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feel a little … fuzzy. So he kept mum, always a good idea in the Bernstein apartment.
    Three months later, when Leonard asked for Sylvia’s hand, an idea suddenly popped into his head. He decided that in addition to an engagement ring, he would give his Beauty a silver fox stole that would set off her pale prettiness. Which was too bad, because Beauty
and
her mother had been thinking more in terms of a Breath of Spring mink jacket, if not a full-length coat. Still, a fox stole is better than nothing: Even though he was not a professional man, not even a college graduate, not even a guy with a couple of years at CCNY, Sylvia knew Leonard was the best she could hope for. At least he was nice looking, and he owned a decent business, which was nothing to be ashamed about—even though she was.
    Well! Three years later, when Lee was born, things had certainly changed! But more about that when the time comes.

Three
    B obette Frisch stood apart from my client’s usual victims. Most of Norman Torkelson’s women lay somewhere between vulnerable and defenseless. Not Bobette. Starting out in Brooklyn, a venue not known for fragile females, she moved due east to Queens in the early sixties when she was about twenty. She worked as a waitress at a tavern in Flushing called the Dew Drop Inn. A couple of years later, when the crowd got meaner and the barkeeper took to tucking a hammer behind the Wild Turkey for protection, she moved east again, this time into Nassau County.
    Like me, Bobette wanted a career. She took a bartending course and found a job at Murray’s Shamrock in Williston Park. It took her another ten years, but she finally moved from labor to management, after convincing Murray’s frantic creditors that the joint could actually turn a tidy profit if it were run by someone sober enough to use a cash register. She becamehalf-owner—keeping an eagle eye on the goings-on so no bartender could pour free drinks for his pals. She tossed out the roughnecks and was always on the lookout for known queasers: to get them up and out of the place so they wouldn’t (as they say with such delicacy here on Long Island) blow their chunks all over the bar.
    Bobette watched over her property from a dimly lit table way in the back. This turned out to be a good idea. First of all, she apparently wasn’t the talkative type. She greeted patrons with a friendly enough “Hiya,” but that was it in the conversation department. If she had an opinion on the Yankees or school taxes or the novels of Danielle Steel, she kept it to herself. After the murder, bar patrons who had no idea what she was like created their own Bobette Frisch for the media, murmuring into the Channel 12 mike: “You could see sweetness in her face. But it was, uh, um, a quiet sweetness. What’s happening, that someone like that gets killed?” And: “She was ultra shy. You know? But a wonderful human being.” However, an anonymous
Newsday
source referred to her as a “major cheapo who wouldn’t let you owe her two bucks,” and someone interviewed in the
Post
referred to her as Blobette. The blob business is a little unfair. According to the charts, Bobette was not terribly overweight. Her body, unfortunately, resembled a beer keg, stout and compact. Her oval face, framed by light brown hair, might have been pretty, or at least not unappealing, except that she had fleshy folds that ran from either side of her mouth down either side of her chin. Thus her jaw appeared to be attached in the manner of a marionette’s. Patrons of the bar first took to calling her Mrs. Howdy Doody, then inevitably, behind her back, Mrs. Doody.
    Bobette was shrewd about money. By the eighties, she owned three bars and two apartment buildings. Starting at four every morning, she made the rounds in her frost-beige Cadillac Eldorado from Williston Park to Franklin Square to Hicksville andpersonally picked up each night’s receipts. She collected her monthly rents in person.
    Neither the