63 pages • 2 hours read
Laura LippmanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Maddie gains access to privileged information through Ferdie; Ferdie’s interest in the Fine case is driven by his goal of getting promoted to detective, an ambition long thwarted by the prejudicial attitudes and policies of Baltimore PD. The police conceal Maddie and Judith’s identities from the press. However, Maddie learns her identity has been uncovered when a reporter named Bob Bauer appears at her apartment. She invites him inside, but deflects, refusing to talk about finding the 11-year-old’s corpse. Instead, feeling obligated to assist, she assures Bob that the pet shop employee will be arrested, omitting any references to her source. Bauer assures her that he will not use her name.
The Sun columnist Bob Bauer hunts down Maddie’s name in police records when his colleague, John Diller, reveals that two women were on the scene. Bob describes Maddie as a beatnik and is puzzled by her choice of residence. He is wounded when he fails to persuade Maddie to speak about the crime scene. Instead, he follows her lead. One of his detective-sources discloses that aquarium sand was found on Tessie’s remains, and Bob secures the exclusive on the suspect’s arrest, penning a pivotal article for the Star.
Cleo warns Maddie that Baltimore shares more in common with a small town than a big city. Cleo knew Ferdie Platt, who frequented the Flamingo, owned by his friend Shell Gordon. Cleo once asked Ferdie if he was “on the take,” alluding to the possibility that Ferdie could be using his position on the police force to profit from participation in Shell Gordon’s less-than-legal business interests. Ferdie denied involvement. Cleo recalls Ferdie as a womanizer who predominantly involved himself with married and white women, a choice she surmised allowed him to avoid investing time and money in his partners. Cleo believed Ferdie’s decision not to pursue her was deliberate, owing to Cleo’s involvement with another man of much higher stature, but she did find him attractive: “Just so you know, Maddie Schwartz. I could have had him” (87).
Maddie sees an ad for a clerical position at the Star and wonders if Bob Bauer would vouch for her. Ferdie follows the Fine case, sharing the details with Maddie. As Ferdie cultivates his professional reputation, hoping to be in a favorable position for promotion when the police department begins easing its racial restrictions, Maddie muses about the gated community where she hopes to live once she is awarded alimony. She buys fabric in a bold, new print, but she refuses to ask Milton for her sewing machine: “She didn’t want anything from him, except money” (92). She concludes that if Wally Wiess had not come to dinner, she would not have left Milton when she did. She decides that she deserves recognition for finding Tessie Fine. Hoping to persuade the cagey suspect in Tessie’s murder to confide in her, Maddie begins drafting a letter to Stephen Corwin.
Stephen Corwin is not cooperating with the police, but he does respond to Maddie Schwartz’s letters, the first of which contains a picture of Maddie. Stephen doesn’t provide Maddie with any concrete indication of his guilt, but his mother and his lawyer are both furious with him for engaging with her. Stephen describes his mother as “very smart,” though the woman is heavily medicated. Stephen notes her tumultuous moods, constant berating, and lack of rationale, but he seems unaware that these issues are problematic. When Stephen’s lawyer suggests they might use the letters as evidence of Stephen’s mental health condition, his mother cries, “No one’s going to say my Stephen is crazy” (98). Eventually, though, she allows herself to be convinced that such a claim could be valuable.
When she visits the Star, Maddie wears the conservative clothing of her former life as Mrs. Milton Schwartz. She proceeds to Bob Bauer’s desk, announcing that she wants a job and attempting to leverage her tip about Stephen Corwin. Bob counters that she lacks qualifications. Maddie produces a letter from Corwin, wanting to use this angle for an article. Bob asks how this would preserve the anonymity Maddie appeared so concerned about. Maddie says the difference is that she will be writing about herself. When Bob scoffs at her naiveté and entitlement, Maddie counters with a threat to bring the letters to the Star’s competitors. They reach an agreement: Bob writes the article, with Maddie’s collaboration and printed credit for her efforts. Corwin’s attorney subpoenas the letters, but the Star identifies Maddie as an employee whose source material is protected under Maryland law. Maddie is offered a job as assistant to Don Heath, author of the Helpline column.
Don Heath is suspicious when told he is being given an assistant. Don knows his colleagues have noticed a decline in his work; they don’t know that he’s been diagnosed with early onset dementia. Mr. Helpline is a popular column deriving its articles from reader letters, so Don tasks Maddie to screen them; he’s impressed when she develops an efficient organizational approach. He wonders where her husband is and decides Bob Bauer must have a sexual interest in her.
Editor Cal Weeks sends Maddie to cover an anniversary party for Violet Wilson Whyte, the first Black woman on Baltimore’s police force. Weeks concedes that the Star would ordinarily not cover the event, but it would be good optics amid rising racial hostilities. Maddie approaches Violet for comment, and the woman shares that her most rewarding opportunity has been providing an example to young people of color. A citizen writes to Mr. Helpline complaining that the lights on the fountain at the park have stopped working, so Maddie calls the Department of Public Works to report the outage.
