Lily White (51 page)

So she stuck to it, trying to compensate for her loss of spirit by
throwing herself into her cases with increased vigor. Which is how she and Chuckie Phalen wound up screaming at each other. He was defending the owner of a cesspool service company, one Jimmy Durk, whom the grand jury had indicted for beating to death Marlon “Buck” Toomey, a service station owner who had refused to do any more work on Durk’s truck until an outstanding bill had been paid. The beating had been witnessed by Durk’s assistant, an eighteen-year-old with a history of drug use.

The fight had begun with Chuckie’s outrage that Lee was charging his client with murder, not manslaughter. “There was no intent to cause death!” he shouted. It was not too loud a shout because his lungs were constricted with emphysema. It was, however, angry and antagonistic to the extreme.

“Of course there was. The kid saw Durk banging Buck’s head against the car lift over and over and shouting at the top of his lungs—”

“‘I’m gonna kill you’ is just an expression, and you know it!”

“Murder in the second degree, Chuckie.”

The fight had gotten worse when Chuckie discovered that Lee had taken the eighteen-year-old witness under her wing, getting him enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program, arranging with the minister of his mother’s church to pay for tutoring so the young man could earn his high school equivalency diploma, getting him a part-time job as a janitor with a furrier in Cedarhurst, a man Jazz and her father knew from the Furriers Industry Council.

Chuckie stormed over to Lee’s desk two days later. “You baked the kid cookies!”

“Brownies. So what?”

“‘So what?’ she says! ‘
So what?
’ You’re buying his testimony against my client. So what about that, Mzzzz. White?”

“I’ll make you a batch when the case is over, Chuckie,” she replied, not even bothering to look up. “Now stop it. You’re not
going to change my mind.” If she had looked up, she would have seen that her opponent had gone from purple-faced to white with rage, and that his jaw was set in stone.

So it did not occur to her an hour later, when Woodleigh Huber’s secretary called and said the Boss wanted to see her, that it had anything to do with Chuckie Phalen and
People v. Durk.
She only knew that she hated every sprayed-in-place white hair on Huber’s head, hated his pale blue telegenic shirts, hated him for putting an incompetent, time-wasting, jurisprudential know-nothing bootlicker like Jerry McCloskey behind Will’s desk.

“Come in!” Huber called out in his big, 60 Minutes voice.

Lee opened the door and saw Huber positioned before his flags and, standing across the desk from him, Chuckie Phalen. She gave Chuckie the beginnings of a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding smile before turning her attention toward the man all the assistant D.A.’s except her called Boss. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Huber?”

“
Are you out of your mind?
” Huber roared. Shaken by his vehemence, Lee took a step backward. “Making all sorts of calls on a cooperating witness’s behalf? Getting him a
job?
”

“What’s wrong with getting him a job?” she inquired.

“What’s
wrong?
” Huber cried out.

“It’s like giving him money,” Chuckie prompted.

“Shut up, Chuckie,” Lee said. She was no longer mildly amused by his running to tattle. She was angry, so angry that for once her stomach did not hurt. She turned back to Huber. “What I did was entirely proper.”

“Then you’re even worse off than I imagined, if you don’t get what was wrong! What you did was
outrageous
! You stepped over the bounds of proper prosecutorial conduct.” He was booming, as if speaking to a great gathering without a microphone. Lee understood, then, that it was a performance. In part for Chuckie.
More, to show her he had no loyalty to her. She was not part of the team. He could not fire her for cause, but he could make her want to quit. “What you did is a discredit to law enforcement!”

She started to say: I’m sorry, but I don’t see it that way, but all she got out was “I’m sorry—”

“Being sorry is not enough!” Huber must have moved, because the flag of the State of New York fluttered. “You’re off this case!”

“Mr. Huber, this is—”

“One more word out of you …” He let the threat hover in the air, then turned to Chuckie. For Huber, Lee was no longer in the room. “Chuckie, Jerry will call you the minute he’s reassigned the case. You have my profound apologies—”

Lee slammed out of his office.

The following day, Jerry McCloskey told her she was no longer in Homicide. If she wanted to, she could remain in the office, but because she had shown such lack of plain old common sense, they did not think she should be trying murder cases. Or even felony cases. The following day, she was assigned an unlawful-dealing-in-fireworks trial.

