Lily White (25 page)

“She’s a
big,
beauti-full girl?” The glimmer in his eye suggested he was recalling something specific: In Chuckie’s case, it was probably a porn film he’d seen in 1947.

“She’s tall, not big. But she looks pretty strong to me.”

“Happen to notice any marks on her forearms? I mean, if she strangled the old maid—”

“Bobette.”

“Right. Bobette. If she strangled her, and if the old maid was no weakling—”

“The autopsy report puts her at five-four, a hundred and sixty-one pounds. She was what you could call solid.”

“—then Beauti-full would likely have had scratches or bruises on her hands or arms, where the old maid would’ve tried to pull her off.”

“Possibly. But then again, Norman didn’t, either, right after he was arrested.”

“So what are you saying: Someone else did it?”

I sipped my Sam Adams from a blue plastic beer stein, a grotesque thing with football helmets embossed on it. Sandi, my secretary, had bought it for me at a flea market. For all its hideousness, it was a great find, with a freezy liquid trapped in its innards that kept the beer at ice-cold perfection. “No, it would really be pushing it to say someone else did it. I mean, there’s a tenant, but from what Terry could find out, he’s just a creep, not a psycho. But what about Mary Dean? She had motive—in her mind, anyway. She was terrified Norman would stay with Bobette, marry her. Maybe she felt she
had
to get rid of her. And she knew the layout of Bobette’s house amazingly well. My guess is Mary had been stalking them for some time, not just the day of the murder. And I bet you anything it wasn’t the first time
she’d broken into Bobette’s house. She wanted the threat of marriage to Bobette eliminated.
There’s
your motive. Now think about this: Norman had no motive.”

“Lee, you’re talking to me, Charles Michael Phalen, your partner,” Chuckie wheezed. “Or do you think I’ve lost all sense?”

“Listen, what could have motivated Norman to commit murder? He has an absolutely predictable M.O. He gets their money, goes out to buy champagne, brings it back, and toasts the mark—so the mark feels confident he’s not running off with her life savings. At which point he runs off with her life savings. He doesn’t have a violent nature.”

“Then why were you so sure up to now that he did it?” Chuckie asked.

I was dying for another beer, but I allow myself only one, and a glass of wine at dinner. For that pleasure, I have to run three miles a day, forgo dessert eternally, and eat more fish than is necessary for human happiness. If I had even a single extra sip, I would gain so much weight so fast that I would make Bobette look like Audrey Hepburn. “This is what I thought happened,” I said slowly, “when I still was convinced Norman did it: He was at Bobette’s. She’d taken the money out of the bank, but maybe she wouldn’t let him have it. She wasn’t a born patsy. She was a shrewd businesswoman; she might have had second thoughts. Or maybe … I don’t know why I think this, but maybe she expected fireworks along with the champagne and Norman wasn’t able to perform. He was really turned off by her. I know he found her very demanding, insisting he sleep over.”

“But why would he kill her?”

“I just had a gut feeling she may have taunted or condescended to him and she did it at the wrong moment. He’s a worn-out man. Tired of the game. Wants desperately to be a big shot to this beautiful young woman he’s in love with and senses she suspects he’s getting weary. So he has this—what do you call
it?—performance anxiety. And so if Bobette ridiculed him, he might have snapped.”

“Are you defending him? It sounds like you’re prosecuting him.”

“I’m ruminating, Chuckie.”

“Ruminate away, dearie.”

“My guess is, Norman was afraid that if he showed Mary how exhausted he really was, she’d run. He was also afraid that Bobette would figure out he was just going through the motions.”

“Why? Wasn’t he good at the con?”

“Sure, but no one’s at his best when he’s tired, and Norman was so exhausted he might not have had the energy to be a great lover. I’m not just talking about the sex part; I’m talking about the stamina it takes to be charming to someone you’re either indifferent to or you can’t stand. But the irony of it is, that’s all he’s equipped to do. He couldn’t hold down a real job. And he sure as hell can’t live off his investments. He’s in his mid-thirties. He’s been doing the con since he was a teenager. Want to bet that he’s never saved any money?”

“Those guys never do. They piss it away. That way, they have a perfect excuse to pull the con again.”

“Exactly. So all Norman wanted was to make a quick score and move on. But he’s not the man he was.”

“Maybe it’s because he’s actually in love with Beauti-full. I mean, real love.”

