Lily White (23 page)

“I’m going,” Flip murmured late one night in April 1970. Although May was just a week away, it was still damp and nasty cold in the apartment. A stiff wind rattled the windows and insinuated itself through the cracks in the splintered wood sash. “To Canada.”

“Mmm,” Lee said in response. It was not that she was uncaring, but Flip had wakened her. She was exhausted. The Cadre of Eight, the leaders of the various antiwar groups on campus, had been eating and drinking and debating whether to take over the student union building until two in the morning, and she had not gotten to bed until after three. She had been busy cleaning up after them, discarding cigarette butts and marijuana roaches, picking up the balled-up papers from the floor, washing dishes and, for half an hour, scouring a black crust of burned tomatoes off the bottom of her sauce pot after one of them, inexplicably, had turned up the burner as high as it would go. Also, Lee did not see Canada as an immediate threat. The night before, Flip had announced that he fully expected to go to jail rather than concede the legitimacy of the draft. Two nights prior to that, he had been musing about joining up with some old movement friends in Sweden.

“I’m leaving right after graduation.” She pulled up the blanket—one of her Grandma Bella’s afghans which she had brought up to college—so it covered her cold shoulder. He’d change his plans a thousand times more. She was rolling over
onto her right side, her most comfortable position, when Flip added: “I got a job in Saskatoon.”

Lee froze on her right side, her back toward him. This sounded serious: a real plan. “Doing what?” she asked, doing her best to sound interested but not anxious.

“Teaching math.” She felt his heated breath on the back of her head.

She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. “Saskatoon?” she managed to say. “Up in Canada somewhere?”

“Saskatchewan,” he said.

“Where is that?” She was dying to turn around and see his expression, but she was positive she had morning breath.

“I don’t know. Up there. Above North Dakota or something.”

Knowing Flip, any question she asked would be interpreted as grilling, and she was fearful of offending him further when he was under so much pressure. “Is it definite?”

He exhaled a badgered breath at even this. “Is
what
definite?”

“The job.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not particularly. Do you think I’m happy about it? Did I go to Cornell so I could teach trigonometry to a bunch of idiot teenagers whose fathers work in a fucking meat-packing plant?” He lapsed into an angry silence. She heard the rapid, dry sound of his rubbing his beard between his fingers.

She knew a really devoted girlfriend would just join him in silence at this moment. But the words spilled out of her mouth. “How long have you been planning this?”

“Jesus!”

“Flip, why couldn’t you just have—”

“Wonderful. Let’s have a discussion about the relationship.”

“No, please, I’m sorry. It’s just that … I understand this must have been too painful to discuss with me.” He didn’t put his arm
around her and pull her close, but at least he stopped playing with his beard. She slid down the mattress a couple of inches so that when she turned over, her breath would be on his breastbone, not in his nose. “Flip,” she said softly when she was facing him.

“What?”

“I love you.” He said nothing, but she could feel his exasperation. She had vowed only three days earlier not to bring that subject up again, and here she was, once again, breaking her promise. “I know I’m not supposed to say it.”

“Then why do you?” He turned on his back and reached for his Marlboros.

“I don’t know. I swear, I don’t mean to put pressure on you. I just …” She took the matches from him and lit his cigarette. He smoked and stared at the dark ceiling. (Three years later, Lee would announce in her consciousness-raising group that this had been a masochistic relationship and that she cringed every time she thought of how she had walked down College Avenue carrying a Santa-sized sack of Flip’s dirty clothes to the laundromat, where she waited so when they came out of the dryer she could fold them before they got wrinkled. But at that moment, all she felt was ennobled by her love of this martyr for peace.) “I love you so much. You have no idea. You’re my life. I’d do anything for you.”

“Then leave me alone!”

Lee tried to console herself with the thought that at least there was no anger in his words, only weariness. But the words themselves hurt, and she began to cry. Flip crushed out his cigarette in the saucer he’d taken from the cafeteria to use as an ashtray, but it smoldered and filled the room with a bitter stench. “Please, Flip.”

“Please
what?
”

“Let me come with you.”