A week later, she walked out of the District Attorney’s Office.

Chuckie Phalen must have heard Lee was packing up because he was waiting on the Courthouse steps, breathing hard. “I’m sorry this happened.”

She knew the Old Boys liked lady lawyers to be ladies, so she said: “Fuck you. Fuck the horse you rode in on.” Then she added “Ass-kissing snitch,” and kept walking.

“What you posit is not without merit,” Chuckie conceded. She turned. He fluttered a not-very-white handkerchief. “See? Now listen to me, Lee—and notice I didn’t call you ‘Sis.’ I know you don’t like that. I blew my cork and went up to Huber’s to
blow off a little more steam. I had no idea he’d lace into you like that, especially in front of me, that self-serving windbag. You know what that was all about last week, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” Lee replied coldly. “And he got what he wanted, didn’t he? I quit. Maybe he’s not such a moron after all.” She walked away from Chuckie, but when she saw he was trying to catch up with her and the effort was too much for him, she slowed her pace.

“Buy you lunch?” he inquired, nodding in the direction of the silvery lunch truck parked around the corner.

“No, thank you.”

Chuckie was gazing down at the framed photos poking out of her overstuffed tote bag. One that she herself had taken, Jazz and Kent at a Knicks game. Another of her and Jazz with the five pups of Ginger’s latest litter. And a picture of Val, queen of the jungle, amid her stuffed animals. “Beautiful. How old is she?”

“Almost two.” She could see him working very hard to hide his discomfort: a mother leaving a child that age to go to work.

“Wonderful age. Lovely child. Don’t suppose you want to go over to TJ’s, have a snort with me?” Lee knew the Old Boys meant by that a jigger of Scotch; cocaine was merely something their clients trafficked in.

“No, thanks. Too early for a snort. And even if it weren’t, Chuckie, I don’t want to drink with you right now.”

“I understand,” he said, and let her walk away. But he was waiting as she turned back to see if he was all right. “Lee!” he called out in his reedy voice. “Stick around. We’ll open a bottle of glue.” Weighed down by her attaché case, her tote bag, her shoulder bag, and a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag filled with copies of her appellate briefs and extra pairs of panty hose, she found herself returning to him. “Come in with me.” At first, she thought he was suggesting TJ’s Taproom again. “Come work for me, Lee. It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t want to work for you, Chuckie. I don’t want to work for anybody.”

“Come on, Sis, wake up and smell the coffee. You know how many firms will hire a female to do trial work? You should jump up and down and clap your hands and say ‘Goody-goody’ that I’m making you an offer.”

“I’ll find something. Or I’ll go out on my own.” Her possessions felt very heavy, and she had to prevent herself from looking over at the courthouse, in the direction of the District Attorney’s Office, wondering if there was a way she could talk her way back in, knowing there was not.

“And who’s going to refer cases to you?”

“I hope you will, Chuckie. And I have a few pals.” Lee knew Chuckie was aware that she was considered Will Stewart’s protégée, and she had no doubt there were rumors of another sort of relationship between them as well. After a six-week trip to China, Will had returned to become a name partner at one of the biggest firms—and certainly the best—on Long Island.

“Will Stewart’s doing civil stuff. Is that what you want to do? Rake in the money doing corporate litigation? Is that the kind of law you want to practice, each aide trying to suffocate the other under reams of paper? Working ten years on a case, never getting into court? I don’t see how your pal stands it. With me, you won’t get rich, but you’ll get the real McCoy.”

“I can get the real McCoy without you.”

“Bushwa!”

She knew she would never go to Will with her hat in her hands. She wanted him as a friend, not a patron. And Chuckie was right. How many lawyers would refer criminal cases to her? Corporate? The thought of doing corporate litigation made her want to take a nap. “Thanks, Chuckie. I appreciate your—”

“Aw, don’t give me that hooey. Put down your things, would you, so’s we can talk properly.” She set down her shopping bag,
tote bag and attaché case. This was nuts, she thought. Out of a job for five minutes and dickering over a new one on the courthouse steps. Take time to smell the roses. Get a subscription to
Foreign Affairs.
Go to the Frick and look at Dutch masters. “What do you want?” he inquired.

“A partnership.”

