Lady in the Lake Page 6

  “When they find her—” Maddie tried again.

  “If,” corrected her mother. “When I was a girl, I remember hearing about a pervert who raped little girls and then killed them. It was where you live now, which was a ghetto then. A ghetto now, really. Anyway, he attacked one little girl and her mother had a gun and shot him, so that was the end of that.”

  Maddie’s neighborhood was not a ghetto and her mother’s story was lifted almost verbatim from the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book beloved by mother and daughter. But there was no point in calling her on it. Tattie Morgenstern believed everything she said.

  “I hope they do find her, and soon,” Maddie had said, surprised by her own fervency.

  She’d told her mother she had to go, although she didn’t have to do anything. She had the insurance money for her “stolen” ring and the proceeds from her car sale to tide her over until Milton was forced to pay alimony. Her lawyer was confident that Maddie soon would have her half of the house, her half of almost everything, including Seth. Until then, she could live off her savings, if she was careful.

  She’d put on her coat and headed out for a walk. Her neighborhood wasn’t that bad. She had a strange fantasy, strange even to her. She imagined one of the men she saw on the street grabbing her, trying to drag her into an alley. He would be foreign, spewing unintelligible syllables, pawing at her. It would be terrifying, yet also exciting, proof of how desirable she was, even at her age. With her straightened hair and tight sweaters, she looked younger than thirty-seven. The man would try to force his mouth on hers, then somehow—she didn’t have to explain it, dreams had their own logic—Ferdie would be there, he would save her and they would both be so overwhelmed that they would find someplace nearby—a bathroom, a car—to make love. Risking exposure in every sense of the word.

  It was a strange fantasy, but fantasies were never wrong, or so Maddie had read somewhere.

  Lost in those thoughts, Maddie had walked farther than she’d planned. What should she do today? The giddy freedom of her early weeks, of having no one to care for, had ebbed and the affair—was that the right word?—heightened the do-nothingness of the rest of life. She was trying not to be too available to Ferdie. Sometimes, she forced herself to go out for dinner around the time he usually called, just to keep him on his toes. She still had the instincts that had made her one of the most sought-after girls in Baltimore, in her day. Back then, she’d even kept a little notebook, with a code, that allowed her to remember how far she had progressed with each boy she dated. K (obvious), SK (“soul kiss,” which she thought a much nicer term than “French kissing”), OC, OB, UB (“over clothes,” “over bra,” “under bra”). Only two boys had gone US (“under skirt”) and she had married the second one.

  Wally Weiss had not merited a mention in her notebook. He had received only one kiss, one time, and it was sisterly, more of a promise that one day he would find a girl to K, SK.

  Yet she had not been physically coy with Ferdie. She blushed with the memory of how quickly they had progressed. The first time he had grabbed her and kissed her, she had assumed it was because he knew. She was lying about the ring and this was the price she had to pay. She was a bad girl and he had this over her. But since that first encounter, she had come to realize that Ferdie had no idea she was, in fact, a criminal. She had found a pawnshop that wasn’t fussy about paperwork, easy to do in her neighborhood, and it paid her half of what Weinstein’s had offered, but it was all profit at this point. Maddie had used the cash to buy things for the apartment—bistro chairs and a marble-topped table, velvet throw pillows, a pretty rug.

  She had stopped at the Beehive for a to-go cup of its strong, scorched coffee. Lying on her bed—so decadent, to be on a bed in the daytime, if one wasn’t sick—she had tried to focus on her library book, Herzog. The poetry she had loved and tried to write as a teenager no longer affected her, but the recommended novels at the Pratt didn’t move her, either. She had chosen Herzog because someone from Hadassah said it was anti-Semitic and she liked to make up her own mind about these things. Maddie was not persuaded, not so far, that Bellow was a “self-loathing Jew,” but she squirmed uncomfortably at the coincidence of the titular character’s second wife’s name, Madeleine, so close to hers. She was an awful person, this Madeleine. It was hard not to take it personally.