Violet Whyte is aware the department has staged this event for public relations purposes. It has the air of a going away party, but Violet has always insisted she will not retire until she has made captain. She finds it odd when Ferdie Platt asks her opinion of the article that appeared in the Star. She considers Ferdie “too handsome for his own good” (123), disapproving of his association with Shell Gordon (123). Still, Violet appreciates the Flamingo employees’ apparent cooperation from when Cleo Sherwood went missing. Violet assigns fault to Cleo herself, puzzled that Cleo could turn out so differently from her respectable parents: “It’s a shame I never met young Cleo. I’m sure I could have helped her find the right path” (123).
Violet and Cleo did meet once: it was Officer Violet Whyte who helped to convince Cleo of her worthiness. When she was six, Cleo and her friends entered the Schwartz’s grocery. Before he became a successful real estate lawyer and Maddie’s husband, Milton Schwartz was a corpulent college student working the till in his father’s store. He bullied young Cleo about her name: “Like some dumb colored kid could ever look like Cleopatra. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. She was royalty. You’re just a poor j-g” (125). Cleo dissolved into tears and fled, only to encounter Violet. Violet walked her back into the store, retrieving Cleo’s candy and money from Milton. Cleo vowed then to preserve her dignity, and she never cries again until she meets the man she calls “the end of me.”
These chapters reveal a series of connections that illustrate Interconnectedness Versus Anonymity in City Life, further complicating the web of connections binding all the characters together. The origin of Cleo’s dislike of Milton connects them both to Officer Violet Wilson Whyte’s character. Ferdie manages to maintain Maddie’s anonymity when he asks Violet’s opinion of the article that appeared in the Star, but Ferdie never would’ve asked in the first place if Maddie were not the author covering his colleague’s party. The small-town culture of Baltimore is even explicitly expressed to Maddie, such as with Cleo’s inner monologue in Chapter 13 and the familiarity that both Cleo and Violet share with Ferdie. These connections, in turn, continue to shape characters’ perceptions. In their separate chapters, Cleo and Violet both describe Ferdie as handsome and highly social, and both believe that his proximity to Shell Gordon is inappropriate given his status as a police officer.
The Intersectionality of Midcentury Prejudices is at play in these chapters as well, especially as Cleo expresses more of her personal reflections. There is a prevailing awareness throughout the novel of how identities clash. Maddie notes, for example, that despite the changing demographic dynamics, the same resentment and racial tensions are present as when families like Milton’s and Cleo’s coexisted. Within this context, in a one-way exchange, Cleo makes a point of telling Maddie that she could have “had” Ferdie as a romantic partner if she had wanted. In Baltimore during the 1960s, especially among more traditional communities, women’s rights were heavily curtailed, and men held disproportionate social and economic power over women’s lives. Such environments tended to foster the idea of women as each other’s enemies and competitors. Moreover, Cleo also grew up with the societal message that she was less than others because of her skin color. Now keen to seize power, Cleo wields as a weapon the knowledge that she and Maddie were both in a position to be involved with the same man; to Cleo, this fact is an equalizing element.
The sexism and racism of the time both continue to interact with the theme of Perspective’s Role in Shaping Reality, with biases and prejudices influencing characters’ perceptions as much as they affect their choices. Violet, for example, assigns the blame for Cleo’s fate to Cleo herself. Violet, perhaps more than any other character, given her three decades as a Black woman on the police force, is in a position to recognize that women’s decisions are not the determining factor in whether or not a man lashes out with violence. Instead, a product of her time, Violet laments only Cleo’s apparent failure to live up to the reputation of her parents, who are respected members of Baltimore’s Black community. In a similar vein, in dealing with Ferdie, Maddie uses the presumptive blowback of taking their relationship public—as an interracial couple—as an excuse to avoid discussing what their partnership might look like long term. Ferdie’s anxiety about racism is legitimate, and it’s a callous act of manipulation to abuse it. Simultaneously, Maddie is struggling with societal pressures placed on her as a woman: only by the end of the novel will she reveal to Ferdie that she has no interest in being a wife ever again.
In terms of manipulating perspective, other secrets and denials are at play on a smaller scale throughout these chapters and appear more frequently as Maddie becomes involved at the Star: Don Heath does not want to disclose his diagnosis for fear of losing his job, denying his worsening dementia. Bob Bauer hides his wife’s degenerative disease and his daughter’s death behind the presentations of his fictional home life in his column. Stephen Corwin makes excuses for his mother, refusing to admit to himself his culpability and hers in the events that led to his deeply deteriorated psyche and the conditions that left him ill-equipped to deal with the obnoxious behavior of Tessie Fine. The Star itself retroactively counts Maddie among its employees in order to protect the Stephen Corwin letters from Corwin’s attorney. Finally, regarding both Cleo and Maddie, there is ample evidence that their recollections and interpretations have been warped by the significant power imbalances placing each woman at a significant disadvantage and by the tumultuous, intense emotional consequences of their entanglements.
By Laura Lippman