Lady in the Lake Read online

  Like I said, I’m not as smart as my ma. That lady used me. A pretty lady put her picture inside a letter, said we had something in common, that I was the last person to see Tessie Fine alive and she was the first person to see her dead, and that bonded us. I wasn’t so dumb that I fell for that. I wrote, No, the last person to see Tessie Fine alive was the person who killed her and that wasn’t me. But I still said too much, and none of it privileged, as my lawyer and Ma kept yelling at me when it came out.

  But then the lawyer calmed down and said, Maybe it’s a gift, after all. Maybe I can use this. Ma was mad at first. She said, “No one’s going to say my Stephen is crazy.” But the lawyer changed Ma’s mind pretty fast.

  May 1966

  May 1966

  Maddie dressed carefully for her visit to the Star. Her instincts told her that this was an occasion to present as her old self. Gloves and a hat, even though the weather was finally warm. How odd she looked this way, how unlike the person she knew she was now. But her shorter skirts and dresses, the bright colors she had taken to wearing—these would not make her look serious. She had to convey seriousness, a sense of purpose.

  It was an easy thing to walk down the hill to the newspaper building, not even a mile from where she lived. How simple it would be, if she got a job, to make that walk Monday through Friday, how satisfying to return home, up the hill, tired after a long day. She wondered if people at the newspaper socialized, if she would be invited out.

  She also wondered how Ferdie would feel if she were no longer at his beck and call. Would he care? Or would he be relieved? It could create the pretext for a graceful ending, assuming that was what he wanted.

  But just crossing the threshold into the building undermined her confidence. She had to approach a huge desk, where a woman sat at a phone bank, elevated, like a judge.

  “Who are you here to see?” she demanded.

  “Mr. Bauer?” Maddie said, hating the way her voice scaled up, as if she had no right to be in this holy place, asking for the well-known man who had sat in her apartment and pleaded to tell her story.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She provided it in a whisper, almost as if she were afraid to be overheard, then waited, at the switchboard operator’s instruction, on a wooden bench. After much muttering and sighing, the woman said: “Fifth floor.”

  “What?”

  “Fifth floor, fifth floor. He’s in the Sunday office on the fifth floor.”

  Maddie’s first impression of the newsroom was that it was, well, filthy. Filthy and loud. So many newspapers, piled everywhere. People shouting, typewriters clacking, a bell ringing somewhere. And so many men. But there were women working here, she reminded herself. She had read their bylines, seen their stories. Women could be reporters, too.

  Mr. Bauer had a desk in the corner of the room where the Sunday staff worked. Its windows faced south, toward the water, and the view would have been bright and expansive if the windows had not been caked with dust and dirt. Someone had written in the grime: The Star, One of the World’s Newspapers. It took Maddie a moment to get the joke. The Beacon, the more sober morning newspaper, with foreign bureaus and a large staff in Washington, called itself “One of the World’s Best Newspapers.”

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” he said, leaning back in his chair. He seemed different at first and Maddie realized the man she had met had been playing a part of sorts. Pretending interest in her, pretending empathy, pretending whatever he needed to pretend to get what he wanted. Now he didn’t need anything from her—or so he thought.

  “I want a job here.”

  He smiled. “I’m not the editor, Ms. Schwartz. I don’t do the hiring. If I did, I’m not sure I’d stump for a woman with no experience.”

  “But you can help me.”

  “Maybe. Only why would I? This is a serious place, for serious people. You just don’t walk in off the street and start doing it.”

  “I helped you get”—she debated with herself whether to use the word, whether it would make her sound ridiculous. “I helped you get a scoop.”

  Another smile. Yet it didn’t cow her. She did not feel ridiculous. She knew what she had, in her purse.

  “You deflected me. You were lucky that the deflection worked.”

  “I offered you something better than what you were seeking. I wouldn’t call that deflection.”

  “And now you think you want to work at the newspaper? What could you possibly bring to this job?”

  She pulled out a sheaf of papers, tied with string. “These are letters. From Stephen Corwin. I wrote him about the murder of Tessie Fine and he wrote me back. Twice.”

  The room did not go quiet—it was a place that was never quiet, Maddie sensed. But something shifted. Other people were listening to them now, or trying to. Perhaps Mr. Bauer noticed as well because he said: “Take a walk with me.”

  She assumed he meant outside, but he took her to the corridor, then down a back staircase. “May I see them?”

  “I’ll show you the first one,” she said.

  Mr. Bauer could read very quickly. “So what?” he said. “He doesn’t admit anything. He just repeats this cockamamie story that the girl came back and he was gone. No one believes it.”

  “I don’t either,” Maddie says. “But there’s a detail that suggests he has an accomplice.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard of reading between the lines, but you’ve all but moved in between them and built a house. That’s a lot to infer. So he made up a story about someone else doing it. How do you get accomplice from that?”

  “Not from there,” Maddie said. “Go back to the earlier part of the letter, about how he fought with his mother that day.”

  “That drivel with the eggs. Not even I could make it interesting.”

  “No, the part about how he walked to work.”

  “Right. So?”

