Lady in the Lake Read online

  That young Ferdinand probably thinks it a grand thing to be in a newspaper. He is a handsome man, a little too handsome for his own good. According to talk, he also is too cozy with certain men in our community, a particular bad man who tries to hide behind good men. Shell Gordon is a disgrace. He owns the place on Pennsylvania Avenue, the second-rate establishment where the girls are forced to wear those terrible outfits. Ferdie Platt goes there, according to the talk I hear, knows the people who frequent it. A small vice, relative to the other sins of this department.

  Besides, it might even be the mark of a good policeman. The Shell Gordons of the world, criminals though they may be, have a rooting interest in maintaining order. Mayhem and criminality are their purview, theirs to pursue and organize, and they will not tolerate freelancers. I know the people at the club tried, in the early days of the investigation, to help police figure out what happened to Cleo Sherwood. Her parents are good people. I don’t know how the girl turned out the way she did. It’s my understanding that she began running wild when she was a teenager. Some girls are simply too pretty for their own good and they don’t know what to do with it. I was never a pretty woman, but I do not think it is vanity to say that I am attractive enough. Well turned out, with a good complexion. Mr. Whyte has never complained.

  It’s a shame I never met young Cleo. I’m sure I could have helped her find the right path.

  So you met Lady Law

  So you met Lady Law, Maddie Schwartz. I knew her, when I was a child. Everyone in that neighborhood knew her. She was the one who comforted me when your future husband made me cry. Milton made lots of children cry. Did you know that? He was a miserable fat boy, sitting in his family’s corner grocery, studying his books. I was only six years old, a first grader, and this college boy decided to taunt me because he heard another child use my nickname, Cleo. My real name is Eunetta. Can you blame me for preferring Cleo?

  The nickname had been bestowed by other children, as nicknames usually are. I suppose some people anoint themselves, but that’s a little sad, isn’t it? We were studying the ancient Egyptians and there was a drawing of Cleopatra, in profile. A boy, thinking he was mocking me, said, “Miz Henderson, this looks like Cleo, her with her nose always up in the air.” My nose is—was—beautiful. Straight, delicate, perfectly formed. It was like walking around with a ten-carat diamond, only no one could take it from me. So people tried to make me feel bad about it, tried to pretend that my beauty was ugliness, that up was down, black was white. But their teasing couldn’t get to me because they couldn’t mask their envy. I had light eyes and a pretty mouth and slanting cheekbones. But, really, it was my nose that organized everything, made me beautiful. I never had an awkward phase, conceited as that might sound. Maybe I should have. Men started coming around way too early, when I was fourteen, fifteen, and by the time I was twenty-one, I was tired of fighting them off. That’s how I ended up with two babies and no husbands.

  Soon I simply was Cleo; no one remembered “Eunetta,” and no one realized they had saved me from the one ugly thing about me. I didn’t think about it twice until the day that Milton heard my cousin use my name in his parents’ store: “Whatcha gonna get with your pennies, Cleo?” Uncle Box had been to visit. He wasn’t our uncle and I don’t know why he was called Box and I don’t know what ever happened to him. All we knew at the time was that he came and he went, and when he came, it was like a party, a party for no reason, the best kind of party. The children got money while my father glowered in the corner. My father hated parties, fun, anything that suggested that we might enjoy our time on this earth.

  “Probably some Now and Laters,” I said to Cousin Walker.

  “Cleo?” Milton asked as I pushed my money toward him. “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s short for Cleopatra,” I said. “People say I look like her.”

  He laughed. “Like some dumb colored kid could ever look like Cleopatra. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. She was royalty. You’re just a poor jig.”

  “Jig.” That was most definitely the word he used. “Jig,” short for “jigaboo.” The other children laughed at me, as if they were somehow not implicated by Milton’s disdain. I was alone, mocked. I burst into tears and ran from the store, forgetting my candy and my money.

  “Why are you crying, little girl? Are you lost? Is there trouble at home?”

  I raised my face, holding my arm across the bridge of my nose, my beautiful straight nose, ashamed of my tears. I would pay for those tears with my schoolmates. They would want to see them again. They would try to see if they could break me as that horrible fat Milton Schwartz had. I looked up, up, up, into the face of Lady Law. Everyone knew Miz Whyte. She was police, but she was okay. She didn’t want to lock people up if she didn’t have to, but lord help you if you tried to walk down the street with a bottle in a brown bag when Miz Whyte was out and about.

  I stammered out my story in a jumble of hot, humiliated words, but somehow she followed every detail.

  “There are people, scholars, who believe that Cleopatra was Nubian,” she told me. “Now, let’s go back to that store and get your money back.”

  She escorted me into the grocery. I got my candy and my money, which astonished me. Was that justice, was that the law? Did Milton owe me candy for free because he had tried to take something from me? When someone tried to hurt you, did they owe you more than you deserved? Who owes you, Maddie Schwartz, and who do you owe?

