After I'm Gone

March 2, 2012

Sandy 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.

February 14, 1959

The 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.

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

Sandy 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.

September 15, 1960

It’s not going to fit in the nursery, not with all the other stuff you have in there.”

Ida Gottschalk, hands on hips, had squared off against an almost life-size baby hippo that was standing in the middle of the living room, an awkward guest who didn’t realize the party was over. Ida had taken against this hippo, which was really very cute, from the moment it was unwrapped. Bambi assumed that her mother had seen the yellow tag in its ear, Steiff, and deduced it was German made. Her mother hated all things German.

Bambi just hoped her mother never found out that the hippo cost $200, which would be far more damning in her eyes. Two hundred dollars. They didn’t pay that much in rent. Assuming they paid the rent every month, and Bambi was beginning to suspect that Felix was casual about what he considered the small stuff, which included, alas, their household bills. At least, she hoped that unpaid bills were the source of the strange phone calls that made talky Felix become monosyllabic. “Yes.” “No.” “Soon.” The sales slip for the hippo had been in the bottom of the elaborately wrapped gift box and Bambi had quickly crumpled it, appalled that a clerk from Hutzler’s could be so inattentive that she would forget to remove it.

Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a clerk who had left the slip in the box. Maybe Bambi was meant to see how much Felix had spent. And then what? Was Bambi supposed to brag about it in a mock-exasperated way? Oh, that crazy doting dad. Or had Felix assumed someone else would open the gift and that the gossip about his extravagance would spread among Bambi’s friends and relatives?

“It’s not going to fit into this nursery,” Bambi told her mother. “But we won’t be here forever. Felix is looking for a house.”

“You’ll be here at least nine more months,” her mother said, tying an apron over her dress, which was very stylish, a little too fancy for a party such as this. Bambi’s mother, plain and bone thin, had always bought the best she could afford when it came to clothes. “You signed a year’s lease in June.”

“Leases can be broken.”

Her mother rolled her eyes at this sacrilege. Bambi knew what she was thinking: A lease can be broken at a cost, but what kind of idiot would take on such an unnecessary cost? My son-in-law, the show-off, that’s who.

Ida was proving to be the one woman, the one person, Felix could not charm. She may have been nonplussed upon meeting him, but she didn’t stay that way long. “I’m not buying what he’s selling,” Ida liked to say. She said it a lot. She went about saying it at the wedding reception, where everyone thought she was being droll. Even Felix thought so. Only Bambi and perhaps her father understood the stark literalism of her mother’s statement. In Ida’s view, Felix was after the Gottschalk fortune, a laughable concept. The Gottschalk “fortune” was about as substantial as the add-a-bead necklace that Linda had been given by her father the day she was born. Felix had no interest in his in-laws’ wholesale greengrocer. He wasn’t even particularly interested in them, although he complimented his in-laws lavishly, behaving like a guest in their home even while living there for the first five months of his marriage to Bambi.

Besides, Felix could never keep the hours required by a wholesaler’s life. He was nocturnal. And he wanted to be rich-rich, as he called it, no-doubt-about-it rich. Stinking rich. Screw-the-world rich. How that goal meshed with ignoring the little bills of day-to-day life was a puzzlement to Bambi, but she didn’t want to be a dreary nag like her mother, so she let it go.

Felix had first spoken of his desire to be wealthy on their Bermuda honeymoon. They stayed in a pretty pink hotel on a pink sand beach, not that they saw much of the ocean, for they enjoyed the novelty of being in a bed together all night and all morning and into the afternoon, finally free of the fear of discovery that had marked their premarital adventures, as Bambi thought of them. Those had been limited to her car and, just once, the basement rec room in the house on Talbot Road, her parents’ heavy tread going back and forth, back and forth in the rooms above them. Bambi had been so nervous that she kept on even more clothes than she had in the car, which they had parked behind the old mansion on the Crimea estate in Leakin Park. Yet the rec room was the first time she had a genuine orgasm, and she wondered if the drama, the suspense, was essential to that experience.

She was very happy to be proven wrong on her honeymoon. It turned out there were quite a lot of ways to have orgasms and Felix wanted to teach her all of them.

“We’re going to be rich,” Felix told her, promised her. “Rich-rich. But we’re not going to play by the rules. The game is rigged, so I’m making my own game. It’s the only way to get out in front. But I need you to understand what that means. Late nights, long hours. Mine is a nighttime business.”

“What about the risk?” she murmured into the pillow. He was rubbing her back, running his fingers through her hair.

“Virtually none. Oh, I’ll get popped now and then, but they’ll never make it stick. You understand what I’m saying, Bambi?” He lay down next to her, turning her head so they were eye to eye. “Things will happen. There will be moments-people will gossip. But we’ll be so respectable-so rich-that no one will be able to afford to look down on us. We’re gonna be benefactors. To the synagogue, to the schools our children attend. We’ll be envied, which can be dangerous, but we’ll also be admired and liked. You’re beautiful and I’m smart.”

“I’m smart, too,” Bambi said, thinking of Bryn Mawr, her failure there, a story she had withheld from Felix. Pretty much the only thing she had withheld from Felix so far. She was shocked at herself, going all the way before they were engaged. But she knew he would propose, in a grand fashion, and he did-the Surrey Inn, the ring winking at her from a raw oyster in the first course, so she wouldn’t be on pins and needles all night. She also knew he would make her first time nice. And now it was getting better. No one had told her that. The veiled conversation with her mother-and there had been only one-had led her to believe that sex was something one got used to, like shots or other unpleasant but necessary things. Why hadn’t someone told her that it was good and got better? Obviously, her mother wasn’t going to share such information, but what about Irene? Bambi was sure Irene had done it, maybe with more than one boy. Irene had been maid of honor at Bambi’s wedding and then had her own big wedding in late January. No one got married in late January. Why not wait until Valentine’s Day? Bambi, who had noticed the way the waist of Irene’s bridesmaid dress strained despite the fitting in early December, was pretty sure she knew why Irene’s wedding had been scheduled for January.

“You’re smart, too,” Felix assured her. “You were smart enough to fall in love with me at first sight.”

“Did not.” She would never admit that.

“Well, I did, so I guess I’m the smarter of the two of us.”

“Which synagogue are we going to join?”

“Beth Tfiloh.”

“You want to attend an Orthodox shul?” That came as a surprise. Although Bambi had been raised in an Orthodox home and had married in an Orthodox temple, Felix had seemed indifferent to religion. She knew nothing of his family. Whenever she pressed him, he changed the subject, said they were gone. She worried he might have lost them in the Holocaust, but she didn’t know how to have that conversation.

“That’s the best one, the one with all those old Germans, the ones who act like they’re goys. Behind closed doors, I’m going to eat bacon and I don’t care if you mix up the plates. But in every part of our life that’s not my business, we gotta be respectable. Best synagogue, best country club, best schools. Behind closed doors, we do things our way.”

Then, much to her delighted shock, he yanked her up to all fours and showed her something else that a man and a woman could do behind closed doors. She was surprised at how much she liked it, given how unromantic the position was, like two dogs going at it. But she liked almost everything Felix did. When he was home, which wasn’t as often as she would have preferred, it turned out. Late nights, he had said. Long hours. Those words had been meaningless in a soft bed in a pink hotel. By the time Linda was born on September 1, they were all too real. The doctor said she could have sex again in two weeks, but Felix was never around. Football season was under way, he explained.

They had honored the Jewish tradition of not having a baby shower or decorating the nursery until after the baby was born, although Felix thought it a silly superstition. He had painted the room shell pink. (Without the landlord’s permission, and Ida was mournful about the cost of that as well. “You’ll never get the damage deposit back,” she said.) The nursery suite was lavish, too lavish for the apartment: matching crib, bureau, changing table, rocking chair, and toy chest, all white with stenciled roses. Felix said the furnishings were a gift from a loyal customer, but Bambi suspected it was a payment against a debt, as it had arrived on a plain truck, carted in by two surly men who grunted when she offered them lemonade on the unseasonably hot day they set it up last week. Once all the furniture was in, there was barely any floor space left. Ida was right: The hippo wouldn’t fit. It didn’t fit anywhere. It was going to have to stand sentry in the living room until they moved.

