Lady in the Lake

My father was a newspaperman in Philadelphia, a columnist, a legend. Jonny Diller. He was Jonathan, I’m John, a mistake on the birth certificate that stuck, so I’m no junior and I don’t let anyone call me Johnny. Of course I wanted to do what my old man did. It looked fun. People acted as if he was special because his name was on the front page of the paper on a regular basis. I ended up at the Star because I went to Hopkins, edited the News-Letter. I always imagined I’d make the hundred-mile journey back home someday, maybe as a columnist or a political writer.

There was only one problem: I couldn’t write. I mean, yes, I can put sentences together in the right order, but I lost any flair I once had. I don’t know how to explain it. The way they structure things at newspapers is that you don’t write at first. You go to a crime scene, you find a pay phone, you call the facts in to rewrite. In an afternoon paper, there’s no time to get back to the office and file. You know where every pay phone in the city is, that’s your desk.

When I caught my first murder, my third day of work, I laboriously wrote the story in my notebook, thinking I would dictate it to the rewrite guy, saving him the work. He chewed me out. I wasn’t saving him time, I was wasting time because what I had written was no good. “This is what I need and this is the order I need it in,” he barked at me. And when I would try to add a bit of color, or a detail I found interesting, he would say, “Answer only the questions I ask, son.”

I thought to myself: I’ll show them. I began working on a novel at night. I poured everything I had into a story about a boy growing up in Philadelphia, one who lived on the right side of the tracks but was drawn to the wrong side, befriended a boy there. Classic stuff, Dead End Kids, one grows up to be a priest, the other a criminal, only not quite as stark as that. In my book, one boy was going to grow up to be a reporter, the other one was going to be a cop, and they would end up at cross-purposes, the reporter insisting on printing something that undercut a major murder case, gave the killer a chance to go free. The cop does what he feels he has to do, kills the killer, and he’s arrested.

I thought I was hot stuff.

One night, I was sitting at my typewriter, looking at what I had written so far. By writing two pages a day, I had amassed three hundred pages midway into the year, almost a full novel. I began reading back through what I had accomplished and I was struck by two things.

One, I really hated the reporter in my own story. All my sympathies were with the cop, although the reporter was the autobiographical character.

Two, I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write for sour apples.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t good. I swear I was good once. I had filled notebooks with poetry and short stories, won contests in high school and college. But the Star, that rewrite man, had destroyed something in me and I couldn’t get it back. I felt like a god stripped of his powers, forced to wander the earth in his reduced state as punishment. Only, punishment for what? As long as I kept calling my stories in to rewrite, my writing skills were going to diminish, diminish, diminish. The Star’s narrow-minded view of what made a story was destroying my own.

But what if I moved up, got a new beat—and I still couldn’t write. What then?

At that moment—I can still see myself at the desk in the living room, my young (then) wife gone to bed long ago, my shirtsleeves rolled up, and it’s like seeing a man who thinks he can fly, only to wake from a dream and find himself standing on a ledge. I froze. I don’t think I could have pressed a key on my typewriter with a gun to my head. I developed writer’s block. I have it to this day. I can’t write sentences, only words. I jot down facts in my notebook, but that doesn’t count as writing, that’s stenography. I actually know steno, which is why my notes are so good, so reliable, my quotes never questioned. No one has ever accused me of getting so much as a word wrong. When all the papers cover the same story and there’s a discrepancy in a quote or a fact, I’m the one who got it right. I haven’t had a single correction in almost thirty years on the job. Do you know how unusual that is?

At lunch, I ask the lady, Maddie-Marjorie, to cover her half. She seems a little surprised, but she gives me her share, as she should. This isn’t a date. I pocket the check and go back to the office, fill out my expenses—including the one for the lunch I just had, writing “Sgt. Patrick Mahoney” on the back of the slip—and walk away with a nice fistful of cash. After work, I head to the cops’ favorite bar, where I use my expense money to buy everyone a round, then grab the check so I can submit that expense later. All legitimate. If buying a cop a beer isn’t part of doing my job, I don’t know what is.

I see the patrolman from the Tessie Fine case, the one who was first on the scene, a young Polack with a reputation for being too good for his own good. He never stays for more than one beer and he has a sanctimonious puss on him, talks a little too much about his wife and not in the way most of the guys do, with good-natured jokes and complaints. No, this guy’s wife is a saint, an angel. The man doth protest too much if you ask me.

“Did you know that that nice lady, the one who found Tessie Fine’s body and became the killer’s pen pal, is working at the paper now?” See, I give a little, then maybe I get a little.

He frowns. “I’m not sure she’s a nice lady.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t want to gossip.”

Which is, of course, the first thing someone says right before he gossips. This one in particular likes to gossip, although he doesn’t call it that. Men never do.

I prime the pump. “She’s decided she wants to look into the Cleo Sherwood case. The barmaid from the Flamingo, the round-heels.”

“Who cares about that?”

“Nobody cares, so why not let her have a crack at it.”

“She sure does like ’em dark,” he says.

I lean in, slide my pack of cigarettes across the bar to him. I know him. He won’t stay for another beer, but he might nurse the one beer through a smoke.

“Not sure I catch your drift.”

“You ever meet a patrol named Ferdie Platt? Northwest, blacker than ink. She knows him.” He leans hard on that word, knows, makes sure I understand the implications.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been looking into him. He’s cozy with Shell Gordon, who owns the Flamingo. I don’t think she’s trying to get a story out of Cleo Sherwood. I think she’s fishing to take information back to Platt. I think he told her some stuff about the Tessie Fine case, which is how Bob Bauer knew what he knew. If she’s chasing this story, even money that Ferdie Platt put her up to it.”

“Why would he do that?”

He exhales smoke from his cigarette. “Got me. But I saw him coming and going from her place, which sure as hell isn’t in the Northwest, I know that much.”

“And what were you doing there?”

The Polack pulls on his beer, doesn’t comment. That’s the thing about this guy. He’s got the soul of a rat, he’s a tattletale who’s never grown up. He’s always keeping score.

“I have to go,” he says. “My wife doesn’t sleep soundly until I get home.”

He leaves me to puzzle over what he’s told me. So this little housewife got her big break because she has a cop boyfriend, a colored one at that. I wonder if he put her up to writing those letters to Tessie Fine’s killer, told her what to say, if the homicide cops were working her through him. But the cops I know were genuinely upset when the story broke, when the Star pointed out the discrepancy between what Corwin told them and what he told her, the thing about the car, the accomplice. Three months later, he’s still holding firm with them, insisting it was all a lie, that he just made stuff up to mess with her, but obviously there’s an accomplice out there and it’s driving them nuts. If they had the accomplice, they could play the two against each other, cinch a death penalty case for one of ’em.

But I’m no tattletale. I won’t go running back to the paper and tell folks that this new girl is sleeping with a cop. It’s not like she’s going to end up covering cops, not for the Star.



What did you think when you saw the body?

What did you think when you saw the body? Did I become more real to you? Or less? It was a monstrous thing, I bet, like something from a horror movie. The creature from the park lagoon. I can’t bear to call it mine. Can anyone—you, the morgue people, the detectives—still see a person in that thing? I don’t blame people for not caring. I don’t care. I can’t feel anything for that mound of flesh and bone, holding stubbornly to its secrets. Full credit to you for staring it down at all.

I know it sounds silly, but—I was naked, I assume? What happened to my clothes? Obviously, they would be the worse for wear, too, and they couldn’t leave them on my body. But are they evidence? Were they examined, then stored somewhere? Cleaned up and thrown away? Every piece told a story, if anyone cared to know it. There was a world of stories in the clothing I picked out that evening.