Maddie's Staged Burglary

Maddie Schwartz's staged burglary is the calculated falsehood that launches her second life. Trapped in a sparsely furnished apartment on Gist Avenue, in a neighborhood of maids and laundresses, milkmen and streetcar conductors, where the neighbors snubbed her as if she were the undesirable one, Maddie decides to manufacture a crime. She takes her engagement ring and shoves it deep into the dirt of a potted African violet she keeps on a rickety table near the patio door, then methodically creates the appearance of chaos by opening drawers in the kitchen and bedroom and tossing some of her clothes to the floor. She pulls the sliding door so only a faint wisp of winter air sneaks through, then runs into the street screaming for help. Within a block, a patrolman rushes toward her. "I've been robbed," she says, her breathlessness making it easy to sound frightened. "My apartment," she adds. "Jewelry—mostly costume stuff, but I had a diamond ring and that's gone." The lie is complete, and it works: the insurance money will come, and with it, her freedom.

The Encounter with Ferdie Platt

The patrolman who answers her call is Ferdie Platt, a Negro officer perhaps ten years younger than she is, broad-shouldered and athletic, one of those men who seemed particularly spick-and-span, always smelling of soap—not aftershave or cologne, just soap. He walks her back to the apartment, his keen brown eyes studying the not-quite-closed patio door and the disarray. Maddie suddenly fears that the impressions of her fingertips are visible in the soil of the African violet, and she checks her nails surreptitiously for signs of dirt. "Let's call the burglary detectives," he says. But Ferdie does more than file a report. Two weeks later, he convinces the landlord to break her lease without penalty and even gets her deposit back; Maddie thinks it better not to ask how he accomplished that. He inspects the apartment she finds near the downtown library, a location he decides is at once safe and private. "Your comings and goings won't be notable here," he tells her. A week after that, he helps her break in her new bed, the one she bought with part of the insurance money. She also has the money from selling her car, though that required Milton's permission, of all things—so infuriating. On the bedside table sits a new phone in a delicious shade of bright red, and next to it, the African violet stands guard, serene and silent.

The Affair and Its Concealment

The staged burglary becomes the foundation of a clandestine affair. Ferdie calls before he comes so she can sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked; he arrives after dark and disappears in the early morning hours, always wearing his uniform. Inevitably, people see him—and her next-door neighbor does more than see him, Maddie knows. She had not been loud before, but now she wants someone to hear, to know that she is having sex two, three times a night, even if it is just her motley assortment of neighbors. Sometimes Ferdie likes to bend her over the sink in her bathroom, and while he keeps his eyes tightly shut, she is mesmerized by their images in the mirror. She has never looked so pale and tiny; before Ferdie, she had thought of herself as dark. He calls before he comes, shows up with Chinese takeout or pizza, and they end up eating the food cold, often in bed, between slugs of foamy beer. He likes Ballantine's Ale, so she keeps that on hand and drinks it with him, although she prefers wine or vermouth. Under the sheets, they inspect each other's naked bodies like satisfied customers; he is circumcised, after all—"Jew doctor," he says, when her hand lingers. The biggest surprise on his compact, athletic body is his navel, an outie, very large and bumpy. She wants to ask if she is the first white woman he has been with, but the question seems rude, and it is easier to make love a third time.

The Lie's Long Shadow

The staged burglary is not merely a private deception; it reverberates through Maddie's public life and her sense of self. The false report of a stolen diamond ring becomes the template for other fabrications, and the objects involved—the ring, the African violet, the red phone—become charged with meaning. The ermine stole that later surfaces in the investigation of Cleo Sherwood's disappearance carries a similar weight: a fine piece of clothing that a young, single woman could only have come by through questionable means, as the psychic's disdainful look suggests. "How did any young, single woman come to have a fur?" The question echoes Maddie's own situation, a woman whose material possessions and their origins are subject to scrutiny. The staged burglary also foreshadows the larger deceptions of the novel: the false confession of Thomas Ludlow, the faked death of Cleo Sherwood, and the lies that Maddie herself will tell and be told. When she later writes to Stephen Corwin, introducing herself as "the woman who found the body of Tessie Fine," she is building a new identity on the foundation of a fabricated crime.

The truth of the staged burglary eventually catches up with her. In a moment of confession, Maddie admits, "My ring wasn't stolen," she said. "I did that to get the insurance money." And Ferdie reveals that he knew all along: "I know," he says. "I told you about Tommy Ludlow because we thought it would make you stop. Shell told Tommy he had to confess, to make you stop." The revelation is double-edged: Ferdie, the man who helped her break her lease and inspected her new apartment, who became her lover and her confidant, had been complicit in a larger scheme to control her. The staged burglary, which began as Maddie's bid for freedom, is revealed to be part of a web of manipulation in which she was both agent and pawn. The lie that bought her independence also bound her to a man who was keeping secrets from her, and the insurance money that paid for her new bed and her red phone came at the cost of a truth she could not see. The African violet, which stood guard over her new life, had been planted in the soil of a deception that would not stay buried.