Lady in the Lake Page 8

  I mention this only to remind you, Maddie, that Baltimore is small, smaller still within its tribes. Everybody in my part of town knew about Ferdie Platt, his eye for women, his fondness for Ballantine’s. He never tried to get with me, but that’s because I was already with someone, someone substantial, and Ferdie was no fool. Besides, he chose women he wouldn’t have to squire, which saved him money. Ferdie Platt was tight with a dollar, as I’m sure you found out. And what kind of woman doesn’t expect her man to take her places, spend on her? Women who can’t go out in public, married women and white women. He really hit the Daily Double with you, Maddie Schwartz.

  But Ferdie used to come by the club, my club, the Flamingo. People assumed he was on the take. He was chummy with Mr. Gordon and some other men of that ilk. I dared to ask him about it just the once, when he was drinking at the bar. Maybe I was flirting, I don’t know. It would have been dangerous for us to have a thing, that’s for sure. But I ended up dead, so maybe I should have gone for it, just the once.

  I said, sassy as you please: “Just because you drink for free here doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tip.”

  “I tip.”

  “Not enough.”

  Look, he was a good-looking man. If I had realized I had the luxury of choosing men strictly for pleasure, I would have considered him. I bet that never occurred to you, did it, Maddie Schwartz? Choosing the men you sleep with based on your own pleasure is what makes a woman really rich.

  I leaned on the bar, which lifted my breasts, already on display in the skimpy costume even I had to wear. He barely gave me a glance.

  “I’ll try to do better by you. Didn’t realize my weekly stop-by was creating a grievance.”

  “Why do you come by here? It’s not on your beat.”

  “Why do you think, Miss Sherwood?”

  I said, bold as brass, because being bold was something that had always worked for me: “Because you’re on the take.”

  It was funny how he handled that. He didn’t get mad. He didn’t jump to deny it. He just patted his pockets thoughtfully and said: “I think if I were on the take, I would tip much better.”

  “That’s not a no,” I pointed out.

  “He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no.” He sang the words, but I wasn’t sure if it was a real song or one he was making up on the spot.

  “Is that a real song? It sounds like a real song. Even in your off-key voice.” His voice was fine, actually, but he didn’t need to hear that from me.

  “Ah, young people today,” he said.

  “You’ve got five years on me at the most.”

  “I’ve also got every album Ella Fitzgerald ever recorded. ‘She Didn’t Say Yes.’ The Jerome Kern Song Book. Released in 1963. I have a nice stereo.” He paused and I held my breath. He was going to ask me over, which was crazy, dangerous. But brave. I had to admire it. By then, the men in the Flamingo left me alone. Mr. Gordon saw to that. A man crazy enough to risk such a thing—maybe he had feelings for me after all.

  He said: “You can probably get a copy at Korvette’s, or Harmony Hut. I’d lend you mine, but I don’t like to lend my records. I’m too punctilious about their care.”

  There he went again, with the big words. I was pretty sure it meant being on time, but I wasn’t going to ask and let him show me up.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like that old-people music. I like the Supremes.”

  “Of course you do,” he said.

  He left me a five-dollar bill that night. I never saw him again. But that’s because I died two weeks later. If I’d wanted Ferdie Platt, I’d have had him. Just so you know, Maddie Schwartz. I could have had him.

  April 1966

  April 1966

  Spring felt tentative that year, unsure of its welcome. But even on the coolest days, Maddie took to her fire escape to smoke. She had quit two years ago, very easily, when the surgeon general’s report came out, and she had never been a true fiend. Smoking was an ancillary activity for her, something to do with a cup of coffee, or when waiting for Milton in a public place and feeling self-conscious.

