After I'm Gone Read online

  But there’s no point in running away when no one wants you back, so he might as well go interview Chef Boyardee.

  “Bayard,” Andrea Norr had said. “Chet Bayard. I was reading Chowhound, and it turns out he has a new place after all these years.”

  “Reading what?” She had called Sandy at 8:00 A.M., which probably seemed late on a horse farm, but Sandy enjoyed taking his time in the morning, inching into the day. He had worked midnights much of his life and was still barely on speaking terms with the hours between six and ten.

  “It’s a website for people who are interested in food.”

  “I know that.” He did. He thought about the woman he had met. Short, stocky, but it had seemed like her natural build, not a body nourished on particularly good or bad food. She had made that god-awful tea, too, and gone back for seconds. Someone who ate for fuel, someone who didn’t pay attention to restaurants.

  “He was on the Eastern Shore ten years ago,” he said, the file alive in his mind. “When the body was found. Cops took a statement then.”

  “Well, he’s in Sykesville now, got a new place.”

  Hadn’t Tubman suggested that Andrea Norr had reasons to divert attention away from her? “So you just happened to be reading this website and you just happened to see this guy’s name and you just happened to remember he was the last person to talk to your sister that day and, bam, there he was?”

  “No, I did a Google search on him and he came up. I’m surprised you haven’t done that.”

  “He was on my list. There are a lot of people in that file. And I thought he was all the way down to Cambridge or something.” And I have better sources than Google, for Christ’s sake. Everyone with a computer thinks they’re so slick.

  “That place in Cambridge closed a few years ago, but he’s trying his luck again.”

  “Poor sap.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” He would humor her, go out there. He didn’t like relatives telling him what to do. Usually, he had already done it. But he wanted to keep Andrea Norr as his ally in this. She knew something. He just wasn’t sure what it was, or if she even realized she had something of significance to share. He’d prefer that she be a liar, actually. You could break a liar down.

  Poor sap. Sandy couldn’t help evaluating Sykesville as a location for what was supposed to be an upscale French restaurant. The heart of the old town was charming, but it wasn’t a destination. The way Sandy understood it—and he had learned much of what he knew about the restaurant business in hindsight—you really needed an inn to make a go of a place like this, either one that was connected to the restaurant or a place within walking distance. The Inn at Little Washington, or even Volt out in Frederick. That had been Julie Saxony’s business plan when she disappeared—add a big-time restaurant to a B and B, then people would have a reason to come to the B and B. But she had been in Havre de Grace, which had the river, things to do. Sykesville struck Sandy as too close in for a weekend getaway, too far for a big night out.

  But the place looked nice enough, and the posted menu was promising. Very traditional French, so old-fashioned as to feel new again. Coq au vin, daily fish specials, lentils, cassoulet.

  He tried the heavy wooden door, found it unlocked.

  “We’re closed,” a young woman said without looking up. “No lunch during the week.”

  “I’m not here for a meal. I’m here to talk to”—he squinted at a piece of paper in his hand, although he knew the name—“Chester Bayard.”

  “Chester—oh, Chet.” She called back to the kitchen. “Chet, some guy for you.”

  The man who came out of the kitchen wore a chef’s coat with his full name embroidered on the breast pocket: Chester Bayard. Cocksman, Sandy thought. Sandy could always tell. It was in the tilt of the head, the predatory nature of the man’s eyes. He was probably sleeping with this girl, who was much too young for him. He probably screwed every attractive woman with whom he worked. He had probably screwed Julie Saxony, or tried. He was one of those guys. It was what he did, automatic as breathing.

  “I’m an investigator with the Baltimore City Police Department.” When he came in cold like this, he never said homicide, not first thing.

  “A detective?”

  “Once, but I retired. I’m a consultant now. I do cold cases.”

  “Murders.”

  Everyone was so goddamn savvy these days. Or thought they were. Yet this guy, this chef, would probably be appalled if Sandy presumed to know his trade based on watching a couple of shows on the Food Network.

  “Yes, Julie Saxony in this case. I’m going to assume you remember her.”

  Bayard nodded. “I’m glad you’re taking an interest. She was a nice lady, gave me my start as a chef. You want to sit?”

  He indicated a table, then picked up a bottle from a pine buffet—Ricard. He poured the yellowish liquid into a small glass, added water from a ceramic pitcher. He was way too into the ritual, which meant he was either a show-off or a boozer. He offered Sandy a glass, but he passed. He drank with friends. Well, he used to. He hadn’t really kept up with any of the other detectives after he retired. Bayard then waggled his fingers at the girl, her signal to leave. She flounced out, clearly miffed, although Sandy couldn’t tell if it was the fact of being dismissed or the way it had been done.

  “Why now?” Bayard asked. “It’s been—”

  “Twenty-six years since she disappeared, eleven since a homicide was established.” Sandy was aware that he was finishing the sentence, but not answering the question.

  “Has something happened?”

  “Not really. Sometimes cold cases are nudged back into being by new information, but sometimes we just look at the file and decide there are things that were never properly explored.”

