Lady in the Lake Read online

  We let her out at this old dump of an apartment building near the cathedral. I want to walk her upstairs, but she’s really firm. Almost too firm, like she thinks I’m going to try something, which is insulting. I’m just trying to fit together the pieces of her story. A son, so there was a husband at some point. Is the son grown? Could be, if she got a real early start. I can’t imagine a kid living in that apartment house. My wife and I, we live in a rowhouse near Patterson Park, but once the kids start coming—and they will, I know they will, we’ve just had bad luck—and I start moving up in the ranks, we’ll find a house farther out, with at least a little lawn. Kids need a yard, not that I ever had one. Anyway, what am I going to do, with Paul in the backseat, the patrol car due back at district before I can go home and get into bed next to my wife, who will be asleep, or pretending to be. She’s going through a phase where she doesn’t like to be touched. Her body has let her down and she thinks she’s let me down, but I don’t blame her, not a bit.

  I grab a beer with Paul and some other guys, maybe play up our role in the discovery of Tessie Fine a little, which means downplaying what that Maddie lady and her friend did, but it was Paul’s flashlight that caught that piece of shoe, we were the professionals on the scene. Anyway, after I finish my one beer, it makes sense to go home by way of her apartment building, just because—I don’t know. I’m worried about her. That’s no place for a nice lady to live.

  When I get there, a patrol car is parked out front. Now I’m really worried. Has something happened? Finding a body can do things to you, or so I’ve heard. It was my first, too. Anyway, I’m about to cross the street and go upstairs when I see a uniform, alone, come out the building—and get into that patrol car. And there’s no way, just no way, that guy can be legit.

  Because he’s blacker than ink and the coloreds don’t get to use cars.

  I make note of the license and the number. It’s from my district, Northwest. Tomorrow, I’ll start asking around, try to figure out why a car from Northwest District was parked outside Maddie Schwartz’s apartment at three in the morning.

  And why some colored cop was coming from there in the middle of the night.

  March 1966

  March 1966

  It was strange, moving through the world with a secret. Not Ferdie—Maddie thought of Ferdie as an arrangement, something she was obliged to keep to herself because of others’ prejudices. But only a handful of people—Judith, the police officers—knew she was the one who had found Tessie Fine. “Discovered by two passersby” was the way the newspapers framed it, while on television, the hosts, including Wallace Wright, said it was a “young couple.” Not wrong, yet not correct, either. And it wasn’t only that “young couple” led people to infer it was some boy-girl pair. Everything said made Maddie’s role in the discovery seem incidental. She had chosen the spot, it was her idea to head down that last trail, but you’d never have known that, reading and watching the news.

  There had been no arrest yet, although Ferdie told her that there was a strong suspect, a clerk in the fish store. The clerk said the girl had been in his store and left immediately, but no one believed him.

  And Maddie learned from Ferdie that she and Judith, if only briefly, had been “persons of interest.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked as they drank beer in bed two days after the discovery of Tessie Fine’s body.

  “First of all, homicide cops are always going to pay attention to people who find bodies. That’s just how they do their jobs. So here are these two women, walking down Cylburn Avenue coming on toward dusk—they thought you might be lesbians. Probably still think that.”

  “I told them we were turned away from the search party and decided to go out on our own,” Maddie said. How could anyone think she was a lesbian? If she were, she would be like Lakey in The Group.

  “Honey, if detectives believed everything people told them, they wouldn’t be very good at their jobs.” A beat. “I’d like to be a detective.”

  “I’m sure you can do whatever you set your mind to.”

  “The department’s segregated, Maddie. Negro cops walk patrols, maybe do undercover in narcotics. We can’t use cars. I don’t even have a radio, just a call-box key. Remember how we met?”

  She glanced at the African violet. “I’m not likely to forget.”

  “Anyway, so you have these two women walking down a quiet street after dusk, far from where either one lives. I bet they asked you if you knew the girl.”

