Wilde Lake: A Novel

by Laura Lippman

  “What did they do?”

  He paused, leaned forward, palms pressed together as if praying, his chin on the thumbs, his nose on the index fingers. “They were too protective. They acted like the parents in Sleeping Beauty. Only it wasn’t spindles that needed to disappear—it was everything. They would have had her live forever in her childhood bedroom, venturing out only under the most controlled circumstances.”

  “Why did they start calling after all this time?”

  “I don’t know. But they won’t be calling again. I’m going to get an unlisted number and install a second phone line for just you and AJ to use, although it will be in his bedroom for now.”

  I wanted to argue that this was unfair, that if the phone were in AJ’s room, then it was his phone. But then my father might ask how often my friends called and I would have to admit that no one called me, ever.

  “What do you say we go out for pizza tonight? I was in such a rush to get home after I heard about the calls that I didn’t stop at Colombo’s on my way.”

  There was no such thing as grandparents’ rights at this time. But I did not know until recently that my careful father, who was not inclined to leave things to chance, took out a restraining order against his in-laws. Today, I suppose, such a thing would become public. Did you hear? The state’s attorney has a restraining order against his in-laws. People had more secrets then. Or maybe they were just better about keeping them.

  At any rate, the three of us, a team, united, made the short drive to Colombo’s, our favorite pizza place. To this day, I find all pizza inferior to the memory of what I ate on Friday nights from Colombo’s. As a treat, we ate at the restaurant instead of getting carryout. We even had a whole pitcher of root beer to share. I was beside myself with joy, but AJ’s mood seemed grim. I tried to understand. AJ knew our grandparents, had loved them and been loved by them. I wasn’t being asked to give anything up. But AJ was, for a second time. Now, I can see it. AJ had lost his grandparents as surely as he had lost his mother. I never had either.

  Both the Closters would be dead soon. It turned out that our grandmother decided to contact us because her husband was dying of pancreatic cancer. He was gone by that summer, and she followed within a year. There was no inheritance, not for us. When I lived in Mount Washington during the first years of my marriage, I sometimes drove a few miles out of my way to go past the Closters’ house. It has been chopped up into apartments, and the upkeep is minimal. But the stained-glass windows and the turret are still there. I would have loved to know that house in its glory. And I think I would have liked to have known my grandparents, but if my father thought I needed to be kept away from them, he must have had good reasons.

  In contrast to AJ’s dark mood at Colombo’s that night, our father was unusually ebullient. He spoke to strangers, laughed at their jokes no matter how lame, shook hands. I think he even bought pitchers of beer for some tables.

  “That was fun,” I whispered to AJ in the cozy cover of the dark backseat. He usually fought to ride in the front, as he was about to get his learner’s permit and wanted to study our father’s driving. “I wish we did things like that more often.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Go out. Talk to other people, like it was a party.”

  “Well, sure,” AJ said. “The election is only eighteen months away. It’s time for Andrew Jackson Brant to pretend he actually likes people.”

  Our father stiffened in the front seat, and the back of his neck reddened. Disrespect was a serious offense in our household, perhaps the most serious offense. “Don’t sass me,” he would say, his Virginia accent suddenly pronounced. Teensy, too, was hell on talking back. But our father said nothing even when AJ added: “Yes, sirree, Andrew Jackson Brant can do a darn good job of pretending to like hoi polloi, the people in whose name he serves. Most people would say the hoi polloi, but Andrew Jackson Brant would be the first to tell them that they’re wrong, it doesn’t require an article. People wonder where I get my acting chops from? Well, look no further. Andrew Jackson Brant could have been the Richard Burton of his day. Although he wouldn’t have married Adele Closter twice, I suppose, the way Burton did with Elizabeth Taylor. Andrew Jackson Brant never makes the same mistake twice.”

  “I would have married your mother over and over again,” our father said.

  “Isn’t that the very definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome?”

  Our father braked sharply, although the light was green. Braked sharply, then turned onto the narrow road that led to the tennis courts behind the Village Center. The lights were on and AJ’s face looked even whiter in their eerie glow. He was terrified. As was I. Neither of us had ever pushed our father this far.

  But, after a minute of suspenseful silence, our father said, without turning around: “I have no regrets, AJ. I don’t expect you to understand that, but it’s true.”

  The next week, we went back to our Friday ritual of having take-out pizza. AJ began taking his slices to his room, talking on the phone while he ate, inserting folded triangles of cheese pizza into his mouth as if he were a sword swallower. I expected our father to reprimand him, but he never did.

  JANUARY 12

  A knock. Oh, bless the Lord, Lu thought, someone has started knocking on my door. It’s her secretary, Della, but that’s a start.

  “Fred Hollister wants to know if he can get on your schedule this afternoon,” Della says. She’s Lu’s age, yet looks years older. Plump, matronly. Did people used to age at more or less the same rate when Lu was a child? More and more, aging seems to be a choice. A choice dictated by genetics and disposable income, but still a choice. After all, anyone can dye her hair, pick out wardrobes that won’t age her. But Della seems comfortable with her gray hair and cushiony frame.

