Backstab (2 page)

Rita called me from her home on Gannett. She lived in a brick one-story shotgun house, so called because you could fire a shotgun through the front door and hit all three rooms. First there was the living room, with a huge TV and a maroon three-piece furniture suite, protected by plastic slipcovers. The TV had a rabbit-ears antenna, with aluminum foil on the ends for better reception.

Next came the bedroom, with a Bassett bedroom set and a pink chenille bedspread. She bought them when she married Ray, who'd passed away ten years ago last March, God love him.

But she lived in her warm cozy kitchen, with the big Chromcraft kitchen set, the permanently percolating coffeepot, and the pride of Rita's life, her collection of salt-and-pepper shakers from all fifty states in a tall glass display case. She'd spent a lifetime collecting the twin igloos from Alaska, the cacti from Arizona, the pair of red barns with corks in the bottom from Connecticut—all the way down to twin cheeses from Wisconsin and two buttes from Wyoming. Every
week Rita took them all out, dusted them and admired them and put them back in their proper places. When she talked on the phone, she fixed her rocking chair so she could watch them glitter and sparkle, especially the ones made from Arkansas fool's gold.

Rita's smoke-cured voice rasped through the phone line with her usual opening, “Honey, did you see the paper today?”

“Yes, Rita.” Here it comes.

“How can they call it a newspaper, when it doesn't have any news? The whole front section is six pages, and four of them are department store ads. And the two big front-page stories are a disgrace. One is called ‘Over Easy: 9-Year-Old Boy Breakfasting at Shoney's Saves 6 Kittens Loose on the Interstate.' ”

I'd wondered about that one myself. The kitten story was about a Chesterfield kid who was staring out the window, eating pancakes and tuning out a lecture from his mother, when he saw a semi make a left turn into a vet hospital van on the access road. The doors popped off, and six frightened kittens popped out. The kid left his breakfast to get cold, ignored his mother when she told him to sit back down, climbed a chain-link fence, and ran into rush hour traffic to save the kittens from being run over. The smiling blond boy was photographed on the front page with a rescued kitten on his head.

“Who the hell cares?” said Rita. “I mean, I wouldn't want the kittens gettin' squashed, but
should your paper encourage children to run into traffic?”

I didn't have to answer that question. Rita went straight into why the other major front-page story bothered her. It had a four-column photo of a weeping black woman, collapsed in the arms of eight of her children, after she heard that her twelve-year-old son was shot in a police raid on a North Side crack house. The story said the kid fired an Uzi at a cop, and the police fired back.

The story began, “Etta Mae has endured much, including her first pregnancy at age 15 and the misery of living on welfare with nine children. But today she had another burden laid on her ample shoulders. Her son, Tyronne, 12, was gunned down, possibly by St. Louis police, during a raid on an alleged crack house….”

Rita was not going to grieve about a dead crack dealer, even if he was twelve. She hated them all. Their desperate young customers had mugged her twice on her way home from her afternoons at the Peppermill. The second time, she held on to her purse so hard she broke her wrist when the kid yanked it out of her hands. Now her afternoons included the added cost of a cab. A tipsy retiree was a target.

“And then they're putting that trashy woman with her dead drug-dealing son on page one,” Rita snapped. “Doesn't your paper do any stories about churchgoing black people? I worked with a lot of them at City Hall, and believe me, they held down two and three jobs to send their sons
and daughters to college. They raised up fine doctors and lawyers and accountants. But not if you read the
Gazette.
All black people are drug dealers and suffering welfare mothers.”

She was warming to her subject. I glanced at the clock: four thirty-five. I had to go soon. I had less than an hour and a half to finish my column.

“Where's the news in my newspaper?” raged Rita. “What's going on in the Middle East? What's Congress up to? What's happening in Mexico after we signed that stupid trade agreement? Why can't I find out what's going on in the world?”

Because the
City Gazette
paid half a million dollars to a group of consultants, who concluded readers wanted local news. If the paper had spent half a million dollars on news staff, they could have had outstanding local stories. But the
CG
didn't want to hire more reporters. So they stuck to murders and kitten rescues, which were cheap and easy to do. They also played to some readers' prejudices: White suburban kids saved kittens. Black city kids sold drugs.

