After I'm Gone

by Laura Lippman

  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.

  He worked his way down in a zigzag pattern, using branches to keep himself steady. He was in okay shape for a man of his age, although he had a paunch he couldn’t seem to shrink. The paunch was noticeable because he was, had always been, a string bean. The belly had come out of nowhere when Mary was sick. It was as if he had his own tumor growing inside him. “Oh, look at you, jealous as ever,” Mary teased. “It was just like when I was pregnant with Bobby Junior and you had all the cravings.” For every pound Mary lost during her illness, he gained one. It was like he assumed he could give the weight back to her when she got better. Only she never got better, and he was stuck with the weight.

  He reached the bottom of the hill without falling, no small thing. Glancing back at the bluff, he realized that returning to his car would be even tougher. But he probably could walk alongside the stream and come out on Windsor Mill Road, get back to his car that way. His time was unmonitored now, except by him. Every night, he wrote down his hours as if he were still on the clock, burning a little at the thought of the overtime he wouldn’t be paid, no matter how long he worked.

  It wouldn’t have been easy, getting a body here in 1986. Four-wheel drives were not as common then. People would have noticed a truck or a Jeep—the people on the bluff above would have heard it; others would have seen the lights, assuming it came in at dark. And if the body had been carried down from Talbot Road—that would have been tough, too. Yet the juxtaposition of Bambi’s childhood home and the body of her husband’s onetime girlfriend—hard to chalk that up to coincidence, even in a dumping ground as popular as Leakin Park.

  The dog had found little more than bones. Sandy knew that from the file, the autopsy. Bones, but the cause of death, a bullet to the head, had been easy to pinpoint. No casing, though. Nothing but a purse, a purse that looked like leather, but wasn’t, so it had held up to the elements. Inside there was a billfold with $385, her ID, an earring without a mate, a lipstick. Normal lady stuff.

  He walked north. At least, he thought it was north. He wasn’t a nature boy, although a lot of people projected that on him, thought he had arrived here on a raft, paddling himself across the Keys. He could understand how kids, his term for everyone under thirty, confused his arrival with the Mariel boat lift, which they knew from Scarface, the Pacino version. But Sandy had no excuse for people his age, who should know a little history, for Christ’s sake. Yet it was easier, always, to let people think whatever they wanted to think. He preferred being lumped in with Scarface to the inevitable questions that followed when people heard where he was from. You’re Cuban? With that hair and those eyes? Is that why they call you Sandy, because of the hair?

  His hair was blond, for Christ’s sake. Who calls a blond Sandy?

  He walked for what felt like forever—going slowly, because someone weighed down with a body wouldn’t make good time—but it was only ten minutes or so by his watch when he found himself opposite a group of white buildings. Another abandoned Baltimore mill, this one renovated for business space. Okay, that was a possible lead. When had it been redone? Did anyone have offices here in 1986? He took out his pad, wrote a note to cross-check the history of the site. Still, it was a long way to carry a body, and it would have meant fording the stream. Man, someone really went to a lot of trouble to make sure that Julie Saxony wouldn’t be found. And that was probably the takeaway, more so than the proximity to the childhood home of Bambi Gottschalk. Julie wasn’t supposed to be found. Definitely not right away, maybe never. Why?

  Because the longer she went without being discovered, the more convinced people became that she had gone to join Felix, wherever he was.

  People, he thought. People, not cops. No cop, looking at those dormant credit cards, the lack of bank activity in the weeks before she disappeared, would have assumed she was a runaway. He had read the massive file twice and he would have to read it several more times before he could keep it all in his head, but one detail stuck out now: She had her car serviced on July 1. Who has her car serviced on July 1 if she’s running away on July 3? Maybe if she had been planning to take the car, part of the way. But her car made it only as far as Pikesville.

  He worked his way back to his car, deciding to take the hill, after all. Harder going up a muddy hill, and he did slip once, dropping to one knee. But the mud would dry and brush off. The key was to be patient enough to let it dry, not to worry it and rub it into the fabric. Lift the dirt with a straight edge, let dry, then scrape.

  Mary had taught him that.

  September 15, 1960

  It’s not going to fit in the nursery, not with all the other stuff you have in there.”

  Ida Gottschalk, hands on hips, had squared off against an almost life-size baby hippo that was standing in the middle of the living room, an awkward guest who didn’t realize the party was over. Ida had taken against this hippo, which was really very cute, from the moment it was unwrapped. Bambi assumed that her mother had seen the yellow tag in its ear, Steiff, and deduced it was German made. Her mother hated all things German.

  Bambi just hoped her mother never found out that the hippo cost $200, which would be far more damning in her eyes. Two hundred dollars. They didn’t pay that much in rent. Assuming they paid the rent every month, and Bambi was beginning to suspect that Felix was casual about what he considered the small stuff, which included, alas, their household bills. At least, she hoped that unpaid bills were the source of the strange phone calls that made talky Felix become monosyllabic. “Yes.” “No.” “Soon.” The sales slip for the hippo had been in the bottom of the elaborately wrapped gift box and Bambi had quickly crumpled it, appalled that a clerk from Hutzler’s could be so inattentive that she would forget to remove it.

  Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a clerk who had left the slip in the box. Maybe Bambi was meant to see how much Felix had spent. And then what? Was Bambi supposed to brag about it in a mock-exasperated way? Oh, that crazy doting dad. Or had Felix assumed someone else would open the gift and that the gossip about his extravagance would spread among Bambi’s friends and relatives?

  “It’s not going to fit into this nursery,” Bambi told her mother. “B
ut we won’t be here forever. Felix is looking for a house.”

  “You’ll be here at least nine more months,” her mother said, tying an apron over her dress, which was very stylish, a little too fancy for a party such as this. Bambi’s mother, plain and bone thin, had always bought the best she could afford when it came to clothes. “You signed a year’s lease in June.”

  “Leases can be broken.”

  Her mother rolled her eyes at this sacrilege. Bambi knew what she was thinking: A lease can be broken at a cost, but what kind of idiot would take on such an unnecessary cost? My son-in-law, the show-off, that’s who.

  Ida was proving to be the one woman, the one person, Felix could not charm. She may have been nonplussed upon meeting him, but she didn’t stay that way long. “I’m not buying what he’s selling,” Ida liked to say. She said it a lot. She went about saying it at the wedding reception, where everyone thought she was being droll. Even Felix thought so. Only Bambi and perhaps her father understood the stark literalism of her mother’s statement. In Ida’s view, Felix was after the Gottschalk fortune, a laughable concept. The Gottschalk “fortune” was about as substantial as the add-a-bead necklace that Linda had been given by her father the day she was born. Felix had no interest in his in-laws’ wholesale greengrocer. He wasn’t even particularly interested in them, although he complimented his in-laws lavishly, behaving like a guest in their home even while living there for the first five months of his marriage to Bambi.

  Besides, Felix could never keep the hours required by a wholesaler’s life. He was nocturnal. And he wanted to be rich-rich, as he called it, no-doubt-about-it rich. Stinking rich. Screw-the-world rich. How that goal meshed with ignoring the little bills of day-to-day life was a puzzlement to Bambi, but she didn’t want to be a dreary nag like her mother, so she let it go.

  Felix had first spoken of his desire to be wealthy on their Bermuda honeymoon. They stayed in a pretty pink hotel on a pink sand beach, not that they saw much of the ocean, for they enjoyed the novelty of being in a bed together all night and all morning and into the afternoon, finally free of the fear of discovery that had marked their premarital adventures, as Bambi thought of them. Those had been limited to her car and, just once, the basement rec room in the house on Talbot Road, her parents’ heavy tread going back and forth, back and forth in the rooms above them. Bambi had been so nervous that she kept on even more clothes than she had in the car, which they had parked behind the old mansion on the Crimea estate in Leakin Park. Yet the rec room was the first time she had a genuine orgasm, and she wondered if the drama, the suspense, was essential to that experience.

  She was very happy to be proven wrong on her honeymoon. It turned out there were quite a lot of ways to have orgasms and Felix wanted to teach her all of them.

  “We’re going to be rich,” Felix told her, promised her. “Rich-rich. But we’re not going to play by the rules. The game is rigged, so I’m making my own game. It’s the only way to get out in front. But I need you to understand what that means. Late nights, long hours. Mine is a nighttime business.”

  “What about the risk?” she murmured into the pillow. He was rubbing her back, running his fingers through her hair.

  “Virtually none. Oh, I’ll get popped now and then, but they’ll never make it stick. You understand what I’m saying, Bambi?” He lay down next to her, turning her head so they were eye to eye. “Things will happen. There will be moments—people will gossip. But we’ll be so respectable—so rich—that no one will be able to afford to look down on us. We’re gonna be benefactors. To the synagogue, to the schools our children attend. We’ll be envied, which can be dangerous, but we’ll also be admired and liked. You’re beautiful and I’m smart.”

  “I’m smart, too,” Bambi said, thinking of Bryn Mawr, her failure there, a story she had withheld from Felix. Pretty much the only thing she had withheld from Felix so far. She was shocked at herself, going all the way before they were engaged. But she knew he would propose, in a grand fashion, and he did—the Surrey Inn, the ring winking at her from a raw oyster in the first course, so she wouldn’t be on pins and needles all night. She also knew he would make her first time nice. And now it was getting better. No one had told her that. The veiled conversation with her mother—and there had been only one—had led her to believe that sex was something one got used to, like shots or other unpleasant but necessary things. Why hadn’t someone told her that it was good and got better? Obviously, her mother wasn’t going to share such information, but what about Irene? Bambi was sure Irene had done it, maybe with more than one boy. Irene had been maid of honor at Bambi’s wedding and then had her own big wedding in late January. No one got married in late January. Why not wait until Valentine’s Day? Bambi, who had noticed the way the waist of Irene’s bridesmaid dress strained despite the fitting in early December, was pretty sure she knew why Irene’s wedding had been scheduled for January.