  Yet recently she had found herself yearning for cigarettes. They soothed her nerves, allowed her to think. Freedom was dizzying, paralyzing. People used the phrase “like a kid in a candy store” to denote crazed pleasure-seeking, but Maddie’s hunch was that most children, after an initial dive into whatever sweet they liked best, wouldn’t know what to do next. Should they focus on quantity or quality? Eat now or commit themselves to gathering as much as possible for later? There was a newish game show, Supermarket Sweep, in which women answered questions about how much things cost, earning their husbands time to “shop,” the point being to grab the priciest things. Even if she were still with Milton, Maddie could not imagine playing such a game, and not just because Milton would refuse to grab the lobster tails on principle. Milton didn’t know what anything at the supermarket cost. For that matter, she had stopped paying attention to prices years ago. Maddie was proud that she had reached a station in life—“a station in life,” the phrase suddenly seemed new to her—where she didn’t have to cut coupons or shop specials. Such thrift had been essential in the early years of their marriage. But it was more fun to have money than not.

  She studied the ads under “Help Wanted, Female.” Nurses, cashiers, waitresses, secretaries, office girls. Nothing seemed suitable. But wait—there was one job, a clerical one, at the Star. Would that nice Bob Bauer help her? She had helped him, hadn’t she? He had written a big front-page story about the man who killed Tessie Fine. In the end, the whole thing had seemed strangely anticlimactic, so cut-and-dried. A little girl walks into a store and stamps her feet, and a man simply “snaps.” Ferdie had told Maddie that the detectives didn’t believe the man, that one doesn’t snap, hit someone on the side of the head, then have the presence of mind to drag the victim to the basement to finish the job by breaking her neck. They believed the man had—what was the word Ferdie used? “Proclivities.”

  Maddie smiled at the memory. Ferdie liked big words, although he didn’t always use them precisely. But in this case, he was close enough, although it sounded too genteel for such an awful thing. The police didn’t think Stephen Corwin had killed before, but they suspected he had touched other children. He had probably been luckier with his previous victims, working in what was, after all, a very tempting place for a child, and doing things that the children didn’t register as too odd. Guiding a small hand into his trousers, asking for no more than a touch or two. Tessie Fine, self-possessed and confident, probably fought back when he tried something with her. But, so far, they hadn’t been able to find any other child who had visited the pet shop basement and the evidence they had wasn’t going to allow them to pursue the death penalty.

  “It’s not like you can go on TV and say, ‘Hey, mamas of Northwest Baltimore, do you think this pervert touched your kid?’ We’ve got women working the schools, making inquiries, talking to ER nurses. But if he was just a toucher—or smart enough to make sure they touched him, without him so much as undoing a hair bow—we’re not going to find anything.”

  Maddie had noted the we’re. Ferdie yearned to be a homicide detective. He had charmed a few detectives, treating them as gods on an unreachable Olympus, and they confided in him.

  She and Ferdie had been smoking in bed when Ferdie shared that particular confidence about Tessie Fine. Maybe it was Ferdie who had brought cigarettes back into her life, come to think of it. Married to Milton, Maddie had long been past the stage of wanting to talk and gossip when sex was over. But with Ferdie, a smoke break was a way to keep him there a little longer. She didn’t want him to stay all night. (Good thing, because he never did.) But she always wanted him to stay a little longer than he was inclined to. So she asked him questions, teased out more answers about his work. In this way, she had learned a little about his boyhood. Youngest of seven children, played baseball at Poly. But he quickly shut down almost every other line of personal inquiry.<
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  He wanted to be a cipher, Maddie realized. He was going to disappear from her life as suddenly and immediately as he had appeared in it. Sometimes, it seemed to her as if they were like one of those math problems from Seth’s homework: A westbound train leaves Baltimore at 6 p.m., traveling 100 mph, while an eastbound train departs Chicago at 8 p.m. Chicago time, traveling 120 mph. If there are 720 miles between those two cities, when will they pass each other?

  What happens if those trains park on a siding for a while? Who will notice, who will know? Will the trains be different when their journeys resume?

  Ferdie wanted to move up. He wanted to be a detective, and not in narcotics, as an undercover. The department, segregated for so long, was rumored to be on the verge of changing. There would be opportunities soon.

  “You’re good,” she had said. “I’m sure you’ll make it.”

