Lily White Read online

  Lily

  White

  Susan Isaacs

  To my daughter-in-law,

  Leslie Stern,

  with admiration and love

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Susan Isaacs

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  I was never a virgin.

  Okay: In the technical sense, of course I was. But even in my dewy days, I never gazed at the world wide-eyed with wonder. If I wasn’t born shrewd, at least I grew up too smart to be naive. So how come in the prime of my life, at the height of my powers, I could not foresee what would happen in the Torkelson case? Was I too street smart? Had I been around the block so many times that I finally lost my sense of direction?

  A brief digression: Ages ago, soon after I became a criminal defense lawyer, Fat Mikey LoTriglio hailed me across the vast concrete expanse of the courthouse steps. “Hey, girlie!” His tomato of a face wore an expression that seemed (I squinted) amiable, pretty surprising considering he’d just been sprung from Elmira after doing two and a half years on the three counts of aggravated assault I’d prosecuted him for.

  “Come over here,” he called out. “Hey, I’m not gonna kill you.” In Fat Mikey’s world, that was not hyperbole but a promise; he got busy straightening his tie to demonstrate he was not concealing a Walther PPK. “I hear you’re not working for the D.A. anymore,” he boomed. I strolled over, smiling to show I didn’t hold any grudges either, and offered my hand, which he shook in the overly vigorous manner of a man trying to show a professional woman that he’s comfortable with professional women. Then I handed him my business card. I was not unaware that Fat Mikey was one of three organized crime figures the cops routinely picked up for questioning on matters of Mob-related mayhem. To have Fat Mikey as a client was to have an annuity.

  He glanced down at my card to recall my name. “Lee?”

  Naturally, I didn’t respond “Fat?” And to call him “Mike” after having called him “a vulture feasting on society’s entrails” in my summation might seem presumptuous. So I murmured a polite “Mmm?”

  “A girl like you from a good family—”

  “Are you kidding?” I started to say, but he wouldn’t let me.

  “I could tell you got class, watching you at the trial,” he went on. “You know how? Good posture—and not just in the morning. Plus you say ‘whom.’ Anyways, you really think you can make a living defending guys like me?” He didn’t seem so much sexist as sincerely curious. I nodded encouragingly. “This is what you had in mind when you went to law school?” he inquired.

  “No. Back then I was leaning toward Eskimo fishing rights. But this is what I’m good at.”

  He shook his head at my folly. “When—pardon my French—a guy’s ass is in a sling, you think he’s gonna hire a girl who says ‘whom’?”

  “If he’s partial to his ass he will.”

  Fat Mikey’s upper lip twitched. For him, that was a smile. Then, almost paternally, he shook a beefy index finger at me. “A girl like you should be more particular about the company she keeps.”

  Years later, I would learn how wise Fat Mikey was.

  Nevertheless, from the beginning I knew there were limits to keeping bad company. I could be sympathetic to my clients without getting emotionally involved: A lot of them had sad childhoods. Many had been victims of grievous social injustice, or of terrible parents (who were themselves victims of terrible parents). Still, I never forgot they were criminals. And while I may have delighted in a bad guy’s black humor, or a tough broad’s cynicism, I was never one of those attorneys who got naughty thrills socializing with hoods. You’d never catch me inviting a client—let’s say Melody Ann Toth, for argument’s sake—to go shopping and out for Caesar salads so we could chitchat about old beaux … or about what she might expect at her upcoming trial for robbing three branches of the Long Island Savings Bank on what might have been an otherwise boring Thursday.

  For their part, most of my clients (including Fat Mikey, who retained me two years after that conversation on the courthouse steps) wouldn’t think I was exactly a laugh a minute either. Whatever their personal definition of a good time was, I wasn’t it. Unlike me, Fat Mikey simply did not get a bang out of crocheting afghans or listening to National Public Radio. With fists the size of rump roasts, Mikey looked like what he was: a man for whom aggravated assault was not just a profession but a pleasure. As for Melody Ann, with her pink-blonde hair that resembled attic insulation, the only reason she’d go shopping at Saks would be to knock off the Estée Lauder counter when she ran out of lip liner. My clients had no reason or desire to pass for upper middle class.

  For that reason alone, Norman Torkelson was different right from the beginning.

  Of course, a con man cannot look like a crook and expect to make a living. If Norman Torkelson had resembled the no-good rat he was, he would have been a sawed-off runt with a skinny mustache like a plucked eyebrow. But then the nine hundred or so women he had proposed marriage to would have told him: Get lost, creepo.

  However, he was not sawed off; he was six feet five. Lucky for him, since in America everyone knows a man’s character increases in excellence in direct proportion to his height. Not that Norman was content with mere tallness; he was clever enough to trip over his own size-thirteen feet every so often, which made him … Some of the descriptions in the witnesses’ statements taken over the years from victims of his scams were: “sensitive,” “tragic, like Abraham Lincoln,” and (my personal favorite) “caring.” So all those women to whom he proposed said yes—Yes, my love! Yes, Norman! (or Yes, whatever alias he was using)—and got their hearts broken.

  I wonder now: What if we hadn’t met in the Nassau County Correctional Center? What if he hadn’t been wearing the official uniform—pants and shirt in an orange that inevitably leeched the life out of every inmate’s face? Would I have wanted to trace with my fingertips the lines of his Mount Rushmore face? No. I would not have.

