After I'm Gone (27 page)

March 27, 2012

9:00
A.M.

Sandy actually felt bad locking Bambi Brewer up overnight. But what else could he do? She was lying her head off, and if he let her go home, she was going to brief whoever she was protecting. The only choice was to isolate her, lock her up too late to get before a judge—and get to the one daughter as quickly as possible.

And, yeah, he felt like a bum, going to see a woman whose daughter had surgery the day before. But it wasn’t life-threatening, according to her mom. The kid had already been discharged.

Rachel Brewer lived maybe a mile, as the crow flies, from where Bambi Brewer had grown up, but a crow would cover a lot of distance in that mile between the once-grand homes of Forest Park and these modest brick rowhouses on Purnell Drive. Sandy found it interesting that she was the kind of person who didn’t mind being in the minority. Hard to know, but he would guess that this stretch of houses was mostly African American. Middle-class, solid citizens, but it wasn’t a situation that most white people he knew sought out. Not that Sandy could ever decide if he was white. Sure, he looked white and Cubanos were technically Caucasian, but did that make him
white
? Coming up, before there were so many Latinos in Baltimore, the world had basically been black-white-Asian, and Sandy was white. But now, although he had not changed, he would be called “Latino,” a word that meant nothing to him.

It was the July fourth thing that had done it. Not impossible. But it made no sense. Where had Julie Saxony been for twenty-four hours in that case? Not driving, based on her car’s odometer. Not at home, not checked into any motel or hotel uncovered by detectives, or ferreted out by the reward money dangled by the Havre de Grace Merchants Association. So Bambi was lying about that. But why? And also lying about sending the daughter to do her bidding, based on what Susie recalled of the conversation. The daughter had said explicitly that her mother didn’t know she was there. Okay, Susie’s memory could be wrong on that point, or the daughter could have been lying to gain some perceived advantage. But the mother was definitely lying, and the daughter was the one person who could contradict her.

The woman who answered the door to Sandy and Nancy was not the beauty her mother was. It was only then, allowing himself that rather ungallant thought, that Sandy realized he did find Bambi Brewer very beautiful for a woman in her seventies. This one was pretty as middle-aged women go, her features roughened by whatever her father had contributed. But likable, younger looking than her age, even with no makeup and those deep circles under her eyes. She hadn’t slept last night. Well, she had a sick kid and a mother in lockup. Those dark circles were earned.

They did the little dance of introductions, the pretense of hospitality. They were keen that she not lawyer up, but it was tricky, playing her this way. He hoped she would be looser at home, more relaxed. He hadn’t factored in the demands of a toddler.

“Your mother confessed last night to killing Julie Saxony.”

“She’s lying,” Rachel said.

“Why?”

“No idea. But I know it’s a lie.”

“How?”

“Because I saw Julie Saxony on July third. I was alone at the house. She came by, she wanted to speak to my mother, I sent her away.”

“Did she come by with the money? The money you asked her for a week earlier?”

A beat. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened. She came by with the money.”

“How much was it?”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand.”

“That’s more than your mother’s mortgage and debt. Based on the papers we’ve seen.”

“Really?” She was surprised they knew about the mortgage. “Well, maybe it was the exact amount she stole.”

“Have you ever seen three hundred fifty thousand dollars? It’s a lot of money to put in a suitcase. Julie Saxony’s sister has described the piece of luggage your father handed to Julie that night. She says there couldn’t have been that much in there. And no one saw Julie put anything in her car that day. Why are you so convinced that Julie stole it?”

“My mother said she did.”

“Your mother told us she killed Julie Saxony, and you have no problem saying that’s a lie.”

“I told you, I saw Julie on July third. I was at home. No one else was. She left, end of story. I thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. She left and someone killed her.”

“She could have come back. The next day. I mean, if she really wanted to see your mother—”

“But she didn’t.”

“Again, how can you be sure?”

The child began chanting then:
miljews, miljews, miljews
. Sandy couldn’t begin to make it out, but it apparently referred to milk and juice, as the woman got up and fetched two cups, the kind with lids that don’t spill, whatever those are called. Sandy would probably know those kinds of things if he were a grandfather. He could tell the mother was happy for the distraction, because she made a big production out of it, probably using the time to think about what she wanted to say.

