Maggie Terry

by Sarah Schulman

  “Can I grow tomatoes in a studio apartment?” she asked Craig, only realizing by his expression of negation that she had sealed her fate with the words studio apartment. Of course, he didn’t answer, which was an act of compassion in itself, really. It relieved her from more recognition of how much she wasn’t ready to be on this job.

  Mike and Enid entered the conference room with a joyful radiance, making clear that this office was a happy place. It was designed to be described as “filled with life.” Photos of the good old times covered the walls. There was evidence of important friends and impressive handshakes, grateful, good-looking families living it up. Portraits smiled down on the room: Enid and Mike with Hillary Clinton, Mike with Bill, photos of his dead son Alex, as though there was nothing to hide. Screaming pictures of Mike running, before he was felled by a sore loser’s bullet. Mike playing touch football, and later post-rehab shots of him playing wheelchair polo and winning second place in the local paramarathon, senior division. I’m alive, his office wall insisted. You can’t stop me. It was his kitsch, his shtick, how alive he was. But Mike’s son was dead forever, and Maggie knew—better than anyone in that room—that that meant Mike was also dead. That he had to live with having ignored the warnings. That could have . . . could have . . . made a . . . made a . . . difference.

  She did remember Mike Fitzgerald telling her that his son was innocent. Sons are always innocent. They get away with everything, but they also never get real help. They self-destruct like Alex did, overdosing in the men’s room in Columbia University’s Butler Library. Or like the son of her veteran detective partner, Eddie Figueroa: hot-headed or lazy or over-the-top, but still taking the life of a man named Nelson Ashford just because he was looking for his keys.

  “It could have been a gun, and then Eddie would be dead. That’s what no one wants to understand,” Julio wept. “He’s innocent. My son.”

  When Maggie had shown up at Mike Fitzgerald’s door, dirty and strung out that very significant morning, he had made a deadly mistake. A narcissistic mistake. He didn’t want to acknowledge that his family had problems, normal human conflicts. Addicted kids were so normal that everyone would have understood. But Mike couldn’t be like everyone else. He couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t accept what it meant about him. Underneath all that energy and accomplishment, his upper-crust lifestyle, good standing, and social role, Mike couldn’t allow himself to be a person with a child who had a real but normal problem. So, he did nothing. And hence, apocalypse. Like Julio, who couldn’t have a kid who was a bad cop. He couldn’t accept it, just like he never mentioned that his partner, Maggie, was getting high before going out on assignments. That she was drinking in the police car. He never said anything. Julio was good, so nothing around him could go wrong.

  But Mike was different, now that his son was dead. Now Mike listened to everything that everyone had to say. He took everyone seriously. He was open now. Now that his son was dead. Now he changed, now that it didn’t matter.

  “Okay, everybody, Maggie, I want you on a case right away.”

  “Mike.” Enid placed her hands on the table. Age spots, of course. “Mike, why don’t we start her with something easy? Like a divorce? Not that divorce is easy.”

  Maggie cringed. She had an enemy already.

  Mike shined his light on Enid. He smiled. His eyes were full of his own open heart. He grinned the way women like men to grin. They learn it as boys to make their mothers calm down and let them do what they want. When he was young it telegraphed juicy bastard, and now it said kind.

  “Now,” Michael continued, putting his hairy hand on Enid’s spotted one. “We have a high-profile client coming in.”

  Craig looked up, annoyed. “Who is it? How come nobody tells me anything around here?”

  There was a knock on the conference room door.

  “Come in!” Mike was beaming now, excited. He knew what was coming.

  “Hi,” Sandy squeaked, a little more nervous than usual. “She’s here!” Sandy giggled.

  This indicated to the rest of the staff that she must have recognized the client, which made everyone else even more curious, since Sandy was considered to know nothing about anything that mattered. So, this client had to be someone whose face would be on the kind of TV shows that everyone assumed Sandy watched. “She’s here.”

  “Who’s here?” Craig was mad now. “How come I don’t know what is going on? Now I’m not prepped. You could have texted me.”

