After I'm Gone (5 page)

“It’s the style,” said Bambi, who had switched to Elizabeth Arden Schoolhouse Red when she married. It was darker—but not quite as dark as the shade on Felix’s collar.

Her mother left at last, leaving behind a shining apartment, for which Bambi was grateful. She was tired these days. The hours crawled by. Linda slept, woke, ate, slept, woke, ate. Bambi waited for Felix, putting together funny stories about the party to entertain him. How her mother’s friend, Mrs. Minisch, had frowned at the carpet. How Aunt Harriet, who doted on Bambi and thought Felix was wonderful, had
loved
the hippo. How dowdy Irene looked since her marriage.

After Linda’s 10:00
P.M.
feeding, Bambi changed into a pretty peignoir, figuring she had up to four hours to focus on Felix, assuming he came home. Eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, one o’clock. He didn’t come and Linda cried and Bambi’s breasts spurted, ruining the gown. What had Felix said?
It’s a nocturnal business, darling. Your father gets up at 4:00 A.M. I’ll be lucky to get home by that time. Two sides of the same coin.
She put Linda down and—tenderly, carefully—touched herself as Felix had touched her on their honeymoon. She didn’t like to do it by herself, but it was better than nothing and allowed her to see if she was ready, as the doctor had promised. Her gentle touch took her back to the honeymoon, the suite, Felix’s hands, his voice, her dreamy assent to everything he said. What had she agreed to as his hands moved through her hair, over her back, between her legs?

Not legal, but not the kind of illegal that anyone cares about. People want to gamble. I’m the bank. What could be more harmless? I collect the money, I give some away, keep the rest. I’m a dream merchant, sweetheart. No one gets hurt. No one is forced to do anything they don’t want to do. The cops don’t even care. No one cares, as long as you play by certain rules, stay away from certain things. I’ll have an office down on Baltimore Street, above the Coffee Pot Spot.

Baltimore Street was the Block, and his office was actually above a strip club, the Variety. A strip club that Felix owned. A strip club where it was rumored that the headliner had to pass a very special kind of audition. Bambi had tried to confront Felix about this but found she could not say the words. She decided it was better never to speak of it, to pretend that she didn’t care, to pretend to be asleep when he crept into bed and whispered: “Everything I do, I do for you.”

She had thought it was quite the stupidest thing she had ever heard. But Felix never said anything he didn’t believe to be true. Which was not to say he didn’t lie, only that he never thought of himself as a liar. But how could he say this? Was he saying that he slept with these whores, these
nafkeh
s, as her mother would say, for her? Then again—she considered his practiced hands, the pleasure he gave her. Maybe they had taught him that. Okay, but now he knew. He should stop.

Linda stirred, uttered her bleating, lamblike cry, only to settle back to sleep before Bambi could swing her feet over the side of the bed. Too bad. She would have been happy to be up with the baby. She could use the company. Having a family was supposed to end her loneliness. Yet, in some ways, she was lonelier than ever before.

On their second date, Felix had stopped in front of a large gold-flecked mirror in the lobby of the Senator Theater. “Look at us,” he said. “We look like a couple.”

Bambi couldn’t see it, but she nodded, giving him a half smile.

“We’ll have the kind of house where there are portraits,” he said. “Of you and the kids, not my ugly mug.”

It wasn’t ugly, though. Not on a man.

True to his word, Felix had already found a house, although it was unclear how they would pay for it. He said he would commission a painting as soon as she was back in fighting shape. Bambi had cried when he said that because she was unused to being found wanting in that way. The women against whom he compared her had long legs and tiny waists. Bambi would never look like that, no matter how hard she tried.

Yet—she knew he loved her best. If he had to choose, he would choose her. But she was too proud to make him choose.

Besides, she had agreed on their honeymoon to do everything his way when it came to the business.
Whatever it takes to make us rich
. Work nights in disreputable places, bring home all that cash. So her husband went off to Baltimore Street in a suit and a hat at two in the afternoon, acting as if he were as normal as apple pie, and Bambi played along. “My husband works in the entertainment business,” she told those nosy enough to ask. “I guess you’d call him an impresario. He books the talent.”

Oh, yes, he
booked
the talent.

She was finally
falling asleep when he slipped into bed at five. He was freshly showered. Why would a man smell of soap at 5:00
A.M.
? He gathered Bambi in his arms and inhaled deeply, as if she were a bouquet of roses.

