Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  And even once Teddy was here, I was special, we had things that were just for us. She used to ask me to zip up her dress before she went out. She’s the one who named me Little Man. “Give me a hand, Little Man, you’re the only man I’ll ever need.” “What about Teddy?” “He’s a sweetheart, but you’re my first, baby, and nothing can ever change that. You’re the one I count on, Little Man. You’re going to steer this family’s ship.”

  I think that means I’m supposed to join the navy because we don’t know anybody who has a boat. I know how to swim, though. My mama taught me. She didn’t like to swim because of her hair, but she knew how, she was strong and fast and she would take me to the big pool at Droodle Hill, near the zoo, and get her hair wet, just for me. Just for me.

  You deserved every bit of it, Maddie Schwartz.

  You deserved every bit of it, Maddie Schwartz. I wish Little Man had hit you harder. I wish he had bashed your head in with that truck.

  And you weren’t done yet, were you? It wasn’t enough to make my mama cry and to incite my sweet gentle Lionel to lash out. It wasn’t enough to touch that fur, as Madame Claire had done. You had to know where it came from, who gave it to me. You had to pick, pick, pick, prod, prod, prod, never considering what you were kicking up.

  Was I even real to you? Was I ever real to you? I don’t blame you for not seeing me in the body at the morgue, that faceless monster. But you saw my photographs, you touched my clothes, you invaded my parents’ home. You probably would have tried to walk through the rooms where I lived with Latetia if they hadn’t been inhabited by new tenants.

  You didn’t care about my life, only my death. They’re not the same things, you know.

  July 1966

  July 1966

  “Here you go,” Bob Bauer said, tossing an envelope onto Maddie’s desk.

  “Are you delivering paychecks now?” she asked. She liked being pert with Bob Bauer, managing the trick of not quite flirting with him, but also not not flirting with him.

  “Boss gave me two tickets to the Orioles game tomorrow night. For my work on the Corwin story. I can’t use ’em and I figured—”

  He did not finish the thought. Maddie wasn’t sure he’d even had the thought, that he was capable of admitting that she had traded what was turning into one of the best stories of the year for this little-more-than-clerical job. Bob Bauer had published story after story about the stubbornly silent killer, his still-unknown accomplice, and the equally mysterious experiments at Fort Detrick, where Corwin had been posted after objecting to the draft on religious grounds, as a Seventh-Day Adventist, then dosed with bacteria. Bauer had even interviewed Corwin’s mother, who had said sorrowfully that her son never seemed quite right after his time in the army.

  Maddie felt like Jack from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” only the beans she had received in exchange for her family’s cow were just beans. She was not particularly impressed by a pair of baseball tickets, even if they were good ones, four rows behind the Orioles’ dugout. But she took them, thinking that she would ask Seth, who would love the outing, might even be impressed that his mother had such good seats. Seth collected baseball cards and spoke about Brooks Robinson as if he were an Old Testament prophet.

  “I have plans,” Seth said when she called him that night. “I can’t go.”

  “Can they be changed?” Maddie asked. “This seems like such a wonderful opportunity. The team is good this year, right?” She was pretty sure the Orioles were good this year. She didn’t follow sports, but the Star had a tradition of running a page one cartoon that encapsulated the previous night’s game. The pen-and-ink Oriole had been joyous and celebratory more often than not this summer.

  “I just saw you last night,” Seth said. He had. Another desultory dinner at the Suburban House. He’d chewed with his mouth open. Maddie had drunk coffee. Nothing on the familiar menu had appealed to her. She had begun reading the New York Times in the Star’s library, copying recipes that appeared under a man’s name, Craig Claiborne. She was particularly taken by a recent piece on leftovers. It had never occurred to her that one could fry a chicken ahead of time and then eat it cold on purpose. She had thought cold chicken was a default food, something to be eaten in front of the icebox, as Milton always had on the late-night raids that had added pounds to his midsection, which had led him to the tennis club at Cross Keys, which had brought Wally Weiss into her life and led her here. Just last week, she had presented Ferdie cold chicken and broiled tomatoes as a proper meal, and he had been impressed by her chicken. She did not tell him that it was from a newspaper recipe. She sensed he would find that ridiculous, following a recipe for fried chicken.