But I couldn't tell Rita that. I didn't have to. She answered her own question: “They're too cheap to do real reporting,” she said. I was always amazed at how much readers figured out by themselves.

“And they've missed the real story. It's right there, right in front of them, buried in their own paper.”

“Where?” I said. If there was a story going loose, I wanted it.

“Check the ‘Police Notes.' The second item under ‘City Murders.' ”

I hunted around for a daily paper, turned to page five-A, and read the single fine-print paragraph: “Police found the body of a prostitute in a Dumpster in the 700 block of Bedler St.”

Hmmm, that address was right by the paper. Also right by the projects. It was a desolate area with empty weed-and-brick-studded lots and soon-to-be-razed buildings. The burned-out shells had the intense blackened look of insurance fires. A lot of bodies were found around Bedler Street.

“An autopsy showed the person had been beaten and strangled and was undergoing a sex change,” the article said.

“Wow!” I said, “That would put a strain on anybody.”

“Don't laugh,” huffed Rita. I could almost see her chin wobbling indignantly. “It says here the deceased was twenty-two, had bosoms, was taking female hormones, but still hadn't had his whatchamacallit cut off.”

That's not quite how the paper phrased it, but Rita caught the spirit. The managing editor, Hadley Harris the Third, was a nineteenth-century prude in a twentieth-century job. He wore hand-tied bow ties, parted his thinning hair in the center, and wrote editorials about family values, Republican virtues, and the joys of raising his two daughters.

What most readers didn't know was, Mr. Family Values ran around on his wife. At first I dismissed the gossip about Hadley. Sure, I'd see him with a female staffer a few times, and then she'd be promoted, but I just thought he was getting to know her. He was. I didn't know how well until I covered an undertakers' convention at the Riverside Inn downtown. I was supposed to interview a “grief counselor” in a seventeenth-floor suite. As the elevator doors opened, I saw Hadley and a mousy-looking city desk reporter coming out of suite 1710. Hadley was tying his bow tie, so I knew it wasn't a clip-on, and smooching Miss Mouse on her round little ear. I ducked back into the elevator, hit the down button and hoped they didn't see me. Three weeks later Miss Mouse got the coveted job of consumer reporter. I wondered what she consumed to get that promotion.

A true Victorian, Hadley felt what you said was more important than what you did. Hadley treated readers as if they were sheltered maidens, too delicate to withstand modern life. Nothing improper—i.e., interesting—was allowed to sully the
City Gazette
's pages. With Hadley on one of his prude watches, I was surprised the sex-changing prostitute made the paper at all, even a paragraph in the “Police Notes.” Hadley was constantly lecturing me on good taste. Our latest run-in was when I mentioned in a column that a grocery store clerk found a used condom draped over a grapefruit. I thought this was a funny vignette about city life. Hadley Harris
read it on a page proof and almost needed smelling salts to revive.

“Not in my newspaper,” he screamed. “Get it out. Out. Out.” You'd have thought a rat had run over his desk. I could see his scalp turning pink through the thinning hair. That was a bad sign.

“Hadley, don't cut the condom,” I said. “It will be talked about.”

“That's not the kind of discussion I want my paper to create,” he said. “A Hadley Harris paper has principles. We don't pander to interest in smut.”

I wondered if Hadley used condoms for his assignations. I wondered if I could still make my Visa payment if I told the skirt-chasing hypocrite to stuff it. Sigh. Why did I argue? It was useless. There was no way I could explain to Rita we were lucky to see one paragraph on the dead prostitute in Hadley's paper. There was no way to explain Hadley.

“There's a story there. Aren't you curious?” said Rita.

“The victim is a prostitute. Lots of them get killed.”

“I still think it's a story,” grumped Rita. “I bet a customer found out she was a he and killed her. Remember BJ Betty?”

Rita couldn't bring herself to say Blow Job Betty, as BJ was really called, not even after two beers.

“Of course I remember Betty,” I said. “I told you the story.”

