Wilde Lake: A Novel Read online

  Still, it had been hard, deciding to run against him. Lu did what she did with most tough questions, sought her father’s counsel.

  “What would you do if he wasn’t your friend?” he asked.

  “That’s easy. I’d run.”

  “Then not running is the real hypocrisy, isn’t it? If you think Fred has done a lousy job, but decline to run against him out of loyalty, then you’re saying your friendship with him matters more than the day-to-day criminal issues that come before this county. It’s as I’ve always told you, Lu—the state’s attorney’s office represents the community. Your obligation should be to the people of Howard County. What’s best for them?”

  Her father always made everything sound simple. And her brother had agreed with him. “I like Fred, too, Lu. He was good to you at a time when you really needed a friend. But he’s had a bad couple of years, with cases reversed on appeal because of mistakes made by his office. I’m just surprised that more people aren’t gunning for him. Must be some sort of gentlemen’s agreement among the players in the Republican Party.”

  “Well, as you know, I’m no gentleman,” she told AJ, who laughed and said: “No, but you used to dress like one. Remember that outfit you picked out when—”

  She doubled up her fists jokingly and he dropped the subject. Almost forty years out, the memory still brought blood to her face, the heat of humiliation.

  Running against one’s boss is problematic. She had to quit her job for one thing. Can’t stay on as a deputy state’s attorney once you declare your intention to seek the top job. Lu camped out in her father’s sleepy in-name-only private practice for a year, doing a lot of pro bono work, biding her time. She had no competition in the Democratic primary, while Fred had to fight off a challenge from a charismatic plaintiff’s attorney. Still, bloodied and weakened as Fred had been by that ugly primary race, he had the summer to regain his standing as the incumbent and it was a good year to be a Republican in Maryland. He outraised her five to one, ran attack ads.

  But all the money in the world couldn’t buy a name like Brant.

  And now Luisa F. Brant is the first female state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland. Three hundred thousand people, give or take, two hundred fifty square miles, give or take, one of the most prosperous counties in the state, in the nation. She was born here, in Columbia, and is part of the first generation of Columbia kids coming into power. There had been criticism, during the campaign, that Lu leaned a little too hard on her first-family status, along with her “daughter of” prestige, but if that was the best the opposition had, she was golden. Then Fred had stooped lower, brought her kids into it, and that had backfired. Badly. In the end, her father was right: she wouldn’t have waffled about entering the race if Fred had not been a friend. The real hypocrisy would have been sitting by, letting him continue in his listless fashion.

  “Got a minute before the staff meeting?” Andi Gleason, once her peer, now her deputy, pokes her head through the door, then sails in without waiting for an answer. Is Lu going to have to train people to knock, to remind her former colleagues that she’s the boss? Does it matter? Should they knock? Would a man worry about such things? Would he worry about the knock, or would he worry about telling people to knock?

  “Sure.”

  Andi sits down and stretches her legs out so they are propped up on the empty-for-now desk. She laughs when she sees the look on Lu’s face, plants her feet on the floor. Andi has long, perpetually tanned legs, and she has adopted the strange habit of never wearing hose, even on days as cold as this one. She read somewhere that’s what New York women do, go bare-legged no matter the weather. Lu, who prefers black tights and boots with heels as high as she can handle, almost shivers looking at Andi’s legs.

  “Just testing you,” Andi says. Lu doesn’t need her closest friend at work to test her. She needs loyalty, support. True, Andi was the one person in the office not to disavow her when she went after Fred’s job, although Lu noticed that they met for drinks at Andi’s apartment more and more, not out in public. Andi is bold in court, careful in the office. Better than the other way around.

  “What’s up?”

  “This staff meeting at eleven—is there anything I should know?”

  “No shake-ups. For now. There’s one or two assistant state’s attorneys I’ll be monitoring closely—”

  “John and—who else?”

  Lu glides past answering or even confirming Andi’s hunch. What was once acceptable gossip between two equals is now off-limits. No personnel discussions with Andi.

  “—but your work has always been good and I don’t see any reason it would change.”

  “In 2014, I did all the homicides that went to trial,” she says.

