Lady in the Lake
With the sun down, the cold begins creeping into our bones, that March dampness that’s worse than dead-of-winter in some ways. I feel bad, not having something to drape over the ladies’ shoulders, but if I take off my jacket, I’ll be in shirtsleeves, and they’ve both got coats. The homicide detectives show up, but Paul and I have to keep the street clear and the women won’t go, not until that little body is taken away, the head hanging at that horrible angle. You don’t have to be strong to do that to a little girl. You do have to be awfully angry. Who could be that angry at a little girl? I hope it’s not a sex crime. I think that would drive me crazy, if a child of mine died that way.
I can tell it hits her hard, the dark-haired one. It’s more personal to her somehow because she has a kid. Or because it was her idea to search here. How did you know to look here? we ask her, but she doesn’t say anything, just hugs herself.
The news people finally get wind of it. We’ve been careful on the radios, but we are less than a mile from Television Hill and the road has been blocked. On a clear late-winter night like this, the red-and-blues can be seen for miles. Some concerned citizen probably began making calls. The reporters are kept at the end of the street, sometimes yelling out questions, but mostly quiet. At some point, I see the Star’s cop reporter, Jack Diller, walking down the street. Diller has been covering the beat so long he’s more cop than reporter and when we tell him to get back, he’s amiable. “But is it Tessie Fine? Just tell me that,” he says. Somehow, he gets confirmation, but not from me.
We drive the women home, of course. Never occurred to me that they live in opposite directions. I wonder how they know each other, how they ended up paired off for the search. The older one gets in the front seat and we let it go. Paul takes the backseat and talks a blue streak. He’s flirting, the bum. We drive up to Pikesville, which I expected, it’s where all the Jews live. But then the other one, the lady with the lawyer husband, tells us: “I live downtown. I’m sorry—I know it’s pretty far out of your way.”
We tell her we don’t mind.
On the drive downtown, I give her some advice: “You don’t have to talk to the press. It’s better if you don’t.”
“Why?”
“There’s a killer out there. The less he knows about what we know, the better. And in the meantime, until there’s an arrest, you’re the story.”
This seems to give her pause. “Is that a bad thing?”
“Not good or bad. But you can’t undo it, once it’s done. That’s all. They’re like dogs, reporters. They’ll scramble for any scrap they can get. And because there are so many of them, they’ll all want a different angle. The one who gets to you first, he’ll build you up. So the others will have to tear you down.”
“Tear me down? What have I done?” She seems really rattled now and I feel bad.
“Nothing. I’m just warning you—the reporters can make a good thing into a bad thing. That’s how they do.” A reporter did my dad dirty once. It didn’t come to anything in the end, but I learned a lesson from it.
We let her out at this old dump of an apartment building near the cathedral. I want to walk her upstairs, but she’s really firm. Almost too firm, like she thinks I’m going to try something, which is insulting. I’m just trying to fit together the pieces of her story. A son, so there was a husband at some point. Is the son grown? Could be, if she got a real early start. I can’t imagine a kid living in that apartment house. My wife and I, we live in a rowhouse near Patterson Park, but once the kids start coming—and they will, I know they will, we’ve just had bad luck—and I start moving up in the ranks, we’ll find a house farther out, with at least a little lawn. Kids need a yard, not that I ever had one. Anyway, what am I going to do, with Paul in the backseat, the patrol car due back at district before I can go home and get into bed next to my wife, who will be asleep, or pretending to be. She’s going through a phase where she doesn’t like to be touched. Her body has let her down and she thinks she’s let me down, but I don’t blame her, not a bit.
I grab a beer with Paul and some other guys, maybe play up our role in the discovery of Tessie Fine a little, which means downplaying what that Maddie lady and her friend did, but it was Paul’s flashlight that caught that piece of shoe, we were the professionals on the scene. Anyway, after I finish my one beer, it makes sense to go home by way of her apartment building, just because—I don’t know. I’m worried about her. That’s no place for a nice lady to live.
