After I'm Gone (3 page)

Then the crasher’s eyes caught Bambi’s, and any flicker of amused condescension faded. He walked straight toward her as if—as if she were a landmark, something famous, something he had been waiting to see all his life. She was the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon.

“Felix Brewer,” he said. “And this is Bert Gelman and Tubby Schroeder.”

“Which is which?” she asked, and the three laughed. They probably would have laughed at anything she said, though.

“Actually, I know Bert,” she said, putting out her hand. “You were a year behind me at Forest Park.”

“This is a private dance,” Barry said.

“Yeah, I’d keep it private, too, a limp affair like this,” said the man who had introduced himself as Felix.
Felix the cat,
Bambi thought, but, no, he wasn’t catlike. Nor doglike. He was—what was smart and shrewd, a little dangerous, but not a predator? A fox? But a fox would eat chickens, given the chance.

“Limp affair? Do you see who’s on the bandstand?”

“Yeah, not bad, but couldn’t you get someone like Fats Domino? He’s great. We saw him last week on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“You go to Pennsylvania Avenue?” Bambi asked.

“Of course I do. All the best music is there. You scared of Negroes?”

“I’m not scared of anything,” Bambi said. “And the Orioles are Negroes, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Bert smiled at Bambi. Lord, this was the problem with dating Barry; now every high school senior thought her fair game. The age of the fat one was impossible to tell, but he was at least twenty or twenty-one. They seemed an unlikely trio, mismatched in every way.

Felix could read her mind. “This”—he jerked a thumb at Bert—“is my lawyer’s son, although I guess he’ll be my lawyer one day. And this”—thumb heading the other way, toward the round one—“is my bail bondsman.”

She laughed her best laugh, a delighted trill.

“No, seriously, he’s a bail bondsman. Not that anyone’s had to set bail on me yet, but you never know. So he’s not
my
bail bondsman, I guess, but he is one.”

“Someone has to be,” Tubby said cheerfully.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Barry said.

“Young man, have you served your country?”

“What?”

“Have you served? I mean, obviously you haven’t been over there, but what’s keeping you from signing up?”

“I’m not yet eighteen,” Barry said. “I’m going to Penn next year.”

“Well, I went to war when I was seventeen. But I guess Penn is something, yes, it is. Your parents must be very proud.”

Barry now appeared to be about six years old in Bambi’s eyes. Which, she realized, was Felix’s intent.

“Look, I must ask you—”

“Oh, as long as you’re
asking
. And as long as you must. But tell me something, couldn’t a serviceman, one who fought to keep this country safe, who skipped college and all it had to offer—would it be too much to let me have one dance with the young lady here? In recognition of my patriotism?”

“Look, this isn’t a dance hall; you don’t just come in here and ask to dance with girls.”

“Oh, Barry,” Bambi said. “What’s the harm?”

The Orioles began a new set. “ ‘Hold Me,’ ” Felix said, and she thought it was a request. Then he added: “They had a hit with this in 1953. They’re good. For local boys.” He led her onto the dance floor, not even bothering to wait for her date’s permission. He was not a smooth dancer, but he was a happy one, full of energy. They did not speak at all. He held her gaze, testing her. They were almost at eye level. She calculated the height of her heels, put him at maybe five-seven. She didn’t care. He sang along with the song—not in her ear, he wasn’t that obvious. He just seemed to like the song.

“ ‘The last you’ll know.’ ” He tried to harmonize on that line, but fell a little short.

“That’s not right,” she said. “It’s
find
. To rhyme with
mind
.”

“I’m the last you’ll know,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

She tried to tell herself that the light-headedness she was feeling was just the inevitable consequence of wearing a merry widow, which constricted her breathing. That would explain the light film of sweat—on Bambi, who never sweated. She concentrated on holding his gaze. It felt shameful, as if she were necking in front of an audience, as if everyone in the ballroom knew what she was feeling.