“I knew you’d say something like that.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“I don’t.”

“There’s nothing for you up there.”

“
You’re
there. That’s all—”

“You know what you’re doing, Lee, don’t you?”

“What?” she asked in a small voice, wanting more than anything not to hear his answer.

“Trying to get me to marry you.”

“I swear …”

He grabbed the Malboros and, snatching the matches out of her hand, lit another. “You are bourgeois to your core. There isn’t an inch of you that isn’t your mother’s daughter. I’ll go to Canada and rot and you’ll finish school and get a mink coat for graduation and you’ll marry some guy with golf clubs. And you’ll live happily ever after.”

“No I won’t!”

“You will,” Flip said, with the blasé certainty of an omniscient god. He blew an imperfect smoke ring.

Lee rested her head on his shoulder, relishing the warmth of his body on her cheek. “Never,” she insisted. “I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”

Not quite. By the time he got around to calling her from his rooming house three and a half weeks later to ask her to join him in Saskatoon, she had moved in with a jPuerto Rico Ahora! insurgent named Jorge.

P
instripes rubbed up against pinstripes in the Nassau County Correctional Center. If you took a deep breath (never really advisable in the visitors room), you got blasted by the expensive musk of lawyers’ aftershave fusing with the raw stink of locked-up men. There were too damn many suits that day. It felt as if every attorney ever admitted to the bar in New York State was conferring with a client under the brutal fluorescence.

Down the row from Norman, a kid with the oily ears of someone who hadn’t seen the inside of a shower for too long was asking counsel about the significance of his third conviction for first-degree robbery. In the row ahead of ours, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Christmas-tree angel of a teenager turned out to be awaiting trial for shooting a nun point-blank in the head. The crimes perpetrated by these young felons were always a double whammy, not only devastating their victims’ lives but diminishing their own souls. Even if they managed not to get in the way
of a bullet, even if they avoided heroin and crack and eluded AIDS, even if they lived another fifty or sixty years, most of them were, already, dead men.

There were a few older, white-collar white men in the slammer that day too. Since they could buy justice that the poor couldn’t afford, these guys were stuck in the clink for a reason: Their deeds were so appalling—first-degree assaults with nauseating consequences, like bit-ten-off ear lobes, or aggravated sexual abuse on a minor—that no magistrate could let them loose on bail. Or they had grown so rich on economic crimes that they were adjudged likely, when their trial date came up, to be sailing off the coast of a tropical paradise that did not enjoy the benefits of an extradition treaty with the U.S. Since the correctional center was, as I have mentioned, the stuff from which nightmares are made, these upper-middle-class malefactors were desperate to buy protection from the horror—or at least distraction from it. Guys like these were always requesting conferences with counsel, and they usually found the sound of “my attorneys” far more bracing than “my attorney.”

One of them, directly to my left, had actually been my client. “Call Me King of the Sea!” was the owner of a small chain of unhygienic seafood restaurants. He deserved the death penalty solely on the basis of his cable TV commercials, on which he wore a crown, carried a scepter in one of the lobster-claw gloves he wore, and screeched: “Eat me for just $12.95!” But it wasn’t his unmitigated coarseness that got him into trouble; it was his viciousness. I had talked the D.A.’s office into dropping the assault charges against King of the Sea on two occasions but had passed on representing him the third time around. Now, for what must have been the tenth time, he was accused of battering one of his employees, this time a woman who now had a flattened disk of cartilage where her nose had been. Unlike most of the other times, he could not buy his victim’s silence. The beating had
been near-fatal—with the dishwasher as an eyewitness—and
Newsday
was on his case. So despite King of the Sea’s largesse to the Republican party, not even Woodleigh Huber, our county’s utterly conscienceless district attorney, could let him pass the time before trial playing billiards in his estate in Upper Brookville.

The room was so congested with legal talent that Terry had to yank two chairs out from under a team of Manhattan lawyers. They grumbled a lot—impressive, four-hundred-dollar-an-hour grumbles—but they didn’t try to stop him. They all had magnificent haircuts, and they all wore worried Park Avenue forehead wrinkles as they huddled across from an abortion-mill owner accused of massive Medicaid fraud.

