March 26, 2012
2:30 P.M.
Bambi had known she was fibbing when she told the girls she didn’t expect to be away long, but even she was surprised to be sitting, three hours later, in an interview room at the downtown police headquarters, having yet to speak to a detective. The man who appeared to be in charge—such sad green eyes—had greeted them and said he was waiting for another detective before he could proceed.
“They’re bringing someone in from the county because they think the case will end up there,” Bert told Bambi. “Only it won’t, because there is no case.”
“How many years do you think I’ll get, Bert? If I confess and enter a plea?” She could do five, she thought, maybe even ten. Would they actually give a seventy-two-year-old woman more than ten? Especially if she claimed she was provoked, did it in—what was the phrase?—the heat of passion. Say she served ten—the number stuck in her head because Felix would have done no more than ten, probably less. She would be out at eighty-two and, based on her mother and aunt’s longevity, she could expect another decade, maybe more. Crummy for the younger grandkids, humiliating for the older ones, but it might not be too bad. She could be like the woman who killed the Scarsdale Diet doctor, devote herself to good works while inside.
“Stop it, Bambi. You are not going to confess, you are not going to enter a plea. You are going to sit here and let me talk while they do whatever stupid dance they’re going to do.”
“Bert, I want to talk.” Could she order him to leave? If she told him everything, would he be obligated to do as she wished? Probably not. She had been impulsive, back at the hospital, but she had no regrets. After thirty-six years of limbo, it felt good to do something, anything.
“Bambi, I know you couldn’t have done this.”
“Bert, with all due respect, there’s a lot you don’t know. I appreciate your kindness, but—it’s time. It’s time to put things to rest.”
The door opened.
“Aw shit,” Bert muttered.
“What?” Bambi realized there was a young woman behind Sad Green Eyes. Well, youngish, plump and blond, with a big sunny smile.
“Nancy Porter,” Bert whispered to her. “I’ve seen her work before. She’s very good.”
“They don’t need someone good when all you want to do is confess,” Bambi whispered back.
She hadn’t considered the possibility of a woman detective, though, and it set her back. She had been counting on a man. Someone like Sad Green Eyes there. She could wrap him around her finger forty times and have enough left over to make curtains as Felix used to say. Two men would have been even better. She would have played them off each other. But not a man and a woman, and definitely not this cheerleader shiksa.
“Hello, Mrs. Brewer,” the girl said, as if greeting her homeroom teacher on the first day of school. “We really appreciate you coming in today to discuss Julie Saxony with us. There are just a few things we’d like to go over, a few new facts that have come to light, especially since you granted us permission to search your apartment yesterday—”
“You what?” Bert asked. “You let them in with a warrant and you didn’t even call me?”
“I didn’t see the harm,” Bambi said. She hadn’t. She still didn’t. The shoebox they had carried away might contain evidence of something else she had done, something not quite kosher. But it wasn’t enough to leverage a murder charge.
Unless the person were already inclined to confess. And she couldn’t see what other choice she had.
Back in the hospital, in the car on her way here, she had thought it would be so easy to say I did it. Yet she couldn’t, she didn’t. For one thing, she couldn’t help being curious about what the detectives thought they knew. She would hear them out, although not because Bert had told her to. Bert had his agenda, she had hers.
“On July third, Julie Saxony left Havre de Grace, telling her chef that she was going shopping. She was never seen alive again. Well, she might have crossed paths with a gas station attendant or gone through a fast-food drive-through. But the last person who saw her alive was probably her killer.”
Bambi couldn’t help herself. “In homicides, isn’t the killer always the last person to see the victim alive?”
The girl nodded and smiled, pleased with Bambi. Bert glowered. “Good point. So let me ask you, did you see Julie Saxony that day?”
“I did.” Bert grabbed her arm. She shook him off.
“Where?”
“She came to my home.”
“Invited?”
“No. I can assure you of that. No. She showed up, out of the blue.”
“And what happened?”
