And When She Was Good Read online

  And When She Was Good

  Laura Lippman

  Dedication

  For every woman I know,

  but in particular the three L’s—

  Lauren Milne Henderson

  Linda Perlstein

  Lizzie Skurnick

  —who manage, despite vast distances, to keep me well fed, well shod, and reasonably sane.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Monday, October 3

  1989

  Tuesday, October 4

  1990

  Wednesday, October 5

  1991

  Thursday, October 6

  1992

  Friday, October 7

  1993

  Sunday, October 9

  1994

  Monday, October 10

  1995

  Tuesday, October 11

  1999

  Wednesday, October 12

  1999

  Thursday, October 13

  1999–2000

  Friday, October 14

  2000

  Monday, October 17

  2001

  Wednesday, October 19

  2005

  Tuesday, October 25

  2005

  Wednesday, October 26

  2005–October 28, 2011

  Monday, November 7

  Tuesday, November 8

  Thursday, November 10

  Tuesday, November 15

  Friday, November 18

  Sunday, November 20

  Tuesday, November 22

  Wednesday, November 23

  Friday, November 25

  Tuesday, February 21, 2012

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Also by Laura Lippman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 3

  SUBURBAN MADAM DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

  The headline catches Heloise’s eye as she waits in the always-long line at the Starbucks closest to her son’s middle school. Of course, a headline is supposed to call attention to itself. That’s its job. Yet these letters are unusually huge, hectoring even, in a typeface suitable for a declaration of war or an invasion by aliens. It’s tacky, tarted up, as much of a strumpet as the woman whose death it’s trumpeting.

  SUBURBAN MADAM DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

  Heloise finds it interesting that suicide must be fudged but the label of madam requires no similar restraint, only qualification. She supposes that every madam needs her modifier. Suburban Madam, D.C. Madam, Hollywood Madam, Mayflower Madam. “Madam” on its own would make no impression in a headline, and this is the headline of the day, repeated ad nauseam on every news break on WTOP and WBAL, even the local cut-ins on NPR. Suburban Madam dead in apparent suicide. People are speaking of it here in line at this very moment, if only because the suburb in question is the bordering county’s version of this suburb. Albeit a lesser one, the residents of Turner’s Grove agree. Schools not quite as good, green space less lush, too much lower-cost housing bringing in riffraff. You know, the people who can afford only three hundred thousand dollars for a town house. Such as the Suburban Madam, although from what Heloise has gleaned, she lived in the most middle of the middle houses, not so grand as to draw attention to herself but not on the fringes either.

  And yes, Heloise knows that because she has followed almost every news story about the Suburban Madam since her initial arrest eight months ago. She knows her name, Michelle Smith, and what she looks like in her mug shot, the only photo of her that seems to exist. Very dark hair—so dark it must be dyed—very pale eyes, otherwise so ordinary as to be any woman anywhere, the kind of stranger who looks familiar because she looks like so many people you know. Maybe Heloise is a little bit of a hypocrite, decrying the news coverage even as she eats it up, but then she’s not a disinterested party, unlike the people in this line, most of whom probably use “disinterested” incorrectly in conversation yet consider themselves quite bright.

  When the Suburban Madam first showed up in the news, she was defiant and cocky, bragging of a little black book that would strike fear in the hearts of powerful men throughout the state. She gave interviews. She dropped tantalizing hints about shocking revelations to come. She allowed herself to be photographed in her determinedly Pottery Barned family room. She made a point of saying how tough she was, indomitable, someone who never ran from a fight. Now, a month out from trial, she is dead, discovered in her own garage, in her Honda Pilot, which was chugging away. If the news reporters are to be believed—always a big if, in Heloise’s mind—it appears there was no black book, no list of powerful men, no big revelations in her computer despite diligent searching and scrubbing by the authorities. Lies? Bluffs? Delusions? Perhaps she was just an ordinary sex worker who thought she had a better chance at a book deal or a stint on reality television if she claimed to run something more grandiose.

  A woman’s voice breaks into Heloise’s thoughts.

  “How pathetic,” she says. “Women like that—all one can do is pity them.”

  The woman’s pronouncement is not that different from what Heloise has been thinking, yet she finds herself automatically switching sides.

  “What I really hate,” the woman continues, presumably to a companion, although she speaks in the kind of creamy, pleased-with-itself tone that projects to every corner of the large coffee shop, “is how these women try to co-opt feminism. Prostitution is not what feminists were striving for.”

  But it is a choice, of a type. It was her choice. Free to be you and me, right? Heloise remembers a record with a pink cover. She remembers it being broken to pieces, too, cracked over her father’s knee.

  A deeper voice rumbles back, the words indistinct.

  “She comes out of the gate proclaiming how tough she is, and when things get down to it, she can’t even face prosecution. Kills herself, and she’s not even looking at a particularly onerous sentence if found guilty. That’s not exactly a sign of vibrant mental health.”

