After I'm Gone Read online

  “You what?” Bert asked. “You let them in with a warrant and you didn’t even call me?”

  “I didn’t see the harm,” Bambi said. She hadn’t. She still didn’t. The shoebox they had carried away might contain evidence of something else she had done, something not quite kosher. But it wasn’t enough to leverage a murder charge.

  Unless the person were already inclined to confess. And she couldn’t see what other choice she had.

  Back in the hospital, in the car on her way here, she had thought it would be so easy to say I did it. Yet she couldn’t, she didn’t. For one thing, she couldn’t help being curious about what the detectives thought they knew. She would hear them out, although not because Bert had told her to. Bert had his agenda, she had hers.

  “On July third, Julie Saxony left Havre de Grace, telling her chef that she was going shopping. She was never seen alive again. Well, she might have crossed paths with a gas station attendant or gone through a fast-food drive-through. But the last person who saw her alive was probably her killer.”

  Bambi couldn’t help herself. “In homicides, isn’t the killer always the last person to see the victim alive?”

  The girl nodded and smiled, pleased with Bambi. Bert glowered. “Good point. So let me ask you, did you see Julie Saxony that day?”

  “I did.” Bert grabbed her arm. She shook him off.

  “Where?”

  “She came to my home.”

  “Invited?”

  “No. I can assure you of that. No. She showed up, out of the blue.”

  “And what happened?”

  Bambi did not answer right away. “She told me that my husband had arranged for me to have access to a large sum of money after he left, but she had taken it.”

  “And?”

  Bert grabbed her arm again, hissed into her ear: “Bambi—a word, please. I need to speak to you privately because if you continue down this road, I am obligated to recuse myself. I cannot allow a client to lie.”

  3:15 P.M.

  Sandy and Nancy retreated to a lunchroom, where they shared coffee from a thermos that Sandy had brought. On a day like today, they would probably end up drinking the house swill, but they didn’t have to start with it.

  “It’s high-octane, the real deal. I make my own at home. I always brought a thermos, all the years I worked here. I could never get used to the crap that machine makes. The other guys laughed at me, said I was prissy. They thought I was prissy about a lot of stuff and busted my balls for it. But once they had my coffee, they would wheedle me for some. By the time I retired, I was carrying the biggest thermos they made.”

  She widened her eyes. “Wow—it is strong. I’m a wimp. I hope you won’t be insulted if I cut it with a little Sweet’N Low.”

  “Not at all.”

  He wasn’t because he liked her. So far. Nancy Porter had been recommended to him by Harold Lenhardt, who had done his twenty in Baltimore City, then bounced to the county and was halfway to his twenty there. Lenhardt was a good police and he swore by this girl, the daughter and granddaughter of big Polish cops, one of the few youngsters who used the old vernacular, a police.

  The mere fact that she was willing to help was a big point in her favor: Most detectives would be reluctant to take on a twenty-six-year-old homicide that wasn’t their case to begin with. More risk than upside. But Nancy was intrigued by what yesterday’s warrants had produced. Not quite the smoking gun—smoking earring—he had hoped for, but as good as. As good as.

  “You’re lucky she did consignment shops, all nice and legal, as opposed to pawn shops. Probably wouldn’t be that much detail on a pawn slip from 1986,” Nancy said now. She was struggling with the coffee, he could tell. But she had manners, unlike so many young people today.

  “Yeah, and lucky that the match didn’t disappear from the evidence room all those years ago. As the slip proves, it was worth quite a bit.”

  “Probably worth more than she got for it. Jewelry stores, when they buy back diamonds—it’s a total rip-off. I had a girlfriend, had a nice ring from that store in Towson, over by Joppa? She and her husband busted up, they paid her, like, twenty cents on the dollar for the same ring, all the time saying: ‘You know, we like to say, it’s not the ring’s fault.’ I did some research on that earring online. David Webb was a big deal, back in the day.”

