Backstab (12 page)

T
wo days later, the temperature shot up to fifty-five degrees. Only rags and patches of snow remained. People packed up their parking-place markers, the broken lawn chairs and death's head signs. They put away their anger, too. Janet even smiled at Melanie, but the Ladue-ite ignored her, preferring to nurse her grudge. Maybe Melanie would make a good city woman after all.

My own sadness was also going, melting like the snow. But something about Ralph's death bothered me, nagging at me like a name I couldn't quite remember. I figured if I didn't try to force it, whatever it was would come to me.

That night, I had the dream again about Ralph dying in the plaster-covered room. I saw his dusty hair. I saw his ladder. And when I woke up, I knew what I didn't see and nobody mentioned: Where was Ralph's inhaler? Even if it was empty, it would still be around somewhere.
Ralph didn't take out the trash—he drove it.

When Ralph rehabbed a house, he dumped his burger bags, chicken boxes, and soda cups in the room where he was working. When he cleaned up the room and literally shoveled out the old broken plaster, the trash went out with it. I was sure he'd toss his old inhalers in with the mess, too. And an orange-and-yellow Proventil inhaler would be easy to spot, even in that gray dust.

I went by Ralph's mother's house to ask if an inhaler had turned up in his effects. Billie did not answer the door at her little gnome's house. Instead, her gray guard, wearing the same gray dress, came to the round-topped wooden door. She was still on duty, protecting Billie from any more pain. It turned out that she was Billie's sister Dorothy from Minneapolis.

“Billie is finally asleep after a bad night,” she said in a half whisper. “I don't want to wake her up unless it's important.”

“That's all right. I don't want to bother her. I just have a question and you can probably answer it. Did any of Ralph's inhalers turn up in his things?”

Dorothy didn't ask why I wanted to know.

“No,” she said. “We got his wallet and some things back, but there was nothing like that.”

“Can I check Lucy?”

She smiled at the truck's name, then looked sad, as if remembering the man who named Lucy was dead. “Sure,” she said. “Lucy is still
parked where you left her. She's not locked. I've been meaning to go out and tape up that broken window.”

I took the hint and offered to do it for her. Dorothy sent me out armed with a roll of silver duct tape and a dark plastic garbage bag. Poor Lucy looked more forlorn and faded than ever. Along with her broken window, the front bumper seemed to have developed a definite droop on the driver's side.

I opened the door. Yeech. Even with the ventilation from the broken window, the truck smelled like old White Castles. They're good going down, but the leftovers can smell like sweaty armpits. There was a greasy bag on the seat, with a half-eaten Castle, an empty fry box, and a pile of wrappers and pickles. Next to it was an empty Big Gulp. I scooted across the seat, careful to avoid any glass chips.

God, Ralph was a slob. How could he do such exquisite work and live in the bottom of a trash barrel? Under the White Castle bag was a fragrant pile of order forms, estimate sheets, and envelopes. Stuck inside one envelope was a spiral notebook Ralph evidently used as an appointment book. I flipped through it and found some notes in pencil for the last days of his life. The whole year, fifty-two weeks, was neatly marked out by hand with a ruler. His handwriting was clear and readable, another surprise.

I saw these appointments:

“L. estimate. Tue. noon”

“Meet F. at Gr. Tues. nite.” That was Burt's wake at the Grand Funeral Home.

“Utah—Meet Ed Wed. ten
A.M
.”

Who was Ralph meeting Wednesday morning at the Utah Place job? Who was Ed? There was no clue, not even an initial for a last name, and he didn't mention anything to me. I thought guiltily about Ralph's question that I never answered. I didn't have a clue, except that it was about someone Ralph thought I worked with, and I didn't work with anyone named Ed.

I came across a Walgreens receipt for a Proventil inhaler dated the Friday before he died. But no inhaler. I did unearth a fried chicken receipt dated September 27, 1995. That's how long Ralph kept junk around. I should have found an inhaler, but there was nothing, not even a used one. I even checked the glove compartment. Ralph may have been the only person on earth who actually kept gloves in there—two pair, one wool knit and the other brown leather driving gloves.

That afternoon, I called Jamie. “I know you said Ralph didn't have an inhaler in his pocket when you found him at the Utah Place house. Was there one anywhere around, maybe on the floor or with his tools?”

“No, but I wasn't looking for one,” Jamie said. “All I saw was Ralph, lying there. Then I called 911.”

“Who owns that house?”

“A young woman lawyer, an EEOC expert. Just won that big judgment for race discrimination.
Her name is Sandra.” Jamie gave me Sandra's office number.

I had one more question. “Did you know Ralph had an appointment Wednesday morning at the Utah job with someone named Ed? Did he ever mention an Ed to you?”

“No,” said Jamie. “But we weren't close enough to trade that kind of information anymore.” He sounded sad when he said that. “Gary gave Ralph a good funeral, didn't he?”

“Yes, he did,” I said.

“I miss him,” said Jamie, and hung up before I could answer.

Sandra the lawyer returned my call at home that evening. She missed Ralph, too, for different reasons. She couldn't find anyone she trusted to finish the job on her Utah Place house. “The last contractor I talked to told me I should drop the twelve-foot ceilings and tear out that old molding,” she said. “He didn't care about my house the way Ralph did. Now I don't know what I'm going to do. I wanted to move in at the end of March, when my apartment lease is up.”