  At any rate, I promised myself at age six that the one thing that nobody would take from me again was my dignity. But the promises we make to our young selves are hard to keep, as you have learned, Maddie Schwartz. For twenty years, however, I did keep my dignity. I cried over no man, not even the two who left me with two little boys and no wedding rings. I held my head high even when I had to wear clothes from the church box. I was Cleopatra, a Nubian queen in hiding.

  And then I met a man, the king I always wanted, and that was the end of me.

  Now it was five, almost six months later. The water in the lake was warming, shifting. Tiny creatures nibbled at what was left of my clothes. Rays of light pierced the murk at midday, but it couldn’t reach me. Somehow that thing that had become me, that inconsiderate, restless rag of a body that had replaced my beautiful one—it moved, blocking or disconnecting a wire. A man heading to a rendezvous at the reptile house one night noticed the lights at the fountain had gone out. At least, I’ve decided that’s who it must have been, what he was up to. Someone with a secret life, his heart racing, his senses at full alert. Everybody in the neighborhood knew what kind of men hung around the reptile house at night. Like calls to like. A man with a hidden life could feel a secret at the heart of something ordinary, sense that the dead lights were part of something larger. Something deader. He wrote a letter to Mr. Helpline, wondering why this bit of civic beauty had been allowed to go dark. He sent me to you; you sent a man to the fountain, rowing across the lake that was like the river outside of hell in the myths they taught us in school.

  May you all rot in hell.

  What was the verse they taught us in school? “For want of a nail . . .” Well, for want of a lightbulb, I was about to be found, and yes, a kingdom of sorts would be lost. Lives would be ruined, a king would be toppled, hearts would be broken.

  And all that’s on you, Maddie Schwartz. I had the good sense, the dignity, to stay silent.

  Part II

  June 1966

  June 1966

  When Maddie stepped off the elevator, cardboard box from the luncheonette in hand, she immediately registered what she could only describe as an absence in the newsroom, a place already familiar and dear to her. A layer of sound had been stripped away. The wire machines still clacked and caroled and the phones rang, but the conversations were muted. No shouts, no laughter. Only essential murmurs, the bare minimum of words required as the newspaper steamrolled toward its final edition, the 8-star.

  The features editor, a deep-bos
omed, red-faced woman named Honor Livingston, was waiting in the “Helpline” cubbyhole with the paper’s top editor, Mr. Marshall. It was like finding God loitering by your mailbox. Maddie put down the cardboard box of sandwich and coffee with trembling hands. Something terrible had happened, that was the only explanation. Seth? Milton?

  “Madeline Schwartz,” Mr. Marshall began.

  “Yes,” she said, although he had not been asking a question. It was disturbing that he knew her name. Was she in trouble? What could she have done? Had there been a mistake in her story about Mrs. Whyte? How bad could it be? She was still on probation, she could be let go without cause. Maybe Cal had accused her of something awful because she had stood up for herself over the overtime issue.

  “There are two police detectives in my office, waiting to speak to you.”

  Her knees buckled and she bolstered herself, palms flat to her desk. Seth, one part of her mind screamed, even as another part whispered: Ferdie. But no one knew about Ferdie. She was in trouble. Something terrible had happened.

  “We don’t have much time,” Mr. Marshall said, his voice low and swift. “It was a lucky thing you were at lunch when they arrived.” Maddie registered the inaccuracy of this; she was fetching lunch, not taking it for herself. She brought her lunches from home most days. “The police are here because, Mr. Heath tells us, you called DPW about the lights at Druid Hill Park.”

  “Yes, I do that sometimes. Handle smaller problems. Did I make a mistake?”

  “A worker has found a body there, a Negro woman. They want to know why you called, what you can tell them about the person who inquired about the lights.”

  “There was a letter.” She tried to remember every detail she could. Handwritten, a masculine hand. Had there been a name? She thought so, but she also remembered that the name had struck her as false. Not John Smith, but similarly generic. She hadn’t checked the name because the letter wasn’t running in the paper, so there was no need to verify the sender. (Once, Mr. Heath had published a letter signed “Seymour Butts,” and now Maddie was required to go behind him.)

  “And you got rid of it,” Mr. Marshall said.

  She started to say no, that she kept a file of the answers she handled on her own, until the issues were resolved. But his deep-set brown eyes held hers and she knew, as she so often knew, what a man wanted to hear.

  “We don’t retain the queries that don’t make the paper,” she said slowly and deliberately. “That wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “Good.” Mr. Marshall nodded. “The newspaper’s legal counsel is in my office. Why don’t I take you there and let you explain to the detectives that we don’t keep—retain—the queries that don’t make the paper.”

  Hearing her words in Mr. Marshall’s mouth was glorious. She must have chosen the right ones. Truthful, but deceptive. The letter about the fountain would have been tossed by week’s end. But, for now, it was still in her files.

  The waiting police officers were homicide detectives, men who didn’t look much different from the city desk reporters. Only in their forties, aged by their jobs and the bad habits those jobs encouraged. They were disappointed to hear that it was policy to throw out unpublished letters and they pushed Maddie to remember whatever details she could. She said that she did not remember the sender’s name, only that he was a man. He said he had been passing the fountain late at night. No one was sure how long the lights had been out at that point, but DPW was dubious that the problem was one of long standing. She had been told that only a few days could have gone by before someone noticed the dark fountain.

