And When She Was Good

And When She Was Good

Laura Lippman

Dedication

For every woman I
know,

but in particular
the three L's—

Lauren Milne
Henderson

Linda
Perlstein

Lizzie
Skurnick

—who manage,
despite vast distances, to keep me well fed, well shod, and reasonably
sane.

Contents

M
ONDAY,
O
CTOBER 3

SUBURBAN MADAM DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

The headline catches Heloise's eye as she waits in the always-long line at the Starbucks closest to her son's middle school. Of course, a headline is supposed to call attention to itself. That's its job. Yet these letters are unusually huge, hectoring even, in a typeface suitable for a declaration of war or an invasion by aliens. It's tacky, tarted up, as much of a strumpet as the woman whose death it's trumpeting.

SUBURBAN MADAM DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE

Heloise finds it interesting that suicide must be fudged but the label of madam requires no similar restraint, only qualification. She supposes that every madam needs her modifier. Suburban Madam, D.C. Madam, Hollywood Madam, Mayflower Madam. “Madam” on its own would make no impression in a headline, and this is the headline of the day, repeated ad nauseam on every news break on WTOP and WBAL, even the local cut-ins on NPR.
Suburban Madam dead in apparent suicide.
People are speaking of it here in line at this very moment, if only because the suburb in question is the bordering county's version of
this
suburb. Albeit a lesser one, the residents of Turner's Grove agree. Schools not quite as good, green space less lush, too much lower-cost housing bringing in riffraff. You know, the people who can afford only three hundred thousand dollars for a town house. Such as the Suburban Madam, although from what Heloise has gleaned, she lived in the most middle of the middle houses, not so grand as to draw attention to herself but not on the fringes either.

And yes, Heloise knows that because she has followed almost every news story about the Suburban Madam since her initial arrest eight months ago. She knows her name, Michelle Smith, and what she looks like in her mug shot, the only photo of her that seems to exist. Very dark hair—so dark it must be dyed—very pale eyes, otherwise so ordinary as to be any woman anywhere, the kind of stranger who looks familiar because she looks like so many people you know. Maybe Heloise is a little bit of a hypocrite, decrying the news coverage even as she eats it up, but then she's not a disinterested party, unlike the people in this line, most of whom probably use “disinterested” incorrectly in conversation yet consider themselves quite bright.

When the Suburban Madam first showed up in the news, she was defiant and cocky, bragging of a little black book that would strike fear in the hearts of powerful men throughout the state. She gave interviews. She dropped tantalizing hints about shocking revelations to come. She allowed herself to be photographed in her determinedly Pottery Barned family room. She made a point of saying how tough she was, indomitable, someone who never ran from a fight. Now, a month out from trial, she is dead, discovered in her own garage, in her Honda Pilot, which was chugging away. If the news reporters are to be believed—always a big if, in Heloise's mind—it appears there was no black book, no list of powerful men, no big revelations in her computer despite diligent searching and scrubbing by the authorities. Lies? Bluffs? Delusions? Perhaps she was just an ordinary sex worker who thought she had a better chance at a book deal or a stint on reality television if she claimed to run something more grandiose.

A woman's voice breaks into Heloise's thoughts.

“How pathetic,” she says. “Women like that—all one can do is pity them.”

The woman's pronouncement is not that different from what Heloise has been thinking, yet she finds herself automatically switching sides.

“What I really hate,” the woman continues, presumably to a companion, although she speaks in the kind of creamy, pleased-with-itself tone that projects to every corner of the large coffee shop, “is how these women try to co-opt feminism. Prostitution is
not
what feminists were striving for.”

But it is a choice, of a type. It was her choice. Free to be you and me, right?
Heloise remembers a record with a pink cover. She remembers it being broken to pieces, too, cracked over her father's knee.

A deeper voice rumbles back, the words indistinct.

“She comes out of the gate proclaiming how tough she is, and when things get down to it, she can't even face prosecution. Kills herself, and she's not even looking at a particularly onerous sentence if found guilty. That's not exactly a sign of vibrant mental health.”

Again Heloise had been close to thinking the same thing, but now she's committed to seeing the other side.
She may be mentally ill, yes, but that doesn't prove she chose prostitution because she was mentally ill. Your logic is fallacious. She happened to get caught. What about the ones who don't get caught?
Do you think they catch everybody?

The deep voice returns, but Heloise is on the couple's wavelength now; she can make out his words. “She said she had a black book.”

“Don't they always? I don't believe that truly powerful men have to pay for it.”

At this point Heloise can't contain herself. Although she always tries to be low-key and polite, especially in her own neighborhood, where she is known primarily as Scott Lewis's mom, she turns around and says, “So you don't think governor of New York is a powerful position?”

