“Never” was a big word, in Sandy’s experience. If love and hate were intertwined, so were never and forever.
The girl came back with a wooden board of cheese and fruit, a long loaf of French bread already sliced.
“Dig in,” the chef said. “It’s almost noon, no?” It was the second time he had allowed himself that Gallic inflection, but Sandy thought this guy was about as French as French’s mustard.
“No, thanks.” He noticed that the girl lingered, pretending to be busy in the immaculate dining room. Ears big as pitchers. Nabby’s expression, a mangling of what other people said about little pitchers and big ears.
“What kind of relationship did you have with Julie?”
“Very good. She was a great boss. And she gave me my start, got me out of the catering business.”
“Was the relationship strictly business?” Bayard’s girl was so fair that Sandy could see the tips of her ears flame red. Honey, this guy is in his fifties. Do you think he’s never been laid before?
“We were friends.”
“More than that?”
Bayard glanced at the young woman. Her back was still to them, but her posture was so rigid that it seemed as if she were literally holding her breath, waiting for the answer.
“I would have liked that. But she was past having lovers. A young woman, still in her thirties, and she claimed she was ‘done with all that.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers. “She needed me as a friend and I was that. I was-”
He stopped.
“Go on.”
“No place to go. I was her friend.”
“A friend with-hope?”
He laughed. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Although-not to be cruel-she wasn’t aging well. She dieted herself until her figure was very severe-anything to get rid of her curves, to hide her old self. She didn’t want people to see the dancer in her.”
“Dancer’s a nice way to say it.”
“Ah. Now see, that was the problem, no? People are so judgmental about strippers. She wasn’t a whore. I’m not saying that girls on the Block didn’t do tricks back then, but she didn’t. She was Felix Brewer’s girl within days of starting there.”
The details were awfully specific, Sandy thought, given she had never spoken of her old life to Bayard.
“She danced in a G-string and pasties. Girls today, they go to the beach in less clothing.” The chef’s eyes rested on his girl, now trying to create busywork over at the bus station, unfolding and folding napkins. He was bored with her, Sandy decided. He was a man who got bored quickly.
“Did she carry a torch for Felix?”
Something caught light in Bayard’s eyes, and he aimed his forefinger at Sandy’s nose. “Do you know you are the first person to ask me the question in that way?”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“No insult intended to your brothers in blue, but no one ever asked me what was in Julie’s heart. It was always-‘Was she in touch with him? Were there mysterious calls?’ They checked her phone bills, her bank accounts. I think they even pulled the records on the pay phone a few blocks away. They were very interested to know if there had been contact, if she had any knowledge of him. As far as I know, there wasn’t, she didn’t. But she was still in love with him.”
“How could you know that if she never talked about it?”
“I know women.”
A smug thing to say, something only an asshole would say. Didn’t make it untrue.
“That bug you? Her carrying a torch for this long-gone guy, while there you were, right under her nose?”
The name is always in the file. Always.
Bayard laughed. “I suppose you have to ask that. But I also have to assume that you have reviewed all the information and know that I spent July 3, 1986, prepping for what we expected to be a very big weekend. We were doing-not exactly a soft open, more of a test for friends. The restaurant was months from its official opening, we hadn’t even finished the renovation of the dining room. I was pretty much in full view of my staff from the moment she drove away. I asked her to go to a kitchen-supply place for me.”
Sandy did know that.
“You reported her missing that very day, right? She tells you she’s going to Baltimore to go shop at Saks Fifth Avenue and you make the first call at ten thirty that night. What made you so sure that something had gone wrong? There are all sorts of reasons for people to stay out late. Traffic jams, a breakdown, running into an old friend, having dinner.”
“The car had just been serviced two days before. And stores close, you know, around nine, and she had already been gone so long.”
“Some women can easily shop that long.”
“Not Julie. She was very decisive. And she had a woman who pulled things for her, to make it easier.”
“Pulled things?”
“Oh, you know-what do they call it? A personal shopper.”
“Did you mention that to the police at the time?”
“I think so. I don’t know. They did take it seriously. Her failure to come home that night, the following day. And the kitchen-supply store was pretty definitive that she had never made it there. But there was the boyfriend, the car-where did they find it?”
“At the Giant Foods on Reisterstown Road, more than a month later.”
“Right. So I assumed they were thinking-well, that fits. She met someone, left the car, didn’t plan on coming back. The thing is, she made no provision for the business. Once she was gone, it went to shit. I didn’t have power of attorney. Neither did her sister. It was a mess, straightening all that out. She had consulted her lawyer a week earlier, but she hadn’t done anything. This was not a woman planning to leave.”
“How did you meet her in the first place?”
“Catering business.”
“Yours or someone else’s?”
“Someone else’s. Julie was looking for a great chef, but she needed someone she could afford. She was very cagey, putting the word out for someone who was good, but not in a position to open his own restaurant. I was practically an indentured servant. I did all the work, the owner reaped the benefits. But I had no name, no backers willing to take a chance on me.”
“But how did she find you?”
The chef played with his Ricard, adding water, swirling it, making quite a production. More show-off than drunk, Sandy decided. “That’s another question no one thought to ask. It’s quite harmless, really, but I didn’t want to talk about it at the time. Out of respect to her, because it just loops around again to the same old topic, and I really did think that was a distraction.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m aware of that.” He tapped a cigarette out of a pack, glanced at it. “I guess I can break the smoking laws in my own damn restaurant when it’s closed. It might be closed forever soon enough. I can’t seem to catch a break in this business. My food is good, too. But that’s never enough.”
“I know,” Sandy said. The chef shrugged as if he thought Sandy was making polite conversation. How could some cop know anything about how hard it was to run a restaurant? “Anyway, how did you meet her?”
“My boss was the caterer of choice for big events among the rich Jews on the Northwest Side. Weddings, anniversary parties, bar mitzvahs. A woman named Lorraine Gelman hired me to do a big party, then referred me to her friend, Bambi Brewer, and I did her daughter’s bat mitzvah. Julie called me a few days before the event, told me she was looking for a chef for a new restaurant, something very ambitious, but she wanted to sample the food, get a sense of what I could do. So she dropped by, hung out in the kitchen during the party.”
“Julie Saxony was in the kitchen during this party for Felix’s daughter?”
Bayard smiled, as if at a memory. “Yeah. I didn’t have all the pieces then. Didn’t understand why she was skittish, why she all but ran into the pantry when one of the family members came into the kitchen. I had tried to talk her out of visiting this particular party, asked that she wait for an occasion where I would be doing something more impressive than crepes and frites. I realized later that it wasn’t entirely accidental, her choosing that event to sample my food. Sometimes, I think she hired me just to save face, you know? Plus, I am a great fucking chef. But that’s not enough to make it in this business.”