Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  Then: She did it. She all but confessed she did it. Even if Stephen twisted the girl’s neck, it was because she told him to. Tessie Fine was alive when his mother got there.

  The police would talk to her at the hospital. She would have to tell them what had happened, what Mrs. Corwin had said to her. Then what? Should she call the Star, tell them what she had learned?

  No, she thought. They’d just make her talk to rewrite.

  November 1966

  November 1966

  They took her to Sinai, the same hospital where she had given birth. Milton insisted they keep her overnight, and Maddie was almost weepily grateful to him for being there, taking charge. Later, she learned that he knew having her spend even a night in the Pikesville house would mean resetting the clock on their legal separation, which would slow down his marriage to Ali Whoever. But she didn’t mind even when she understood. She didn’t want to be in the Pikesville house, either, but she was too tender, in body and mind, to be alone in her apartment.

  She was given a private room with her own television and watched through the evening as the story unfolded. Mrs. Corwin had not gotten very far; she had crashed her car on Northern Parkway. She was in custody for stabbing Maddie and was expected to be arraigned for her role in the murder of Tessie Fine. She was her son’s accomplice and she had stabbed Maddie because she believed he had told her as much.

  It was very satisfying, hearing her name in Wallace Wright’s mouth. He described her as a reporter on assignment. Not accurate, but who cared. She had assigned herself. She had not broken her promise to Ferdie. The paper’s top editor called her, ever so solicitous, making it clear that he expected Maddie, once recovered, would give the Star the scoop.

  “We’d have you write it in the first person,” he said. “Face-to-face with a killer. I could put you on with rewrite now, or in the morning if you need to sleep—”

  But Maddie was an old hand at not making promises to men and she glided through the call with her usual grace. “I’ll call when I feel up to it,” she said.

  She was exhausted, sincerely, yet had trouble sleeping. It was almost midnight when she closed her eyes. A few hours later, she woke disoriented from a thankfully dreamless sleep. Where was she? What was going on? She was in the hospital. She had been stabbed. She had helped police find the accomplice—perhaps the perpetrator. With the two of them charged, police could then press one to cooperate, ensuring the death penalty for the other. Surely, that mother happily would see her son dead, would make that deal in a heartbeat if it meant a better outcome for her. How unnatural she was, but then—what is natural? People might call Maddie unnatural, too, if Seth were to screw up one day. What do you expect when his mother up and left when he was just sixteen?

  While she had required stitches, Mrs. Corwin was an inept assailant. The scar would not be pretty—Maddie thought of Ferdie and his bumpy navel—but it would seldom be seen by anyone. Maddie, eight days away from her thirty-eighth birthday, was past the time for two-piece bathing suits, never mind bikinis.

  Someone was in the room. A nurse? No, this was a Negro woman, fiddling with the trash. How inconsiderate, Maddie thought. Surely the trash could wait until tomorrow.

  The woman turned and said to her: “What have you done now, Madeline Schwartz?”

  “Maddie,” she corrected, automatically, stupidly. “Only my mother calls me Madeline. Do I know you?”

  “No, but not for lack of trying.” The woman sat in the Formica chair for visitors, the one where Milton had sat not even six hours ago. Even in the dim light, Maddie could see that the drab uniform was baggy on the woman’s slender frame, that her bone structure was striking, her eyes pale beneath dark lashes.

  “Who are you?”

  “I was Cleo Sherwood.”

  Maddie was hallucinating. Or dreaming. She gave herself a small pinch near the base of her elbow. But the woman didn’t disappear; quite the opposite. As Maddie’s eyes adjusted to the light, her face came into sharper focus.

  “Cleo Sherwood is dead.”

  “Yes, she is, always will be. But, man, you couldn’t let her be, could you?”

  “I don’t—”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t understand anything and you never will.”

  “I just wanted to know who killed you, how you came to be in the fountain. When I realized whom you were dating—”

  “Whom.” The repeated word felt like an accusation. But what, exactly, was the charge?