  “To discuss what?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me, but he says it’s important, something he doesn’t want you to hear from anyone else.”

  Intriguing. Lu’s mind runs through the various possibilities. She assumes it’s some hangover from Fred’s tenure, a case that’s going to boomerang back on appeal because of shoddy work by this office or the police department. She had plans for this afternoon, but she accepts that this has to take precedence. If Fred thinks she wants to hear it from him first, then she definitely does.

  “Put him in for noon. I’ll eat at my desk.”

  Seven days into her new job, Lu is still trying to get a handle on all the bureaucracy that comes with it. She gets up at four and answers e-mail for an hour, but it’s like fighting a hydra: for every reply she manages, another three crop up. Meetings, memos, memos about meetings. In the modern age, access cannot be curtailed. Back in the ’70s, her father had an office with six lines and no answering machine. No mobile phone, not even when the big clunky models became available in the ’80s. Maybe a beeper, she thinks, by his final term. A beeper. She feels like some futuristic creature whose every cell is available for sensory input. And it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that his/her message, call, memo is one of many, that what is urgent to them can be of a lower priority to her. To the sender or caller, that message is the only one, the crucial one. Lu worked all weekend to justify a long lunch away from the office and now she’s lost that reward.

  When Fred arrives, he looks much more cheerful than the man who visited Lu only a week ago. More pampered, too. His gray suit is sharp, expensive looking, his graying hair recently trimmed, not that he has a lot of it. New glasses, tortoiseshell frames with a glint of gold at the temples. He’s actually whistling, although the first thing he says is: “Whoa—trigger warning. I swear I got a little PTSD walking in here.”

  “Really? Your step is so springy. And that suit. Are you on someone’s payroll?”

  “I am. Do you know Howard & Howard?”

  “Of course I do, Fred. I was an assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore. With you. Remember? Howard & Howard is only one of the biggest law firms i
n the city.”

  “Right. Of course. Anyway, I’m going to be doing criminal defense work for them. And I thought you should hear it from me: I’m defending Rudy Drysdale. Defending him—and invoking Hicks.”

  “You want to go to trial within a hundred eighty days?”

  “Yes. Jail is hard on Rudy. Every day he’s inside is an eternity for him. By the way, I also want a hearing on bond reduction. Rudy’s original counsel was, uh, somewhat over her head. I don’t know how your office got him locked up with no bail.”

  “Because he’s a homeless man with no fixed address. But, hey, go for it. Even if you can get him bail, it’s going to be pretty high. Who’s paying for all this? Did you take this on pro bono?”

  Fred laughs. “No, Howard & Howard made it quite clear that hiring me as a potential partner did not mean I was free from the burden of contributing to the bottom line, not yet. Maybe down the road I’ll have the luxury of cases that don’t pay. Rudy Drysdale is paying full freight.”

  “How?” Lu asks. “He’s on SSI, and he can’t even stretch his check for a month. That’s why he broke into Mary McNally’s apartment, right?”

  Fred lets that pass. “Arrangements have been made, don’t worry.”

  “Aren’t you going to request a competency hearing?”

  “I brought it up, but you know and I know he’s not going to meet the standard, so it’s a waste of time. My client’s only concern is that whatever happens needs to happen as soon as possible. Jail is physically painful to him and erodes his mental state. He needs to be outdoors. Do you know he walks, every day, all day, in all kinds of weather?”

  Lu has no intention of telling Fred what she knows about Rudy Drysdale. Fred has some kind of ace in the hole. She needs to flush it out.

  “Absent a new development,” she says, “I don’t see a deal on this one. So how fast do you want to go?”

  “I can go as fast as you can. This will be the only thing on my plate for a while.”

  So it’s a grudge match, pure and simple. Fred is going to try and show Lu that it wasn’t his fault that he pulled away from trials, that the state’s attorney has too much other stuff to do and can’t focus effectively on trial work. And it’s not a bad case for a good defense attorney. She wonders if he will argue that Rudy was in the apartment pre- or postmortem. Which would she argue, as a defense attorney? She runs through the possible scenarios. Premortem. He breaks in, then leaves, never even sees Mary McNally. Then why does he touch the thermostat upon departing? No, he’s going to stick to the postmortem discovery. Fred’s going to argue that Rudy didn’t adjust the thermostat, only that he touched it for some bullshit reason. He’s going to introduce a phantom third party, one who didn’t leave prints. He can spin whatever fairy tales he wants to spin. That’s the advantage of being a defense attorney.

  “Fine,” she says. “My secretary will be in touch with the schedule. I’m really glad you landed on your feet, Fred. It’s nice to see you enthusiastic about a case. How did Rudy’s parents even know to contact you?”

  “I didn’t say it was Rudy’s parents who contacted me,” he says.

  “Who else would it be?” Lu asks.

  He’s determined to have the last word: “By the way, even though I’m not challenging his competency, I am considering a ‘not criminally responsible’ plea.”

  “He’ll still do time. He might do it at Patuxent”—Maryland’s facility with a unit for offenders with psychiatric problems—“but he’ll still be inside.”

