Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  “The minute you begin ‘May I ask,’ you’ve lost any edge you have,” she said.

  “I didn’t know I needed an ‘edge.’” Edna was no different from one of the old battle-axes she’d had to charm at the synagogue and Hadassah back in the day, when she had been a young bride, just beginning to serve on committees.

  “You need authority, confidence. Do you know how I got into this business?” Maddie, thinking the question rhetorical, did not answer. “Well, you should. If you want to be a reporter, the first step is to prepare for every interview, to go in knowing as much as possible about your subject.”

  Maddie was thrown, but she didn’t want to show it. “I didn’t think of you as a subject. More of a colleague.”

  “That was your first mistake,” Edna said.

  It was a moment, that make-or-break second in which one’s entire future depends on reacting the right way. Maddie had experience with such moments. Just like when she was not quite eighteen, standing expressionless in a Northwest Baltimore driveway, watching movers carry furniture, stowing her dreams away in the back of a truck as certainly as they loaded a yellow silk sofa. Just as when, a month later, she met Milton at a dance, and realized he was at once worldly and naive, a man she could fool.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said sweetly. She was thinking: No, my first mistake was trying to get a woman to help me. I do better with men. I always do better with men.

  That night, Ferdie laughed at her, too. “Because she’s a Negro, Maddie. That’s why it wasn’t a big deal when she went missing.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I’m not naive.”

  But she was hurt. She had thought her anger over the callousness of the men at the Star was a kind of tribute to her lover. So what if they could never go out in public—it wasn’t because of race. It had more to do with her marital status. And maybe his, although she remained unclear what that status was.

  “There was a time when the death of a Negro woman didn’t make the local papers,” Ferdie said. “I don’t blame your bosses for not caring until Cleo Sherwood was found. A girl like her—she got around. The Afro only made a big deal of it because the mother was so upset—and because Cleo worked at Shell Gordon’s place. He’s waist-high in a lot of stuff.”

  “Did you know her?”

  Again, that laugh. “We don’t all know each other, Maddie. It’s a big town.”

  She was drifting off to sleep before she realized he had not answered her question. And by then it seemed too—wifelike to follow up. What was it to her whom Ferdie knew or had known?

  Yet Maddie couldn’t let the subject drop. So much about the discovery of Cleo Sherwood seemed to parallel the death of Tessie Fine, but in a through-the-looking-glass way. No search parties, no attention. No official cause of death, not yet. No swift arrest, no outrage.

  The one thing the two deaths had in common was Maddie.

  A coincidence, but when one is the coincidence, it’s hard not to find the fact momentous. There would be justice for Tessie, even if Corwin never revealed the identity of his accomplice. But what would there be for Cleo? How had she gotten there? Why had she gone there? Was she alive when she arrived at the fountain?

  “Where did you say that Cleo Sherwood worked?” That seemed a fair question, a safe question.

  “The Flamingo Club,” Ferdie said. “Maddie, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t get involved in this.”

  “How would I get involved?” Even she could hear the false notes in her voice.

  “Let’s see, how would Madeline Schwartz insert herself into a murder case? Well, she might join a search party. She might give an interview to a newspaperman—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “—she might write a letter to some pervert who’s going to end up on death row, then finagle her way into writing about that for the newspaper. There’s something about you and that newspaper, Maddie. Moth to a flame, if you ask me.”

  “I work there now. It’s my job. I’m trying to get ahead. How does that make me any different from you?”

  Ferdie did not speak for a while after that and in the silence, Maddie’s question took on more layers and meanings than she had intended. They were in bed. They were always in bed. Sometimes, they got up and drank beer and ate meals, but they never seemed to get dressed all the way. Once or twice, they had tried sitting on the sofa to watch a television show, but it had felt unnatural, upright and side by side, their clothes on. Ferdie lugged her television into the bedroom and propped it on the bureau, where they sometimes watched the Moonlight Movie on channel 11. This bedroom was their entire world.

  Ferdie said: “I think you—” then stopped. Maddie was thrilled and terrified. Few things were as provocative as a lover telling you who you were.

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t have the words, exactly. I think you felt, I don’t know, kind of hidden from the world. Or stuck between two worlds. You’re not Mrs. Schwartz no more. But you’re not not her, either. You liked it, when your name was in the newspaper. You want it to be there again. Not in a story, on top of a story.”

  “A byline.” It was exactly what she wanted. When she had given Bob Bauer the story about Corwin, her story, they had printed her name at the top of the article, in italicized type: Based on a correspondence with Madeline Schwartz, part of the search party that discovered Tessie Fine’s body. But she knew now that this did not count as a byline. It was not, in some ways, even her name. But then, what woman actually had her own name? Maddie’s “maiden” name was her mother’s married one.

  Had she chosen Ferdie because marriage was literally forbidden to them, against the law in Maryland? Could she even claim she had chosen him? They were living in a bubble, in this room, hiding out—from what, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t afraid of Milton. In fact she liked to fantasize about Milton’s discovering that she had a lover, especially this one. Ferdie didn’t have to run around chasing tennis balls lobbed by Wally Weiss to stay firm.