  Just because Lu wasn’t in the office in 2014 doesn’t mean she doesn’t know the numbers. “All two of them.”

  “Right. How many of the murders are you going to take for yourself? Do you have a quota in mind?”

  “I was going to cover that at the staff meeting.”

  “You mean, you’re going to try them all.” Her tone is one of fact-finding. Andi is probably resigned to giving up the homicides for now. But if she confirms this before the meeting, she can nod, unsurprised, saving face with her colleagues.

  “Yes, if they’re interesting, I’m going to try them,” Lu tells her.

  “You mean if they get lots of press attention,” Andi says. Oh, this is definitely a test. She’s probing to see how frank she can be, going forward, where the boundaries are now. Lu has no fear of candor, but she also believes there’s a line between candor and rudeness.

  “The media and I don’t necessarily agree on what’s interesting,” she says carefully. “You know I’m talking about cases that stimulate me, that intrigue me legally. It’s not about attention.”

  Andi looks dubious. Fair enough, as Lu is totally bullshitting her. Prosecutors tend to like attention. And Lu is more of a showboat than most.

  “There will be plenty of work to go around,” she promises. She can’t, of course, guarantee that Howard County’s generally genteel citizens will start killing each other at an accelerated rate. But there are other felonies, other crimes that matter. There’s even been some gang activity in Howard County, although most of those cases end up with the feds. “And by the way, I’ll tell you first: there’s a new protocol. Someone from this office is going to go to all major crime scenes. I’m talking to Biern over at homicide today, telling him to make sure they alert us ASAP when they do catch a case.”

  “So you’ll send one of us, then decide if it’s going to be your case?”

  “No, it applies to me, too. I’ll go, if it sounds like a case I’m going to end up trying. Fred was too checked out. There were some sloppy investigations, which made our jobs harder. Better we be there sooner rather than later, you know?” Lu smiles. “And now you know most of what I’m going to cover today at the staff meeting.”

  “I’ll try to act surprised,” Andi promises. She’ll do the opposite. Lu knows Andi. She wants people to think she has special access. It always bugged Andi, when Lu first started in the office, that Lu went so far back with Fred. Andi’s initial overtures of friendship probably stemmed from her desire to keep her enemy close. Then she realized Lu was, in fact, capable of being a good friend. Loyal and discreet. Extremely discreet.

  “Now let me have thirty minutes to unpack a few things, okay?” Lu watches Andi saunter out, notes how streaky her legs look from the back. Self-tanner. If she’s going to insist on a year-round glow, maybe she should spring for the kind you get at a spa.

  Meow, she thinks, shaking her head and smiling at herself. Cattiness is a waste of good energy. Lu doesn’t feel competitive about other women. Lu feels competitive about everybody.

  She studies her office, hers for the next four years, maybe beyond. Her father held it for two terms—no, more than that, he was appointed before he ran for office in 1978. Not this physical space, though, a bland, characterle
ss rectangle with a few pieces of cheap furniture and faded squares on the beige wall where Fred’s plaques and pictures had hung. Lu takes a small, tissue-wrapped object from her purse and walks over to the bookcase. Lady Justice emerges from the paper, blind as usual, but in the form of a robed skeleton, a Day of the Dead piece that Luisa’s husband gave her when she started working as a prosecutor in Baltimore City. It’s hard not to wonder what Gabe would think about today. He would have been proud, of course. But Gabe made so much money, first as a founder of a file-sharing company that was acquired by a bigger player in that field, then consulting in tech, that her state job always seemed like a hobby to him, especially after the twins were born.

  “Why work?” he asked her.

  “How can I not?” she asked back. “I love the law.” She did not dare tell the terrible truth that she found straight-up motherhood boring.

  “Okay, but it’s on you to make it work. Spend whatever it takes and let’s hope it’s a financial wash, state salaries being what they are.”

