After I'm Gone (2 page)
S
andy was at lunch when he got the call that the jury was coming back. They had been out since midday Thursday and it was now early Friday afternoon. Normally, he would be confident with a jury coming in after less than eight hours, but he’d known panels that had been broken down by one adamant member on the grounds of TGIF. These twelve weren’t sequestered, but it had been a relatively long trial and they probably yearned to go into the weekend without their civic duty hanging over them. They had been seated last Thursday, then heard four days of testimony. He didn’t like the look on number three’s face. It didn’t help that the defendant appeared so frail. The assistant state’s attorney had tried to remind the jury that the crime had taken place thirty years ago, that the defendant had been in his forties then, brawny and vital, his victim seventy-three.
She also was the defendant’s mother, for what it was worth. But that could work against them, too. In a group of twelve people, what were the odds that at least two didn’t hate their own moms? Sandy had lost his parents young, which haloed their memories, but it was kind of a miracle that he had never lunged at Nabby, the woman who ended up raising him.
Back at the courthouse, Sandy walked through the metal detectors like any civilian, which he now was. No gun, no badge. It bugged him, a little, but only because the absence of those two professional tokens was a reminder that he was on a pension and
still
working at the age of sixty-three. Wasn’t supposed to be like that. Working for less than he made when he was full-time, when you calculated the lack of overtime and benefits. Then again, he got to cherry-pick his cases, and he was batting a thousand as a result. Not just in clearances, but in actual convictions. It’s not bragging if it’s true.
Too bad
his
stats also burnished the reputations of the state’s attorney and the chief of police, both of whom he disliked. Big talkers, too slick and glib for his taste.
He took a seat in the back of the courtroom, hunkering down so he could watch the jurors without making actual eye contact. Juror number three looked constipated, bottled up with something. Could be a problem. People didn’t usually get that angry over a “guilty.” Then again, could be straight-up constipation. The foreman was asked if a verdict had been reached, the piece of paper was passed to the judge, then back to the foreman. Sandy had always wondered at that bit of ceremony, felt it was overdone. If the judge had already read it, why not just have him say it? But, you know,
we the people
. It was their verdict, they got to deliver it. Other than the $20 a day, what else did they get for their service?
“We find Oliver Lansing guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Sandy needed a second to absorb it. Even when his hearing was perfect, Sandy had always experienced this weird time shift at the moment the verdict was read, as if he were hung up in time while everyone else went forward. But, no, he wasn’t imagining things.
Guilty
. The jury was thanked, and now the process of processing began for the defendant, guilty of the first-degree homicide of his own mother. It was a de facto death sentence, given the guy’s age, and Sandy was happy for that. Think of the thirty years this guy had enjoyed. He was getting off easy, in Sandy’s view.
The original detectives on the case had looked at Lansing back then. Of course they had. Sandy had yet to work a cold case where the name wasn’t in the file. But this guy was so sick that he had the presence of mind to take his own mother’s panties off. Oh, he knew what he was doing, the sick fuck. No one could imagine a guy doing that to his mother’s body. The other thing was, he didn’t cover up her face, just left her lying on her back in her own blood, skirt flipped up, naked between the waist and the knee-high nylons. Who does that? This guy did, and the prosecutor hadn’t been squeamish about hitting that note during testimony and closing arguments.
But when Sandy decided to work the case, he had focused on a background detail in the photos from the scene—a cup in the sink, when all the other dishes were washed and on the drainboard. It was Sandy’s opinion that the victim was not the kind of woman to leave a cup in the sink for even thirty seconds. Her house was that neat, based on the photos. Obviously, the cup had been tested for fingerprints at the time, but it came up clean.