“A partnership? You’re talking through your hat! You’re still a kid. You just got your walking papers from the D.A. You’re not being realistic. Here I was thinking: This girl’s got a head on her shoulders. I guess I was wrong. You’re living in a dream world.”

“We try it out for a year. You pay me fifty thousand dollars.”

“
What?
That’s crazy.”

“That’s a bargain. You’ve got a huge practice, Chuckie.” She did not mention that he was ill and it was common knowledge that he desperately needed help with his caseload. She did not have to. “After a year, we’re partners.”

“What’ll you be asking? Ninety percent of the take?”

“What do you think is fair?”

“Twenty,” he muttered. “I’m the founder. I built it up.”

She really was embarrassed about haggling with him. After all, she didn’t need the money. Everyone knew she had a successful husband. Allow an Old Boy like Chuckie his male pride.

Not if she was going to be his partner. “Thirty percent, and fifty percent of any work I bring in.”

“You’ve been smoking that funny stuff, Sis.”

“Call me ‘Sis’ one more time and it’s off.”

“Lee,” he sighed, and put out his hand.

She shook it and said, “Chuckie.”

While Will celebrated her decision to join Chuckie Phalen as if she had just been appointed attorney general, sending not merely a case of champagne to Lee’s new office but a six-foot-tall flowering hibiscus tree, Jazz reacted as if she’d told him she had
bought new towels for the guest bathroom. “Great,” he said, bisecting his baked potato and hiding it under a dollop of sour cream only a person with a vigorous metabolism could consider. “I look forward to meeting him.” Lee ground some pepper on her half potato and waited for questions about their deal. Jazz wasn’t just her husband; he was a smart businessman as well as a lawyer. But he had no questions.

Lee was furious at his reaction: I have to listen to a two-hour diatribe about what the fur buyer at Bonwit Teller said about the buttonholes on raccoon jackets and then prove I’m listening by asking questions for another hour, and he can’t even ask: Hey, where’s your new office? But as she was doing with increasing frequency, she quickly transformed her anger to hurt, and then almost immediately transmuted her wounded feelings into sympathy. I understand Jazz is having trouble dealing with my career because he was brought up in such a hidebound, male-dominated world and because the whole subject of lawyering is painful to him. He’s trying so hard to be supportive, and he’s really thoughtful about everything else.

This was true. When she was on trial, he took over completely, coming home early from work, often giving their nanny a night off to be with her boyfriend, making dinner for two—him and Val. While Lee still fulfilled many of the usual female functions—buying birthday and Christmas gifts, keeping the social calendar and the family checkbook, gardening—Jazz took over the grocery shopping and stacked and emptied the dishwasher.

And he did it with such good nature. Lee could never get over his best quality, his innate cheer, and realized that it would have been wasted in the solemn halls of Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle. But in the retail business, his buoyancy, blue-blood manners, and brilliant smile brought him nothing but success. Where Leonard was insecure, Jazz was confident. The younger man was
the one who decided to approach chichi department stores around the country and soon had them carrying Le Fourreur’s line of fun furs—jackets and coats designed for everyday wear. Emboldened by his success in the upscale market, Jazz, subtly and diplomatically, convinced his father-in-law to overcome his snobbery and go out for the low-priced trade as well; there were now three Furhavens in New York and New Jersey, with a fourth and fifth on the drawing boards.

So before their thirtieth birthdays, Mr. and Mrs. Jasper Taylor—as the place cards at the Fashion Congress’s annual Luxe Awards dinner had them—were already a well-to-do young couple.

“Turn around,” Sylvia said to Lee, eyes narrowing as she assessed her daughter’s outfit, a classic ivory strapless ball gown that gleamed, like the pearl choker she was wearing, against Lee’s golden skin. “Nice. Whose is it?”

“Valentino.”

“Impeccable. When did you get it?”

“Last month sometime.” Then she added, because she knew it would annoy her mother, “I went one day during my lunch hour.”

Sylvia sighed and shook her head at Robin, but fairly good-naturedly. Now that her younger daughter was drug-free and dressed in a four-thousand-dollar blue-and-green Saint Laurent peasant gown, she was easier about granting her elder daughter the right to be eccentric. “And I’ll bet you bought this because it didn’t need any alterations,” Sylvia said indulgently.