  Gabe had started a second company by then and they had so much money that they were building castles in the air that could be real castles if they could just pick a location. A castle rising in Spain, as their favorite song, “My Romance,” had it. They talked about buying or building a second home. Nova Scotia. The Outer Banks. Or the west coast of Ireland, which seemed almost more accessible than the Outer Banks, given that Aer Lingus had daily flights to Shannon out of BWI at the time. The world was their oyster. Better, Gabe said, they were going to sit at that place outside Galway, where the oysters were so fresh that it seemed as if they had been harvested minutes after you placed your order.

  And then—he died. Heart attack in a hotel room in San Jose, California. Thirty-nine years old. Penelope and Justin were not quite three. It made sense, as much as anything was ever going to make sense again, to sell the Baltimore house and move back to her father’s, accept Fred’s offer of a job. Lu needed the work, if not the paycheck. She was strangely, bizarrely, unfathomably rich. She supposed she had been rich all along, but when Gabe was alive, she never really thought about their money. Numb, she stumbled through the days like a zombie, several years before zombies were to become fashionable again. She needed her father. More than that, she needed Teensy, who had worked for her family since before Lu was born. If there was one thing Lu knew for certain, it was that Teensy, although now in her seventies, could care for Lu’s children as she had once cared for Lu and AJ. Fiercely, sternly, but with genuine affection.

  Lu was less sure that her father, then going on eighty, could adjust to having small children in his home. Yet it was at his insistence that they invaded his quiet, orderly universe. “I’ll just turn my hearing aid down when they get too rambunctious,” he said.

  A joke. He didn’t have a hearing aid, still doesn’t. Nor does he have a stoop, or memory troubles, or any real sign of aging beyond his gray hair. Again, he made everything seem so simple. Her father is well aware of the world’s ambiguities. But when it comes to his family, he is quick and decisive. His daughter became a widow at age forty. She needed her family. She needed to come home. Full circle.

  And now she has completed another full circle, earning the office her father once held. Not this very room; the Carroll Building, where she works, was built after her father left office. But she is the second State’s Attorney Brant and the first woman elected to the job, although far from the first woman state’s attorney in Maryland. She draws herself up to her full height, which, alas, is only five foot two, although today’s boots allow her to top five five. Everyone expected her brother to be their father’s successor, but she’s the one who has the chops for criminal law, the stomach for politics. She practically prances into a courtroom when she has a trial, her small stature and hoydenish quality an advantage. Other lawyers seduce juries. Lu Brant, with her freckles and girlish appearance, widens her eyes and reduces matters to simple issues of black and white. Lifetime—lifetime—she has lost fewer than ten cases and all of those were in Baltimore, where the juries are notoriously tough. She’s never lost a case in Howard County.

  She doesn’t plan to start now.

  OH BRAVE NEW WORLD THAT HAS NO TREES IN IT

  The Sunday drive was still in fashion the June day in 1969 that my father, mother, AJ, and I made our first trip to Columbia. The “new town” utopia had engaged my father’s curiosity. “I want to see the future,” he said, which stirred up visions of spaceships in AJ’s boyish imagination—and set him up for a huge disappointment. Only a year or two later, AJ would be given a board game called “Ecology,” and the idea of setting out for a twenty-mile recreational drive in a car that averaged sixteen miles to the gallon would be considered wasteful. But not on this particular Sunday in 1969. We got into the family’s Ford Fairlane station wagon, no one constrained by seat belts, because seat belts were for out-of-state trips only. Daddy driving, mother in front, AJ in the back alone, bouncing from window to window as the view demanded.

  I was there in utero, although no one knew, floating in my mother’s flat, seatbelt-less belly. My mother, puffing on a Kool, might have suspected my presence, but she didn’t quite believe it, not yet. She had had terrible morning sickness with AJ eight years earlier, and there was no nausea at all this time, only a vague rumble of heartburn that came on about 3 P.M. Besides, there had been two miscarriages since AJ’s birth and she had been told that she could not have another child.

  At the time, my parents lived in Roland Park, a pretty North Baltimore neighborhood that was something of a planned community itself, with a significant swath designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. My mother and father lived with my mother’s parents. This was a strange arrangement even in 1969, made stranger still by the fact that my father was not young when he married.