  Maggie observed it all. She saw Enid’s fear, Mike’s dominance, Craig’s expectation of disrespect, and how no one looked at Sandy at all. No one saw her. And using those same impulses, Maggie noticed that Sandy wore a simple, gorgeous, handmade ring on the middle finger of her right hand. It was rough gold with a garnet stone. It wasn’t expensive, but someone had made it for her; it was so perfect for her hand. So, Sandy had people in her life with sophisticated taste who were personal and intelligent and talented. Maggie knew that someone with those kinds of acquaintances, perhaps even friends, had conversations as advanced as their taste in rings. Clocking how none of her new workmates had taken this in, Maggie started to wonder if maybe someday she might be able to get back in the game. She imagined a possibility: gratitude.

  “Okay team.” Mike straightened his tie like they were going to have the time of their lives. “Here we go.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2:00 PM

  Lucy Horne was an emblematic person, a weather changer. When she arrived at the party, people felt differently about themselves. They were transformed into those in the same room as Lucy Horne, into selfies trying to catch her in the frame. Tweets, profile pics, and status updates galore. Anyone’s doubts about their past missteps dissolved into satisfaction, as the revelation of being in a circle that included Lucy Horne was the irrefutable, concrete marker of true success.

  “I was a little faggot getting the shit beat out of me in Mississippi, but now I am serving scallop crudo to Lucy Horne.”

  “I’ve had nowhere to go on Christmas for sixteen years, but tonight I shook hands with Lucy Horne at a benefit for Planned Parenthood. Who needs love?”

  It was the ultimate fuck-you to everyone who had never believed, who criticized, belittled, shunned, and bullied. It proved that those others were nothing and the beleaguered survivor of their hideous status quo was now all.

  When Lucy Horne stepped into the conference room at Fitzgerald & Robbins, there was a gasp of silent awe, if silence could gasp. Each party snapped to recognition, then became elevated to their best and most performative self. Mike was in charge, Enid was the voice of reason, Craig was dependable and no-nonsense, Sandy ready-to-please. The shroud of negative attention lifted, giving Maggie a breather, a chance to absorb rather than deflect. This unexpected spectacle was her first opportunity to watch her gang of new colleagues respond to something other than her own unwanted presence. Maggie saw Craig glance up at Lucy, have his moment of instant recognition, and then automatically google her. This was the new politesse of the IT professional—no need for business cards, or even introductions. The famous face stimulated the search: websites, Wiki pages, Twitter streams, YouTube channels. Factoids reinforced the faith at the center of the American aesthetic that any person—even with the complications of fame, marketing, and other people’s projections—can be summed up.

  Lucy had good skin, an expensive body, and healthy hair. She was seductive, smiled with a slight tilt, had excellent, undetectable plastic surgery, and so exemplified “looks great for her age.” Sixties looking like fifty. Classy. O’Neill. The false naturalness and natural falsity of a true sophisticate. Aging through the classics. Encompassing the entirety of Chekhov’s The Seagull: first playing innocent Nina, then disappointed Masha, and finally the survival-by-narcissism grand dame Irina Arkadina. Maggie’s English degree from Vassar always came in handy. There was no loss in being able to reference the Western canon, which peeked around every corner where power lurked.

  “
Lucy needs no introduction,” Mike began. “She was the best student at Yale School of Drama, brought her ethereal gravitas to the New York stage, broke into cinema working with the most credible auteurs; she became the star needed for anything that had meaning, and once she became too big to fail, she herself brought the meaning it lacked of its own accord. She is the brand for quality and for brass: Shakespeare, musicals, new plays, celebrity bios, costume dramas. She even appeared almost nude, once.” Everyone laughed. “And then she had a brilliant television career, on Mister and Mrs., for eleven seasons. All along Lucy was carefully allied with the most liberal of causes, birth control, the rights of the poor to something, racism is wrong.”

  “And Hillary, of course,” Enid jumped in.

  Maggie noticed everything. She saw Enid smile authentically, which made the whole room unconsciously and silently sigh with relief, like seeing Mama finally happy. Enid seemed to be the group’s emotional moderator, and her consent made Mike glow with the joy of successfully being the Leader. That was Enid’s function, to withhold approval. And then, when Mike surpassed all bounds, to finally, jarringly, and sparingly deliver. She was one of those tough old ladies who never said “good job” until she meant it, and Mike desperately needed a bullshit detector within arm’s length.