  “Who killed you?”

  “Shell Gordon ordered me killed. Because it was the only way to keep me from becoming the second Mrs. Taylor. That was going to happen. Ezekiel—not EZ, never EZ, not to me—didn’t care about the state senate. He didn’t care about Shell, and that was the real problem. One thing to be married to Hazel and to tomcat around Baltimore with any old piece. But to find love? To know happiness? That ate Shell up inside. Ezekiel was going to choose life with me and there was no job, no woman that Shell could dangle in front of him that would get him to change his mind.”

  Maddie remembered Judith’s tossed-off words, They also say Shell Gordon is a Baltimore bachelor, for what it’s worth.

  “He told Tommy to kill you. So who did Tommy kill? Whose body was in the fountain?”

  “My roommate, Latetia. But Tommy didn’t kill her. She overdosed two days after Christmas. So we dressed her in my clothes, although not my favorites, did what had to be done, put her someplace where she wouldn’t be found for a while.”

  Even in her haze, Maddie found the story not quite right. If Thomas Ludlow had been ordered by Shell Gordon to kill Cleo, why not just say he had and let her go? Why did there have to be a body at all?

  “Who are you, really?”

  “Why, I’m Latetia Tompkins. I eloped over the holidays, sent my roommate a telegram from Elkton. I’ve been living in Philly. Close enough so I could sneak down from time to time, just look at the people I left behind. I thought, maybe one day, that I could tell them. But, no. It’s gone too far. Now my father’s in jail, probably going to die there. Nice to know he loved me, after all, but it was a hell of a way to find out.” A pause. “I blame you.”

  “All I did was write the story. Someone was going to write it.”

  “That’s true. But you had already kicked up so much dust. Going to see the psychic. Talking to my parents, in front of my boys.”

  Maddie still felt as if she were in a dream. But one can, at times, be sharp in a dream.

  “Tommy wouldn’t know that. About your parents. And there’s no doubt that they think you’re dead. But someone else knows. Your sister, the one who lives at home?”

  “You should have let me be. That’s all I ever wanted. You can’t leave anything be. Who was I to you? The Lady in the Lake? Well, I wasn’t a lady and I was never in no lake. Everything you wrote was a lie, whether you know it or not. At least you’re haunting other folks now. Leave me be, Maddie Schwartz. I’m warning you.”

  “Why did you need a body? Why couldn’t Tommy just tell Shell Gordon that you were gone for good, buried somewhere you’d never be found?”

  “I didn’t say we needed one. I said we had one, and we used it.”

  Maddie pondered the serendipitous death of Latetia, the girl who wouldn’t be missed. Perhaps Thomas Ludlow did, in fact, have something to confess to. Maybe he had loved Cleo enough to do whatever he thought was necessary.

  Or had Cleo killed Latetia without thinking things through, then called Tommy in a panic? It still seemed impossible for even two people to drag an inert body up and over the fence, across the lake, up and into the fountain. But—a double date, a seemingly spontaneous dare. Let’s row over to the fountain, climb up, look at the city lights from there. Maybe Cleo had gone out that night with the man Thomas Ludlow had described to police, but maybe she had fixed Ludlow up with Latetia. Maybe it had just been the three of them.

  “But—”

  “Goodbye, Maddie Schwartz.”

  Maddie watc
hed almost in wonder as the woman stood, allowed her long, lovely body to droop into the defeated posture of a janitress, and shuffle out into the hall. Maddie would have been within her rights to wonder, come the morning, if it all had been a dream. But it was true. Cleo Sherwood was alive and Maddie could never tell anyone.

  As she fell back asleep, she realized that the hospital walls were a pale institutional green, while the Formica chair was yellow.

  November 1966

  November 1966

  Maddie was home before her thirty-eighth birthday. She expected a visit from Ferdie, curious about the gift he had promised, but he didn’t show up. Perhaps he didn’t realize she had returned to the apartment.

