Lady in the Lake Page 10

  Ambition comes off this one like heat. Where did you come from? I want to ask. Didn’t you have a husband, pretty as you are? Is Bob Bauer trying to get into your panties? You wouldn’t be the first, the way I hear it. Mr. Family Man, Professional Nice Guy. There are no nice guys in this business, but you’ll learn that soon enough.

  I make her start bringing me my lunch.

  June 1966

  June 1966

  “Okay, scoop—we’re going to let you try out your training wheels.”

  Calvin Weeks, the assistant city editor, loomed over Maddie, an ominous piece of copy paper in his hands. Only two weeks into her job, Maddie already knew the legend of Calvin Weeks and his “black beans,” which he usually shoved into reporters’ mail cubbyholes at the end of his shift. He typed these missives on carbon paper, keeping the originals for himself and bestowing the smudgy duplicates on the reporters. Perhaps those smudges were why they were called black beans, but no one really knew. Calvin Weeks had been an assistant city editor for almost twenty years and he had been dispensing black beans for nineteen of them.

  “There’s a reason he’s been in that job for so long,” Bob Bauer had told Maddie. “You’ve heard of the Peter Principle. This is the Cal Corollary, the newspaper’s version of the Hippocratic Oath. First, do the least harm. That’s why he’s on the three-to-eleven shift. If a big story happens late, the overnight editor takes over. If news breaks during the day, the big bosses are here. Weeks is a traffic cop at best, directing the flow of copy.”

  It was three thirty p.m. Maddie’s workday ended in ninety minutes. That should have been all the excuse she needed not to slip her neck into the noose that Cal was holding. “I’m off at five.”

  “I’m sure Don won’t mind if I borrow you.”

  Mr. Heath nodded, a master surrendering his servant. Did he have the power to do that? Who was her true boss? Maddie should probably figure that out.

  “There’s a little party this afternoon,” Cal continued. “Normally, we’d just send a photog. But with all the Negroes being so upset these days, the big boss thought it was a good opportunity to generate a little goodwill, show that we don’t only write about the riots and muggings.”

  He handed her the piece of paper, the black bean, reciting its contents as she scanned it: “Violet Wilson Whyte is celebrating her twenty-ninth year on the police force today. Isn’t that something? The first Negro cop was a woman. So there’s a little party for her, at headquarters. You go by, get a few quotes—how she got started, how honored she is, rutabaga, rutabaga—and file six inches. We’ll use it inside tomorrow.”

  Rutabaga, rutabaga was another Cal tic, his version of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Again, no one had a clue how this had come to be. He reminded Maddie of an actor she had seen in The King and I at Painters Mill, a mediocre one who was nevertheless extraordinarily pleased with himself as he strutted the stage in that dusty tent theater. He had entered for one scene by marching up the aisle alongside Maddie’s seat, his cape flying behind him, although Maddie did not believe capes were worn by Siamese royalty. The cape’s hem, flowing behind him on eddies of summer heat, had whipped the corner of her eye. It hadn’t hurt, but the unexpected contact was startling and Maddie gave a little yelp. The actor had looked back, smiling as if he had bestowed a gift, then continued steaming toward the stage, where he proceeded to destroy Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics with a performance that appeared to be modeled on Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  She tried again. “I’m off at five.”

  “Then you better get going.”

  She understood, or was pretty sure that she did. The press release had come in late, but some higher-up was demanding it be done and Cal was carrying the bigger boss’s water. The year was shaping up to be one of unrest throughout the United States, riots breaking out in various cities. Baltimore had been spared so far. Maddie was being given this “big chance” because Cal assumed she was too timid to file for overtime, or she was hungry enough for a byline to forgo her right to extra pay.

  He was right on both counts.

  She walked up to police HQ, showed her Star ID. “That’s not a press pass,” she was told.

  “I know,” she said. She didn’t. “But I work there. They sent me here because Mr. Diller is busy.”

