Another part of her mind, even more cool and cruel, chimed in: Well, look at you. You are truly your mother’s daughter now, a woman whose husband loves her so much that he sleeps with other women. Love at first sight, love at second sight-what about love at last sight? Is that too much for a Brewer woman to ask? Or does one have to settle as Linda has, for a man who’s sweet but weak and pliable?
How had Rachel ended up living her mother’s life? How could she get out of it with her dignity intact? It was one thing to marry the better poet, but he was supposed to be a better man, too.
“Where are we, Rachel?”
She thought the question existential, but Marc, a suburban boy, had gotten twisted in the city’s one-way streets and ended up making a series of squares.
“You’re going north on Calvert. You should circle back to the JFX here.”
“But I can pick it up in a few blocks, right?” He always asked for her help, always got defensive when she provided it. He couldn’t possibly know-or could he?-that his chosen route took them past Horizon House, one of the high-rises thrown up in the 1960s during yet another abortive Baltimore renaissance. It was not quite the spiffy place it had seemed to Rachel ten years ago when her mother had pointed it out to her two oldest daughters, saying in a strangely matter-of-fact voice: “Your father’s girlfriend lives here, but I bet she’ll be moving now that she has all his money.”
March 14, 2012
The day after his meeting with Bayard, Sandy found himself walking down Thirty-sixth Street. The area appeared to be thriving after a few soft years. He stopped tallying up all the restaurants when he got to five. There was home-style stuff, a noodle place, Mexican and the Golden West, with its eclectic mix of Tex-Mex, Thai, and what Sandy thought of as Elvis-Southern. Deep fried, fatty, disgusting, great. A Cuban restaurant would have been a good addition to the current mix. Had he just been ahead of his time? He had used that excuse, but it felt hollow after hearing Bayard invoke it, a loser’s defense. “You’re an orphan,” Nabby would hiss when he disappointed her. “No one wants you and now I’m stuck with you and you’re good for nothing.”
The cost of picking at other people’s brains for a living was that Sandy was all too aware of the machinations of his own mind, where ideas pinged around like errant pinballs. He had known all along where he was headed when he went out for this walk today. Now he had reached his old building, currently an antiques store full of things he could never afford. Sandy turned his collar up and put his head down, although the wind wasn’t particularly cutting. He felt like a teenager, riding his bike past the home of a crush. Just passing by. See me. Love me.
Then he saw the kid, as he always thought of him, one of his few regulars, coming out of some weird bakery that was all muffins and cupcakes, not an honest roll or loaf of rye to be found. The kid was juggling packages while trying to keep a toddler in tow. Sandy had thought the kid had a baby, not a child who was already walking. Then he realized-this was the same baby. Must be two years since he had last seen this guy. Of course the baby had grown. That’s what babies do. Normal ones.
“Can I give you a hand?” Sandy offered, catching the bakery bag before it tumbled to the ground, even as the big satchel on the kid’s shoulder started to slide.
“Hey, Sandy!” He was impressed at the kid’s ability to pull up his name on the spot. For his part, Sandy couldn’t have said for the life of him what the kid’s name was. And the guy’s seeming joy at seeing Sandy, a marginal acquaintance at best, appeared genuine. Sandy couldn’t remember the last time someone had been that happy to see him. Only Mary. Never Bobby. That should have been a sign, right? A boy should be excited when his dad comes home.
“What’s going on, Sandy? What are you up to since the restaurant closed?”
The kid managed to make it sound positive, as if the restaurant was something Sandy had chosen to leave behind. “I’m a consultant. Doing cold case work for the police department.”
“Hey, that’s great-” He took a few steps, grabbed his daughter by the back of her coat. “This is Scout. Carla Scout, but we somehow ended up calling her Scout.”
“Scout?”
He made a face. “I know. It’s so hipster. But it’s from To Kill a Mockingbird and not the least ironic. Besides, I’ve gone through life being called Crow by most people, despite having the perfectly respectable name of Edgar, and I’m relatively unscathed.”
Now, see, the kid was classy that way. He had managed to remind Sandy of his name without putting it on Sandy. Sandy now remembered that he had never called him Crow but had made a joke out of his real name, dubbing him Fast Eddie. If Sandy were running a proper restaurant, a white tablecloth place, he would want this guy for the front of the house.
“Pupcake,” the girl said, looking up at Sandy with enormous blue eyes, but all kids had big eyes. Scout. That was just a crazy thing to do to any kid, but especially a girl. “More pupcake.”
“She’s pretty,” Sandy said, unsure if she really was, but how could you go wrong, telling a man his daughter was pretty. The girl did have amazing coloring-light eyes with dark hair, the black Irish thing. Like Mary. But her clothing was bizarre-shorts layered over heavy tights, beneath a sensible duffel coat. Sandy wasn’t exactly up-to-date on what the fashionable two-year-olds were wearing. Maybe this was-what did the kid call it?-hipster, too.
“She dresses herself,” offered his old customer. “So are you working on something good?”
Sandy realized he wanted to talk about his case. He suddenly wanted to talk, to have this human moment that so many people took for granted. How was work today, dear?
“It’s actually kinda interesting. Julie Saxony, the girlfriend of Felix Brewer.” No look of recognition. “He’s a guy who skipped town back in the ’70s rather than do the time on a federal gambling rap. Way before your time, I’m guessing.” Details were coming back to him. The kid had grown up somewhere else, but his wife was hard-core Baltimore, the kind of local who was said to be Baltimore born, bred and buttered. “Ten years later, almost to the day he ran, she disappeared. The cops were always pretty sure it was a murder, but the body didn’t surface until 2001.”
“Any particular reason you’re working it?”
“No.” You couldn’t tell a guy like this about a sexy photo, the way a dead woman’s eyes had pulled you in.
“You know, my wife is a private detective.”
“I don’t think I did know that.” Was Sandy so incurious off the job that he had failed to ask one of his few regular customers what his wife did? Or was he just the kind of man who didn’t think about women working in a meaningful way? He had to cop to being both. But the thing about being a murder police is that you spend so much time absorbing other people’s lives that you don’t solicit people’s life stories in your off-hours.
“Anyway, she says money is the thing that drives people. Money and pride.”
Sandy wanted to be polite, but he was getting awfully tired of other people telling him his business. A PI wouldn’t know that much about homicide. Divorce work, maybe. Where, come to think of it, everything was driven by money and pride.
“Most murders,” Sandy said, “come down to stupidity, impulse, and opportunity.”
“Sure, most. But those are-what do you call it? The dunkers?”
Lord, how Sandy wished people would just stop watching cop shows. Only cops should watch cop shows.
The kid continued: “I’m thinking about the cases that go unsolved, which is what cold cases are. The ones where people have done something deliberately, then taken care to cover their tracks.”