  Thanksgiving came and went, disturbingly warm, sixty-six degrees. In New York, the unseasonable temperatures created a bizarre smog event, blanketing the city with dense, blackish air until a cold front dispelled it. By the last Sunday of November, the weather had returned to normal, late-fall temperatures. But Maddie’s apartment on the third floor was always warm, so she continued to sleep with her window cracked. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  She was not asleep when she heard the window being raised—it wasn’t quite ten o’clock—but she pretended to be.

  Only Ferdie did not slide into bed, as was his usual practice. After a minute or two of playing possum, she opened her eyes. There he was, out of uniform. He wore slacks and a V-neck sweater with a collared shirt. His hair was getting longer—well, fuller. It grew out and up, not down. It looked good. He looked, Maddie realized, like a boxer whose photo had been in the papers earlier this month, frugging in London with a striking actress.

  “I’ve told you and told you about that window, Maddie.”

  “It just gets so hot up here.” She pushed away the covers, glad she’d had the foresight to wear a pretty gown.

  “You’ve been a busy girl.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Laughing, uninterested in talking. She held out her arms to him. But he stayed by the window.

  “You promised me, Maddie. You promised not to write anything.”

  “I promised not to write anything based on what you told me. And I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, maybe people who read the papers believe you went to talk to her—what did you say, mother to mother? No one in my shop was fooled. They knew someone had to have told you. They realized right away it was me.” A pause. “That we were together.”

  “But how—”

  “Some other cop saw me leaving here once, in a patrol car. That’s what they got me on. Not talking to you, but unauthorized use of a vehicle. Got me and my friend in the garage, who would let me borrow patrol cars at night, using them for a few hours before they were to be put back into service the next day. Did you ever wonder how I got here at night, Maddie? Do you know where I live, how far it is from here, how buses don’t run in the middle of the night?”

  “You never wanted to talk about yourself.”

  “Maybe I was waiting to be asked.”

  She had tried to ask him questions, she was sure of it. He had always deflected them. Hadn’t he?

  “I thought you were married.”

  “I’m not.”

  “That you had other women.”

  “I won’t lie to you. I did. At first. But then—Maddie, I love you.”

  She had nothing to say to that.

  “I guess that’s my answer. You don’t love me.”

  “I do, Ferdie. But you have to know it’s impossible.”

  “Because I’m black.”

  Yes and no, she thought. It was illegal because he was black. But it was impossible because he was younger. Because he was a cop and she was Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz and she wasn’t going to be a newspaper clerk forever. She could go out in public with—her mind groped to think of a black man of stature—Sidney Poitier. Andrew Young. Harry Belafonte Jr. But Ferdinand Platt was impossible on many levels, and race was only one of them. Wasn’t it?

  “That’s really not it.”

  “You know my happiest day of the past year? Going to that ball game with you. Even if I couldn’t hold your hand or put my hand at the small of your back as we moved through the crowd. Some people knew we were together. I could tell, by their looks. We fooled most people, but we couldn’t fool everyone. I was so proud to be with you. I love you, Maddie.”

  She still could not say the words back, even though it would be so easy, so true. She would not be bound by them, and yet she could not say them, even in past tense. “I don’t think I want to be anyone’s wife again, Ferdie. I don’t want to lose you, but I don’t want to lose myself, either.”

  “Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said.

  “For using a patrol car off hours?”

  “They let me resign. I could have stayed, but I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I put our business out on the street. Almost got a civilian killed.”

  It took Maddie a beat to realize she was the civilian. She lifted her nightgown, showed him the bumpy loop of a scar, then lifted the gown off her head.

  “Maddie—”

  “I’m so sorry for everything. I’m sorry about the job. I’m sorry—” She could not tell him her other regrets. She was sorry for Thomas Ludlow and sorry for Cleo’s father. Sorry that Cleo’s mother could never know that her daughter was alive. She was even sorry for Shell Gordon, trapped inside so many identities, never allowed to express what he really yearned for, small and mean enough to want others to be denied what he could not have. She was sorry for Latetia, dead and unmourned, fixed in history as a careless girl who eloped and was never heard from again. She was sorry for Mrs. Taylor, living in her beautiful house with a man who loved another. She was sorry for Cleo’s children.