  Sandy thought suddenly of Mary’s jewelry. Not that it was of significant value, not at all. But he had kept her engagement ring and wedding ring, her other good pieces, in part because he could not imagine anything sadder than trying to sell them. Although maybe having no one to give them to was the real sadness.

  “Well, the store she went to, back in ’86, down on Baltimore Street—it’s gone. But the bill of sale matches to a T. One diamond-and-platinum earring was found in Julie Saxony’s purse. We looked past that, all these years.” He thought he was being generous with the “we.” He hadn’t looked past it. “You see an earring in a purse, you think, ‘Oh, she lost an earring, put the mate in her bag, and forgot about it.’ But where are the earrings she was wearing that day? That’s the part that was overlooked.”

  “Killer could have taken the earrings.” But Nancy was just being fair, excusing the work of the previous detectives.

  “Could’ve. But one was in her purse—and the other one was sold a week later.”

  “Do you think she killed her there, at the house?”

  “I can’t make up my mind on that. Twenty-five years out—it was a lot, hoping to find a casing, anything like that. I almost wish we hadn’t searched the house because Gelman will pretend that proves definitively it didn’t happen there. And maybe it didn’t. I can see it going down lots of ways. I can see her getting angry, taking a swing—that would have knocked the earring loose, maybe, and she finds it later. But you know what? I can also imagine her hiring someone to take Julie out. And maybe they brought the earring back to her as a trophy or, you know, proof.” He was thinking of Tubman again. “She might have asked her husband’s old friend, the bail bondsman, if he knew some guys who were available for hire. See, I kept thinking he was mooning over Julie, all these years. But maybe he was just guilt-ridden because he helped to kill her. She leaves Bambi’s house, some guy follows her—if she’s really lying, as her lawyer says, it might be to cover for Tubman.”

  3:20 P.M.

  “Bambi, I’m sure you have a reason for doing this, but you have to understand that I could be disbarred if I permit you to lie.”

  “I’m not lying.” A beat. “Besides, how can you know that? You can’t know I’m lying.”

  “We were all in Bethany that week—you drove over to spend time with Lorraine and me, at the beach house.”

  “Not until the evening. I had all day to myself.”

  “But you came over on the evening of the second, not the third.”

  Hell, was that possible?

  “I’m pretty sure I drove over on the morning of the third.”

  “No. No. We had a party on the second. It was Lorraine’s birthday. It was her forty-first. Remember? She refused to have a party for her fortieth, so we had a surprise party for her at the beach, on the second, which was two weeks late—but what could be more surprising than that. We were all there. You, Michelle, even Linda and Henry made it, although Noah was a newborn. You went home on the fourth, after dropping Michelle at a friend’s place in Rehoboth. You said you wanted to be alone.”

  “Your memory’s playing tricks on you. I wasn’t there.”

  “We have photos. I’m almost sure. Jesus, Bambi, I don’t know why you’re lying about this, but you have to stop. You have a perfect alibi, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say to many of my clients over the years. Just say nothing, okay?”

  She felt at once deflated and relieved. She had been relishing the idea of confession, accepting guilt, serving the sentence that
Felix had failed to serve, showing him how it was done.

  “Okay, I won’t lie, Bert. But I want to hear what they have to say. They know something, something new. I need to know it, too, Bert. Don’t ask why.”

  She had known Bert for so long—Lord, more than fifty years now. They had long ago reached a point where she didn’t treat him as she treated most men. He was Felix’s friend, Lorraine’s husband. But he was her friend as well, her only true male friend. So she didn’t widen her eyes, or smile her little half smile, or do anything flirtatious. She simply held his gaze until he nodded.

  “Follow my lead,” he said. “Please don’t lie.”

  “I’ll try not to,” she said, thinking, No lies that Bert can catch. That’s the new rule. It’s only a lie when someone knows it’s false.

  4:00 P.M.

  They brought the shoebox with them on the next trip into the interview room. Brown-and-white-striped Henri Bendel’s. Size 7 and a half.

