Lady in the Lake(44)
“That’s why it got attention when she was found. But the Afro explored most of the avenues we might have gone down. She’s just a girl who went out on a date with a bad guy. There’s no story to that. She went out with a lot of guys, from what I hear.”
“What’s a lot?”
“I don’t know. I’m—” He was struggling to be proper. “I’m just saying what I heard. There are women, good-time girls. It’s how they pay the rent. And she worked at that club, the Flamingo. It’s sort of a Playboy Club for people who can’t afford the real thing. Girls in skimpy outfits slinging watered-down drinks, second-rate bands. The guy who owns it, he runs whores, everybody knows that.”
Maddie thought about what she had seen, the degradation of the body that had once been Cleo Sherwood. Nature was vicious. When Marilyn Monroe had died four years ago, people had said she was undone by her age, her fading looks, that she wanted to leave a beautiful corpse. No one leaves a beautiful corpse. Even if the death is free of trauma, only the embalmer’s skill can make the body presentable once a few hours have passed. Every day, Maddie was a little less beautiful than she had been the day before. Every moment she lived, she also was dying.
Monroe had been thirty-six when she died. Maddie had been just a few weeks shy of her thirty-seventh birthday when she decided to live.
“What if I went to talk to the parents?”
He shrugged. “Kind of ghoulish, especially if you don’t get a story out of it, but I guess you can do whatever you like as long as Mr. Helpline is happy. But if you’re looking for a feature story, why don’t you visit the medium?”
“Medium what?”
“The medium. The psycho or psychic, whatever you call it. Parents went to her to try to figure out where their daughter was. You could use that to do a piece on her, kind of a profile. She said she saw green and yellow, but there’s no yellow in that fountain and the only green is algae, which wouldn’t have been there the night she disappeared. And the bartender had already told police she was wearing a green blouse, so that wasn’t new. I bet if you ask her today to explain that, she’ll say the face was turned toward the sun—only it wasn’t—or that there were daffodils along the lake, but there weren’t, not in January.” He laughed and his laugh took over until he could barely speak; he had amused himself. “Don’t call first because, because”—literally slapping his own knee now—“because I bet she’ll never see you coming.”
The Cop Reporter
The Cop Reporter
I know what my coworkers say behind my back. They call me Deputy Dawg. They say I’ve gone native, that I’m more cop than reporter. That I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, which is why I’m still on the cop beat after thirty years. No one serious about his newspaper career stays on the cop beat. Look at this little filly, thinking she’s going to make a career writing about some dead Negro. She doesn’t get it. Even at the Star, which doesn’t try to be like the fancy-pants Beacon, with its foreign bureaus and eight-man staff in DC, the cop beat is supposed to be a way station, a place you pass through.
A fifty-two-year-old cop reporter is unusual. To my face, the other cop reporters call me the “dean.” They pretend to look up to me. They try to steal my sources, certain they can do better by them. But I have these sources because I’m not going anywhere. These young guys would betray someone in a flash. I socialize with the men on my beat. I go to their kids’ christenings, attend the occasional FOP bull roast, buy rounds at the bar the cops favor.
I’m happy at HQ. My stomach drops to my ankles when I have to show up at the newsroom, unless it’s to pick up my paycheck or cash out my expenses. Those are the only good reasons to walk into the Star.
My father was a newspaperman in Philadelphia, a columnist, a legend. Jonny Diller. He was Jonathan, I’m John, a mistake on the birth certificate that stuck, so I’m no junior and I don’t let anyone call me Johnny. Of course I wanted to do what my old man did. It looked fun. People acted as if he was special because his name was on the front page of the paper on a regular basis. I ended up at the Star because I went to Hopkins, edited the News-Letter. I always imagined I’d make the hundred-mile journey back home someday, maybe as a columnist or a political writer.
There was only one problem: I couldn’t write. I mean, yes, I can put sentences together in the right order, but I lost any flair I once had. I don’t know how to explain it. The way they structure things at newspapers is that you don’t write at first. You go to a crime scene, you find a pay phone, you call the facts in to rewrite. In an afternoon paper, there’s no time to get back to the office and file. You know where every pay phone in the city is, that’s your desk.
When I caught my first murder, my third day of work, I laboriously wrote the story in my notebook, thinking I would dictate it to the rewrite guy, saving him the work. He chewed me out. I wasn’t saving him time, I was wasting time because what I had written was no good. “This is what I need and this is the order I need it in,” he barked at me. And when I would try to add a bit of color, or a detail I found interesting, he would say, “Answer only the questions I ask, son.”
I thought to myself: I’ll show them. I began working on a novel at night. I poured everything I had into a story about a boy growing up in Philadelphia, one who lived on the right side of the tracks but was drawn to the wrong side, befriended a boy there. Classic stuff, Dead End Kids, one grows up to be a priest, the other a criminal, only not quite as stark as that. In my book, one boy was going to grow up to be a reporter, the other one was going to be a cop, and they would end up at cross-purposes, the reporter insisting on printing something that undercut a major murder case, gave the killer a chance to go free. The cop does what he feels he has to do, kills the killer, and he’s arrested.