  Yet Diller, the police reporter, was in the room. Why couldn’t he write the story? But Maddie, again courtesy of Bob Bauer, knew why. Diller couldn’t write anything. He called in his facts, then the rewrite man shaped them into a publishable article. It was a beginner’s job and most men angled to leave the police beat as soon as possible, eager to write the words that appeared beneath their bylines. Diller had no desire to move on. Diller could dictate the facts about a Negro woman if she were dead; he could do that in his sleep. But faced with a story without a crime, he wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.

  Maddie took out her thrillingly fresh reporter’s notebook and tried to keep up with the police commissioner’s rote, banal compliments. She had never learned shorthand and she wasn’t sure how one was supposed to get quotes exactly right without it, but she did the best she could on the fly, creating her own set of abbreviations. The room was crowded, but the cake, not Violet Wilson Whyte, seemed to be the star attraction. When the commissioner insisted the guest of honor say a few words, she kept her comments short and spoke softly, but with a notable confidence and authority.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m just glad to be here, twenty-nine years later. But my work is not done, not yet.” She leaned hard on that last word.

  “Here’s to twenty-nine years more,” someone shouted from the back of the room. Inane, Maddie thought. Rude, even. It sounded sarcastic, as if the man who had spoken was mocking Mrs. Whyte. She wondered if Ferdie was here. Certainly, other Negro officers should have been called downtown for this particular celebration. But the crowd was very sparse, and very white.

  She asked Diller as much. Not about Ferdie, but the lack of Negroes in general.

  “It’s a dog-and-pony show for the press,” he said. “Who gets a party for her twenty-ninth year? They threw it together at the last minute. Straight-up public relations ploy to remind everyone that they do more with Negroes than bust their heads open.”

  “Then why are we covering it?”

  He gave her an odd look: “Wait, are you with the Star?”

  “I am, I’m Maddie—”

  But he had already moved away, having secured his slice of cake, a brick of a corner piece. He was with a group of men. Reporters like him, probably. What did one call a group of reporters? A gaggle would be good, Maddie thought. A murder of crows, a gaggle of reporters.

  She approached the guest of honor, notebook out, and introduced herself as a reporter. She was doing a reporter’s job, was she not?

  Mrs. Whyte demurred. “I’ve had many opportunities to talk about myself. If you checked the files before you came here—and, of course, I’m sure you did—you must know everything about me.”

  A veiled rebuke and a fair one. Maddie should have pulled the clips from the library. Her face flamed, but she was not going to go back to the newsroom without a story. She was being tested, and Maddie had always aced her tests.

  “What’s it like, being a first?”

  “Not that different from being the second or the third or the thousandth.”

  “But the department still doesn’t have that many Negroes. And they’re not allowed to do as much as their white counterparts.” Ferdie had told her that, of course. Negroes could be patrols or vice cops and that was pretty much it. No cars, no radios. Maddie had chosen not to ask Ferdie how he wrangled a patrol car for his late-night visits to her.

  Mrs. Whyte, clearly surprised by Maddie’s knowledge, softened a little. “Well, I’m an old hand at making more out of less. I walked a beat on Pennsylvania Avenue when I was younger. I felt like I did more for the children of that neighborhood in that job than I did as a teacher. I’m not criticizing teacher
s. I was one and my husband has spent his entire career in the school system. But there were plenty of women teaching. The children saw them every day. When I walked down the street, in my uniform, I showed them that there were other things to be. We cannot imagine what we cannot see.”

  Maddie scribbled furiously. She was so taken by Mrs. Whyte’s fierce pride in her job that she almost forgot the basic questions—her age, her husband’s name. She then asked a little about where she had grown up, how her parents had felt about their daughter’s vocation, what she did to relax at day’s end.

  The last question amused Mrs. Whyte. “Watch a little television,” she said. “Read the newspaper. I tried knitting, but all I could make were scarves and even then, the shapes were all over the place. My sister said I was loose with my needles.”

  Maddie was back at the paper by four thirty. She was a fast typist, but not a fast writer, and she labored over her copy. But she was enjoying herself; it was like working on her column back in high school, coming up with witticisms, bestowing nicknames on the other popular kids. It was almost eight by the time she turned in the requested four hundred words. She was too shy to call out “copy” as the other reporters did, so she walked the pages to Cal herself.