“Tell it to me again,” she said, like a teacher
prompting a not-very-smart student. “Maybe it will convince you this is a story.”

“It happened last summer,” I said. “Betty hung around the Last Word.”

“The newspaper bar,” said Rita.

“Right.”

“I've never been there,” she said.

“You haven't missed a thing. The Word is a dingy place where the staff goes to complain about editors and talk about what they would do if they ran the paper. The draft beer tastes off because Terry, the bartender, doesn't keep the lines clean. The tables wobble and have match-books under the legs. The tops are sticky with old spilled drinks and the ashtrays overflow. The floor crunches and rustles with empty peanut bags, spilled chips, and dropped pretzels.”

“Sounds like a lot of old bars,” Rita said.

“It's not. It has a mean and nasty atmosphere. You go there to gripe and grouse, get drunk and cheat. I stay away from the Last Word, unless I want to get really depressed. But I was there the night BJ Betty's story broke. Betty was a brassy little blonde with a haystack of bleached hair. She always wore a tight black skirt and red spike heels. She had knobby knuckles and long red nails. The red-painted nail on her little finger glittered with a rhinestone. Betty had oddly big, bony feet for someone so small, but I doubt the guys got much past her bulging blouse.”

“They never do,” sniffed Rita.

“Betty's name was her specialty. She had oral sex with a lot of reporters, copy editors, phone
clerks, and even a few printers in the back of her white Cadillac. It was kind of a ritual. Betty would come in, order a strawberry daiquiri, which Terry the bartender always grumped about making. Terry hated froufrou drinks.”

“He probably didn't want to clean the blender,” said Rita, who used to work part-time at a bar.

“Betty's order was the signal for one of the guys to sit down beside her. If Betty liked him, and the woman made Will Rogers look like a snob, she'd let him pay for her drink. After a couple of rounds, the guy would ostentatiously escort Betty, a little wobbly now on those red heels, out the back door to the parking lot. About half an hour later, he'd come back alone, grinning.”

“Hah. Men. They're all alike,” said Rita.

“Charlie was one of her regular escorts,” I said, trying to continue. The beer was definitely taking its toll on Rita.

“Is he that little short, balding shit I met that time I toured the paper?” growled Rita.

“Some of my best friends are short,” I teased her. “Anyway, these days we say Charlie is vertically challenged.”

“That's not the problem. He has mean, shifty eyes. I don't trust him.”

I didn't either, but I'd had to find out the hard way. I never could figure out how Rita sized the little creep up so fast.

“Charlie said he liked BJ Betty because he didn't have to lie to The Wife. I never heard
Charlie use the woman's first name. Maybe she was baptized The. ‘If The Wife asks me if I've ever slept with Betty, I can tell her no. Well, I didn't sleep with her, did I?' he said, winking. ‘I didn't go to bed with her, either.' ”

“See, a sneaky little shit,” said Rita. It sounded shocking coming out of her mouth. She used the S-word only on her Peppermill afternoons.

“Some guys would ask Betty for a little more than oral sex and she would say, ‘Oh, no, honey. Not today. It's my time, you know.' Few complained. They'd rather have Betty's specialty anyway.

“One night five or six guys got to bragging in the bar about Betty's talented tongue. One of them mentioned he wanted to go all the way, but Betty said it was ‘her time' this week.

“ ‘Yeah? She told me it was her time last week,' said Dick.

“ ‘She told me it was her time the week before that,' said Jim.

“ ‘Who cares?' said Charlie. ‘She'll never come whining to you that she's pregnant.'

“A fat old beat cop who used to work the Stroll was listening to this conversation. He started laughing. I suspect he was ticked off because the
Gazette
had just done its Doughnuts to Diners exposé, revealing some city cops had free doughnuts or dinners at local diners. The owners gave them free food because there were fewer holdups in a diner full of blue uniforms.”

“That series was a real revelation,” said Rita,
sarcastically. “A lot of good cops got stung because they ate a burger.”

I didn't want to hear about it anymore. I continued my story.

“Anyway, the fat cop said, ‘If you get Betty pregnant, you'll wind up in the
Guinness Book of Records.'