Only liars and very polite people need that much time to decide what to say.

“Do I have any—I don’t know—I mean, not confidentiality, but can I tell you things that you won’t tell my mother?”

“Maybe. It depends.”

She sighed. “Julie Saxony came to tell my mother that my father had sent for her. Of course, that wasn’t true.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she was found dead.”

“But that doesn’t mean she was lying. You’re working backward from a known fact. She might have been going to your father, wherever he was. And someone might have killed her to prevent that from happening. Maybe your dad wanted her dead.”

Rachel was clearly having trouble processing all this. Again, it might have been the fatigue, or it might have been that she had held back this piece of the story for so long that she hadn’t thought about how others might arrange the same facts. Felix had summoned Julie Saxony, but Julie was found dead. In this woman’s mind, those two things weren’t connected.

Sandy believed they were.

“But I didn’t—” She stopped.

“You didn’t kill her? I mean, you hit her hard enough to knock her earring out, the one that your mother found and sold a month later, but you didn’t kill her? Your mom thinks you did.”

“She didn’t tell you that.”

“No, she just confessed to a murder she probably didn’t commit. Possibly to protect the person who did.”

She wasn’t having problems focusing anymore.

“I need a lawyer.” It was a statement of fact, flat and plain-spoken. By force of habit, Sandy tried to forestall the inevitable.

“Look, we’re still just talking here. If you say you didn’t kill her, you didn’t kill her. Maybe you just, I don’t know, knocked her out, called one of your father’s old buddies, like Tubman, to help you? And you didn’t know what he did or how it ended. That’s okay. We’re just talking. You bring a lawyer in, we’ve got to go out to headquarters, you’ll want to find a babysitter and here’s your kid, just getting over something really major—”

“No, I need a lawyer. We can drop Tatiana at my sister’s house. Michelle, the younger one. And I’ll call Bert Gelman before we leave. Is that a problem, Bert representing my mother and me? Is he allowed to be my lawyer, too?”

“I have a hunch,” Sandy said, “it’s what your mother wanted when she fired him last night.”

Noon

Michelle had a nanny whom she called a babysitter. She wasn’t fooling anyone, including herself. The woman lived in a private apartment above the garage, worked almost sixty hours a week, with Tuesdays and Sundays off. Michelle felt guilty about this. But Hamish wanted her free to go out, to focus on him. She missed the children when she was out, yet she also dreaded Tuesdays and Sundays, which seemed to last forever. It never stopped. Two was so much harder than one, although thank God Hamish III was in school now. Still, that left her with Helena, who was more outrageous than most three-year-olds.

Helena’s high-maintenance ways were thrown into sharp relief by Tatiana’s temperament. A by-product of being in an orphanage, Rachel had said once, and Michelle had said: “Do you think there’s an orphanage where I can drop my kids off for a week or so?” She thought it was funny. Rachel, not so much.

Today was a Tuesday, but she hadn’t mentioned that when Rachel had called. She had said, “Sure, bring her over.” And that had felt good. Until a few years ago, she had so little to offer her sisters. It was nice to be the generous one, the bountiful one. To have the biggest house, to hold the family gatherings, to be able to help out financially. She was especially keen to do anything she could for Rachel.

Rachel’s one was so dainty, alongside Helena. Of course, she was younger and, well, malnourished. But there was something in her movements, something delicate and fine. Michelle watched her examine Helena’s cache of toys in the den—and watched Helena become instantly passionate about any toy that Tatiana touched. “Mine.”

“Be nice,” she said. “Share.”

Tatiana didn’t seem to mind. She just moved on to the next toy, which Helena promptly took, saying: “Mine.”

She was her mother’s daughter all right.

Although the house was toasty warm, Michelle pulled her sweater tighter around her, took another sip from her homemade cappuccino.
Why are you going to talk to the police now?
she had asked her sister.
What is going on?

It’s going to be okay. It’s just crazy. No one did anything.

Did Mom—

No, no.