  They had, in fact. But to Maddie, it was almost like a social conversation, goyim trying to understand the connectedness of the Jewish community. Oh, how she had chattered away. Her grandmother and my mother knew each other—I suppose almost any woman in Northwest Baltimore who owns a fur knows the Fines. And I went to school with her father, years ago. He took me to a dance once. She was embarrassed, in retrospect, how easily she had shared her stories with them, wondered if they had found her tiny details portentous, at least briefly. It also had not occurred to her to wonder why she and Judith were questioned separately the next day.

  “Not that you would ever be a serious suspect,” Ferdie added. Somehow that was more insulting still. How had she become a bit player in a story that wouldn’t even have happened were it not for her? Obviously, she didn’t want to be in the newspaper or on television because then she would have to be defined as—what? A woman who was separated, the former wife of, the estranged (not by choice) mother of. Who was Madeline Schwartz? She could not lay claim to the discovery of Tessie Fine without having that question asked.

  She realized that she should have been content with that trade-off when she came home from a walk the next day and found a portly man in a trench coat and hat perched on her stoop.

  “Bob Bauer,” he said, extending his hand.

  “I know who you are,” she said. He had a popular column in the Star. It ran with a winsome pen-and-ink sketch.

  “And you are . . .”

  “Madeline Schwartz.”

  “Just the woman I’ve come to see,” he said.

  “May I ask why?”

  “I think you know—look, can we go inside? I walked here and it’s uphill. That’s hard on a fat man such as myself.”

  “I wouldn’t call you fat,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know what else you would call it.”

  Charmed, aware that she was being charmed, she let him in and offered him water. He was practically wheezing after the climb to her third-floor apartment.

  “Nice place,” he said. “I almost went to the other address by mistake, but my source set me straight.”

  “The other . . . ?”

  “Where you lived before.”

  For a moment, she thought he meant Gist Avenue. Then she realized he had almost visited the house where Milton and Seth still lived. A catastrophe averted, she thought, then wondered why she felt that way. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It would be nice if Seth at least knew his mother had found Tessie Fine.

  “My husband and I are divorcing,” she said.

  “Happens in the best of families. Anyway, I thought it was quite a human-interest story, you and your friend finding Tessie Fine. A story worth telling, don’t you think?”

  Part of her longed to say yes. But it meant laying too much bare. Not just her current stature, but also the chain of thought that had led her to the arboretum. It suddenly seemed impossible to explain her line of thinking if she didn’t mention the fearsome necking she had done in that location. She worried if she offered even a sanitized version of that story, she would end up telling everything. Ferdie, how she had pretended to be a virgin on her wedding night, maybe even the identity of the man who had made that pretense necessary, a secret she had safeguarded all these years.

  “I’m not interested in publicity,” she said.

  “We could use just your first name,” he said. His manner was kind, polite, yet there was a coiled tenacity about him. He wasn’t going to move from her kitchen ch
air, even if he did have his hat and coat still on. “Obscure some details.”

  “I’m not obligated to talk to you. I know that. My husband is a lawyer.”

  He smiled. “Of course you’re not obligated. Not legally. But it’s a story people want to know and it’s yours. Don’t you want to share it?”

  She allowed herself to live the moment in her imagination. All eyes on her. What would that feel like? And why was she so keen to know? But no, not this way, she decided. She remembered the patrolman’s warnings.

  Yet she felt she had to give this man something. Why? She couldn’t have said. All she knew was that when a man showed up and needed something from her, she felt obligated to help him. But it was like raising children. You could divert them. You substituted the healthy food for the lolly or sweet they wanted, making them think it was their idea all along.

  “I’m not the story,” she said. “The man from the pet shop—he is.”

  “How do you know that? They haven’t arrested him.”

  She could not say, I know because my lover told me. Instead: “There’s something about the body that the police haven’t shared yet. Something they found on it. They’re waiting to get some kind of report back. When they do, they’ll probably arrest the clerk.”

  He was impressed. More important, he was, in fact, no longer interested in her. “I hate to ask—it’s not something that could ever be in the paper—but do they think it’s a sex crime?”