  “Is there a rule that you can’t see me two nights in a week?” Maddie had asked.

  “I have plans,” Seth said.

  “A date?”

  “Mom.” He packed at least three syllables and so much disdain into the word that Maddie didn’t have the heart to pursue the matter. She let him go. And when Ferdie came by later that night and they were sated, on steak sandwiches and beer and sex—the same article on leftovers had recommended grilling an extra steak and making sandwiches later, not that Maddie had any business buying steak on her salary—she asked Ferdie: “Do you like baseball?”

  Not quite twenty-four hours later, they enacted the charade of two strangers, chatting pleasantly after finding themselves seated next to each other at Memorial Stadium. That is, Maddie chatted. Ferdie, it turned out, loved baseball and the Orioles. His eyes seldom left the field. He clapped and cheered with vehemence. Once, when a particular play delighted him—Maddie had been daydreaming, so she wasn’t sure what had happened—he jumped to his feet so suddenly that the people around them started. Most Orioles fans tended toward a restrained politeness.

  He was the only Negro in their section, Maddie realized. But, of course, they were very good seats. Her eyes traveled the stadium, searching the more affordable bleachers, the upper reaches. Almost all the fans were white. It was entirely possible that there were more Negroes on the field than there were in the stadium’s seats. Didn’t Negroes like baseball?

  She almost touched Ferdie just then, but realized in time that she could not. She had a ticket, he had a ticket. It was happenstance that they were seated together. They chatted as strangers in a stadium might, polite and distant. Do you like baseball? Yes, I played in Patterson Park when I was young, usually outfield, although I could pitch, too. At Poly, I played center field. In some ways, she was learning more about him than she ever had in bed.

  An Oriole swung, number six, his bat catching the ball and sending it into a backward arc toward them, but it landed a few rows up. Ferdie, his eyes following the trajectory, could have been a teenager; his yearning for it was that pronounced. He watched the lucky man who barehanded it give it to a little boy behind him and nodded, pleased by the man’s generosity.

  Sex that night was better than ever, which surprised Maddie. She didn’t know it could keep getting better. But Ferdie seemed exhilarated—by the Orioles’ victory, by the saucy naughtiness of their game, and he kept at Maddie with such enthusiasm that she was worried her little cries could be heard in the street, over the sound of the box fan in her window.

  “I don’t like that fan,” Ferdie said.

  “Because it’s loud?” She had been grateful for the whap-whap-whap of the old-fashioned blades.

  “Because you have to keep the window open when you use it. It’s not safe, Maddie.”

  “You picked this neighborhood for me.”

  “I know. But—I was thinking of me, really. I needed a place I could come and go, without anyone caring. I thought this was safe enough. In the winter, when I met you, and things—windows—were locked up tight and the only reason I cared about the fire escape was for me to come up and down it before you got a phone. But now—I worry. Remember how we met.”

  Maddie looked at the African violet, huge and velvety.

  “It’s worked out okay. It’s walk
ing distance to the Star. Saves me bus fare. And when I take buses or cabs on assignment, they pay me back.”

  “Word is that you went to see Cleo Sherwood’s parents.”

  This surprised her. “Word where?”

  Ferdie sighed. “You’re going to get hurt, going to neighborhoods like that. People are rioting everywhere. It could happen in Baltimore, too.”

  “It’s Negroes getting hurt. Have you seen the news out of Cleveland?” Two black men had been murdered there, several white men arrested.

  “There’s no story in Cleo Sherwood being killed, Maddie. She was just a girl who went out with the wrong man.”

  “She had a boyfriend. Maybe he got jealous, maybe—”

  “The bartender at the Flamingo described the man she left with.”