As it was, Linda had yet to sleep in her beautiful, crowded nursery. Bambi was breast-feeding and kept her in a Moses basket in their room. Her mother found this appalling as well-the breast-feeding, the little basket by the bed-and added it to the list of things that were Felix’s fault. As to Linda’s birth date, which came exactly thirty-five weeks after Bambi’s wedding day-Ida had no comment, other than the dry observation that nine pounds was an exceptionally good weight for a preemie.

Bambi was perhaps a month pregnant at her wedding, but who cared? The wedding, after all, had been in the planning stages for six months, so no one could ever say it had been forced on them. (Unlike Irene’s engagement, which was announced over the winter holidays, a scant month before the ceremony. Her son, Benjamin, was born in mid-August.) Bambi had no problem standing before her guests in the whitest of white gowns, perhaps the loveliest dress she would ever wear. Not long, but cocktail length, in keeping with the simple ceremony, much simpler than Felix would have liked. Simple, in part, because her parents were paying, but also because Bambi had urged them to scale back. Felix’s yen for extravagance scared her a little. Bambi sensed that this would be a theme for the rest of their lives together: Felix would want to be lavish, and she would pull back. He was the first person in her experience to use “middle class” as a kind of an insult. Her parents considered the life they had crafted for their only daughter to be one of their greatest achievements, but Felix thought them small-timers, she knew. And that was the worst thing Felix would say of anyone. Small-timer. He thinks small. He settles for scraps.

Linda, who had gone to sleep in the middle of the party in her honor, stirred in her basket. Bambi could have gone into the bedroom to nurse her, but she felt contrary so she brought the baby out and nursed her in the living room in full view of her mother, who was folding up the wrapping paper and ribbons in order to reuse them. Thank goodness Bambi had thrust that receipt into the pocket of her smock.

“She looks like Edward R. Murrow,” Bambi said fondly.

“She looks like her father,” Ida said. Less fondly.

It was tacitly understood before Linda was born that no daughter of Bambi’s should be held to that standard of beauty, but Linda really did look like her father. Exactly. Bambi’s kinder friends said she had striking features and she would grow into them. By which they meant: Oh, dear God, the nose is ENORMOUS. Bambi didn’t mind. She believed her daughter would blossom. Besides, being beautiful, Bambi didn’t overrate its power. She didn’t underrate it, but she didn’t overrate it. Bambi’s beauty had been like a savings bond procured at her birth. A nice investment. But it couldn’t, as it turned out, provide her with everything she needed.

For example-a husband who slept in his own bed every night.

“Toys and clothes, clothes and toys,” her mother said, taking inventory of the gifts. “Why don’t people give useful things?”

“It’s more fun to give a little girl dresses and stuffed animals,” Bambi said.

“Fun,” her mother repeated, as if it were a profanity. “I don’t even understand why you had a party at all.”

“People like parties.”

“People like a lot of things.”

Bambi did not ask what her mother meant by this. Although her parents had always struck her as naïve, Bambi had to wonder if her mother had been onto Felix. If she had been right not to buy what he was selling.

To her own horror, she began to cry.

“Is something wrong?” her mother asked.

Bambi wanted to snap at her like a teenager. Of course something’s wrong. Instead she said: “I’m just so tired.”

“Babies are wonderful,” her mother said. “But they change everything.”

“For the better.” It was a question, but she tried to make it sound confident, emphatic.

“Mostly. But fathers get jealous. They can’t help it. The world revolved around them. Now it doesn’t anymore.”

“Did Papa get-jealous?”

“Papa was older. He had been through-a lot.” Bambi’s parents had an essentially arranged marriage, albeit one sweetened by genuine love and respect, then saddened by the string of miscarriages.

“Felix isn’t that young. He’s twenty-five, almost twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five.” Her mother really could cram a lot of meaning into a single word, a number.

“When we were engaged, you said twenty-five was too old. Now it’s too young?”

“You’ll see,” her mother said. Again, Bambi had to wonder just how much her mother knew. Earlier today, she had insisted on helping Bambi by sorting the laundry and taking it down to the basement. “Such dark lipstick you’re wearing these days,” her mother said, as she made a pile of Felix’s handkerchiefs. “I like you in lighter shades.”

“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 nafkehs, 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

Next 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.

December 31, 1969

Not the way I’d run a lottery-”

The ambient sound in the country club was odd. Lorraine Gelman was having trouble hearing Bambi, who was right next to her, yet Felix and Bert’s conversation on the other side of the table boomed loud and clear. Their heads were bent together as they lighted cigars, an indulgence for the night. Meanwhile, Bambi’s soft voice was lost in the weird jangle of noises.

But Lorraine smiled and nodded, sure she would agree with anything Bambi said. Lorraine adored Bambi. Adored. It was hard to remember now that she had been a little snobbish about the Brewers when she and Bert started dating six years ago. “Isn’t he just a crook?” she had asked Bert. Lorraine’s family were German Jews; her great-grandparents had lived on Eutaw Place when Eutaw was nice. Her mother had attended Park School in the early days. Bert, the son of a prominent attorney, had barely met her parents’ standards. And when Bert said Felix Brewer would be best man at the wedding, Lorraine’s parents had tried to dissuade him, to no avail. “He’s my best friend and one of our best clients,” Bert had said. “That’s never going to change.”

We’ll see, Lorraine thought.

But her friends’ husbands did seem rather drippy alongside Felix. Plus, Bambi turned out to be so nice. In Lorraine’s experience, women like Bambi usually weren’t nice, not to her.

Yet Bambi had been a good sport from the start, showing up at Lorraine’s bridal party, trying hard to enter into the fun, although she was a little older and didn’t know the other girls. Lorraine had ended up being embarrassed by her friends, who seemed young and, yes, even a little tacky alongside Bambi, who came from a perfectly nice family, if not as nice as Lorraine’s. Even Lorraine’s mother thought Bambi was someone special, once she got past the nickname.

So when it became apparent that life with Bert meant life with Felix and Bambi, Lorraine was fine with that. The men talked about the things they found interesting, politics and sports and, more and more these days, Vietnam. For goodness’ sake, they were talking about it again, right now, the draft lottery. Who cared? She didn’t have children, and the Brewers didn’t have sons. It wasn’t their problem.

“I can’t believe those earrings,” she said to Bambi, looking at Felix’s anniversary gift. “Aren’t you worried they will fall off?”

“I got my ears pierced, see? At a jewelry store on Reisterstown Road.” Bambi leaned closer to Lorraine, let her examine the cunning catch. Large diamonds, good ones, set in ovals of gold, a new design from David Webb. Lorraine knew because Felix had consulted her before buying them. His taste was okay, but old-fashioned. Safe. Like a lot of people who didn’t come from money, he was almost too cautious. Lorraine had known that Bambi would appreciate this pair, which were trendy, but not so trendy as to go out of style quickly.

“Incredible,” she said. Felix caught her eye across the table and winked.

“Put your eyes back in your head, honey,” Bert said. “Bambi had to wait ten years for those.”

“Ten is tin,” Lorraine said, then wished she hadn’t. Who would know that except a woman who had looked up the anniversary list as she had earlier this year, when disappointed by Bert’s gift of a carved rosewood jewelry box. She had been prepared to argue, but it turned out he was right: Five was wood. And ten was tin. You had to make it to sixty for diamonds. Still, Bert earned as much as Felix, or close. He could afford diamonds, too.

But Bert was handsomer, Lorraine decided, swinging back to her husband’s side. And while he might represent criminals, he wasn’t one. Lorraine was forever cataloging the differences between Felix and Bert, Bambi and Lorraine, the Brewers and the Gelmans. Bambi was older. She’d be thirty next month. Bambi was beautiful, whereas Lorraine was only well put together. Good haircut, perfect clothes, and, most important of all these days, thin, which required living on Tab and carrot sticks and, after a vacation binge, some pills. She had tried the Dr. Stillman diet that so many Pikesville ladies swore by, but it gave her horrible gas. Bambi carried a few extra pounds, but men never seemed to notice.

The two couples did everything together. Vacations-cruises, Ocean City in the summer. The symphony, plays at the Morris Mechanic. Shopping for the women, sporting events for the men, although Felix considered that work. And when their men stayed out late, which they did often, Lorraine went to Bambi’s and drank sweet vermouth, gossiping into the night.

