Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  “You know, if I were found dead in my apartment tomorrow, someone could say similar things about me.” Maddie did not really believe this, but she thought it a good argument. “I’m just a woman who left my husband. My own son doesn’t want to live with me. That’s why I didn’t want to talk to you that day. Because you would have had to tell that part and my son, Seth, would have been so embarrassed.”

  Bob Bauer thwacked the ketchup bottle ineffectively. Maddie was about to take it from him but the waitress intervened, swift and familiar. She appeared to know him well, had joked with him about his order. Deviled ham, you devil.

  “Why are you trying so hard to get a job as a reporter, Maddie? Most of the women in this business, they get in young, or they marry into it. And most of them are battle-axes, in my opinion.”

  “The world is changing,” she said.

  “Not for the better, I’m afraid.”

  “What about Margaret Bourke-White?” Even Maddie realized she was grasping. Why was she talking about a photographer? Who were the famous women journalists?

  “The exception that tests the rule. There will be exceptions, always. Do you believe yourself to be exceptional?”

  She took the daintiest bite possible from the messy sandwich, chewed more thoroughly than necessary. “As a matter of fact, I do. And Martha Gellhorn. I meant to say Martha Gellhorn.”

  “Then maybe you can turn this story into something. Tell you what, tomorrow on your lunch break, let’s walk down to the cop shop, I’ll introduce you to John Diller, and he can run you through some basics. How to pull a police report, for starters.”

  “I met him briefly at headquarters the other day, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in the newsroom.”

  “You probably never will. He calls his information in to rewrite, couldn’t write a note to his mother or even a grocery list without a rewrite man on the other end of the phone. Other reporters call him Deputy Diller or Deputy Dawg behind his back. We’ll tell him that this is—kind of a training mission. That way, he won’t get spooked about some gal he’s never heard of making phone calls on his beat. Like I said, he’s more cop than reporter. Blood runs blue. He knows everything that happens at the PD.”

  Not everything, Maddie thought, blood rushing to her cheeks.

  The Waitress

  The Waitress

  They’re talking about Cleo, Mr. B and the woman with him. I almost lean in and say, I knew her, but that throws people, being reminded that the waitress ain’t deaf and dumb. It’s a guaranteed way to get stiffed on the tip, let me tell you.

  I’m surprised when the woman with Mr. B picks up the check at lunch, more surprised that she leaves a good tip. Not that all women are bad tippers, but this woman doesn’t look as if she knows much about hard work, and that’s what makes the difference in tips. Lawyers are the worst, very stingy. But housewives, who’ve never held down a job, they can be just as bad.

  Maybe she’s trying to impress Mr. B. I’ve been waiting on Mr. B for almost ten years now. I remember when he was younger, thinner. He says he’s trying to reduce, then orders deviled ham. I know him well enough that I’ll give him a playful tap when he reaches for someone else’s French fries.

  Of course, this woman doesn’t order French fries.

  Why would a woman pick up the check for Mr. B? That isn’t allowed. He told me once he has to pay for himself, always. That if I see him with a stranger, I should make sure he gets the check. But he lets this woman pay. How odd. She clearly isn’t a romantic interest, because then she definitely wouldn’t have paid. Besides, he’s married. He says “happily” but I’m not convinced the word happily can be applied to any part of Mr. B’s life, except maybe the newspaper. He likes his job. He doesn’t want to go home. I know because sometimes he comes in right before closing and drinks a very slow cup of coffee while I count my tips, talks to me about where he grew up, a town a lot like the one I come from, back in West Virginia.

  None of my business. My business is to get the food on the table, fast and hot.

  I’ve been waiting tables since I was thirteen, a leggy thirteen who could pass for sixteen. My parents brought the family to Baltimore during the war, for that Glenn Martin money. That didn’t work out. Nothing worked out for them. They drank, they divorced, they got back together, which was worse than the drinking or the divorce. I had to find a way to escape, even if I was just thirteen, so I got a job at a place called Stacey’s. Then I went to Werner’s and now I’m at the New Orleans Diner. The NOD, as we call it, is long and skinny. It has defeated many a waitress. I’ve seen a lot of young ones come and go because they weren’t efficient. Too much trot, not enough glide. But I know how to cover the maximum ground with the minimum steps.