Bambi did not answer right away. “She told me that my husband had arranged for me to have access to a large sum of money after he left, but she had taken it.”
“And?”
Bert grabbed her arm again, hissed into her ear: “Bambi—a word, please. I need to speak to you privately because if you continue down this road, I am obligated to recuse myself. I cannot allow a client to lie.”
3:15 P.M.
Sandy and Nancy retreated to a lunchroom, where they shared coffee from a thermos that Sandy had brought. On a day like today, they would probably end up drinking the house swill, but they didn’t have to start with it.
“It’s high-octane, the real deal. I make my own at home. I always brought a thermos, all the years I worked here. I could never get used to the crap that machine makes. The other guys laughed at me, said I was prissy. They thought I was prissy about a lot of stuff and busted my balls for it. But once they had my coffee, they would wheedle me for some. By the time I retired, I was carrying the biggest thermos they made.”
She widened her eyes. “Wow—it is strong. I’m a wimp. I hope you won’t be insulted if I cut it with a little Sweet’N Low.”
“Not at all.”
He wasn’t because he liked her. So far. Nancy Porter had been recommended to him by Harold Lenhardt, who had done his twenty in Baltimore City, then bounced to the county and was halfway to his twenty there. Lenhardt was a good police and he swore by this girl, the daughter and granddaughter of big Polish cops, one of the few youngsters who used the old vernacular, a police.
The mere fact that she was willing to help was a big point in her favor: Most detectives would be reluctant to take on a twenty-six-year-old homicide that wasn’t their case to begin with. More risk than upside. But Nancy was intrigued by what yesterday’s warrants had produced. Not quite the smoking gun—smoking earring—he had hoped for, but as good as. As good as.
“You’re lucky she did consignment shops, all nice and legal, as opposed to pawn shops. Probably wouldn’t be that much detail on a pawn slip from 1986,” Nancy said now. She was struggling with the coffee, he could tell. But she had manners, unlike so many young people today.
“Yeah, and lucky that the match didn’t disappear from the evidence room all those years ago. As the slip proves, it was worth quite a bit.”
“Probably worth more than she got for it. Jewelry stores, when they buy back diamonds—it’s a total rip-off. I had a girlfriend, had a nice ring from that store in Towson, over by Joppa? She and her husband busted up, they paid her, like, twenty cents on the dollar for the same ring, all the time saying: ‘You know, we like to say, it’s not the ring’s fault.’ I did some research on that earring online. David Webb was a big deal, back in the day.”
Sandy thought suddenly of Mary’s jewelry. Not that it was of significant value, not at all. But he had kept her engagement ring and wedding ring, her other good pieces, in part because he could not imagine anything sadder than trying to sell them. Although maybe having no one to give them to was the real sadness.
“Well, the store she went to, back in ’86, down on Baltimore Street—it’s gone. But the bill of sale matches to a T. One diamond-and-platinum earring was found in Julie Saxony’s purse. We looked past that, all these years.” He thought he was being generous with the “we.” He hadn’t looked past it. “You see an earring in a purse, you think, ‘Oh, she lost an earring, put the mate in her bag, and forgot about it.’ But where are the earrings she was wearing that day? That’s the part that was overlooked.”
“Killer could have taken the earrings.” But Nancy was just being fair, excusing the work of the previous detectives.
“Could’ve. But one was in her purse—and the other one was sold a week later.”
“Do you think she killed her there, at the house?”
“I can’t make up my mind on that. Twenty-five years out—it was a lot, hoping to find a casing, anything like that. I almost wish we hadn’t searched the house because Gelman will pretend that proves definitively it didn’t happen there. And maybe it didn’t. I can see it going down lots of ways. I can see her getting angry, taking a swing—that would have knocked the earring loose, maybe, and she finds it later. But you know what? I can also imagine her hiring someone to take Julie out. And maybe they brought the earring back to her as a trophy or, you know, proof.” He was thinking of Tubman again. “She might have asked her husband’s old friend, the bail bondsman, if he knew some guys who were available for hire. See, I kept thinking he was mooning over Julie, all these years. But maybe he was just guilt-ridden because he helped to kill her. She leaves Bambi’s house, some guy follows her—if she’s really lying, as her lawyer says, it might be to cover for Tubman.”