And life was fun, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Here they were at the club on New Year’s Eve, which also happened to be their dearest friends’ wedding anniversary. There was a band, the kind of band that Lorraine preferred. Lorraine liked to be held when dancing. Besides, musicians were getting so dirty. They looked dirty, they acted dirty. That nasty Jim Morrison, down in Florida. Who does such a thing? A few months ago, at a party, one of Bert’s friends had followed Lorraine to the powder room and tried to put her hand on him, through his trousers. She had told Bambi, expecting her to share her shock, but Bambi had just shrugged, said some men were flirts when they drank. Then Lorraine realized that such things must happen to Bambi all the time and she felt bad that it didn’t happen to her more often.

Sometimes, with Bert, handsome as he was, she thought about what it would be like to be with someone else. Bert was all she knew. She had asked Bambi one time if Felix was her one and only. “Of course,” Bambi said. “I was only nineteen when I married him.” “I didn’t mean-” “What did you mean?” Bambi had asked, with a hard look, and Lorraine realized Bambi thought she was asking if Bambi had taken a lover to get back at Felix. Lorraine would never suggest such a thing. Out of loyalty to Bambi, she wouldn’t even listen to gossip about Felix’s girls. When she said to Bert, just the once, that Felix was attractive in a weird way, he had seemed upset: “Watch out for him. He likes women.” “Oh, I’m not his type,” she had trilled, embarrassed but emboldened, for saying a crush’s name out loud is the same as admitting the crush. Then Bert had to go and say, “No, you’re not his type.” That had kind of ruined it. He added, seeing her face: “You’re much too classy for Felix. As is Bambi, if the truth were known. Felix likes a rough girl.”

If Bert were to cheat on Lorraine-but, no, Bert would never do that, good-looking as he was, as much female attention as he got. Bert liked being respectable. He had been drawn to Lorraine because her family was good, solid. Not as much money as people thought, but socially on a par with the old families, the Meyerhoffs and the Sonneborns. Lorraine’s father was president of the temple board this year, her mother was a former Hadassah president.

Lorraine was optimistic about 1970. Certainly, she would get pregnant this year. Although, like Bambi, she had married at nineteen, she had stayed in college and earned a degree. True, she had expected motherhood to interrupt her education-she didn’t try to get pregnant, but she didn’t try very hard not to-yet there she was three years later, graduating cum laude from Goucher. She wanted three children, spaced out two years apart. If she had the first one by the end of this year, that meant another in ’72 and then she would be done by ’74. So she would be twenty-nine when her youngest child was born, which meant she would be forty-seven when that child headed off to college. Forty-seven. It sounded so old. Bambi was going to be thirty in the coming year, Felix would be thirty-six, closer to forty than thirty, and Bert was twenty-eight. Lorraine liked being the baby of the group even if they did gang up and tease her sometimes, act as if she didn’t know anything about the world before she was born. She had skipped a grade in elementary school. It felt natural to be the youngest in a group.

The band began playing one of Lorraine’s favorite songs. “Our song,” Felix said with a significant look at Bambi.

“How can that be?” Lorraine asked.

“I slipped the band a twenty.”

“No, I mean-this song was on the radio just a few years ago, when Bert and I were living in the apartment near Mount Washington. You were old married folks by then.”

“That was the remake. The original was 1952, but it was also recorded by Connie Francis in 1959 and the Orioles had a hit with it as well. It was playing the night Bambi and I met. Remember, Bert?”

“What I remember is that I was left alone with Tubby and a bunch of fraternity punks who wanted to beat us up, so it doesn’t have the same romantic associations for me.”

But Bert held out his hand and led Lorraine to the dance floor. He was a very good dancer-better than Felix, who was a little hoppy for Lorraine’s taste-but she couldn’t help being aware that Bert’s eyes were everywhere, surveying the room over her shoulder, keen to know who was here, who they were with. If Bert were a woman, he would be considered a gossip. Meanwhile, Felix held Bambi as if she were the only woman in the world. Yet Felix was the one who cheated and Bert was the trustworthy one. It was confusing. Lorraine wanted the kind of attention that Felix lavished on Bambi, but she could never work out if such intense devotion was the by-product of cheating, in which case wasn’t it better not to have the attention?

The music shifted to something a little fast, so Bert and Felix were out. Lorraine sometimes tried the new dances, home alone, watching Kirby Scott. She thought of it as exercise. But the clothes-the truly mod clothes-did not suit her, thin as she was. They made her look old, mutton trying to pass as lamb. The same with the short haircut she had tried with the two side curls, coaxed out at night and held down with Scotch tape. What are those, payos? Felix had teased her. Yet Bambi, so much older, looked divine in her Pucci shift tonight.

She and Bambi went to the powder room together, checked their hair and lipstick, taking their time in front of the mirrors. It was a little hard, being side by side in a mirror with Bambi, but Bambi smiled encouragingly at Lorraine as if she understood, as if even she found her beauty burdensome. It was going to be hard for her daughters. Linda and Rachel. Lorraine could imagine boys falling in love with Bambi when the girls began to date. Lord, it was hard enough to be her friend, to notice how men noticed her. Bert, out of courtliness, always insisted Lorraine was prettier.

“It’s exciting,” she said, “being at the start of a new decade. The last time that happened, I was fourteen years old. I couldn’t have begun to imagine where I’d be tonight-married to someone like Bert, getting ready to start a family.”

“Ten years ago tonight, I couldn’t really imagine my life, either,” Bambi said, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. Lorraine looked at it longingly-so much easier to stay thin while smoking-but she had quit the moment the surgeon general’s report came out. “I thought I could, but I didn’t have a clue.”

“Where did you go for your honeymoon?”

“We spent the night at the Emerson Hotel, before going to Bermuda the next day.” She exhaled. “The Emerson Hotel was sold at auction this year.”

“We got married at the Lord Baltimore,” Lorraine said.

“I know. I was there.” Bambi was staring into space, not even making contact with her reflection as she usually did in such a space. Bambi liked mirrors.

“Of course. That was a wonderful night. Maybe the best night of my life.”

“I hope not,” Bambi said with a shudder.

Lorraine was offended. “What do you mean?”

“Because then it would be all downhill from there, no?”

“Well, I mean the best night of my life so far. I know there will be better ones to come. Having children.” She ran her hand over her flat stomach. There was a slight bulge, probably from the indulgent meal, although wouldn’t it be exciting if she were already pregnant. “A year from now, I’ll have a baby.”

Bambi pointed her cigarette to the ceiling. “Man plans.”

“What do you mean?” Lorraine felt as if she were saying that a lot tonight.

“It’s an old saying. Man plans, God laughs.”

“You’ve never had any problem getting pregnant.” She realized this made it sound as if everything Bambi had, she should have, too, which sounded grudging. Luckily, Bambi didn’t seem to notice.

“Very true. But I can’t help it, I still have the evil eye thing. I know it’s silly, but some of the old folklore-it’s there. Felix doesn’t have a superstitious bone in his body. Everything is numbers with him, straight math. He laughs at the people-the people who have reasons, as he calls them.”

“Reasons?”

“Oh, you know, people who pick a racehorse based on its name, or bet their ages at the roulette tables, or-well, you get the picture. That kind of thing.”

Lorraine realized that Bambi had been on the verge of saying that Felix laughed at his own customers, the people who placed dollar bets on sequences of numbers they found intensely meaningful. But Bambi never spoke of her husband’s work. No one did. Lorraine supposed Bert and Felix talked about it at times. Bert was Felix’s lawyer, after all. But everyone else played along. Here, at the country club, where Felix’s gift had meant improvements, and at temple, where he gave generously to the building fund. He would never be president of the temple, but Felix didn’t want to be. He spread his money around like a kind of insurance, spending enough so that no one wanted to alienate him or his family. His girls went to Park, and Lorraine, a very involved alum, knew that Felix had been generous with the school, too. Well, when she had children, they would be third generation at Park and that would make them special, more special than money ever could. Some things can’t be bought.