  She didn’t know the answer, yet she felt some weird desire to protect Tessie Fine. “No,” she said. “But he’s the one. Watch.”

  He doffed his hat. “Mrs. Schwartz, you have been extremely helpful.”

  “You won’t mention my name, right?”

  He smiled. “No, I can’t even call you a ‘source.’ But when I chat up my friends at headquarters, I can tell them that I have firsthand information. It is firsthand, right?”

  She wasn’t completely sure what firsthand meant in this situation, but she nodded.

  The Columnist

  The Columnist

  I’m a columnist. I don’t have to break stories, worry about getting beat. I don’t really do that much news anymore. It’s supposed to be a badge of honor, reaching the point where you’re above the fray, allowed to pontificate, or just write these little sketches about your own life. That’s my gig, most of the time. I write about life in suburbia—my wife, my kids. Then, sometimes, I get to thinking I need to horn in on a story. H. L. Mencken didn’t get his own room at the Pratt library by writing funny stories about his wife. If you’re a Baltimore reporter, Mencken’s the standard-bearer. Mencken, Jim Bready, maybe Russell Baker, although I remember when he started on night cops and he was no great shakes.

  But Tessie Fine—I had to write about her. I had to know. The obvious thing would have been to go talk to the parents. They would have opened their door to me. Almost everyone does. There’s something about being a cartoon that makes people more susceptible to trusting you. What could be the harm in talking to me? I’m just that funny drawing come to life.

  I think about that a lot. How I’m an actual cartoon.

  Anyway, I was chatting up Diller, our nighttime cop reporter, been on the job so long that he’s more cop than reporter. About as incurious a guy as I’ve ever known. There are more of those types in newspapers than you might think. If you could teach a dog to put on a fedora and carry a notepad, he would do his job the way Diller does, barking out facts to night rewrite. Girl, dead. Found alongside Cylburn Avenue. No arrests at this time. Sources confirm it’s Tessie Fine. But sometimes Diller knows stuff without knowing what he knows and he’s the one who described to me the two women at the scene. I still have enough sources down at the cop shop that I was able to unearth the one’s name.

  I walk to her place over on Cathedral Street because I always forget how hilly the city is as you head north from the harbor, where the Star offices are. It isn’t a bad neighborhood, but it isn’t a good one. What’s a nice girl doing in a place like this? I want to say when I see her coming up the street. She looks young, in her beatnik clothes. Okay, maybe not that young when she gets closer, but still pert and fresh, like the very breeze on this day, which feels more like early autumn than late winter. She reminds me of my wife, my real wife, not the woman I’m married to now. I mean, I’m married to the same woman, going on twenty-seven years, but she’s not the woman I met back in Quincy, Pennsylvania, when we were in high school. And I’m not the same man. I can’t blame her. Not even Job himself would have survived what we’ve been through.

  I am shocked when this lady doesn’t want to talk to me. Everybody wants to talk to Bob Bauer. But, fair play, she gives me something better. I assume it’s because she was eavesdropping at the scene, or some patrolman was indiscreet. A pretty woman like that—you might be tempted to blow and brag a little bit. Anyway, I call a detective I know, someone who’s always been kind to me. Out of pity, probably, but that’s okay. I’ll take it. I’ve earned it. I ask him to meet me at a bar where we wouldn’t see other cops and reporters, so we end up at Alonso’s on Cold Spring Lane.

  And go figure, the lady was right. The clerk is the primary suspect.

  “They found something under the fingernails,” my detective friend says. “And in her hair. Mainly.”

  “Somebody else’s blood?” Thinking: She promised me it wasn’t sexual.

  My friend shakes his head. “This weird dirt, more like sand. It wasn’t like anything you’d find in that park. You don’t find it in all of Maryland.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Aquarium sand!” the guy says. “But you can’t write that until they serve the warrant tomorrow. They’re going to arrest him at home. He lives with his mother.”