  Still (before I leave the subject of color), even the vicious glow of that orange could not hide the fact that Norman’s eyes were such a startling blue they seemed more a Crayola than an eye color: Viking blue, a shade somewhere between royal and turquoise. If not for those eyes, would the hundreds of women thrilled to empty their bank accounts for him have found themselves destitute, suddenly dependent on disgusted relatives or the public dole?

  However, let’s not go overboard on the blue eyes business. A con man cannot afford to be suspiciously handsome, and Norman Torkelson was not. First of all, he had a too teeny nose. Instead of the cute upward tilt you’d expect from a nose like that, it hooked; in certain lights, you’d swear Norman was half man, half parakeet. So not gorgeous—an asset to a con man because true beauty evokes curiosity. And not slick. At least, he didn’t seem slick. Like any professional swindler, he was just convincing enough to persuade a woman who had never met a man from Yale that he had gone to Yale.

  Furthermore, a competent con man never overacts. Norman may have listened avidly when a woman
spoke, but he never pretended to drown in the depths of her eyes; he didn’t shift around in his seat either, crossing his leg to hide an alleged erection. Oh, one more handy imperfection: He had a slight lisp.

  I heard his first words as: “I thwear I didn’t do it, Mth. White.” He lowered his big head and whispered, “Jethuth!”

  “It’s not me you have to convince, Mr. Torkelson,” I told him. “I’m on your side. It’s the D.A. who’s a problem.”

  He clutched the top of the white Formica barrier that separates inmates from their visitors. “Please,” he begged me, “call me Norman.”

  Amazing: He threw his entire being behind that request. His forehead furrowed, his shoulders tensed, his Adam’s apple bulged, every part of him seemed to yearn: Call me Norman.

  A con man’s hokey trick? Absolutely. I tried to be cool, glancing around the visitors room, a huge space filled with rows of Formica-topped tables, which resembled a school cafeteria. However, instead of patrolling teachers there were armed guards carrying semiautomatic rifles, and closed-circuit cameras.

  Despite the ugly publicness of the place, I felt a private flush of gratification at my client’s request: Please, call me Norman. Almost as if he had willed it, I actually eased my attaché case off my lap and set it by my feet, then pushed my chair back so he could get a fuller view: I carried on as if I were OD’ing on estrogen. I actually crossed my legs, movie starlet style, and began to inscribe a sexy O with my foot.

  Naturally, all this took place within a microsecond. Then I realized I was being manipulated—which only proved to me what I’d already suspected. Norman Torkelson was not a great con artist. Just a fairly competent one.

  “I was not—and I quote—conning Bobette out of her money!” he announced in that very instant.

  “Norman,” I said, uncrossing my legs, “let’s get our priorities straight. The fraud by false pretenses charge is the least of your problems right now.”

  “Bobette and I were friends,” he insisted. “She was lending me the money. I told her: ‘Have your attorney draw up the proper paperwork, with whatever interest you feel is fair. I’ll sign it. I won’t have it any other way!”’

  “Norman.” I tried to cut him off.

  “This was a legitimate business transaction!”

  “It may have been, but right now you’re not in business. You’re in the slammer, and Bobette Frisch is on ice over at the medical examiner’s.” A small shudder vibrated his shoulders, a not unusual reaction new clients display when I talk like a defense lawyer—i.e., straight. But I believe straight is better than cute, especially when a guy is looking at fifteen to life. Let me amend that: Straight is better than cute, period, which is not to say a lawyer can’t mitigate the effects of brutal directness with an empathetic smile and a mastery of the New York penal code. I peered right into Norman’s eyes. “You’re facing a murder charge,” I reminded him.

  “I didn’t touch her!” Norman unclasped his hands and gripped his side of the table. “How can they think I could take a human life?”

  I shook my head despondently to show how utterly unthinkable such a notion was to me and then explained in my tranquilizing, consoling, I-know-you-don’t-deserve-to-be-in-the-hoosegow voice: “From what I gather, at around two-thirty last Friday, Bobette went into her bank and withdrew forty-eight thousand of the fifty-two thousand dollars she had in her account. After that, no one seems to have seen her—until yesterday.”

  “Who …” He cleared his throat, presumably to show me how choked up he was. “Who found her?” he asked.

  “Some local kids. They were selling chocolate bars so their high school band could go to the Hula Bowl. When they knocked on her door, they smelled something. One of their parents called the cops, and the cops found Bobette. There was no sign of the money.”

  Norman sat back in his molded plastic chair as if amazed: No sign of the money?! The performance over, he leaned forward, his face flushing with outrage. “How did the cops get to me?”

  “Fingerprints?” I suggested helpfully.

  It is the rare miscreant who comes right out and tells his attorney: I’m a crook. Career criminals are too sophisticated to admit to a specific crime, because they know their lawyer cannot put them on the stand if the lawyer knows they are going to lie through their teeth. Besides, most have an aversion to responsibility (to say nothing of an antipathy to reality). They cry out: “Who, me? I didn’t do anything.” And it goes double for someone accused of murder. They not only deny guilt; they play victim: Why are you picking on me? As their lawyer, my job isn’t to get them to confess; it’s to give them the best defense possible. To do that, I have to nudge them, gently, until they’re facing the facts.

  “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 c
ircle 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—

  Two

  In 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.