“What do you do?” she asked, realizing the song was coming to an end.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I do very well. I’ll be able to take good care of you.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, yes, you did. Look, your date, Little Lord Fauntleroy, is going to make a fuss.” Barry had gathered a group of Sigmas and they did look as if they were getting ready to bum-rush Felix. “I’m going to go. I’ll find you.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“That just makes it more interesting. Coke bet—I’ll find you within twenty-four hours. We’ll have a date tomorrow night, a proper one. I’ll come to your house and meet your parents and I will take you out for dinner. If I can’t do that, I’ll owe you a Coke.”

“But if you can’t do that, how will I find you to collect?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She didn’t. The next day, she told her parents that a new boy was coming to call. She said
boy
out of habit. The whole point of Felix Brewer was that he was a man. She put on a dress of polished blue cotton and waited, something she had never done for any date. He arrived at 6:00
P.M.
with flowers for her mother and a firm handshake for her father. They seemed taken aback, as helpless in the tug of his charm as Bambi had been.

On the fieldstone
path outside her home, Felix glanced back at the house where she had grown up, the house where she had been so lonely. For all her social success, Bambi had no real friends. And siblings weren’t to be. She had been her parents’ miracle baby, born quite late after multiple miscarriages.

“It’s nice,” he said. “I like this style. Understated. A man’s home is his castle, but it shouldn’t look like a castle. I want something classy and elegant. But not grand. I want a house where a kid can spill something and it won’t be the end of the world. A living room where people live. What do you want, Bambi?”

She didn’t dare say what she wanted just then. She wasn’t that far gone. But she was close.

“I don’t care, really. More than one kid. Not that I’m in a rush.”

He gave her a look, as if to say:
Who are you kidding?
He knew her. He
knew
her. How was that possible?

But all he said was: “That dress matches your eyes. I’m not sure what you’d call that color. Cobalt? Cerulean? Yeah, cerulean.”

They were married ten months later.

March 5, 2012

S
andy stood on Talbot Road, trying to decide where best to trespass. He could knock on any door, ask permission to cut through someone’s backyard. But then he would have to go through the blah, blah, blah about not being a detective, just a consultant. He’d rather trespass, assuming he could be sure there wasn’t a dog lurking.

He tried a side gate. Unlocked. He wouldn’t leave his gate unlocked in this neighborhood, not the way it was now. He was humming to himself, he realized, that corny song from
The
Sound of Music,
the one about starting at the very beginning. Sandy and Mary had seen that movie on their first date, a date made more memorable by the fact that they left a world of balmy-for-January sunshine and emerged into a raging blizzard. They had taken a bus downtown—he didn’t own a car and Nabby sure as hell wasn’t going to let him borrow hers—and Mary wasn’t dressed to wait outside, much less walk so much as a block. He told her to stand under the marquee, then trudged around the corner and hot-wired a car, telling Mary that he had borrowed it from a friend who lived near the Mayfair. He drove her home, a five-mile journey of slip-and-slides that took an hour. He literally carried her into her parents’ house. He then drove the car back to the space he had left, which he had to clear off by hand. It was a snow emergency route, but that worked out well. The car would be towed and the owner could argue with the city impoundment people over who was responsible for the damaged ignition. He then walked home. His shoes fell apart about a mile from the house and Nabby gave him hell, but it was worth it. He was seventeen years old, and he had met the love of his life. Risked everything for her, truth be told. If he had been pulled over in that car, it wouldn’t have been juvie, not this time around. Sandy often looked back in wonder at that afternoon, how his entire life turned on that day. He didn’t know it, but he was poised, as if on a tightrope, and things were either going to go very wrong or very right, no in-between.

It had never occurred to him that he might come crashing to earth forty-four years later. When destiny wants to fuck with you, it can afford to be patient. Destiny has all the time in the world.

