After I'm Gone Page 13

  Back in the car, she sat in silence as Marc wondered aloud again why she had abandoned him all night. He was nudging, trying to pick a fight, then backing away as if nervous about what a quarrel might bring.

  “I mean, it’s okay, I can handle talking to Lorraine Gelman, although she bores me silly. She and my mom go all the way back to Park. But why would you do that to me, Rachel? You looked so pretty tonight. I just wanted to be with you. Why did you disappear?”

  I don’t know. Because I was having more fun in the bathroom. Because I missed my father so much tonight. Because you have a girlfriend. Some stupid piece on the side who actually sends you notes at our house.

  “There were just so many people to talk to,” she said.

  Was it really only yesterday that she had opened the hand-lettered note to Marc? She wasn’t a snoop by nature. She had picked it up only because it was from Saks and she assumed it was some stupid flyer for a sale and Marc could be needlessly extravagant. She expected to find a notice of a fur sale, given the time of year, or maybe jewelry tied to Mother’s Day.

  Instead she found the most explicit love letter she had ever read. A sex letter would be a better description. Your cock here, your cock there, my mouth on your cock. It seemed as if the letter went on for pages, that it was longer than Ulysses, longer than all twelve volumes in A Dance to the Music of Time, a work that Rachel and Marc both loved, but it was really only a page and a half, and it wouldn’t have been that long if the handwriting had been more controlled. Part of Rachel’s mind detached, imagining Marc’s horror at such pedestrian language, the sloppy handwriting.

  Another part of her mind, even more cool and cruel, chimed in: Well, look at you. You are truly your mother’s daughter now, a woman whose husband loves her so much that he sleeps with other women. Love at first sight, love at second sight—what about love at last sight? Is that too much for a Brewer woman to ask? Or does one have to settle as Linda has, for a man who’s sweet but weak and pliable?

  How had Rachel ended up living her mother’s life? How could she get out of it with her dignity intact? It was one thing to marry the better poet, but he was supposed to be a better man, too.

  “Where are we, Rachel?”

  She thought the question existential, but Marc, a suburban boy, had gotten twisted in the city’s one-way streets and ended up making a series of squares.

  “You’re going north on Calvert. You should circle back to the JFX here.”

  “But I can pick it up in a few blocks, right?” He always asked for her help, always got defensive when she provided it. He couldn’t possibly know—or could he?—that his chosen route took them past Horizon House, one of the high-rises thrown up in the 1960s during yet another abortive Baltimore renaissance. It was not quite the spiffy place it had seemed to Rachel ten years ago when her mother had pointed it out to her two oldest daughters, saying in a strangely matter-of-fact voice: “Your father’s girlfriend lives here, but I bet she’ll be moving now that she has all his money.”

  March 14, 2012

  The day after his meeting with Bayard, Sandy found himself walking down Thirty-sixth Street. The area appeared to be thriving after a few soft years. He stopped tallying up all the restaurants when he got to five. There was home-style stuff, a noodle place, Mexican and the Golden West, with its eclectic mix of Tex-Mex, Thai, and what Sandy thought of as Elvis-Southern. Deep fried, fatty, disgusting, great. A Cuban restaurant would have been a good addition to the current mix. Had he just been ahead of his time? He had used that excuse, but it felt hollow after hearing Bayard invoke it, a loser’s defense. “You’re an orphan,” Nabby would hiss when he disappointed her. “No one wants you and now I’m stuck with you and you’re good for nothing.”

  The cost of picking at other people’s brains for a living was that Sandy was all too aware of the machinations of his own mind, where ideas pinged around like errant pinballs. He had known all along where he was headed when he went out for this walk today. Now he had reached his old building, currently an antiques store full of things he could never afford. Sandy turned his collar up and put his head down, although the wind wasn’t particularly cutting. He felt like a teenager, riding his bike past the home of a crush. Just passing by. See me. Love me.