  Maggie, of course, recognized Lucy, but had only really experienced her as someone to fall asleep to on late-night television. TV was something from Maggie’s past life to stare at without comprehension and nod off in front of, something to make the world go away and replace it with nothing, to curl up with Frances and not have to talk. For the stoned, TV was an engaging series of light, graphics, and a wall of too much sound. A stand-in for every missing person and idea, and Lucy Horne was a pillar of this apparatus of mass substitution.

  “Mike, thank you so much for seeing me.” Lucy telegraphed her emotions of real gratitude, confidence, history of care. Yes, she was an actress, used to the employ of performance to compensate for a cheesy and overwritten improvisational script called Daily Life. “I am so . . . grateful.” That line was cliché but the delivery was understated balance.

  When Maggie worked as a detective all those years, the guys on the force would read the Post, and sometimes the Daily News, especially if there was a cop story or a sports scandal. In that way, she had become familiar with working-class public figures, corrupt politicians, popes, diplomats caught on dates with topless dancers . . . society’s scum, both high and low, and all their many victims. Julio read El Diario, but they’d never discussed its contents. Eleven years working with the same partner and she did not share his news. It was a kind of privacy. He didn’t know what she was snorting and she didn’t know what he was reading. Julio’s in-laws, Julio’s nieces and nephews, Julio’s father’s cancer. Those were the things they discussed. And his son Eddie. How Eddie went down. How to rescue him. And the suspects of course. The human beings under investigation; most of them were guilty: the confused, those with no impulse control, the desperate, the fourteen-year-olds with brains who were doing stupid things because they were so fucking bored, the enraged, the abandoned, the ones who couldn’t get anyone to care, the hungry, and most of all, the New Yorkers who didn’t know how to solve problems. That was the source of everything bad in the world that wasn’t caused by the weather: people not knowing how to solve problems. Detectives know that the truth lies in the order of events. You cannot get at anything’s core until you know the order of events. There are initiating actions and then there are consequential ones. Nothing just happens, and no one is just bad. All detectives know this: people do things for reasons. In order to gather the facts, you have to listen and ask. And if you flash the badge, they are supposed to answer. Murder, child murder, child rape, stealing everything, burning down the house, and, oh yeah, calling the police every time a person can’t be bothered to look in the mirror and alter themselves a little. Just a smidge. These were the cases sent to Detectives Terry and Figueroa, over and over again for eleven years. People in trouble.

  Maggie suddenly understood, looking at the texture of Lucy Horne’s casual/fancy/sporty/singular/stunning/breezy/summer ensemble, that that car, with Julio, had been the safe place where she could hide. How much did Lucy’s outfit cost? A thousand dollars? The dirty station houses, the green paint, the lack of comfort, the greasy smell. The holding cells, the bad food, the locker room, the young rookies, the badge. And the squalor in which so many New Yorkers live: cramped quarters, holes in the ceiling, rats de rigueur. Nothing works, not the elevator, not the lights in the stairwell. Not the bathtub, nor the windows. Frances came from a working-class family and when she got mad she’d say that Maggie was slumming, but actually that world was the place to hide in plain sight, away from anyone who couldn’t be bothered to see through her. Because, after all, Margaret Elisabeth Terry came from pedigree. When a smart little WASP grows up around gardeners, third-world aristocrats, Eurotrash, and the most protected people on the planet, ultimately the other members of the inflated class are the only ones who can really see when something has gone very, very wrong. And that is the one thing that WASPs never want to discover. Because so much is already wrong: the privilege, the arrogance, and the superiority. So, when regular people look at it, they see the emblematic injustice. But, the depth of an individual’s pathology? Indistinguishable.

  Coming to work at her job as a New York City police detective after doing drugs at lunch was wrong. Maggie knew that for real, now. She didn’t know that when she was doing it, because she was deluded. There is an overlap between addiction and arrogance. Why else does someone stick a needle in their arm for the first time? They know what’s going to happen. They know people get addicted and their lives become hell, but they do it anyway. If she had slid into the station house on three martinis or Bloody Marys at breakfast, the guys would have attributed it to her religion: WASP Nonexistent. But doing proletarian drugs with blond hair and blue eyes was beyond any socially recognized transgression or overstep. It was too stupid to be understood.

