Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  “This is Marjorie Schwartz,” Diller said.

  “Madeline,” she said. She thought about offering her hand, decided it was unsterile. “I had hoped to talk to you about Cleo Sherwood.”

  “Oh right, the Lady in the Lake,” the medical examiner said. Maddie made a mental note. She liked the nickname. Maybe using the term would humanize Cleo Sherwood’s story the way “Tic-Tac-Toe Killer” granted some dignity to his victims.

  The ME took her to the bank of drawers, began banging them open haphazardly as if he didn’t know where Cleo Sherwood’s corpse might be. Maddie saw a man with stab wounds, several unremarkable corpses, and, finally, the one she had come for. Her stomach churned, but she maintained her composure.

  “Her . . . face,” she said. It was barely a face and the color was neither white nor brown, more of a mottled gray.

  “Did her mother have to see this?”

  “Sister identified her.”

  How, Maddie wondered. Instead she asked, “What caused this?”

  “Water, five months of exposure—it’s not optimal. We have been able to establish that she didn’t drown and there’s no sign of trauma to the skeleton.”

  “No, I mean, how can it be anything but a homicide? How would a body even get in that fountain?”

  “That’s not our job,” the medical examiner said. “We look for cause of death. So far, we can’t find one.”

  “What are the possibilities?”

  “Exposure, hypothermia. Maybe she got stuck in the fountain—January first, the last day she was seen by anyone, was a mild day.”

  “You think she swam to the fountain, fully clothed—she was fully clothed, right?—and crawled into the fountain?”

  He read from a report: “‘Subject was wearing leopard-print slacks, a red wool coat, and a green blouse.’” Looking up: “You’d be amazed at what drunk people do. People on drugs, they’re even crazier.”

  “You mean like LSD?” Maddie had read scary things about the drug in Time magazine.

  “In Baltimore? Her? More like heroin.”

  “Cleo Sherwood was a heroin addict?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s not something we can know.”

  The men were watching her, gauging her, waiting for her to break. Maddie turned to Diller: “It’s almost noon. Do you want to go to lunch? I’m famished.”

  He took her to a tavern across the street. “Babe Ruth’s father once owned this joint,” he said. Maddie’s stomach roiled when she saw some of the menu items—scrapple, shaved meats, piled high—but she was determined to eat heartily, or at least make a show of eating heartily. She was used to pretending to be the fun female who indulged in greasy, fattening foods. She ordered a club sandwich and French fries, knowing she would simply nibble at the sandwich, then push it around her plate, breaking it into ever smaller pieces. When Diller requested a beer, she did the same.

  She had thought him unobservant, but he noticed how little food was making it to her mouth.

  “Feeling off?”

  “Trying to reduce,” she said. “Some women eat cottage cheese. I get exactly what I want, then eat only a few bites.”

  They ate—he ate—in silence.

  “Have you talked to her family?”

  He seemed mystified by the question. “Whose?”

  “Cleo Sherwood. The Lady in the Lake.” Trying out the phrase, making it hers.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you? Isn’t that something you normally do when people die?”

  He finished the last bite of his burger, dabbed his mouth with a napkin. He was not a coarse man. His manners were as good as Maddie’s, possibly better. His shirt was snowy white, his shave barbershop close, his seersucker jacket crisp.

  “She’s colored.”

  “So?”

  He seemed to take the question seriously, if only because it was novel to him.

  “They’re not big stories, the colored dying. I mean, it happens all the time. It’s the opposite of news. Dog bites man. Plus, you heard the ME. Probably drugs. She got high and decided she could swim to the fountain.”

  “But her death was so public. And so mysterious.”

  “That’s why it got attention when she was found. But the Afro explored most of the avenues we might have gone down. She’s just a girl who went out on a date with a bad guy. There’s no story to that. She went out with a lot of guys, from what I hear.”

  “What’s a lot?”