  “Fancy,” Nancy had said when she saw it. “And look at the price—two hundred and fifty dollars. That was a lot of money for shoes in 1986.”

  “Isn’t that a lot of money now?” Sandy asked, knowing he was making a joke. He had priced Belgian loafers recently and discovered they were over $400. He’d just have to keep taking care of the old ones.

  The key receipt was bagged, separated from the others. They wouldn’t let her see that right away. First, they were going to talk about the box itself. Sandy would have to take the lead because he had been the one who accompanied the officers with the warrant. He had taken the box with him because he figured that no one moved that kind of stuff from a house to a condo unless it was deeply meaningful. The receipts were old—some went back to the early 1980s, and they continued through the year 2000. But one receipt stood out. All the other stuff that had been sold had been complete, unbroken—and not particularly valuable. And this slip was for a different store from the rest, a not-quite-as-nice jewelry store downtown. The receipt had stood out like, well, a diamond in a dustbin.

  “We’re curious about these receipts. You sold a lot of stuff over fifteen years. Was it yours?”

  “I sold those things at my aunt Harriet’s request. She died in September 2001, right after 9/11.”

  Right after 9/11. Was that gratuitous detail supposed to import some gravitas?

  “Yes, but all these things were sold before that date.”

  “You see, she was in a retirement home for almost the last twenty years of her life. Things were tighter for her than people realized, and I was her favorite niece.” A wry smile. “Also her only niece. I was supposed to be her sole heir, so what did it matter if I sold the things before she died. I would sell things for her, and we would split the proceeds.”

  “Fifty-fifty?”

  “Oh, no. Aunt Harriet wasn’t that generous. I brought her the money and she decided, based on some internal formula I never understood, how to divvy things up. I sometimes got as little as ten percent, sometimes as much as thirty, but never more than that.”

  “And you used this place”—he squinted at the slip, as if reading the printed name for the first time, but he knew it by heart—“the Turnover Shop.”

  “Yes. They were great to work with.”

  “And you went there every time?”

  “I went to several places, but that was my favorite.”

  “Like jewelry. Did you sell any jewelry?”

  “Some.”

  “But did you sell it to them?”

  “No, I went to a Pikesville jeweler for that. Weinstein’s. I knew the owner back in high school.”

  “Yeah, Weinstein’s. We saw those receipts, too. But we found one receipt, and it wasn’t from there.”

  “Well, sometimes a piece isn’t right for a certain retailer. They don’t anticipate demand for an item. That’s how consignment works. As you see from the slips, I sold a lot of clothes, too, over the years, but I went down to D.C. for that. People in D.C. are better about the value of clothes. And the clothes were mine, not Aunt Harriet’s.”

  “But for jewelry you went to Weinstein’s. Except this once, when you went down to Baltimore Street. Why didn’t Weinstein’s want this piece?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Was it because it was just one earring, one without a mate?”

  “Could be.”

  Bert was looking at her, trying to get her to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. Her heart was rising like a skyrocket, up, up, up. She saw herself on her hands and knees, dusting. Cleanliness had been Bambi’s only weapon against the house’s encroaching seediness. Down on all fours, trying to get a dust mop under that long buffet in the living room. It was a beautiful piece. She should have sold it. French, antique, worth a lot. But Felix had loved it so. He was never happier than on a holiday when that buffet was piled high with food. Above it was a family portrait, commissioned pre-Michelle, which always irked her petulant youngest. Once, when Michelle was four, she attempted to add herself to it. Luckily, Bambi had caught her before she had a chance to touch a single crayon to the oil paint.

  So there Bambi was, on her hands and knees on a wretchedly hot July morning, air-conditioning off because she had learned to pinch pennies until they bled copper, and there it was, winking at her, the beautiful diamond in the distinctive David Webb setting, her tenth anniversary gift from Felix.

  Her first thought was: I didn’t even realize I had lost one of these.

  Her second thought was: I didn’t. I wore them just last week at Lorraine’s party.

