Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  “I’m not authorized to pay you overtime,” he told her, ever suspicious.

  “Not looking for OT,” she said. “Mr. Heath is on vacation for the next two weeks and filed his column ahead of time, so there’s only so much I can do.”

  He gave her press releases to rewrite. Maddie found that even Cal Weeks had a few things to teach her, such as words to avoid. “Be careful with terms like first and only because they’re often inaccurate. And the word unique never takes a modifier.” He also had insights into the city around them, who the real players were. And he liked her. Men always did, if Maddie wanted them to. So when she saw that Ezekiel Taylor was going to be opening his sixth dry cleaners, on Gwynn Oak Avenue, she offered to cover it.

  “I don’t know, Maddie. He’s one of eight candidates in the Fourth. Might look like favoritism.”

  She had prepared for his objections. “It’s at four o’clock today. I skipped lunch, so I’ll be off the clock, more or less. What if I go by and see if he makes news? Like a policy position? Or something about Senator Welcome?”

  Weeks snorted. “Your time, your dime.”

  She would not expense the cab she took to Gwynn Oak.

  Maddie knew the signs that indicated a neighborhood was about to tip from white to black. The newest location of EZ Kleeners was next to a beauty shop in a neighborhood that was just beginning to change. The “Under Contract” and “SOLD” signs swinging beneath the original “For Sale” signs were covert code for Get out now. She couldn’t understand why whites in the city didn’t want to live next to black people, but they didn’t. The mass hysteria over the issue meant that values plummeted rapidly. Was it bigotry to want to live among one’s own? The Christian neighborhoods hadn’t wanted the Jews. Still didn’t, really. The white women walking into Pietro’s to get their hair cut and styled would be happy for the convenience of a dry cleaners in the neighborhood, but they wouldn’t want Mr. Taylor as their neighbor.

  She had arrived in time for the ribbon-cutting, which she knew from Cal Weeks could never be considered news. But that was all there was—a ribbon-cutting, with a photographer from the Afro dutifully recording it. The Afro had different standards from the city’s dailies, apparently.

  Mr. Taylor had that charisma that some successful men have, a way of making you think that you’d find him attractive even if he weren’t successful. Bulky, he moved slowly, spoke slowly and softly, but his eyes were sharp and watchful. Maddie could feel him assessing her quickly as she approached, reporter pad in hand.

  “Madeline Schwartz from the Star,” she said.

  He smiled, but it was a smile that showed no teeth. “Glad to know the Star thinks this is news.”

  “Well, you are running for state senate. Although I suppose if you win, you’ll leave the dry-cleaning business behind.”

  “Maryland has a part-time legislature, miss, as I’m sure you know. It would be an honor to represent my district, but I still need my job.”

  She did not, in fact, know that Maryland’s legislature was considered a part-time office. It had never occurred to her to think about it. But she did not intend to dwell on politics. She had other topics to discuss with Ezekiel Taylor.

  “One thing I did want to ask you—did you know a young woman, Eunetta Sherwood?”

  “Eunetta—” His brow furrowed.

  “Most people knew her as Cleo, but her parents preferred her given name, Eunetta.” She wanted to remind him that Cleo was someone’s daughter. “She worked at the Flamingo. You know, Shell Gordon’s place over on—”

  “I am familiar with Mr. Gordon and the Flamingo. The young woman, however—”

  “After she went missing, her mother found clothing from your dry cleaners in her apartment. Lots of clothing. Even a fur.”

  “Obviously, I don’t know all my customers.”

  “Obviously. But Mrs. Sherwood, Cleo’s mother—she told me that Cleo said she was going to marry you one day.”

  There was a split second of hesitation—and then he laughed and Maddie was impressed. This was not an easy man to rattle. “The stories girls tell their mothers. I am married, Miss—”

  “Mrs.,” she said. “Schwartz.”