  Maddie wondered if she would ever be someone’s second wife. She wanted to live passionately, fully. Is that possible in a marriage of long standing? She and Milton had been very amorous in their early years. She was almost too amorous. She still blushed at the memory, the two of them a week out from their wedding, parked in a popular spot near Cylburn Arboretum, so close to doing the deed.

  He’d said no.

  He’d said no.

  She’d had her hand on him, something she did for him and just one other man, something else she never wrote down. Her diary was like a general’s campaign, noting only what territory had been seized from her. It did not occur to her to document her own sorties. And there had come a time when she wrote nothing at all, when it was unthinkable to admit what she was doing—and with whom.

  She parted her legs and tried to guide Milton inside her; she thought it was the greatest gift she could bestow. They were betrothed, almost married. What could be the harm?

  “I don’t want to lie before God,” Milton said. For a second, she thought he meant lying down.

  “Of course,” she said, her always reliable instincts guiding her to what was necessary to rescue her dignity, her reputation. “I was just so carried away by you, Miltie.”

  On her wedding night, she remembered to mimic the pain she had experienced her true first time. If Milton ever suspected his bride was not a virgin, he was polite enough—or disappointed enough—not to let on. It was an important first lesson in a young marriage. Let some lies lie.

  At noon, Maddie had put away her book and poked around the icebox for something to eat. Her practice for the past few years had been to lunch on things like melba toast and cottage cheese. Yet Ferdie wanted her to put on weight, was forever urging food on her. “Someone needs to take care of you, baby,” he said, clearly having decided that her thinness was a by-product of her caring for others, not a rigidly achieved state. Maddie, who had always followed fashion, couldn’t help noticing that a girl named Twiggy was suddenly everywhere. The new styles favored thin women. Of course, she was too old for such clothes. Or was she? No matter how thin she got, her breasts never seemed to shrink. She thought of how many boys had begged, begged, to progress from OC to OB to UB, how the discovery of her breasts took their breaths away, like they were men seeing land after a long time at sea.

  Cylburn Arboretum. It wasn’t that far from where Tessie Fine had last been seen, no more than a mile, a bit of wildness in the heart of the city. If one were to dump a body somewhere—

  She’d checked the clock. Maybe she should go help look for Tessie Fine. Not doing something just because her mother had suggested it was sullen, the kind of behavior one would expect from an adolescent. Maddie would call that girl, the one from the jewelry store, and ask her to go along. She didn’t know why she wanted a companion, but it seemed more respectable somehow.

  Judith, clearly excited to hear from Maddie, had said her brother would let her leave work given the gravity of the mission. They’d taken buses to the synagogue parking lot, arriving just as the volunteers were about to set out.

  “Men only,” said the synagogue president, who had organized the search parties.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Maddie said.

  “This is no job for women.” He looked at their clothes, as if he could eliminate them on that basis alone, but their shoes were sensible, their coats suitable to combing alleys and vacant lots.

  “Then we’ll do our own search,” Maddie said. “It’s not as if we need your permission to walk around Baltimore.”

  The arboretum was farther down Northern Parkway than she recalled, the grounds larger an
d more heavily wooded. The day, which had started with promises of spring, had aged into something raw and punishing. They walked the trails systematically, aware that they needed to leave by five, the closing time during winter. The trails went deep, all the way down to Cylburn Avenue. With their deadline approaching, Maddie said to Judith: “Let’s walk this last one all the way to the fence.”

  Later, when she was asked, How did you think to look there? Maddie would be nonplussed. She couldn’t say, I remembered parking there with all the boys I dated, much less, I tried to get my future husband to make love to me there, but he wanted to wait because he thought I was a virgin.

  So she would say: Just a hunch.

  On that hunch, they walked down the final trail, to the fence line along the avenue. The land dipped here, creating a gully. The fence was broken, torn open, but you couldn’t see the bottom of the gully from the street, you had to be on the hill, above it, to see what Maddie saw.