  “You’re smart, too,” Felix assured her. “You were smart enough to fall in love with me at first sight.”

  “Did not.” She would never admit that.

  “Well, I did, so I guess I’m the smarter of the two of us.”

  “Which synagogue are we going to join?”

  “Beth Tfiloh.”

  “You want to attend an Orthodox shul?” That came as a surprise. Although Bambi had been raised in an Orthodox home and had married in an Orthodox temple, Felix had seemed indifferent to religion. She knew nothing of his family. Whenever she pressed him, he changed the subject, said they were gone. She worried he might have lost them in the Holocaust, but she didn’t know how to have that conversation.

  “That’s the best one, the one with all those old Germans, the ones who act like they’re goys. Behind closed doors, I’m going to eat bacon and I don’t care if you mix up the plates. But in every part of our life that’s not my business, we gotta be respectable. Best synagogue, best country club, best schools. Behind closed doors, we do things our way.”

  Then, much to her delighted shock, he yanked her up to all fours and showed her something else that a man and a woman could do behind closed doors. She was surprised at how much she liked it, given how unromantic the position was, like two dogs going at it. But she liked almost everything Felix did. When he was home, which wasn’t as often as she would have preferred, it turned out. Late nights, he had said. Long hours. Those words had been meaningless in a soft bed in a pink hotel. By the time Linda was born on September 1, they were all too real. The doctor said she could have sex again in two weeks, but Felix was never around. Football season was under way, he explained.

  They had honored the Jewish tradition of not having a baby shower or decorating the nursery until after the baby was born, although Felix thought it a silly superstition. He had painted the room shell pink. (Without the landlord’s permission, and Ida was mournful about the cost of that as well. “You’ll never get the damage deposit back,” she said.) The nursery suite was lavish, too lavish for the apartment: matching crib, bureau, changing table, rocking chair, and toy chest, all white with stenciled roses. Felix said the furnishings were a gift from a loyal customer, but Bambi suspected it was a payment against a debt, as it had arrived on a plain truck, carted in by two surly men who grunted when she offered them lemonade on the unseasonably hot day they set it up last week. Once all the furniture was in, there was barely any floor space left. Ida was right: The hippo wouldn’t fit. It didn’t fit anywhere. It was going to have to stand sentry in the living room until they moved.

  As it was, Linda had yet to sleep in her beautiful, crowded nursery. Bambi was breast-feeding and kept her in a Moses basket in their room. Her mother found this appalling as well—the breast-feeding, the little basket by the bed—and added it to the list of things that were Felix’s fault. As to Linda’s birth date, which came exactly thirty-five weeks after Bambi’s wedding day—Ida had no comment, other than the dry observation that nine pound
s was an exceptionally good weight for a preemie.

  Bambi was perhaps a month pregnant at her wedding, but who cared? The wedding, after all, had been in the planning stages for six months, so no one could ever say it had been forced on them. (Unlike Irene’s engagement, which was announced over the winter holidays, a scant month before the ceremony. Her son, Benjamin, was born in mid-August.) Bambi had no problem standing before her guests in the whitest of white gowns, perhaps the loveliest dress she would ever wear. Not long, but cocktail length, in keeping with the simple ceremony, much simpler than Felix would have liked. Simple, in part, because her parents were paying, but also because Bambi had urged them to scale back. Felix’s yen for extravagance scared her a little. Bambi sensed that this would be a theme for the rest of their lives together: Felix would want to be lavish, and she would pull back. He was the first person in her experience to use “middle class” as a kind of an insult. Her parents considered the life they had crafted for their only daughter to be one of their greatest achievements, but Felix thought them small-timers, she knew. And that was the worst thing Felix would say of anyone. Small-timer. He thinks small. He settles for scraps.

  Linda, who had gone to sleep in the middle of the party in her honor, stirred in her basket. Bambi could have gone into the bedroom to nurse her, but she felt contrary so she brought the baby out and nursed her in the living room in full view of her mother, who was folding up the wrapping paper and ribbons in order to reuse them. Thank goodness Bambi had thrust that receipt into the pocket of her smock.

  “She looks like Edward R. Murrow,” Bambi said fondly.

  “She looks like her father,” Ida said. Less fondly.

  It was tacitly understood before Linda was born that no daughter of Bambi’s should be held to that standard of beauty, but Linda really did look like her father. Exactly. Bambi’s kinder friends said she had striking features and she would grow into them. By which they meant: Oh, dear God, the nose is ENORMOUS. Bambi didn’t mind. She believed her daughter would blossom. Besides, being beautiful, Bambi didn’t overrate its power. She didn’t underrate it, but she didn’t overrate it. Bambi’s beauty had been like a savings bond procured at her birth. A nice investment. But it couldn’t, as it turned out, provide her with everything she needed.