Still, she wished Bert weren’t so tight. They had almost as much money as the Brewers did, they could cut loose a little more. At least, she thought they could. She didn’t actually know how much money he earned or what their debts and investments were. Bert said it was less than she thought, that being a partner in his father’s firm wouldn’t be really lucrative until his father retired. But that was part of the reason she wanted to get pregnant. She was pretty sure that Bert wouldn’t insist on staying in the apartment once there was a child, even with two bedrooms. She wanted something out near Bambi and Felix, of course, but not in the same style. Something modern, preferably with a pool.

She and Bambi returned to the table, continuing to dance the slow numbers with their husbands, sitting for the fast, although a few women did the twist together when their husbands refused. They never changed partners, not with Felix and Bambi, not with anyone. Lorraine was getting tired, but she stifled her yawns, intent on midnight and her plans beyond it. Maybe they would conceive tonight. Then their child would have a birthday close to Linda’s.

By 1:30, Lorraine and Bert were in the car, heading home. They would have gotten out faster if he had tipped the valet a little more, as Felix had. Bert’s driving seemed weavey to Lorraine, but they didn’t have far to go and the roads were dry, free of snow and ice. Once they were home, she changed into a negligee she had bought for this night, lavender so sheer it might as well be see-through. It was, she realized, perfect for Bambi’s coloring. But it was fine with her own and she was very thin, which was the fashion. Some women were even going braless now. Lorraine could if she wanted to, but she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to.

Bert looked at her with appreciation, recognizing the significance of the negligee. She wasn’t usually insistent on having her turn, as she thought of it, but she pushed for it tonight, believing, even as she knew it made no sense, that conception would be marked by an orgasm. Perhaps she put too much emphasis on it, because it was a little weak and sputtery, not at all what it should have been. This is it, she told herself. We just made a baby. Then: Everything’s going to be better now. The second thought, unbidden, scared her. Why did things need to be better? Things were wonderful. She tried to shoo it away. We just made a baby.

She remembered Bambi’s face in the country-club mirror, sad and resigned. Had Bambi seen the same expression in Lorraine’s eyes? Was this what marriage was? Were diamonds the consolation prize for sticking with it for ten, twenty, sixty years? She batted away these melancholic thoughts, blaming Bambi. Bad moods were contagious, like colds. Lorraine’s life was wonderful. It was a new year, a new decade. She was going to have a baby and then everything would fall into place. Maybe she would have boys, who could marry the Brewer girls, except-the boys would be so much younger. No, that wouldn’t work at all, not at all.

March 9, 2012

Tubby the onetime bail bondsman was in assisted living up at Edenwald, the kind of place that Sandy wouldn’t have minded for himself and Mary, if they had had the money. Although he guessed they would have taken her away from him, in the end, put her in a nursing wing, and he wouldn’t have had that for anything. Sandy hoped Tubby wasn’t in the nursing wing, or on machines that would make it tough for him to talk. Then again, people often gabbed when the end was near. He had closed more than one case on dying declarations.

He checked in at the front desk, explained his mission. It always took longer without a badge, although he had an ID and that helped. Yes, official business for the Baltimore Police Department. City, not county. Nothing bad has happened, no, but I need to talk to Mr. Schroeder. The girl was skeptical. He could tell she was very protective of “her” residents, probably worried about scammers, fake stockbrokers, and the like. Sandy wished there had been someone like her looking after his interests when he needed it. If Mary had a flaw, it was that she never questioned anything he did, although maybe it wasn’t fair to call that a flaw. Eventually, the girl called up-Tubby was in the regular apartments, not the health-care wing, as it turned out-but she said there was no answer.

“Is today the day that Mr. Schroeder goes to the pool for water aerobics?” she asked another attendant.

Water aerobics. Sandy envisioned a man-manatee crouching in the shallow end of the pool, barely moving. Still, good on him for trying.

“There’s a bridge game today, in the library. I’m pretty sure he signed up for that.”

The library was well appointed. There were six tables of foursomes, all women except one man, a lean, leathery strip of a guy, deeply tanned and-what do you know-sporting a full Towson in March. White shoes and white belt, paired with lime trousers. The shoes and belt went nicely with his white hair, and his bright sweater complemented his tan. Pink, Sandy would have said, and Mary would have said, No, coral. Or salmon. Sandy said a lot of things just a little wrong for the pleasure of Mary’s corrections, offered politely and sweetly, usually after a moment of hesitation. He had never met a woman who took less pleasure in contradicting her man. Yeah, that’s not a flaw.

Cock of the walk, Sandy thought, looking at the guy in the coral sweater. Cock of the walk. True, being the only rooster in this henhouse was a little like being the one-eyed king in the land of the blind, but it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to a guy. He just hoped the man could direct him to Tubby Schroeder.

“Can I help you?” the man asked when Sandy’s alien presence registered in the room.

“Maybe. They told me I could find Tubby Schroeder here.”

A confused murmur among the women, but the man laughed heartily. “Tubby Schroeder is long gone, sir. Long gone. But if you want to talk to Tubman Schroeder, that could be arranged. After this rubber.”

Sandy took a seat in an armchair and waited. The players were intense, possibly because there was a table of prizes for the winners. He didn’t know the game, but he picked up on the fact that Tubby was good at it. So good, in fact, that he was holding back a little, making mistakes out of gallantry. He won, anyway, and excused himself.

“Hate to take you away from the game,” Sandy apologized.

“Oh, we break for refreshments now. Your timing is good. Let’s go down to the pub for a little privacy. Tubby, huh? That will be the talk of Edenwald for weeks now. I buried that nickname a long time ago.”

But his tone was good-natured.

“Tubman-I never thought about ‘Tubby’ being short for something.”

“Yes, most people assumed it was about my girth. Tubman Schroeder. Named for Harriet Tubman, or so claimed my crazy lefty mother, who tried to make me into a red diaper baby, but I loved money too much. Still, it’s suitable for a bail bondsman. Let my people go. But, please, no runaways on my underground railroad.”

He had the kind of patter Sandy had always distrusted, not being capable of it. The strong, silent type, Mary had teased him. A man had to play to his strengths.

“How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Don’t mind at all. I’m seventy-six, and I feel better today than I did at thirty-six. Did you come here for my health secrets?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He was used to talking to women who found him fascinating, Sandy supposed, accustomed to filling up any gaps in a conversation. “Here’s how it worked for me: I had four heart attacks in four years, starting when I was forty-six. The first time, they told me to lose weight and exercise. The second time, they told me to lose weight and exercise. The third time, they told me to lose weight and exercise. The fourth time, they told me to lose weight and exercise. And, for some reason, the advice took on the fourth time. It started with a walk around my dining-room table. I’m not kidding. That’s all I could do at first. I weighed 275 pounds and I walked around my table. But then-I had a pretty big dining-room table.”

The story had a polish to it, the mark of a tale that had been told many times. Still, it was interesting to Sandy. People never changed. Until they did.

They had reached the pub, an inviting place of leather chairs and dim lights, quite empty at midday.

“So that’s all it took?” Sandy asked. “A walk around the dining-room table?”

“That’s how it started. And here’s where it ends up. A hundred pounds lighter and I have the smallest pillbox of anyone here. That’s kind of a brag, you know.”

Sandy knew. He already took two pills with his breakfast, one for blood pressure, another for cholesterol. And a baby aspirin.

Tubby’s-Tubman’s-light tone changed. “So you’re a cop?”

“Retired, yes, but I was a police with the city for a long time.”

“I think I remember you. Not that we met, but our paths must have crossed, here or there. Across a crowded courtroom, to change the song slightly. But it probably wasn’t enchanted.”

“No, not a lot of enchantment in my business. I work cold cases now.”

“Felix or Julie? Has to be Julie, I’m guessing. I mean, there’s probably no statute of limitations for federal flight, but, Jesus, who cares at this point. If Felix is alive, he’s older than I am. What would be the point? It’s not like a Nazi war criminal, you know.”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“He’s going to be a frail old man. Who wants to be the person who brings him back?”

“You’re not frail.”

“Felix isn’t me. He never learned from his mistakes.”

That was interesting. Tubby-Tubman-intended it to be interesting, dropped it with a big thud, all but begging Sandy to jump on it, this observation about Felix and his mistakes. Which, to Sandy’s mind, made it like a dollar on a string, a trick for losers and optimists.