3:20 P.M.
“Bambi, I’m sure you have a reason for doing this, but you have to understand that I could be disbarred if I permit you to lie.”
“I’m not lying.” A beat. “Besides, how can you know that? You can’t know I’m lying.”
“We were all in Bethany that week—you drove over to spend time with Lorraine and me, at the beach house.”
“Not until the evening. I had all day to myself.”
“But you came over on the evening of the second, not the third.”
Hell, was that possible?
“I’m pretty sure I drove over on the morning of the third.”
“No. No. We had a party on the second. It was Lorraine’s birthday. It was her forty-first. Remember? She refused to have a party for her fortieth, so we had a surprise party for her at the beach, on the second, which was two weeks late—but what could be more surprising than that. We were all there. You, Michelle, even Linda and Henry made it, although Noah was a newborn. You went home on the fourth, after dropping Michelle at a friend’s place in Rehoboth. You said you wanted to be alone.”
“Your memory’s playing tricks on you. I wasn’t there.”
“We have photos. I’m almost sure. Jesus, Bambi, I don’t know why you’re lying about this, but you have to stop. You have a perfect alibi, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say to many of my clients over the years. Just say nothing, okay?”
She felt at once deflated and relieved. She had been relishing the idea of confession, accepting guilt, serving the sentence that Felix had failed to serve, showing him how it was done.
“Okay, I won’t lie, Bert. But I want to hear what they have to say. They know something, something new. I need to know it, too, Bert. Don’t ask why.”
She had known Bert for so long—Lord, more than fifty years now. They had long ago reached a point where she didn’t treat him as she treated most men. He was Felix’s friend, Lorraine’s husband. But he was her friend as well, her only true male friend. So she didn’t widen her eyes, or smile her little half smile, or do anything flirtatious. She simply held his gaze until he nodded.
“Follow my lead,” he said. “Please don’t lie.”
“I’ll try not to,” she said, thinking, No lies that Bert can catch. That’s the new rule. It’s only a lie when someone knows it’s false.
4:00 P.M.
They brought the shoebox with them on the next trip into the interview room. Brown-and-white-striped Henri Bendel’s. Size 7 and a half.
“Fancy,” Nancy had said when she saw it. “And look at the price—two hundred and fifty dollars. That was a lot of money for shoes in 1986.”
“Isn’t that a lot of money now?” Sandy asked, knowing he was making a joke. He had priced Belgian loafers recently and discovered they were over $400. He’d just have to keep taking care of the old ones.
The key receipt was bagged, separated from the others. They wouldn’t let her see that right away. First, they were going to talk about the box itself. Sandy would have to take the lead because he had been the one who accompanied the officers with the warrant. He had taken the box with him because he figured that no one moved that kind of stuff from a house to a condo unless it was deeply meaningful. The receipts were old—some went back to the early 1980s, and they continued through the year 2000. But one receipt stood out. All the other stuff that had been sold had been complete, unbroken—and not particularly valuable. And this slip was for a different store from the rest, a not-quite-as-nice jewelry store downtown. The receipt had stood out like, well, a diamond in a dustbin.
“We’re curious about these receipts. You sold a lot of stuff over fifteen years. Was it yours?”
“I sold those things at my aunt Harriet’s request. She died in September 2001, right after 9/11.”
Right after 9/11. Was that gratuitous detail supposed to import some gravitas?
“Yes, but all these things were sold before that date.”
“You see, she was in a retirement home for almost the last twenty years of her life. Things were tighter for her than people realized, and I was her favorite niece.” A wry smile. “Also her only niece. I was supposed to be her sole heir, so what did it matter if I sold the things before she died. I would sell things for her, and we would split the proceeds.”
