She didn’t dare say what she wanted just then. She wasn’t that far gone. But she was close.
“I don’t care, really. More than one kid. Not that I’m in a rush.”
He gave her a look, as if to say: Who are you kidding? He knew her. He knew her. How was that possible?
But all he said was: “That dress matches your eyes. I’m not sure what you’d call that color. Cobalt? Cerulean? Yeah, cerulean.”
They were married ten months later.
March 5, 2012
Sandy stood on Talbot Road, trying to decide where best to trespass. He could knock on any door, ask permission to cut through someone’s backyard. But then he would have to go through the blah, blah, blah about not being a detective, just a consultant. He’d rather trespass, assuming he could be sure there wasn’t a dog lurking.
He tried a side gate. Unlocked. He wouldn’t leave his gate unlocked in this neighborhood, not the way it was now. He was humming to himself, he realized, that corny song from The Sound of Music, the one about starting at the very beginning. Sandy and Mary had seen that movie on their first date, a date made more memorable by the fact that they left a world of balmy-for-January sunshine and emerged into a raging blizzard. They had taken a bus downtown-he didn’t own a car and Nabby sure as hell wasn’t going to let him borrow hers-and Mary wasn’t dressed to wait outside, much less walk so much as a block. He told her to stand under the marquee, then trudged around the corner and hot-wired a car, telling Mary that he had borrowed it from a friend who lived near the Mayfair. He drove her home, a five-mile journey of slip-and-slides that took an hour. He literally carried her into her parents’ house. He then drove the car back to the space he had left, which he had to clear off by hand. It was a snow emergency route, but that worked out well. The car would be towed and the owner could argue with the city impoundment people over who was responsible for the damaged ignition. He then walked home. His shoes fell apart about a mile from the house and Nabby gave him hell, but it was worth it. He was seventeen years old, and he had met the love of his life. Risked everything for her, truth be told. If he had been pulled over in that car, it wouldn’t have been juvie, not this time around. Sandy often looked back in wonder at that afternoon, how his entire life turned on that day. He didn’t know it, but he was poised, as if on a tightrope, and things were either going to go very wrong or very right, no in-between.
It had never occurred to him that he might come crashing to earth forty-four years later. When destiny wants to fuck with you, it can afford to be patient. Destiny has all the time in the world.
Anyway, it sounded simple, starting at the beginning, but it was often a challenge in a cold case to know just where the beginning was. First, Sandy had to read the file in its entirety, try to put it in some semblance of order. This one was really two files-the original missing person case from Havre de Grace, then the official homicide case from 2001. It was a jumble of witness statements and reports. He couldn’t fault anyone on work ethic. They talked to almost too many people-every single employee at the bed-and-breakfast where Julie Saxony had worked, a couple of associates from her time at the Variety, at least one relative. Friends of Felix-his lawyer, his bail bondsman. Whatever the general public thought was going on, the cops pegged her as a homicide pretty early. Her credit cards had never been used again after July 3, 1986, she hadn’t pulled a significant amount of money out of checking or savings-$200 on July 2, then another $200 on July 3. She had told an employee that she was going to Saks, but her car was found at a Giant Foods on Reisterstown, maybe five miles away. She could have been grabbed and made to make that second withdrawal, but there was nothing on the ATM tape to support that.
And then there was the place her body was found all those years later, which had to be a good ten, fifteen miles from her car. Not buried or concealed in any particular way, just left out to rot. It killed civilians to hear that. People in urban areas couldn’t believe how long a body could go undetected, but it happened all the time. Leakin Park was twelve hundred acres, much of it heavily wooded, and it wasn’t legal to hunt there, so the odds of people walking through the rough, overgrown areas was pretty remote. The city had created a trail that, theoretically, could be followed all the way into the heart of downtown if one was willing to hike or bike through some sketchy areas, but that was on the other side of a stream from where the body was discovered. Julie’s remains might not have been found at all if it weren’t for a rambunctious dog that led a young couple on a chase.
Sandy couldn’t help wondering about them, incidental as they were to the story. One of the things he loved about the show Law & Order-and he loved almost everything about it, particularly the fakeness-were the discoveries that started every episode. New York City had, in real life, maybe eight hundred homicides a year, which was nothing per capita. Baltimore’s rate had fallen back from the almost one-a-day that he had seen in his glory days, but it was still one of the highest in the country. Yet, if you watched Law & Order, and he had done quite a bit of that in the four long months that it took Mary to die, it seemed as if everyone in the city must have tripped over a body here and there. He thought those people deserved a show of their own. He wanted to write the producer a letter and suggest that as a spin-off. Law & Order: The Discoverers. There was probably a better title, but that was the drift. A young couple out on a date. Was it a first date? Which one owned the dog? Was the dog running away, or was it off-leash in that sneaky way people used so they could avoid cleaning up? (Sandy lived near a small park and he had taken to eye-fucking anyone who looked like they might not clean up after a dog.) Finding a dead body on a date seemed a pretty bad omen, but he and Mary had hit a deer on their second one, and that had turned out great. The date, if not Mary’s parents’ car.
He started to head down the hill. Damn. It was muddier than he had anticipated, capable of seriously screwing up a man’s loafers. He retreated to his car to see if he had anything he could use. Nada, zip, nothing.
The houses here were big and rambling, although most had been cut up for apartments. As the reporter had said, the neighborhood had been something once. The Gottschalk home, per the property tax records, stayed in her family until 1977, when it was sold for $19,000, not much more than they had paid for it in 1947. Sandy wasn’t clear if there had been a death or if her parents had downsized. He might need to run them through vital stats at some point. They weren’t part of the file, and not even Bambi had been interviewed after Julie’s body was discovered.
Yet Julie had ended up a few hundred yards from here, near the house where Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk had lived until her marriage on December 31, 1959. It was a date Sandy knew well, for his own reasons. Sandy had arrived in Baltimore a year later, almost to the day. People talk about having nothing but the clothes on their backs, but for Sandy that had been literal. It was part of the reason that he used to be fastidious about his clothes, even by the standards of a murder police, which was a pretty high standard. He looked at his shining loafers. They were old, but extremely well cared for, exhibit A in the wisdom of buying quality. He knew mud wouldn’t destroy them, but it seemed unfair to subject such good shoes to a muddy hillside. He looked around. The sidewalks were littered with newspapers in plastic wrappers, the weekly freebie thrown by the increasingly desperate Beacon-Light. He liberated two of the papers and put the bags on his feet, knowing it would wreak havoc with his traction and he might fall on the steep hillside, getting mud on a lot more than his shoes. But it was easier to brush dirt from a suit, if you did it right.