“Yeah, I’m here to talk about Julie. Her sister says you’re the one who introduced her to Felix.”

“Her sister tell you anything else of interest?”

“What do you mean?”

Tubman flagged a waitress. Young, by the standards here, not quite forty and a nice forty, if not a spectacular one. And even she seemed caught in this guy’s charm. What was that about? He had very good manners. Not flirtatious, but kind, which probably worked better. He ordered a red wine for himself-“The cab, the one I like”-and asked Sandy if he wanted anything.

“I’m good.”

“It’s the elixir of life. You’ll live forever.”

“Doesn’t strengthen the case for me.”

Tubman laughed, thinking Sandy was making a joke.

“The sister-”

“Ah, you’re quite the pointer. Not going to let go of the scent, are you? Look, I don’t tell other people’s secrets. Let’s just say that Andrea Norr wasn’t the innocent bystander she’d have you believe.”

“In Julie’s death?”

“I don’t want to play that game because then you’ll ask me another question and another question. No, nothing big, nothing to do with Julie’s death. But she knows things, more than she’s ever told. She may have even forgotten how much she knows.”

“About Felix leaving.”

“I told you, I’m not playing. For the record, I’ve never thought the two were connected. Felix leaving, Julie disappearing.”

“Will you tell me why?”

Tubman had to think about that. His wine arrived and he cupped the bowl with his hands, inhaled it, but Sandy didn’t think such ostentatious enjoyment of wine was his normal style. The guy had been a bail bondsman, a beer-and-a-shot guy who hung out on Baltimore Street back in the day. People don’t change that much. He was stalling.

“You know, I don’t have any reasons. Just a feeling. In my business, I lived by my hunches, and my hunches served me well. It’s about character, my business. The character of people already thought to be criminals. Yet some thieves have honor and some don’t.”

“Felix Brewer was your best friend. Did you have a hunch he was going to burn you?”

Tubman laughed. “Men don’t have best friends. That’s a girl thing. We were friends. Felix, me, Bert. He was a man involved in a criminal enterprise. I was a bail bondsman, Bert was a criminal attorney. We liked each other’s company, and we were useful to each other. At times.”

“Your friend stuck you with a bond of one hundred thousand dollars, no small sum.”

“Yes. Yes, he did.”

Sandy looked around the pub. “You weathered it, I guess.”

Tubman continued to smell his wine. Maybe he was an ostentatious prick, after all. “If Felix Brewer found a way to compensate me for skipping his bail, you realize there would be serious repercussions for me. IRS, being charged as an accessory.”

Sometimes, you just had to repeat a thing over and over, not accept the non-replies and the digressions. “Julie Saxony went missing almost ten years from the day that Felix did.”

“And she was murdered, it turned out. Do you think Felix was murdered?”

“No, but it’s hard to ignore the juxtaposition.” He liked the occasional fancy word like that, which proved to him that he had mastered his second language, even if he had lost his first. Spanish was almost like a dream to him now. There had been no one who spoke it in Baltimore when he was growing up. Now, it was everywhere, and when he heard it at bus stops, in restaurants, it was like running into an old friend-and having nothing to say. Plus, the accents were odd to his ear.

“Julie was hard to ignore, wasn’t she?” Tubman smiled over the rim of his glass as if they shared some secret.

“Not sure what you mean.”

“She was gorgeous. God, she was gorgeous.”

“You discovered her, as I hear it.”

“How-oh, the sister. Right. Yes, Bert and I stumbled on Julie at Rexall. Not quite like finding Lana Turner at Schwab’s, but close enough. There was a soda fountain, still. But she was behind it.”

“Did it bug you that she ended up being Felix’s girlfriend?”

“No. I took her to him. I knew what I was doing. She was a gift.”

“Was she yours to give?”

“Who knows? I took her into Felix’s club and that was that. I didn’t figure her for having such staying power, though. That surprised all of us.”

“Us?”

He didn’t answer. He was a smart guy. Smart enough not to talk to a cop at all, if it came to that. But something-Sandy’s not-quite-cop status, Tubby’s own boredom in his plush nest-made him want to play this game. More challenging than bridge with a bunch of wistful ladies.

“How did his wife feel? About Julie?”

“I wasn’t Bambi’s confidant. Lorraine, maybe, she could tell you, but I can’t.”

“Lorraine?”

“Bert’s wife. Now they’re best friends. Bambi and Lorraine. Like sisters. What do the kids call it? BFAs? BBFs? Something like that.”

Kids. Sandy’s mind jumped to kids, kids playing a game of hot potato. Andrea Norr had sent him to Tubby. Now Tubby was sending him to Lorraine.

And everyone kept trying to send him away from Felix, that night ten years before Julie disappeared. Nothing to see here, keep moving. Well, the IRS implications could be enough to scare a guy.

He got to his feet, thanking Tubby for his time, releasing him to the henhouse.

“It’s impressive,” he told Tubman. “The way you changed. As you said, almost no one ever does. Did you ever think about why it took the fourth time, the doctor’s advice?”

“A mystery,” Tubman said in a self-satisfied way.

“Four heart attacks in four years. You were how old? When the last one happened?”

“Fifty.”

“Which would have been, what, 1986?”

“Thereabouts.” As if he didn’t know the date to the moment of his last heart attack.

“What month?”

“August.”

“Right around the time Julie disappeared.”

“I don’t see what the two things have to do with each other. Oh, wait, I get it-you think I had the last heart attack carrying her body to its resting place in Leakin Park.”

“I just think it’s an interesting-juxtaposition.” He would have used a synonym if he knew one. “A woman disappears, a woman you discovered, for want of a better term. And, maybe whatever happened to her is somehow connected to the life you introduced her to. Maybe that’s on you. You have your fourth heart attack and suddenly you’re ready to change your life, to do all the things you never could before, as if you suddenly understand what’s at stake, what mortality is. You ever consider that those two things were connected?”

Tubman’s face lost something then, although Sandy wasn’t able to say what. A bit of color, or maybe just the forced bravado that most older men used to conceal their sadness.

“Many times,” he said. “Many times.”

Sandy walked with Tubman back to the library where the bridge women awaited their king. There was a plate of food by his place. “I thought you might be hungry, missing the snack break,” one said. Had women doted on the old Tubby this way? Sandy thought not. The laws of supply and demand, coupled with a hundred-pound weight loss, can work a peculiar kind of magic.

Sandy got into his car, thinking about the most meaningful moment of the whole interview. You think I had the last heart attack carrying her body to its resting place in Leakin Park.

That Julie Saxony had been found in Leakin Park was a matter of public record.

That she had been murdered somewhere else? That information had never been revealed anywhere. Sure, one could infer it, especially if one knew the topography of the park, could spot the telling omissions. But a guy would have to be paying very close attention.

Tubman “Tubby” Schroeder had been paying very close attention to the details around Julie’s death, the one in the one-two punch that had convinced him to change his life. The question that Sandy couldn’t decide was whether he was carrying a torch or trying to bury one.

March 14, 1974

Julie knew how to drive, had picked it up when she was only thirteen, but she had never bothered to get a license. Andrea had driven them to Baltimore and they had only the one car and then Julie fell in love with Felix. And because she didn’t have a car, he drove her home one night and came inside the little apartment she shared with Andrea. That led to him finding her a better apartment, in Horizon House, this new high-rise with a rooftop pool, although the view from the pool included the jail, which amused Felix greatly. Of course, getting a license wouldn’t keep Felix from driving her home and coming inside her apartment, but if she got a license, Felix might buy her a car. He had said as much. An Alfa Romeo. But Julie knew what the car would be-her going-away gift.

No license, no car.

No car, no going away.

She knew it was silly and yet-sometimes, silliness worked. Look at Susie, propped up on a telephone book in her boyfriend’s absurdly large Cadillac, piloting them toward Washington, D.C. She had already made four wrong turns and they weren’t even on the Capital Beltway yet. Julie had built in extra time for Susie’s waywardness, so she wasn’t concerned about being late. She just remained amazed at how well life worked out for Susie, who didn’t have a care in the world or a thought in her head.

Perhaps those two things were connected.

“What do they do, again?” Susie asked. The whole thing was really over her head. It was as if the literal overheadedness of life allowed her to let everything else fly by her, too.