  “Too long,” he said, without even reading the copy, and promptly crossed out the final paragraph with a red X.

  “But that’s the best part,” Maddie said. “That was her quote about how she hoped she inspired the children she saw every day.” We cannot imagine what we cannot see.

  “You’re not supposed to put the best stuff at the end.”

  Since starting at the Star, Maddie had been reading the newspaper with an attention and focus that her previous self had never mustered. She had noticed what made some stories sing, while others were Dragnet-style: all we want are the facts, ma’am.

  “It’s a feature, right? Features can have . . .” She paused, unsure of the word and her right to use it. “Features can have kickers. Can’t they?”

  “It’s supposed to be six inches about a Negro who’s not rioting or stealing.”

  “But she’s interesting,” Maddie said. “I think there’s more there.”

  “We’ve written about her plenty. Be glad that there’s even a story—we could have done this with a photo and a cutline. But if you’re good, maybe I’ll throw some more stories your way.”

  If you’re good. Maddie was not fooled. Cal was going to try to use her for future late-afternoon assignments, counting on her ambition and decorum to accept them. Counting on her to be too meek to push for what she was owed.

  “It’s past eight,” she said. “I’ve worked three hours overtime. How do I enter that on my pay card at week’s end?”

  “Take comp time,” he said airily. “I’ll tell Don. You can take an hour a day over three days.”

  “Comp time?”

  “Compensatory time. It’s okay as long as everyone agrees to it. Oh, strictly, it has to be taken that week, to keep you below forty hours, but nobody worries about those technicalities.”

  Maddie was pretty sure that it was management that didn’t worry about such technicalities.

  “Overtime is paid at one point five. So shouldn’t I get four point five hours? Otherwise, comp time sounds like a bad deal to me.”

  His eyes went cold and what little friendliness he had been able to fake vanished from his face. With his overly sharp incisors, too-white skin, and too-red eyes, Cal looked like a vampire or an albino cat. He was a man of no true authority, Maddie saw. How it must have grated on him.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “You’ve earned four point five hours. To be taken by mutual consent. What are you going to do? Enjoy a longer lunch hour? Go shopping?”

  “I’ll bank the time for now. One never knows when one might need time. Will you explain the situation to Don? That you asked me to do this for you and I earned comp time?”

  “To be taken by mutual consent,” Cal said. “You can’t just announce that you’re leaving early. You’ll have to clear it with Don.”

  “Of course.”

  She walked away, well aware that she had not answered his intrusive questions about what she intended to do with her time. She had no intention of telling him that she planned to find another way to get into the paper. A real story.

  When the Star was published the next day, her piece had been cut to five paragraphs. There was no trace of Maddie’s name and everything she had thought lively or good about the writing, the quotes, had been excised. She didn’t care. She cut it out and put it in a manila folder in her desk, which she titled, after some thought, “Morgenstern, Madeline.” When she did get a byline, maybe that should be the name she used.

  She opened the letters she had left when Cal had sent her to the police station. Two of them had potential and she put them to the side to give to Mr. Heath. One was something she could handle. A passerby had noticed that the lights were no longer working at the fountain in Druid Hill Park. She would call the Department of Public Works tomorrow and report the outage. It wasn’t worth space in the column. She had learned to make such distinctions by now and was proud of the initiative she showed. Bob Bauer had warned her that Heath was worried that Maddie was gunning for his job.

  Maddie had her sights set much higher, so high that she could not yet see exactly what she wanted. She cosseted and spoiled Mr. Heath, bringing him Entenmann’s cookies or a slice of Sara Lee swirl cake with his afternoon cup of coffee. Soon enough, she was back in his good graces. Four point five hours, hers to use as she wished. But how did she wish to use them? What could one do with four point five hours?

  An electrician in a rowboat was about to provide the answer.