  Then he saw the kid, as he always thought of him, one of his few regulars, coming out of some weird bakery that was all muffins and cupcakes, not an honest roll or loaf of rye to be found. The kid was juggling packages while trying to keep a toddler in tow. Sandy had thought the kid had a baby, not a child who was already walking. Then he realized—this was the same baby. Must be two years since he had last seen this guy. Of course the baby had grown. That’s what babies do. Normal ones.

  “Can I give you a hand?” Sandy offered, catching the bakery bag before it tumbled to the ground, even as the big satchel on the kid’s shoulder started to slide.

  “Hey, Sandy!” He was impressed at the kid’s ability to pull up his name on the spot. For his part, Sandy couldn’t have said for the life of him what the kid’s name was. And the guy’s seeming joy at seeing Sandy, a marginal acquaintance at best, appeared genuine. Sandy couldn’t remember the last time someone had been that happy to see him. Only Mary. Never Bobby. That should have been a sign, right? A boy should be excited when his dad comes home.

  “What’s going on, Sandy? What are you up to since the restaurant closed?”

  The kid managed to make it sound positive, as if the restaurant was something Sandy had chosen to leave behind. “I’m a consultant. Doing cold case work for the police department.”

  “Hey, that’s great—” He took a few steps, grabbed his daughter by the back of her coat. “This is Scout. Carla Scout, but we somehow ended up calling her Scout.”

  “Scout?”

  He made a face. “I know. It’s so hipster. But it’s from To Kill a Mockingbird and not the least ironic. Besides, I’ve gone through life being called Crow by most people, despite having the perfectly respectable name of Edgar, and I’m relatively unscathed.”

  Now, see, the kid was classy that way. He had managed to remind Sandy of his name without putting it on Sandy. Sandy now remembered that he had never called him Crow but had made a joke out of his real name, dubbing him Fast Eddie. If Sandy were running a proper restaurant, a white tablecloth place, he would want this guy for the front of the house.

  “Pupcake,” the girl said, looking up at Sandy with enormous blue eyes, but all kids had big eyes. Scout. That was just a crazy thing to do to any kid, but especially a girl. “More pupcake.”

  “She’s pretty,” Sandy said, unsure if she really was, but how could you go wrong, telling a man his daughter was pretty. The girl did have amazing coloring—light eyes with dark hair, the black Irish thing. Like Mary. But her clothing was bizarre—shorts layered over heavy tights, beneath a sensible duffel coat. Sandy wasn’t exactly up-to-date on what the fashionable two-year-olds were wearing. Maybe this was—what did the kid call it?—hipster, too.

  “She dresses herself,” offered his old customer. “So are you working on something good?”

  Sandy realized he wanted to talk about his case. He suddenly wanted to talk, to have this human moment that so many people took for granted. How was work today, dear?

  “It’s actually kinda interesting. Julie Saxony, the girlfriend of Felix Brewer.” No look of recognition. “He’s a guy who skipped town back in the ’70s rather than do the time on a federal gambling rap. Way before your time, I’m guessing.” Details were coming back to him. The kid had grown up somewhere else, but his wife was hard-core Baltimore, the kind of local who was said to be Baltimore born, bred and buttered. “Ten years later, almost to the day he ran, she disappeared. The cops were always pretty sure it was a murder, but the body didn’t surface until 2001.”

  “Any particular reason you’re working it?”

  “No.” You couldn’t tell a guy like
this about a sexy photo, the way a dead woman’s eyes had pulled you in.

  “You know, my wife is a private detective.”

  “I don’t think I did know that.” Was Sandy so incurious off the job that he had failed to ask one of his few regular customers what his wife did? Or was he just the kind of man who didn’t think about women working in a meaningful way? He had to cop to being both. But the thing about being a murder police is that you spend so much time absorbing other people’s lives that you don’t solicit people’s life stories in your off-hours.

  “Anyway, she says money is the thing that drives people. Money and pride.”

  Sandy wanted to be polite, but he was getting awfully tired of other people telling him his business. A PI wouldn’t know that much about homicide. Divorce work, maybe. Where, come to think of it, everything was driven by money and pride.

