Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  Besides, if Fred wanted to make it personal, there were better, juicier—truer—rumors to spread. He just didn’t know where to look.

  JANUARY 8

  They get a hit on the fingerprints quickly, from the door and the thermostat: Rudy Drysdale, a fifty-one-year-old vagrant with a history of loitering, trespassing, breaking and entering. But not a single act of violence, which tempers Lu’s excitement. A smart defense attorney could knock this charge down in a heartbeat. With this guy’s record, it would be easy to argue that he broke into the apartment after the woman was dead, panicked, and left. That wouldn’t answer the mystery of the print on the thermostat, but she’s not going to risk charging him on the fingerprint alone. She’s not even sure she wants to interrogate him yet, but she also can’t afford to leave a killer on the streets. Two detectives are dispatched to the cheap motels along Route 1. Drysdale, on medical disability, apparently stays in motels at the beginning of the month when he’s flush with his government money, then resorts to sleeping outdoors if the weather allows. Howard County is not an easy place to be a homeless man. There are no emergency shelters and only a handful of food pantries. How do you survive the winter if you are homeless in Howard County?

  You break into a place you believe is empty. Lu thinks back to Mary McNally’s apartment. No lights were on. That hadn’t registered or seemed important because it was daytime. And, of course, the perp might have turned the lights out so no one would notice the ajar door, assuming he had left the door open on purpose. The thermostat, the door—Lu has to assume the killer wanted to play with the environment, complicate the process of determining the approximate time of death. Did the killer know Mary was on vacation, not expected back at work until January sixth?

  One thing’s for certain: Mary didn’t meet Rudy Drysdale while standing in line for The Theory of Everything. Or at a coffee shop, or a wine bar. This was not a man that a woman invited into her home. Unless Mary McNally was the kind of softhearted person who saw a man with a WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign and took him at his word, asked him to do a few small chores for her.

  The detectives find Drysdale at the second motel they check. He is docile—so docile, based on what Lu hears, that he might not be competent to stand trial. They attempt to interview him, but he says nothing, asks for nothing, only stares at the ceiling. He’s probably happy to spend a night in jail. After a few mild days, Maryland is in the grip of a terrible cold snap, with a low of ten degrees forecast for tonight.

  Mike Hunt goes out with Drysdale’s mug shot, shows it around the Silver Diner, the apartment complex. Lu’s money would have been on the Silver Diner. It seems plausible that Drysdale treated himself to a cup of coffee there, sitting at the counter and nursing it as long as he could on a cold day. Silver Dollar advertises a bottomless cup of coffee. Get an English muffin, eat and drink slowly. As long as he didn’t smell and didn’t do anything too off-putting to the other customers, he could have spent hours there.

  But the Silver Diner comes up empty. It’s the neighbor, the one with the long legs, who recognizes Rudy, says she saw him lurking in the parking lot the week before Christmas. Probably saying that just to get closer to Mike Hunt, Lu thinks. But it’s enough for a lineup, which Lu attends, and Jonnie Forke is grim, businesslike. Also very definite. “That’s the man I saw,” she says. “I saw him twice.” He was always moving, but there was something about him that didn’t seem right, which is why she noticed him.

  B-I-N-G-O. With an ID this strong and the prints, Lu will have no problem charging the guy with first-degree murder. She calls home, asks her father if he’s comfortable supervising homework and bedtime. When he hears that she wants to stay to observe an interrogation, he says he’ll ask Teensy to work late. After all these years, Lu remains too cowed by Teensy to ask her to do anything extra. She still gets nervous helping herself to an ice cream sandwich when Teensy isn’t around to give permission.

  Lu has takeout at her desk, reads the newspaper online—always strange to see Davey Robinson writing op-ed pieces, stranger still to realize he’s an out-and-out conservative—scrolls through the day’s e-mail, looks at her telephone messages. Her office still uses the pink “While You Were Out” slips. The last one, logged at 4:45 P.M., is from a Mrs. Eloise Schumann. Says you will know what this is in reference to, Della has written on the slip. (Is it wrong that Lu secretly loves having a secretary named Della, as Perry Mason did?) Of course Lu has no idea what it is in reference to. Isn’t that always the way? Everyone thinks his or her own drama is so central. She searches her e-mail for “Schumann,” searches her mind. Nope, blank, nada.

  Mike Hunt calls. “He decided to open his mouth long enough to lawyer up already.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, so we’re going to let him spend the night in jail, push the interrogation to tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it, Lu. This guy can’t bear to go up to Baltimore, spend a night in a mission. He sleeps outside or breaks into places. Anything to avoid human contact. A night in jail is going to rattle him.”

  “Is he crazy, Mike? I mean, the kind of crazy that’s going to raise competency issues.”

  “He’s got issues, but he’s pretty lucid. Lucid enough to lawyer up after being tight as an oyster all day. We played the game with him, told him it would be better not to rush into an official conversation, but he was having none of it. He wants a lawyer. So he’ll have one in the morning, the best that the Howard County public defender’s office has to offer.”

