After I'm Gone

by Laura Lippman

  “You don’t have an older sister.” A beat. “Oh. Wow. I’m sorry. Did he mean—that one?”

  “I think so. I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, that was for sure.”

  The man from the valet line, the one who had been with Michelle, came into the bar, waved at the younger members of the wedding party, and asked the bartender for a beer. But he didn’t go over to his friends, not right away, just sat at the bar, shoulders slumped, a picture of dejection and rejection.

  “Don’t let my sister get to you,” Linda said, leaning across Henry. She could imagine Noah being hurt by a girl like Michelle. Just thinking about it made her angry. “She’s a diva.”

  “She shouldn’t be driving. She had a lot to drink.”

  “No, she probably shouldn’t, but it’s a straight shot down Boston Street, more or less, and she’ll never get above twenty-five miles an hour.”

  “I live thirty minutes from here and I got a room for the night. They have a rate.”

  It occurred to Linda that she and Henry should have gotten a room, made a little getaway out of it. Why didn’t she ever think of such things? Maybe she could start.

  “She’ll be fine. She always is, Michelle.”

  “Look, you’re her sister—should I call her? Or is she seeing somebody?”

  “Call her,” Henry said, even as Linda said: “I think she’s seeing someone.”

  “She gave me her card.” He pulled it out. Sinergie. Linda still cringed at the name and was still unsure what the company was supposed to do. Something to do with nightlife?

  “Well, if you’re going to call her on her work number, do it quickly,” Linda said, feeling a little loose, not so much from alcohol but just from the unfamiliar sensation of being unfettered, at no one’s beck and call, although she was technically always reachable on her BlackBerry.

  “Because she’ll forget me?” the man asked.

  “Because Sinergie is going down the tubes.” And, yes, because she’ll forget you. She’s already forgotten you. You could carry Michelle out of a burning building and she wouldn’t remember you.

  He tapped the card on the bar, lost in thought, then went back to his friends, looking a little more resolute and confident. She assumed he was going to call Michelle next week and get shot down.

  March 25, 2012

  Sandy didn’t work for a couple of days, not on the file. Again, he couldn’t fool himself about his own motivations. He was avoiding an unpleasant task, trying to talk to Bert Gelman, by throwing himself into another unpleasant task, cleaning out the house in Remington and preparing it for a new set of tenants.

  Not that Bert would be rude or unkind to Sandy. He just wasn’t going to tell Sandy anything. One thing to let your wife share some old gossip, quite another to implicate yourself as an accessory to a fugitive’s flight. Sandy was stuck. He couldn’t figure out where to go next. So he cleaned.

  The old Remington rowhouse was in crap shape, trashed. Again. No matter how carefully Sandy chose his tenants, they all went out the same way, as if they had done some sort of cost-benefits analysis and decided that they’d rather forgo the deposit than, say, clean out the vegetable crisper, which was always full of soggy surprises. This batch had had a cat, too, although that wasn’t allowed under the terms of the lease. Sandy was going to have to flea-bomb and replace the carpet in the finished basement.

  Over the years, Sandy had done everything he could to make Nabby’s house bright—painted all the walls eggshell, installed a transom above the front door, switched out the curtains for neutral bamboo blinds chosen by Mary—but it was hard to pull light into a north-facing row house. He was struck anew by the darkness every time he crossed the threshold. Didn’t help that the latest tenants had removed all the lightbulbs, even the ones in the overhead fixtures.

  But the house was also dark in his memory of his arrival there, a starless December night when he couldn’t quite see the woman who inspected him and said, “Oh—I was expecting someone younger.”

  “Abuelita?” he asked. Little grandmother? He thought he had been going to a relative, at least a distant one.

  “No,” she said. “No abuela.” Then shouting, as if he were deaf. “NO ABUELA. NO ABUELA. NO ABUELITA FOR YOU.”

  And that was how Hortensia Saldana became Nabby.