I gave Sandra a couple of rehabbers' names, then asked if she'd let me look around the house for his family, to see if he'd left anything behind.

Like an inhaler.

“Sure. You'd do me a favor if you packed up his things,” Sandra said. “There's a toolbox and a radio and some other odds and ends. I feel guilty. I should have taken them to his mother by now.”

It wasn't often I was invited to snoop. Now
Sandra regarded my nosiness as a public service. We aim to please. “How do I get in your house?”

“There's a key on a nail by the garage door,” Sandra said. “It opens the kitchen door. Have a look around, and don't forget to turn off the lights.”

I got to Utah Place about ten the next morning, and parked my Jag out front. None of the neighbors complained, even though I was wearing my oldest jeans. I knew this was going to be a dirty job. I walked around back to the garage. The garage door was not locked. There was no reason. It was empty except for a stack of rusty window screens, a garden hose, and a slab of grayish marble like you find in bathrooms in old public buildings. The key was right where Sandra said it would be.

I walked through the backyard and opened the kitchen door. The work on the first floor was finished, except for the final cleanup. I don't know much about kitchens. My favorite appliance is the phone, and I can tell you every restaurant that delivers in thirty minutes. But Sandra's kitchen was a knockout. The counter was covered with deep blue Mexican tiles. The stove looked like something you'd find in a five-star restaurant. I wondered what my scrambled egg would taste like if I cooked it on that baby. I liked the double sink, too. It looked big enough to hold a week's unwashed dishes. Everything—the counter, the stove, and the floor—was covered with a gray film of plaster dust. It's insidious, fine as face powder but gritty as sand.

I walked through a dining room paneled in dark wood and a living room painted all white. The front hall was the size of my first apartment. It was the only room on the first floor that showed the signs of Ralph's trauma. The grit on the hardwood floor was trampled with dozens of frantic footprints. Long stripes in the dust from the stretcher wheels went across the hall and up the wide, carved staircase. There were raw scrapes in the wood of the steps and a nasty gouge in the plaster on the landing where the EMS crew had swung the stretcher around the corner. Too bad they had no reason to hurry. Ralph was already dead when they arrived.

The floor of the upstairs hall and the room with the primrose paper were covered with plastic drop cloths. The wide sliding doors were open, and I could see more plastic taped over the fireplace. The plaster had crumbled into bits about the size of gravel in a driveway. It crunched when I walked. I followed the footprints and wheel marks to the room where Ralph had died. At first, I couldn't bring myself to look at the six-foot-square area by the ladder where the plaster was tracked over and pounded down. That's where Ralph had died. Instead, I looked up at the work he'd been doing. He'd knocked out almost the whole ceiling, except for about three square feet in the far corner.

Plaster is tricky. It can crack and fall on your head in the night when you're asleep. But even old, bulging ceilings can be tenacious when you try to take them down. Ralph had to beat the
stuff with a crowbar. I saw the crowbar he used, dropped on the floor. Nearby was a dented metal thermos and his battered old boom box, dusty and spattered with paint. I saw a grimy three-foot pile of Big Gulps, foam coffee cups, and White Castle bags. I saw a blue dust mask, the elastic band broken. I saw everything but an orange-and-yellow Proventil inhaler.

I began searching the room systematically. I started in the corner closest to the fireplace, sifting through the dust and debris, moving the larger chunks of plaster with the crowbar. I found Ralph's almost new red toolbox under a tarp, his tools neatly placed inside, with compartments for the duct tape, nails, screws, and washers. He was a fanatic about caring for his tools. If only he'd taken care of himself so well. I found his jeans jacket, folded next to the toolbox. I found a bag of petrified jelly doughnuts and more empty coffee cups, a can of Spackle and a Red Devil putty knife. But no inhaler.

I packed up the tools, thermos, jacket, and radio to take to his mother. Then I took a look at the aluminum stepladder. Like everything else in the room, it was coated with plaster dust. A dusty red bandanna hung on one step. A half-empty Big Gulp was on the top step. The inhaler should have been somewhere around there, too. He kept it in a pouch tied about halfway down on the ladder. Ralph had showed it to me once. “That's my medical insurance,” he said. “Right within reach, in case of emergency.”

His insurance had been canceled. The inhaler
wasn't there. But I did see the string that held the pouch. It had been cut. It was time to have a talk with my favorite homicide detective, Mark Mayhew. I waited till three o'clock that afternoon. I could usually find Mayhew in his office then, doing paperwork and drinking even worse coffee than the swill at the
City Gazette.
I called and he picked up on the first ring. “Mayhew,” he answered the phone.

“It's me, Francesca,” I said.

“Of course it's you, Francesca. I'd recognize that voice anywhere. You give great phone.” Mayhew was fun to talk to, but he never hit on me. He liked women. He loved his wife. If he fooled around, I didn't know about it. He was a lot more discreet than some of the cops, who brought their girl friends into Uncle Bob's.

“How about if I give great lunch? I have something I want to run past you. Money's no object, up to ten dollars or so. You want to go to Uncle Bob's?”

“Jeez, Francesca, don't you ever eat anywhere else? You're in such a rut.”

“I like the food.”

“Everything tastes like a pancake there. Even the coffee.”

“I like Uncle Bob's atmosphere. But if you want to go somewhere different, name it.”