  Third thought: Did Felix buy all his women the same earrings? Now that she had it in her palm, she saw that it was slightly smaller than the ones she wore, but otherwise an exact copy.

  Fourth thought: Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

  And now, twenty-six years later, she felt again everything she had felt then. Surprise, correction, muted fury, fear. No, something worse than fear, something primal and huge.

  Bambi looked at the detective, the male detective, in the eye: “I killed Julie Saxony. She came to my house on July fourth, and I killed her. Not July third, July fourth. And, no, I don’t know where she was during the intervening twenty-four hours.”

  5:00 P.M.

  “Mama?”

  The word still had the power to shock Rachel. It seemed to surprise Tatiana, too. Even now, eight months after she had joined them, there was a testing quality to it. The question mark at the end seemed to encompass a dozen questions: Are you there? Still? Will you be there tomorrow? Are you really my mother? Is this really my life?

  Rachel put her hand in her daughter’s and said: “Yes, I’m here, Tatala.” Rachel had called her daughter Tatiana, a choice that surprised everyone, because she wanted to use the endearment Tatala without confusing a little girl who was already on her second name, possibly her third. True, “tataeleh” was meant for boys, but Rachel had always liked the sound of it. She had justified “Tatiana” to Joshua by saying she had found a similar name in one of the Chinese dynasties. She didn’t tell him it was the name of a consort.

  Tatiana’s Hebrew name was Mazal—the equivalent of Felicia. Bambi had raised one careful eyebrow at this, but said nothing. But, yes, Rachel believed her father was dead. She couldn’t explain why. It was a feeling that had come over her the day that Tatiana was placed in her arms. Felix was gone, his energy was no longer a part of this world, but there was someone new to fill that void.

  Only now she was in danger of losing her mother. What was her mother saying to detectives? Why was she doing this? It was crazy, it wouldn’t stand. Rachel had to assume that Bambi’s “confession” would be seen through quickly enough, then the matter would be over. But what if she managed to persuade detectives of this monstrous lie? How much would Rachel have to tell? Did they know that she had gone to see Julie?

  It had been such an emotional time. She had le
ft Marc and promptly lost her job, as she had prophesied. No job for the girl who was divorcing the only male Singer. Marc wanted to reconcile, but he continued to lie about his infidelity, deny anything had happened. How could she return to him as long as he was lying? She was living at home with her mother and Michelle, feeling like such a loser. It was in this state that she first read the article about Julie Saxony’s “second act” as an innkeeper and soon-to-be restaurateur. The article ran in the Star, an afternoon paper that was a little more down-market, and it included a photo of Julie in her glory. “Saxony at the height of her fame as a Block dancer, in 1975, where she performed under the stage name Juliet Romeo. A year later, her boyfriend, Felix Brewer, would disappear, leaving her only the deed to a small coffee shop on Baltimore Street. Saxony used that opportunity to learn the hospitality business.”

  So much to hate in just a few words. “Her boyfriend”—no mention, not in the caption, of the wife and three children he also left. “Only the deed to a small coffee shop.” That was more than he had left his family. “The height of her fame.” What was she famous for? Dancing in pasties and a G-string? Sleeping with her boss?

  The more Rachel thought about it, the more it made sense: Julie had their money, just as Mother had always said. Even if all she had received was the coffee shop—that should have been theirs. Commercial real estate downtown wasn’t exactly moving in 1976, but by 1980, with the opening of Harborplace, the land might have been worth something. Julie had sold it for a profit she “preferred not to disclose.” How lazy of the reporter not to find it out, Rachel thought, reading the article in dull fury.

  And next thing she knew, she was driving to Havre de Grace.

  Julie Saxony led her into a breakfast room, empty at this time of the day, although Rachel could hear someone banging about nearby, possibly in a laundry room of sorts. A dryer was humming, whump-whump-whump. Whump-whump-whump.

  “You know who I am,” she said. Flat, not sinister, but also not a question.