Sandy had studied the cup in the photo, compared it to the ones on the drying rack. The others were part of a set, dainty and flower flecked, while this was a mug, solid and sturdy. He’d bet anything that this mug wasn’t chosen because it was at hand, that someone had reached deep into the shelves for this cup. The cup wasn’t random. It was someone’s favorite, the way people get about mugs. He had the photo blown up, then blown up again, so he could read the logo. No, it didn’t say
WORLD’S BEST SON
on it or carry the stamp of the guy’s high school, nothing that obvious. It was a Jiffy Lube mug. But it didn’t feel random to Sandy.
So he found the son and talked to him. Lansing didn’t confess, but he talked too much, began embroidering the story, then contradicting himself. Sandy reconstructed the time line of that weekend, put the guy in the neighborhood, which didn’t jibe with his original statement. He found a relative who was willing to testify that there had been a quarrel about money. Lansing wanted to open a car wash, but his mother wouldn’t help him out.
Lansing never did open the car wash, but he sold his mother’s house and took an interest in a duckpin lane, only to see it close within five years. Stupid. Not that Sandy sat in judgment of people who made bad financial decisions, but even in the early 1980s, a duckpin lane was a piss-poor investment. There were maybe two left in the city now.
Okay, done. RIP
Agnes Lansing. Time to find another case. Given that the city paid him only $35,000 a year, he tried not to start a new file until the last one was done. During the downtime, he continued to organize the files, which had been a mess when he proposed this gig—strewn everywhere, some actually water damaged. He had found some cast-off filing cabinets, wrangled a corner to work in, putting aside cases for future consideration. People left him alone, which was all he could ask for.
He preferred elderly victims. Even if they were shrewish or unkind—and there was evidence that Agnes Lansing was a piece of work, that her son’s rage didn’t come out of nowhere—they were seldom complicit in their own deaths. Didn’t sell drugs or engage in other criminal enterprises. Sandy couldn’t help thinking that there was a lack of urgency when the victims were old, that sympathy for them was muted by the fact that they had been playing for small stakes.
He grabbed several folders he had put aside, sat at the empty desk that they let him use. It’s not that he was looking for dunkers. If they were dunkers, they would have been solved at some point. But he wasn’t going to assign himself something if he didn’t think he had a shot of bringing it home.
A photograph slipped from one of the files. He stooped to pick it up, knees and back protesting. Mary was right. Maintaining the same weight, give or take ten pounds, wasn’t enough to be healthy. He needed to exercise, stay flexible. The photograph had landed facedown, and the back said Julie “Juliet Romeo” Saxony. When Sandy flipped it over, he was staring at a stripper, and she was staring back at him. He remembered this one. Except he didn’t. Killed by her pimp? Because most of those girls were not much better than whores. No, that wasn’t it. But something notable, something notorious.
He opened the file, actually one of several folders, running, he estimated, to almost eight hundred pages. Thick, but not the thickest he had ever seen. Wildly disordered; he had to dig to find the original report, which came out of Harford County. So why was this in the city files? Oh, the body had been discovered in Leakin Park in 2001.
That
was it. Julie Saxony, Felix Brewer’s girl. Probably danced under the other name. Brewer disappeared in 1976, and she went missing ten years later. Gossips assumed she had gone to be with Felix. There was a “Missing Person” flyer, circulated by the Havre de Grace Merchants Association, with a black-and-white photocopy of Julie Saxony as she had looked in 1986. Sandy did the math—thirty-three. She wasn’t aging well. Too thin, which wasn’t good for that kind of heart-shaped face, just left her eyes sunken, her forehead creased. Last seen July 3, 1986, the flyer noted. Reward for any information, etc., etc.
Leakin Park, Baltimore’s favorite dumping ground. Although usually not for white ladies from Havre de Grace. How had she ended up there? He reminded himself of his credo: The name is in the file. And the file is eight hundred pages. The obvious thing is to look to Felix Brewer. Maybe Julie knew something. Girlfriends tend to know a lot. More than wives.
