Backstab (16 page)

Marlene went to the Bunn coffee maker to make a fresh pot. I went into my other office, the one at the newspaper that I visited as little as possible. I called Sam Sharky, the city attorney who'd been at the table with Dunright. He was in. Amazing.

“Hi, Mr. Sharky,” I said cheerfully. “I hear you're planning to dump Dunright at the press conference tomorrow.”

“Where did you hear that?” said Sharky. For once, he sounded surprised.

“I can't reveal my sources,” I said piously.

“It's Dunright,” he said. “He went whining to the press after I told him to keep his mouth shut.”

“I can't say, sir,” I said. “But you've just confirmed that it's true.”

“I won't confirm or deny,” he said, which is governmentspeak for yes. I'd quote Sharky accurately
and really upset him. Now I had one source, and I needed two for my story. I called Dorreen, my low friend in high places. She was a secretary in the mayor's press office, shoved off behind a door and a file cabinet. She knew everything and everyone. “They're dumping Dunright, right?” I said.

“Just typed the press release,” Dorreen said. “Goes out tomorrow.”

Marlene was right, but I already knew that. I wrote the column at the
CG
offices for a change, and smiled all the while I typed. I loved nailing people like Dunright. His exit was literally a back-room deal. Too bad word would get out in my column before the big press conference. If those lawyers had tipped waitresses like Marlene a little more and treated them a little better, I wouldn't find out so much. I finished the story early and sent it off to Charlie.

He came back an hour later, while I was answering some letters. “Hadley is running your column on the front page instead of in my section,” he said. “Congratulations.” He said the word as if he were spitting out something sour.

Sorry, Charlie. You'll get the credit for having a columnist who can get the big stories. But you won't be happy. I know your secret. You don't have the guts to do what I do.

Charlie used to be a good writer when he started at the
CG.
But he'd sold out his craft to become a corporate coat-holder. It was easier for him to sit in meetings and write memos than write stories. Charlie once told me he could do
the reporting, but he couldn't take what he called the three
A.M
.'s—those nagging doubts all writers have in the middle of the night: Did I spell her name right? Did I quote him right? Did I check that one last fact? We all knew the old saw: “Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers put theirs in jail. Reporters put theirs on the front page.” Everyone knew when we screwed up.

“I couldn't stand second-guessing myself,” Charlie confessed to me once, and then instantly regretted it. In his eyes, he thought he'd revealed a weakness. Now my success was a reproach to him. It increased the tension between us. Sometimes he tried to write a feature story, but his work was flat and lifeless. It lacked a point of view. He didn't have one anymore. Charlie looked like he had a lot of power, but he did as he was told.

And he'd been told to tell me I did a good job. So he swallowed his pride, and grudgingly gave me a verbal pat. I took it. “Does city desk have any questions?” I asked.

“You're fine,” he said. “Go home.” He wanted me out of his sight. I was glad to go. It was three in the afternoon. I went home early for the first time in months. Home for the last week or so had been Lyle's house. He was in the dark paneled living room, reading a Lawrence Block mystery and wearing my favorite blue sweater. He looked lean and relaxed.

I told him about my triumph, and then my failure—the fight with Babe. He thought the scene with Marlene and Babe was funny. “I'm
not laughing,” I said. “I was stupid. I shouldn't have said those things. I know Babe is a snake. He'll report everything that was said to Hadley and Charlie.”

“Come on, you're too rough on Babe,” Lyle said. “He's a pretty good guy. He'll cool off. He always does. And you didn't say anything derogatory about Hadley and Charlie, Marlene did. Besides, Babe's not going to go running to Hadley and Charlie over what a waitress at Uncle Bob's said about them. And even if he does, they have more important things to worry about.”

“But I made fun of his phone sex routine,” I said.

“So, he's a sexy writer. He'll be flattered. At least you didn't call him a closet queen, like most of the staff. Get your coat. It's too nice a day to sit around here and worry.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the zoo,” he said. “We haven't seen the bears yet this year.”

He was right. St. Louis has a really world-class zoo. It's one of the last free zoos in the country. It was also one of the few zoos where I didn't feel sorry for the animals. These weren't cages full of listless creatures. They were lively. Well, some were. An enormous brown bear was spread-eagled by the pool in his outdoor area, soaking up the rays like a sunbather. His bearish neighbors two doors down had a better idea of how to spend the afternoon. They were humping away to the cheers of the crowd.