  “Michael.” Lucy coasted the room, intelligently, seductively, appropriately insinuating and reasonable. She played her layers, that one.

  “Lucy.” He glowed.

  “Michael, you have been so wonderful to me over these many years. All those wills and contracts and divorces.” She smiled, so the staff laughed. Even Enid. “Sometimes it has been awful, really, and you’ve been so terrific.”

  Enid nodded. “Divorce is awful.” She was commiserating with a celebrity but would have embraced anyone subjected to a divorce. “I have tickets to see your play.”

  “Lucy is on Broadway at the moment,” Michael explained to Craig, Sandy, and Maggie, who he assumed never went to Broadway.

  In Maggie’s case, he was absolutely correct. But Craig had a family, he had in-laws, he had out-of-town guests from various universities and his fraternity, and Maggie guessed he would rather drop money on theater tickets than have to sit across the table and maintain a conversation. As for Sandy, well she was silent and therefore she must know something. She must know how little it would help her to tell Lucy Horne about all of her performances she had enjoyed and benefitted from, because it would only deposit her into the category of sycophant.

  “Have you seen today’s news?” Lucy asked, a haunted quality now.

  “You mean Nelson Ashford?” Craig barely inflected.

  “What about him?” Maggie blurted out.

  “The Klan-loving head of the Department of Justice is dismissing all charges against his killer.”

  Maggie froze. Eddie was free.

  “I’m sorry Craig, but that is not what Lucy is referring to.” Mike was annoyed. Hillary was a fine topic for office politics but nothing too racial.

  Whoa! Eddie Figueroa was going to walk. Oh my God, Maggie winced. She looked at Craig, but, having been reprimanded, he was now blank.

  “More settlements on the West Bank?”

  That had come from Sandy, now revealed to be the bigges
t freak of all, the most extreme, and also the most deceptive.

  “No.” Lucy glided, as smooth as lube for ladies. “I’m afraid there was a murder.”

  “Actress!” Maggie shouted. And there it was, lodged in her memory box, Nick Stammas behind the deli counter that very morning, holding up the New York Post and plopping it down next to her apple and tea. Finally, a new experience produced. One not demanding to be suppressed. A day in which nothing terrible had happened yet, except that Nelson Ashford was dead for no reason and Officer Eddie Figueroa was free without having to produce an explanation, but his family would be so relieved. Julio’s wife. She would be so . . . justified. The headline: “Actress Strangled.”

  “Yes.” Lucy looked her straight in the eye. Another blue-eyed blond, just like Maggie. Blue-eyed blonds threw silent recognition at each other constantly. About how recessive they are, and therefore how untouched. “May I have some coffee?”

  Sandy jumped up because this was her lapsed responsibility.

  “Me too,” Craig said, annoyed, taking advantage of the moment to get his needs met. Why does he always have to wait for someone else to ask Sandy to get them coffee before she would get him his?

  Sandy left the room to serve and Lucy showed her hand, like an adult waiting for the child to go to bed before telling the story of a rape.

  “That poor girl, in the newspaper. That sweet, sweet girl was in my play. That girl. My play. I want you to find her killer.”

  Murder. In a constant avalanche of unbearable memories and associations—Alina, Frances, Julio, crack, dope, Courvoisier and Coke, and coke—only murder, was useful to recall. Maggie knew a great deal about death. It had been her profession. Disemboweled, decomposed, decapitated bodies in elevators, on toilets, in washing machines, in swimming pools, garbage bags, subway tracks, in the arms of their killers, lovers, mothers, all of whom were guilty. Like Julio always said, “Once you’ve fucked someone, it’s easier to kill them.” The wall is down. The penetration is so natural. It’s easier to break a neck that you’ve licked, sucked, and ravished. Overkill is the greatest sign of love. Why say, “I’m too anxious to negotiate the relationship right now,” when you can end someone’s life? Right? Pulverize rather than communicate. Murder is for people who cannot slow down. Every detective knows that. So, look for the person whose mind is racing.