  But Seth could never know. A teenage boy could not cope with his mother’s romances, nor should he be expected to. What would happen when she was divorced at last, when she reentered the real world, whatever the real world was at this point? Would she marry again? Did she want to marry again? Maybe, probably. But for now, she wanted only this, whatever it was. This, and the newsroom. There were other women there, women who wrote about the port, the world, Washington.

  Edna. Her cheeks flamed at how easily the woman had dismissed her.

  In bed with Ferdie that night, she didn’t tell him any of these things. Not the encounter with Edna, which she found shameful. Or that she planned to cultivate men for her ambitions, though he would be jealous, flatteringly so, she was sure. If Ferdie were her endgame, she would have desired this jealousy, required it. Like with Milton.

  Only Ferdie was not, could not, be her endgame. Even if it were legal—but it wasn’t legal, not in Maryland. That wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t something she could change, even if she wanted to.

  They made love again. Sometime around three a.m., she became aware of his creeping away. He stroked her hair, kissed her one more time.

  She thought: Maybe I should change back to my old style. Shorter, more bouffant. Edna wore her hair that way. Most of the women at the newspaper did, come to think of it.

  No, no, Maddie reminded herself. She was going to cultivate the men.

  The Battle-Axe

  The Battle-Axe

  I stab out my cigarette in the standing metal ashtray provided in the ladies’ room. Most of the butts are mine. The other women on staff long ago conceded that this women’s bathroom, one of only two on the floor, is my private lair. It is small and mean and utilitarian. Like me, some would say. But never to my face.

  I go to my desk and start working the phones for a story I plan to file later this evening. The bosses hate how I schedule my day, but I’m too good at what I do for them to make me change. St
ill, they complain. It’s an afternoon paper, Edna. What if there are developments overnight or in the morning? What if we have to chase something in the morning papers? As if anyone in town has ever scooped me. I come in when I please, make notes on how today’s copy was butchered, scream at Cal, then start writing tomorrow’s copy. I file about eight or nine, so Cal has to move my stories. I like working with Cal. He’s a little scared of me, as he should be. But, still, he tinkers.

  Today, he has all but tinkered his way into a correction box and you better believe it will say Due to an editing error, something they are loath to admit, but I make ’em say it. I will talk to Cal about this later and scare him sufficiently so he won’t try it again for several months. He’s like a dog, a dumb one, who has to be trained over and over again. Frankly, I should be allowed to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper when he misbehaves. There are plenty at hand and I think my lessons would stick better.

  My desk looks like a fortress, one of those children’s castles made with large, lightweight blocks, only the blocks are my files, stored in cardboard boxes. I wasn’t trying to wall myself off from the newsroom, not at first. I simply wanted my files nearby and I ran out of space in the drawers. I know where everything is, can find anything I need in less than ten minutes, much faster than anyone in the library pulling clips. But no one else would be able to locate a specific file in my little warren. Perhaps that is by design.

  I have a highly specialized beat, one I practically invented at the Star. They call me the “labor” reporter, which means I track the city’s various unions. Inevitably, I am often the secondary on big stories coming out of the port or Beth Steel. Cops and firefighters and teachers. Labor touches everything in Baltimore. The only union about which I have never filed a story is the Newspaper Guild, which might end up striking by year’s end. If it does, I will not join my colleagues on the picket lines. I will claim that would make me appear biased. I wouldn’t cross a picket line—that would be foolhardy, make for hard feelings once the strike is resolved, and strikes are always resolved—but I won’t march in one, either.

  The truth is, I hate unions and negotiated for one of the so-called exempt slots when I joined the Star, so I’m not a dues-paying member of the guild. Marching is for children; strikes are games that distract the workers from the singular fact that no one is on their side. Not management, not their own leadership.

  Some of my colleagues have tried to argue that it’s biased for me not to be in the union, but I think it makes me more objective. My stories, my relationships with Baltimore’s union leaders, speak for themselves. The fact is, the various union bosses prefer to talk to me because I don’t cut them any slack. My questions—direct, skeptical, even adversarial—often help them see the defects in their strategies.

  I have been the labor reporter eleven years, at the Star for nineteen years, a newspaper reporter for twenty-four years, twenty-eight if you count my years on the school paper at Northwestern. (I do.) Add the two years I spent stringing for the paper in my hometown of Aspen, Colorado, in high school and that puts me at three decades of newspaper work. I was never the first woman in the newsroom, but there were only a few of us, and fewer still who wanted to do the hard, masculine beats.

  It helped, of course, that I am homely as a mud fence. Oh, I know some people would say I’m unfair to myself, but I was small and thin as a teenager, coming of age at a time when the hourglass figure was worshipped. And my nose, while not unsightly, is too big for my face. Other women dealt this hand might have gone the Diana Vreeland route, or emulated Martha Graham. I can’t be bothered. At my first two jobs, in Lexington, Kentucky, and then in Atlanta, I ignored men completely, confident that I would be moving on very quickly. What was the point of romance in places I would never deign to linger?