  “I don’t know. I’m—” He was struggling to be proper. “I’m just saying what I heard. There are women, good-time girls. It’s how they pay the rent. And she worked at that club, the Flamingo. It’s sort of a Playboy Club for people who can’t afford the real thing. Girls in skimpy outfits slinging watered-down drinks, second-rate bands. The guy who owns it, he runs whores, everybody knows that.”

  Maddie thought about what she had seen, the degradation of the body that had once been Cleo Sherwood. Nature was vicious. When Marilyn Monroe had died four years ago, people had said she was undone by her age, her fading looks, that she wanted to leave a beautiful corpse. No one leaves a beautiful corpse. Even if the death is free of trauma, only the embalmer’s skill can make the body presentable once a few hours have passed. Every day, Maddie was a little less beautiful than she had been the day before. Every moment she lived, she also was dying.

  Monroe had been thirty-six when she died. Maddie had been just a few weeks shy of her thirty-seventh birthday when she decided to live.

  “What if I went to talk to the parents?”

  He shrugged. “Kind of ghoulish, especially if you don’t get a story out of it, but I guess you can do whatever you like as long as Mr. Helpline is happy. But if you’re looking for a feature story, why don’t you visit the medium?”

  “Medium what?”

  “The medium. The psycho or psychic, whatever you call it. Parents went to her to try to figure out where their daughter was. You could use that to do a piece on her, kind of a profile. She said she saw green and yellow, but there’s no yellow in that fountain and the only green is algae, which wouldn’t have been there the night she disappeared. And the bartender had already told police she was wearing a green blouse, so that wasn’t new. I bet if you ask her today to explain that, she’ll say the face was turned toward the sun—only it wasn’t—or that there were daffodils along the lake, but there weren’t, not in January.” He laughed and his laugh took over until he could barely speak; he had amused himself. “Don’t call first because, because”—literally slapping his own knee now—“because I bet she’ll never see you coming.”

  The Cop Reporter

  The Cop Reporter

  I know what my coworkers say behind my back. They call me Deputy Dawg. They say I’ve gone native, that I’m more cop than reporter. That I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, which is why I’m still on the cop beat after thirty years. No one serious about his newspaper career stays on the cop beat. Look at this little filly, thinking she’s going to make a career writing about some dead Negro. She doesn’t get it. Even at the Star, which doesn’t try to be like the fancy-pants Beacon, with its foreign bureaus and eight-man staff in DC, the cop beat is supposed to be a way station, a place you pass through.

  A fifty-two-year-old cop reporter is unusual. To my face, the other cop reporters call me the “dean.” They pretend to look up to me. They try to steal my sources, certain they can do better by them. But I have these sources because I’m not going anywhere. These young guys would betray someone in a flash. I socialize with the men on my beat. I go to their kids’ christenings, attend the occasional FOP bull roast, buy rounds at the bar the cops favor.

  I’m happy at HQ. My stomach drops to my ankles when I have to show up at the newsroom, unless it’s to pick up my paycheck or cash out my expenses. Those are the only good reasons to walk into the Star.

  My father was a newspaperman in Philadelphia, a columnist, a legend. Jonny Diller. He was Jonathan, I’m Jo
hn, a mistake on the birth certificate that stuck, so I’m no junior and I don’t let anyone call me Johnny. Of course I wanted to do what my old man did. It looked fun. People acted as if he was special because his name was on the front page of the paper on a regular basis. I ended up at the Star because I went to Hopkins, edited the News-Letter. I always imagined I’d make the hundred-mile journey back home someday, maybe as a columnist or a political writer.

  There was only one problem: I couldn’t write. I mean, yes, I can put sentences together in the right order, but I lost any flair I once had. I don’t know how to explain it. The way they structure things at newspapers is that you don’t write at first. You go to a crime scene, you find a pay phone, you call the facts in to rewrite. In an afternoon paper, there’s no time to get back to the office and file. You know where every pay phone in the city is, that’s your desk.