Others would call what flashed through Sandy’s mind at this moment a hunch, but it wasn’t. It was an equation as neat as arithmetic. Or, more accurately, a proof in geometry. You take certain postulates, work toward a theorem. Sandy picked up a phone, dialing—okay, punching buttons, but he liked the word “dialing” and wasn’t going to give it up; his English was too hard won to abandon a single word—dialing one of the few reporters he still knew at the
Beacon-Light,
Herman Peters.
“Roberto Sanchez,” he said to the voice-mail box. He almost never got a human on the first try anymore. He didn’t use his nickname with reporters and got feisty if they tried to appropriate it without his invitation. Sandy was for other cops, friends, although he didn’t really have any friends. Mary had called him Roberto most of the time. Peters was okay, though. Might even know the nickname’s origins, come to think of it, not that he heard it from Sandy. Whenever anyone asked if he was called Sandy because of his hair, he said: “Yes.” And when people asked how a Cuban boy named Sanchez had ended up living in Remington, he said: “Just lucky I guess.”
Peters called him back within fifteen minutes. “What’s up?” No niceties, no shooting the shit, no parlay. There was no time for that anymore. The reporters, the few who were left at the
Beacon-Light,
were blogging and tweeting, writing more than ever and yet missing more than ever. Reporters used to actually work in the police headquarters, come by, ask about family, make small talk. Sandy had hated that. Then it stopped and he sort of hated that, too. Then Mary died and everything went to shit, and he was glad now that no one ever asked him anything beyond: “What’s up?” And didn’t really care about the answer, if it came to that.
“You remember Felix Brewer?”
“I know the story,” Peters said. “Before my time, but they send me out to his wife’s place every now and then, around the anniversary of his disappearance, just to see if she’s ready to talk.”
“The wife—yeah, what was her name?”
“Bambi Brewer.”
“
Bambi?
” Funny, the stripper had the normal name, and the wife had the stripper name.
“That’s what everyone calls her. Her given name was something else. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.”
“She a Baltimore girl?”
“Yeah, Forest Park High School, around the time of Barry Levinson. Married Felix when she was only nineteen. Her family was in the grocery business, success story of sorts, from peddlers to a decent produce wholesaler in one generation.”
“Can you find out where she grew up? I mean, what street?”
“Why?”
“A bet with McLarney,” he said, referencing one of the few homicide detectives left over from his time. “We got to talking about the case and he thought she was a Pikesville girl, but I said she grew up in the city.”
“Bullshit,” the reporter said. “You couldn’t remember her name five seconds ago, but you were having some random conversation about where she grew up?”
“Look, it’s nothing now. If it becomes something, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” No.
“Does it have something to do with her husband?”
“I don’t think so.” He didn’t think it did and he didn’t think it didn’t. What was he thinking? He was thinking that Julie Saxony, in her Juliet Romeo incarnation, all but looked him in the eyes and asked him to help her out. And that the older, thinner Julie seemed to need him even more.
He heard a series of clicks on the other end of the line. The world was full of clicks now. At ticket counters, at hotels, all you heard was clicks. At least this one yielded something useful. “She grew up on Talbot Road in Windsor Hills. It would have been nice then, I think. Even into the ’60s.”
“I’ve heard.” Sandy had spent the 1960s in Remington and didn’t think it was possible to go far enough back in time to say Remington was ever nice. Maybe around the time the
Ark
and the
Dove
made land in 1634.
“That meaningful? The address. Did I settle your
bet
?”
“Naw. I thought she was from Butchers Hill. Nobody wins.”
“Something going on in Butchers Hill?”
“Always. Gotta go.”
He checked the city map, although he already knew what he was going to find. He knew before he picked up the phone. That’s how good he was at his job. Talbot Road snaked through Windsor Hills on the southern edge of the neighborhood. It sat on a bluff, high above a deep ravine and Gwynns Falls—and not even a mile from the section of Leakin Park where Julie Saxony’s body had been discovered.
