Lady in the Lake(74)

The next day, Cal Weeks said: “So, no news out of the ribbon-cutting?”

“Nope,” Maddie said.

“Not even in August could a dog-and-pony show like that make news.”

Who was the dog? Who was the pony?





September 1966





September 1966



Labor Day. Where was I a year ago? Maddie wondered. At the club, the straps of her gingham checked one-piece pushed down, burnishing her tan so it might last a few more weeks. Her mother had always said that Maddie shouldn’t sunbathe because she tanned too easily. Such an odd idea, that anything achieved with ease was to be avoided, but that was Tattie Morgenstern’s worldview in a nutshell.

This summer, Maddie was not her usual pecan hue, but even if she had been, she would have still seemed pale alongside, beneath, Ferdie. She was under him for much of the holiday, not minding the heat, the pooling sweat. They made love until the sheets were slushy, until it felt as if they were underwater, then they took cool showers together, changed the sheets, ready for a second turn. It was a luxury, having that second set of sheets at the ready, but she had found a cheap laundry on North Liberty Street. She could drop off her linens on the way to work tomorrow. She didn’t have to be ashamed in front of the woman who took her bundle of soiled sheets, who spoke no English. Understood, perhaps, but didn’t speak, and it was what others said about you that could hurt, not what they thought.

But on this particular night, a holiday even for lowly clerks and patrolmen, at least this lowly clerk and patrolman, they did not resume making love after the shower. Ferdie pulled her to him, stroked her hair, and murmured the last thing she ever expected him to say.

“I think I have a story for you.”

“A story?”

“For the newspaper. It’s going to happen tomorrow.”

“How can you know what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

“Because it’s happening now, actually. Started to happen. But the guy won’t be arraigned until tomorrow. What time is your deadline?”

“They go all day, right up until three.” Could Ferdie really have a valid tip for her? He had known the inside details about Tessie Fine, after all. “But it’s best to have it in all editions, and update throughout the day.”

“It’s supposed to happen tonight. I got a tip. I mean—the man who told me, he didn’t realize it was a tip. To him, it was gossip. He likes being in the know. Makes him feel big. He liked telling me about police business, telling me my business, to show how plugged in he is. Cock of the walk and all. Didn’t occur to him that I know anyone at the papers.”

“Ferdie, what is it?” As urgent as she felt, she also was sure it would be nothing, an anticlimax. She had been wrong so many times about what might be news. How could Ferdie’s judgment be any better?

“A man’s going to walk into headquarters tonight and confess to the murder of Cleo Sherwood.”

Not an anticlimax.

“Who?”

“The bartender from the Flamingo.”

“The white guy? Spike?”

“That’s the one. Tommy something. It was all made up, everything he told the police. He killed her. He told her he was in love with her, she laughed at him, and he killed her. But he can’t be arraigned until the courts open back up tomorrow. So he’ll be in lockup tonight.”

“How do I get the story?”

“If you trust me, you got it. The guy who works overnight at your paper, no one’s going to tell him, right? It’s a holiday, they probably got the second string on. This is solid, Maddie. Look, call Homicide right now. Tell them you’re from the Star, that you have a tip. They’ll deny it. But then you say, ‘I’m going with it if you don’t tell me I’m wrong. You don’t have to confirm or deny it, you don’t have to say anything.’ Reporters do it all the time.” A pause. “That’s what I’m told.”

Would that work? It seemed a dangerous game to play. Diller would be angry, being usurped on his beat, but what would it matter if the tip was right?

She stared at her phone, scarlet and inert, indifferent to its role in changing her life. “What’s the number?”

Ferdie rattled it off, then said, “But don’t call from here. Wait another hour, take a cab to the office, make the call from there, okay?”

She kept the promise to wait but broke the others, calling from home, not bothering to go to the office. After she hung up with the homicide detective, whose silence confirmed that Thomas Ludlow had arrived without an attorney to confess to the murder of Eunetta “Cleo” Sherwood, she dialed the city desk and said, as if she had said it a thousand times before: “Cal, this is Maddie Schwartz. Please put me through to rewrite. I’ve gotten a big break on the Cleo Sherwood story.”

Cal quizzed her, of course. But she had it cold, and she had won him over, doing all those thankless tasks in the dog days of August.

And by ten o’clock the next morning, most of the city knew it: a white man had killed Cleo Sherwood for the very everyday crime of not loving him. It was not a page one story and Maddie understood the calculus that determined that: the dead woman was a Negro, she was killed for love, or for lack of love more accurately. But it was a story good enough for the metro page, the ending to the tantalizing tale of the Lady in the Lake.