Lady in the Lake(22)
He doffed his hat. “Mrs. Schwartz, you have been extremely helpful.”
“You won’t mention my name, right?”
He smiled. “No, I can’t even call you a ‘source.’ But when I chat up my friends at headquarters, I can tell them that I have firsthand information. It is firsthand, right?”
She wasn’t completely sure what firsthand meant in this situation, but she nodded.
The Columnist
The Columnist
I’m a columnist. I don’t have to break stories, worry about getting beat. I don’t really do that much news anymore. It’s supposed to be a badge of honor, reaching the point where you’re above the fray, allowed to pontificate, or just write these little sketches about your own life. That’s my gig, most of the time. I write about life in suburbia—my wife, my kids. Then, sometimes, I get to thinking I need to horn in on a story. H. L. Mencken didn’t get his own room at the Pratt library by writing funny stories about his wife. If you’re a Baltimore reporter, Mencken’s the standard-bearer. Mencken, Jim Bready, maybe Russell Baker, although I remember when he started on night cops and he was no great shakes.
But Tessie Fine—I had to write about her. I had to know. The obvious thing would have been to go talk to the parents. They would have opened their door to me. Almost everyone does. There’s something about being a cartoon that makes people more susceptible to trusting you. What could be the harm in talking to me? I’m just that funny drawing come to life.
I think about that a lot. How I’m an actual cartoon.
Anyway, I was chatting up Diller, our nighttime cop reporter, been on the job so long that he’s more cop than reporter. About as incurious a guy as I’ve ever known. There are more of those types in newspapers than you might think. If you could teach a dog to put on a fedora and carry a notepad, he would do his job the way Diller does, barking out facts to night rewrite. Girl, dead. Found alongside Cylburn Avenue. No arrests at this time. Sources confirm it’s Tessie Fine. But sometimes Diller knows stuff without knowing what he knows and he’s the one who described to me the two women at the scene. I still have enough sources down at the cop shop that I was able to unearth the one’s name.
I walk to her place over on Cathedral Street because I always forget how hilly the city is as you head north from the harbor, where the Star offices are. It isn’t a bad neighborhood, but it isn’t a good one. What’s a nice girl doing in a place like this? I want to say when I see her coming up the street. She looks young, in her beatnik clothes. Okay, maybe not that young when she gets closer, but still pert and fresh, like the very breeze on this day, which feels more like early autumn than late winter. She reminds me of my wife, my real wife, not the woman I’m married to now. I mean, I’m married to the same woman, going on twenty-seven years, but she’s not the woman I met back in Quincy, Pennsylvania, when we were in high school. And I’m not the same man. I can’t blame her. Not even Job himself would have survived what we’ve been through.
I am shocked when this lady doesn’t want to talk to me. Everybody wants to talk to Bob Bauer. But, fair play, she gives me something better. I assume it’s because she was eavesdropping at the scene, or some patrolman was indiscreet. A pretty woman like that—you might be tempted to blow and brag a little bit. Anyway, I call a detective I know, someone who’s always been kind to me. Out of pity, probably, but that’s okay. I’ll take it. I’ve earned it. I ask him to meet me at a bar where we wouldn’t see other cops and reporters, so we end up at Alonso’s on Cold Spring Lane.
And go figure, the lady was right. The clerk is the primary suspect.
“They found something under the fingernails,” my detective friend says. “And in her hair. Mainly.”
“Somebody else’s blood?” Thinking: She promised me it wasn’t sexual.
My friend shakes his head. “This weird dirt, more like sand. It wasn’t like anything you’d find in that park. You don’t find it in all of Maryland.”
“How can that be?”
“Aquarium sand!” the guy says. “But you can’t write that until they serve the warrant tomorrow. They’re going to arrest him at home. He lives with his mother.”
We both snort, knowing what a loser that makes him, although my heart would soar and burst like fireworks if my grown son wanted to be in our house.
“Might be good if one reporter had the inside track on this,” I say. “Someone you could trust to emphasize how smart you guys are.”
The flattery works. It usually does. I don’t accompany the cops to the actual arrest, but I’m at headquarters when they bring the guy in. He tries to say he’s crazy, but the crazy ones never say that.
If only his cleaning skills had been better. The basement of that pet store is lousy with evidence. And why is the evidence in the basement? She wouldn’t have had any reason to go down there unless he promised her something. Medical examiner said he hit her first, hard, but not enough to kill her, then broke her neck. No, I’m pretty sure the guy didn’t snap. He had probably just seen the movie Psycho, thought he had a surefire defense.
My scoop is a sensation. I knew it would be. All the other papers have to chase it. The young cop reporters, even the ones on my own paper, are pissed. (Except for Diller, whose only concern is figuring out my source.) Who am I to be poaching one of the biggest stories out of the cop shop? I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Bob Bauer. I served in World War II, came home and married my high school sweetheart, started at the bottom and wrote my way to the top. I can do anything—features, hard news, political analysis. I’m the two-thousand-pound gorilla who sits wherever I want. In the newsroom, the day my story runs, I sit at my desk in the corner of the Sunday office and the other reporters come by to pay homage, congratulate me, ask me how I did it. I cock a finger at them and smile. “Trade secret, men. Trade secret.”