When I get there, a patrol car is parked out front. Now I’m really worried. Has something happened? Finding a body can do things to you, or so I’ve heard. It was my first, too. Anyway, I’m about to cross the street and go upstairs when I see a uniform, alone, come out the building—and get into that patrol car. And there’s no way, just no way, that guy can be legit.
Because he’s blacker than ink and the coloreds don’t get to use cars.
I make note of the license and the number. It’s from my district, Northwest. Tomorrow, I’ll start asking around, try to figure out why a car from Northwest District was parked outside Maddie Schwartz’s apartment at three in the morning.
And why some colored cop was coming from there in the middle of the night.
March 1966
March 1966
It was strange, moving through the world with a secret. Not Ferdie—Maddie thought of Ferdie as an arrangement, something she was obliged to keep to herself because of others’ prejudices. But only a handful of people—Judith, the police officers—knew she was the one who had found Tessie Fine. “Discovered by two passersby” was the way the newspapers framed it, while on television, the hosts, including Wallace Wright, said it was a “young couple.” Not wrong, yet not correct, either. And it wasn’t only that “young couple” led people to infer it was some boy-girl pair. Everything said made Maddie’s role in the discovery seem incidental. She had chosen the spot, it was her idea to head down that last trail, but you’d never have known that, reading and watching the news.
There had been no arrest yet, although Ferdie told her that there was a strong suspect, a clerk in the fish store. The clerk said the girl had been in his store and left immediately, but no one believed him.
And Maddie learned from Ferdie that she and Judith, if only briefly, had been “persons of interest.”
“What do you mean?” she asked as they drank beer in bed two days after the discovery of Tessie Fine’s body.
“First of all, homicide cops are always going to pay attention to people who find bodies. That’s just how they do their jobs. So here are these two women, walking down Cylburn Avenue coming on toward dusk—they thought you might be lesbians. Probably still think that.”
“I told them we were turned away from the search party and decided to go out on our own,” Maddie said. How could anyone think she was a lesbian? If she were, she would be like Lakey in The Group.
“Honey, if detectives believed everything people told them, they wouldn’t be very good at their jobs.” A beat. “I’d like to be a detective.”
“I’m sure you can do whatever you set your mind to.”
“The department’s segregated, Maddie. Negro cops walk patrols, maybe do undercover in narcotics. We can’t use cars. I don’t even have a radio, just a call-box key. Remember how we met?”
She glanced at the African violet. “I’m not likely to forget.”
“Anyway, so you have these two women walking down a quiet street after dusk, far from where either one lives. I bet they asked you if you knew the girl.”
They had, in fact. But to Maddie, it was almost like a social conversation, goyim trying to understand the connectedness of the Jewish community. Oh, how she had chattered away. Her grandmother and my mother knew each other—I suppose almost any woman in Northwest Baltimore who owns a fur knows the Fines. And I went to school with her father, years ago. He took me to a dance once. She was embarrassed, in retrospect, how easily she had shared her stories with them, wondered if they had found her tiny details portentous, at least briefly. It also had not occurred to her to wonder why she and Judith were questioned separately the next day.
“Not that you would ever be a serious suspect,” Ferdie added. Somehow that was more insulting still. How had she become a bit player in a story that wouldn’t even have happened were it not for her? Obviously, she didn’t want to be in the newspaper or on television because then she would have to be defined as—what? A woman who was separated, the former wife of, the estranged (not by choice) mother of. Who was Madeline Schwartz? She could not lay claim to the discovery of Tessie Fine without having that question asked.
She realized that she should have been content with that trade-off when she came home from a walk the next day and found a portly man in a trench coat and hat perched on her stoop.
“Bob Bauer,” he said, extending his hand.
“I know who you are,” she said. He had a popular column in the Star. It ran with a winsome pen-and-ink sketch.
“And you are . . .”
“Madeline Schwartz.”
“Just the woman I’ve come to see,” he said.
“May I ask why?”
“I think you know—look, can we go inside? I walked here and it’s uphill. That’s hard on a fat man such as myself.”
“I wouldn’t call you fat,” she said.
“Well, I don’t know what else you would call it.”