“I love you,” he said. “Do you love me?”

She wanted to claw him and cry. Instead she said: “I suppose I do.”

“Things are going to be so great when we move into the new house. It will be beautiful. It’s beautiful,” he said. “You’re beautiful. And we have a beautiful daughter. We are going to fill that house with children.”

“It has only four bedrooms,” she pointed out. It wouldn’t be motherly to object to his inaccurate description of wrinkly Linda, all nose, that dark hair creeping so low on her forehead.

“We’ll build an addition. We’ll do something with that space over the garage. You’ll make it beautiful.”

Five beautifuls in the space of less than a minute. She knew what Felix valued about her, and it had never been her parents’ modest bank account. Beauty and the slightest bit of reserve, as if she didn’t need anyone. The key to keeping him was to never let him feel too comfortable, to maintain that cool competence. The other women would come and go, come and go. She was his wife and he would never embarrass her. Or their children. She hoped there would be lots of them, enough to make up for all the brothers and sisters she never had, and the husband who wasn’t home as much as he should be.

“It’s going to be a great life,” he said.

“Isn’t it already?”

The question seemed to surprise him. He pulled his face from her neck, didn’t answer right away. “Of course. But it can be better. It can always be better. Don’t think small.”

“How can we afford the house on Sudbrook Road, Felix?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No one we know has a house like that. Not starting out, not in that neighborhood.”

“That’s ’cause they’re all coming slow out of the gate. I run wire to wire, baby. Wire to wire.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m always in the lead. Some horses have to hold back, wait for others to tire, then surge. I’m always out in front. No one can catch me.”

“I caught you.”

“I caught
you
.”

“You wanted me.” This was their litany.

“You bet I did. From the moment I saw you in that dress. You thought you were so grown up, with that little boy of yours.”

“I was grown up.”

“You were born grown up. That’s why you were so bored with those little boys. You needed a man. You needed me.”

She was drifting off. It was all well and good for him to talk, but she would have to get up with the baby very soon. Felix had a night job. She had an all-day one.

“I love you, Bernadette.” He used her real name when he wanted to be serious. When he wanted her to know he was serious. The first time he said it, under the
chuppa
—“I take thee, Bernadette”—she had almost started, wondering why he was saying another woman’s name at such a sacred moment. But now she was used to it. Liked it, enjoyed having this private persona with him. In all the world, only Felix called her Bernadette.

“I love you,” he repeated more insistently, demanding an answer.

“I know you do.”

March 7, 2012

N
ext of kin. Sandy mused on the phrase as he drove.
Next of kin
. It’s one of those expressions that people use every day, then you stop to think about it, wonder what it means. Next of kin. Kin, obvious, but next of? Next to what? Did it imply a hierarchy—there was next of kin, then the next of next of kin?

More than fifty years after arriving in the United States, Sandy still found that English tripped him up at times, brought out these literal turns. When it came down to it, Sandy didn’t have much use for words because so many of the ones he had heard over his life had been lies. Words had been the weapons of choice in the interrogation rooms, used by both sides. By the end of the day, he was done with words. Mary seldom complained about anything, but sometimes she admitted that she wished Sandy would talk a little more when he came home. To Sandy, that was like asking the guy who worked in the ice cream parlor to come home and make himself a sundae. Sure, some murder police were big talkers, storytellers. He wasn’t one of them. Sandy got more done with a steady stare.

Not that he planned to stare at Julie Saxony’s sister. He’d have to talk a lot, probably, prod her to tell the stories she had told so many times before.

Typically in a cold case, Sandy left the relatives alone as long as possible. Didn’t want to get people’s hopes up. But Andrea Norr was all he had, so he was going to pay her a visit. Not unannounced—he wanted her to be prepared, to have thought quite a bit about things. He had called Monday and now it was Wednesday, one of those gray, drizzly days that feel so much colder than what the thermometer says. As he pulled into the long driveway for the horse farm where she lived, he wondered if she were as pretty as her sister, if she had aged better.

No and no. Or, maybe, no and who knows? The woman who greeted him was short and stocky, with thick gray-blond hair in a no-nonsense cut. Her body was thick, too, but not from inactivity. Sitting still in her own kitchen seemed to make her crazy and she kept jumping up. Brewing tea, putting box cookies on a plate, suddenly washing a dish that had caught her eye.