“I think he is. On the other hand, he does admit he considered actually marrying Bobette. The guy is desperate to stop.”

“So, Lee,” Chuckie said, swirling the scotch around his glass, “you’re not prosecuting him now? You’re back to defending him?”

“Right.”

“So it was Beauti-full who done it, because she was afraid Norman would marry the old maid.”

“Right.”

“But are you
sure
Norman didn’t do it? The old maid may have laughed at him and he snapped. Remember? Or she figured out it was a con and he snapped. Or she held the money back in some way and he snapped.”

“Maybe Bobette wasn’t onto him. Maybe she was just kidding around. Like, ‘I’m not going to give you the money until you kiss my … whatever.’”

Chuckie shuddered. “Dreadful notion.”

“It’s not a dreadful notion, Chuckie. You’re antediluvian.”

“I’m not antediluvian. I’m Irish, and it’s dreadful. Anyone can see that’s why the poor fella snapped.” I shook my head, but I started picturing Norman’s powerful hands around Bobette’s throat. Then the next second, in my mind’s eye those hands tapered and grew soft and it was Mary who was strangling Bobette. “I can see that the sixty-four-dollar question remains unanswered in your mind,” Chuckie said.

“Who done it?”

“Pre-cisely!” Chuckie slammed his glass down on the desk for emphasis. A few drops of liquid sprinkled his hand. “Who done it?” He brought his hand to his mouth and licked off the drops.

I replied: “I still don’t know.”

As I rose to go back to my office, pack up my attaché case, and go home, Chuckie huffed: “One more sixty-four-dollar question, partner.”

“What’s that?”

“If she did do it—which strains what little is left of an old man’s credulity—is it conceivable that a fella with Norman’s character would actually take the rap for her?”

The next morning, I was the first lawyer at the correctional center. But not the first caller. I was chatting up one of the guards outside the visitors room, asking about her son, a kid I’d
once represented for carrying a concealed weapon; I’d gotten him off and he was now studying to be an X-ray technician. Suddenly I smelled a familiar gardenia fragrance. At that same instant, a flash of canary yellow registered at the edge of my peripheral vision. I looked in the direction of the odor and color. Sure enough, it was Mary Dean, in a minidress that looked as if someone had taken a bolt of yellow polyester, wrapped it tight around her body, and then, on a whim, added sleeves the size of volley balls. The odd thing was, no one looking at her too-made-up face and trashy dress would say: Boy, does she look cheap. No, there was something about Mary that engendered goodwill. People would think: Aw, isn’t it sad that glorious-looking woman can’t afford expensive clothes?

“Hi!” she said, too cheerfully.

“How are you, Mary?”

She teetered on her high heels, not because she couldn’t balance in them, but because her weight was on the balls of her feet; she looked ready to run—and I got the feeling it was from me. “Me?” she said. “I’m fine!”

“Good.”

She teetered some more. “I hate to, like, insult you or anything, but I’ve got an appointment and I’m already late.”

“What kind of appointment?” I asked.

Naturally, she didn’t have an answer and it took so long for her to come up with one that even she knew she shouldn’t have bothered. “A-uh-a, you know. Doctor.”

“Did you just see Norman?”

“Yes,” she said, unconsciously slipping her hand under her hair and tossing it lightly. Norman must have just complimented her on it.

“How does he seem to you?”

“Um … Listen, I really have to get going. Give him a kiss for me.” I must have looked unnerved, because as she hurried off to
retrieve her handbag from the lockers and get away from me, she called out: “I mean, tell him Mary sent him a big, juicy kiss.”

Norman was not in the mood to receive a kiss. The second the guard who brought him over to me left, Norman snapped: “Leave Mary the hell alone!”

“Norman, I know you’re very protective of her. I admire that. But she was in Bobette’s house the day of the murder. She stole Bobette’s wallet.”

“No she didn’t!” His brows drew so close together they became one.

“She admitted it to me,” I said.

“She lied.”

“No, she didn’t lie,” I replied calmly. “She stole it.”

“Listen,” Norman hissed, “she did not take the goddamn wallet. She wasn’t even in the house the day of the murder. It was another day that she was there. She’s confused. Maybe she’s covering up for me.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. I think she—”

“
I
stole the wallet. I gave it to her. I said: ‘Go ahead. Buy out a store or two.’”