  Not that I was much smarter when I was a young pup. Turns out having cash money at the end of the day isn’t the best thing for a teenage girl on her own. There were a couple of dark years where I almost became my mom. That’s basically the story of every woman’s life, right? You become your mother or you don’t. Of course, every woman says she doesn’t want to be her mother, but that’s foolish. For a lot of women, becoming their mothers simply means growing up, taking on responsibility, acting like an adult is supposed to act. I hear the young women talking over their coffees, complaining about their mothers’ opinions, their rules. I’m on the mothers’ side. Especially now, with the young people starting to act so odd, dress so odd, listening to crazier and crazier music.

  Still, I can sympathize with the girls, too. I remember being young, loving Elvis. I wish there had been a mother at home who railed at me a little, instead of a ghost in a bathrobe with a gin bottle who sneaked into my room while I was out and stole my tip money.

  Anyway, one day, I woke up pregnant and that was that. The guy married me, but it was the only correct thing he ever did and pretty soon I was nineteen, with a baby, all alone.

  Now that baby, Sammy, is fourteen years old, an honor student. I don’t drink and our house is neat as a pin. A rental, but neat as a pin, whatever that means. How are pins neat? I go home every day and spend an hour with my feet up on the ottoman, a glass of Pepsi at my side. Because I do that, my legs are still worth a whistle, not a trace of a varicose vein. Less trot, more glide. Elevate. Those are the secrets I would share with the younger girls if they asked. But they never ask. They think they have all the answers, even the ones who manage to survive at the New Orleans Diner.

  That name creates a lot of confusion, let me tell you. Some people think it’s supposed to be New Orleans food, whatever that is. But it’s just a joint that used to be on Orleans Street, then the owner moved it to Lombard, so he decided to call it the New Orleans Street Diner to keep his trade, but he screwed up and left the word “street” off the menus and was too cheap to fix it. He’s a Greek, good with money and cooking, dumb about everything else.

  The woman at lunch with Mr. B—she asks him lots of questions. But not in a get-to-know-you way. Not in a date way. I don’t even need to hear the words to know that. This woman is like a dog stalking a squirrel, her body all a-quiver. Whenever I see a dog like that, I wonder: What do you want with a squirrel? You’re well-fed, it’s not going to taste that good. Whatever that woman wants from Mr. B, it can’t be as important as she thinks. Nothing is. I have learned that lesson over and over again. Nothing you want matters as much as you think it does.

  It’s when I’m pouring Mr. B his third or fourth coffee that I hear her name, Cleo Sherwood. She worked in the kitchen at Werner’s, although not very long. She wanted to be a waitress, but the bosses weren’t having it. You had to be white to wait tables, they said it was what the customers wanted. Cleo was too pretty to be hidden away in the kitchen, in her opinion. She was right. Now she’s dead. I saw it in the Star the other day. She’s the first dead person I know, outside, you know, the kind of people who are supposed to die, grandparents and such. It was weird, reading in the paper that Cleo was dead. In the lake yet. How does a girl end up in a fountain?
Had to be man trouble. A woman dies young, it’s man trouble.

  Thinking about Cleo makes me realize how short life is, how a person needs to live a little. When I count up my tips that afternoon and see that I’ve had an unusually good day, I find myself walking the opposite direction from my bus stop, over to the center of downtown where the big department stores cluster. Hutzler’s is too much, I could never imagine myself shopping at Hutzler’s. It’s ten stories tall, there’s so much to buy there that it runs over into another building. But Hochschild Kohn isn’t as scary. I push through the revolving doors and march over to the perfume counter because it’s the first thing I see.

  Perfume is wasted on me. I pretty much smell like bacon and French fries all the time, no matter how often I wash my hair. Not that anyone’s around to notice. When Sammy started school, I decided to forget about men. I’ll be all of thirty-five when he goes to college. That’s not too old to have some fun. The woman at lunch, she smelled good. I’d like to smell like that.