“Fifty-fifty?”
“Oh, no. Aunt Harriet wasn’t that generous. I brought her the money and she decided, based on some internal formula I never understood, how to divvy things up. I sometimes got as little as ten percent, sometimes as much as thirty, but never more than that.”
“And you used this place”—he squinted at the slip, as if reading the printed name for the first time, but he knew it by heart—“the Turnover Shop.”
“Yes. They were great to work with.”
“And you went there every time?”
“I went to several places, but that was my favorite.”
“Like jewelry. Did you sell any jewelry?”
“Some.”
“But did you sell it to them?”
“No, I went to a Pikesville jeweler for that. Weinstein’s. I knew the owner back in high school.”
“Yeah, Weinstein’s. We saw those receipts, too. But we found one receipt, and it wasn’t from there.”
“Well, sometimes a piece isn’t right for a certain retailer. They don’t anticipate demand for an item. That’s how consignment works. As you see from the slips, I sold a lot of clothes, too, over the years, but I went down to D.C. for that. People in D.C. are better about the value of clothes. And the clothes were mine, not Aunt Harriet’s.”
“But for jewelry you went to Weinstein’s. Except this once, when you went down to Baltimore Street. Why didn’t Weinstein’s want this piece?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Was it because it was just one earring, one without a mate?”
“Could be.”
Bert was looking at her, trying to get her to meet his eyes. She couldn’t. Her heart was rising like a skyrocket, up, up, up. She saw herself on her hands and knees, dusting. Cleanliness had been Bambi’s only weapon against the house’s encroaching seediness. Down on all fours, trying to get a dust mop under that long buffet in the living room. It was a beautiful piece. She should have sold it. French, antique, worth a lot. But Felix had loved it so. He was never happier than on a holiday when that buffet was piled high with food. Above it was a family portrait, commissioned pre-Michelle, which always irked her petulant youngest. Once, when Michelle was four, she attempted to add herself to it. Luckily, Bambi had caught her before she had a chance to touch a single crayon to the oil paint.
So there Bambi was, on her hands and knees on a wretchedly hot July morning, air-conditioning off because she had learned to pinch pennies until they bled copper, and there it was, winking at her, the beautiful diamond in the distinctive David Webb setting, her tenth anniversary gift from Felix.
Her first thought was: I didn’t even realize I had lost one of these.
Her second thought was: I didn’t. I wore them just last week at Lorraine’s party.
Third thought: Did Felix buy all his women the same earrings? Now that she had it in her palm, she saw that it was slightly smaller than the ones she wore, but otherwise an exact copy.
Fourth thought: Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.
And now, twenty-six years later, she felt again everything she had felt then. Surprise, correction, muted fury, fear. No, something worse than fear, something primal and huge.
Bambi looked at the detective, the male detective, in the eye: “I killed Julie Saxony. She came to my house on July fourth, and I killed her. Not July third, July fourth. And, no, I don’t know where she was during the intervening twenty-four hours.”
5:00 P.M.
“Mama?”
The word still had the power to shock Rachel. It seemed to surprise Tatiana, too. Even now, eight months after she had joined them, there was a testing quality to it. The question mark at the end seemed to encompass a dozen questions: Are you there? Still? Will you be there tomorrow? Are you really my mother? Is this really my life?
Rachel put her hand in her daughter’s and said: “Yes, I’m here, Tatala.” Rachel had called her daughter Tatiana, a choice that surprised everyone, because she wanted to use the endearment Tatala without confusing a little girl who was already on her second name, possibly her third. True, “tataeleh” was meant for boys, but Rachel had always liked the sound of it. She had justified “Tatiana” to Joshua by saying she had found a similar name in one of the Chinese dynasties. She didn’t tell him it was the name of a consort.
