The woman who answered the door to Sandy and Nancy was not the beauty her mother was. It was only then, allowing himself that rather ungallant thought, that Sandy realized he did find Bambi Brewer very beautiful for a woman in her seventies. This one was pretty as middle-aged women go, her features roughened by whatever her father had contributed. But likable, younger looking than her age, even with no makeup and those deep circles under her eyes. She hadn’t slept last night. Well, she had a sick kid and a mother in lockup. Those dark circles were earned.
They did the little dance of introductions, the pretense of hospitality. They were keen that she not lawyer up, but it was tricky, playing her this way. He hoped she would be looser at home, more relaxed. He hadn’t factored in the demands of a toddler.
“Your mother confessed last night to killing Julie Saxony.”
“She’s lying,” Rachel said.
“Why?”
“No idea. But I know it’s a lie.”
“How?”
“Because I saw Julie Saxony on July third. I was alone at the house. She came by, she wanted to speak to my mother, I sent her away.”
“Did she come by with the money? The money you asked her for a week earlier?”
A beat. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened. She came by with the money.”
“How much was it?”
“Three hundred and fifty thousand.”
“That’s more than your mother’s mortgage and debt. Based on the papers we’ve seen.”
“Really?” She was surprised they knew about the mortgage. “Well, maybe it was the exact amount she stole.”
“Have you ever seen three hundred fifty thousand dollars? It’s a lot of money to put in a suitcase. Julie Saxony’s sister has described the piece of luggage your father handed to Julie that night. She says there couldn’t have been that much in there. And no one saw Julie put anything in her car that day. Why are you so convinced that Julie stole it?”
“My mother said she did.”
“Your mother told us she killed Julie Saxony, and you have no problem saying that’s a lie.”
“I told you, I saw Julie on July third. I was at home. No one else was. She left, end of story. I thought-well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. She left and someone killed her.”
“She could have come back. The next day. I mean, if she really wanted to see your mother-”
“But she didn’t.”
“Again, how can you be sure?”
The child began chanting then: miljews, miljews, miljews. Sandy couldn’t begin to make it out, but it apparently referred to milk and juice, as the woman got up and fetched two cups, the kind with lids that don’t spill, whatever those are called. Sandy would probably know those kinds of things if he were a grandfather. He could tell the mother was happy for the distraction, because she made a big production out of it, probably using the time to think about what she wanted to say.
Only liars and very polite people need that much time to decide what to say.
“Do I have any-I don’t know-I mean, not confidentiality, but can I tell you things that you won’t tell my mother?”
“Maybe. It depends.”
She sighed. “Julie Saxony came to tell my mother that my father had sent for her. Of course, that wasn’t true.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she was found dead.”
“But that doesn’t mean she was lying. You’re working backward from a known fact. She might have been going to your father, wherever he was. And someone might have killed her to prevent that from happening. Maybe your dad wanted her dead.”
Rachel was clearly having trouble processing all this. Again, it might have been the fatigue, or it might have been that she had held back this piece of the story for so long that she hadn’t thought about how others might arrange the same facts. Felix had summoned Julie Saxony, but Julie was found dead. In this woman’s mind, those two things weren’t connected.
Sandy believed they were.
“But I didn’t-” She stopped.
“You didn’t kill her? I mean, you hit her hard enough to knock her earring out, the one that your mother found and sold a month later, but you didn’t kill her? Your mom thinks you did.”
“She didn’t tell you that.”
“No, she just confessed to a murder she probably didn’t commit. Possibly to protect the person who did.”
She wasn’t having problems focusing anymore.
“I need a lawyer.” It was a statement of fact, flat and plain-spoken. By force of habit, Sandy tried to forestall the inevitable.
“Look, we’re still just talking here. If you say you didn’t kill her, you didn’t kill her. Maybe you just, I don’t know, knocked her out, called one of your father’s old buddies, like Tubman, to help you? And you didn’t know what he did or how it ended. That’s okay. We’re just talking. You bring a lawyer in, we’ve got to go out to headquarters, you’ll want to find a babysitter and here’s your kid, just getting over something really major-”
“No, I need a lawyer. We can drop Tatiana at my sister’s house. Michelle, the younger one. And I’ll call Bert Gelman before we leave. Is that a problem, Bert representing my mother and me? Is he allowed to be my lawyer, too?”
“I have a hunch,” Sandy said, “it’s what your mother wanted when she fired him last night.”
Noon
Michelle had a nanny whom she called a babysitter. She wasn’t fooling anyone, including herself. The woman lived in a private apartment above the garage, worked almost sixty hours a week, with Tuesdays and Sundays off. Michelle felt guilty about this. But Hamish wanted her free to go out, to focus on him. She missed the children when she was out, yet she also dreaded Tuesdays and Sundays, which seemed to last forever. It never stopped. Two was so much harder than one, although thank God Hamish III was in school now. Still, that left her with Helena, who was more outrageous than most three-year-olds.
Helena’s high-maintenance ways were thrown into sharp relief by Tatiana’s temperament. A by-product of being in an orphanage, Rachel had said once, and Michelle had said: “Do you think there’s an orphanage where I can drop my kids off for a week or so?” She thought it was funny. Rachel, not so much.
Today was a Tuesday, but she hadn’t mentioned that when Rachel had called. She had said, “Sure, bring her over.” And that had felt good. Until a few years ago, she had so little to offer her sisters. It was nice to be the generous one, the bountiful one. To have the biggest house, to hold the family gatherings, to be able to help out financially. She was especially keen to do anything she could for Rachel.
Rachel’s one was so dainty, alongside Helena. Of course, she was younger and, well, malnourished. But there was something in her movements, something delicate and fine. Michelle watched her examine Helena’s cache of toys in the den-and watched Helena become instantly passionate about any toy that Tatiana touched. “Mine.”
“Be nice,” she said. “Share.”
Tatiana didn’t seem to mind. She just moved on to the next toy, which Helena promptly took, saying: “Mine.”
She was her mother’s daughter all right.
Although the house was toasty warm, Michelle pulled her sweater tighter around her, took another sip from her homemade cappuccino. Why are you going to talk to the police now? she had asked her sister. What is going on?
It’s going to be okay. It’s just crazy. No one did anything.
Did Mom-