  “A man who wasn’t her boyfriend.” She was proud of how she made this a declaration of fact, how knowing she sounded, but she had no idea if this was true.

  “The bartender at the Flamingo isn’t anybody’s boyfriend,” Ferdie said.

  “I meant—” She didn’t go on. Ferdie knew what she meant. He was being deliberately obtuse.

  He placed his hand on Maddie’s midsection, a sign that he was done talking. She was embarrassed by her midriff. The current fashion magazines showed girls in bikinis that drooped on knobs of hip bones, their arms and legs skeletal. Maddie had always taken great pride in her slenderness, but she looked bovine when compared to these young girls. Dated, a woman from another era. She wanted to be modern and sleek, a rocket built for missions to the stars.

  “I wish—” Ferdie did not finish his sentence right away and in that shining, open moment Maddie felt at once fearful and excited. What did Ferdie want, really?

  “I wish,” Ferdie repeated, “that I had caught that baseball. I would have given it to a kid, too. But I wish I could have been the one to catch it. Wouldn’t that have been something?”

  Number Six

  Number Six

  Bottom of the third, I’m facing Lopez and the go-ahead run is on second. Lopez can be wild. He’s already hit six batters this season and he wasn’t trying to brush them back. He’s got no control.

  Ball one.

  Ball two. It comes close to me. I can feel my teammates tensing in the dugout.

  Strike one, looking.

  Strike two—it tips off my bat, into the stands.

  It’s my third season with the Orioles, although I didn’t get any real playing time in ’64. One at-bat, one strikeout, in the lineup eight times total. Last year, I played a hundred sixteen games, hit .231. Not great, but better than Etchebarren, and my defensive skills can’t be faulted. I also got hit by a pitch four times. I don’t mind getting hit, but it’s not the way I want to get on base.

  The next pitch, it’s going to curve, it’s going to be just in. I swing, I connect, the run comes in, I’m on first. We’re up, 2–1.

  The Orioles fans are almost too polite, prone to murmuring, not shouting, but then they don’t boo that much, either, so I guess it’s a push. Still, even in the relative quiet of Memorial Stadium, you can tell the fans know this summer is special. We’re magic. Here we are, almost to the All-Star break, and we’re 54-25 and I’m hitting close to .300. I won’t make the All-Star team. Obviously, that will be Frank, probably Brooks. But one day I’ll make it, I bet. The All-Star squad, maybe a Gold Glove or two. I am twenty-two years old and I am making eight thousand dollars a year and I wake up smiling every day.

  This is what I’ve wanted, all my life, since I was eight. Willie Mays was my hero, but when I saw my chance to make the majors, I thought, I gotta find my own style, can’t do that basket catch. I didn’t want anyone to say I was copying Willie. But I can play shallow, like Willie, chase balls in the gap. If I don’t catch something, you can bet it’s a home run.

  After the game, I sit in my car, a ’65 Dodge Dart bought for a good price when the ’66 models came in, and the kids swarm, asking for autographs. As long as there’s a single kid waiting for a signature, I don’t leave. The fans are our real bosses, in the end. If they don’t show up, we don’t have a job. I’ll sign cards, balls, scraps of paper, anything. And if a boy asks me if he should try to be a ball player, I’ll say yes, dreams come true. I’m proof.

  Today, a guy comes up, a little older than me. He doesn’t ask me to sign anything. “I’m Ferdie Platt, just want to shake your hand, Mr. Blair. You are living the life.” Mister, although he’s got at least six or seven years on me.

  But he’s right. This is the life and I am living it.

  July 1966

  July 1966

  The Flamingo was a bit of a disappointment to Maddie, not because of its lack of grandeur—she had very low expectations for the second-best club on Pennsylvania Avenue—but because of its humdrum ordinariness, its very lack of danger. Of course, it was only six p.m., early for decadence on anyone’s clock, but the club struck her as not that different from the Woodholme Country Club on a theme night.