  She caught a glimpse of something shiny, too shiny, in the gray-green wintry underbrush. It was a bright silver crescent on the heel of a shoe. The shoe was attached to a leg, the leg to the body, the body to a head, a face. A face that was too composed, too still. No child’s face was ever this still.

  With her loden-green coat and brown tights, Tessie Fine had almost disappeared into the landscape. But her red tresses flamed like out-of-season wildflowers, and her shoes shined on, catching the last rays of light.

  The Patrolman

  The Patrolman

  When the call comes in, my first thought is, Thank God, I don’t have to go to Burger Chef. Every night, my partner, Paul, and I argue about dinner and he won tonight. I prefer Gino’s. Maybe that sounds callous, thinking about dinner when a call comes in about a body, maybe the body that everyone’s looking for, but you have to understand I’m thinking it’s going to be a big fat nothing. In fact, somehow I get it in my head that they are teenagers, a boy and a girl, doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. They looked at the clock, realized they were supposed to be home for supper, had no shot, so they had to have a reason.

  At any rate, we’re on Northern Parkway, headed west, the closest patrol to the arboretum, so we take the call. Usually, the place would be closed by now, but the staff stayed and kept the gates open.

  The first thing I notice is that the couple aren’t boy-girl and they aren’t teenagers. It’s two women, one in her twenties and one in her thirties, clearly not related. And although the older one has at least ten years on me, she’s the looker of the two. The younger one is presentable, don’t get me wrong, with shiny hair and a nice face. But the older one has dark hair and light eyes and a tiny waist—she’s wearing a trench coat, belted tight—and it’s hard not to think, Wow. I’m married and I don’t whore around like some of my colleagues, but I’m not blind.

  Still, I don’t believe they’ve found the girl, especially when they lead us out and around the arboretum, down to Cylburn Avenue. It’s not a busy street, but it gets enough traffic so that someone, somehow, would have spotted a body over the past two days. We leave the patrol car in the parking lot and walk, two by two, like the worst double date ever. I’m next to the dark-haired one, who’s leading the way.

  She’s been crying. “I have a son,” she says. “A teenager.” I tell her that I haven’t been married long enough to have any kids, which is more or less true. I’ve been married three years and we’ve had two miscarriages. The doctor says there’s no reason we won’t have healthy kids one day. Sons, I hope, to follow me into the line of duty. My father was a police and I’m a police. My grandfather arrived from Poland in 1912 and his English was never really that good, or else he might have been a police, too. People today are always talking about prejudice and stuff, like the rest of us never knew it. When my family came to America, to Baltimore, the Irish ran it and they took care of their own. Then the Italians ran it and they took care of their own. Then us bohunks finally got a turn. On and on, that’s the way things have always been and always will be. You just have to wait your turn.

  I ask what her husband does and she starts as if the question surprised her, but if you have a kid, you have a husband, right? She says: “Attorney,” then adds quickly: “Not crime. Civil. Real estate law.”

  “I bet he makes a good living,” I say, just to say something. The night is so quiet. You can hear the traffic noises not far away—Northern Parkway, the steady swish of cars on the new expressway, the Jones Falls, visible through the trees this time of year—yet it still feels hushed, like church. We keep our voices low out of respect.

  Speaking only for myself—I don’t know what goes on in Paul’s head most of the time, if anything, other than a desire to eat at Burger Chef and chase tramps—I want these women to be wrong. Not because it will make for a late night. We’ve just come on, we have nothing better to do. But I don’t want anything to do with a dead kid. It feels like bad luck. Two miscarriages, that’s enough death for me. I wonder sometimes if the miscarriages are a punishment, but for what? I’m a good man. I had some wildness when I was younger, which is natural and right. In a man. My wife, Sophia, is six years younger than me, very pure. She deserves to have her babies. If God feels He needs to punish me for some reason, that’s one thing, but Sophia doesn’t deserve that. And if He would just give us children, we would raise such good citizens, boys who would follow me into the department and girls who would learn to make all the wonderful things Sophia can make, cabbage rolls and brisket and pierogies.