T
he dance was an impulse, her date even more so, a barely acceptable young man, a young man who would not have been acceptable a year ago, or even six months ago. For one thing, he was younger than she was, a senior in high school. A very desirable senior, perhaps the most desirable boy in Forest Park High School’s Class of ’59, but she was the Class of ’58. Barry Weinstein was a big wheel in his fraternity, with broad shoulders and a swoop of blond hair that made him look like a Jewish Troy Donahue. But he was a high school senior whereas she was a college freshman.
Or supposed to be. Had been, up until December, and was still pretending to be one. But time was running out. She either had to return to school in the fall or—or what? What else could she do to avoid being disgraced? Thank God no one else from Forest Park had gone to Bryn Mawr. But there was a boy from the Class of ’57 at Haverford. So far, she had been able to play off her absence from school as a lark, another thrilling installment in the madcap life of crazy, impulsive Bambi Gottschalk.
Oh, darlings
,
it was amazing,
she had said to her best friends over the winter break, as they gathered around her bed in her girlhood room, solemn and kind and yet predatory, waiting for her to tumble from the high perch she had occupied her entire life.
The fever—the fever masked everything. I could have died.
But wasn’t there pain? Didn’t you think to go to the infirmary?
No, no pain at all. That’s why I didn’t understand what was happening.
No pain, but when my cousin—
I am a medical oddity, dears. It will probably end up in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. I’m surprised they ever let me go. They wanted to make a study of me. As it is, I have to take the entire semester off, worse luck.
But what would she tell people in the fall? That problem was very much on her mind when she’d run into Barry two weeks ago at Hutzler’s downtown. Bambi had been studying silk scarves on the counter as if they were runes that contained her future. Barry, whom she would have cheerfully snubbed a year ago, asked her for help in choosing a gift for his mother. She applied herself to the task with the utmost seriousness. Within an hour, they were eating shrimp salad on cheese bread in the tearoom where Bambi had let it drop that she was just crazy about the Orioles, not that she would
even consider
going to a high school dance, not even one as swanky as the Sigmas’ Winter Formal. She was pretty sure Barry already had a date. But he wasn’t going steady, which made him fair game, and if he broke a date with some other girl to ask Bambi out—that was on his conscience. And painful for the other girl, not that Bambi had any firsthand experience in being stood up. She supposed it hurt one’s pride. Still, some high school girl’s pride was of no importance to her. A deadline was fast approaching, and her life was like some tedious board game, Uncle Wiggily or Candy Land. She couldn’t linger at the start and hope to rocket to the end in one lucky move. She would have to take small incremental steps, find a way of getting herself back into circulation. Barry was just the first card drawn in a long game.
The problem was, Barry didn’t know his place. He was already dropping hints about the senior prom.
The senior prom!
She wanted to weep at the idea, the sheer embarrassment of someone even thinking she could consider such a thing. The Sigma dance was acceptable. Barely. It was exclusive, held in the Lord Baltimore Hotel, with all the trappings. But the prom a year after graduating—she would never live it down. That would be like drawing a card that sent her all the way back to start.
“Do you like
the orchid?” Barry asked. “I checked with your mother about the color of your dress because I wanted you to be surprised. I chose a wrist corsage because I hoped you would wear a strapless gown. I remember you at last year’s dance.”
Bambi’s dress, which wasn’t strapless but had a very sheer net over the shoulders, appeared white from a distance, although it had a shimmering violet cast up close. The color was a bold choice for a winter dance and her mother had, for the first time ever, argued about the price, the impracticality of it. She thought Bambi should have worn one of the formals she had taken to college last fall. “I’ve worn them all,” Bambi said. “Not in Baltimore,” her mother countered. Still, Bambi got her way, as usual.
“It’s very nice,” said Bambi of Barry’s corsage. She had received enough orchids in her life to open her own greenhouse and actually preferred simpler flowers—sweetheart roses, peonies. But orchids were the gold standard, and she would be insulted if a boy had brought her anything less. She realized that it was strange to hide one’s desire for something only because the rest of the world felt differently, but she didn’t know another way to be. In high school English, the teacher had made a big deal out of
Hamlet,
“To thine own self be true,” but Bambi had believed that was an attempt to make the odd kids feel better about themselves. Everyone cared what others thought, even those who were defiantly different. They cared more than anyone.