  “Most murders,” Sandy said, “come down to stupidity, impulse, and opportunity.”

  “Sure, most. But those are—what do you call it? The dunkers?”

  Lord, how Sandy wished people would just stop watching cop shows. Only cops should watch cop shows.

  The kid continued: “I’m thinking about the cases that go unsolved, which is what cold cases are. The ones where people have done something deliberately, then taken care to cover their tracks.”

  “Motives,” Sandy said, not bothering to suppress his sigh. “Well, no one benefited financially from this lady’s death.”

  Lady. Would he have called her that a week ago? Maybe not. But the more he knew about her, the more he liked Julie Saxony. She was a go-getter.

  “I’ve always been curious—do the police have a lot of access to financial information in a murder? Can you get people’s accounts, do a kind of credit report? I mean, my wife—” He suddenly busied himself, wiping “pupcake” from his daughter’s face, which hadn’t bothered him at all a minute ago. Sandy suspected the kid was about to incriminate his wife, reveal that she had sources that got her information through not exactly legal methods. Must be nice, but she didn’t have to stand behind her work in court, delineate every piece of evidence and how it was obtained. Divorce work was like going to war, and all was fair in love and war.

  All was fair in love and war. His brain replayed his own thought, telling him to pay attention, not to let go of what might seem like just another cliché passing through.

  “Sure, with the proper paperwork I can get what I need. I mean, it’s not like the movies where I go click, click, click, and some amazing document opens on the computer. But there’s no money to follow here. She had a nice business. Her disappearance didn’t benefit anyone, and it screwed up a lot of people—her employees, her sister. In her absence, they couldn’t work it out. Business went bust.”

  “Ah, so what do you think happened? I mean, where do you start?”

  “With the original witnesses, every single name in the file—and this file runs to almost eight hundred pages. Of course, I can only get to those who are still around. Twenty-five years, things happen.” He considered the youth of the man in front of him, the sunny disposition. “People die.”

  The kid nodded. “Or disappear, or don’t remember. Or they think they remember, which is even worse. Did you know the more we tell a story, the more degraded it becomes? Factually, I mean. It’s like taking a beloved but fragile object out of a box and turning it over in your hands. You damage it every time.”

  “That’s interesting.” Sandy wasn’t being polite in this instance. He had begun to pay careful attention to the subject of memory, key in cold cases. He worried that there would be a day when defense attorneys could jettison all testimony based on memory. He really thought the United States ought to go the way of the UK, put cameras up everywhere. Oh, all the ACLU types would howl, but if you’re not a criminal, why would you care? All was fair in love and war.

  Love, he thought. Love. It didn’t rule out stupidity or impulse. In fact, love tended to run with that crowd.

  “Gotta go,” he said abruptly, aware he was being rude, unable to stop himself. “She’s a cutie.”

  He went into a diner, an honest one that dated back to the Avenue’s pre-chic days, and ordered a cup of coffee. He got out a notepad and began doodling. Sometimes, it was better not to have the file in front of you, just your head and some paper.

  He re-created the shapes in his head—the major triangle of Julie, Felix, and his wife, who didn’t even show up until the murder file was opened in 2001, and she had been eliminated pretty definitively. Everyone had fixated on Felix when Julie disappeared, but what good does it do to kill your husband’s girlfriend ten years after he’s gone, having left both of you? But there were other triangles. Felix–Julie–the sister. Julie had kind of dumped Andrea for her boyfriend, hadn’t she? Moved out, moved up. He drew another triangle: Felix-Julie-Tubby. The former fat man had met her first, brought her to Felix. Tribute? Or had he wanted her for himself and been surprised when she chose Felix?