  Sandy had come to her through a program known as Operation PedroPan. Cuba had fallen, but the Catholic Welfare Bureau persuaded the government to allow kids to enter the United States and stay in foster homes until their parents could join them. At first, almost everyone went to Florida, but eventually other cities offered homes as well. Sandy was one of the last ones placed, convinced by his parents that it would make it easier for them to follow if they had a son in the States.

  Hortensia Saldana had no use for Cubanos, but she liked the idea of being paid to care for one. She was a social worker, although years later, when Mary got to know her, she would describe her as the least-socialized social worker she had ever known. The day they came to tell him his parents were dead, killed in a car accident, an improbable catastrophe—they had a car, but seldom the gas to drive it—Nabby had just looked at him blankly, like a bureaucrat refusing to do a job above her pay grade. She wasn’t paid to offer him comfort. She received a check to feed him and clothe him. And they both knew there was no way she was going to adopt him, this teenage boy who wasted hot water and left the milk on the counter sometimes. But he could stay on until he was eighteen, she said, as long as he made himself useful—and as long as the checks kept coming.

  Sandy stole his first car a week after he received news that his parents had died. He didn’t actually know how to drive, but he taught himself, on the fly. He wasn’t sure what he planned to do with the car, once he got it going. It wasn’t like he could drive back to Cuba, and there was no one there for him, anyway. He was already beginning to lose his Spanish from lack of use. (The relief agency had assumed Hortensia Saldana spoke Spanish, but she didn’t know a word. Her Puerto Rican father had abandoned her mother, an African American, when she was a baby. She thought Spanish the language of demons and bad men.)

  The cops pulled Sandy over five minutes after he got behind the wheel of his first stolen car. He was going fifteen miles an hour on University Parkway. A motivated young public defender told his whole story—how, Sandy was never sure, as he didn’t share it—and he was given a second chance. Hortensia Saldana was furious. She told him if he did such a thing again, he would be out of her house forever.

  He stole another car the next day. To his disappointment, he drove for hours and no one pulled him over. Finally, he left the car on the side of the road, its tank empty.

  He was content to do that for a while—take cars, drive them until empty, abandon them. Of course, as soon as he no longer wanted to get caught, he was. They sent him to “training school,” and, against all the odds, it worked. He got a high school education, found a friend and mentor in one of the teachers. He left and found a part-time job, a little apartment, his first and only girl, Mary. His juvie record sealed, he was accepted into the police academy. Hortensia Saldana, now frail and needy, reached out to him. He wasn’t fooled. He told Mary: “She’s mended her fences with me so I can mend everything else in that old house.” But when she died, she left it to him and he maintained it as a rental. Then he mortgaged it for the restaurant and—well, that was that. Remington was coming back. That was kind of a mantra among those who owned the houses: The area is coming back! He would sell it as soon as he was no longer underwater. But selling required more work than maintaining it for tenants, so he kept renting it.

  It took him the better part of three days to ready the place, and when he sorted old mail that had accumulated there, he found a four-week-old letter from the city, claiming he was at risk of a lien because he hadn’t paid the property taxes. He knew he had paid online last August, but he wasn’t going to trust a
computer to screw it up again. He headed down to the courthouse, as familiar as his home, assuming it would take all afternoon to straighten it out.

  But the glitch was apparently systemwide and the weary-but-kind clerk immediately credited his account. With time left on his parking meter, he decided to stop for lunch, ending up at Subway, which made him sad. There used to be so many good lunch places near the courthouse, old-fashioned diners. Werner’s. The Honeybee. Now it was mainly chains and a few really dingy places. His heart sank at the sight of the menu board—no knock on the sandwiches, which were fine, but this was not how people should eat. Assembly lines were for things made out of metal and plastic, not sandwiches. Why wasn’t there a place in Baltimore to buy a simple, classic Cubano?

  There had been. It was a restaurant on the Avenue and it had failed miserably because of its dumb-as-shit owner, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez.