Anyway, it sounded simple, starting at the beginning, but it was often a challenge in a cold case to know just where the beginning was. First, Sandy had to read the file in its entirety, try to put it in some semblance of order. This one was really two files—the original missing person case from Havre de Grace, then the official homicide case from 2001. It was a jumble of witness statements and reports. He couldn’t fault anyone on work ethic. They talked to almost too many people—every single employee at the bed-and-breakfast where Julie Saxony had worked, a couple of associates from her time at the Variety, at least one relative. Friends of Felix—his lawyer, his bail bondsman. Whatever the general public thought was going on, the cops pegged her as a homicide pretty early. Her credit cards had never been used again after July 3, 1986, she hadn’t pulled a significant amount of money out of checking or savings—$200 on July 2, then another $200 on July 3. She had told an employee that she was going to Saks, but her car was found at a Giant Foods on Reisterstown, maybe five miles away. She could have been grabbed and made to make that second withdrawal, but there was nothing on the ATM tape to support that.

And then there was the place her body was found all those years later, which had to be a good ten, fifteen miles from her car. Not buried or concealed in any particular way, just left out to rot. It killed civilians to hear that. People in urban areas couldn’t believe how long a body could go undetected, but it happened all the time. Leakin Park was twelve hundred acres, much of it heavily wooded, and it wasn’t legal to hunt there, so the odds of people walking through the rough, overgrown areas was pretty remote. The city had created a trail that, theoretically, could be followed all the way into the heart of downtown if one was willing to hike or bike through some sketchy areas, but that was on the other side of a stream from where the body was discovered. Julie’s remains might not have been found at all if it weren’t for a rambunctious dog that led a young couple on a chase.

Sandy couldn’t help wondering about
them,
incidental as they were to the story. One of the things he loved about the show
Law & Order
—and he loved almost everything about it, particularly the fakeness—were the discoveries that started every episode. New York City had, in real life, maybe eight hundred homicides a year, which was nothing per capita. Baltimore’s rate had fallen back from the almost one-a-day that he had seen in his glory days, but it was still one of the highest in the country. Yet, if you watched
Law & Order
, and he had done quite a bit of that in the four long months that it took Mary to die, it seemed as if everyone in the city must have tripped over a body here and there. He thought those people deserved a show of their own. He wanted to write the producer a letter and suggest that as a spin-off.
Law & Order: The Discoverers.
There was probably a better title, but that was the drift. A young couple out on a date. Was it a first date? Which one owned the dog? Was the dog running away, or was it off-leash in that sneaky way people used so they could avoid cleaning up? (Sandy lived near a small park and he had taken to eye-fucking anyone who looked like they might not clean up after a dog.) Finding a dead body on a date seemed a pretty bad omen, but he and Mary had hit a deer on their second one, and that had turned out great. The date, if not Mary’s parents’ car.

He started to head down the hill. Damn. It was muddier than he had anticipated, capable of seriously screwing up a man’s loafers. He retreated to his car to see if he had anything he could use. Nada, zip, nothing.

The houses here were big and rambling, although most had been cut up for apartments. As the reporter had said, the neighborhood had been something once. The Gottschalk home, per the property tax records, stayed in her family until 1977, when it was sold for $19,000, not much more than they had paid for it in 1947. Sandy wasn’t clear if there had been a death or if her parents had downsized. He might need to run them through vital stats at some point. They weren’t part of the file, and not even Bambi had been interviewed after Julie’s body was discovered.

Yet Julie had ended up a few hundred yards from here, near the house where Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk had lived until her marriage on December 31, 1959. It was a date Sandy knew well, for his own reasons. Sandy had arrived in Baltimore a year later, almost to the day. People talk about having nothing but the clothes on their backs, but for Sandy that had been literal. It was part of the reason that he used to be fastidious about his clothes, even by the standards of a murder police, which was a pretty high standard. He looked at his shining loafers. They were old, but extremely well cared for, exhibit A in the wisdom of buying quality. He knew mud wouldn’t destroy them, but it seemed unfair to subject such good shoes to a muddy hillside. He looked around. The sidewalks were littered with newspapers in plastic wrappers, the weekly freebie thrown by the increasingly desperate
Beacon-Light
. He liberated two of the papers and put the bags on his feet, knowing it would wreak havoc with his traction and he might fall on the steep hillside, getting mud on a lot more than his shoes. But it was easier to brush dirt from a suit, if you did it right.

