Lily White (54 page)

You’ve gone off the deep end, the defense lawyer in her declared. He bought the book in a sentimental moment on some business trip and forgot it in his camera bag. And the shampoo? An out-of-town department store buyer visiting New York could have given it to him. Do you honestly believe that? the prosecutor demanded. No, she did not.

She tiptoed downstairs. She knew Jazz would not be so stupid
as to charge an extramarital affair on their joint American Express card, but she went through the receipts for the past twelve months: no evidence. At twelve-twenty, she woke Terry Salazar and told him she had a confidential matter she wanted handled. He understood that when she said “handled,” she did not mean handled the following morning. When she called him back at one-thirty, he told her that a J. Taylor from a company called Le Fourreur had stayed at the Carlyle twenty-two times in the past year. She wrote down the dates. Thank you, she said to Terry. Please hand-deliver your bill. Don’t send it to the firm. There’s no bill, he said. And listen, Lee, I’ve already forgotten what I just found out. She thanked him and he told her he was sorry for her troubles and it sucked the big one, didn’t it, learning shit like this when she was on trial.

She had forgotten she was in the middle of the Urquhart case. Absolutely forgotten. Twenty-two times. So he was seeing her twice a month. Was she from out of town? From New York and married? He traveled only about two or three nights a month. Except on buying trips to Scandinavia and the U.S.S.R. And for industry conferences. Or if a store executive needed special handling. Actually, he was away more than she had realized.

She took the list of dates she had written down and the little book of sonnets, and retrieved the bottle of shampoo from the floor of Kent’s shower. She hid the evidence in the toe of her L.L.Bean Maine hunting shoe. Then she went back to bed, where the man who had betrayed her slept in perfect peace.

“Not now,” Will told her.

“I have to,” Lee insisted.

“Of course you have to. But you’re on trial for two or three more weeks.” At eight-fifteen the next morning, they were sitting in the empty courtroom. Lee realized that Will had simply assumed she wanted company, or was getting cold feet and
needed bucking up; he arrived with a heartening greeting and a bag with two coffees and a sesame bagel. Still, when she told him of her discovery, he did not flinch or appear in any way surprised. She did not want to ask if there had been something about Jazz she had not seen, if Will had felt all along that he was a heel. For the time being, she took comfort in telling herself that Will was the worldliest man she knew and, therefore, nothing surprised him. “If you deal with your marriage now,” he told her, “you won’t have the energy to deal with Paula Urquhart.”

“How can I not think about it?” she asked, staring into the tan depths of her coffee.

“I’m not saying not to think. I’m saying not to act—unless you feel there is some need for immediate action.”

“Who could it be?” she asked. “
Why?
What did I do—”

“I’ll take the day off right after your jury comes in. We’ll sit down and talk about everything for the entire day. I’ll even throw in lunch. Okay? Right now, tell me: What’s your biggest problem in the case?”

“You’re trying to get my mind off Jazz.”

“Yes.”

Lee was not sure if she had managed a smile or if her face had merely twisted. “My biggest problem?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s that I am totally convinced of my self-defense theory when I’m in court. This woman was so terrified that she felt her husband was in sole control of her fate. She wasn’t able to call for help because somehow Eddie would find out. He was her whole universe. He was God, and he was omnipotent.”

“Why is that a problem?” Will asked.

“Because when I’m not in court, when I’m driving home or shaving my legs I start to think: This woman is full of shit.”

“You do?”

“My own experts testify under oath that she could not have
picked up the phone and called the cops or a priest or someone for help. They swear there was no way she could have told the truth about what hit her all those times she went to the doctors and the hospital. They say, sure, the kids heard what was going on, and yes, they’re quite damaged, but she did the best she could, protecting them from seeing the worst of it by going upstairs. And you know what? I can’t buy it. There’s a voice inside me saying: No matter what, you have to take responsibility for yourself. It may take everything you’ve got, it may kill you, but ordinary people act with amazing courage every day. And even if she couldn’t stop the abuse for herself, how could she not protect her children from living in that hell?”