Having won two seats, we were finally able to inquire of Norman how come his girlfriend Mary’s fingerprints happened to turn up all over Bobette Frisch’s house when he had stated unequivocally that Mary had never been at Bobette’s. “Mary’s never been arrested,” Norman assured me.

“What does that have to do with the price of tomatoes?” I asked.

Norman looked as if he were trying to gauge the depth of my stupidity. “I’m sure she’s never been arrested,” he explained patiently. “The cops couldn’t have her fingerprints on file. Whosever fingerprints they are, they aren’t hers. It must be a mistake.”

“It’s no mistake,” Terry chimed in, ominously drawing out each word. Having intimidated the Manhattan lawyers, he was on a roll.

“As of now, the police don’t realize those fingerprints are Mary’s,” I explained. “They don’t know whose they are, and so far they don’t care.”

Norman swallowed hard. “But it’s only a matter of time?”

“It may be.”

He blanched. Each time I visited, he looked less imposing. Not in size of course. In luminosity. He had lost his glow; his magic was dying. A thick blue vein pulsed nervously on his left temple. Just below it, a rash shaped like Florida dotted his cheek, its redness clashing with his orange prison uniform. In addition, Terry, glowering beside me, was spooking Norman more than I would have believed possible; that diminished him even more. Of course, when I thought about it, I realized why someone as blatantly, crudely masculine as Terry was so disturbing. Norman’s entire world revolved around women: He charmed them, he conquered them, he destroyed them. He was not used to dealing with men. Or maybe he was afraid of them and had carefully crafted a universe in which he was the only male.

“Listen,” I said. “If the police decide to investigate Bobette’s murder any further, it
will
be only a matter of time before they ask Mary if she’d mind coming with them to headquarters for a little chat. But the way things stand now, there’s not going to be any chat. As far as they’re concerned, you’re it. The D.A. is completely satisfied that Holly Nuñez has a strong circumstantial case against you and can get a guilty verdict.”

Norman rested his head against his open palm. Not weary, I thought. The man had made a meticulous study of how he appeared to others. He knew how that pulsing vein on the side of his head could give him away: Over and over again, it throbbed a message: Nervous! Nervous! “Do
you
think they’ve got a strong case?” he asked.

“I think I’ve indicated before that it may not be strong, but it is … I’d call it solid. If I were the prosecutor, I wouldn’t hesitate to go to trial.”

“Oh,” was all Norman could say.

“I’ve been straight with you right from the beginning. The way things stand, I can’t get you a very good deal. The assistant D.A. says she won’t plea-bargain now—although she probably
will eventually. But the deal she’ll offer will be so lousy that I don’t see any choice but to go to trial. Either way, you’re looking at a minimum of twenty years.”

“I see,” Norman replied. I don’t know if he actually said it; the visitors room had become very loud. No shouts, but a deep, angry hum, the most ominous male sound, the noise that might rise from a band of wild creatures just before a rampage.

“Do you see that from our point of view,” I said, louder, “finding someone else’s fingerprints at the crime scene is the first break we’ve had in the case?”

“But you say they’re
Mary’s
prints,” Norman said. “She’s not the murderer. There’s got to be an innocent explanation. She couldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Are you sure she couldn’t have hurt Bobette?”

“Positive! The whole idea is ridiculous!” He shook his head sadly. The fleeting half smile of someone faced with monumental idiocy curled his lips. “More than ridiculous. It’s insane.
Mary?
”

Yes, I knew Norman was a con man, but I could also see he could not believe that Mary could have had anything to do with homicide. Of course, it was easy for him to have that sort of confidence if he knew himself to be the killer. “Well,” I said patiently, “an eyewitness puts you there that day, right around the time of Bobette’s murder. You say you did not kill her. Okay. So how did she die? She didn’t put her own hands around her neck and strangle herself. Someone else was there. And now Mary’s fingerprints put her in that house.”

“Listen …,” Norman began. But he didn’t know what to say.