“Three times,” said Lyle admiringly.

The male bear swatted the female playfully on the rump, and they ambled inside away from the curious humans. We went on to see the penguins.

“They're behaving in a far more dignified way,” I said.

“Must be the tux,” said Lyle.

We saw Rajah, the baby elephant, and the first elephant born at the zoo. The zoo was immensely proud of the little fellow. Then we strolled through the cast-iron outdoor birdcage, a graceful structure left over from the 1904 World's Fair. If you imagined a giant platter, the birdcage was shaped like its huge cover. The high, airy structure was big enough to house whole trees and flocks of birds. Walking through it was an exotic experience, provided you didn't take any direct hits from the flying residents. I was staring at the pink flamingos wading in the pool in the cage. They looked amazingly like the plastic ones on lawns, only not as smart.

“Hello,” said Lyle. “Are you in there?” He put his arm around me and drew me close. He smelled good, like coffee and Crabtree & Evelyn sandalwood soap. “You've been lost in thought all afternoon,” he said. “You're not still brooding about Babe, are you?”

“No,” I said. “A little fresh air blew him out of my mind. I'm thinking about Ralph and Burt.”

“You miss them,” he said.

“I do. But that's not the only reason. I keep thinking there's something wrong with their
deaths. I still believe they were murdered. You think I'm nuts on the subject, don't you?”

“Not necessarily. Why do you feel that way?”

“I don't know. There's nothing I can put my finger on. People I respect, like Mark and Marlene, give me good reasons why their deaths were what they appear to be: a stabbing during a robbery and an asthma attack.”

“But you don't think they were,” Lyle said.

“No. I don't. And I have nothing to go by but my feelings.”

“Then follow your feelings,” said Lyle.

“But all I have are some nagging doubts. Where do I go from here?”

“You're a reporter,” Lyle said. “Start asking questions. When you get the answers you want, you'll have the facts to go with those feelings.”

That was what I needed to do: treat their deaths like another story. Start interviewing the people involved: Burt's wife, Ralph's mother. I felt better now that I had a plan. I would find out who murdered them and why.

I smiled up at Lyle and picked a small bit of bird fluff off his blue sweater. “I love you,” I said. “You're wonderful.”

“I know,” he said modestly.

T
he murderer confessed the next morning. It was the Aryan Avenger. I found the letter in the mail on my desk, along with a circular for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He claimed he'd killed Ralph and Burt both.

I'd always dismissed his mindless drivel. He sent me letter after letter after Burt died, and I'd tossed them all in my Weirdo file. His cretinous brain could only hold one thought: Burt was Jewish. It was so stupid and so wrong, I'd simply ignored his primitive poetry that oozed malice like an open sore. Not this time. Not after this letter.

It even looked lethal. The lame verses and limping meters seemed murderous. The swastikas were big and black and dripping blood. The SS lightning bolts slashed down the paper like saws. The block printing had degenerated into black spikes, driven into the blue-lined paper. For once I read every rambling word. The six
suppurating lines were addressed to “Francesca, the Liberal Bitch”

What's better than two hundred dollars?

Making the JewBurt holler.

And my final solution for a filthy fag?

Breathless death. Choke and gag.

Beautiful to see. You'll thank me.

Lightning white Justice makes the Christian free.

Burt's killer took two hundred dollars from the register, but that number was never in the news. The police held back that information in their interviews with the press and I didn't print it. It could help identify Burt's killer. But the Aryan Avenger knew exactly how much had been taken. And that wasn't all he knew.

There were no newspaper stories about Ralph's death, just a brief obituary notice that didn't say how he died. So how did the Avenger know that Ralph had had a “breathless death,” choking and gagging? Unless he'd been there to see it. Did he take Ralph's inhalers and watch him die? Did he stab Burt with Dolores's butcher knife? Did he kill two men for some crazy, bigoted reason? What else was in his letters?

I got out my Weirdo file and pawed through the folder for the Aryan Avenger letters. From the postmarks, they started right after Burt's death. They were easy to pick out. The envelopes were covered with lightning bolts and swastikas. Reading them caused major mind pollution. No wonder I tossed them in the file without finishing
them. Most of the Avenger's verses were anti-Semitic insults with rhymes like “dirty Jew” and “hate you.” T. S. Eliot needn't worry that this St. Louisan was after his poetry title. The Avenger also sprinkled his work liberally (no, that's the wrong word) with insults for other minority groups: gays, Asians, African Americans, and “women's libbers.”

