The girl frowns. It’s a pretty frown. “But if she had gone public, made a fuss, that would have been bad for everyone.”

“Girls like that never make a fuss. She knew the score. Besides, she was with another man the night she disappeared. That’s an established fact.”

“Is it?”

It’s hard not to reach over and pat that earnest little head. “Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory. I bet you think the Warren Commission was wrong when it ruled that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

“No—no. It never occurred to me to question that.”

“Life is very simple, miss.”

“Mrs.,” she corrected.

“More often than not, things are pretty much as they seem. Maybe that doesn’t make for good movies or page one newspaper articles, but that’s how the world works. Okay, sure, this girl they found in the fountain, she dated EZ Taylor. Successful men, rich men—they’ve always had women on the side. It’s no big deal.”

“But he wouldn’t be able to run for office if people found out.”

“No one was going to find out. This happens all the time, ma’am.” Heh. She doesn’t like ma’am any better than she liked miss. Be careful what you wish for, honey. “All the time, at every level. Men are men. Presidents have fooled around—look at Warren Harding. FDR, probably. LBJ, almost definitely. But it’s understood if you keep things discreet, keep up appearances, no one talks about it. And Taylor’s a long shot, anyway. Shell hasn’t built the coalitions he needs to get his own candidate in. Maybe two, four years from now, but not this year.”

She looks chastened but not defeated. The set of her jaw—she’s going to keep going. Not my problem. I’ve told her how things work, the way I promised my baby sister I would. Maryland politics 101. It’s all about money and organization. The Democratic primary is the real contest, especially in Baltimore city, and it’s winner take all, no runoffs. We’ll know the winners by the morning of September 14, but we’ll pretend it’s a contest until November.

I pay for our drinks, or try. She picks up the check, says she’ll expense it. Says a newspaper reporter can’t have sources buying her anything. I wonder where she heard that one? I pick up checks for reporters all the time, send them whiskey at Christmas, hams at Easter.

We part ways at the corner of Charles and Mulberry. It’s close to dusk, but she says she lives only a block away.

“Do you live up this way?” she asks me.

“Oh, I’ll just catch the Charles Street bus,” I say, not answering her question.

Once I’m on my own, I take a circuitous route, although it’s not as if anyone is following me. I’m heading to Leon’s, a discreet place on Park Avenue, not even ten blocks from where she lives, but it’s a whole different universe.

Once there, I realize all I want is a drink. I don’t have the energy for company. A burden lifts the second I walk through the door at Leon’s. It’s just a relief sometimes to have a drink in a place where I’m allowed to be myself, in total. I can finally be me. Not Donald Weinstein, macher, mensch, the hard-driving chief of staff for a guy who could be governor in eight years. I used to be just a muldoon, a foot soldier, but now I’m a b’hoy, calling the shots, making the deals, getting things done. I’ll know I’ve really made it when I have a nickname, like Harry “White Shoes” McGuirk, or even Shell Gordon, who’s nursing a beer in the corner. I don’t care what my nickname is, as long as it isn’t fagalah.

My life, my preferences—plenty of people know, but no one ever talks about it. I guess people—my boss, my sister—think they’re doing me a favor, ignoring the obvious, making jokes about “Baltimore bachelors.” I have two friends, Ron and Bill, they share a little house in an out-of-the-way neighborhood up in the Northwest, and everybody seems to think they’re just two swinging single guys, on the prowl for women. Ron drives a flashy little sports car, they’re both handsome guys. I was over there on Halloween last year and the boy across the street came to the door, trick-or-treating, dressed as a woman. We all had a good laugh at that, gave the kid extra candy. One day, he’ll look back, connect the dots, a house full of men at a Halloween party. Heck, maybe one day he’ll be one of us. Who knows? I was in my teens before I figured it out, in my twenties before I dared to act on my desires. And I have to be so careful, while the Ezekiel Taylors of the world just have to avoid embarrassing their wives.

An early mentor once told me that the secret to getting by at work was to carry a legal pad and frown; everyone assumes you’re doing something important. But I feel as if that’s my life, too, that I am charging down the streets of Baltimore with an invisible legal pad always in my hand, brow furrowed in concentration, and no one sees what I’m really up to. “He’s married to his job,” my mother says, with equal parts pride and exasperation.

It’s true. What other option do I have?

July 1966

July 1966

She had worried that Judith’s brother might insist on walking her to the door, maybe even make a pass. As soon as she was a block west of Charles Street, she hailed a cab.

Men were no help, after all, she had decided. Men kept each other’s secrets. Men put men first, in the end. It made no sense for Cleo Sherwood to be killed by some strange man in a turtleneck who was never seen again. Sure, it could have happened. Bad things happened to women all the time. But Maddie was sure that Ezekiel Taylor was the link. And no one cared because no one cared about Cleo. Well, Maddie cared. She cared enough to challenge Mr. Taylor’s alibi. And there was only one way to do that, one person.

The cab took her to one of the still-grand blocks near the park. Not that far, her mind registered, from the lake, the fountain. Her own maternal grandparents had lived on this street once; The Park School had started not far from here. It was still relatively early. She was betting that Mr. Taylor was not someone who rushed home. Married men who dallied with young women did not rush home; Maddie knew that about them. She knew more than she wanted to know about married men. It was time to put that knowledge to use. Just as she had drawn on her memories of her old necking spot to find Tessie Fine’s body, she would now rely on her regrets to inform her quest into the life of a young woman who had made a similar mistake. Maddie had never confronted her lover’s wife. But she would come face-to-face with the woman married to Cleo Sherwood’s lover.

The Taylor house was a grande dame among ruffians. Most of the other big old houses had been subdivided; there were telltale signs of a neighborhood losing whatever self-respect it once had. The tiny yards were not being maintained and in the meticulous hedges guarding the Taylor home, someone had left a Zagnut wrapper. The better-off Negroes were beginning to abandon the neighborhood, just as the Jews of Milton’s generation had. These beautiful old town houses—not rowhouses, not here, they were too wide, too architecturally distinct—had stood for so much once. For dreams and aspirations. But there would come a day when they were all cut up into makeshift apartments. She was surprised the Taylors had remained.

Once the cab let her out, she stood for several minutes on the sidewalk, knowing how out of place she looked, not caring. She was tired of caring what others thought about her, more tired of how they thwarted her. First and foremost, Shell Gordon and those who worked for him. But also the cops, reporters, even Judith’s brother Donald. The world kept telling her to look away, to pay no attention to an age-old system, in which men thrived and inconvenient women disappeared.

Maddie wasn’t having it. She set her jaw, squared her shoulders, and marched up to the lovely house with the stained glass features and rang the doorbell.

The Wife

The Wife

When I glimpse that white woman standing on my porch, bold as brass, I wish for the first time that I had listened to Ezekiel when he suggested we have servants. Of course, we have help—a young girl (not too young), who comes once a week to do the heavy cleaning—but Ezekiel took the notion a few years back that we should have live-in staff. At least, that’s how it was presented to me.

I had come downstairs one day to find him at the kitchen table with a young couple, a husband and wife (or so they said, or so I thought, they could have been a brother and a sister, I suppose). They were country and fresh off the bus. I could smell the farm life on them, they had probably done their chores before leaving that morning. They were running away from something, I was sure of that.