Werner's is a modest Baltimore restaurant that enters the story of the Lady in the Lake as the place where Cleo Sherwood once worked, briefly, in the kitchen. It is a workplace defined by the color line: Cleo wanted to be a waitress, but the bosses would not have it. The customers wanted white waitresses, they said, and so Cleo was hidden away in the back, too pretty, in her own opinion, to be kept from view. She was right about that, as a fellow worker later reflects, remembering her as the first dead person he knew outside the circle of grandparents and others who are supposed to die. Reading in the Star that Cleo was dead, and dead in the lake at that, struck him as strange and sad. How does a girl end up in a fountain? His answer was simple and grim: a woman dies young, it is man trouble.

A Workplace Divided by Race

The restaurant's racial hierarchy is the defining fact of Cleo's time there. She was hired to work in the kitchen, not to serve, and the distinction was enforced by the owners' claim that the customers wanted it that way. The same rule that kept Cleo from the dining room also shaped the lives of other Black workers in Baltimore's service economy, where the best restaurants did not hire women to wait tables even if they were white, and where a Black woman could find herself stuck in the back, cut off from the tips that came in folding money rather than change thrown on the table. Cleo's frustration at Werner's was part of a larger pattern she was determined to escape, a pattern that pushed her toward the idea that she would need to look as if she did not need money in order to get a man who had it.

Maddie Schwartz Learns Cleo's Name

Werner's is also the place where Maddie Schwartz first hears Cleo's name spoken in connection with her death. During a lunch meeting at the restaurant, Maddie's companion is served by a waiter who overhears the name Cleo Sherwood and recognizes it. The waiter remembers that Cleo worked in the kitchen at Werner's, although not for very long, and that she had wanted to be a waitress. The conversation is a small revelation for Maddie, who has been pursuing the story of the dead woman found in the fountain. It is also a moment that exposes the limits of her understanding. When she later tells her lover Ferdie Platt about the callousness of the men at the Star, he laughs at her and explains that Cleo's disappearance was not a big deal because she was a Negro. Maddie insists she is not naive, but she is hurt, having believed her anger was a kind of tribute to her lover. The exchange at Werner's, and the conversation it sparks, forces her to confront the fact that race, not just gender, determined who mattered and who did not.

A Waitress's Portrait of Cleo

Months later, after Maddie has published her story and become known by her byline, she returns to Werner's and is recognized by a young waitress with freckles on her nose and the bit of chest she let show in her pink uniform. The waitress is shy and excited, younger than Maddie, and she says she knew Cleo back at Werner's. Asked what Cleo was like, she takes so long to answer that Maddie assumes she has not been heard. Then she speaks: Hungry. She wanted things. She just didn't know what they were. The portrait is brief but resonant, capturing Cleo as a woman of appetite and ambition who had not yet found the object of her desire. It is the most direct testimony anyone gives Maddie about who Cleo was, and it lingers because it refuses to reduce her to either victim or schemer.

The Restaurant's Place in the Story

Werner's functions in the novel as a point of contact between the living and the dead, a place where Cleo's memory is kept by ordinary people who worked alongside her. It is not a grand or important institution, but a working-class restaurant where a Black woman was denied the chance to wait tables and where, years later, a white reporter came looking for the truth of her life. The restaurant is also a reminder of how little Cleo mattered to the wider world. In hindsight, Maddie sees that Cleo could not have swayed an election, that she had never mattered at all. Werner's, with its kitchen and its color line, is one of the few places where Cleo's brief life left a trace that someone bothered to remember.