  “Tessie Fine’s body was found almost two miles from the pet shop. How did it get there? Whose car did he use? I went back and read all the articles about him at the Enoch Pratt.” How purposeful she had felt, going to the central branch, just steps from her front door, and requesting the long wooden rods of the daily newspapers. She had seldom used the Pratt. It felt castle-like compared to the modern blandness that was the Randallstown branch where she had checked out popular novels.

  “He probably hid the body overnight, took it out the next day.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he realized that he slipped, telling that part, which suggests there’s an accomplice, or someone with knowledge of what he’s done. That’s why he wrote me the second letter, about his time at Fort Detrick.”

  “What about it?”

  “Stephen Corwin was drafted five years ago. He claimed conscientious objector status as a Seventh-Day Adventist. He was sent to Fort Detrick and was part of an experiment known as Operation Whitecoat.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Bauer said. “The army doesn’t run tests that turn men into killers of little girls.”

  “It sounds ridiculous to me, too,” Maddie said. “As if he’s grasping at straws. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Something that hasn’t been published yet. I’d like to write the account of our correspondence.”

  “Won’t that expose you to all the things you feared when I first visited you? Revelations about your personal life? Embarrassment to your son?”

  “Not if it’s under my name. If I’m the author.”

  He needed a few seconds to process what she was requesting. “Byline,” he said. “You want a byline. You want us to hire you and then your first piece will be this page one scoop. But that’s not how it works, Lois Lane. What are you going to do, insert yourself into every big murder? Dress up like a wino and go out and find the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer who’s terrorizing Baltimore’s drunks? Find the guy on the grassy knoll? That’s not reporting. That makes you more like a stuntwoman, some second-rate Nellie
Bly.”

  Another mask had slipped. She had offended him. And Maddie, whose instincts for what men need were unerring, knew immediately how to make it right.

  “Would it be so wrong if I wrote this, with your help, and that would be my tryout? I’m happy to start at the bottom, to work my way up. I’m not asking for special treatment.”

  “Oh, Maddie, newspaper work coarsens women. You should see the battle-axe who covers labor.”

  “I’d like to think that, whatever I do, I’ll always be a woman first.”

  “I bet you will,” he said. “Look, this would be easier if I could have the letters, show them to my bosses—”

  She slipped the one back into her purse. “I don’t actually have the second one with me. I came here first. I came to you first. But there are two other newspapers in town, the Beacon and the Light. Maybe I should visit them, see what they offer.”

  Two days later—two days of sitting by Mr. Bauer’s side, sometimes typing, sometimes talking, letting him rewrite her, but also insisting, at certain moments, on having her way with the words that were forming on the copy paper in his cantankerous typewriter—Maddie’s piece appeared on the front page. a killer unburdens himself. Mr. Bauer had the byline, but her name appeared in italicized print: Based on a correspondence with Madeline Schwartz, part of the search party that discovered Tessie Fine’s body.

  Her correspondence was woven into a larger story, augmented by Mr. Bauer’s reporting. An army spokesman said staunchly that the “treatments” Stephen Corwin had been subjected to would not, could not, induce psychosis. His mother said Stephen was an unhappy person and had always been a disappointment to her, that everything he said was a lie, even the story about the eggs. He had shifty friends, men of whom she did not approve.

  Finally, his attorney tried to subpoena Maddie, only to be told that her notes were protected by Maryland’s shield law because she was a contractual employee at the Star. And if the newspaper’s lawyer implied that contract predated her correspondence with Corwin, as opposed to being drawn up hastily in the wake of the request, he never said as much in so many words and the inexperienced public defender gave up that line of attack, deciding to focus on the idea that Corwin wasn’t competent to stand trial.

  The story was a sensation, dominating the news for several days. In part, Maddie was the story—attractive not-quite-divorcée tricks kid-killer into revealing he had an accomplice—but she never lost sight of the fact that she had made the story and, with Mr. Bauer’s help, written the story. After all, although she had the good sense not to mention it to Mr. Bauer or anyone else at the Star, she had once yearned to write poetry and fiction, had worked at the high school newspaper. Which was where she had met Allan Durst, which had indirectly almost destroyed her life.

  Now, perhaps, writing would indirectly help her reinvent her life.

  Maddie’s reward for her scoop was a job as an assistant to the man who ran the Star’s “Helpline” column, Don Heath, who was highly skeptical. “I’ve never had an assistant, why do they think I need an assistant all of a sudden,” Mr. Heath fretted. “I guess you can open the mail. When you get the hang of things, I’ll let you tackle some of the easier questions, the ones we don’t write up for the paper.”

  Given the mundane inquiries that did make it into the paper, Maddie wondered just how fatuous the others could be. But it didn’t matter. She had a desk. She had a job. As she sliced open the envelopes that arrived daily, a Sisyphean array of petty complaints, she imagined a future self explaining to someone young, someone worshipful, how it all began. Maybe to Seth, maybe a roomful of college girls. “They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well my journey of not even fifty steps, from the ‘Helpline’ desk to the real newsroom, began with a thousand paper cuts.”