  We reach Cylburn Avenue, and at first, it looks as if I’m going to get my wish. There’s no body to be seen.

  “Where is—?” The dark-haired one frets. “I thought she was right here.” The younger one, she’s barely spoken up ’til now, Paul has been nattering to her all the way down the hill. He’s single, technically, has a pretty steady girl, although I guess that isn’t my business. Before marriage, whatever you do, that’s your own business.

  The younger one says: “No, go a little farther.” Night has fallen, thick and fast, and we get out our flashlights. I’m trying to make them feel better: “You’d be surprised how often people make this kind of mistake”—and then Paul’s light catches a flash of something and there she is. Tessie Fine, her neck snapped like a chicken’s. You don’t need to be a coroner to figure that out.

  We call it in. Paul offers to walk the women back up to the arboretum parking lot, but they say they don’t have a car up there, they walked here from the synagogue.

  “We can call you a cab,” I say.

  The older one protests. “No, no. I—I have to stay. I’m a mother. If something happened to my boy and another mother found him, I’d want her to stay.” I don’t get this, but I have to respect it. I bet Sophia would do the same.

  With the sun down, the cold begins creeping into our bones, that March dampness that’s worse than dead-of-winter in some ways. I feel bad, not having something to drape over the ladies’ shoulders, but if I take off my jacket, I’ll be in shirtsleeves, and they’ve both got coats. The homicide detectives show up, but Paul and I have to keep the street clear and the women won’t go, not until that little body is taken away, the head hanging at that horrible angle. You don’t have to be strong to do that to a little girl. You do have to be awfully angry. Who could be that angry at a little girl? I hope it’s not a sex crime. I think that would drive me crazy, if a child of mine died that way.

  I can tell it hits her hard, the dark-haired one. It’s more personal to her somehow because she has a kid. Or because it was her idea to search here. How did you know to look here? we ask her, but she doesn’t say anything, just hugs herself.

  The news people finally get wind of it. We’ve been careful on the radios, but we are less than a mile from Television Hill and the road has been blocked. On a clear late-winter night like this, the red-and-blues can be seen for miles. Some concerned citizen probably began making calls. The reporters are kept at the end of the street, sometimes yelling out questions, b
ut mostly quiet. At some point, I see the Star’s cop reporter, Jack Diller, walking down the street. Diller has been covering the beat so long he’s more cop than reporter and when we tell him to get back, he’s amiable. “But is it Tessie Fine? Just tell me that,” he says. Somehow, he gets confirmation, but not from me.

  We drive the women home, of course. Never occurred to me that they live in opposite directions. I wonder how they know each other, how they ended up paired off for the search. The older one gets in the front seat and we let it go. Paul takes the backseat and talks a blue streak. He’s flirting, the bum. We drive up to Pikesville, which I expected, it’s where all the Jews live. But then the other one, the lady with the lawyer husband, tells us: “I live downtown. I’m sorry—I know it’s pretty far out of your way.”

  We tell her we don’t mind.

  On the drive downtown, I give her some advice: “You don’t have to talk to the press. It’s better if you don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a killer out there. The less he knows about what we know, the better. And in the meantime, until there’s an arrest, you’re the story.”

  This seems to give her pause. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not good or bad. But you can’t undo it, once it’s done. That’s all. They’re like dogs, reporters. They’ll scramble for any scrap they can get. And because there are so many of them, they’ll all want a different angle. The one who gets to you first, he’ll build you up. So the others will have to tear you down.”

  “Tear me down? What have I done?” She seems really rattled now and I feel bad.

  “Nothing. I’m just warning you—the reporters can make a good thing into a bad thing. That’s how they do.” A reporter did my dad dirty once. It didn’t come to anything in the end, but I learned a lesson from it.