  Again Heloise had been close to thinking the same thing, but now she’s committed to seeing the other side. She may be mentally ill, yes, but that doesn’t prove she chose prostitution because she was mentally ill. Your logic is fallacious. She happened to get caught. What about the ones who don’t get caught? Do you think they catch everybody?

  The deep voice returns, but Heloise is on the couple’s wavelength now; she can make out his words. “She said she had a black book.”

  “Don’t they always? I don’t believe that truly powerful men have to pay for it.”

  At this point Heloise can’t contain herself. Although she always tries to be low-key and polite, especially in her own neighborhood, where she is known primarily as Scott Lewis’s mom, she turns around and says, “So you don’t think governor of New York is a powerful position?”

  “Excuse me?” The woman is taken aback. So is Heloise. She had assumed the self-possessed voice would belong to another mom, fresh from the school drop-off, but this is a middle-aged woman in business attire, talking to a man in a suit. They must be going to the office park down the street or on their way to a day of brokers’ open houses or short sales. There has been an outbreak of auctions in the community, much to everyone’s distress and worry.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing. You said powerful men don’t pay for sex, yet the former governor of New York did. So are you saying that’s not a powerful job?”

  “I guess that’s the exception that proves the rule.”

  “Actually, the saying should be the exception that tests the rule. It’s been corrupted over the years.” Heloise has spent much of her adult life acquiring such trivia, putting away little stores of factoids that are contrary to what most people think they know, including the origin of “factoid,” which was originally used for things that seem true but have no basis in fact. There’s the accurate definition of the Immaculate Conception, for example, or the historical detail that slaves in Maryland remained in bondage after the Emancipation Proclamation because only Confederate slaves were freed by the act. The purist’s insistence that “disinterested” is not the same as “uninterested.”

  “But okay, let’s say an exception does prove the rule,” she continues. “Let me run through a few more exceptions for you—Senator David Vitter, Charlie Sheen, Hugh Grant. Tiger Woods, probably, although I’m less clear on whether he visited professional sex workers or women in more of a gray area. I mean, you may not think of politicians, actors, and sports stars as inherently powerful, but our culture does, no?”

  People are looking at her. Heloise does not like people to look at her unless she wants them to look at her. But she is invested in the argument and wants to win.

  “Okay, so there are some powerful men who pay for sex. But they wouldn’t risk such a thing unless they were very self-destructive.”

  “What’s the risk? It seems to me that sexual partners whose services are bought and paid for are more reliable than mistresses or girlfriends.”

  “Well—”

  “Besides, they didn’t get her on sex, did you notice that? She was arrested on charges of mail fraud, racketeering, tax evasion. They couldn’t actually prove that she had sex for money. They almost never can. Heidi Fleiss didn’t go to jail for selling sex—she served time for not reporting her income. You know who gets busted for having sex for money? Street-level prostitutes. The ones who give hand jobs for thirty bucks. Think it through. Why is the one commodity that women c
an capitalize on illegal in this country? Who would be harmed if prostitution were legal?”

  The woman gives Heloise a patronizing smile, as if she has the upper hand. Perhaps it’s because Heloise is in her version of full mom garb—yoga pants, a polo-neck pullover, hair in a ponytail. It is not vanity to think that she looks younger than her real age. Heloise spends a lot of money on upkeep, and even in her most casual clothes she is impeccably groomed. The woman’s companion smiles at her, too, and his grin is not at all patronizing. The woman notices. It doesn’t make her happy, although there’s nothing to suggest they are more than colleagues. But few women enjoy seeing another woman being admired.

  “You seem to know a lot about the case,” the woman says. “Was she a friend of yours?”

  Heloise understands that the point of the question is to make her disavow the dead Suburban Madam with a shocked “No!” and thereby prove that prostitution is disreputable. She will not fall into that trap.

  “I didn’t know her,” she says. “But I could have. She could have been my neighbor. She was someone’s neighbor. Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s mother.”

  “She had kids?” This is the man, his interest piqued, in Heloise if not in the topic, although Heloise has never met a man who isn’t fascinated by the subject of prostitution.

  “No—that was just a figure of speech. But she could have been, that’s all I’m saying. She was a person. You can’t sum up her entire life in two words. You didn’t know her. You shouldn’t be gossiping about her.”

  She feels a little flush of triumph. It’s fun to claim the higher moral ground, a territory seldom available to her. And Heloise really does despise gossip, so she’s not a hypocrite on that score.

  But her sense of victory is short-lived. The problem, Heloise realizes as she waits for her half-caf/half-decaf, one-Splenda latte, is that people can be reduced that way. How would Heloise be described by those who know her? Or in a headline, given that so few people really know her. Scott’s mom. The quiet neighbor who keeps to herself. Nobody’s daughter, not as far as she’s concerned. Nobody’s wife, never anyone’s wife, although local gossip figures her for a young widow because divorcées never move into Turner’s Grove. They move out, unable to afford their spouses’ equity in the house, even in these post-bubble days.