  At night, Ferdie rubbed cream into her hands and worried over the damage she was doing to her lovely nails. Maddie told him, with a confidence that felt different from her old confidence: “I won’t be opening the mail forever.”

  Mr. Helpline

  Mr. Helpline

  I never asked for an assistant and it scares me when they suddenly announce I need one. They put me in the “Helpline” job four years ago when I started making—let’s call them mistakes. Nothing fatal or libelous. I got confused one day, said that a local banker who was getting an award had gone to Crown University in Long Island. No, I had never heard of such a place, but that’s what it sounded like to me. Damn young people mutter and mumble so much these days. Okay, so it was Brown University in Rhode Island. They caught it before it went into the paper. Isn’t that what the copy desk is for, to spot that kind of error? They sent me to an audiologist, but my hearing checked out fine. I told them that I had a couple of drinks at lunch that day. It’s not like other reporters didn’t do it. We’re an evening paper. Final street deadline was two p.m. You filed, allowed the editor his tinkers, fought the good fight, then went to lunch. I like Connolly’s, practically across the street. Decent fish sandwich. Came back, did the interview. It could happen to anyone. I promised I wouldn’t drink anymore. I didn’t tell them that I hadn’t had a drink that day.

  They bought it. But they eased me out of the column, gave it to that snake in the grass Bauer. Oh, such a nice man, with his nice stories about his nice family. I’d rather gouge my eyes out than write that sentimental crap. They gave me the “Helpline” column and a good editor and, from time to time, took surreptitious (or so they thought) sniffs at my breath.

  If only there were something there to smell. I’d rather have gin or vodka on my lips. But I guess when the brain starts to go, it doesn’t rot in a way that creates an odor.

  My doctor says there’s no sign of dementia. He forgets—ha, ha, the doctor I asked to diagnose my dementia, he forgets things—that I’ve been there, I’ve seen it close up. It took my mom, and don’t tell me these things don’t run in families. She started just the way I did. A mental slip here, a mental slip there. My doctor says forgetting things isn’t the real issue. He asks me if I recognize the people in my life, if I ever forget basic words. So far, so good. But if that’s the case, why did they give me an assistant? Train her, they said. She’s eager. Not young, but eager. They can’t fool me. She’s almost forty, who starts working at a newspaper at that age? I wonder if she’s a nurse, or someone hired to spy on me. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. The union makes it hard for them to fire me, but the union can’t protect me if I make a big mistake, if I’m really sick. You can drink yourself to death in a corner of the newsroom, Ned Brown is doing it as we speak. That’s okay. But if I show up here without my pants on one day, I’m out. Luckily, it’s hard to make a big mistake running “Helpline.” A monkey could do it. As long as he wasn’t getting senile.

  The assistant’s first week, I can’t figure out what to do with her. I’m in a corner of the office, the better to be forgotten. They manage to carve out a little spot for her, which irritates me. I am used to my privacy, to speaking on the phone without being overheard. I send her to fetch coffee, which takes up, oh, maybe ten minutes total every day. Finally, I turn the mail over to her, tell her to screen it. I say: “That will give me that much more time to work on my immortal prose.” She laughs. She’s the kind of woman who laughs at men’s jokes even when they’re not funny.

  The real joke is, I have the stupidest column in the paper, but it’s also the most popular. You can’t believe the mail it generates, and yeah, I confess—I wasn’t getting to all of it. I read until I had enough problems to fill the space. Four columns a week, I need at least twelve good questions. And they have to be consumer complaints, things I can do something about. I’m not Dear Abby, but you wouldn’t know it by my mail.

  I don’t think anyone lives long enough to imagine his next decade accurately. You get to thirty and you think you know what forty will be like, but you don’t, then comes fifty and boy does forty look good. I’m fifty-eight right now and I’m not going to
pretend I have a clue what my seventh decade will be, other than disappointing. Because every decade so far has been less than I hoped; why should the next one be different?

  I’ll confess this, too: I have a system for culling my mail. Typewritten over handwritten, masculine handwriting over feminine handwriting, cursive only, no jailbirds, I don’t care if they have photographic evidence of the cops framing them. I’m here to fix traffic lights and find out why you can’t return a pair of shearling gloves to Hutzler’s if the tags are still attached. (The store agreed finally to take them back for store credit. I guess Hutzler’s thought the gloves were shoplifted, and yeah, they probably were. Mr. Helpline isn’t here to make moral judgments.)

  So I give the eager beaver the mail. She does a good job, maybe too good. She catches on quickly, this one. She gets what makes a good question, learns to recognize the duds. She works the phones before she shows me the letters, making sure there are answers. She creates a whole new category—easy problems that don’t rate a column mention but can be addressed by a quick phone call. I don’t like that at first, but then I decide—why not? I still follow up, I still write the column, and it’s my style that makes it popular. My style and the fact that it’s one of two things in the papers that’s actually trying to help people. The other is obits. You won’t catch me saying this around the newsroom, but people are right that newspapers prefer bad news to good most of the time. Bad news sells papers. There is no Happy Valley Gazette.