The trick, Bambi decided, was to care about things while making others care more.
Barry ran his hand up and down her bare arm, ostensibly admiring the flower he had selected. “Now that I think about it, it’s the color of your eyes.”
“The whites? Yes, I suppose so.” Said with a gentle humor, hoping he would drop the subject and avert the faux pas he was about to make.
But, of course, he wouldn’t. “The purplish cast of the flower, I mean. Brings out the violet in your eyes. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s.”
It was not the first time the comparison had been made. It probably would not be the last. Bambi had found it thrilling when she was younger. Then frustrating, because who could win against Elizabeth Taylor? Now, she considered it merely boring. Up until five months ago, she used to contradict the boys who sought to flatter her this way. “My eyes,” she would say with flirtatious sternness, as if the fact in dispute were of great importance, “are
cerulean
.” This wasn’t true at all—cobalt, perhaps, or even ultramarine. But men seldom contradicted Bambi. She was beginning to find this boring, too. She had been dating since she was fourteen. The year she turned fifteen, the book
Marjorie Morningstar
had been published and that was another comparison through which she had suffered. “Oh, it’s about you,” said her mother’s friends. (Her mother, perhaps deducing that this would make her Mama Morningstar, an overweight peasant with a sly wit, was silent on the matter. Ida Gottschalk was thin and quite chic.) Bambi always replied: “No, it’s not. I don’t want to be an actress and I can’t wait to get married and move to the suburbs and have a huge family.”
Everyone laughed, but she was telling the truth. The truth was handy that way sometimes, the best cover for what one really wanted. The problem was, that truth was now
too
true to work: It had been a wonderful gambit when she was seventeen, then eighteen, then heading off to Bryn Mawr. Now she was nineteen, and while the official story was that she was taking a semester off because of a mysterious malady that might have been an inflamed appendix or walking pneumonia or mononucleosis or possibly all three, that story was going to be exposed eventually. So here she was, on a date that was just barely acceptable.
Come to think of it, the same thing happened to Marjorie in the book. She went to a dance with a too-young boy and found only humiliation.
Still, Bambi couldn’t afford to coast. She snapped to, turned the full force of her not-really-cerulean eyes on her date. “I’m having a marvelous time, Barry.” She used to have marvelous times and maybe she would again. Maybe it was only a matter of trying.
Then again, they had said the same thing about college. All she had to do was
try
.
“Some very smart girls simply aren’t ready for college emotionally,” the dean had told her parents. The school was apologetic, almost embarrassed, because they had not anticipated a student such as Bambi, who went to every class, took notes, earned passing grades on her midterms—then disappeared finals week, forging an overnight permission slip and never returning. By the time it was apparent what was going on, Bambi had been at the Ritz in Philadelphia for three days, having persuaded the people at the front desk to open an account that would be paid, she said, by her father when he arrived.
And he did, and it was, because what could Sy Gottschalk do under the circumstances with his only, beloved, spoiled-to-death daughter. He gathered her and her luggage—all of it, three pieces and a steamer trunk, a high school graduation gift—and drove her home while she sat in a petulant silence, as if he were in the wrong. She never did tell her parents, or anyone, why she had fled Bryn Mawr—and done so in such a way that she risked expulsion. She was still trying to figure that out herself. Being accepted at the school had been thrilling, another crown in a high school life that had included many such honors. She had basked all spring in her classmates’ slightly stunned admiration, for Bambi had been clever about hiding her good grades and ambition. Bryn Mawr was like being homecoming queen or a Sigma Sweetheart. All she really wanted to do was brandish her acceptance letter, then put it in a frame, another triumph achieved.
The problem was that college demanded you do more than just show up and wave.