Otherwise, there was nothing to distinguish the Avenger from any other prejudiced pervert in the file. I looked through the stack. Most letters were block-printed and had a lot of underlinings. Some were in pencil. One was in orange crayon. My favorite nut letter was from the guy at the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It began, “Dear Francesca: I saw you on TV and you're not too fat. I would like to marry you but the doctors say I can never touch another woman again.” He planned to ignore his doctor's advice and marry me as soon as he got out. Then he sent me a poem he'd written—“Darkness and Blackness and Very Bad Smells”—that made me grab the phone and ask the hospital director if the nuptials were anytime soon.

“Oh, dear,” said the director. “He's been writing letters during recreation again.”

“Anything you can do to curtail his fun? This boy sounds scary,” I said.

“Oh, don't worry,” said the director. “He won't be getting out for a very long time. He writes letters to the President, too. The Secret Service watches him very closely.”

I hoped he wouldn't get red Jell-O for dessert for a week after the letter he wrote me.

I knew I had at least one more Aryan Avenger letter in the file. Ah, there it was, stuck on the back of a “Dear Dumb Bitch” letter in black furry ink. The writing looked like a spider had crawled over the page. This was the coffee-stained Aryan Avenger poem from the day Ralph died. I'd never gotten past the snappy opening. It began:

“Dear Whore of the
CG
: You liberal bitches are all alike….” The ink had smeared, but I could still read the rest of his epic:

Imagine a world with no more fags and kikes.

Won't it be Grand?

No, it will be by Klocke!

That poem made even less sense than the others. Was it just Nazi nonsense, or did “by Klocke” mean something? Maybe it was German for “by crackey.” It nagged at me. Klocke sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn't know what it meant. For all my German heritage, I didn't speak a word of the language. Well, a few cusswords, but that's about it. I wasn't allowed to learn German. I wanted to take it in high school, but my grandparents believed in the melting pot. “You're an American, speak English,” they said. “You don't need to know how they talk in the old country.” In the sixties, German was still the language of the vanquished enemy,
and there was no reason to speak it. Ethnicity, especially German ethnicity, was not particularly prized.

Marlene, the waitress at Uncle Bob's, knew a little German. One of her Irish uncles had married a second-generation German, and Aunt Gertrude taught her some of the language. I grabbed the letters and hit Uncle Bob's at eleven thirty, just before the lunchtime rush. I was going to have a scrambled egg twice in one day. There was no point in thinking about ordering anything else. Tom the Cook saw my car pull into the lot and dropped my egg on the grill. Marlene brought it out by the time I got to my booth.

“Couldn't stay away from us,” said Marlene. “Nobody scrambles an egg like Uncle Bob's. McDonald's offered us a million dollars for our secret recipe, but we refused to give it up.”

“I like the food,” I said. “But I really come here for the conversation. When I need to be taken down a notch, I go to Uncle Bob's.”

“Must need it a lot,” said Marlene. “You're in here all the time.”

I showed her the smeary, coffee-soaked Aryan Avenger letter. It was the color of a paper grocery bag. “Do you want me to boil this and pour it for you?” she said.

“I want you to read it and analyze it,” I said. “What do you make of this letter?”

I told Marlene the story and said I was looking for some hint as to where I could find this anonymous Aryan Avenger. “This section here
bothers me,” I said. “Why does that K-word look familiar?”

Marlene studied the crude couplet:

Won't it be Grand?

No, it will be by Klocke!

“Klocke is a South St. Louis street,” she said, pronouncing it “Clock-key.”

“That's right. It is. A short street right off Grand Boulevard. Between Merb's Candy and Giuseppe's Restaurant.”

No true St. Louisan gives an address when she can name a landmark. And maybe that's what that crazy phrase was: a way to locate Klocke Street, off Grand. I suspected the Aryan Avenger was a South St. Louisan. Klocke wasn't a street most people from any other neighborhood would ever find—or go looking for. You had to be there.

“It's a good place to start looking for the Aryan Avenger,” I said.

“What if you find him?” Marlene said. “I've seen some of those neo-Nazis in the restaurant. They're scary looking. Remember the kid with the shaved head and the swastikas on his hands the day Babe was in here? Did you see his muscles? Did you notice his boots? What if he's your killer? Do you think you can go up against someone like that?”