Did you—

No, Michelle. I think Mom thinks she’s protecting me or something, but I didn’t do anything. Honest, I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t do anything really bad.

But Michelle had. Michelle had done something very bad. She had come so close to telling Rachel, the day of the shower, before Hamish III was born. But she had a moment of—what to call it? Clarity. She wanted to confess to Rachel because it would make
her
feel better. She wanted to tell her sister about the worst thing she had ever done, in hopes of forgiveness that she didn’t deserve. She still yearned to be forgiven—and still understood that she didn’t deserve it. That was the price she had to pay. For six, almost seven years now, she had tried to persuade herself that her life was proof that she had done the right thing. Hamish, the children—a bad person would not be given these things. And a remorseful person was not bad, right? She used to be bad, but she wasn’t anymore.

“Mine,” Helena said, snatching another toy from Tatiana’s hands. Tatiana never countered, never complained, just went searching for something else. Was Michelle supposed to check her bandage soon? She needed to read the sheet Rachel had left for her.

She sipped her cappuccino. She was really enjoying being nice, if not the Nice One, the role that still belonged to Rachel. It had been a revelation, learning that being nice wasn’t for suckers, that living a life in which one could like one’s self was akin to being softly massaged, all the time. Every “please,” every “thank you”—it was like a coin dropped into a bank. No—a coin tossed into a fountain, like the old wishing fountain at the Westview Cinemas. You gave the coin away. It was no longer yours. It had no currency. And yet you still felt rich somehow, in the moment you released it.
I can afford to surrender this quarter. I can afford to say please and thank you and no, you were ahead of me, because I can afford to be nice now because someone finally loves me
. Someone I don’t deserve. If Hamish knew—if Rachel knew—if her mother knew—

“Mine,” Helena said again. Tatiana moved on, unperturbed.

She probably should call Linda.

1:00
P.M.

Sandy felt as if he had been working with Nancy Porter forever. He had never been partnered with a woman before. There had only been two in homicide, and one of them was a head case. But Nancy Porter was the real deal. He had trouble remembering she was a woman, even though she was pretty girly. She was good police. Even had the old-school Baltimore accent, all those vowels.

Plus, she agreed with him, most of the time. That never hurt.

“How do you want to play this?” she asked now, very deferential, although it seemed increasingly evident that it would be a county case. Later, if it got written up in the papers—and this case was definitely going to get written up in the papers—his decision to execute the search warrant on Bambi Brewer’s apartment would be called a hunch. True, he hadn’t known what to expect. He just believed that Julie Saxony went to that house on July 3, 1986, and probably died there. He had thought he might find a gun among Bambi’s possessions, maybe even a casing in the old house. But it was the oddity of that one shoebox, in what was otherwise a very uncluttered, serene apartment. An accumulation of papers so meaningless that they had to be meaningful.

“She’s not an experienced liar, this one,” Sandy said. “Her mom’s not very good, either, but she’s even worse. She’s a nice lady, she’s used to doing and saying things that people want to hear. I think everything she’s told us is the truth. She stopped talking, though, when things got serious. She shut down fast.”

“Is it possible that she thinks her mom did it?”

“I think it’s more likely that she realizes her mother suspects her and is trying to save her. Mom probably thought it was slick, but it gives us more leverage. This isn’t a girl—”

“She’s a woman,” Nancy said, manner mild. “She’s fifty.”

Why had he said girl? “But she seems young, doesn’t she? Younger and older than she should be.”

Nancy thought about this. It was another thing he liked about her, how she wasn’t a rat-a-tat, wisecrack person. He had never been good with those types.

“She takes care of others,” Nancy said. “Even more than an average mom would. I can see why she wanted to be a mother badly enough to do it so old. I’ve got two kids now and I can barely keep up with them and I’m only thirty-five. I had this aunt, whose father died when she was really young, eleven or so, and she had to become her mother’s mainstay. That was my mom’s word—poor Evie, she’s the ‘mainstay.’ If Rachel didn’t do this, she knows who did, or thinks she knows. She’s still in protection mode. She knows something and she’s desperate not to tell us.”