“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.