Tatiana’s Hebrew name was Mazal—the equivalent of Felicia. Bambi had raised one careful eyebrow at this, but said nothing. But, yes, Rachel believed her father was dead. She couldn’t explain why. It was a feeling that had come over her the day that Tatiana was placed in her arms. Felix was gone, his energy was no longer a part of this world, but there was someone new to fill that void.
Only now she was in danger of losing her mother. What was her mother saying to detectives? Why was she doing this? It was crazy, it wouldn’t stand. Rachel had to assume that Bambi’s “confession” would be seen through quickly enough, then the matter would be over. But what if she managed to persuade detectives of this monstrous lie? How much would Rachel have to tell? Did they know that she had gone to see Julie?
It had been such an emotional time. She had left Marc and promptly lost her job, as she had prophesied. No job for the girl who was divorcing the only male Singer. Marc wanted to reconcile, but he continued to lie about his infidelity, deny anything had happened. How could she return to him as long as he was lying? She was living at home with her mother and Michelle, feeling like such a loser. It was in this state that she first read the article about Julie Saxony’s “second act” as an innkeeper and soon-to-be restaurateur. The article ran in the Star, an afternoon paper that was a little more down-market, and it included a photo of Julie in her glory. “Saxony at the height of her fame as a Block dancer, in 1975, where she performed under the stage name Juliet Romeo. A year later, her boyfriend, Felix Brewer, would disappear, leaving her only the deed to a small coffee shop on Baltimore Street. Saxony used that opportunity to learn the hospitality business.”
So much to hate in just a few words. “Her boyfriend”—no mention, not in the caption, of the wife and three children he also left. “Only the deed to a small coffee shop.” That was more than he had left his family. “The height of her fame.” What was she famous for? Dancing in pasties and a G-string? Sleeping with her boss?
The more Rachel thought about it, the more it made sense: Julie had their money, just as Mother had always said. Even if all she had received was the coffee shop—that should have been theirs. Commercial real estate downtown wasn’t exactly moving in 1976, but by 1980, with the opening of Harborplace, the land might have been worth something. Julie had sold it for a profit she “preferred not to disclose.” How lazy of the reporter not to find it out, Rachel thought, reading the article in dull fury.
And next thing she knew, she was driving to Havre de Grace.
Julie Saxony led her into a breakfast room, empty at this time of the day, although Rachel could hear someone banging about nearby, possibly in a laundry room of sorts. A dryer was humming, whump-whump-whump. Whump-whump-whump.
“You know who I am,” she said. Flat, not sinister, but also not a question.
“Yes,” Julie Saxony said. She sat in a dining-room chair, but she didn’t invite Rachel to sit. Her posture was impeccable, her hands folded in her lap. Oh, aren’t you the lady, Rachel wanted to sneer. In some part of her mind, she realized she was having the fight with Julie that she couldn’t have with Marc, much less his piece on the side. But that was okay, she reasoned. Being angry would help her get what she needed.
“Why were you at my sister’s bat mitzvah?” It wasn’t where she had planned to begin. She realized she had no plan, not really.
“I told you—I was observing the caterer. I hired him. He’s going to be the chef here. He’s already trying out menus and we hope to open this fall.”
“So it was just a coincidence.” Julie Saxony said nothing. “I didn’t think so. Did you spy on us a lot?”
She thought of her own mother, taking the older girls by Horizon House, pointing out Julie’s apartment. But that was just once. That didn’t count as spying.
“Did you?” she repeated. Her words had real authority to her ears. She felt dangerous, and it was thrilling.
“Certainly, I was interested in Felix’s family.”
“Don’t say his name.”
“I think,” Julie said, “this is going to be a difficult conversation if I’m not allowed to say his name.” A pause. “More difficult, I guess I should say.”
“You stole my family’s money. My mother told me.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s a lie. If your mother couldn’t live on what was provided, then that’s probably because she wasn’t willing to economize.”
“Economize? Economize? You try to economize with three daughters in private school, with college tuitions and a house that’s falling apart at the seams. You try to find a job when you dropped out of college at eighteen and became a mother by age twenty.”
