Backstab (19 page)

“You may now kiss,” he concluded.

Edna and Elvis did kiss, a dreamy kiss with their eyes closed, like teenagers on a date. They looked so happy, I envied them. The whole office applauded.

I stuck around while the minister did the paperwork and we witnesses signed some stuff. Then I shook some hands, stuck a few chips in
the dips, congratulated the newlyweds, and left. I felt oddly lonely. I couldn't talk with Lyle. He was at the university. This was his late day. He had classes until nine thirty at night. I had nothing to do but find a murderer.

Fit-Mor was a few blocks from Billie's house. I might as well start with Ralph's mother. I drove down Hampton Avenue to Billie's house. This was one of my favorite sections of South St. Louis. Most cities put their workers in plain ugly boxes—a prelude to their long-term residence in a plain pine box. But St. Louis workers lived in houses made with style and imagination, brick bungalows with delightful details: a brick arch over a front door, a small stained-glass window, stone trim on the porch.

Billie's neighborhood always gave me the feeling I'd entered an enchanted forest. The steep peaked roofs of the small brick homes looked like they belonged in a German fairy tale. And Billie, who had seemed much too young to be Ralph's mother, was a blond enchantress who'd cast a spell so she wouldn't grow older.

The spell was broken at Ralph's death. The woman who came to the door of the enchanted brick bungalow could have been Billie's mother. Her small and shapely figure had shrunk so it looked like an empty sack. Billie didn't care anymore. She was suffering horribly after her son's death.

Billie's gray bodyguard, her sister Dorothy, had gone back home to Minneapolis. Billie was alone now. She looked like she'd been sleeping,
and my knock on the door woke her up. “I was going to call you,” she said, “but I just don't have the energy these days. I sleep all the time, but I never feel rested. Ah, well, you don't need to hear that. Can I get you some coffee or a beer?”

I said coffee was fine. We sat at the kitchen table, where South Siders feel most comfortable. I was pleased. The living room was for company, the kitchen for close friends. After we settled in with our coffee mugs, Billie said, “I have something for you from Ralph.”

I must have looked startled because she said, “It wasn't a bequest. Ralph didn't leave anything but bills and that old truck and it cost me to have it hauled away. This was something he wanted to give you before he died. Ralph was going to drop it by your office, but he got distracted and left the envelope on my kitchen table. Before he could pick it up and take it to you, he died.”

I looked at the envelope and smiled. Ralph had removed the postage and pasted a sticker with my name over the previous name. That was Ralph. He believed in recycling. “I'll read it later, unless you want a look now.”

“No, take your time. He was always clipping newspaper articles and cartoons and crazy stuff for you. But I'm not sure I want to see it. I think I've cried all I can.”

I could feel her sorrow. It sat in the room with us, as if it was another presence. I wanted to pour it a cup of coffee, it seemed so real. I put the envelope away for later. I had something I
wanted to ask her, and I didn't want any distractions. “Did you ever wonder why there were no inhalers found near him? Do you think someone removed his inhaler and that's why he died?”

“I would love to believe someone killed Ralph,” she said. “But I know my son too well. He killed himself with his carelessness. He'd get caught up in a job, and that's all he'd think about. He wouldn't stop to get an inhaler.”

“But he was afraid of dying of asthma.”

“He was afraid of dying of AIDS, too, but he chased after a drag queen who was unfaithful to him,” Billie said.

I must have raised an eyebrow. I can't keep the unruly things down.

“I knew Ralph was gay,” his mother said. “We talked about it. I asked him if he practiced safe sex, and he said safe sex was almost as bad as no sex at all. I lectured him, I really did, but he didn't listen. He told me the risk was what made it so exciting. He said he didn't want to die an old man. Well, he got his wish.”

It sounded harsh when she said it. I wondered if under that sorrow, she was angry at her son.

“Ralph took risks,” Billie said. “It was just the way he was. I've asked myself again and again how I could have brought him up differently, so he wouldn't take chances. But if I had, then he wouldn't have been Ralph.