  “Is there new information?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if there was.”

  “The detectives, the first time around. Small-town cops, didn’t know what they were doing. They did a shit job, no?”

  “No. They did okay. It’s hard without a body. Not impossible, but hard. Havre de Grace police don’t work a lot of murders, but their file was complete. Woman drove away, was never seen again. They talked to a lot of people, followed every lead they had. They talked to you.”

  “Well, I was the one who reported her missing. They kept asking me about the boyfriend.”

  “You mean Felix Brewer?”

  “Yeah. That guy. Stupid waste of time.”

  Sandy couldn’t help himself. “Everyone thinks everything’s a waste of time when it’s not the thing that leads to an answer.” He paused, taken by his own turn of phrase, considered its larger implications. It could be a philosophy, almost. Then he realized it was a variation on that hippy-dippy shit about life’s journeys. Still, it was a good rule in police work. Ruling stuff out was a kind of an answer. “It would have been irresponsible not to consider it, given the world in which he moved.”

  “She never spoke of him.”

  “Really?”

  “Not to me. Never mentioned him or her past. She was hurt when the business became successful and he was always part of the things that were written.”

  “Never” was a big word, in Sandy’s experience. If love and hate were intertwined, so were never and forever.

  The girl came back with a wooden board of cheese and fruit, a long loaf of French bread already sliced.

  “Dig in,” the chef said. “It’s almost noon, no?” It was the second time he had allowed himself that Gallic inflection, but Sandy thought this guy was about as French as French’s mustard.

  “No, thanks.” He noticed that the girl lingered, pretending to be busy in the immaculate dining room. Ears big as pitchers. Nabby’s expression, a mangling of what other people said about little pitchers and big ears.

  “What kind of relationship did y
ou have with Julie?”

  “Very good. She was a great boss. And she gave me my start, got me out of the catering business.”

  “Was the relationship strictly business?” Bayard’s girl was so fair that Sandy could see the tips of her ears flame red. Honey, this guy is in his fifties. Do you think he’s never been laid before?

  “We were friends.”

  “More than that?”

  Bayard glanced at the young woman. Her back was still to them, but her posture was so rigid that it seemed as if she were literally holding her breath, waiting for the answer.

  “I would have liked that. But she was past having lovers. A young woman, still in her thirties, and she claimed she was ‘done with all that.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers. “She needed me as a friend and I was that. I was—”

  He stopped.

  “Go on.”

  “No place to go. I was her friend.”

  “A friend with—hope?”

  He laughed. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Although—not to be cruel—she wasn’t aging well. She dieted herself until her figure was very severe—anything to get rid of her curves, to hide her old self. She didn’t want people to see the dancer in her.”

  “Dancer’s a nice way to say it.”

  “Ah. Now see, that was the problem, no? People are so judgmental about strippers. She wasn’t a whore. I’m not saying that girls on the Block didn’t do tricks back then, but she didn’t. She was Felix Brewer’s girl within days of starting there.”

  The details were awfully specific, Sandy thought, given she had never spoken of her old life to Bayard.

  “She danced in a G-string and pasties. Girls today, they go to the beach in less clothing.” The chef’s eyes rested on his girl, now trying to create busywork over at the bus station, unfolding and folding napkins. He was bored with her, Sandy decided. He was a man who got bored quickly.

  “Did she carry a torch for Felix?”

  Something caught light in Bayard’s eyes, and he aimed his forefinger at Sandy’s nose. “Do you know you are the first person to ask me the question in that way?”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “No insult intended to your brothers in blue, but no one ever asked me what was in Julie’s heart. It was always—‘Was she in touch with him? Were there mysterious calls?’ They checked her phone bills, her bank accounts. I think they even pulled the records on the pay phone a few blocks away. They were very interested to know if there had been contact, if she had any knowledge of him. As far as I know, there wasn’t, she didn’t. But she was still in love with him.”

  “How could you know that if she never talked about it?”

  “I know women.”

  A smug thing to say, something only an asshole would say. Didn’t make it untrue.

  “That bug you? Her carrying a torch for this long-gone guy, while there you were, right under her nose?”

  The name is always in the file. Always.

  Bayard laughed. “I suppose you have to ask that. But I also have to assume that you have reviewed all the information and know that I spent July 3, 1986, prepping for what we expected to be a very big weekend. We were doing—not exactly a soft open, more of a test for friends. The restaurant was months from its official opening, we hadn’t even finished the renovation of the dining room. I was pretty much in full view of my staff from the moment she drove away. I asked her to go to a kitchen-supply place for me.”

  Sandy did know that.

  “You reported her missing that very day, right? She tells you she’s going to Baltimore to go shop at Saks Fifth Avenue and you make the first call at ten thirty that night. What made you so sure that something had gone wrong? There are all sorts of reasons for people to stay out late. Traffic jams, a breakdown, running into an old friend, having dinner.”

  “The car had just been serviced two days before. And stores close, you know, around nine, and she had already been gone so long.”

  “Some women can easily shop that long.”