  “Any idea whose body it is?” Mr. Marshall asked the detectives. “The cause of death? How it even got there?”

  It.

  “The body’s in pretty bad shape.” The detectives seemed to watch Maddie’s face, to see if that detail would rattle her. “A Negro woman. We—well, we won’t say more for now.”

  You aren’t telling us everything you know so we’re not telling you everything we know. How childish grown men could be, in a way women never were, not in Maddie’s experience. Sullen and grumpy, still playing by the sandlot rules, obsessed with fairness and stature. Of course women cared about stature, too, but they learned early to surrender any idea that life was a series of fair exchanges. A girl discovered almost in the cradle that things would never be fair.

  As if to prove that point, Mr. Marshall dismissed her, as if she were of no importance to the meeting. She was an instrument, no different from a typewriter or her telephone headset. She conveyed information, but she couldn’t tell you how she did it. Maddie sliced open that day’s mail, seething. How many larger crimes lurked in the city’s petty complaints?

  But an hour later, when the detectives were gone, she was summoned back and asked to bring any files that she “thought might be relevant.”

  The editor in chief had a sumptuous office, which she had been too overwhelmed to notice on her first visit. An immense desk, possibly mahogany; a leather chair; a green-shaded lamp. Guests sat in upholstered wing chairs. It was a stark contrast to the newsroom’s dingy chaos.

  “I want to be clear about what just happened,” Mr. Marshall said, hunched forward over his clasped hands. “We are good citizens. We cooperate with the police as necessary. But we want to know what we have before we share it. Once the police saw your files, we might not ever have seen them again. They could have been seized as evidence.”

  “I don’t think there’s much here,” she said, handing him the manila folder where she kept “her” problems, the letters that she took on and solved, the invisible Mrs. Helpline. Or was she a “Miss” again? Neither honorific seemed right for her. Mrs. was Mrs. Milton Schwartz, who had run her household with ruthless ease. “Miss” was a seventeen-year-old girl.

  “Why don’t you take the letter out and read it to us?” he suggested. “After all, your fingerprints would already be on it. We can’t keep the evidence pristine, but we can try to avoid contaminating it further.”

  She located the letter easily, its envelope stapled to it, although the only information that provided was the postmark, establishing it had been mailed in Baltimore last week. The inquiry was straightforward. The name, Bob Jones, sounded even phonier now.

  “We don’t check people’s identities if we’re not using the letter in the column,” she explained. She realized that Mr. Heath had not been invited to the meeting, and this made her feel proud, although she couldn’t have said why.

  “Not much there,” Mr. Marshall said. “I confess, I was hoping it would give us a little lead, something we could get out in front with.”

  “Dead Negro woman in fountain,” said the city editor, Harper. “I wouldn’t even lead the metro section with it. Diller says he hears that it’s probably a woman who disappeared earlier this year, a cocktail waitress from the Flamingo, Shell Gordon’s joint. The Afro’s been all over it, but there doesn’t seem to be any real news there.”

  The newspaper’s lawyer was staring at Maddie. “You’re the woman who tricked Stephen Corwin.”

  She blushed. “I wouldn’t say tricked. I simply asked him to write to me.”

  Mr. Marshall picked up the thread. “And now here you are, making a random call to DPW and a body comes up.”

  She felt as if she were being accused of something. Meddling? Dishonesty? Neither characterization was entirely off base, but shouldn’t she be praised as a go-getter, an employee with instinct and promise? She decided to say nothing. The moment was pregnant. Something was going to happen. She was going to be rewarded or singled out. At the very least, they were going to tell Mr. Heath that she was not his personal secretary.

  Instead, she was dismissed for the second time that day. “Thank you for your help, Madeline.”

  She had not walked ten feet before she heard boisterous laughter from the editor’s office. She did not believe that the laughter was at her expense, but it did not make her feel any better to realize how quickly they had moved on to some priva
te hilarity. Miserable, she went to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on her face, hoping to erase the high color in her cheeks.

  The ladies’ room was one of the few calm and relatively clean places on the entire floor. It even had a tiny anteroom with a Naugahyde love seat, although the only woman who ever lingered there was Edna Sperry, the labor reporter. She parked herself on the love seat with her copy, coffee, and cigarettes, emerging at the last possible moment to file, preemptively cursing the changes she anticipated to her prose.

  “Mrs. Sperry . . . ,” Maddie ventured after washing her hands and splashing water on her face.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Madeline Schwartz, I work on the ‘Helpline’ column. But I’d like to be a reporter here. I know I’m starting late—I’m just past thirty-five.” After all, thirty-seven was only two notches past thirty-five, whereas “almost forty” sounded like death. “May I ask you—”

  The older woman flicked her eyes across Maddie, flicked her cigarette ash into the brimming ashtray at her side, and made a sound that could have been a laugh.

  Maddie refused to be intimidated.

  “May I ask how you became a newspaperwoman?”

  Edna definitely laughed then.

  “What’s so funny?”