  Most of all, she was sorry for herself. Because, like Ezekiel Taylor, she was so close to having a second chance at real love and she wasn’t brave enough to take it.

  “We shouldn’t,” he said. “We never should have started in the first place.”

  “My ring wasn’t stolen,” she said. “I did that to get the insurance money.”

  “I know,” he said. “I told you about Tommy Ludlow because we thought it would make you stop. Shell told Tommy he had to confess, to make you stop.”

  “I know,” she said. She hadn’t.

  He came to bed. For one last time, he came to her bed, and for the first time ever he stayed until the sun rose. Maddie walked him downstairs and kissed him goodbye at the front door, in full sight of the cathedral and whoever was walking down Mulberry Street at seven a.m.

  And then she went to work.

  The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, October 1985

  The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, October 1985

  “And now, our speaker. Madeline Schwartz has worked at the Beacon since 1966, where her career began with a harrowing first-person account of her near death at the hands of Angela Corwin, who was eventually convicted of the first-degree murder of Tessie Fine, a young Jewish girl killed in the tropical fish store where Corwin’s son worked. Stephen Corwin was given the death penalty for his role in the crime, but that was changed to life after a US Supreme Court decision struck down most of the nation’s death penalty laws in 1972. Schwartz started at the Beacon as a general assignment reporter, went on to cover city hall and the legislature, but is best known for her work in the Living section, first as a reporter of human-interest stories, now as a columnist. In 1979, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.”

  Maddie edited her introduction in her head. This was not the copy she had provided, she was sure of that. Close, but embellished here and there. Although, yes, she was the one who had written the Star out of her official history. She had taken her first-person near-death story about Angela Corwin, parlayed it into a job at the Beacon, and never looked back. The Beacon was a little stuffy and dull after the Star, but it was willing to give her a chance as a reporter.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. “And ‘finalist for the Pulitzer’ is a very
grand way of saying that one lost the Pulitzer.”

  Audiences like a little gentle self-deprecation, but she was always of two minds about publicizing her bridesmaid status. It bugged her that she hadn’t won that year, the first time that the prize for feature writing was given. More galling, it had gone to a colleague on the Light, the Beacon’s less mannerly sister paper. He had written about brain surgery, while her story had centered on a child with a rare heart condition. “Brains trump heart, I guess,” Bob Bauer had said when they met up for drinks later that week. The remark had been tinged with envy; Bauer had won all the state prizes and some national ones, but had never come anywhere close to a Pulitzer.

  Maddie had won almost everything, too, and she still had plenty of years in her.

  As a high-profile columnist, she was much in demand on the ladies’-luncheon circuit. The Beacon had a speaker’s bureau and actually paid its reporters to make these presentations; the paper considered it a good community-relations ploy. Maddie had learned how to appear to talk off the cuff, to vary her stories just enough so she couldn’t be accused of being canned or rote.

  “I’m often asked”—a lie, she was never asked—“what, exactly, is human interest? What makes a person interesting? Well, I believe all people are intrinsically interesting if you know the right questions to ask, if you take time. I think a good reporter should be able to open a phone book, stab a name with a pencil, call up the person, and find a story. Sometimes, I do just that.”

  (Also a lie, she had never done that.)

  She told of her latest triumph, an exclusive interview with the parents of a child who was kidnapped from the Sinai Hospital maternity ward by a woman disguised as a nurse, caught several days later when she tried to con another hospital into giving her a birth certificate. The parents still expressed wonder at how easily someone had slipped into Sinai Hospital. Maddie did not tell them she knew it was, in fact, quite easy. A uniform and a defeated posture could do the trick.