  “I do go to the Flamingo when they have musical acts to my liking. I tip well. Who knows what kind of story a young girl could build on top of a little folding money left on a table for a job well done. I’m sure Cleo Sherwood knew who I was. And I’m sure I saw her a time or two behind the bar. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  He walked to his car with an unhurried, unconcerned gait. Why should he be concerned? He had absolutely checkmated her. Or maybe the better metaphor was poker. Maddie had been so sure of her winning hand that it never occurred to her that she could be bluffed, stonewalled. The men made the rules, broke the rules, and tossed the girls away.

  What had she expected? That he would sweat and stammer? That he would confess to her that, yes, Cleo Sherwood had been killed because she threatened his ambition, his livelihood?

  She watched a Perry Mason rerun that night, an episode clearly modeled on Oliver Twist, only the Fagin character, played by Victor Buono, was killed. Mason defended the accused boy, one of the gang members. He sensed something good in him.

  The next day, Cal Weeks said: “So, no news out of the ribbon-cutting?”

  “Nope,” Maddie said.

  “Not even in August could a dog-and-pony show like that make news.”

  Who was the dog? Who was the pony?

  September 1966

  September 1966

  Labor Day. Where was I a year ago? Maddie wondered. At the club, the straps of her gingham checked one-piece pushed down, burnishing her tan so it might last a few more weeks. Her mother had always said that Maddie shouldn’t sunbathe because she tanned too easily. Such an odd idea, that anything achieved with ease was to be avoided, but that was Tattie Morgenstern’s worldview in a nutshell.

  This summer, Maddie was not her usual pecan hue, but even if she had been, she would have still seemed pale alongside, beneath, Ferdie. She was under him for much of the holiday, not minding the heat, the pooling sweat. They made love until the sheets were slushy, until it felt as if they were underwater, then they took cool showers together, changed the sheets, ready for a second turn. It was a luxury, having that second set of sheets at the ready, but she had found a cheap laundry on North Liberty Street. She could drop off her linens on the way to work tomorrow. She didn’t have to be ashamed in front of the woman who took her bundle of soiled sheets, who spoke no English. Understood, perhaps, but didn’t speak, and it was what others said about you that could hurt, not what they thought.

  But on this particular night, a holiday even for lowly clerks and patrolmen, at least this lowly clerk and patrolman, they did not resume making love after the shower. Ferdie pulled her to him, stroked her hair, and murmured the last thing she ever expected him to say.

  “I think I have a story for you.”

  “A story?”

  “For the newspaper. It’s going to happen tomorrow.”

  “How can you know what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

  “Because it’s happening now, actually. Started to happen. But the guy won’t be arraigned until tomorrow. What time is your deadline?”

  “They go all day, right up until three.” Could Ferdie really have a valid tip for her? He had known the inside details about Tessie Fine, after all. “But it’s best to have it in all editions, and update throughout the day.”

  “It’s supposed to happen tonight. I got a tip. I mean—the man who told me, he didn’t realize it was a tip. To him, it was gossip. He likes being in the know. Makes him feel big. He liked telling me about police business, telling me my business, to show how plugged in he is. Cock of the walk and all. Didn’t occur to him that I know anyone at the papers.”

  “Ferdie, what is it?” As urgent as she felt, she also was sure it would be nothing, an anticlimax. She had been wrong so many times about what might be ne
ws. How could Ferdie’s judgment be any better?

  “A man’s going to walk into headquarters tonight and confess to the murder of Cleo Sherwood.”

  Not an anticlimax.

  “Who?”

  “The bartender from the Flamingo.”

  “The white guy? Spike?”

  “That’s the one. Tommy something. It was all made up, everything he told the police. He killed her. He told her he was in love with her, she laughed at him, and he killed her. But he can’t be arraigned until the courts open back up tomorrow. So he’ll be in lockup tonight.”

  “How do I get the story?”

  “If you trust me, you got it. The guy who works overnight at your paper, no one’s going to tell him, right? It’s a holiday, they probably got the second string on. This is solid, Maddie. Look, call Homicide right now. Tell them you’re from the Star, that you have a tip. They’ll deny it. But then you say, ‘I’m going with it if you don’t tell me I’m wrong. You don’t have to confirm or deny it, you don’t have to say anything.’ Reporters do it all the time.” A pause. “That’s what I’m told.”