“You don’t think the killing was self-defense?”

“I think she did have to get rid of him. I think she could have done it two ways: with a call to a local cab company, saying come and get me—or with an ice skate. I think she hated him. With good reason. He did terrible things to her. He took away joy and he took away hope. She hated what she had become. I have no doubt that she was a victim of a terrible, continuing crime. And if I were on my jury, I’d tell myself: Self-defense? Bullshit! She murdered him in cold blood.”

The night after the jury came in, Lee slept for thirteen hours. The second night, she told the nanny to go out, visit her boyfriend, enjoy herself. She sent Kent for a visit with his parents. She sent Val to her parents’ house with five stuffed animals. She knew Robin could be trusted to keep Val happy.

Jazz flew into the house at seven o’clock, a huge bouquet of white roses mixed with white lilies and a bottle of fine red wine
to celebrate her victory. When he heard Kent and Val were spending the night away from home, he could not hang up his trench coat fast enough. He raced back into the kitchen, but Lee was not there. When he rushed into the living room and found her sitting at the end of the couch, feet primly on the floor, he said: “Hey, the flowers are still in the kitchen. You forgot to put them in water.”

“I don’t care about the flowers.”

“What’s wrong, honey?” He sat beside her, his brow creased with concern. She knew he was waiting to hear how exhausted she was, or that after all the adrenaline of the trial, she was let down. Lee could feel the warmth of his arm through the sleeve of his suit, so she got up and sat in a chair catercornered to his. “Something’s the matter?” he asked.

“You are having an affair.” He got out the “Wh—” of “What are you talking about” but she cut him off. “On nights that you were supposedly out of town on business, you stayed at the Carlyle. Thirty-five East Seventy-sixth, corner Madison.” It is said that when people are shocked, they look as if they have been hit in the stomach. To Lee, Jazz looked as if he’d been hit in the face. His features went slack and so soft that the bones underneath could have been shattered into smithereens. “But then, I don’t have to give you the address, do I? You found it twenty-two times.” She watched as he tried to come back with something, but he could not find anything to say. He put his head in his hands. His wedding band looked dull in the lamplight, as if it had a film of soap scum over it.

Finally, he spoke through his fingers. “When did you find out?”

She wanted to tell him what a horrible blow it had been, seeing that little shampoo bottle. Twelve days I held it in! You know how they say in stories: She thought her heart would break? Well, my chest hurt on the left side for almost two weeks. A terrible,
piercing pain sometimes. It would spread out and it would zing me, in the middle of the day as I was rising to object, in the middle of the night. But I’m too much the trial lawyer to give away my case, she told herself. And with that, she gave away her case. “Who is she?” she cried out, unable to stop herself from showing how little she really knew. He sat there, his head still in his hands, saying nothing. “Damn it, I have a right to know who she is!”

“No, you don’t.” He stood and walked across the room and poured himself a tumbler of vodka. He did not ask if she wanted anything.

“Do you love her?” she demanded of his back.

In his own good time he turned around. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. Then he added: “Yes.”

It was worse than she had thought. In all her imaginings, he always started crying and begged for another chance, that the woman was nothing, stupid, not worth throwing away a beautiful marriage for. Please, Lee, forgive me. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to end the marriage? Or do you want to give her up?”

“I wish I knew what I wanted. I wish I knew what would be the right thing.”

“How could you sleep with me when you’re sleeping with someone else?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t
what?
” she shouted. “Don’t imagine you fucking your brains out at the Carlyle and stealing teeny bottles of shampoo, you cheap bastard!”

“Oh,” he said. “Is that how you found out?”

She was not going to let him think he had been caught on that one false move. “One of many clues. You didn’t cover your trail
very well.” She waited for him to hang his head, or put down his drink and run to her, kneel before her and cry how hurting her seared his soul. But he just sipped his vodka slowly and methodically, as if he were at a boring fraternity party at Colgate, trying to get drunk without getting sick. “I’ll give you till tomorrow morning to make up your mind,” she told him.