  He’d laughed. “It’s not just about being good. They’re going to be plugging people in, try to improve the numbers fast. Being good won’t be enough. I have to be lucky.”

  So Ferdie was barreling into Baltimore’s Penn Station at the fastest speed possible, whatever that was. Whereas Maddie was moseying along, unsure of where she wanted to go. Right now, she couldn’t even decide if she wanted to buy some fabric for summer dresses, these gorgeous Marimekko prints she had seen at a boutique. Very cutting-edge for Baltimore, although Jackie Kennedy had been photographed wearing the label’s clothes years ago, early in her husband’s presidency. But the new patterns were bolder, bigger. Maddie had been studying them wistfully at a place called the Store Ltd., at Cross Keys, the new gated community on the North Side, sort of a village within Baltimore. Maddie liked Cross Keys. Maybe she would live there when she and Milton finally settled everything.

  The fabric wasn’t the only thing to covet at the Store Ltd. The owner made amazing jewelry. So simple—deft curves of silver, striking shapes, gems used sparingly, if at all. And yet so expensive. This was the future, sleek and streamlined. Looking at that jewelry, Maddie wanted to cut her hair as short as possible, but Ferdie would have objected. Ah well, there would be time enough to cut her hair. And he couldn’t object to her getting her ears pierced, could he?

  Sitting on her fire escape, she fingered her lobes, stretched thin from years of heavy clip-ons, some probably valuable. She had left most of her jewelry at the house, in what she believed was a show of good faith. But perhaps that had misled Milton and Seth, perhaps they were angry at her because they believed she would quickly tire of this odd experiment and return to them. She had never meant to leave Seth, of course. She had thought he would want to join this new life, too. Given her experience trying to sell her engagement ring, she wouldn’t bother to see what she could get for those old things. But she wanted to get her ears pierced. She pulled out the yellow pages and found a jeweler up in Pikesville that would do it for the price of the fourteen-karat earrings she would have to wear until her ears healed.

  She went straight from Pikesville to the Store, to stare lovingly at the Betty Cooke creations she could not afford. The saleslady, recognizing her from the previous visit, brought out new bolts of Marimekko.

  “I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t,” Maddie said. There was a blue floral with black tones, perfect for her coloring. And spring was coming. She took six yards, then found a pattern for a simple halter dress, so simple she probably could have run it up herself if she had a machine. But that, too, was back at Milton’s. She hated to ask him for it. She didn’t want anything from him, except money.

  She bought an apple at the little grocery across from the Store, walked the curving pathways of Cross Keys, studied the apartments and town houses. Eventually, she found herself near the tennis barn. What would have happened if Milton hadn’t taken up tennis, brought Wally Weiss to their home? Maddie probably would not have moved out, not when she did. And if she hadn’t moved out, she wouldn’t have been harangued by her mother that day and she wouldn’t have found the body of Tessie Fine. She knew it was a logical fallacy to think that meant Tessie never would have been found, but she would not have been found that day, the search had not yet gone that far afield. Maddie had done something important; Maddie was important. Even if no one knew it.

  And having been important, even if no one knew it, created a taste. She wanted to matter. She wanted the world to be different because she had been born. Being Seth’s mother wasn’t enough. Even if he went on to be the first Jewish president of the United States or a doctor who cured cancer, his accomplishments wouldn’t address this terrible yearning. She needed something for herself, beyond Ferdie and her bedroom overlooking the cathedral.

  She wished she could talk to the man who had done it. She would have liked to understand him in a way that she didn’t think was important to the police. They didn’t care why he had killed, only that he would be behind bars, incapable of hurting other children. But if Maddie were Tessie Fine’s mother, she would want to know more. It all felt so unfinished.

  Maybe she could talk to the man who had done it. Not talk—correspond. Write him a letter, encourage him to confide, reveal to him the bond they shared, the body of Tessie Fine.

  On her way back to her apartment, she got off the bus two stops early and visited a stationer’s on Charles Street.