  Then he saw Bert Gelman in the corner, eating alone. Hello, Smalltimore. But Bert was a lawyer and, as Sandy had just been reminded, there were only a handful of places to eat near the courthouse.

  “Hey, Bert. Sandy Sanchez.” He offered his hand, then had an inspiration. “I appreciate you letting me talk to your wife the other day.”

  Bert looked up with a ready impersonal smile. Guy had thick hair, broad shoulders—he had to work out to have that physique into his sixties. He was practiced at guarding his emotions. But Sandy had surprised him, he could tell.

  “Ah, well, wives. They do what they want to do, one way or another. She didn’t even tell me what it was about.”

  Uh-huh. She didn’t tell you at all.

  “We’re looking at Julie Saxony. As a cold case.”

  “Making any headway?”

  “Some. You know what they say. If the original detectives did their job right, the name’s in the file. I tried to go counterintuitive on it, find a way it didn’t lead back to Felix Brewer. But you know what? It did. Circled all the way back to a horse trailer and two sisters, driving the guy to some private airfield out of state.”

  “Interesting.”

  Sandy’s only advantage was to charge ahead with what he knew, try to catch Bert without a story prepared. “Even more interesting is that Andrea Norr says you knew. You and Tubby. Knew Felix was going and when. Helped him get his affairs in order. Even got Julie a passport.”

  In a case like this, you hope that the fucker starts talking right away. But Bert was a criminal attorney. He didn’t speak for a second or two, and Sandy knew he had lost this round.

  “Now, Sandy, you know I’m not going to talk about Felix. He was my client and he remains my client to this day, with all the privileges. But I will tell you this much—the sister’s wrong about the passport. I have no idea what she’s referring to.”

  “You could have forgotten. She said you did it as a nice deed, that you knew Felix wasn’t going to take her, but you didn’t want to be the person to tell her that.”

  Bert shook his head. “Come on, Sandy. We’re not talking about this. I’m sorry, I can’t. Even if I could, I don’t think it would help you find the person who killed Julie. I’ve never believed there was a connection to Felix.”

  “Your wife does, I think.”

  “My wife is Bambi Brewer’s best friend. I think that Lorraine would like there to be—a point, if you will, to Bambi’s suffering. Unfortunately, the only point to the story is that Felix was a selfish prick who didn’t care about anyone.”

  “I thought you were friends.”

  “We were—until the day he left. It was a rotten thing to do. To Bambi, to their daughters. And, yes, to Tubby and me. You know how much time he would have done, in reality? Five, seven tops. Couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. He was that cowardly, that weak. I’ve never talked about it, though. No reason to have tension between the two families. Bambi needs Lorraine. Less obviously, Lorraine needs Bambi.”

  “Julie’s sister told me something about a suitcase. That Julie took money meant for Bambi instead of giving it to someone, probably you. That would explain a lot.”

  “I can’t speak to that,” Bert said. “I don’t have any knowledge of that. Again, I don’t have any knowledge about how Felix left. But my opinion? My thoughts based on a hypothetical situation about which I have no knowledge? It explains nothing even if it’s true.”

  “People hold grudges.”

  “Are you suggesting that Bambi Brewer decided, ten years after the fact, that she wanted to kill Julie Saxony because of some rumor about a suitcase?”

  “Not a rumor. The sister told me.”

  “The sister says now. Not then, right? No reference to it in the file, I’m betting. No, you open the case again, sister finally admits that she played a role in Felix’s disappearance, which is a federal crime, and—oh, look, shiny object, Detective. Go follow it. You’re smarter than that, Sandy.”

  “Am I?” He wasn’t being self-deprecating. It was his way of saying: And how would you know? “One of the Brewer girls confronted Julie a week before she disappeared. Meanwhile, the sister said Julie was obsessed with Bambi, used to go around saying she thought that Bambi had Felix killed.”

  “So what?”

  “So I think maybe it’s time I talk to her. Bambi Brewer, her daughters. Maybe revisit what everyone was doing around that time.”

  “Not without me in the room, Detective.”

  “Are you their lawyer?”