“I didn’t even finish high school,” Julie said.
“Yes, but you had an advantage my mother doesn’t have. You were willing to sleep with another woman’s husband.”
Her words hurt, she was sure of it, although Julie’s composure did not crack. She said only: “I loved your father very much.”
“Then you should honor the woman my father loved and give her the money that is rightfully hers.”
“There is no money. What I had, I invested, and it was mine. I’m sorry, but that’s true.”
“My mother’s about to lose her house. She’ll be humiliated. Don’t you get it? She’s not just an ordinary citizen who can be foreclosed on in private. The house will go to auction when her balloon note comes due and the papers will write about it and it will all be dredged up again, just like the stupid article about you dredged it all up. My father loved my mother, above anyone. I don’t care what he told you or promised you. He loved my mother. You weren’t the first, you know. You wouldn’t have been the last.”
Julie licked her lips. “I don’t have any money. I just don’t have it. Not that I would give it to you if I did. I’m sorry if your mother has been improvident—”
“Such big words from the stripper,” Rachel said. Who was this person? Who had she become? It was horrible. It was strangely delightful, too, like playing a villain in a play. She was channeling the fury she felt for Marc, for every woman who had been cheated on.
“I’m sorry if your mother has been improvident.” That word again. “I really am. But it’s not my fault. What’s mine is mine.”
“If only you had been so clear about ownership when you started sleeping with my father. He loved her, Miss Saxony. Her and his daughters. Not you, never you.”
She sensed this was her best weapon, the only way to hurt Julie Saxony. And if Julie Saxony wasn’t going to help her, then Rachel wanted to hurt her. Men couldn’t cheat without women’s cooperation. Sure, there were men who lied, who misled their partners into unwitting adultery. But not her father. And not Marc. Believe someone the first time they tell you who they are. Marc had been a player in high school. He had been famous, Rachel remembered in wretched hindsight, for breaking up with girls by starting new relationships, then waiting for his ex to confront him. Everyone knew what he did, and every girl assumed it would be different for her.
The difference now was that Marc wouldn’t admit his behavior. He called her every night, asking her to come back, but he wouldn’t confess to his indiscretions, Rachel realized now, because they were going to continue. Just more discreetly. Marc loved her, but he had no intention of changing. Instead, he said: Have a baby. Please have my baby. If we have a baby, everything will be okay. The thing was, he thought he was speaking theoretically, about a baby that did not yet exist.
“Rachel—”
“Don’t say my name.”
There was a spike of fury in Julie’s words now. “Don’t say your father’s name, don’t say your name—why are you so proprietary about names? What’s the big deal? Brewer probably wasn’t even your father’s family’s real name, back in Russia or wherever they came from. I’ll tell you this much—if your father had stayed, if he hadn’t been forced to leave, I’d have his name by now. He loved me. He wanted me.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Rachel said. “Tell yourself whatever lies you need to tell to get through.” She had an inspiration. “He knows you stole from us. He couldn’t do anything about it, where he is, but he knows. He never loved you, not really, and now he hates you. You destroyed the thing he loved most of all, his family.”
Finally, she had gotten a rise out of the woman. She was quite livid, almost in shock.
“He—he talks to her? To this day?”
“To this day.”
She left Julie’s inn with that feeble, hollow victory. The situation hadn’t changed, despite her triumph over Julie. Her mother needed money, now, or she was going to lose the house. And Rachel knew what she would have to do to get it. It took a little longer than she anticipated, almost a week, but when her mother returned from the beach, Rachel was able to present her with the money she needed.
“Where did you get this?” her mother demanded.
“Let’s just say that Julie Saxony made good on her debts,” Rachel said. It felt like a safe lie at the time. But Rachel was an inexperienced liar and did not know all the ways even a safe lie can go wrong. Maybe she should have asked Marc for some pointers as part of their settlement, a settlement brokered by her mother-in-law, who was very happy to void the prenup if it meant Rachel would grant the get that Mrs. Singer desired, then go away forever—and take the stain of the Brewer name with her.