  But I am, despite what some of my colleagues say behind my back, a woman with a woman’s needs, and when I landed in Baltimore, I considered the men available to me. Colleagues, cops, assistant state’s attorneys, labor bosses. Those were the sort of men that a female reporter met. None were to my liking. I found a gentle young man, a junior high school English teacher, drinking coffee at Pete’s Diner and fixed my sights on him. Shy and inexperienced, he was so grateful for my romantic interest that it never occurred to him that he wasn’t obligated to propose. We have two children now, well into their teens, and if the early years were hell—they were—the good news is that I no longer remember all the particulars of how we survived it. We did, that’s all that matters.

  And now here comes this housewife, who has decided she can waltz into the Star and become a reporter, just like that. Certainly, many people on staff have made similar journeys, rising from clerical jobs, even the switchboard, but they started young and humble. This one—she doesn’t burn to know things, I am sure of it. She wants the accessories of a newspaperwoman’s life—a byline, a chance to perch on a man’s desk and swing her pretty legs while bumming a smoke. One of the reasons that I seldom smoke at my desk is because it’s a fire hazard. But also, by meting cigarettes out to myself—rewards for stories filed, phone calls made—I make myself efficient. I call it my three C’s—copy, then cig and coffee. I proof the pages in the ladies’ room and most of the women on staff have learned not to bother me.

  Everyone knows that the pretty girl only got the job as Heath’s assistant because she is pretty. But that post is a dead end. She should have tried for a job in the Sunday section; she would have been a natural writing up brides and engagements. Not that many Jewish weddings are featured in the paper, but there’s always a Meyerhoff, the occasional Herschel.

  I’m often mistaken for a Jewess, but my family were Scots, tough and durable, as hard as the marble they quarried. Again, people think this means I should have sympathy for unions, and again, it is quite the opposite. Unions work for average people and they are a godsend for the incompetent. If you are very good at what you do, a union holds you back.

  I wonder what my own colleagues would think if they knew I’ve been contacted by Agnew, who’s running for governor this year, not that it will be an easy road for a Republican. He offered me the press secretary’s job, said it could lead to something in his administration. I countered that I want to be in his cabinet, preferably Commerce. Then I reached out to Congressman Sickles, who has the best shot of taking the Democratic nomination, and told him that Agnew wants me. Come November, I’m in a win-win. My agreements with the two camps prove that I’m unbiased, right?

  I’ve had enough of newspaper life. Too many of these pretty girls, trip-trapping through the newsroom in their high heels, thinking it’s fun and exciting. They even want to date newspapermen. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my time, but that’s not one of them.

  June 1966

  June 1966

  After her disastrous conversation with Edna—and Maddie was no fool, she knew she had fumbled it badly—she took quick and quiet stock of what she had, what she wanted, and what she needed. She made subtle changes to her appearance, toning down her almost too-fashionable clothing, putting her iron-straightened hair up into a chignon. (She couldn’t stop straightening it, Ferdie would be upset.) She looked at what she thought of as her “successes” so far—stumbling on Tessie’s body near the arboretum, throwing Mr. Bauer a shred of knowledge to divert him from focusing on her, calling the city public works department about the fountain. Coincidences, yes, but what was the one common element? Maddie.

  She decided not to emphasize the role of luck when she asked Mr. Bauer if he would go to lunch with her and advise her about her career.

  He squinted at her, perplexed. “Where?”

  “Here, at the paper.”

  “No, I mean where do you want to eat?”

  “The New Orleans Diner?” It was a few blocks away, a place where clerks and secretaries grabbed lunches on the go, although Maddie almost always brown-bagged it to save money. Some reporters ate there, too, but not many. The reporters preferred the seafood restaurant on the nearby
pier or, if senior, indulgent two-hour, three-martini meals at dark, hushed places after the final deadline. They bobbled back to the office on wavelets of gin, but that didn’t matter so much with their daily deadlines behind them. They had all afternoon and into the evening to catch a second wind. Maddie would have loved to go to such a place for lunch, but if she suggested it, Mr. Bauer might think she had something else in mind.

  Besides, she wanted to pick up the check.

  Over their lunches—tuna salad and a Tab for her, a deviled ham sandwich and coffee for him—she said: “I know I’m not a reporter. But I think I could be a good one if they would let me. And I don’t mean those silly things that Cal tries to give me.”

  “Let you,” Mr. Bauer said. “No one’s going to let you do anything. You have to make things happen for yourself.”

  “What if I found a story, a good one, that I reported on my own time?”

  “You’d probably be poaching on someone else’s beat,” he said. “That’s not going to fly.”

  “If the story is being ignored, I’m not really poaching, am I?”

  “You sound like a kid with your hand in the cookie jar, trying to get off on some technicality.” But he was amused by her doggedness, she could tell. He had a little crush on her. That was okay. Maddie was used to it. All her life, men had been getting crushes on her. The trick was to maintain this delicate emotion, to keep it from tilting into something serious, something with hurt feelings and wounded pride.

  “So you think there’s some story that’s going to be missed if you don’t follow up on it?”

  “That girl—the woman—in the lake.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not a story.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was in her twenties, not taking care of her own kids, out for a good time. Wasn’t even married to her kids’ fathers. She goes out on a date with some strange guy. A chop suey date. He kills her. So what?”