He worked his way down in a zigzag pattern, using branches to keep himself steady. He was in okay shape for a man of his age, although he had a paunch he couldn’t seem to shrink. The paunch was noticeable because he was, had always been, a string bean. The belly had come out of nowhere when Mary was sick. It was as if he had his own tumor growing inside him. “Oh, look at you, jealous as ever,” Mary teased. “It was just like when I was pregnant with Bobby Junior and you had all the cravings.” For every pound Mary lost during her illness, he gained one. It was like he assumed he could give the weight back to her when she got better. Only she never got better, and he was stuck with the weight.

He reached the bottom of the hill without falling, no small thing. Glancing back at the bluff, he realized that returning to his car would be even tougher. But he probably could walk alongside the stream and come out on Windsor Mill Road, get back to his car that way. His time was unmonitored now, except by him. Every night, he wrote down his hours as if he were still on the clock, burning a little at the thought of the overtime he wouldn’t be paid, no matter how long he worked.

It wouldn’t have been easy, getting a body here in 1986. Four-wheel drives were not as common then. People would have noticed a truck or a Jeep—the people on the bluff above would have heard it; others would have seen the lights, assuming it came in at dark. And if the body had been carried down from Talbot Road—that would have been tough, too. Yet the juxtaposition of Bambi’s childhood home and the body of her husband’s onetime girlfriend—hard to chalk that up to coincidence, even in a dumping ground as popular as Leakin Park.

The dog had found little more than bones. Sandy knew that from the file, the autopsy. Bones, but the cause of death, a bullet to the head, had been easy to pinpoint. No casing, though. Nothing but a purse, a purse that looked like leather, but wasn’t, so it had held up to the elements. Inside there was a billfold with $385, her ID, an earring without a mate, a lipstick. Normal lady stuff.

He walked north. At least, he thought it was north. He wasn’t a nature boy, although a lot of people projected that on him, thought he had arrived here on a raft, paddling himself across the Keys. He could understand how kids, his term for everyone under thirty, confused his arrival with the Mariel boat lift, which they knew from
Scarface,
the Pacino version. But Sandy had no excuse for people his age, who should know a little history, for Christ’s sake. Yet it was easier, always, to let people think whatever they wanted to think. He preferred being lumped in with
Scarface
to the inevitable questions that followed when people heard where he was from.
You’re Cuban? With that hair and those eyes? Is that why they call you Sandy, because of the hair?

His hair was blond, for Christ’s sake. Who calls a blond Sandy?

He walked for what felt like forever—going slowly, because someone weighed down with a body wouldn’t make good time—but it was only ten minutes or so by his watch when he found himself opposite a group of white buildings. Another abandoned Baltimore mill, this one renovated for business space. Okay, that was a possible lead. When had it been redone? Did anyone have offices here in 1986? He took out his pad, wrote a note to cross-check the history of the site. Still, it was a long way to carry a body, and it would have meant fording the stream. Man, someone really went to a lot of trouble to make sure that Julie Saxony wouldn’t be found. And
that
was probably the takeaway, more so than the proximity to the childhood home of Bambi Gottschalk. Julie wasn’t supposed to be found. Definitely not right away, maybe never. Why?

Because the longer she went without being discovered, the more convinced people became that she had gone to join Felix, wherever he was.

People,
he thought. People, not cops. No cop, looking at those dormant credit cards, the lack of bank activity in the weeks before she disappeared, would have assumed she was a runaway. He had read the massive file twice and he would have to read it several more times before he could keep it all in his head, but one detail stuck out now: She had her car serviced on July 1. Who has her car serviced on July 1 if she’s running away on July 3? Maybe if she had been planning to take the car, part of the way. But her car made it only as far as Pikesville.

He worked his way back to his car, deciding to take the hill, after all. Harder going up a muddy hill, and he did slip once, dropping to one knee. But the mud would dry and brush off. The key was to be patient enough to let it dry, not to worry it and rub it into the fabric. Lift the dirt with a straight edge, let dry, then scrape.

Mary had taught him that.