5:30 P.M.
The minute she said July 4, Bert had demanded another conference. Bambi granted his wish out of courtesy, but her mind was made up.
“Bambi, I may have to withdraw as your counsel,” Bert said, “if you insist on going forward with this.”
Was that all he had? “Then withdraw. I’m ready to tell this story, with or without you. You can’t say what happened on July fourth, can you, Bert? So you’ll just have to listen.”
A tape recorder was set up. Both detectives made eye contact in their individual ways. Nancy Porter was bright and focused, the kind of grade grubber who sat front and center back at Forest Park High School. The sad-faced one looked as if he knew every unfortunate thing that had ever happened to Bambi. Lugubrious, Bambi thought. That is the only word for how he looks. She decided to look at neither detective as she spoke, focusing on a point between their heads. They probably thought she was trying not to cry. Well, she was trying not to cry.
“She came to my home on July fourth. She brought me money, quite a bit. I needed it to pay a balloon note on a mortgage. You see, I was very foolish and these one-year ARMs, they were quite new then. I didn’t understand how it worked. I just knew that if I took out this mortgage, I would get a very large lump sum. Enough to pay for Michelle’s bat mitzvah, repairs to the house. So I took out this loan. I didn’t realize that I had to pay it back in a year, that I had to find the cash equivalent in the form of another mortgage, and I had—well, I had bad credit, I thought it just converted. I . . . I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so stupid. I owed on the mortgage, I had maxed out my credit cards. I needed money fast.”
“Jesus, Bambi,” Bert said. “You could have come to me.”
“But I was always coming to you. Always. There had been ten years of coming to you at that point. I tried my mom, my aunt Harriet—they couldn’t help me. But then I saw in the paper how that . . . that Julie Saxony was expanding her bed-and-breakfast into a proper inn with a restaurant, and I thought: She has money. She should give me the money I need. She came to my house that day to give me the money.”
Something changed, then, in the detectives’ faces. Sad-face scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to the girl. She had a poker face. Bambi couldn’t discern anything from it. But maybe it was just that she was a woman and Bambi had spent so much of her life trying to understand men and what they wanted. The two got up and went outside.
“Stop lying, Bambi,” Bert said in a low tone. “They know you’re lying.”
“I’m not lying, though. Julie Saxony did provide the money. That’s true. You could probably look up the bank records, see when I paid off the note. In cash.”
“She didn’t come to your house on the fourth. You’re saying that because you know you were at the beach until the night of the third. We were all at the beach.”
“Yes. We were all at the beach on the third. Agreed. But I met Julie on the fourth. On the tenth anniversary.”
“You didn’t. Why are you lying about this? What are you trying to prove?”
“Bert, you’re fired. Please leave.”
“I can’t—”
“You will. You are. Go.”
He looked lost, confused, two expressions that Bambi had seldom seen pass across Bert’s face. Of course he was confused. Because she was lying, but what else could she do? She had run the numbers. Something, someone, had to be sacrificed. It was as if another onerous financial commitment had come due again. But this time she was going to take care of it. What a fool she had been, how inept. She had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s. She had lived in denial for years about what things cost. Thrown away her father’s money on a semester at Bryn Mawr. Let Felix throw money around, too, and never asked the price of anything.
About two weeks before he had left, Felix had sat down with her and their checkbook. “Going forward,” he said, “you need to write down everything, keep the balance. Because—well, you’re just going to have to keep track. Because once I go away, the money, it will come in at a different rate. There will still be money, but it will be different, okay? You’ve got to learn to budget, Bambi. Can you do that?”
She could have. Only, after he left, there was no money coming in. Twenty thousand dollars. That was what had been in their joint checking account in July 1976. Twenty thousand dollars. It had been gone in less than a year.