  My mother was. A prodigy of sorts, she had met my father on her first day of law school at the University of Baltimore, when she was only nineteen. He was attending on the GI Bill after trying a stint at the local newspaper, the Beacon. The life of a newspaperman had not suited him. My father hated what he called the faux objectivity of journalism. On the one hand, on the other hand. He wanted to pick a side, the right side, then persuade, argue. He had been hired by the paper because of his undergraduate degree from Yale; the Beacon was snobby that way. But he was not a twenty-two-year-old with nothing but college behind him. He was a thirty-one-year-old Korean War veteran and he thought he should be treated differently from the other young hires. Once he understood that it would be years before he could hope to have a column or a slot on the editorial page, he decided to leave. So after five years of languishing on night cops, he went to law school and met a beautiful young woman named Adele Closter.

  “She was like a character in a fairy tale,” my father would say later, when I begged him for stories about my mother. Photos established her dark beauty, but my father insisted it was her mind that impressed him. She had graduated from high school at age sixteen, zipped through Goucher in less than three years, then applied to law school. “Not a lot of women went to law school then, so to be a female law student at age nineteen was more astonishing still. Everyone noticed her. I didn’t have a chance. I was just some older guy and people made fun of my accent. They thought I was a dumb hick.”

  My father didn’t have to tell me that his accent, long flattened by the years in Maryland, was quite the opposite of a hick’s. He was from an old Tidewater, Virginia family, one that could trace its roots to the seventeenth century. My mother’s family, while well-to-do, were German Jews, who arrived in the United States more than two hundred years after the Brants. If my father had ever allowed his parents to meet his in-laws, his people would have been appalled. Yet the Closters looked down on my father because he didn’t have money. He had broken with his family—and its considerable wealth—because he found their implacable racism infuriating. The Closters didn’t care that his poverty was principled. It was still poverty.

  But he was one o
f the few men willing to endure my grandparents’ odd ideas about courtship. In a twist worthy of a fairy tale, they kept their daughter under lock and key in a stone house with turrets, twisting staircases, and stained-glass windows. Any man who wanted to date Adele Closter had to pay a call on her parents first. If they approved of the would-be suitor, the dates were chaperoned—by them.

  Apparently, this did not appeal to most of the young men Adele met. Only Andrew Jackson Brant was willing to persevere.

  And for all her parents’ care and oversight, she managed to get pregnant. AJ was born seven months after my parents’ wedding day, and everyone pretended he was terribly premature. I think this charade was meant not only to dodge the question of his legitimacy, but also to make sense of the fact that the new family chose to live with Adele’s parents. “Just for a year or so,” her father said. “Until everyone is on their feet.” One year turned into seven. There was always a reason to stay a little longer. AJ loves his nursery school, it would be a shame to move him. AJ is going to Gilman, practically in our backyard. I now believe my father steered the family station wagon toward Columbia that day not only out of genuine inquisitiveness, but also desperation. He had to get out of his in-laws’ house. The destination was an accident. Or was it?

  Columbia itself was the opposite of an accident. One could argue it was inevitable, that this undeveloped land equidistant from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was destined to be a suburb, but the developer Jim Rouse had something much grander in mind. Visionary is an overused word, but Rouse probably deserved it. Howard County had slightly more than thirty-five thousand people in 1960, but it was expected to boom before the end of the twentieth century. Rouse’s company began acquiring farmland privately, to avoid having prices shoot up. People knew the land was being purchased, but for what? There were paranoid, Cold War–fed rumors—Russian spies hoping to get close to NSA, a West German VW plant. Then, in June 1967, Columbia was born, a “town” comprising four villages, with each village defined by a set number of neighborhoods. The early neighborhood and street names—Dorsey, Phelps, Owen Brown, Warfield—drew on the county’s history. But the names quickly became more fanciful and literary. Faulkner’s Run, Hobbit’s Glen, Longfellow. Many of the early buildings in the town’s center were designed by Frank Gehry, but the houses themselves were generic split-levels, built to conform to the preferences of buyers at the time. Founder Rouse wanted to challenge a lot of ingrained biases in our culture; taste was not among them. He gave people the ticky-tacky houses they wanted. The only real choices were brick or wood siding, a Baltimore or a D.C. prefix for your phone.