“If it was a fashion showdown, a DKNY pantsuit beats an old
KISS
T-shirt any day,” I said.

Marlene didn't seem impressed. “I think you should tell your cop friend, Mark Mayhew,” she
said. “The police keep tabs on those hate group guys.”

“I'm not going to have Mark tell me I'm crazy again. If the Aryan Avenger turns out to be a harmless nutcase, I'll have wasted Mark's time and confirmed his suspicions about me. Besides, I haven't found the Avenger yet.”

“What are you going to do? Walk down Klocke, listen for which house has Wagner blasting, and bust down the door?”

“You saw that movie, too,” I said. “If it is the guy in the
KISS
T-shirt, I don't think I'll hear the ‘Ride of the Valkyries' playing.”

I went back to work and finished writing my column. It was three thirty by the time I hit the button and sent it into the oosphere. There was still time to check out Klocke Street. I grabbed my coat. The elevator doors opened just as I pressed the button. What luck. Uh-oh. The managing editor, Hadley Harris the Third, stepped into the elevator as the doors were closing. I always felt uncomfortable with that man. Being caged in an elevator with him was torture. Slow torture.
CG
elevators shuddered and bumped down every floor, as if they were lowered by a hand with a rope. If I was lucky, Hadley would be in a grumpy mood, give me a curt nod and ignore me. Unfortunately, today he was going for jovial. “Well, Francesca,” he said, “are you sneaking out early, ha-ha?” He spoke with that phony-friendly headmaster's voice.

“I'm tracking down someone in deepest South St. Louis,” I said. “On Klocke. A little street
you've probably never heard of, but I hope it will be a good story and…” And I was babbling and the light indicated we had two more floors to go. At last, we landed. “Good-bye, Francesca,” Hadley said.

“Have a nice day,” I said—probably the dippiest good-bye in the language. The fact that I used it showed how rattled I was. Hadley smiled and went out the back door to his executive parking spot. I went out the front to the peons' lot. I took a deep breath. The smog, underlined with that faint beery smell, was a reviver. So was the sunny, chilly air. The unseasonably warm temperatures were gone, and the crisp cold weather made you want to go for a brisk walk. It was a good day to visit South St. Louis. I drove south on Grand. Klocke was a one-way street emptying out on Grand, and getting to it was tricky. I parked my car on Klocke and started walking. I had no idea what I would find. I just wanted to look.

The people who lived on Klocke were starting to come home from work. I saw tired-looking men in tan or blue coveralls and women in plain cloth coats made to last several seasons. This was not a street where lawyers and accountants stayed late at the office. There were no Beemers or Mercedeses in front of the houses, and nobody went out for sixty-dollar expense account lunches. People on Klocke worked hard at the plant or the office, paid their bills, and took one vacation a year, in the Ozarks.

The houses were mostly two-bedroom brick
bungalows, neat homes with small pointed-roofed porches and little slanted square lawns with steep concrete steps and metal-pipe handrails. The lawns had concrete ornaments and yellow plastic sunflowers. The trim was painted either white or green and most of the paint was fresh. So were the black SS lightning bolts next to the mailbox of the house just past the middle of the block.

Lightning bolts?

I stopped dead on the sidewalk and stared.

A long brass mailbox was bolted beside the front door, precisely even with the door knob. On either side of the box were black SS lightning bolts. They looked like the ones on the Aryan Avenger letters. I pulled the Avenger letters out of my purse and checked. The lightning bolts sure seemed similar, at least to me, standing down here on the street. I climbed the narrow concrete steps to the porch. Definitely the same lightning bolts.

The house was as well-kept as its neighbors. The back porch had a well-crafted wheelchair ramp, painted white. The front porch was white, too. So was the birdbath. The gutters were forest green. The steps were painted battleship gray. These were the classic South Side colors. A traditionalist lived here.

I rang the doorbell, and a man about forty-five answered it. He looked like he needed to sleep for a week. His black hair was thin. His hips were wide. His brown sweater was shapeless and pilled, and made his face look yellow. His shoulders
slumped, emphasizing a small round potbelly. His Hush Puppies looked like they should have been put to sleep. I bet he didn't know they were back in style. I felt tired and defeated just looking at the guy.