“Those are good questions,” Diller said. But he didn’t try to answer them.

The office of the medical examiner was a bright, sterile place. As Diller and Maddie entered, the men gathered at a gurney opened their tight circle, providing her an unobstructed view of the dead body lying there. It was a large man, his skin verging on purple. The body was positioned in such a way that she was staring straight at his crotch.

“This is Marjorie Schwartz,” Diller said.

“Madeline,” she said. She thought about offering her hand, decided it was unsterile. “I had hoped to talk to you about Cleo Sherwood.”

“Oh right, the Lady in the Lake,” the medical examiner said. Maddie made a mental note. She liked the nickname. Maybe using the term would humanize Cleo Sherwood’s story the way “Tic-Tac-Toe Killer” granted some dignity to his victims.

The ME took her to the bank of drawers, began banging them open haphazardly as if he didn’t know where Cleo Sherwood’s corpse might be. Maddie saw a man with stab wounds, several unremarkable corpses, and, finally, the one she had come for. Her stomach churned, but she maintained her composure.

“Her . . . face,” she said. It was barely a face and the color was neither white nor brown, more of a mottled gray.

“Did her mother have to see this?”

“Sister identified her.”

How, Maddie wondered. Instead she asked, “What caused this?”

“Water, five months of exposure—it’s not optimal. We have been able to establish that she didn’t drown and there’s no sign of trauma to the skeleton.”

“No, I mean, how can it be anything but a homicide? How would a body even get in that fountain?”

“That’s not our job,” the medical examiner said. “We look for cause of death. So far, we can’t find one.”

“What are the possibilities?”

“Exposure, hypothermia. Maybe she got stuck in the fountain—January first, the last day she was seen by anyone, was a mild day.”

“You think she swam to the fountain, fully clothed—she was fully clothed, right?—and crawled into the fountain?”

He read from a report: “‘Subject was wearing leopard-print slacks, a red wool coat, and a green blouse.’” Looking up: “You’d be amazed at what drunk people do. People on drugs, they’re even crazier.”

“You mean like LSD?” Maddie had read scary things about the drug in Time magazine.

“In Baltimore? Her? More like heroin.”

“Cleo Sherwood was a heroin addict?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s not something we can know.”

The men were watching her, gauging her, waiting for her to break. Maddie turned to Diller: “It’s almost noon. Do you want to go to lunch? I’m famished.”

He took her to a tavern across the street. “Babe Ruth’s father once owned this joint,” he said. Maddie’s stomach roiled when she saw some of the menu items—scrapple, shaved meats, piled high—but she was determined to eat heartily, or at least make a show of eating heartily. She was used to pretending to be the fun female who indulged in greasy, fattening foods. She ordered a club sandwich and French fries, knowing she would simply nibble at the sandwich, then push it around her plate, breaking it into ever smaller pieces. When Diller requested a beer, she did the same.

She had thought him unobservant, but he noticed how little food was making it to her mouth.

“Feeling off?”

“Trying to reduce,” she said. “Some women eat cottage cheese. I get exactly what I want, then eat only a few bites.”

They ate—he ate—in silence.

“Have you talked to her family?”

He seemed mystified by the question. “Whose?”

“Cleo Sherwood. The Lady in the Lake.” Trying out the phrase, making it hers.

“Why would I do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you? Isn’t that something you normally do when people die?”

He finished the last bite of his burger, dabbed his mouth with a napkin. He was not a coarse man. His manners were as good as Maddie’s, possibly better. His shirt was snowy white, his shave barbershop close, his seersucker jacket crisp.

“She’s colored.”

“So?”

He seemed to take the question seriously, if only because it was novel to him.

“They’re not big stories, the colored dying. I mean, it happens all the time. It’s the opposite of news. Dog bites man. Plus, you heard the ME. Probably drugs. She got high and decided she could swim to the fountain.”

“But her death was so public. And so mysterious.”

“That’s why it got attention when she was found. But the Afro explored most of the avenues we might have gone down. She’s just a girl who went out on a date with a bad guy. There’s no story to that. She went out with a lot of guys, from what I hear.”

“What’s a lot?”

“I don’t know. I’m—” He was struggling to be proper. “I’m just saying what I heard. There are women, good-time girls. It’s how they pay the rent. And she worked at that club, the Flamingo. It’s sort of a Playboy Club for people who can’t afford the real thing. Girls in skimpy outfits slinging watered-down drinks, second-rate bands. The guy who owns it, he runs whores, everybody knows that.”

Maddie thought about what she had seen, the degradation of the body that had once been Cleo Sherwood. Nature was vicious. When Marilyn Monroe had died four years ago, people had said she was undone by her age, her fading looks, that she wanted to leave a beautiful corpse. No one leaves a beautiful corpse. Even if the death is free of trauma, only the embalmer’s skill can make the body presentable once a few hours have passed. Every day, Maddie was a little less beautiful than she had been the day before. Every moment she lived, she also was dying.

Monroe had been thirty-six when she died. Maddie had been just a few weeks shy of her thirty-seventh birthday when she decided to live.

“What if I went to talk to the parents?”

He shrugged. “Kind of ghoulish, especially if you don’t get a story out of it, but I guess you can do whatever you like as long as Mr. Helpline is happy. But if you’re looking for a feature story, why don’t you visit the medium?”

“Medium what?”

“The medium. The psycho or psychic, whatever you call it. Parents went to her to try to figure out where their daughter was. You could use that to do a piece on her, kind of a profile. She said she saw green and yellow, but there’s no yellow in that fountain and the only green is algae, which wouldn’t have been there the night she disappeared. And the bartender had already told police she was wearing a green blouse, so that wasn’t new. I bet if you ask her today to explain that, she’ll say the face was turned toward the sun—only it wasn’t—or that there were daffodils along the lake, but there weren’t, not in January.” He laughed and his laugh took over until he could barely speak; he had amused himself. “Don’t call first because, because”—literally slapping his own knee now—“because I bet she’ll never see you coming.”

The Cop Reporter

The Cop Reporter

I know what my coworkers say behind my back. They call me Deputy Dawg. They say I’ve gone native, that I’m more cop than reporter. That I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, which is why I’m still on the cop beat after thirty years. No one serious about his newspaper career stays on the cop beat. Look at this little filly, thinking she’s going to make a career writing about some dead Negro. She doesn’t get it. Even at the Star, which doesn’t try to be like the fancy-pants Beacon, with its foreign bureaus and eight-man staff in DC, the cop beat is supposed to be a way station, a place you pass through.

A fifty-two-year-old cop reporter is unusual. To my face, the other cop reporters call me the “dean.” They pretend to look up to me. They try to steal my sources, certain they can do better by them. But I have these sources because I’m not going anywhere. These young guys would betray someone in a flash. I socialize with the men on my beat. I go to their kids’ christenings, attend the occasional FOP bull roast, buy rounds at the bar the cops favor.

I’m happy at HQ. My stomach drops to my ankles when I have to show up at the newsroom, unless it’s to pick up my paycheck or cash out my expenses. Those are the only good reasons to walk into the Star.