He whirled around the liquid in his glass. “I need more time than that, Lee.”

“You don’t have it. I’ve had all the pain I can tolerate. If you don’t choose me by tomorrow, you’ve chosen her.”

At seven-thirty the following morning, Jazz told Lee he wanted to stay with her.

Late that afternoon, when he had gone to pick up Val and Kent, it occurred to Lee that she had never even asked herself whether she wanted to stay with him.

T
here were gaps in my education. Take Spanish. For example, I can to this day have a conversation in Spanish, as long as no complex ideas intrude and it stays in the present tense. I can even quote several key lines of dialogue from
La casa de Bernarda Alba.
However, it took five years of visiting the Nassau County Correctional Center before I realized that a sign I’d thought was a rather menacing warning aimed discriminately at Latino inmates,
EL VATO,
was the result of someone’s pinching the
E
and the
R
from the elevator sign in Building C.

Another gap? I had taken Psych 1, to say nothing of Criminal Law, but I hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to deal with a client who refuses to get out of jail. So I just said: “Norman, you can’t stay here anymore.”

“Go to hell,” he growled at me. He couldn’t say much more because he was busy scuffling with two correction officers, who were trying to turn him over to me for the short walk through the
door and out to the parking lot and freedom. Being six foot five, Norman was much taller than either of them, but as they were built along the lines of
corrida
bulls, his progress from the Return Uniforms Here window to the exit door, where I was waiting, was fairly swift. “You’re making a terrible mistake!” he cried to his escorts, trying to pull his arms out of their powerful grips.

“Get your ass outta here,” the beefier one of them grunted, displaying not the slightest intellectual curiosity about why an inmate would be so intent on remaining on the premises.

“Listen,” Norman gasped at them, breathless from his struggle. He was not more than five feet from where I was standing, and getting closer, “I killed Bobette Frisch! Don’t let me out.” The smaller of the officers—but a guy who could lead the running of the bulls in Pamplona—seemed to hesitate.

“Check the paperwork,” I advised the cop. “They want him out of here. Someone else confessed. They arrested her. He’s trying to protect her.”

“I choked Bobette to death!” Norman stretched out his fingers to demonstrate strangulation, but as his arms were so tightly held so far apart, he could not get his point across. “It was
me.
I did it.”

“The one they arrested is his girlfriend,” I explained. Unimpressed by Norman’s gallantry, the guards heaved him in my direction.

The fluorescent lights in the jail are pretty strong, so I’m not sure that there is a physiological reason why every person who is released squeezes shut his eyes momentarily, as if to keep them from getting scorched by the sun’s fierceness. Norman stood outside the closed door of the Center, using his hand as a visor. His red and white checked shirt and gray slacks—the clothes he’d been wearing at the time of his arrest—were now too big for him. Seamed with stiff creases from being folded into a plastic bag, the shirt and slacks looked shabby as well, as if they had
contracted some nasty fabric infection that was out of control in the Clothing Storage Room.

I don’t know what I expected for getting Norman out of jail and the murder charges against him dropped. Certainly not a thank you, as what I had done was explicitly against his wishes. Not a physical attack either, because the one thing I felt confident about was that Norman did not express his anger in a violent way. I figured I’d hear a big-time chewing out, really nasty, with bellowing and maybe some fist-banging on the trunk of someone’s car, a diatribe that would end with one of the guards in the parking lot strolling over and threatening to arrest him for first-degree harassment.

What I did not expect was to be ignored. Once Norman got used to the sunlight, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away. “Norman.” I tried to catch up with him, but with his long legs, he was taking two steps for my one. So it was not until he stopped, apparently confounded by the number and ugliness of the jail’s pale, bloodless brick buildings, that I was able to apologize. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This was not what you wanted—”

“Quite the opposite.” Because he was so tall, it was easy for him to pretend I wasn’t there. He kept his head high and moved it back and forth, trying to home in on some elusive target.