  “May I show you something?” asks a salesgirl. Pretty dress, nice hair, gorgeous hands that make me want to thrust my own into my pockets.

  Instead, I ask to try a sample of Joy, but only because I remember the ads that say it’s the costliest perfume in the world. The salesgirl grudgingly hands me a piece of scented paper, won’t even give me so much as a dab on my wrist. I sniff it. No, that wasn’t the scent on the woman at lunch with Mr. B. Guessing wildly, I point at a bottle with a dove on top of it. L’Air du Temps. I don’t dare say the name. Even if I could speak French, my accent would make it sound ridiculous. Until two years ago, I didn’t even know I have an accent, then Sammy brought a friend home and I heard them talking in the kitchen. “Why does your mom talk like that?” “Like what?” asked Sammy, my good boy, my darling boy. “Like she’s one of the Beverly Hillbillies.” Unfair, because I don’t sound like them at all. My West Virginia drawl has been eaten up by the Baltimore accents around me. My accent’s kind of like Sammy, a nice result from an ill-advised collision. People like my voice. They like me, my regulars, their faces light up when I come to take their order. I am loved and beloved. I’m sure not going to try to say L’Air du Temps in front of some salesgirl just so she can mock me.

  “The cologne is cheaper,” the girl says. “But the bottle isn’t as grand.”

  “I wouldn’t buy perfume for the bottle,” I assure her. I want her to know I’m no rube.

  But the cost—jeez, Louise. Who could pay that just to smell good? Why not just dab some vanilla extract behind your ears and call it a day?

  Yet I am sure, when I inhale it, that this is the scent on the woman at lunch with Mr. B. And I know this is something I can never afford, no matter how many miles I glide up and down the New Orleans Diner, no matter how many times newcomers look at the menu and make the joke, “What, no gumbo?” I always laugh as if I’ve never heard that one before, no sirree. I am as pretty as that woman, or could be. I’m prettier than the girl at the perfume counter, with her pointy nose practically touching the ceiling. My legs are shapely, my skin has good color. I have a great kid, we’re doing okay. But I’ll never have a bottle of perfume with a dove on top and it is probably just one of many bottles on that woman’s bureau, sitting on one of those mirrored trays that fancy women have for their perfume.

  “I’m afraid it’s not my style,” I say. “It’s too—fruity.”

  She smiles as if she’s caught me out at something.

  I go home, I put my feet up for an hour, drink Pepsi, and watch Bowling for Dollars. It always makes me happy, that show. I don’t know why. Sometimes I see ladies I know from around the neighborhood. I take my stockings off, rub cocoa butter into my legs. They look good. Less trot, more glide. I would have been a good carhop, the kind on roller skates, but you don’t see those types of places in Maryland. I think they’re a California thing, or wherever the weather is good more often than not.

  Sammy comes in, fourteen years old, already four inches taller than I am, kisses me on the cheek without being asked. Last Mother’s Day, he gave me lily of the valley perfume from Rite Aid and you know what? That’s better than Joy, or some bottle with an angel on top. L’Air du Temps. What does that even mean? Air something? I’ll ask Sammy later. He’s getting straight A’s at Hamilton Junior High, even in French. He’s going to set the world on fire, my boy. He’s all I need, the best thing I’ll ever do.

  I read the Star during commercials. Cleo Sherwood is truly yesterday’s news, already gone from the paper. She told me once she was going to be famous and I guess she is, in a way. Or was, for a day.

  I should have leaned in, told that lady: “I knew her, Cleo Sherwood. Ask me some questions.” Wouldn’t that have been something? But you never want the customers to know how much you hear. They think their conversations are private. I’ve waited on secret lovers, people breaking up, men clearly doing stuff they’re not supposed to be doing. I bring them their food, flirt with my regulars, otherwise pretend I’m deaf and practically blind.

  I move across the buckling linoleum floors of the New Orleans Diner like a skater, the best at what I do, all glide, no trot.

  June 1966

  June 1966

  Mr. Bauer dropped Maddie at the press room in police headquarters like a careless parent taking his child to the first day of kindergarten. He got her as far as the door, but it was on her to march in and claim her place.