“So, something new?” she asked after the teakettle sang and she had settled down with a cup. He accepted one, took a sip. Jesus, it was awful. How did someone make bad tea from a bag of Lipton’s?

“No, nothing new. But I have a good track record on these cold cases.”

“Person who killed her is probably dead.”

He was on that like a cat.

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know why I said it.” She was convincing in this, seemed surprised and confused by what she had blurted out. “I mean, it’s not like everyone’s dead who was alive then. I’m alive. But then—I didn’t keep the kind of company that Julie kept.”

“I thought she was on the straight and narrow for some time when she disappeared.”

“Yeah, she was, but she still had ties to those bums she knew back on the Block.”

“You’re saying she still had business with Felix’s old bookmaking buddies?”

“I’m not saying anything like that. I’m saying that my sister danced on the Block, hung out with crooks. Lay down with dogs, et cetera. She actually used to defend him to me, say it was
only
gambling and that no one got hurt. Lots of people got hurt by Felix Brewer every day. Gambling is a terrible thing.”

“Aren’t you a trainer?”

“Show horses, not racehorses.”

He was curious about what she did, how it worked, if it paid the bills, why she thought it so pure. He had heard there was plenty of fraud in the show horse world, too. Sometimes, it was helpful to give in to his curiosities. Put the person at ease, primed the pump. But Andrea Norr did not seem like a woman who would have much patience for digressions.

“I know you’ve answered a lot of the same questions before. But it’s the first time I’ve asked them. We’re starting over. Assume I know nothing, okay? Because I don’t.”

“What’s to know? Julie got in her car on July third to drive to Baltimore and we never saw her again.”

“Yes, that’s according to the guy who worked for her.”

“The
chef
.” Said with some disdain. Well, given Andrea Norr’s tea, she probably didn’t put a lot of stock in preparing food.

“But when was the last time
you
saw her before that day?”

She twisted in her chair, like a little kid playing with a swivel seat, although this chair was rigid, with no swing to it. “It had been almost six months.”

“Six months? So you weren’t close.”

“We were. Once.”

“What happened?”

“We had . . . words.”

There it was again, another strange usage.
We had words
. Everyone has words. Sandy and Andrea Norr were having words right now. What a useless euphemism. The phrases that people used to make things prettier never worked.

“About?”

“I thought she was stupid, expanding the inn, adding a restaurant. I didn’t think it was the smart thing to do.”

“Did you have an interest in the place? A financial interest?”

“No.”

“Was she trying to borrow money from you?”

“No.” She clearly knew where he was headed and decided to jump the gun. “We didn’t have any money issues between us. I just thought it was a bum idea. The inn was doing fine as a B and B. She was making things unnecessarily complicated for herself. She had always made things unnecessarily complicated for herself, getting into messes and running to me, as if I could help her. I couldn’t.”

“Messes like what?”

If only people knew how obvious their lies were, at least to him. Maybe then they wouldn’t bother with them. “Nothing important,” she said, and he knew it was at least somewhat important.

“Messes involving Felix.”

She shrugged. “He was married. That’s always a mess. A big stupid mess that everyone saw coming but her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Same old story. She fell in love with him. He had a wife. He had always had girlfriends at the club, but he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He had a wife, a steady girl, and more girls on the side. Julie thought she was so sophisticated, thought she knew what she was doing. Me, I never got the big attraction. He was short, nothing to look at it. Sure, he had money, and he bought her things, but so what?”

“Didn’t he set her up, after he left?”

“Who told you that?” Defensive. Okay, it was gossip, pure and simple, but gossip wasn’t always wrong. Someone had staked Julie Saxony.

“Did he or didn’t he?”

“He gave her this little coffee shop on Baltimore Street. That’s all, as far as I knew. But she was good at running things. She parlayed up.”

“That’s a big parlay, from a coffee shop on Baltimore Street to an inn on the verge of opening a restaurant.”

“Look, I know what I know. I can’t tell you what I don’t. We weren’t in each other’s pockets. I never asked her for money, she never asked me. We were brought up to take care of ourselves.”

“And where was that?”

“Aw, c’mon, you know this stuff. You told me you read the file. You probably know more than I do.”

“I have to pretend I don’t.”

Andrea Norr sighed.