“Well, you strip down-”

“Like we do?” Teasing. Susie wasn’t stupid, just not willing to make an effort. Thought Julie was crazy, going for her GED and then starting classes at community college.

“No, I get to wear a bathing suit.”

“And that’s it? You just put on your bathing suit and do, like, a cannonball off the side?”

“There are questions first.”

“Like a test.”

“Sort of.”

“Do I have to be there for that?” Worried, as if she didn’t even want to be in the same room as a test.

“No, you don’t have to come inside at all.”

“I don’t want to sit in the car, though. Tubby says it’s bad to run the heater and the radio off the battery and I’ll go crazy, alone with my own thoughts.”

Yes, it would be crazy-making to be alone with Susie’s thoughts. Lonely, too.

“There are restaurants nearby. You can go have a cup of coffee or something.”

“Okey-dokey.” Susie used such phrases with complete ease. She was only four foot eleven, although she claimed five feet, and her popularity as a performer might have been disturbing if it were not for her enormous chest and wasp waist. She was a pocket Venus with a natural tumble of honey-gold curls and saucer eyes, and Julie would have quite disliked her, except for the fact that Felix never looked at her twice. In fact, he called her “my little freak” in private and thought the men who flocked to see her were pervy. But Felix hadn’t become a rich man by making judgments on what people wanted. Sure, he had standards. He was strict about drugs at the club, strict about drugs in general, but that’s because that enterprise generated more heat from the authorities. He was also rather straitlaced about sex-girls got fired if they got caught doing any kind of play-for-pay. That was the by-product of having two daughters.

Three, Julie reminded herself. He had three now. Michelle had been born almost a year ago, less than ten months after her relationship with Felix began. She still had a hard time believing that Felix had a baby daughter.

She pulled out a compact and studied herself in the mirror, even as Susie made the mistake of taking the Connecticut Avenue exit and had to circle back to the Beltway, saying cheerfully: “Well, I knew I was looking for a state.” As if that was a rarity in D.C., a street named after a state. Julie’s makeup was conservative for this occasion, her hair pulled back into a smooth ponytail. She was less sure of the outfit. Short-but everything was either short or long these days, and she hated the maxi look. The shift dress barely skimmed her knees, although the sleeves went past the elbows, and she had paired it with boots and a trench coat. She looked-what did she look like? A young mother, someone who played tennis and kept up with fashion. Cool, but conservative.

Not unlike Bambi Brewer, whom Julie had seen shopping at the little grocery store in Cross Keys after a morning at the indoor tennis barn.

Julie pointed out the various places where Susie could wait for her on Wisconsin Avenue, but Susie fretted that she could never parallel park this huge boat of a Cadillac. At almost three hundred pounds, Tubby, Susie’s boyfriend, needed a big car. But even with the seat pulled all the way up, Susie could barely see over the wheel. It probably would be hard for her to put the car in reverse, or see out the rear window.

“I’ll just go round and round,” she decided.

“It might be a while,” Julie warned.

“I don’t mind.” The amazing thing about Susie was that she didn’t. Chances were, she would end up getting lost just making a circle. She wouldn’t mind that, either. Julie didn’t want to look like Susie, but she wouldn’t mind being like her. Free as the breeze, not a care in the world.

She took a deep breath and walked inside the synagogue, trying not to let it intimidate her. It was just a building, like any other. She had a right to be here. Or would have the right, soon enough.

“Thank you,” she said to the one man she knew among the three who sat in judgment of her. “I appreciate you getting this on the schedule so swiftly.”

“You were very diligent in your study,” he said. “Besides, we needed to get this done before the holiday.”

“St. Patrick’s Day?” she asked in wonder, then corrected herself. “Oh, Easter, of course.”

She wasn’t swift enough to cover the second mistake and he winced. “You mean Passover, Julie.”

“Sure, right, because the Last Supper was a seder.” See what a good student I am, Rabbi Tasmin? “I just got confused, because I didn’t see how Easter could be a problem, but I thought because we’re in D.C. and it’s a federal holiday-”

“It’s not, actually,” said one of the two rabbis she didn’t know. She hadn’t been able to focus on their names when they were introduced, but maybe she could get by with calling him rabbi, or even rebbe, although it might sound funny, coming from her. Felix laughed whenever she tried to say a Yiddish word.

The rabbi said: “Easter doesn’t have to be designated a federal holiday because it always falls on a Sunday. But it’s treated like a holiday for all. This is part of the life you are choosing. You’re used to being mainstream, of having your ways seen as ‘normal.’ Are you really ready to have a life that is otherwise? Of having to ask for holidays that your work doesn’t grant?”

“Yes,” she said, trying not to smile at the idea of asking for Yom Kippur off at the Variety. “This is what I want to do.”

“Why do you wish to become a Jew?”

“I’m in love,” she said. “The man I love cannot marry me if I don’t convert.”

“Has he said he will marry you if you do convert?”

Julie had anticipated that question. “We are not officially engaged, no. I’m not the type of person to give ultimatums. And I don’t want my conversion to appear to be a condition, or even a ploy. Religion must be deeply felt. My conversion guarantees nothing when it comes to the love of this man. He doesn’t even know I’m pursuing it.”

“Really?” asked the third rabbi.

“I thought I should want this, for myself, and that would be the proof that I was making the right choice. It doesn’t hinge on anything, any man. It’s for me.”

But, of course, it would make a difference, she thought. How could it not? Felix had entrusted her with a secret, one he had shared with no one. He cared about Judaism, no matter how much he pretended otherwise. So she must care, too.

“So you would want to be a Jew even without this man in your life?”

“Yes,” Julie said. “It feels right to me.”

“You were raised-?”

“Protestant. Baptist.”

“Was your family religious?”

She had to stop and think about this. “My mother went to church and insisted that the kids go, too, but my father didn’t. I think my… dissatisfaction with religion started there-how could it be meaningful if my father didn’t take part?” She was making things up now, trying to say the right things, but suddenly her fibs felt true. There had been a little worm of discontent. Her father had refused to attend church. But then, so had her mother. Also that was good, saying she had been dissatisfied. Made her sound deep.

“What do you do, Miss Saxony?” asked Rabbi Tasmin, the closest thing she had to a friend here.

“I’m a hostess.”

“A hostess?”

“In the Coffee Pot Shoppe. I tell people where to go. Where to sit.”

“Ah.” The second rabbi now. “Like a hostess.”

“Yes.” Hadn’t she said that?

“Have you thought about Christmas?”

She had, in fact. It had occurred to her to keep the secret from Felix until then and present it as a gift, but-oh, no. They were asking her something very different.

“It will no longer be part of my life.”

“Are your parents alive?”

They were, but she preferred to close any line of inquiry she could. “No.”

“There are siblings?”

“We’re not close.” They had been once. Two giggling girls, on their own. But Felix didn’t want a girl who lived with her sister, so Julie had moved out. She had told Andrea about what she planned today and they had quarreled. They were always quarreling, though, especially about Felix. It wasn’t a big deal.

The rabbis did not trust her, she could tell. They did not want her. But she had put in the time, done what was required. She continued to answer all their questions in a calm, thoughtful manner. Eventually they led her downstairs to a room that smelled, disappointingly, like the indoor pool at the Y where she had worked at the front desk one summer.

“Make sure every inch is covered,” one rabbi advised, and Julie had a strange flashback, her first time dancing, the lecture about the pasties, what the law allowed. A lecture delivered by Felix, who pretended to be all gruff indifference, but she understood that the mere fact that he was tutoring her was indicative of his interest. There had been no jealousy among the other girls. They assumed she would fade, as they all had. Felix had a wife and two daughters, and he claimed he wanted a son, although it seemed to Julie that ship must have sailed. Surely his wife was too old to have more children? “I can’t name him Felix Junior because of the Jewish tradition,” Felix told Julie the second time they slept together. “But see if I don’t. Not that I would do that to a kid, but I don’t like rules. Just because my father was a cantor doesn’t mean I have to do everything by the book.”

“Your father was Eddie Cantor?”

“Oh, my sweet little shiksa, the things I have to teach you. That’s a secret, between us, by the way. No one knows about my dad, not even my wife.”

