been Weissberg until 1948—two years before Lee’s birth—when Leonard shortened it to Weiss. When asked, “Weiss?” by a customer who acted as if she had heard something unpleasant, he replied (too quickly): “Weiss means ‘white.’ It’s actually a very common German name … like White is here.” As the fur trade was in those days an industry of men named Glickstern and Steinberg and Rubin, the knowing smile on his customer’s face mortified Leonard and determined him to be White, although it took him two years to get up the courage to actually do it.

In any case, until Lee was born, Leonard and Sylvia were so confident in the imminence of a son (whom they planned to name Bartholomew, after Leonard’s grandfather Baruch Weissberg) that they barely gave a thought to what to name a daughter, much less to how silly Lily White sounded, especially when, after a few months it became obvious that the girl’s coloring was going to be decidedly Mediterranean.

Fortunately, their firstborn’s childish pronunciation of Lily was Lee-Lee, so in a sense, Lee christened herself … although in the case of the Weissberg-Weiss-Whites, christened is obviously not the right word, while “jewed” would be not only a misnomer but might give offense, however unintended—somewhat the way “lily white” began to in 1954, in those months just after
Brown
v.
Board of Education
was handed down.

That Leonard WWW would be sensitive to the feelings of the Negro is not surprising, since he was the incarnation of that old Nixonian saw that Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. His liberalism, however, was not the usual concern for the underdog. He really didn’t care about the underdog unless the underdog had managed to get a few bucks together and was in the market for a fur garment for his wife or lady friend. No, Leonard’s liberalism was his inescapable inheritance from his card-carrying-Communist father, Nat, a shop steward for the Fur Workers Union, and his big-hearted, big-mouthed mother, Bella.

Leonard received one further legacy: While Nat could not help his son gain admission to Harvard or obtain a seat on the stock exchange, he was able to secure him a position as floor boy in the back room at Frosty Furs in Forest Hills. Thus began his career: in 1942, seventeen-year-old Leonard—safe from the Army’s clutches because of a quirky kidney—traveled from Borough Park in Brooklyn to Queens. He swept the floors and scoured from workbenches the reeking grease that dripped off
untreated raccoon pelts. He stretched lynx skins on a board for the cutter and marked patterns onto garments. He was a hard worker, and an excellent one too. But nothing he did was good enough for his boss. Whenever there were no customers around, his boss, Isadore Frumkin, would growl, “Move yer whatsis, sonny boy!” He would scrutinize Leonard’s every move with the tight-clenched face of the congenitally sadistic.

Was revenge on Mr. Frumkin the spark that made Leonard determine that someday
he
would be the boss of Frosty Furs and when he was, he would treat his floor boy like a human being? Who knows what ignites the entrepreneurial fire in a young man? Rebellion against his Trotskyite father? The ignominy of sweeping up scraps of muskrat and cigarette butts as well as the curlicues of oily lettuce that appeared to molt from the wet-breaded sardine sandwich Milton Kuperschmidt, the cutter, devoured every noon? Was it glancing out the window onto Austin Street and seeing Mr. Frumkin’s resplendent 1942 Packard illuminating the February dusk? Or could it have been observing Mr. Frumkin, kneeling on the floor to better gauge the hemline of Mrs. Whitcomb Knoll’s broadtail, casually run his hand up Mrs. Knoll’s pale and silky and Protestant calf?

In those days, Queens was not yet the vigorous ethnic mishmash it is today. Entire neighborhoods—Douglaston Manor, Forest Hills Gardens—were not merely lily white: even the lightest Jews were prohibited, and, indeed, Catholics—including the fairest, without O’s or Mc’s or excessive offspring—were encouraged to reside elsewhere. To young Leonard, delivering a lapin muff and bonnet for Mrs. William Warren’s little Amanda, or picking up Mrs. Bradley Mercer’s nutria jacket (onto which Mr. Bradley had upchucked five Rob Roys and Welsh rarebit on New Year’s Eve) for a cleaning, Forest Hills Gardens was paradise. A mere three-block walk from the store put him on a street where flaxen-haired angels tossed balls to airborne blond dogs.
Velvet lawns encircled four-bedroom, mullion-windowed houses that Leonard was soon to learn were called (albeit redundantly) English Tudor.

He rarely saw the masters of the house; they were a half world away, fighting Heinies and Japs. Or at least they were in Manhattan, writing advertising copy for stool softeners.

But the women stayed home in those days, and Leonard moved quickly from being merely enamored to falling in love with them all: the debutante daughters, the newlyweds, the young mothers, the matrons, the menopausal. It was, of course, pure prejudice, the viewing of an entire group as the Perfect One: a woman in tennis whites, with shiny hair and a voice as soft and luxe as lynx. (Clearly, this passion for anything female and Episcopalian was an indication that Leonard had a few unresolved odds and ends in the Oedipal department; they would remain problematical even after he undertook psychotherapy a decade later. It should be noted here, however, that his mother, Bella, a good-hearted, effusive woman who claimed a brief career as a character actress in the Yiddish theater, weighed nearly three hundred pounds and had dyed her frizzy hair the color of a rusty steel wool pad. Bella’s voice was so lacking in mellifluence that a simple “How are you,
tataleh?
” was, to her son, more agonizing than a thousand pieces of fresh chalk screeching along a blackboard.)

But these women of the Gardens were so removed from Leonard’s experience they might as well have belonged to another species. He could only worship them from afar. While he could easily (very easily) picture himself wrapping a golden sable cape around pearly shoulders in the front hall of one of the grander Tudors and hearing a grateful wifely “Thank you, Leonard, my dearest,” he could not actually bring himself to smile his wide, engaging smile at one of them, so afraid was he of rejection—or perhaps of acceptance. His only sexual encounters took place in another borough: exchanging chaste kisses with Brooklyn
stenographers—and feeling up Flo Feinman, the Slut of Borough Park. Secretly, he was afraid he would never find anyone he would desire enough to marry.

Six years passed. Since this is Lee’s story, not Leonard’s, suffice it to say that much happened in that time. Although Leonard remained innocent of the wondrous topography of women, in business he was on his way to being a man of the world. He had risen higher than he had ever dreamed—thanks to that louse Isadore Frumkin. Leonard’s boss’s black market diet of marbled steak and Hershey bars led, inexorably, to a crippling heart attack shortly after V-J Day. Leonard, backed by a loan arranged by an eager-beaver junior vice president of the East New York Savings Bank (a member of Nat’s Communist cell), became the owner of Frosty Furs just before Christmas in 1946. A year later, he proved he was a natural capitalist. Business was booming to such an extent that he repaid his bank loan, bought a 1947 Lincoln Continental that made Mr. Frumkin’s Packard look like a hunk of junk—and told his father, “Absolutely no contributions to Communist front organizations!” when Nat hit him up for a fifty-dollar contribution to the Soviet-American Folk Dance League.

Leonard was not only putting some distance between himself and his past. He was also hard at work to get the polish he hadn’t been born with. He went to the theater and saw Cornelia Otis Skinner in
Lady Windermerés Fan
(which he’d thought might have something to do with the fashion business). He listened to WQXR for culture. He went to the movies for diction lessons (although he did drop his lord-of-the-manor “How teddibly luffly of you” pretty quickly after his mother, Bella, started yuk-king it up, mistakenly believing that her son was indulging in a rare moment of frivolity and doing an imitation of Ronald Colman in
The Late George Apley
).