Fat Mikey

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, l 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 had finally lost my sense of direction?

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 going to 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. any more,’ 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. 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 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 had sad childhoods. Many had been victims of grievous social injustice, or of terrible parents (who were themselves victims of terrible parents). Still, l never forgot they were criminals. And while I may have delighted in a bad guy’s black humour, 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 meals 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 kick 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 try to pass for upper middle class.

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