  “I will be before you get back to your car.”

  Sandy consulted the old ADC map he kept in his car—he preferred the big paper maps, which provided more context than those little Google squares, whether on phones or computers—and drove out to the home of Bambi and Felix Brewer. It was in an older section of Pikesville, probably very grand in its day. He bet, if Felix had stayed, they would have moved farther out, to something bigger, like the Gelman house in Garrison Forest. But it looked good in its own way. Sandy preferred the houses built in the 1950s and 1960s to the new monstrosities.

  He wasn’t aware how long he just sat there looking at the house, but it was long enough for a woman to come down the walk, arms wrapped around her body to protect from the cool day. The woman was thin, in her thirties, and plain. One of the daughters? A maid?

  “May I help you?” she said.

  He held up his ID. “Lady of the house in?”

  “I am the lady of the house.”

  “You’re Bambi Brewer?”

  “No, my husband and I bought this place from her six years ago. I think she moved to a condo downtown.”

  Feeling sheepish, Sandy tried to pinpoint his mistake. He had just assumed Bambi hadn’t moved after all this time.

  “She’s a nice lady,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t want anything else bad to happen to her.”

  “Anything else? You mean, besides her husband leaving?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  It was enough. Leaving, leaving you broke. Leaving you, leaving you broke, and doing little to conceal to the world at large that he had another woman. A woman who might have taken your money. It was all enough to make a woman very angry, to send an emissary to ask for her money back.

  And a week after that confrontation, Julie drove off on some mystery errand to Saks Fifth Avenue, passport in her purse, and never came back. Passport in her purse. Expired even then. But only by two days. There are places you can go without a passport, or were able to go at the time. Mexico. Canada.

  Sandy tried to never lose sight of the fact that we tend to order things according to the reality we know, as we discover it. All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings. A woman disappeared, presumed murdered as she hadn’t made the kind of arrangements one would expect of someone who planned to flee. A woman was found, murdered. Her passport was expired. And she was dead, so it wasn’t about her leaving because there was no indication that she was going anywher
e.

  Except maybe she was.

  Saks, which didn’t even exist anymore, would have been no more than ten miles from here. The grocery store where Julie’s car was found, weeks later? Sandy propped his map book on the steering wheel. He ripped out two pages so he could see them relative to each other. Here was another triangle, a physical one. What if Felix Brewer had sent for Julie Saxony after all, telling her to leave no trail, persuading her that he would be safe only if she left everything behind? And what if Julie Saxony had stopped here, incapable of resisting the urge to tell Bambi Brewer: Guess which one of us he chose.

  He was going to need a warrant. A warrant and some luck. But, no, it wouldn’t be luck. It was never luck, no matter what anyone thought. It all went back to the things that Julie Saxony had in her purse that day, those ordinary items that had been dutifully cataloged but never considered.

  He was going to need two warrants.

  May 15, 2006

  Rachel made it exactly five minutes into the party before she said something rude to Michelle. “I can’t believe you’re having a shower.” She didn’t mean to. She had resolved not to mention the shower issue at all. The words were like toads, hopping out of her mouth in spite of her. She was like someone under a curse; she couldn’t stop saying the wrong thing.

  Worse, Michelle didn’t seem to realize how hateful Rachel was being. “I know we can afford whatever we need,” she said. “But Hamish’s friends wanted to do something for us.”

  “Oh, no—that wasn’t what I mean. I mean—just the tradition, you know? The evil eye. Which is nonsense, of course, but Linda observed it and I guess I just assumed we—you—would as well.”

  Once you’ve said something cruel, why waste it? Might as well make sure that Michelle knows how awful I can be.

  Michelle only laughed. Thirty-three years old and thirty-six weeks pregnant, she was more beautiful than ever. Rachel wanted to chalk it up to her sister eating real food for the first time in her adult life, but, no, this was something else, something beyond the clichéd glow of pregnancy. It was as if love, true love, had drained Michelle of all her petulant grudges.