Lady in the Lake(45)

I thought I was hot stuff.

One night, I was sitting at my typewriter, looking at what I had written so far. By writing two pages a day, I had amassed three hundred pages midway into the year, almost a full novel. I began reading back through what I had accomplished and I was struck by two things.

One, I really hated the reporter in my own story. All my sympathies were with the cop, although the reporter was the autobiographical character.

Two, I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write for sour apples.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t good. I swear I was good once. I had filled notebooks with poetry and short stories, won contests in high school and college. But the Star, that rewrite man, had destroyed something in me and I couldn’t get it back. I felt like a god stripped of his powers, forced to wander the earth in his reduced state as punishment. Only, punishment for what? As long as I kept calling my stories in to rewrite, my writing skills were going to diminish, diminish, diminish. The Star’s narrow-minded view of what made a story was destroying my own.

But what if I moved up, got a new beat—and I still couldn’t write. What then?

At that moment—I can still see myself at the desk in the living room, my young (then) wife gone to bed long ago, my shirtsleeves rolled up, and it’s like seeing a man who thinks he can fly, only to wake from a dream and find himself standing on a ledge. I froze. I don’t think I could have pressed a key on my typewriter with a gun to my head. I developed writer’s block. I have it to this day. I can’t write sentences, only words. I jot down facts in my notebook, but that doesn’t count as writing, that’s stenography. I actually know steno, which is why my notes are so good, so reliable, my quotes never questioned. No one has ever accused me of getting so much as a word wrong. When all the papers cover the same story and there’s a discrepancy in a quote or a fact, I’m the one who got it right. I haven’t had a single correction in almost thirty years on the job. Do you know how unusual that is?

At lunch, I ask the lady, Maddie-Marjorie, to cover her half. She seems a little surprised, but she gives me her share, as she should. This isn’t a date. I pocket the check and go back to the office, fill out my expenses—including the one for the lunch I just had, writing “Sgt. Patrick Mahoney” on the back of the slip—and walk away with a nice fistful of cash. After work, I head to the cops’ favorite bar, where I use my expense money to buy everyone a round, then grab the check so I can submit that expense later. All legitimate. If buying a cop a beer isn’t part of doing my job, I don’t know what is.

I see the patrolman from the Tessie Fine case, the one who was first on the scene, a young Polack with a reputation for being too good for his own good. He never stays for more than one beer and he has a sanctimonious puss on him, talks a little too much about his wife and not in the way most of the guys do, with good-natured jokes and complaints. No, this guy’s wife is a saint, an angel. The man doth protest too much if you ask me.

“Did you know that that nice lady, the one who found Tessie Fine’s body and became the killer’s pen pal, is working at the paper now?” See, I give a little, then maybe I get a little.

He frowns. “I’m not sure she’s a nice lady.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t want to gossip.”

Which is, of course, the first thing someone says right before he gossips. This one in particular likes to gossip, although he doesn’t call it that. Men never do.

I prime the pump. “She’s decided she wants to look into the Cleo Sherwood case. The barmaid from the Flamingo, the round-heels.”

“Who cares about that?”

“Nobody cares, so why not let her have a crack at it.”

“She sure does like ’em dark,” he says.

I lean in, slide my pack of cigarettes across the bar to him. I know him. He won’t stay for another beer, but he might nurse the one beer through a smoke.

“Not sure I catch your drift.”

“You ever meet a patrol named Ferdie Platt? Northwest, blacker than ink. She knows him.” He leans hard on that word, knows, makes sure I understand the implications.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been looking into him. He’s cozy with Shell Gordon, who owns the Flamingo. I don’t think she’s trying to get a story out of Cleo Sherwood. I think she’s fishing to take information back to Platt. I think he told her some stuff about the Tessie Fine case, which is how Bob Bauer knew what he knew. If she’s chasing this story, even money that Ferdie Platt put her up to it.”

“Why would he do that?”

He exhales smoke from his cigarette. “Got me. But I saw him coming and going from her place, which sure as hell isn’t in the Northwest, I know that much.”

“And what were you doing there?”

The Polack pulls on his beer, doesn’t comment. That’s the thing about this guy. He’s got the soul of a rat, he’s a tattletale who’s never grown up. He’s always keeping score.

“I have to go,” he says. “My wife doesn’t sleep soundly until I get home.”

He leaves me to puzzle over what he’s told me. So this little housewife got her big break because she has a cop boyfriend, a colored one at that. I wonder if he put her up to writing those letters to Tessie Fine’s killer, told her what to say, if the homicide cops were working her through him. But the cops I know were genuinely upset when the story broke, when the Star pointed out the discrepancy between what Corwin told them and what he told her, the thing about the car, the accomplice. Three months later, he’s still holding firm with them, insisting it was all a lie, that he just made stuff up to mess with her, but obviously there’s an accomplice out there and it’s driving them nuts. If they had the accomplice, they could play the two against each other, cinch a death penalty case for one of ’em.