Lily White by Susan Isaacs

cork it if silence is what it costs to buy information that will save said client? “How about this, Mary? Unless it’s a matter of life and death, I won’t say a word to him. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Tell me about Norman and Bobette’s relationship.”
    “Strictly business,” she declared, with finality.
    “Then how come she was found dead in a nightgown and negligee?”
    “Maybe the murderer changed her clothes after he killed her!” she suggested, pleased with herself. For the first time, she allowed herself to wriggle back into the big armchair, lean back, and cross her legs. Her shoes were designed not for an unseasonably cold May morning but for a gala midsummer bash: Two narrow straps of gold just beyond her toes and another around her ankle were all that held them on. The heels were high gold daggers.
    “The murderer didn’t change her clothes,” I said. “The autopsy would have indicated that Bobette had been moved postmortem. How come she was in her nightgown?” Mary chewed the inside of her cheek a little more, a buying-time mannerism I knew I would never grow to love. She could have said: Norman left before she changed out of her regular stuff. Or: She got into asexy nightgown because her boyfriend—
the guy who killed her
—was coming over. I explained: “Norman was seen at her place at six-thirty in the evening. You said he left immediately after the man who is the witness saw him. So say that was at six forty-five.” Mary inched forward. “From Merrick to your apartment … Fifteen, twenty minutes? Sometime around seven—daylight-saving time—so it was still light outside, this lifelong spinster puts on a sexy negligee?”
    “But he was with me the whole …” She sputtered to a halt. She didn’t know what to say. Even if I spent weeks preparing her testimony, she’d be a lousy witness. Forget street smarts: She lacked the confidence to utter a simple declarative sentence and leave it alone. “I should say he was with me the whole time, shouldn’t I?”
    “If that’s the truth,” I said. “But I’d like to keep you off the stand. You seem to get a little nervous when you’re under the gun.”
    “You said it!” she agreed.
    “So you can see why I need to know more about what was going on. I need something I can use to trip up the D.A.”
    “Right.”
    “So let’s talk about Norman and Bobette—honestly.”
    Mary uncrossed her legs, blinked her lashes and opened her eyes wide. “Okay.”
    “You’re telling me what went on between Norman and Bobette was strictly a business deal. If I know that’s nonsense, can you imagine what Holly Nuñez, the assistant D.A., knows? She’s had a whole squad of homicide cops investigating Norman Torkelson. Now, was he conning Bobette Frisch?” A little-girl shrug, head to the side. Her mannerisms were overly cutesy for such a tall woman. For such a beauty. Either she’d bloomed quite late in adolescence or her mother had been petite and revoltingly winsome. “That’s a yes, he was conning her?”
    “Uh … yes. But he wasn’t having sex with her.”
    Right. “Really?”
    “Really. I mean, he told me he
never
had sex with them, even before he met me. He said lonely women …” She wasn’t so naive that she didn’t know what Norman did was reprehensible. But it didn’t seem to appall her; at that moment, she was just slightly unsure of how to present it. “Lonely women …”
    “Say it straight.”
    “Lonely women … I
can’t
say it. I can’t think of the word. It means ‘can’t get enough.’”
    “Insatiable?”
    “That’s it!” she squealed. “Hey, you and Norman should play Scrabble!”
    “‘Lonely women are insatiable …’” I prompted her.
    “So if you start having sex, they’ll milk you dry. I mean, if he was doing them, do you think he’d have time for me?”
    “So he never goes near them?” I asked.
    “He
cuddles
them,” she explained serenely, the way Norman must have explained it to her: I