  Lady Law

  Lady Law

  I did not want the party. Who has a party in one’s twenty-ninth year of employment? I’m not leaving until I make captain, as I have told my superiors numerous times. Numerous times.

  But I understood what was going on, why the department wanted to celebrate me, why there were photographers, even a reporter, although she seemed very green to me, despite her age. I thought, She’s going to need more confidence to do that job, that’s for sure. I have been interviewed quite a bit, for much more in-depth pieces. I did not need to be photographed holding a cake knife.

  Confidence is something I have never lacked. My father taught me not to fear death and that is why I have been able to do the work that I do. Not fearing death is not the same as being fearless. It means that I am not worried about where I’m headed, the consequences of death. I have not led a blameless life. But I am a Christian woman who prays to my Lord to lead me through my hard times, to forgive me when I slip from the path, to extend a hand and help me back onto the straight and narrow.

  I often don’t like things people think I should like. I don’t like parties. I don’t like being photographed. I don’t like attention. I didn’t really like being on that television show, To Tell the Truth, but at least I was the one telling the truth. Still, there was something undignified about it. The whole point of the show is that one is somehow odd, maybe even freakish. I am not freakish. I am a college-educated woman who cared about children, my own—I have four, two that I birthed and two that I adopted—and all the children of the neighborhoods I patrolled. I was, in some ways, more social worker than police officer. I think, though, I have made more of a difference than social workers. When a social worker comes to a house, she’s the enemy, a meddler. When I visited—usually because of reports of drunken or loutish behavior—the mothers welcomed me, secretly. They knew I understood, that I cared. But I had to put their children first, always.

  They called me “Lady Law.” I did like that, especially the first part. I pride myself on my manners, my gentility. In the 1950s, when I supervised several younger women, I stressed the importance of good manners, a civilized appearance. There was no reason that our work had to make us masculine or rough. Sometimes, I had to be the strict schoolmarm, if you will. I would catch the y
oung boys sneaking into the movies, cutting school. I’d tell them that I could take them home or to Cheltenham, it was their choice. They always chose home.

  I suppose they think that I should be considering retirement. I will be sixty-nine this fall. Perhaps this party was a hint. But I don’t take hints, don’t worry about odd looks, muttered criticisms that I may or may not be meant to hear. If someone has something to say to me, he can say it to my face. I am not ready to go. I have not planned my funeral. Not even staring into the barrel of a gun, as I did with that man who pretended to be a messenger of God but was just a procurer of young women—not even that moment prompted me to plan for my funeral. Why would I do it now? I intend to live a good long while. My legacy will be much more than simply being first.

  That’s what I was trying to explain to that reporter, so very tentative for someone well into her thirties. (One thing about white people, it’s very easy to fix their ages. Their skin tells their age as surely as a tree’s rings reveal its age.) Ah, well, I was new on this job when I was forty. I suppose it’s never too late to start a career. Maybe I’ll start a third one when I leave here. I would be a good preacher, I think. But I prefer doing, as opposed to exhorting others to do. Maybe there’s a business or a charity I can start, based on my annual practice of assembling holiday baskets. But I won’t use the Lady Law name. That would be undignified. The name will retire with me.

  The next day, when the afternoon paper comes out, my photo is inside, only a few paragraphs attached, and the girl has misquoted me in spots. But one of the Northwest patrol officers, Ferdinand Platt, stops me in the hall, asks me questions, rather frivolous ones to my mind. What did I think of the article? Was I pleased with it? I told him the truth, that I was not much interested in articles about myself, that there had been many over the years. Why, my name was appearing in print long before I was a police officer, for my work with Woman’s Christian Temperance Union chapters nationwide. In my opinion, alcohol is one of the great evils of our age. Drugs, too, of course, but alcohol is legal. When I drive past the Carling plant on the Beltway, I smell more than scorched hops. That is the odor of destroyed, broken families. I have testified before the Kefauver Committee about the danger of narcotics, but alcohol is even worse, in terms of the costs it exacts. Yes, I understand the paradox of prohibition. I was an adult woman then. I saw what happened. But I’m not sure making it legal was the solution.