“I guess I did the right thing. I let him live the life he wanted, and I didn't interfere. It is the biblical curse, you know, to outlive your child. If only he'd had some of his brother's caution.”

His brother had plenty to spare. I remembered Jonathan, the Brooks Brothers poster child, and his boring wife, Rebecca, from the wake. They were so cautious they were lifeless. Ralph wasn't the only stiff in the room.

Billie stared into her coffee cup. The coffee was growing cold, but she hardly drank any of it. She went on as if she were talking to herself instead of to me. “Maybe I encouraged Ralph to be wild in reaction to my straight son. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I don't know. I love both my boys and they are so different.

“Did someone take Ralph's inhaler? No.” As she said this, her gray eyes came alive and I saw a flash of the beautiful Billie of old. “But I'll tell you this much. I'd love to have someone else to blame, so I could quit blaming myself. But I don't think I will ever stop.”

I could hardly look at her sorrow-ravaged face. I left her sitting at the kitchen table, and let myself out. I took the envelope with me and went home to Lyle's house. He wouldn't be home for hours yet, but I wanted to see what was in Ralph's envelope. I set it down on the couch, while I lit a fire in the fireplace. Might as well get comfortable. Big gray Monty sat down firmly on Ralph's envelope. I moved the cat's dozen pounds of muscle. He jumped down and began playing with my shoestrings. When I opened the envelope, Monty began batting something across the carpet, but I didn't pay much attention to him.

The first thing out of the envelope was a “Far
Side” cartoon. It showed a herd of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes. “Why the dinosaurs are extinct,” it said. I laughed. Ralph and I were dinosaur buffs, and we'd been discussing the latest theories on what killed them. Trust Ralph to have the last word on the subject—or in this case, the last laugh.

There was also a souvenir program for the Miss American Gender Bender Pageant, the one we went to together, a thousand years ago. It was folded open to the page where the queens and pageant winners wish one another well in large ads. I thought again how girlish their congratulations looked—they could have come straight, if you'll pardon the word, from a Junior Miss program. Ralph had circled one full-page color ad. It said: “Good luck to the sweetest girls in the world. You're all winners, no matter how the pageant turns out.” It was signed “Maria Callous, the Ass with Class—Last Year's Third Place Winner, Miss American Gender Bender Pageant.”

The picture showed a petite, pretty blonde, surprisingly subdued for an impersonator. Maria didn't go in for the usual outrageous sequin outfits and dramatic makeup. In the photo, she was dressed like a young woman going to tea at her fiancé's family mansion for the first time. Maria was looking coyly over her shoulder. She wore a navy-blue suit with a little bow at the back, to set off the Ass, and I had to admit it had Class. She wore white gloves to give her hands class, too. Even her hair was classy. Instead of
the usual wild mane of curly red, blond, or black hair, she had a silky blond wedge cut. Maria looked rather like Princess Di, as I remembered Ralph saying at the pageant. He'd also said Maria was a no-show. Ralph thought she dropped out of the pageant rather than risk her title.

Why had Ralph circled that ad in the program? Maybe her act was a little different, but under the suit was one more drag queen.

There was something else in Ralph's envelope. A
City Gazette
“Police Notes” column. The one Rita the Retiree read to me on the phone. Rita insisted there was a story in that item, and I'd told her no, because I really didn't want to go up against Hadley's current smut campaign.

Now it looked like Ralph agreed with Rita. He'd circled the same small item that fascinated the salty retiree. It began: “Police found the body of a prostitute in a Dumpster in the 700 block of Bedler St. An autopsy showed the person had been beaten and strangled and was undergoing a sex change. The victim was 22, and believed to be taking female hormones. The name has been withheld pending notification of the victim's family….”

What made Ralph circle that item? And why did he have Maria's ad circled? I looked inside the envelope but there wasn't anything else. Then I noticed that Monty was batting a yellow Post-it note around on the floor. I grabbed it away from the cat when I recognized Ralph's neat, precise writing. The note said: “Francesca—Do you think this is Maria?”