That had been two years ago. Two years.

She took a deep breath and submerged. She wasn’t scared of water, but she had never learned to swim properly, just knew a paddling kind of motion, the better to keep her hair above the water.

When she came up, she was surprised at how beautiful the singing was, how it really did make her feel holy and changed. The rabbis’ eyes were on the ceiling, as if they didn’t want to catch a glimpse of her in her bathing suit, modest as it was. I’m a Jew, she thought in the locker room, as she combed her hair back into its ponytail, changed into her clothes, and went to collect Susie. “Drinks on me,” she said. “Gampy’s.” It was a place all the dancers favored because it stayed open late. Felix came here a lot. She had a cheeseburger, which was pretty funny, not that Susie picked up on the joke. Felix didn’t come in, but she didn’t really expect him to. She and Susie went to the Hippo and danced until 2:00 A.M. Then she went back to her apartment, which, like the pool, also overlooked the prison, and stared at her phone until 4:00 A.M., wishing she dared to call him at home. She knew the number, of course. Knew the number, knew the house. Back when she was living with Andrea, she would take the VW in the middle of the night and drive by it, risking so much-Andrea’s wrath, Felix’s discovery. It was a lovely house. Felix had such good taste. That’s why he would choose her, eventually.

She had hoped to make a ceremony out of telling him about her conversion, turn it into something special. But it happened that several days went by without her seeing him, and when he stopped by the club in the early evening, the news had been too pent up and she blurted out: “Hey, I’m a Jew!”

He laughed. “You’re not a Jew. You order the lean corned beef at Jack’s.”

“No, seriously,” she said, lowering her voice. “I converted. Susie was there and everything. She was, like, a witness.”

Not exactly true, but she knew Susie would cheerfully lie for her. Susie believed women had to stick together. Another way in which she was naïve.

“Really,” he said, as if she had commented on the weather. A few minutes later, he had gone upstairs to his office. She didn’t see him for a week. Oh, she saw him, but there were no late-night coffees at the Coffee Pot Shoppe, no visits to her apartment. Well, it was Passover now. He had to be with his family. After the holidays, they started up again, as if there had never been a break at all.

A few weeks later, she was window-shopping at an antiques store on Howard Street when she saw an interesting plate. She was pretty sure she knew what it was, but she asked the owner to be sure.

“It’s an old seder plate, very rare. There’s a place for all the things that matter during the ritual-the lamb shank, the bitter herbs.”

“I know,” she said, although she had not yet sat at anyone’s seder table.

“It’s made in France,” he said, showing her the unmarked back, as if that proved it was made in France.

She knew she was being sold, but that was okay. She was in sales herself, helping to move the weak drinks at the Variety. The plate was $65, no small sum, but she bought it and put it in an old trunk at the foot of her bed. There, the plate joined china and silverware she had begun to assemble, piece by piece. There was a large serving dish that dated to Revolutionary War times, the kind of item one would expect to find in a house such as the Brewer home in Sudbrook Park, although, of course, Julie would never live there. Mount Washington, maybe. Guilford if the divorce didn’t leave Felix too strapped. But not that house, that neighborhood, through which she had driven far too many times. At any rate her things kept accumulating in this small wooden trunk, eighteenth-century English, also discovered on Howard Street. Julie never called this trunk a hope chest, but that didn’t keep it from being one.

One night, in her English class at CCB, she was struck by a particular F. Scott Fitzgerald quote shared by the teacher, about the test of a first-rate intellect being the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts without going insane. She carried it back to Felix, another tribute to drop at his feet, like a house cat with a mouse.

“So you must have a first-rate mind,” she said. “If you think you can really love two women at the same time.”

She assumed he would at least have the courtesy to say that he loved her best but couldn’t leave his wife while the children were young. Or that Bambi wouldn’t give him a divorce under any circumstances. Once he had told her he could never marry a shiksa, but she had fixed that problem. So what was holding him up?

“Yes siree,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “You and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two first-rate intellects for the ages.”

“Who says I’m not crazy?” Felix said, kissing the top of her head.

March 9, 2012

Sandy decided to call it a day after talking to No-Longer-Tubby Schroeder. One of the perks of being a consultant was making his own hours. The downside was that those hours could never be overtime. Work as much or as little as he wanted. Didn’t matter, no one cared. He earned a flat rate, no benefits.

But it filled the evenings, reading the Julie Saxony file, and he found himself gravitating back to it even as the days were growing longer. It was really two stories, parallel universes. A missing woman from Havre de Grace. A dead woman in Leakin Park. Fitting, he thought, for a woman with two lives-Juliet Romeo, Variety headliner. Julie Saxony, respectable business owner, valued member of the Havre de Grace Merchants Association, which had put up a reward when she disappeared.

He rubbed his eyes. Even now, after two years, the house ached with quiet. Not that Mary had been a loud person, quite the opposite. Nor had Bobby Junior been noisy, not by a child’s standards. When he was a toddler, Sandy and Mary had called him the colonel, mistaking his silence for dignity. Who knew, back then, what could be going on in a kid’s head? Mary knew. She always knew, even before the trouble started. She kept it to herself as long as possible, outright lying to pediatricians and teachers and, eventually, Sandy. So when Bobby’s problems started, about age six or so, they seemed to come out of nowhere. But it was just that Mary had papered over them for so long. For someone who usually couldn’t tell a mild fib, she had been a disturbingly good liar when it came to Bobby Junior.

Then there were the five hard years, the years when they fought about what to do, only to have the decision made for them: Bobby needed to go away. It was an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless, that Sandy had been happy to have Mary all to himself again when Bobby was sent to “school.” Maybe if Bobby Junior had been different, normal, Sandy wouldn’t have felt that way. How could he ever know what he would feel? His kid was born different, not right. The fact that Mary still gloried in Bobby Junior was the essence of Mary, the reason Sandy loved her so much. After all, she had gloried in him, too, despite his flaws, the mistakes that her parents said made him unsuitable as a husband. He was just grateful that the decision about Bobby was taken out of their hands, that they could stop fighting over it.

Mary wasn’t. But she rallied because that’s what she did and Sandy thought they had a pretty good time after that. Thank God her family had the money to pay for Bobby’s care, set up a trust. There wasn’t enough cop overtime in the world to pay for that kind of thing.

The Saxony file was open on the dining-room table, all the various pieces spread out. He started gathering them up, not because he was a neat freak, but because he knew the mere act of organizing a set of papers could highlight something he hadn’t considered yet. It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn’t show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs. It was a kind of muscle memory, ingrained by years of doing a thing. The body led, the mind followed. He was good at being a murder police and proud of being good at it. But was it so wrong that he had hoped to be good at something else in his lifetime?

Sandy’s retirement, almost ten years ago, had been full of promise. He had stayed on the job longer than most, making it to thirty years of service. But he was only fifty-two then and he had no intention of truly retiring. Almost no one who left the department did. They went to other government jobs, or into private security. Some of his older friends were double-dipping now, drawing two government pensions and their Social Security. They lived well.

But Sandy had a different idea for his retirement, a dream he had nurtured for years. He had wanted to open a restaurant, an authentic Cuban one that would serve the dishes of his childhood. There was no place in Baltimore that really did it right, and don’t even mention the Buena Vista Social Club to him, which was basically a great location that served nachos. Nachos! Sandy was going to make arroz con pollo and plantains and real Cuban coffee. People who had eaten in Miami’s best-known Cuban restaurants said Sandy’s food was as good, better.

And maybe it was, but that didn’t change the fact that no one came. If a plantain falls in the forest and no one’s there to eat it-he still had nightmares, thinking about the waste, the uneaten food, the not-special-to-anyone specials.

The location was good, or should have been. Mary-she was always up for whatever he wanted-found a storefront on Hampden’s Thirty-sixth Street, not far from their Medfield home. Hampden was gentrifying at a fast clip at the time, although, like most Baltimore neighborhoods, it never turned the corner all the way. But real estate was going up, up, up in a way that had never happened in Baltimore. It seemed so smart to extend themselves to buy the building, with a long-term eye toward renovating the upstairs for apartments. Within six months of the purchase, the building was worth twice as much as they had paid for it. Except they hadn’t really paid for it. They had put nothing down, borrowed 110 percent. Everyone was doing it.