  Lu feels let down, almost as if she has been stood up for a date she was anticipating. Twitchy with adrenaline, she considers stopping for a drink on the way home. Or even going to a movie. Who would ever know? Free evenings are rare. She thinks about asking Mike if he wants to have a beer. He’s good company and their mutual lack of interest in each other makes it fun to talk to him. But it also makes him dangerous because Lu could imagine confiding in him, if she got enough liquor in her. Better to go home, tuck her kids in as she tries to do every night, have that drink alone. Besides, she’ll want to be fresh tomorrow, even if she’s only an observer.

  “Okay, we can push it until tomorrow. Get your beauty sleep.”

  “As if I need it,” Mike says. How she envies him his confidence. Lu has learned to put on a confident attitude, to wear it like her clothes—and she wears her clothes well, but only after they are tailored. She’s built like a short-legged Betty Boop and feels she has to downplay the parts that other women might consider assets. Everything off the rack is too long, baggy below the waist, strained across her chest. Mike is a natural-born winner, and no one understands that better than someone like Lu, who has always had to study, try, fail, try again. It was galling, but as the younger sister of another natural-born winner, she’s gotten used to it. What other option did she have?

  WE’RE ALL IN COLUMBIA

  Summer, usually our dullest season, flew after we met Noel. True, there wasn’t much left. But how he breathed life into those last, dreary days of August. He always had plans, which he called escapades. “What sort of escapade should we have today?” he would ask, rubbing his hands together. And although I was not expressly invited on Noel’s adventures, AJ wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without me. Teensy foisted me on him using the pretext of filial love. I suspect she just didn’t want me underfoot, whining about how bored I was. I learned to ride a bike well and fearlessly that summer I was six years old because I was trying to keep up with two fourteen-year-olds.

  What did we do? We rode over to Lake Kittamaqundi at what was known as Town Center and rented a rowboat, although that required the boys lying about their ages. Well, AJ claimed to be sixteen; no one believed Noel was even fourteen. We went to the movies and experimented with sneaking into the one we hadn’t paid for, a difficult feat at the little two-screen cinema. You had to leave one auditorium, go to the bathroom, then buy something from the concession stand, drop your change, go back to the bathroom, ask for napkins.
Noel taught us the valuable lesson that making a spectacle of yourself was sometimes the best way to get people to stop noticing you. Noel lived his life based on that premise, although he would have been heartbroken if he weren’t the center of attention when he wanted to be. He was that rare young person who understood exactly who he was and what he needed—and that his parents, his friends, the world at large, were not ready for this information.

  We always ended up at the mall, Noel’s favorite place. The mall still felt shiny new then, maybe five years old, immortalized by its own television jingle: We’re all in Columbia / At the Mall in Columbia. Almost everything Noel wanted was in that mall. Noel loved things. Clothes, first and foremost, but, really, everything, anything. He yearned for stuff. He could spend hours browsing. Bix Camera Store, where he was genuinely interested in the lenses and camera bodies. Bun Penny, where he would pretend to be shopping earnestly for a sophisticated event. (“Miss, what kind of cheese would you suggest I take to a Labor Day cookout? Do you have Cinzano? Campari?”) At Bailey Banks & Biddle, a jewelry store, he tried on watches, claiming to have a windfall check from his doting grandmother. He liked to get free samples from the “natural” cosmetics place. (“This face cream does smell like almonds! My mother will love it.”) We always ended up at Waldenbooks, reading entire novels on the sly, which felt outlaw back then when bookstores did not have easy chairs or coffee bars. We could have ridden our bikes to the library branch in Wilde Lake Village Center, read the same books while sitting comfortably. But it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

  And, yes, I could read at age six and was already ripping through chapter books. The Hardy Boys, my father’s boyhood collection of Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, a series of books about famous people—mostly men—as children. I had been reading since age four. During that slow, boring summer, AJ dug out his first-grade primers, which had been boxed up in the attic. Our mother had put them there, I was told, because she had taught AJ to read at a young age and planned to do the same with me. AJ introduced me to Dick, Jane, and Sally. The first word I learned was Oh. Sally says Oh. Oh, oh, oh. It seemed an improbable way to learn to read, yet I did. By the time I was five, I could read the newspaper. (“Although only the evening one,” my father would say, a joke at the expense of the Baltimore-Light, which was considered less intellectual than its morning sister, the somber Beacon.) I read my horoscope every day and took it to heart. I was a Capricorn, which grieved me. Who wants to be the goat?

  By the time I was six, I was reading newspaper articles about my father, who had been appointed Howard County state’s attorney the year before. These articles were generally bland, approving things, but I never got over the thrill of seeing his name—also my name—in print, even if it was usually on the back of the second news section. And in the summer of 1976, he began to appear on Page One almost every day because he was trying a big murder. Murder was rare in Howard County and this case would have been considered sensational in any jurisdiction, in part because there was no body. But there was more to the story than that.

  A man had come home drunk in the fall of 1974, blood on his clothes, told his wife he had hit a deer. The damage to the car, an old station wagon, was minimal, but he had tried to move the animal from the road to protect other drivers, he told her. A week later, the wife was using the car when a woman’s shoe, a heavy wooden platform, slid out from under the driver’s seat. She said she almost got into an accident when the shoe jammed beneath the accelerator, but she managed to kick it free. The shoe was flamboyant, even by the fashions of the day, a cherrywood platform with a cutout between heel and sole, so it looked almost like a fish about to take a bite. The fabric that crossed the foot, leaving the toes bare, was a lovely pink-and-green plaid.

