Lady in the Lake(36)

“Not much there,” Mr. Marshall said. “I confess, I was hoping it would give us a little lead, something we could get out in front with.”

“Dead Negro woman in fountain,” said the city editor, Harper. “I wouldn’t even lead the metro section with it. Diller says he hears that it’s probably a woman who disappeared earlier this year, a cocktail waitress from the Flamingo, Shell Gordon’s joint. The Afro’s been all over it, but there doesn’t seem to be any real news there.”

The newspaper’s lawyer was staring at Maddie. “You’re the woman who tricked Stephen Corwin.”

She blushed. “I wouldn’t say tricked. I simply asked him to write to me.”

Mr. Marshall picked up the thread. “And now here you are, making a random call to DPW and a body comes up.”

She felt as if she were being accused of something. Meddling? Dishonesty? Neither characterization was entirely off base, but shouldn’t she be praised as a go-getter, an employee with instinct and promise? She decided to say nothing. The moment was pregnant. Something was going to happen. She was going to be rewarded or singled out. At the very least, they were going to tell Mr. Heath that she was not his personal secretary.

Instead, she was dismissed for the second time that day. “Thank you for your help, Madeline.”

She had not walked ten feet before she heard boisterous laughter from the editor’s office. She did not believe that the laughter was at her expense, but it did not make her feel any better to realize how quickly they had moved on to some private hilarity. Miserable, she went to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on her face, hoping to erase the high color in her cheeks.

The ladies’ room was one of the few calm and relatively clean places on the entire floor. It even had a tiny anteroom with a Naugahyde love seat, although the only woman who ever lingered there was Edna Sperry, the labor reporter. She parked herself on the love seat with her copy, coffee, and cigarettes, emerging at the last possible moment to file, preemptively cursing the changes she anticipated to her prose.

“Mrs. Sperry . . . ,” Maddie ventured after washing her hands and splashing water on her face.

“Yes?”

“I’m Madeline Schwartz, I work on the ‘Helpline’ column. But I’d like to be a reporter here. I know I’m starting late—I’m just past thirty-five.” After all, thirty-seven was only two notches past thirty-five, whereas “almost forty” sounded like death. “May I ask you—”

The older woman flicked her eyes across Maddie, flicked her cigarette ash into the brimming ashtray at her side, and made a sound that could have been a laugh.

Maddie refused to be intimidated.

“May I ask how you became a newspaperwoman?”

Edna definitely laughed then.

“What’s so funny?”

“The minute you begin ‘May I ask,’ you’ve lost any edge you have,” she said.

“I didn’t know I needed an ‘edge.’” Edna was no different from one of the old battle-axes she’d had to charm at the synagogue and Hadassah back in the day, when she had been a young bride, just beginning to serve on committees.

“You need authority, confidence. Do you know how I got into this business?” Maddie, thinking the question rhetorical, did not answer. “Well, you should. If you want to be a reporter, the first step is to prepare for every interview, to go in knowing as much as possible about your subject.”

Maddie was thrown, but she didn’t want to show it. “I didn’t think of you as a subject. More of a colleague.”

“That was your first mistake,” Edna said.

It was a moment, that make-or-break second in which one’s entire future depends on reacting the right way. Maddie had experience with such moments. Just like when she was not quite eighteen, standing expressionless in a Northwest Baltimore driveway, watching movers carry furniture, stowing her dreams away in the back of a truck as certainly as they loaded a yellow silk sofa. Just as when, a month later, she met Milton at a dance, and realized he was at once worldly and naive, a man she could fool.

“Thank you for your time,” she said sweetly. She was thinking: No, my first mistake was trying to get a woman to help me. I do better with men. I always do better with men.



That night, Ferdie laughed at her, too. “Because she’s a Negro, Maddie. That’s why it wasn’t a big deal when she went missing.”

“I know that,” she said. “I’m not naive.”

But she was hurt. She had thought her anger over the callousness of the men at the Star was a kind of tribute to her lover. So what if they could never go out in public—it wasn’t because of race. It had more to do with her marital status. And maybe his, although she remained unclear what that status was.

“There was a time when the death of a Negro woman didn’t make the local papers,” Ferdie said. “I don’t blame your bosses for not caring until Cleo Sherwood was found. A girl like her—she got around. The Afro only made a big deal of it because the mother was so upset—and because Cleo worked at Shell Gordon’s place. He’s waist-high in a lot of stuff.”

“Did you know her?”

Again, that laugh. “We don’t all know each other, Maddie. It’s a big town.”