Lady in the Lake(24)
“Ah, young people today,” he said.
“You’ve got five years on me at the most.”
“I’ve also got every album Ella Fitzgerald ever recorded. ‘She Didn’t Say Yes.’ The Jerome Kern Song Book. Released in 1963. I have a nice stereo.” He paused and I held my breath. He was going to ask me over, which was crazy, dangerous. But brave. I had to admire it. By then, the men in the Flamingo left me alone. Mr. Gordon saw to that. A man crazy enough to risk such a thing—maybe he had feelings for me after all.
He said: “You can probably get a copy at Korvette’s, or Harmony Hut. I’d lend you mine, but I don’t like to lend my records. I’m too punctilious about their care.”
There he went again, with the big words. I was pretty sure it meant being on time, but I wasn’t going to ask and let him show me up.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like that old-people music. I like the Supremes.”
“Of course you do,” he said.
He left me a five-dollar bill that night. I never saw him again. But that’s because I died two weeks later. If I’d wanted Ferdie Platt, I’d have had him. Just so you know, Maddie Schwartz. I could have had him.
April 1966
April 1966
Spring felt tentative that year, unsure of its welcome. But even on the coolest days, Maddie took to her fire escape to smoke. She had quit two years ago, very easily, when the surgeon general’s report came out, and she had never been a true fiend. Smoking was an ancillary activity for her, something to do with a cup of coffee, or when waiting for Milton in a public place and feeling self-conscious.
Yet recently she had found herself yearning for cigarettes. They soothed her nerves, allowed her to think. Freedom was dizzying, paralyzing. People used the phrase “like a kid in a candy store” to denote crazed pleasure-seeking, but Maddie’s hunch was that most children, after an initial dive into whatever sweet they liked best, wouldn’t know what to do next. Should they focus on quantity or quality? Eat now or commit themselves to gathering as much as possible for later? There was a newish game show, Supermarket Sweep, in which women answered questions about how much things cost, earning their husbands time to “shop,” the point being to grab the priciest things. Even if she were still with Milton, Maddie could not imagine playing such a game, and not just because Milton would refuse to grab the lobster tails on principle. Milton didn’t know what anything at the supermarket cost. For that matter, she had stopped paying attention to prices years ago. Maddie was proud that she had reached a station in life—“a station in life,” the phrase suddenly seemed new to her—where she didn’t have to cut coupons or shop specials. Such thrift had been essential in the early years of their marriage. But it was more fun to have money than not.
She studied the ads under “Help Wanted, Female.” Nurses, cashiers, waitresses, secretaries, office girls. Nothing seemed suitable. But wait—there was one job, a clerical one, at the Star. Would that nice Bob Bauer help her? She had helped him, hadn’t she? He had written a big front-page story about the man who killed Tessie Fine. In the end, the whole thing had seemed strangely anticlimactic, so cut-and-dried. A little girl walks into a store and stamps her feet, and a man simply “snaps.” Ferdie had told Maddie that the detectives didn’t believe the man, that one doesn’t snap, hit someone on the side of the head, then have the presence of mind to drag the victim to the basement to finish the job by breaking her neck. They believed the man had—what was the word Ferdie used? “Proclivities.”
Maddie smiled at the memory. Ferdie liked big words, although he didn’t always use them precisely. But in this case, he was close enough, although it sounded too genteel for such an awful thing. The police didn’t think Stephen Corwin had killed before, but they suspected he had touched other children. He had probably been luckier with his previous victims, working in what was, after all, a very tempting place for a child, and doing things that the children didn’t register as too odd. Guiding a small hand into his trousers, asking for no more than a touch or two. Tessie Fine, self-possessed and confident, probably fought back when he tried something with her. But, so far, they hadn’t been able to find any other child who had visited the pet shop basement and the evidence they had wasn’t going to allow them to pursue the death penalty.
“It’s not like you can go on TV and say, ‘Hey, mamas of Northwest Baltimore, do you think this pervert touched your kid?’ We’ve got women working the schools, making inquiries, talking to ER nurses. But if he was just a toucher—or smart enough to make sure they touched him, without him so much as undoing a hair bow—we’re not going to find anything.”
Maddie had noted the we’re. Ferdie yearned to be a homicide detective. He had charmed a few detectives, treating them as gods on an unreachable Olympus, and they confided in him.
She and Ferdie had been smoking in bed when Ferdie shared that particular confidence about Tessie Fine. Maybe it was Ferdie who had brought cigarettes back into her life, come to think of it. Married to Milton, Maddie had long been past the stage of wanting to talk and gossip when sex was over. But with Ferdie, a smoke break was a way to keep him there a little longer. She didn’t want him to stay all night. (Good thing, because he never did.) But she always wanted him to stay a little longer than he was inclined to. So she asked him questions, teased out more answers about his work. In this way, she had learned a little about his boyhood. Youngest of seven children, played baseball at Poly. But he quickly shut down almost every other line of personal inquiry.