And then what? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to work, although her mother had begun to make ominous noises about learning basic bookkeeping, in order to help with the family business. She was too short to model except at department-store teas, which didn’t pay. There was only one thing to do, only one thing she really wanted to do. She wanted to marry and have children, as soon as possible. She should have let the Bryn Mawr acceptance be enough, gone to the University of Maryland. She would have been engaged by the Christmas break, either to a desirable senior or maybe a junior. Then she could have withdrawn from school and started planning her wedding and her life beyond it. A life with a house full of children, a house that would be the opposite of the one in which she had grown up.
Instead, she had risked her momentum, her aura of perfection. No one really believed that she had withdrawn from the semester because she had walking pneumonia. Or an inflamed appendix or mononucleosis. She had blown all the hard-won capital of her youth in one single bet. It reminded her of her parents’ struggles after they expanded and opened a chain of grocery stores, assuming it was the logical move after their success in wholesale produce. They had overextended themselves and been forced to scale back. They had taken a second mortgage on the house, which her parents found immensely shameful. Ultimately, they had surrendered their dreams of genteel shops and shored up the wholesale side, servicing the very ghetto stores they had been trying to escape. But they had survived and even prospered. So Bambi knew one could recover from missteps. She just didn’t particularly want to expend the energy. Recouping one’s losses took time and patience, not her strong suits. She had been on a very long winning streak—nineteen years, her entire life. She could not bear to be on a losing streak for even nineteen minutes.
Barry brought her punch, inevitably doctored. The too-sweet punch and the cheap alcohol did not bring out the best in each other. It was like eating a flaming wad of cotton candy.
“Delicious,” she said.
He smiled, besotted. He probably thought she was fast, being older and all. Well, he was in for a surprise. If she wanted to go that route, she would have engineered a chance meeting with her high school boyfriend, Roger. He was two years older than she was and had developed a very appealing confidence since transferring to the University of Baltimore. He also was dating her friend Irene, one of the girls who had gathered at Bambi’s bedside to hear the horrific story of how she almost died from misdiagnosed pneumonia/inflamed appendix/mononucleosis. It would have been tempting to see if she could get him back, but then she would have him back. And she didn’t want to return to her sixteen-year-old self, which is what she would be with Roger. Even then, Roger had been too fast for her, pushing her hard to do things she was not ready to do. He was probably faster now. She had asked Irene point-blank if they were doing it and Irene had—“simpered,” that was the word. Simpered. So they were. That was dangerous. Not because Bambi was prudish, but because it limited one’s options. You really shouldn’t have sex unless you were sure this was the right man because you should marry the first man with whom you had sex. Before marriage was okay, but only if he was
the
one. It wasn’t morality, it was simply smart. Your first would be your last. Bambi didn’t ponder the why of this, and she certainly didn’t want her husband to be a virgin. Nor did she expend much time thinking about how her future husband might have gained his sexual experience. Presumably with other girls, not nice girls, why should she care? Bambi was a prize, and part of the prize was her virginity, much in the same way new cars were prized for their unblemished whitewalls and perfect upholstery. Yet their value dropped the moment they were driven off the lot.
Barry glanced at the door, which gave her a chance to put down her drink. They would dance soon and she could “forget” the cup. There was a potted plant nearby, but that was too crude, pouring out the contents, and he might get her another one. She would just tuck it on the windowsill—
“Crashers,” he said. “They’ve got some nerve.”
There were three men in the door. One was handsome in a very conventional way, with broad shoulders and lots of dark hair, medium height. A boy from the neighborhood, Bert Gelman, a senior, but not a Sigma. One was enormous, a sphere of a man, and jolly-looking, with pink cheeks and a sheen of sweat despite the cold night.
The third was on the short side, with very dark skin, a biggish nose, and so much energy it seemed to be coming off him in waves. Older. Older than the kids at the dance, older than his companions. She put him at twenty-four, twenty-five. His gaze seemed to say,
Kid stuff,
although the Sigma dance was very sophisticated, as nice as the country club dances her parents attended.