  “Not Julie. She was very decisive. And she had a woman who pulled things for her, to make it easier.”

  “Pulled things?”

  “Oh, you know—what do they call it? A personal shopper.”

  “Did you mention that to the police at the time?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. They did take it seriously. Her failure to come home that night, the following day. And the kitchen-supply store was pretty definitive that she had never made it there. But there was the boyfriend, the car—where did they find it?”

  “At the Giant Foods on Reisterstown Road, more than a month later.”

  “Right. So I assumed they were thinking—well, that fits. She met someone, left the car, didn’t plan on coming back. The thing is, she made no provision for the business. Once she was gone, it went to shit. I didn’t have power of attorney. Neither did her sister. It was a mess, straightening all that out. She had consulted her lawyer a week earlier, but she hadn’t done anything. This was not a woman planning to leave.”

  “How did you meet her in the first place?”

  “Catering business.”

  “Yours or someone else’s?”

  “Someone else’s. Julie was looking for a great chef, but she needed someone she could afford. She was very cagey, putting the word out for someone who was good, but not in a position to open his own restaurant. I was practically an indentured servant. I did all the work, the owner reaped the benefits. But I had no name, no backers willing to take a chance on me.”

  “But how did she find you?”

  The chef played with his Ricard, adding water, swirling it, making quite a production. More show-off than drunk, Sandy decided. “That’s another question no one thought to ask. It’s quite harmless, really, but I didn’t want to talk about it at the time. Out of respect to her, because it just loops around again to the same old topic, and I really did think that was a distraction.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I’m aware of that.” He tapped a cigarette out of a pack, glanced at it. “I guess I can break the smoking laws in my own damn restaurant when it’s closed. It might be closed forever soon enough. I can’t seem to catch a break in this business. My food is good, too. But that’s never enough.”

  “I know,” Sandy said. The chef shrugged as if he thought Sandy was making polite conversation. How could some cop know anything about how hard it was to run a restaurant? “Anyway, how did you meet her?”

  “My boss was the caterer of choice for big events among the rich Jews on the Northwest Side. Weddings, anniversary parties, bar mitzvahs. A woman named Lorraine Gelman hired me to do a big party, then referred me to her friend, Bambi Brewer, and I did her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Julie called me a few days before the event, told me she was looking for a chef for a new restaurant, something very ambitious, but she wanted to sample the food, get a sense of what I could do. So she dropped by, hung out in the kitchen during the party.”

  “Julie Saxony was in the kitchen during this party for Felix’s daughter?”

  Bayard smiled, as if at a memory. “Yeah. I didn’t have all the pieces then. Didn’t understand why she was skittish, why she all but ran into the pantry when one of the family members came into the kitchen. I had tried to talk her out of visiting this particular party, asked that she wait for an occasion where I would be doing something more impressive than crepes and frites. I realized later that it wasn’t entirely accidental, her choosing that event to sample my food. Sometimes, I think she hired me just to save face, you know? Plus, I am a great fucking chef. But that’s not enough to make it in this business.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Julie disappearing—I never caught a break after that. That restaurant was my big shot. I left Maryland, came back. Tried a superlocal thing on the Eastern S
hore, but that was ahead of its time and too far from the Washington money. Now I’m trying to make traditional work. Want my advice? Look at what I’m doing now and do it in five years, and you’ll be a rich man.”

  “What’s the old saying? How do you make a million dollars in the restaurant business?”

  Bayard smiled, finished his Ricard, then finished the joke. “Start with two million.”

  April 12, 1986

  Rachel washed her hands, taking far more time than necessary, but she was enjoying listening to Michelle’s young friends as they ran in and out of the bathroom, puffed up with their intrigues. Joey says he likes you more than a friend, but not quite as a girlfriend. Michael kissed Sarah even though he’s going with Jessica. Baz—Baz?—says you’ll be cute after your nose job. Rachel loved kids, of every age, but you couldn’t pay her to be thirteen again, not even a thirteen-year-old beauty such as her sister, who had been pulling a pout all evening over this party, for which their mother had spent thousands, maybe tens of thousands.

  “When did bat mitzvahs start having themes?” Linda had asked Rachel rather crankily when they entered the Peabody Hotel’s party room, transformed into the Rue Brewer in the Thirteenth Arrondissement. The thirteen was for Michelle’s age, of course. The Brewers had no intimate knowledge of Paris.

  “They all do now,” said Rachel, who had been her mother’s confidante throughout the planning, in part because the mere mention of the party triggered Linda’s temper. “One boy in her class did baseball—the family created an entire deck of baseball cards, with all the kids and their ‘stats’—and another girl did Madonna, if you can believe it. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, and I can’t imagine what she wore. Then that one girl, Chelsea, whom Michelle dislikes, also decided to do a Paris theme and hers was first, in March. When Michelle got the invitation, she tried to wheedle Mom into changing the whole thing—I think she wanted to do some variation on Hollywood—but Mother was firm with her.”

  “For once,” Linda had said, apparently determined to be in a bad mood all evening. She was seven months pregnant, and the hormones were taking their toll.