  Would that work? It seemed a dangerous game to play. Diller would be angry, being usurped on his beat, but what would it matter if the tip was right?

  She stared at her phone, scarlet and inert, indifferent to its role in changing her life. “What’s the number?”

  Ferdie rattled it off, then said, “But don’t call from here. Wait another hour, take a cab to the office, make the call from there, okay?”

  She kept the promise to wait but broke the others, calling from home, not bothering to go to the office. After she hung up with the homicide detective, whose silence confirmed that Thomas Ludlow had arrived without an attorney to confess to the murder of Eunetta “Cleo” Sherwood, she dialed the city desk and said, as if she had said it a thousand times before: “Cal, this is Maddie Schwartz. Please put me through to rewrite. I’ve gotten a big break on the Cleo Sherwood story.”

  Cal quizzed her, of course. But she had it cold, and she had won him over, doing all those thankless tasks in the dog days of August.

  And by ten o’clock the next morning, most of the city knew it: a white man had killed Cleo Sherwood for the very everyday crime of not loving him. It was not a page one story and Maddie understood the calculus that determined that: the dead woman was a Negro, she was killed for love, or for lack of love more accurately. But it was a story good enough for the metro page, the ending to the tantalizing tale of the Lady in the Lake.

  Mr. Heath was back from his vacation and she went about her usual tasks with her usual efficiency, waiting for the moment she would be summoned to the boss’s office. She understood and accepted that she would not continue to report the story—that Tommy’s arraignment would be covered by someone on courts or cops, that Diller would look for a folo out of the cop shop. That was fine. She didn’t want to be a cop reporter.

  After the final deadline, Bob Bauer stopped by her desk.

  “Hey, Scoop Schwartz.”

  She blushed in spite of herself.

  “So you have sources, huh?”

  “I do.”

  “Who are they?”

  She hesitated. He leaned in, his voice low and serious. “You don’t tell anyone who your sources are. Not other reporters, not the bosses. Not the law, if it comes to that. Whatever you do, protect your sources.”

  It seemed an odd comment, but she realized that Bob, plugged in as ever, must have known what was coming for her. Because when she was summoned to the city editor’s office not even an hour later, it was not for an “attagirl.” It was because a furious John Diller wanted her reprimanded for poaching from his beat.

  Thirty minutes later, a shaken but dry-eyed Maddie walked out of the office and into the ladies’ room, where she splashed water on her face, then gripped the sink with trembling hands.

  “You okay?” asked Edna, sitting there with her three C’s—coffee, cig, and copy.

  “I think so.”

  “Saw your byline. Nice work. Diller’s pissed, isn’t he?”

  “You could say that.”

  “He’s terrified someone’s going to dethrone him at cop shop. As if anyone wants to be the dean of that bunch. Cop shop’s a place to pass through. No one good stays there.”

  “He—he wanted me to tell my source. He claims to know who it is. I don’t understand why that should matter.”

  “Like I said, he’s scared.”

  The man had appeared more malevolent than scared to Maddie. He had fumed and sputtered like Rumpelstiltskin, on the verge of tearing himself apart. “I know who told you about the confession. That’s no source. You risked the paper’s integrity trusting him.”

  “Except I was right. Tommy Ludlow did confess.”

  The city editor had treated them like two squabbling schoolchildren. “It was a holiday weekend, John. She had a tip, she ran with it, and it’s good. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It’s not the way we do business around here. It was sloppy, it was amateurish, it was—”

  “What are you implying, Mr. Diller?” Maddie was investing so much willpower into not crying that her voice screeched a little.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. You got lucky this time, going with a one-source story—and that source at that. Stay away from the cop shop.”

  “You knew I was trying to write about Cleo Sherwood. And you didn’t mind when I filed the story on ‘Lady Law.’ That was fine by you.”

  “Because it was barely a story. It was press-release pap.”

  “I’m just trying to become a reporter. Is that so wrong?”