  When I caught my first murder, my third day of work, I laboriously wrote the story in my notebook, thinking I would dictate it to the rewrite guy, saving him the work. He chewed me out. I wasn’t saving him time, I was wasting time because what I had written was no good. “This is what I need and this is the order I need it in,” he barked at me. And when I would try to add a bit of color, or a detail I found interesting, he would say, “Answer only the questions I ask, son.”

  I thought to myself: I’ll show them. I began working on a novel at night. I poured everything I had into a story about a boy growing up in Philadelphia, one who lived on the right side of the tracks but was drawn to the wrong side, befriended a boy there. Classic stuff, Dead End Kids, one grows up to be a priest, the other a criminal, only not quite as stark as that. In my book, one boy was going to grow up to be a reporter, the other one was going to be a cop, and they would end up at cross-purposes, the reporter insisting on printing something that undercut a major murder case, gave the killer a chance to go free. The cop does what he feels he has to do, kills the killer, and he’s arrested.

  I thought I was hot stuff.

  One night, I was sitting at my typewriter, looking at what I had written so far. By writing two pages a day, I had amassed three hundred pages midway into the year, almost a full novel. I began reading back through what I had accomplished and I was struck by two things.

  One, I really hated the reporter in my own story. All my sympathies were with the cop, although the reporter was the autobiographical character.

  Two, I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write for sour apples.

  Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t good. I swear I was good once. I had filled notebooks with poetry and short stories, won contests in high school and college. But the Star, that rewrite man, had destroyed something in me and I couldn’t get it back. I felt like a god stripped of his powers, forced to wander the earth in his reduced state as punishment. Only, punishment for what? As long as I kept calling my stories in to rewrite, my writing skills were going to diminish, diminish, diminish. The Star’s narrow-minded view of what made a story was destroying my own.

  But what if I moved up, got a new beat—and I still couldn’t write. What then?

  At that moment—I can still see myself at the desk in the living room, my young (then) wife gone to bed long ago, my shirtsleeves rolled up, and it’s like seeing a man who thinks he can fly, only to wake from a dream and find himself standing on a ledge. I froze. I don’t think I could have pressed a key on my typewriter with a gun to my head. I developed writer’s block. I have it to this day. I can’t write sentences, only words. I jot down facts in my notebook, but that doesn’t count as writing, that’s stenography. I actually know steno, which is why my notes are so good, so reliable, my quotes never questioned. No one has ever accused me of getting so much as a word wrong. When all the papers cover the same story and there’s a discrepancy in a quote or a fact, I’m the one who got it right. I haven’t had a single correction in almost thirty years on the job. Do you know how unusual that is?

  At lunch, I ask the lady, Maddie-Marjorie, to cover her half. She seems a little surprised, but she gives me her share, as she should. This isn’t a date. I pocket the check and go back to the office, fill out my expenses—including the one for the lunch I just had, writing “Sgt. Patrick Mahoney” on the back of the slip—and walk away with a nice fistful of cash. After work, I head to the cops’ favorite bar, where I use my expense money to buy everyone a round, then grab the check so I can submit that expense later. All legitimate. If buying a cop a beer isn’t part of doing my job, I don’t know what is.

  I see the patrolman from the Tessie Fine case, the one who was first on the scene, a young Polack with a reputation for being too good for his own good. He never stays for more than one beer and he has a sanctimonious puss on him, talks a little too much about his wife and not in the way most of the guys do, with good-natured jokes and complaints. No, this guy’s wife is a saint, an angel. The man doth protest too much if you ask me.

  “Did you know that that nice lady, the one who found Tessie Fine’s body and became the killer’s pen pal, is working at the paper now?” See, I give a little, then maybe I get a little.

  He frowns. “I’m not sure she’s a nice lady.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t want to gossip.”

  Which is, of course, the first thing someone says right before he gossips. This one in particular likes to gossip, although he doesn’t call it that. Men never do.

  I prime the pump. “She’s decided she wants to look into the Cleo Sherwood case. The barmaid from the Flamingo, the round-heels.”