  Sandy paid for his coffee. A buck twenty-five and this place was cheap by today’s standards. Had he really once lived in a world where a cup of coffee cost a quarter, candy bars were a nickel, hamburgers could be had for less than fifty cents? He never flinched at the gas station, no matter how high the prices got, because it made sense to him that something like gas kept going up, up, up, controlled by all those sheiks. It was the small items of his youth that he remembered. And they had seemed expensive then, coming from Cuba. Expensive and bountiful. The first time he had walked into the pharmacy on Twenty-ninth Street, the one with the soda fountain, he had been overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of his new life. It had taken him forty minutes to choose a candy bar. He told that story to Mary, told her it was a Marathon bar. Mary pointed out that Marathons weren’t around when he was fourteen.

  So the kid, Crow, was right. The things Sandy thought he remembered best were the things he was getting wrong. In which case—what did that say about his memories of Mary? Were they wrong? As long as they were loving, did it matter if they were wrong? He wished, as he wished every day, for her company. True, she could drive him mad with her endless analysis of every single personal interaction, but that was what women did.

  He doodled a name on his pad: Lorraine Gelman. Indirectly brought the chef and Julie together. Knew Bambi and Felix, probably knew Tubman through her husband, the criminal attorney. She would be protective of her old friends. Wives side with wives. But she might know stuff, might have spotted the dynamic he suspected. The only worry in Sandy’s mind was that a woman married to one of the best criminal attorneys in the city wouldn’t talk to him without lawyering up.

  Lawyering up. She might even say that. I’ll have to lawyer up. Jesus. Sometimes, Sandy felt like a magician in a room where even the youngest kid yelled out: “It’s a trick box! She’s pulled her knees up to her chest!”

  June 18, 1991

  Michelle was aware of the impression she made as she walked out to the pool in high-heeled sandals and a pink bikini. She strolled the full length slowly, toward the deep end where the adults—her mother, Bert, Lorraine—were seated. She then had to go back and procure one of the chaises at the other end. Again, she made a show of it, letting the wheels clatter, refusing the help of the all-but-panting teenage boys who offered to do it for her. How could her mother possibly think that Michelle—eighteen, a high school graduate—should attend a party of sixteen-year-olds. It had been bad enough, having Sydney’s company pushed on her all these years, but to attend a Sweet Sixteen on the first beautiful Saturday in June—torture. Especially when her boyfriend had wanted to take her to Philadelphia for dinner, to Le Bec Fin. But her mother couldn’t possibly know that, right? She didn’t even know about the boyfriend.

  Michelle had come up with such a good plan to get away, too. She told her mother that she was going to Philadelphia for the day to visit an art museum with a girl she had met on the College P
ark visit, a girl who might be her roommate if she proved, on this outing, as collegial as she seemed. This should have been a no-brainer for Bambi—art, a girl, Michelle trying to be sensible and optimistic about the whole College Park thing, which had been a bitter pill to swallow. Not because she was a brainiac like Rachel, or a grind like Linda, but because she had wanted to go someplace fun. ASU, Tulane, University of Miami. Only she hadn’t got into any of them. Bambi said Maryland was a bargain and if Michelle wanted to go out of state, she should have put more effort into high school, as Linda and Rachel had.

  “You might also want to consider if the number of tanning days belongs on a list of things you need in a college,” she had added.

  Tanning days. Michelle flipped on her stomach, reached behind her and unsnapped her halter top, then slid the top beneath her and onto the table where her Diet Coke was sweating. Her mother and the Gelmans were enjoying Bellinis, although the kids—the kids!—had been promised sips of champagne when the cake came out. Michelle’s own sisters—well, Linda at least—had been able to drink at eighteen, but the law had changed. Just another entry on Michelle’s List of Everything Unfair.

  But now that her top was off, no one would dare approach her. It actually hurt a little, pressing her bare breasts into the Japanese-inspired lounge chair—Lorraine always had the most beautiful things, but she didn’t always have the most comfortable things—and it would probably leave marks, but who cared? She wasn’t going to see her boyfriend tonight. Her perfect plan had been torpedoed by Bambi, who had blandly told Michelle that she wouldn’t cover the cost of the train ticket because Michelle was overdrawn on her allowance by six weeks. And Michelle couldn’t have the car because Bambi needed it to go to this party, which Michelle was going to attend, too.