After I'm Gone Read Free Page B

around the anniversary of his disappearance, just to see if she’s ready to talk.”
    “The wife—yeah, what was her name?”
    “Bambi Brewer.”
    “ Bambi? ” Funny, the stripper had the normal name, and the wife had the stripper name.
    “That’s what everyone calls her. Her given name was something else. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.”
    “She a Baltimore girl?”
    “Yeah, Forest Park High School, around the time of Barry Levinson. Married Felix when she was only nineteen. Her family was in the grocery business, success story of sorts, from peddlers to a decent produce wholesaler in one generation.”
    “Can you find out where she grew up? I mean, what street?”
    “Why?”
    “A bet with McLarney,” he said, referencing one of the few homicide detectives left over from his time. “We got to talking about the case and he thought she was a Pikesville girl, but I said she grew up in the city.”
    “Bullshit,” the reporter said. “You couldn’t remember her name five seconds ago, but you were having some random conversation about where she grew up?”
    “Look, it’s nothing now. If it becomes something, you’ll be the first to know.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes.” No.
    “Does it have something to do with her husband?”
    “I don’t think so.” He didn’t think it did and he didn’t think it didn’t. What was he thinking? He was thinking that Julie Saxony, in her Juliet Romeo incarnation, all but looked him in the eyes and asked him to help her out. And that the older, thinner Julie seemed to need him even more.
    He heard a series of clicks on the other end of the line. The world was full of clicks now. At ticket counters, at hotels, all you heard was clicks. At least this one yielded something useful. “She grew up on Talbot Road in Windsor Hills. It would have been nice then, I think. Even into the ’60s.”
    “I’ve heard.” Sandy had spent the 1960s in Remington and didn’t think it was possible to go far enough back in time to say Remington was ever nice. Maybe around the time the Ark and the Dove made land in 1634.
    “That meaningful? The address. Did I settle your bet ?”
    “Naw. I thought she was from Butchers Hill. Nobody wins.”
    “Something going on in Butchers Hill?”
    “Always. Gotta go.”
    He checked the city map, although he already knew what he was going to find. He knew before he picked up the phone. That’s how good he was at his job. Talbot Road snaked through Windsor Hills on the southern edge of the neighborhood. It sat on a bluff, high above a deep ravine and Gwynns Falls—and not even a mile from the section of Leakin Park where Julie Saxony’s body had been discovered.

 
    February 14, 1959
    T he dance was an impulse, her date even more so, a barely acceptable young man, a young man who would not have been acceptable a year ago, or even six months ago. For one thing, he was younger than she was, a senior in high school. A very desirable senior, perhaps the most desirable boy in Forest Park High School’s Class of ’59, but she was the Class of ’58. Barry Weinstein was a big wheel in his fraternity, with broad shoulders and a swoop of blond hair that made him look like a Jewish Troy Donahue. But he was a high school senior whereas she was a college freshman.
    Or supposed to be. Had been, up until December, and was still pretending to be one. But time was running out. She either had to return to school in the fall or—or what? What else could she do to avoid being disgraced? Thank God no one else from Forest Park had gone to Bryn Mawr. But there was a boy from the Class of ’57 at Haverford. So far, she had been able to play off her absence from school as a lark, another thrilling installment in the madcap life of crazy, impulsive Bambi Gottschalk. Oh, darlings , it was amazing, she had said to her best friends over the winter break, as they gathered around her bed in her girlhood room, solemn and kind and yet predatory, waiting for her to