“No, not a lot of enchantment in my business. I work cold cases now.”
“Felix or Julie? Has to be Julie, I’m guessing. I mean, there’s probably no statute of limitations for federal flight, but, Jesus, who cares at this point. If Felix is alive, he’s older than I am. What would be the point? It’s not like a Nazi war criminal, you know.”
“Not sure what you mean.”
“He’s going to be a frail old man. Who wants to be the person who brings him back?”
“You’re not frail.”
“Felix isn’t me. He never learned from his mistakes.”
That was interesting. Tubby-Tubman-intended it to be interesting, dropped it with a big thud, all but begging Sandy to jump on it, this observation about Felix and his mistakes. Which, to Sandy’s mind, made it like a dollar on a string, a trick for losers and optimists.
“Yeah, I’m here to talk about Julie. Her sister says you’re the one who introduced her to Felix.”
“Her sister tell you anything else of interest?”
“What do you mean?”
Tubman flagged a waitress. Young, by the standards here, not quite forty and a nice forty, if not a spectacular one. And even she seemed caught in this guy’s charm. What was that about? He had very good manners. Not flirtatious, but kind, which probably worked better. He ordered a red wine for himself-“The cab, the one I like”-and asked Sandy if he wanted anything.
“I’m good.”
“It’s the elixir of life. You’ll live forever.”
“Doesn’t strengthen the case for me.”
Tubman laughed, thinking Sandy was making a joke.
“The sister-”
“Ah, you’re quite the pointer. Not going to let go of the scent, are you? Look, I don’t tell other people’s secrets. Let’s just say that Andrea Norr wasn’t the innocent bystander she’d have you believe.”
“In Julie’s death?”
“I don’t want to play that game because then you’ll ask me another question and another question. No, nothing big, nothing to do with Julie’s death. But she knows things, more than she’s ever told. She may have even forgotten how much she knows.”
“About Felix leaving.”
“I told you, I’m not playing. For the record, I’ve never thought the two were connected. Felix leaving, Julie disappearing.”
“Will you tell me why?”
Tubman had to think about that. His wine arrived and he cupped the bowl with his hands, inhaled it, but Sandy didn’t think such ostentatious enjoyment of wine was his normal style. The guy had been a bail bondsman, a beer-and-a-shot guy who hung out on Baltimore Street back in the day. People don’t change that much. He was stalling.
“You know, I don’t have any reasons. Just a feeling. In my business, I lived by my hunches, and my hunches served me well. It’s about character, my business. The character of people already thought to be criminals. Yet some thieves have honor and some don’t.”
“Felix Brewer was your best friend. Did you have a hunch he was going to burn you?”
Tubman laughed. “Men don’t have best friends. That’s a girl thing. We were friends. Felix, me, Bert. He was a man involved in a criminal enterprise. I was a bail bondsman, Bert was a criminal attorney. We liked each other’s company, and we were useful to each other. At times.”
“Your friend stuck you with a bond of one hundred thousand dollars, no small sum.”
“Yes. Yes, he did.”
Sandy looked around the pub. “You weathered it, I guess.”
Tubman continued to smell his wine. Maybe he was an ostentatious prick, after all. “If Felix Brewer found a way to compensate me for skipping his bail, you realize there would be serious repercussions for me. IRS, being charged as an accessory.”
Sometimes, you just had to repeat a thing over and over, not accept the non-replies and the digressions. “Julie Saxony went missing almost ten years from the day that Felix did.”
“And she was murdered, it turned out. Do you think Felix was murdered?”
“No, but it’s hard to ignore the juxtaposition.” He liked the occasional fancy word like that, which proved to him that he had mastered his second language, even if he had lost his first. Spanish was almost like a dream to him now. There had been no one who spoke it in Baltimore when he was growing up. Now, it was everywhere, and when he heard it at bus stops, in restaurants, it was like running into an old friend-and having nothing to say. Plus, the accents were odd to his ear.
“Julie was hard to ignore, wasn’t she?” Tubman smiled over the rim of his glass as if they shared some secret.
“Not sure what you mean.”
“She was gorgeous. God, she was gorgeous.”
“You discovered her, as I hear it.”
“How-oh, the sister. Right. Yes, Bert and I stumbled on Julie at Rexall. Not quite like finding Lana Turner at Schwab’s, but close enough. There was a soda fountain, still. But she was behind it.”
“Did it bug you that she ended up being Felix’s girlfriend?”
“No. I took her to him. I knew what I was doing. She was a gift.”
“Was she yours to give?”
“Who knows? I took her into Felix’s club and that was that. I didn’t figure her for having such staying power, though. That surprised all of us.”
“Us?”
He didn’t answer. He was a smart guy. Smart enough not to talk to a cop at all, if it came to that. But something-Sandy’s not-quite-cop status, Tubby’s own boredom in his plush nest-made him want to play this game. More challenging than bridge with a bunch of wistful ladies.
“How did his wife feel? About Julie?”
“I wasn’t Bambi’s confidant. Lorraine, maybe, she could tell you, but I can’t.”
“Lorraine?”
“Bert’s wife. Now they’re best friends. Bambi and Lorraine. Like sisters. What do the kids call it? BFAs? BBFs? Something like that.”
Kids. Sandy’s mind jumped to kids, kids playing a game of hot potato. Andrea Norr had sent him to Tubby. Now Tubby was sending him to Lorraine.
And everyone kept trying to send him away from Felix, that night ten years before Julie disappeared. Nothing to see here, keep moving. Well, the IRS implications could be enough to scare a guy.
He got to his feet, thanking Tubby for his time, releasing him to the henhouse.
“It’s impressive,” he told Tubman. “The way you changed. As you said, almost no one ever does. Did you ever think about why it took the fourth time, the doctor’s advice?”
“A mystery,” Tubman said in a self-satisfied way.
“Four heart attacks in four years. You were how old? When the last one happened?”
“Fifty.”
“Which would have been, what, 1986?”
“Thereabouts.” As if he didn’t know the date to the moment of his last heart attack.
“What month?”
“August.”
“Right around the time Julie disappeared.”
“I don’t see what the two things have to do with each other. Oh, wait, I get it-you think I had the last heart attack carrying her body to its resting place in Leakin Park.”
“I just think it’s an interesting-juxtaposition.” He would have used a synonym if he knew one. “A woman disappears, a woman you discovered, for want of a better term. And, maybe whatever happened to her is somehow connected to the life you introduced her to. Maybe that’s on you. You have your fourth heart attack and suddenly you’re ready to change your life, to do all the things you never could before, as if you suddenly understand what’s at stake, what mortality is. You ever consider that those two things were connected?”
Tubman’s face lost something then, although Sandy wasn’t able to say what. A bit of color, or maybe just the forced bravado that most older men used to conceal their sadness.
“Many times,” he said. “Many times.”
Sandy walked with Tubman back to the library where the bridge women awaited their king. There was a plate of food by his place. “I thought you might be hungry, missing the snack break,” one said. Had women doted on the old Tubby this way? Sandy thought not. The laws of supply and demand, coupled with a hundred-pound weight loss, can work a peculiar kind of magic.