Besides, at the time, she thought Felix meant prison when he said he was going away. It was not until the night before that she understood he was going somewhere else. She had been putting things away and discovered a pair of cuff links was missing from his drawer. Cuff links she knew well, for she had given them to him for their fifteenth anniversary. Yet there was Felix, in short sleeves—because it was, after all, July. He was packing, she realized. Squirreling things away, getting ready to go. She didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t want to know. And not because she feared the police and their questions. She could not bear to hear Felix tell her that he was a coward.
Bert left the interrogation room, his broad shoulders slumped. Lord, how she had leaned on him over the years. Lorraine had been kind about it. But then Lorraine pitied Bambi. In the early days, the pity had been a way for her to mitigate all the things she envied about Bambi, and that had been okay. She had pitied Bambi because Felix had other women, then pitied her because he was gone.
Bambi had forgiven Felix his indiscretions. They had been there from the first. The cowardice—that was different. Felix had slept with other women, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Perhaps the opposite. Sleeping with other women was the only wedge he had against his love for her. Sure, she knew that sounded like a rationalization, but some rationalizations were true. No, it was in his flight that Felix had betrayed her and their children.
The detectives returned.
“For the record—you are speaking to us without a lawyer at your own behest,” the girl intoned into the tape recorder.
“Yes, for the record I am.”
“Okay,” said the sad-eyed detective. “You contacted Julie Saxony—when? How?”
She looked at him long and hard. “I sent my daughter Rachel. On my behalf. She went to speak to her the week before. I’m not sure of the exact date.”
“You sent your daughter Rachel, she asked Julie for money, and a week later, Julie brings you money? On the Fourth of July?”
“Yes.”
“And how did she get the money? Banks would have been closed. And, as you must know, Julie Saxony’s financial life was pored over. There’s no record of any big cash transaction in the weeks before she disappeared.”
“I haven’t a clue. All I know is I got the money I needed.”
“We should probably speak to your daughter.”
“My daughter’s at the hospital.”
It was the first sign of genuine emotion in the female detective’s face. So she was a mother. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not major. Her child needs cleft palate surgery. She’s adopted, from China. It’s pretty common now. For the children to need this surgery. If you don’t agree to a special-needs child, it’s much harder to adopt from there.” She found her speech speeding up. She was chattering, as if she was nervous. Why was she nervous? She had already done the hardest part. “It didn’t used to be that way. Foreign adoption has changed so much. And Rachel and Joshua, because they live in the city—well, it seemed unlikely that they would get a child domestically, in the city, and they were over forty, which makes them too old for most U.S. adoptions, and then Guatemala closed and Vietnam had problems and—well, China was it.”
Nattering, nattering, nattering. Gathering her thoughts even as she appeared to be fraying. Maybe she shouldn’t have sent Bert away. What were her rights now? Did she get another phone call, could she demand a new lawyer? How could she get word to Rachel?
“Look, I said I did it. Can’t you just arrest me? The sooner you do that, the sooner I can get before a judge, see if bond can be arranged. My granddaughter had surgery today. I can’t possibly spend the night here.”
But in the end, that’s exactly what she did. They took her into custody and drove her out to Towson, locked her up in detention there and told her to be grateful for that. Granted a phone call, she swallowed her pride and called the Gelmans’ home, praying Lorraine would answer.
For the first time in a long time, a prayer was answered.
“Bambi—Bert told me what’s going on. He’s beside himself. What are you thinking? How can you turn your back on his help when he only wants what’s best for you? Why—”
“Lorraine, you have to get to Rachel. Tonight. I think I bought her some time, but the police will come for her tomorrow. Whatever happens, she has to insist she was not at my house on July third, or that she didn’t see anyone there.”
“I don’t—”
“Lorraine, she’s my daughter. She finally has the only thing she ever wanted, her own child. Her life is worth more than mine, in so many ways. I know that I can’t say such things to Bert. He can’t allow me to lie, which is why I’ve had to let him go. But you’re my friend and a mother, not a lawyer. You have to let me do this. Whatever Rachel did—she did it for me. Now I have to do this for her.”