  She took the box of stationery to the fire escape, despite the anemic light and cool breeze. Simple cream vellum, no time for monograms. Besides, what initials would she use? She went through several drafts in a notebook, then committed to the page in front of her, covering it with her fine, bold handwriting.

  Dear Mr. Corwin,

  I am Madeline Schwartz, the woman who found the body of Tessie Fine. As a result, I feel connected to you, for better or worse. You were the last person to see her alive, I was the first person to see her dead . . .

  She walked to the main post office to make sure it would be delivered as soon as possible.

  It never occurred to her that he might not write her back because men almost always did what Maddie wanted them to do. Almost.

  The Suspect

  The Suspect

  The first letter comes with a photograph of her. She looks like a nice lady. She wants to know my side of the story. She’s interested in me. In me.

  I didn’t really confess, you know. I just stopped talking after they arrested me. What was I going to say? The aquarium sand, the fact that people knew she had gone into the store—what could I say? I said I was done, refused to talk anymore, and when they finally let me make a phone call, I didn’t waste it on a lawyer. I called my ma, knowing she would make the arrangements, that she would want to take care of everything. She told me I was stupid, but I’m used to that. The morning of that day that everything happened, she had told me I was stupid. She told me I was stupid almost every day.

  But she doesn’t mean it. She just gets easily frustrated, my ma. She’s high-strung. She has to take pills. It was a hard life, my father being gone and her having to raise a kid like me. I wasn’t good at much. I wish I could tell you that I loved my job at the store, that I was one of those people who liked fish and snakes, because that seems like something a smart guy would say. I was a guy who needed a job. The man who owned the store needed someone who could work Saturdays because they did good business on Saturdays. Jews aren’t the only people who buy fish and snakes, he said. I can’t keep my doors open if I don’t open Saturdays. And everyone will know you’re not a Jew.

  I don’t know what it means not to look like a Jew. I have red hair and blue eyes and very pale skin, although no freckles. If you had to guess, you’d probably say I’m Irish, but our name is actually from Spanish, although we’re not Spaniards, obviously. My ma says that there really aren’t that many red-haired Irish people, that it’s just that Irish people tend to be redheaded more than other people. My ma is smart. That’s why she gets frustrated with me. I can’t blame her.

  I’m not slow, though, or retarded. I’m just not as smart as my ma, but she’s very smar
t. She could have been anything she wanted to be, if she had been a man. Instead, she married a man who wasn’t really good enough, a bum who ran out when I was little. Anyway, that’s another reason I think I wrote to the lady who wrote me. I wanted to show that I wasn’t a retard. And it was just a lady, writing me. I didn’t know she would show my letter to anybody.

  Plus, I didn’t really tell her anything. In fact, I told her that I couldn’t talk to her or anybody, that my lawyer was very firm on that. Yes, it looked bad that the girl had been in the shop, but that didn’t prove I did it. I locked up at five. Anything could have happened after I left. The back door had been jimmied.

  All I tell her is that I met the girl and she was rude to me. I was having a bad day. My ma and I had a fight that morning. It was so stupid. Our fights are always stupid. That day, I think she was mad at me for leaving only two eggs. She said you couldn’t really get a good scramble from two eggs and I said, I’ll make you two fried, and she said she didn’t want fried or poached, she wanted scrambled and two didn’t fluff up enough. Next thing you know, we were screaming our heads off at each other. That’s how we fought. Like cats and dogs, like Andy Capp and Flo, we screamed at each other and she said I couldn’t have the car to get to work that day, I’d have to walk in the rain.

  Trudging to work, I knew she would feel bad when I got home. She would apologize, bring me a towel for my hair, dry my shoes so they wouldn’t end up stiff and out of shape from the long walk. She would make me tea and we would eat our dinner on trays together. We fought a lot, but we always made up. But until we make up, I always feel out of sorts, as if the world isn’t quite right. That’s why I yelled at the girl, told her to get out of the store. She must have come back, later. Maybe she broke in, up to some mischief, and someone followed her. That’s what I think happened, and that’s all I told the lady who wrote me. Okay, I told her about the army, too, the things they did to me there.