“May I show you something?” asks a salesgirl. Pretty dress, nice hair, gorgeous hands that make me want to thrust my own into my pockets.

Instead, I ask to try a sample of Joy, but only because I remember the ads that say it’s the costliest perfume in the world. The salesgirl grudgingly hands me a piece of scented paper, won’t even give me so much as a dab on my wrist. I sniff it. No, that wasn’t the scent on the woman at lunch with Mr. B. Guessing wildly, I point at a bottle with a dove on top of it. L’Air du Temps. I don’t dare say the name. Even if I could speak French, my accent would make it sound ridiculous. Until two years ago, I didn’t even know I have an accent, then Sammy brought a friend home and I heard them talking in the kitchen. “Why does your mom talk like that?” “Like what?” asked Sammy, my good boy, my darling boy. “Like she’s one of the Beverly Hillbillies.” Unfair, because I don’t sound like them at all. My West Virginia drawl has been eaten up by the Baltimore accents around me. My accent’s kind of like Sammy, a nice result from an ill-advised collision. People like my voice. They like me, my regulars, their faces light up when I come to take their order. I am loved and beloved. I’m sure not going to try to say L’Air du Temps in front of some salesgirl just so she can mock me.

“The cologne is cheaper,” the girl says. “But the bottle isn’t as grand.”

“I wouldn’t buy perfume for the bottle,” I assure her. I want her to know I’m no rube.

But the cost—jeez, Louise. Who could pay that just to smell good? Why not just dab some vanilla extract behind your ears and call it a day?

Yet I am sure, when I inhale it, that this is the scent on the woman at lunch with Mr. B. And I know this is something I can never afford, no matter how many miles I glide up and down the New Orleans Diner, no matter how many times newcomers look at the menu and make the joke, “What, no gumbo?” I always laugh as if I’ve never heard that one before, no sirree. I am as pretty as that woman, or could be. I’m prettier than the girl at the perfume counter, with her pointy nose practically touching the ceiling. My legs are shapely, my skin has good color. I have a great kid, we’re doing okay. But I’ll never have a bottle of perfume with a dove on top and it is probably just one of many bottles on that woman’s bureau, sitting on one of those mirrored trays that fancy women have for their perfume.

“I’m afraid it’s not my style,” I say. “It’s too—fruity.”

She smiles as if she’s caught me out at something.

I go home, I put my feet up for an hour, drink Pepsi, and watch Bowling for Dollars. It always makes me happy, that show. I don’t know why. Sometimes I see ladies I know from around the neighborhood. I take my stockings off, rub cocoa butter into my legs. They look good. Less trot, more glide. I would have been a good carhop, the kind on roller skates, but you don’t see those types of places in Maryland. I think they’re a California thing, or wherever the weather is good more often than not.

Sammy comes in, fourteen years old, already four inches taller than I am, kisses me on the cheek without being asked. Last Mother’s Day, he gave me lily of the valley perfume from Rite Aid and you know what? That’s better than Joy, or some bottle with an angel on top. L’Air du Temps. What does that even mean? Air something? I’ll ask Sammy later. He’s getting straight A’s at Hamilton Junior High, even in French. He’s going to set the world on fire, my boy. He’s all I need, the best thing I’ll ever do.

I read the Star during commercials. Cleo Sherwood is truly yesterday’s news, already gone from the paper. She told me once she was going to be famous and I guess she is, in a way. Or was, for a day.

I should have leaned in, told that lady: “I knew her, Cleo Sherwood. Ask me some questions.” Wouldn’t that have been something? But you never want the customers to know how much you hear. They think their conversations are private. I’ve waited on secret lovers, people breaking up, men clearly doing stuff they’re not supposed to be doing. I bring them their food, flirt with my regulars, otherwise pretend I’m deaf and practically blind.

I move across the buckling linoleum floors of the New Orleans Diner like a skater, the best at what I do, all glide, no trot.

June 1966

June 1966

Mr. Bauer dropped Maddie at the press room in police headquarters like a careless parent taking his child to the first day of kindergarten. He got her as far as the door, but it was on her to march in and claim her place.

Even the Star’s newsroom, messy and chaotic as it was, had not prepared Maddie for the dingy corner of the police headquarters that had been set aside for the men of the press. And they were all men, although John Diller insisted there was one female cop reporter, Phyllis Basquette, who worked for the other afternoon paper, the Light.

“Where is she?” Maddie asked skeptically.

“Driving around the Beltway, trying to get her mileage to match her expense account,” Diller said.

Maddie suspected she was being played, but she nodded. If there were such a woman, Maddie could understand why she would want to avoid this room. The room, the whole building, in fact, was one of the most masculine places into which she had ever ventured, and not in a good way like, say, the bar at Haussner’s. (Or how she imagined the bar at Haussner’s to be; women still were not allowed in, a strange rule at a popular restaurant where reservations were not accepted. Then again, the line for tables was always down the block, so it wasn’t hurting business.) Yes, there were some female police officers and secretaries, this legendary Phyllis Basquette. But it smelled of men—of their sweat, their tobacco, of Brylcreem and aftershave. Cheap, bad aftershave.

Diller took her on a tour, first showing her how to pull a report. She read the brief details about Cleo Sherwood’s disappearance, which had gone weeks without being noted. A bartender, Thomas Ludlow, said she had been picked up for a late date in the early morning hours of January 1. The man was tall, slender, thirtyish, with a turtleneck under his black leather jacket. Cleo did not introduce him and he was not someone the bartender had seen before. She wore a green blouse, leopard-print slacks, a red car coat, and red leather driving gloves. Maddie wrote all these details down in her notebook, if only for the sake of doing something.

“What’s a number one female?” she asked Diller.

“A colored,” he said. “Whites are number two, coloreds are number ones.”

Diller led her from department to department, introducing the various sergeants. They perked up when she entered the room, but their faces fell as soon as Diller said she was his colleague. Her usual advantages with men did not seem to be working here. And when she tried to engage the captain in Homicide on the matter of Cleo Sherwood, he was taciturn to the point of brusqueness. “Not officially a homicide yet,” he said. “Still waiting on the ME.”

Throughout all this, Diller, a small, dapper man, was impossible to read. Maddie assumed he was enjoying her discomfiture, that he was trying to haze her so she would go away and leave him be. But he was the one who suggested, when their tour was done: “Do you want to go to the morgue and see if they’ve made any headway on this Sherwood case?”

She wasn’t sure and her very lack of conviction told her she had to say yes.

“Is her body still there?”

“I don’t think they’ve released it to the family yet. Even if they have, it won’t be a wasted trip. If you want to write about police matters, you should get to know the fellas over there.”

Oh, good—more fellas.

The morgue was a shortish walk from the Star, a slightly longer one from police HQ. Along the way, Diller talked about the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer, who preyed on the barflies along the waterfront, and pointed out an alley where one victim had been found. He also cheerfully detailed the wounds that the newspaper had hid behind the nickname, allowing readers to infer exactly what had happened to the bodies. “Normally, I wouldn’t tell such stories to a lady, but you’re a reporter.”

The Inner Harbor was a grimy place. The McCormick spice factory on the western edge filled the air with cinnamon, an odd contrast to the landscape. Maddie had seldom ventured as far south as the waterfront, although she had passed through on field trips to Fort McHenry when Seth was a child. She tried to imagine the sad, sick men who were being lured from bars and then left dead in vacant lots and alleys. But even they were treated with more respect than Cleo Sherwood. Their killer had been named, personified, and their deaths linked.

“How can Cleo Sherwood’s death be anything but a homicide?” she asked Diller. “How does a body get into the fountain in January?”