“We were born in West Virginia. Most of our parents’ friends had the gumption to leave during World War II, get factory jobs in Baltimore. Ours didn’t, which tells you everything about them that you need to know. They’ve been dead for years, since before Julie disappeared. We left when we were teenagers. Two giddy girls with a VW bus and four suitcases. Three of them Julie’s. She was the pretty one. That was okay with me.”

Interesting that she provided that detail automatically, as if it were still uppermost in her mind. It wasn’t like he was going to ask. Wonder, but not ask.

“We rented a room on Biddle Street and got hired at Rexall Drugs. Clerks. One day, two guys walked in, took one look at Julie and said she should be a dancer.
A dancer
. We may have been hicks from West Virginia, but it was 1972, we knew the score. One of the guys introduced her to his friend Felix and that was that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Love at first sight. I guess I should be grateful it was a respectable strip joint, where the girls wore pasties and G-strings, because Julie would have done whatever Felix asked her to. She was a goner. I never got it. Then—I never got men.”

“You married, though?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Isn’t Norr your married name?”

“No, it’s our given name. I’m a happy spinster. Saxony was something that Felix hung on her. It wasn’t enough to give her that stupid stage name, Juliet Romeo. He had to rechristen her completely. She made it legal, down at the courthouse. Although—well, she was prone to that. Trying to make herself into what she thought Felix wanted.”

He was stuck on that tantalizing
although,
wished she had followed it through. “Yeah? What else did she do for Felix?”

A vague hand, waving at nonexistent flies. “Silly stuff. Not important. You know how women are.”

No, he knew how one woman was, Mary. And, he supposed, Nabby, but he didn’t think Nabby’s behavior reflected on anyone but Nabby.

“Did your sister know where Felix was after he left?”

“No.” Fast, emphatic.

“Did she know anything about the circumstances of his flight?”

“No.”
Too
fast, too emphatic.

“You know the statute of limitations is long past on that.” He should check to see if that was true. Might be important in dealing with people as he went forward. “And your sister’s dead. She can’t get in trouble for something she might have done in 1976.”

“Not everyone is dead.”

“You know there was always this rumor about Felix, how he escaped in a horse trailer.”

“Rumors are just that. Rumors. It’s not my fault I work as a trainer, or that my sister dated that crook.”

He let it drop. He didn’t want her as his antagonist, not at this stage.

“Ever strike you as weird, the timing?”

“Timing?”

“Your sister disappeared almost ten years to the day. You think he came back for her?”

“To kill her? Even I don’t hold Felix in such low esteem.”

“No. But maybe someone else was looking for Felix. Someone who followed her that day—I mean, in 1986—in hopes of finding him.”

“It was the government that wanted Felix. I don’t have much affection for the federal government, but I don’t think they kill people.”

“Other people might have wanted him, too. Like the bail bondsman, for example.”

Andrea laughed. “You didn’t do all your homework, Mr. Sanchez. Remember those guys who walked into Rexall? One of them was Tubby Schroeder, Felix’s best friend. He wrote the bond, he took the loss.”

He did know. That is, he knew that Tubby Schroeder was a bail bondsman, a big fat guy, everybody’s friend. Sandy knew that Tubby had written the bond for Felix and been awfully philosophical about his best friend skipping out on him. Everyone assumed Felix had made good on the hundred thousand in cash. Sandy had thrown out the fact about the bond to see what
she
knew.

“Thank you for your time,” he said. “And the tea.”

“You barely touched it.”

“I don’t eat between meals,” he said. “Nothing but water. Doctor’s orders.”

“Well, why didn’t you say something?”

“I forgot.”

Fifteen minutes later,
Sandy was at Chesapeake House, enjoying an early lunch at Roy Rogers. En route, he had passed the exit to Havre de Grace. The two sisters couldn’t have lived more than ten miles apart, yet they hadn’t seen each other for six months when Julie disappeared. Interesting. Nothing more at this point. Just another line in the geometry he was building, a distance between two points.

He was even more interested in the fact that Tubby Schroeder had seen her first, brought Julie to Felix. Might be worthwhile to interview him, assuming a guy that fat was still alive at age seventy-five or so. Sandy remembered seeing him once or twice in the courthouse, had to be almost thirty years ago. Always laughing, big as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon, the life of the party. A back slapper, a joke teller.

Everything that Sandy detested in a man.