Did I think what was Maria? Oh, did I think the dead hooker was Maria, and she got her classy ass dumped in a vacant lot? That might be another reason why she dropped out of the pageant without a word—she was murdered. Ralph was wired enough in to that world to pick up any rumors. He would have asked me to check them out.

I could, too. What time was it? Almost seven. Good. Not too late. Time to saddle up the Jag and head for the
Gazette.
I started to leave Lyle a note—“Off to the morgue. Won't need dinner.”—but when I read it over I decided maybe it would be better if I didn't leave a note. I sounded like a member of the Addams Family. Maybe I'd call him from the paper.

By seven o'clock the first deadline on the paper was over. It was another half hour for the second edition. That's the edition for corrections and additions and late-breaking news stories. This was the newsroom at its most serious, when everything—and everyone—worked. The sniping and backstabbing were at a minimum at this time. People were too busy. They were on the phone correcting or chasing down stories. Editors were reading at their computers or checking proofs. Charlie was gone for the day, but I could see Hadley reading page proofs at his desk. The newsroom had a sense of purpose and a high energy level. It was exhilarating to be in the room then.

But I wasn't going to be working in the newsroom tonight. I headed to the morgue—the
newspaper reference library. I always wondered if it was called the morgue because nothing is deader than old news. The
Gazette
morgue had newspaper clipping files dating back to the 1890s. For the last ten years, the newspaper stories were kept in the computer.

The people who work back there are not morgue attendants. They're reference librarians, and the
Gazette
had some good ones. Unfortunately, the paper, which suffered from chronic stinginess, cut back on its morgue staff when the reference library went on computer. The paper's money men reasoned that the news staff could do their own checking on the computer and save the cost of several reference librarians.

It was a nice theory, but most reporters were only so-so at the intricacies of the computer system. We made some colossal bloopers because we didn't know the fine points of searching the system. Once an error got into a story, and that story got into the reference system uncorrected, it stayed that way. The most famous example was a local politician with the name of Waavermann. Some reporter spelled his name the way it sounded—Waverman—which is the name Waavermann would have gone by if he'd had any decency or compassion for the press. Anyway, the wrong-way Waverman got into the computer system and became the rock that many a reporter crashed on. The last time I looked, Waavermann had his name misspelled at least eighteen times, more times than he had it spelled right. And unless you knew how to look
for the correct spelling, a skill most reporters never mastered, you'd check the name Waverman in the reference computer, see that it had racked up an impressive number of hits, and assume it was the correct spelling.

I didn't rely on my computer skills when I worked on something important. I threw myself on the mercy of the reference librarian. Fred was on tonight, and he was good. He was also cute. His hair was permanently mussed from running his fingers through it, and he had freckles on his nose. He frowned at the “Police Notes” clip I showed him.

“Fred, was there a follow-up on this story on the murdered prostitute? Did the
Gazette
ever print the victim's name?”

Fred typed several key words into his computer, hit a button, and waited. “No follow-up,” he said.

“Sure the information wasn't misfiled?”

“Nope,” he said, “Nothing. The story was dead and dropped—just like the hooker.”

Next I talked with Tina. She was still at her desk. Tina is a tall, handsome African American reporter who covers the city police beat. She could have risen higher at the paper, but she had no patience with the
CG
office politics. Tina liked writing and reporting and digging for facts. She hated playing games and toadying to editors. Police beat suited her. She did her job accurately and well. I pulled up a chair and showed her the “Police Notes” column.

“Sure, I remember that story,” Tina said. “I
did a follow-up with the victim's name, and Hadley killed it.”

“Why? Was he on one of his smut rampages?”

“You got it. Said the name didn't belong in a family newspaper. The victim's mother called Hadley up after the first item appeared and said she'd suffered enough. He told me he killed the story out of compassion for the mother. Ask me, he was looking for an excuse. You know how weird he gets about sex in general and sex and murder in particular. It wasn't a big story, so I didn't protest too much.”

“Do you remember the victim's name?”