“Excuse me?” The woman is taken aback. So is Heloise. She had assumed the self-possessed voice would belong to another mom, fresh from the school drop-off, but this is a middle-aged woman in business attire, talking to a man in a suit. They must be going to the office park down the street or on their way to a day of brokers' open houses or short sales. There has been an outbreak of auctions in the community, much to everyone's distress and worry.

“I couldn't help overhearing. You said powerful men don't pay for sex, yet the former governor of New York did. So are you saying that's not a powerful job?”

“I guess that's the exception that proves the rule.”

“Actually, the saying should be the exception that
tests
the rule. It's been corrupted over the years.” Heloise has spent much of her adult life acquiring such trivia, putting away little stores of factoids that are contrary to what most people think they know, including the origin of “factoid,” which was originally used for things that seem true but have no basis in fact. There's the accurate definition of the Immaculate Conception, for example, or the historical detail that slaves in Maryland remained in bondage after the Emancipation Proclamation because only Confederate slaves were freed by the act. The purist's insistence that “disinterested” is not the same as “uninterested.”

“But okay, let's say an exception does prove the rule,” she continues. “Let me run through a few more
exceptions
for you—Senator David Vitter, Charlie Sheen, Hugh Grant. Tiger Woods, probably, although I'm less clear on whether he visited professional sex workers or women in more of a gray area. I mean, you may not think of politicians, actors, and sports stars as inherently powerful, but our culture does, no?”

People are looking at her. Heloise does not like people to look at her unless she wants them to look at her. But she is invested in the argument and wants to win.

“Okay, so there are some powerful men who pay for sex. But they wouldn't risk such a thing unless they were very self-destructive.”

“What's the risk? It seems to me that sexual partners whose services are bought and paid for are more reliable than mistresses or girlfriends.”

“Well—”

“Besides, they didn't get her on sex, did you notice that? She was arrested on charges of mail fraud, racketeering, tax evasion. They couldn't actually prove that she had sex for money. They almost never can. Heidi Fleiss didn't go to jail for selling sex—she served time for not reporting her income. You know who gets busted for having sex for money? Street-level prostitutes. The ones who give hand jobs for thirty bucks. Think it through. Why is the one commodity that women can capitalize on illegal in this country? Who would be harmed if prostitution were legal?”

The woman gives Heloise a patronizing smile, as if she has the upper hand. Perhaps it's because Heloise is in her version of full mom garb—yoga pants, a polo-neck pullover, hair in a ponytail. It is not vanity to think that she looks younger than her real age. Heloise spends a lot of money on upkeep, and even in her most casual clothes she is impeccably groomed. The woman's companion smiles at her, too, and his grin is not at all patronizing. The woman notices. It doesn't make her happy, although there's nothing to suggest they are more than colleagues. But few women enjoy seeing another woman being admired.

“You seem to know a lot about the case,” the woman says. “Was she a friend of yours?”

Heloise understands that the point of the question is to make her disavow the dead Suburban Madam with a shocked “No!” and thereby prove that prostitution is disreputable. She will not fall into that trap.

“I didn't know her,” she says. “But I could have. She could have been my neighbor. She was
someone's
neighbor. Someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother.”

“She had kids?” This is the man, his interest piqued, in Heloise if not in the topic, although Heloise has never met a man who isn't fascinated by the subject of prostitution.

“No—that was just a figure of speech. But she could have been, that's all I'm saying. She was a person. You can't sum up her entire life in two words. You didn't know her. You shouldn't be gossiping about her.”

She feels a little flush of triumph. It's fun to claim the higher moral ground, a territory seldom available to her. And Heloise really does despise gossip, so she's not a hypocrite on that score.

But her sense of victory is short-lived. The problem, Heloise realizes as she waits for her half-caf/half-decaf, one-Splenda latte, is that people
can
be reduced that way. How would Heloise be described by those who know her? Or in a headline, given that so few people really know her. Scott's mom. The quiet neighbor who keeps to herself. Nobody's daughter, not as far as she's concerned. Nobody's wife, never anyone's wife, although local gossip figures her for a young widow because divorcées never move into Turner's Grove. They move
out,
unable to afford their spouses' equity in the house, even in these post-bubble days.

What no one realizes is that Heloise is also just another suburban madam, fortifying herself before a typical workday, which includes a slate full of appointments for her and the six young women who work at what is known, on paper, as the Women's Full Employment Network, a boutique lobbying firm whose mission statement identifies it as a nonprofit focused on income parity for all women. And when people hear that, they never want to know a single thing more about Heloise's business, which is exactly as she planned it.