  When Diller left, muttering all the way, the city editor sighed. “It was a good story, Maddie. But I don’t want you to pin your hopes on a reporting job. It’s a young person’s game. If we were to hire a rookie, I’d want it to be someone with a long future ahead of him.”

  Him.

  Now, in the bathroom, she stared at her own reflection, ashen in the mirror. If Diller really did know the identity of her source, what would that mean for her, for Ferdie? Would he get in trouble? She wished she could call him, be comforted. But she could never call him. She didn’t have his number, didn’t know where he lived. If she wanted to find Ferdie, her only hope was to head up to Northwest and walk down the street, screaming her head off, which was how she had found him nine months ago. Otherwise, she waited for him to come to her.

  She decided to take a walk up to the New Orleans Diner, grab a coffee before closing. She sat at the counter while the waitress she remembered from her lunch there with Bob Bauer leaned on her elbows, reading the newspaper. Reading Maddie’s story.

  “I wrote that,” she said. Technically untrue; the rewrite, Ettlin, had written it from her notes. But she couldn’t help herself.

  “So you’re”—the waitress looked from the byline to Maddie, back to the byline—“Madeline Schwartz?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew her. Cleo. Back at Werner’s.” She seemed at once shy and excited. Maddie noticed for the first time how young she was, younger than Maddie, with freckles on her nose and the bit of chest she let show in her pink uniform.

  “What was she like?”

  The waitress took so long to answer that Maddie assumed she hadn’t been heard. But then: “Hungry. She wanted things. She just didn’t know what they were.”

  Tell me about it, Maddie thought. Except—she knew what she wanted. She was going to be a reporter. Not just any reporter. She was going to be like Bob Bauer one day. A columnist, someone who got to pick and choose her stories.

  Oh, it wouldn’t be the same. It would be harder. And while she could see the goal, shining, shimmering, she couldn’t see the path. It seemed ridiculous. She had just been told she couldn’t even be the night cop reporter, that the paper would never hire her. And yet—she was not unlike Cleo Sherwood. If she really wanted something, she got it. She had wanted Allan Durst, had seduced him as much as he had seduced her. She had wante
d Milton, the cloak of respectability he promised when Durst left her, deflowered and almost ruined. She had wanted to have a child. Then she had wanted her freedom. Thirty-seven might have been old or late to do such things, but it was not impossible. After all, there was . . . well, Grandma Moses. Oh lord, there must be someone other than Grandma Moses.

  When she returned to the newsroom, the fifth floor had that extra charge, unusual with the final deadline past. “What’s happening?” she asked one of the copyboys.

  “Shooting at the courthouse,” he said. “At the arraignment for that guy who confessed to the Lady in the Lake killing.”

  She had used that phrase this morning, in her story, and now here it was, set, immortalized. Maddie had sincerely forgotten that she had stolen it from the medical examiner.

  “What happened?”

  “Guy took a shot at him when they took him out of the wagon at the side entrance.”

  “Is he dead?” She felt a weird throb of sympathy for the man who had walked her to her car, had compared Cleo Sherwood to a poem.

  Then she remembered he had killed her.

  “In surgery at Mercy. No condition report yet.”

  “And who shot him?”

  “Cleo Sherwood’s father.”

  Maddie didn’t even bother to ask. She grabbed a notebook and went to Auchentoroly Terrace. There, a stunned Mrs. Sherwood let her inside, sobbing. In the span of less than twelve hours, she had seen her daughter’s death resolved, only to have her husband make this ill-conceived stab at vengeance. Her daughter was dead and now her husband was going to be in jail, possibly for murder.

  Maddie approached Cal Weeks about eight p.m., knowing he would have eaten dinner by then.

  “Has anyone talked to the mother?”

  “The who?”

  “Merva Sherwood. She was the mother of Cleo Sherwood.” Cal looked confused. “Her husband—Cleo’s father—was arrested for trying to shoot Cleo’s killer today.” She added: “Her parents preferred to call her by her given name, Eunetta.”