  The fabric also had blood on it.

  What the woman did next seemed to shock people more than the discovery of the bloody shoe: she went to the state police barracks in Jessup. She told the story of her husband saying he had hit a deer. She produced the shoe. She would have brought the shirt as well, but she had already laundered it. “That’s the kind of wife I am,” she told police. “I wash my husband’s bloody shirts, get every speck out. It took two washings.”

  The woman returned home, made her husband’s favorite dinner, let him have all the beer he wanted. She gave him steak and french fries, despite his cholesterol. She sat at the kitchen table and asked him gentle, probing questions. She told him about the shoe. He demanded to see it. “Oh, I threw it away.”

  Where? he demanded. Where? We’ve got to be careful. If they find that shoe—

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” the woman said. “You can trust me.”

  The story poured out of her husband. He had seen a hitchhiker, given her a ride. It had been the girl’s idea to pay him with sex, he swore to this. But the girl had hurt him, bit him. (This part was mysterious to me when I was six. I knew vaguely how babies were made, but I didn’t know how someone could bite you during the act. I assume she bit him while they were kissing.) All he did was try to make her stop. Was that so wrong, trying to make a girl stop? When she was hurting him?

  They never found the girl’s body, but the shoe was used, Cinderella-like, to identify her. Sheila Compson, sixteen, from New Jersey, had decided to hitchhike to a concert in Largo, Maryland, after a fight with her father. I think it was a Styx concert. She never came home. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

  The odd thing was that everyone hated the wife. While it is true that spouses cannot be compelled to testify against each other, they have always been free to do so willingly. Yet people treated this woman as if she had violated some natural law. She was cold-blooded, with no real concern for the girl who had died, only anger toward the husband who had betrayed her. My father had to coach her to call Sheila Compson something other than that slut or trollop.

  Meanwhile, the husband became bizarrely pitiable. His defense was that he had told his wife the story he thought she wanted to hear at the time. The truth was that he had a pleasant consensual encounter with the girl at the truck stop near 216, then let her out just north of the Montgomery County line, where he assumed she caught one more ride.

  “And she left with only one shoe?” my father asked him when the defendant took the stand.

  He held up his hands and shrugged, as if to say Women! Under redirect from his own attorney, he said that the shoe had been in a rucksack the girl was carrying, that she was wearing something more substantial on her feet and the shoe had rolled out from her bag while they were in the backseat “enjoying each other.”

  He would come to regret that turn of phrase. My father used it over and over in his final arguments. “And that blood, on the shoe—I guess, that, too, happened while they were—enjoying each other. A sixteen-year-old girl, trying to get to a concert. A twenty-four-year-old man. He certainly enjoyed himself. Did she?”

  Final arguments were held the week before school started. AJ and I were allowed to attend, and Noel tagged along. Standing in front of the jury, my father cradled that shoe in his hand. He told the jurors a story about the girl, who, he reminded them, was not there to speak for herself, whose body was still missing. This shoe was all that was left of her, all we would ever know of her. This shoe and her parents and her room back in New Jersey, where she had a poster of a cat hanging from a chin-up bar and a pink-flowered bedspread and a drawer of T-shirts from national parks, purchased on a trip she had taken cross-country with her family just two years ago. My father had driven up there to meet Sheila’s parents, studied her bedroom, learned everything he could about her. Sheila had bought these shoes with money saved up from her job at Baskin-Robbins. He told the jurors how much she made an hour, how hard it was to scoop certain flavors like Jamoca Almond Fudge. But Sheila never complained. The platforms were difficult shoes to walk distances in, but they were her best shoes, and when she decided to go see her favorite band in Largo, they were the obvious ones to wear, even if the chill of autumn had arrived. Those were the kind of dec
isions a sixteen-year-old girl made. Impractical, heartfelt. She had on overalls, a peasant blouse, and a peacoat when she left school that afternoon. Her parents thought she was going to work, then sleeping over at a friend’s house, so they did not worry when she did not return that night. No one mentioned a rucksack. Her parents swore that she carried her books tight to her chest, a small purse slung over her arm. No rucksack.

  My father reminded the jury that at least two other men had given Sheila Compson rides that day. They had testified at the trial. They had described a bright, lovely girl, full of excitement. “They enjoyed—her conversation,” my father said. “Nothing more.” Yes, she had quarreled with her parents. Yes, she had defied them, lied to them. She was not a perfect girl by any means. And, yes, she might have chosen to have sex with this man. Here, my father cast an incredulous look at the defendant, who was not particularly attractive.

  “She’s out there somewhere,” he said. “We may never find her. Her parents have been denied the ritual of burial, which is no small thing in our culture. How we treat our dead is central to our humanity. There is no doubt in my mind that Sheila Compson is dead. The defense would have you believe that she is a runaway. But, really, how far could she have run?”