Lady in the Lake(35)

“We don’t have much time,” Mr. Marshall said, his voice low and swift. “It was a lucky thing you were at lunch when they arrived.” Maddie registered the inaccuracy of this; she was fetching lunch, not taking it for herself. She brought her lunches from home most days. “The police are here because, Mr. Heath tells us, you called DPW about the lights at Druid Hill Park.”

“Yes, I do that sometimes. Handle smaller problems. Did I make a mistake?”

“A worker has found a body there, a Negro woman. They want to know why you called, what you can tell them about the person who inquired about the lights.”

“There was a letter.” She tried to remember every detail she could. Handwritten, a masculine hand. Had there been a name? She thought so, but she also remembered that the name had struck her as false. Not John Smith, but similarly generic. She hadn’t checked the name because the letter wasn’t running in the paper, so there was no need to verify the sender. (Once, Mr. Heath had published a letter signed “Seymour Butts,” and now Maddie was required to go behind him.)

“And you got rid of it,” Mr. Marshall said.

She started to say no, that she kept a file of the answers she handled on her own, until the issues were resolved. But his deep-set brown eyes held hers and she knew, as she so often knew, what a man wanted to hear.

“We don’t retain the queries that don’t make the paper,” she said slowly and deliberately. “That wouldn’t make any sense.”

“Good.” Mr. Marshall nodded. “The newspaper’s legal counsel is in my office. Why don’t I take you there and let you explain to the detectives that we don’t keep—retain—the queries that don’t make the paper.”

Hearing her words in Mr. Marshall’s mouth was glorious. She must have chosen the right ones. Truthful, but deceptive. The letter about the fountain would have been tossed by week’s end. But, for now, it was still in her files.

The waiting police officers were homicide detectives, men who didn’t look much different from the city desk reporters. Only in their forties, aged by their jobs and the bad habits those jobs encouraged. They were disappointed to hear that it was policy to throw out unpublished letters and they pushed Maddie to remember whatever details she could. She said that she did not remember the sender’s name, only that he was a man. He said he had been passing the fountain late at night. No one was sure how long the lights had been out at that point, but DPW was dubious that the problem was one of long standing. She had been told that only a few days could have gone by before someone noticed the dark fountain.

“Any idea whose body it is?” Mr. Marshall asked the detectives. “The cause of death? How it even got there?”

It.

“The body’s in pretty bad shape.” The detectives seemed to watch Maddie’s face, to see if that detail would rattle her. “A Negro woman. We—well, we won’t say more for now.”

You aren’t telling us everything you know so we’re not telling you everything we know. How childish grown men could be, in a way women never were, not in Maddie’s experience. Sullen and grumpy, still playing by the sandlot rules, obsessed with fairness and stature. Of course women cared about stature, too, but they learned early to surrender any idea that life was a series of fair exchanges. A girl discovered almost in the cradle that things would never be fair.

As if to prove that point, Mr. Marshall dismissed her, as if she were of no importance to the meeting. She was an instrument, no different from a typewriter or her telephone headset. She conveyed information, but she couldn’t tell you how she did it. Maddie sliced open that day’s mail, seething. How many larger crimes lurked in the city’s petty complaints?

But an hour later, when the detectives were gone, she was summoned back and asked to bring any files that she “thought might be relevant.”

The editor in chief had a sumptuous office, which she had been too overwhelmed to notice on her first visit. An immense desk, possibly mahogany; a leather chair; a green-shaded lamp. Guests sat in upholstered wing chairs. It was a stark contrast to the newsroom’s dingy chaos.

“I want to be clear about what just happened,” Mr. Marshall said, hunched forward over his clasped hands. “We are good citizens. We cooperate with the police as necessary. But we want to know what we have before we share it. Once the police saw your files, we might not ever have seen them again. They could have been seized as evidence.”

“I don’t think there’s much here,” she said, handing him the manila folder where she kept “her” problems, the letters that she took on and solved, the invisible Mrs. Helpline. Or was she a “Miss” again? Neither honorific seemed right for her. Mrs. was Mrs. Milton Schwartz, who had run her household with ruthless ease. “Miss” was a seventeen-year-old girl.

“Why don’t you take the letter out and read it to us?” he suggested. “After all, your fingerprints would already be on it. We can’t keep the evidence pristine, but we can try to avoid contaminating it further.”

She located the letter easily, its envelope stapled to it, although the only information that provided was the postmark, establishing it had been mailed in Baltimore last week. The inquiry was straightforward. The name, Bob Jones, sounded even phonier now.

“We don’t check people’s identities if we’re not using the letter in the column,” she explained. She realized that Mr. Heath had not been invited to the meeting, and this made her feel proud, although she couldn’t have said why.