  We both snort, knowing what a loser that makes him, although my heart would soar and burst like fireworks if my grown son wanted to be in our house.

  “Might be good if one reporter had the inside track on this,” I say. “Someone you could trust to emphasize how smart you guys are.”

  The flattery works. It usually does. I don’t accompany the cops to the actual arrest, but I’m at headquarters when they bring the guy in. He tries to say he’s crazy, but the crazy ones never say that.

  If only his cleaning skills had been better. The basement of that pet store is lousy with evidence. And why is the evidence in the basement? She wouldn’t have had any reason to go down there unless he promised her something. Medical examiner said he hit her first, hard, but not enough to kill her, then broke her neck. No, I’m pretty sure the guy didn’t snap. He had probably just seen the movie Psycho, thought he had a surefire defense.

  My scoop is a sensation. I knew it would be. All the other papers have to chase it. The young cop reporters, even the ones on my own paper, are pissed. (Except for Diller, whose only concern is figuring out my source.) Who am I to be poaching one of the biggest stories out of the cop shop? I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Bob Bauer. I served in World War II, came home and married my high school sweetheart, started at the bottom and wrote my way to the top. I can do anything—features, hard news, political analysis. I’m the two-thousand-pound gorilla who sits wherever I want. In the newsroom, the day my story runs, I sit at my desk in the corner of the Sunday office and the other reporters come by to pay homage, congratulate me, ask me how I did it. I cock a finger at them and smile. “Trade secret, men. Trade secret.”

  No one asks me out after work. I’m not sure I could have gone if they had. But it would have been nice if someone had asked. I stopped going out with the guys a long time ago and they stopped asking.

  So I go home, to the sad, dark house in Northwood, where the woman who inspired “Betty” in my columns, the Lucille Ball to my Ricky Ricardo, sits in a wheelchair, her body riddled with MS. She drinks all day, and who can blame her? In my columns, “Betty” goes to dances, runs around the neighborhood making good-natured mayhem, cooks and cleans. She can’t really clean anymore, much less cook. I do the be
st I can, which isn’t much. But I don’t want to hire anyone because that means letting someone inside, exposing the lie of the fantasy life I’ve created for the paper, about the jolly house where the wife does scatterbrained things and the husband is a foil and the son and the daughter just laugh and laugh and laugh at it all.

  The son lives in California. The daughter died of leukemia when she was three.

  That’s what I should have told Maddie Schwartz: Everyone has secrets. I have secrets. I’ll find a way to write around yours. I won’t tell the world that you’re separated. I don’t need to know how you knew they were looking at the fish store clerk. But your source was a man, wasn’t it, Maddie Schwartz? A woman like you—there’s always going to be a man.

  My wife and I eat in front of the TV. My story is all over the news. She tries to rally to cheer me on, but she knows and I know how hollow my victories are. A fish store clerk, leukemia—at least, with a fish store clerk, you can imagine closing your hands around his throat, or seeing him go to the gas chamber. I’m not saying I envy the Fines. I never want to see anyone admitted to this horrible club. But they had eleven years, I had only three.

  Three years. A thousand days and change.

  My column’s due tomorrow. I’m going to write about the time my daughter thought the devil lived in our garage. Did it happen? What does it matter? I don’t have to be accurate about my own life. Who’s going to complain if I get it wrong?

  When I was eleven years old

  When I was eleven years old, our social studies class had to do reports on the ten largest US cities. Baltimore was number six, but the thing I noticed was the steep drop-off from five to six, Detroit, almost two million people, to Baltimore, which didn’t even have a million. New York, at the top of the list, had almost eight million. Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia—those were cities. Baltimore was a village. The other kids wanted Baltimore, maybe out of hometown pride, maybe out of the belief that it would be easier. I wanted nothing but New York. The teacher put me on Saint Louis’s team, number ten at the time. Do I look like a Saint Louis girl? I was furious. Stupid Saint Louis, with nothing but the Mississippi River and its shoe manufacturing factories. Saint Louis was small-time and I knew I was destined for the big time.