“When did you have time to give her the wallet? She made those purchases late afternoon or early evening the day of the murder, when you say you were still with Bobette, or going out to buy the champagne.”

“There was time. And she did not kill Bobette! Okay? Get off that!”

“Then who did? You?” Norman didn’t answer. He scowled, and although it looked like an adolescent’s sullen expression at first, it was clear his compressed lips were a grown man’s attempt to keep from screaming words of rage. “I know this is a terrible situation for you,” I went on. “You want to take care of Mary. The last thing you want is to implicate her in a murder. I admire that. But her presence at Bobette’s is your only hope.”

“Let me tell you something,” Norman said. He spoke so softly that I had to move close to the barrier between us. His face was just inches away from mine. I could see bunches of red capillaries in the inside corners of his eyes. “You leave her out of this. She is a sweet, innocent girl.”

“Then you’re saying she had nothing to do with the murder of Bobette Frisch?”

“I’m saying if you don’t leave her alone, you’re fucking fired.”

G
raduation day did not start out all
that
badly. A single powder puff of a cloud was all that marred the sky’s blue perfection. True, Robin had promised—sworn, in fact—that she would meet the family at nine-thirty on the dot in front of Barton Hall, where Cornell’s commencement exercises would take place. By ten o’clock, she still had not shown. Also true, Sylvia’s first act upon seeing her elder daughter in cap and gown was to lift a handful of Lee’s long, lank hair in her open palm, examine it, and inquire, after a tsk loud enough to be heard at UCLA: “I
know
it’s the style, but couldn’t you have pulled it back into a ponytail, so it’s off your face?”

Lee, who had spent three-quarters of an hour ironing her hair so it would meet her mother’s rigid Hair Sleekness Criterion yet still conform to proper student radical standards, snapped: “No. I could not have pulled it back in a ponytail.”

“Fine.” Wearily, Sylvia upended her palm; Lee’s hair dropped
from her hand. “You’re the one who’s going to have to look at your graduation pictures ten years from now.”

Lee had taken Psych 1. While not introspective, she was hardly a bubblehead. She had to have known there was nothing she could do, short of marrying Yves Saint Laurent, that would make her mother happy with her. In fact, in her heart of hearts, Lee probably knew that even Yves would not please Sylvia, for when it came to Lee, her mother was unpleasable. Yet for all her pot-smoking, revolution-fomenting rebellion, Lee could not stop trying. Intent on giving peace a chance this day, she even smiled at her mother. But Sylvia, concentrating on the untweezed inch between Lee’s brows, did not notice.

“Girls.” Leonard cut into the silence. “Let’s make it a happy day.”

He was not taking his own advice. To begin with, he was stewing over Robin’s failure to appear, although this should not have surprised him. Failure had become Robin’s vocation. She had dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania, having failed every course she took her first semester. She then failed to complete applications to any of the other, more tolerant institutions of higher learning that a pricey college adviser had suggested. Following that, Robin failed to show up for work at the Revillon showroom at Saks Fifth Avenue, where Leonard, after much obsequious pleading and pledging of future favors, had succeeded in landing her a trainee’s job. The man was at his wits’ end. During spring break, he had even confided to Lee that Sylvia suspected Robin might be smoking pot. Lee, subduing an urge to whoop with mean-spirited laughter, merely mumbled: “She never talked to me about pot.” Technically, that was no lie. As far as Lee could see, Robin was not much interested in such a namby-pamby hallucinogen as marijuana, preferring lysergic acid diethylamide.

A happy day? Not for Leonard. It wasn’t only Robin. In fact,
for him, Robin was mere irritation. No, his misery was on a grander scale. He knew now: He was doomed to be forever locked out of the world he yearned to enter. His elder daughter could feel at home in the Ivy League. He could only pay the bills. For some reason, it had taken him forty-seven years to finally comprehend this simple fact of American life: He would never be one of them! Now, as he trudged up the seemingly endless hill that was the Comell campus, his legs ached. His knees felt as if someone had bisected them with a hatchet. The hammering in his chest made him feel that his heart was trying to crash through his rib cage and roll on the grass in shame. Also, he could not get his wind and had to clamp his mouth shut and concentrate on breathing through his nose in order that all the Old Boys and Old Girls so at home at this place wouldn’t think the Ivy League was too much for him.