  What no one realizes is that Heloise is also just another suburban madam, fortifying herself before a typical workday, which includes a slate full of appointments for her and the six young women who work at what is known, on paper, as the Women’s Full Employment Network, a boutique lobbying firm whose mission statement identifies it as a nonprofit focused on income parity for all women. And when people hear that, they never want to know a single thing more about Heloise’s business, which is exactly as she planned it.

  1989

  You have a nothing face.”

  Helen hadn’t realized that her father was even in the house. She had come home from school, fixed a snack for herself, and was heading upstairs when she heard his voice from the living-room sofa. He was lying there in the dark, the television on but muted. The remote control was broken, which meant one had to get up to change the channels or adjust the volume. So her father stayed in the dark, stuck on one channel. Helen thought of a saying used by her AP English teacher, the one about lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. Her father preferred to curse the darkness.

  “I mean, it’s just there, you know?”

  She stopped, caught off guard. She should have kept going. Why did she stop? Now she was stuck, forced to listen to him until he granted her permission to leave.

  “Not ugly, but not really pretty either. Unmemorable,” he continued.

  From where she stood, she could see her face in the cuckoo-clock mirror that hung at the foot of the stairs, a curious item to her, because it combined two things that shouldn’t be combined. If you glanced at a clock, you were usually running out somewhere, worried about being late. Yet the mirror invited you to stay, linger, attend to your reflection.

  “Just another face in the crowd. There must be a million girls that look like you.”

  Helen had brown hair and blue eyes. Her features were even, proportionate. She was of medium height, relatively slender. But her father was right. She had noticed that unless she took great pains with her looks—put on makeup, wore something showy—she seemed to fade into the background. It bugged her. And Hector Lewis was very good at knowing what bugged people about themselves. If only he could make a living from it.

  “If I looked like you, I’d rob banks. No one would be able to describe you. I can’t describe you, and I’m your father.” A beat. “Allegedly.”

  Helen knew he was challenging her to contradict him, to defend her mother’s honor. But she didn’t want to prolong the encounter. This was fairly new, his verbal abuse of her, and she wasn’t sure how to handle it despite watching him dish it out to her mother for much of her life. It had never occurred to Helen that he would start to treat her this way. She had thought she was immune, Daddy’s little girl.

  “What are you gawping at?”

  That was her signal that he was done with her. She climbed the stairs to her room and started her algebra homework, which required the most focus. Math did not come as easily to her as her other subjects. She charted her points, drew lines, broke down the equations, imagining the numbers as a wall that she was building around herself, a barricade that her father could not breach. She put an album on her record player, one of her mother’s old ones, Carole King. Most of her albums had been her mother’s, which wasn’t as strange as it might sound. Her mother hadn’t even been twenty when Helen was born. The music was yet another boundary, the moat outside the wall of algebra.

  But Helen knew that if her father decided to get up off the couch and follow her into her room, continue the conversation, nothing could stop him. Luckily, he seldom wanted to get up off the couch these days.

  Helen had been baffled when her father started in on her the week before last. If he saw her eating dessert, he warned her about getting fat. “You’re not the kind of girl who can get away with an extra pound. You take after your mother that way.” If she was reading, he pronounced her a bookworm, a bore. If she tried to watch a television show, he told her she’d better bring home a good report card, yet she had been close to a straight-A student for most of her life.

  She asked her mother why her father was irritable, but she shrugged, long used to her own up-and-down dynamic with him.

  Then Helen finally got it. Her father was putting her on notice because she had seen him at McDonald’s with Barbara Lewis, even though Helen hadn’t given it a second thought at the time. In a town of fewer than twenty-five thousand people, everyone ends up at the McDonald’s at some point. They had been in the drive-through lane. Why not? she told herself as she locked up her bike, skirting his eye line as she walked inside. She went to McDonald’s with all sorts of people, didn’t mean anything. Money went a long way at McDonald’s. You could get a large shake and fries for what some places charged for a shake alone. Her father wouldn’t want to go someplace expensive with Barbara, because she was always trying to shake him down for money. He wasn’t treating Barbara, he was showing her how little he cared for her.

  In Barbara’s defense, she did have four kids with Hector Lewis. So even though she had a decent job and he had none, he probably should be helping her out, at least a little.

  Hector had left Barbara fifteen years ago, after impregnating nineteen-year-old Beth Harbison. Helen was born seven months later. Meghan, Barbara and Hector’s youngest, was born four months after Helen, and Helen had no trouble doing that math. “That was the last time he was ever with her,” Helen’s mother often said, as if it were something of which to be proud, that he went back to have sex with Barbara only once. “And she still won’t give him a divorce. So why should he pay her any support? A woman can’t have it both ways.”

  But someone was having it both ways, Helen realized that day outside McDonald’s. There might not have been another baby after Meghan, but there had been sex. They had probably had sex that very afternoon. Perhaps it was Hector who kept persuading Barbara not to divorce him. That way he never had to marry Beth, whom he blamed for keeping him in his own hometown, an indistinct place just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not quite a town yet too distant from anywhere else to be a suburb. “Like a wart on somebody’s asshole,” her father said.