  “Who cares about that?”

  “Nobody cares, so why not let her have a crack at it.”

  “She sure does like ’em dark,” he says.

  I lean in, slide my pack of cigarettes across the bar to him. I know him. He won’t stay for another beer, but he might nurse the one beer through a smoke.

  “Not sure I catch your drift.”

  “You ever meet a patrol named Ferdie Platt? Northwest, blacker than ink. She knows him.” He leans hard on that word, knows, makes sure I understand the implications.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been looking into him. He’s cozy with Shell Gordon, who owns the Flamingo. I don’t think she’s trying to get a story out of Cleo Sherwood. I think she’s fishing to take information back to Platt. I think he told her some stuff about the Tessie Fine case, which is how Bob Bauer knew what he knew. If she’s chasing this story, even money that Ferdie Platt put her up to it.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  He exhales smoke from his cigarette. “Got me. But I saw him coming and going from her place, which sure as hell isn’t in the Northwest, I know that much.”

  “And what were you doing there?”

  The Polack pulls on his beer, doesn’t comment. That’s the thing about this guy. He’s got the soul of a rat, he’s a tattletale who’s never grown up. He’s always keeping score.

  “I have to go,” he says. “My wife doesn’t sleep soundly until I get home.”

  He leaves me to puzzle over what he’s told me. So this little housewife got her big break because she has a cop boyfriend, a colored one at that. I wonder if he put her up to writing those letters to Tessie Fine’s killer, told her what to say, if the homicide cops were working her through him. But the cops I know were genuinely upset when the story broke, when the Star pointed out the discrepancy between what Corwin told them and what he told her, the thing about the car, the accomplice. Three months later, he’s still holding firm with them, insisting it was all a lie, that he just made stuff up to mess with her, but obviously there’s an accomplice out there and it’s driving them nuts. If they had the accomplice, they could play the two against each other, cinch a death penalty case for one of ’em.

  But I’m no tattletale. I won’t go running back to the paper and tell folks that this new girl is sleeping with a cop. It’s not like she’s going to end up covering cops, not for the Star.

  What did you thi
nk when you saw the body?

  What did you think when you saw the body? Did I become more real to you? Or less? It was a monstrous thing, I bet, like something from a horror movie. The creature from the park lagoon. I can’t bear to call it mine. Can anyone—you, the morgue people, the detectives—still see a person in that thing? I don’t blame people for not caring. I don’t care. I can’t feel anything for that mound of flesh and bone, holding stubbornly to its secrets. Full credit to you for staring it down at all.

  I know it sounds silly, but—I was naked, I assume? What happened to my clothes? Obviously, they would be the worse for wear, too, and they couldn’t leave them on my body. But are they evidence? Were they examined, then stored somewhere? Cleaned up and thrown away? Every piece told a story, if anyone cared to know it. There was a world of stories in the clothing I picked out that evening.

  Because the weather was mild, I chose leopard-print slacks, a lightweight red car coat, and an emerald-green blouse beneath it, 100 percent silk. The combination bothered me because it was too Christmas-y, but there was a man waiting for me, telling me not to dawdle. Time was a-wasting. A scarf tied snug over the hair, straightened just the day before. No jewelry.

  The clothes were all gifts from my man, but that doesn’t tell you the whole story. Any man can buy a woman a dress, a coat, a scarf. My man was much more cunning. He had to bide his time, then pounce on opportunities that presented themselves. Just like he had pounced on me the second he saw me. Occasionally, alterations were required. He did them himself. He knew my body that well. The idea of him bent over a sewing machine, tailoring those clothes to my frame—let’s just say that when I think of that, I know he loved me and I loved him for loving me. He was a king and I could have been his queen, a better one than the one that was forced on him, the one everyone said he had to keep if he wanted to expand his kingdom. I had read a lot of books about Henry VIII and his wives. Anne Boleyn was my favorite. I was, in a sense, trying to play her game, although the rules were a little different in 1965 than they were in 1500-whatever.