Seven years later, when he went to sell the building, it was worth about 60 percent of the debt they were carrying. They had never established any real equity because they had used a second mortgage-and a third and a fourth and then cash from the money that Mary’s parents left her when they died, money outside the trust set up for Bobby Junior-for improvements to the restaurant. They sold it in a short sale, the most excruciatingly long process Sandy had ever endured at the time, although Mary’s allegedly fast cancer took half the time and felt longer still. Sometimes, watching television, Sandy came across a rerun of Seinfeld about a Pakistani guy who runs a restaurant that’s always empty and it’s played for laughs, being a sitcom and all, and all Sandy wanted to do was throw a brick at the TV set. Maybe running a failing business is funny when you’re a millionaire comedian, but when you lived it, the jokes didn’t come so fast.

Sandy was that rare person who understood he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He had faked it well enough at work, knowing when to laugh, even getting a good line off every now and then, but he wasn’t inclined to see the funny side of things, and life didn’t tempt him to change his point of view.

And that was before Mary got sick. He knew the two things were not connected, that she didn’t get cancer from the heartbreak over the restaurant. He also knew it wasn’t the earlier surgeries, all those years ago, when she lost so much blood and needed transfusions, but he couldn’t shake the notion. She had allowed him his dream, bankrolled it without a single word of reproach when all that money went down a rabbit hole lined with black beans and flan. And then she got pancreatic cancer. Stage IV. Mary never did anything halfway.

His papers gathered, he started making coffee, the good stuff. He still cooked for himself, but there wasn’t much joy in it, and he almost never made Cuban food.

He wasn’t stupid or naïve. He went in knowing that a restaurant was hard work; he came from restaurant people. He knew that most restaurants didn’t make it. But he also knew that he was smart and that his food was good. So why didn’t people come? Sometimes, he blamed the low-carb diet fad, which put rice and bread off the menu for so many people. He blamed the lack of Cubans in Baltimore. There had been a big influx of Latinos on the East Side, but they were all from Central America and Mexico. His food did not speak to them. It seemed that his food spoke only to him and a few stubborn regulars. There had been one young man, a guy who looked like an aging skateboarder, but he turned out to be in business himself, running a music venue with his father-in-law. Sandy and the kid talked about the perils of small business sometimes while the boy sat at the counter, wolfing down cappuccinos. But they never spoke about their lives, probably because Sandy kept that door closed to everyone but Mary. He was shocked, a year ago or so, to see the boy, as he still thought of him, pushing a stroller down Thirty-sixth Street, in the company of an attractive woman, although she wasn’t Sandy’s type. He didn’t like sturdy women. He liked the little flowers, the women who needed protection in this world. He had been drawn to Mary’s delicacy, only to be amazed by her steel. First with Bobby, then with her own illness.

Cancer. In his lifetime, it had become less of a thing. Everyone was so cheerful about it now. They forgot that it could still be pretty awful. Even he had forgotten. He had been stubbornly, stupidly hopeful, asking the doctor about those commercials, the ones for miracle places that cured people everyone had given up on. But Mary had accepted, from the first diagnosis, that she was being given a death sentence. If she had been thinking only of herself, she would have gone home and swallowed rat poison. She was a dignified woman, and there was no dignity in what happened to her over the next four months. “I carried you to your doorstep on our first date,” Sandy said. “What’s the big deal in my carrying you now?”

But he was carrying her to the toilet, which she found humiliating. Mary had been a woman who, through thirty-plus years of marriage, insisted on decorum, especially about bathroom matters. To have her body assert all its ugly reality in those final months grieved her so. She put on lipstick and beautiful nightgowns until the end. But she no longer wanted fresh-cut flowers in the house. “When they die, they remind me that I’m dying.”

Sandy had objected, defending the flower bearers in a way he was not inclined to defend most people. He had a pretty low opinion of people and whether that was because of the job or the job was because of that tendency was a chicken-or-an-egg question at this point. At any rate, he argued for the flowers. “No, they’re pretty, they’re nice, you’re not-”

“I am,” Mary said. “I’m dying. And look at those cut stems in water. They’re dying the moment they’re cut.”

The next day, he had brought her an orchid, in a pot. And although he didn’t know dick about plants, he learned to tend to it, and then another, and another, until the first floor was a bower, a word that Mary taught him. After she was gone, he thought about letting the orchids go, or giving them away, but Mary would be disappointed in him, giving up on yet another living thing, so he kept the bower, feeling for all the world like Nero Wolfe or goddamn Ray Milland when he played the villain on Columbo, complete with ascot. Only an asshole wore an ascot.

Columbo-that was a good show. Utterly ridiculous, but it wasn’t trying to be a documentary on police work. At least the writers knew that solving a homicide was more talking than anything else, although some of those confessions-well, Sandy wouldn’t want to be the assistant state’s attorney who took Columbo’s cases to court.

He turned on the television to keep him company while he puttered among the plants. No one would accuse him of having a green thumb, but he saved more than he lost now.

The rowhouse was still set up as it had been in Mary’s last months, so she could live on one floor. Now Sandy lived on one floor, using the first-floor bathroom. He went upstairs only to shower and change his clothes. But he slept in the sofa bed where she died, although it bugged his back.

Mary’s last word was “Bobby.” He tried to tell himself it was for him, that she had reverted, in that final moment, to the given name he no longer used. But Mary had almost always called him Roberto. Her last word was for her son, who loved his mother so much that he had almost killed her.

A few days after she died, Sandy drove out to the group home where Bobby now lived; tamed and dulled by medication, the boy-a thirty-five-year-old man, but always a boy to Sandy-was puzzled by the news. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, although he had been told repeatedly she was gravely ill, that this day would come. “Where’s Mom? When is Mom coming to see me again?”

Sandy had not visited him since that day. It wasn’t a plan. Nobody plans to be that much of a bastard. Mary’s illness had disrupted what routine there was and she was the keeper of that flame. He forgot to go, something came up. Then something else came up and before he knew it, six months had gone by and the caretakers, when he called, told him that Bobby was fine. “Does he ask after me?” No, he was told. He asks for his mother, but never his father. Okay, so that was that. He had no relationship with his son. It wasn’t his fault that Mary could forgive Bobby Junior for throwing her through a plateglass window, while Sandy never could. It didn’t matter to him that Bobby was only eleven at the time, or that he did not understand what he had done, that he cried over his bloodied mother as paramedics tended to her. She had lost so much blood that day, almost enough to kill her. Did the transfusions cause her cancer? Sandy knew that was ridiculous, that he shouldn’t blame Bobby for killing his mother-and yet he did. He just did.

At the table, the one where Mary used to insist on taking her meals despite being so weak she could barely sit up, he ate an early supper and watched the news. He missed having an afternoon paper, although it had been almost twenty years now since one was published. Sometimes, he felt that he was born to miss things, to lose things despite his meticulous ways. In Spanish, translated strictly, things lost themselves to you and that had been Sandy’s experience. His restaurant. His parents. Mary. The promise of his son-not the boy himself, but the dream of the child who never was, the boy who had seemed so happy and healthy and perfect at birth, straight 10s on his Apgar. Nowadays, you couldn’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV, without hearing about autism and Asperger’s, and people were always telling you about this book they read or Rain Man or how their boss was on the “autism scale.” Not that people talked to Sandy about these topics, because there was no one left in his life who knew about Bobby Junior. But he heard things, on TV and out in the world. He heard things.

The local news got silly after the first break, and he opened Julie Saxony’s file again. It was the opposite of whatever picking at a scab was. Something was registering every time, even if he didn’t know what it was. He was beginning to prefer the more recent photograph, the one where she was too thin. Yes, to be honest, the va-va-voom shot of her in her stripper days had been what first caught his eye. But the 1986 photo, where she was all of thirty-three-she looked so old and sad. This was the woman who had been murdered, he reminded himself. A woman who had achieved a lot, but at some cost. If he were the kind of a guy who talked to photos, he might have asked her: “What made you so sad?”

But Sandy was not that kind of a guy. He didn’t talk to photos or even to himself. When he wasn’t working, he might go a day or two without speaking to anyone at all. And that suited him just fine.