  She took a seat at the bar, ordered a vermouth. The bartender was white, a stocky man with dark hair and hooded eyes. Could this be the bartender, the one who had described Cleo Sherwood’s date to police? She hadn’t expected a white man in a club owned by a Negro, which served mainly Negroes. She assumed a white man would be less hostile to her, but he leaned back, arms folded, making no move to prepare her drink.

  “We prefer,” he said, “that our lady customers be accompanied by men. And even then, we don’t seat them at the bar. The owner finds that—” He paused, searching for a word. “Disreputable.”

  “I’m not a customer,” Maddie said.

  “Good, you catch on fast. Why don’t you go hang with the ladies at Hutzler’s tearoom? That seems more your style. Or if you really want a drink, the Emerson Hotel.”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  Was that amusement in his sleepy eyes? At any rate, he served her, then went to the end of the bar to continue his prep for the evening. She sipped the drink, surprised to find it comparable to the vermouths she’d had in other bars, then realized how silly she was to be surprised. There was not a lot of variety among vermouths. Wines, yes, whiskeys, yes, but vermouth in Maddie’s experience ran to sweet or dry. This was a sweet one.

  A girl walked in, wearing slacks and a loose blouse, glanced curiously at Maddie, then at the bartender.

  “What’s your story?” Maddie asked the bartender.

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Everybody has a story.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. You’d be surprised how many non-stories I hear in a night. What’s yours?”

  “I told you. I’m a reporter.”

  “Which rag?”

  “The Star.”

  “Never read it.”

  “Which paper do you prefer?”

  “The Beacon.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the thickest and I’ve got a parakeet.”

  Maddie sipped her drink. Not that long ago she would have been rattled by his hostility, the gamesmanship. She would have started gabbing or maybe even flirting. Now, his attitude just convinced her that she was finally in the right place. The last place that Cleo Sherwood had been seen, heading out with a man no one knew or recognized. According to this man.

  “I’m working on a story about Cleo Sherwood.”

  “No story there.”

  “How can you say that? A young woman has died, under mysterious circumstances. Of course that’s a story.”

  “Maybe I should say, no story here. Whatever happened to Cleo—it doesn’t have anything to do with the Flamingo.”

  The young woman who had eyed Maddie earlier returned from the back room, now arrayed in the club’s signature costume, fishnet stockings and a leotard with pink feathers at the neckline and around the tailbone. Oh how sad, how dreary, Maddie thought. Could anyone find this costume glamorous? She thought of Cleo, the surprisingly fine clothes she owned. Clothes provided by someone, she was sure of that. Find t
he man who gave her clothes and find—well, something.

  “Did you know Cleo?” Asking the girl, not the bartender. Predictably, the girl looked to him for guidance. He met her eyes, nothing more.

  “How could I?” she said, putting glasses on a tray. “I took her spot. I wasn’t here when she was.”

  The bartender could convey a lot in a look, give him that.

  “Good point.” Maddie turned back to the bartender. “But you knew her. You worked with her. You described the man she left with that night—early morning—of New Year’s Day. Described the man and what she was wearing.”

  “Yep.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s in the police report, which I’m assuming you’ve read. You think I’m gonna say something different? I’m not gonna say something different.”

  She flipped open the narrow steno pad and looked at her notes. Cleo did not introduce her date, who came into the bar about four a.m. She had changed into a green blouse, leopard pants, a red car coat. She wore heels and carried a large green purse. Driving gloves of red leather. The man was a tall, dark-skinned Negro in a black leather coat and turtleneck, maybe in his thirties, with close-cropped hair. Very slender, quite dark. That fact had been repeated twice in the police report. Was that because the bartender thought it significant or the police did? It was my impression that she was upset he had come inside. She said: “I told you to wait outside.” Maybe she didn’t want to be seen with him, but I don’t know why. He wasn’t anybody to me. I never saw him before and I haven’t seen him since.