  “True. And in the end, I have to do what he wants to do. Rudy says he’s innocent. That’s good enough for me.”

  As soon as Fred leaves, Lu goes to her computer and searches the county property database, then finds a reliable website for current real estate values. Rudy’s parents live on Rain Dream Hill, less than a mile from the Brants. Their house would have been among the earliest Columbia homes—modern then, stodgy now, with the best on the street valued at less than $500,000. The Drysdale house has no mortgage on it, not as of last week, but it’s valued at $375,000, and Google Street View indicates that’s a generous assessment. Another reason to invoke Hicks, then. A good defense will run more than $375,000, much more. Howard & Howard will assemble experts, jury selection coaches. They have a big timeline to play with—a lot can happen in a week. Lu has fingerprints and a witness who picked Rudy out of a lineup. She also has a man who has no history of violence, accused of beating a strange woman. Was she a stranger to him? Obliterating someone’s face is damn personal. They need to lean harder on that. Maybe Mary McNally volunteered somewhere or gave him a ride one day. Heck, she could even be the kind of softie who tried to give a homeless guy some task to do in her house. Lu’s going to lean on Mike and her own staff investigator to do more legwork on the victim.

  She feels a surge of adrenaline. Lu has always been competitive. All the Brants are. Her father tried to curb this tendency in her, probably because he found it distinctly unfeminine. But this only made Lu more competitive. Fred wants to go all Montague and Capulet, avenge his honor? She won’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s personal, even if it is for him. She’ll win this case because she’s right, because a nice middle-aged lady walked into her apartment one night, probably still thinking dreamy thoughts about the leading man in The Theory of Everything, only to be strangled and then beaten.

  She checks her calendar. She could reschedule her lunch for tomorrow or Wednesday. She calls out to Della, asks if she’s right about having that time free.

  “It can work,” Della says, as she walks into Lu’s office and places a phone message slip on her desk. “I’ll make it work. Meanwhile, while you were with Fred, that woman who called the other day, Mrs. Schumann, asked that you call her back.”

  “About what?”

  “She still insists you would recognize her name.”

  Lu doesn’t, not at all. And the number on Della’s pink memo is a California one, 650 something. She remembers that prefix from Gabe’s trips. She will remember that prefix forever. Of course, area codes mean nothing now, just an indication of where you got your first cell phone. She crumples the pink slip into a ball and makes a high, arching shot toward her wastebasket. It hits the rim, but it goes in. Her brother, who deigned to play basketball with her in their driveway on those rare occasions when his friends weren’t around, always told her: It doesn’t have to go in pretty, Lu. It just has to go in.

  THE PEOPLE TREE

  Columbia turned ten in 1977, the year I turned seven, but its birthday was a much bigger deal than mine, a series of events and concerts and fireworks. My father found what he called the “hoopla” mildly ridiculous, although he was careful not to express this view in public.

  “Europe thought our bicentennial was a joke,” he said over dinner. It was spring, the sky was bright well into evening, and I stared longingly at the world beyond our supper table. Most evenings, there were just two of us. AJ, as it happens, was at rehearsal for one of the birthday concerts. “And here we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of an unincorporated town. But it would be impolitic for me not to attend all the festivities.”

  “You’re in politics,” I said, confused.

  “Exactly.”

  I don’t think he minded, really. Much as he disliked celebrations about him, he wanted other people to enjoy themselves. I realized that night that we never had acknowledged my father’s birthday, which fell a week after mine. We never did anything to mark the day—at his insistence. Earlier that week, we had been assigned the task of making “spring tradition” cards—no Easter, no Passover in Columbia schools. I had spent my childhood creating holiday cards and Father’s Day cards, but never a birthday card, not for my father.

  “Why don’t you have birthday parties?” I asked.

  “It’s a week after yours, and yours is eight days after Christmas. The parties have to stop sometime.”

  “But a birthday—everyone deserves a birthday,” I said. “It’s your special day, a
day of your own day.” I had a little book that called it just that.

  “I don’t think I merit attention for hanging around another year.”

  “Are all grown-ups like that?” I was nervous that I might be expected to behave this way one day.

  “No, not at all. Your mother loved hers. She turned it into a weeklong celebration sometimes.”

  Later that evening, as I reported the conversation back to AJ, he gave me a scornful look. He had been giving me those looks more and more since he turned fifteen. “It’s the day Mom died, Lu. That’s why he doesn’t celebrate it.”

  “How did she die, AJ?” I had asked this question before, but I still needed the reassurance that my birth had not killed her.

  “Teensy said she just wasn’t made for this world and her heart finally gave out.”

  “But not because of me, right? Not because she had a baby? Is that what our grandparents think? Is that why we don’t talk to them?”

  “No, not because of you,” AJ said. “I think she got some infection or something in the hospital and it ate away at her heart. Because she was already weak. She was in bed most of the time she was pregnant with you.”

  Still, didn’t that make it my fault? I decided to change the subject. “Daddy says it’s silly, having a celebration for a city’s ten-year-old birthday.”