  Even the Star’s newsroom, messy and chaotic as it was, had not prepared Maddie for the dingy corner of the police headquarters that had been set aside for the men of the press. And they were all men, although John Diller insisted there was one female cop reporter, Phyllis Basquette, who worked for the other afternoon paper, the Light.

  “Where is she?” Maddie asked skeptically.

  “Driving around the Beltway, trying to get her mileage to match her expense account,” Diller said.

  Maddie suspected she was being played, but she nodded. If there were such a woman, Maddie could understand why she would want to avoid this room. The room, the whole building, in fact, was one of the most masculine places into which she had ever ventured, and not in a good way like, say, the bar at Haussner’s. (Or how she imagined the bar at Haussner’s to be; women still were not allowed in, a strange rule at a popular restaurant where reservations were not accepted. Then again, the line for tables was always down the block, so it wasn’t hurting business.) Yes, there were some female police officers and secretaries, this legendary Phyllis Basquette. But it smelled of men—of their sweat, their tobacco, of Brylcreem and aftershave. Cheap, bad aftershave.

  Diller took her on a tour, first showing her how to pull a report. She read the brief details about Cleo Sherwood’s disappearance, which had gone weeks without being noted. A bartender, Thomas Ludlow, said she had been picked up for a late date in the early morning hours of January 1. The man was tall, slender, thirtyish, with a turtleneck under his black leather jacket. Cleo did not introduce him and he was not someone the bartender had seen before. She wore a green blouse, leopard-print slacks, a red car coat, and red leather driving gloves. Maddie wrote all these details down in her notebook, if only for the sake of doing something.

  “What’s a number one female?” she asked Diller.

  “A colored,” he said. “Whites are number two, coloreds are number ones.”

  Diller led her from department to department, introducing the various sergeants. They perked up when she entered the room, but their faces fell as soon as Diller said she was his colleague. Her usual advantages with men did not seem to be working here. And when she tried to engage the captain in Homicide on the matter of Cleo Sherwood, he was taciturn to the point of brusqueness. “Not officially a homicide yet,” he said. “Still waiting on the ME.”

  Throughout all this, Diller, a small, dapper man, was impossible to read. Maddie assumed he was enjoying her discomfiture, that he was trying to haze her so she would go away and leave him be. But he was the one who suggested, when thei
r tour was done: “Do you want to go to the morgue and see if they’ve made any headway on this Sherwood case?”

  She wasn’t sure and her very lack of conviction told her she had to say yes.

  “Is her body still there?”

  “I don’t think they’ve released it to the family yet. Even if they have, it won’t be a wasted trip. If you want to write about police matters, you should get to know the fellas over there.”

  Oh, good—more fellas.

  The morgue was a shortish walk from the Star, a slightly longer one from police HQ. Along the way, Diller talked about the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer, who preyed on the barflies along the waterfront, and pointed out an alley where one victim had been found. He also cheerfully detailed the wounds that the newspaper had hid behind the nickname, allowing readers to infer exactly what had happened to the bodies. “Normally, I wouldn’t tell such stories to a lady, but you’re a reporter.”

  The Inner Harbor was a grimy place. The McCormick spice factory on the western edge filled the air with cinnamon, an odd contrast to the landscape. Maddie had seldom ventured as far south as the waterfront, although she had passed through on field trips to Fort McHenry when Seth was a child. She tried to imagine the sad, sick men who were being lured from bars and then left dead in vacant lots and alleys. But even they were treated with more respect than Cleo Sherwood. Their killer had been named, personified, and their deaths linked.

  “How can Cleo Sherwood’s death be anything but a homicide?” she asked Diller. “How does a body get into the fountain in January?”

  “Those are good questions,” Diller said. But he didn’t try to answer them.

  The office of the medical examiner was a bright, sterile place. As Diller and Maddie entered, the men gathered at a gurney opened their tight circle, providing her an unobstructed view of the dead body lying there. It was a large man, his skin verging on purple. The body was positioned in such a way that she was staring straight at his crotch.