Backstab (22 page)

“Todd, did Maria leave any letters or diaries or even an address book?”

“She had very few papers, and I never came
across any letters, except bills. Maria never kept a diary that I knew about. She did have an address book, but I gave it to her mother, along with all her clothes and papers and belongings.”

“Her mother burned everything.”

“Poor Maria. Her mother would, too, the miserable bitch.”

“Why did Maria enter the Gender Bender Pageant this year if she was going to quit?”

“I think she still wanted some insurance she could earn a living if this romance didn't work. She was working on a version of her new act. She was going to perform it at the pageant. It wasn't quite perfected, but it wasn't bad.”

“What was it?”

“She looked a lot like Princess Di, you know. Maria bought a knockoff of one of Di's ball gowns, and she was working on this dance routine with a guy who looked like Prince Charles. At least, he had big ears and a long nose. The new act was quite funny. Di and Charles fight onstage, and she pulls his ears, slaps his face, and boots him out, which is what most people wanted her to do to him anyway. During the fight, he strips off her long gown, and she does this hot dance in her bra and garter belt. I'm not explaining it right—it's better than it sounds. I wish you could have seen Maria. She was small and blond to begin with, but with the right makeup I could make her look enough like Di to get her into Buckingham Palace.

“I didn't tell you the best part of Maria's new act,” he said. “She was talking about taking a
new stage name to go with it. I thought it up. You know what it was? Di Tryon? Get it? Trying to be Princess Di.”

“Or died trying,” I said.

Todd told me a little about Maria. But not enough to lead me to the person who killed Ralph and Burt, and tried to kill me. Besides, something about Todd bothered me. He was pleasant and helpful and a hell of a lot more concerned about Maria than her mother. But if he really cared, and I think he did, why wasn't he worried when she dropped out of the pageant? He said it was because she'd gone off with the love of her life. But would she really leave him flat right before the debut of her new act, when they'd worked so hard together on it? Wouldn't Todd have called around to find out where she was? Or checked with her friends? Why didn't he get upset or curious? She sure didn't call and tell him where she was.

I needed to know more, and I suspected I wouldn't find it out from Todd. I called Jamie, Ralph's ex-lover. Ralph had introduced him to a lot of female impersonators, and Jamie stayed in touch with some of Ralph's friends. Maybe he'd know something.

I was lucky. Jamie was home. “It's my turn to cook dinner tonight,” he said. “Roast baby chicken with baby squash.”

“Sounds like child abuse. Ever eat anything that grows to adult size?” As soon as the words fell out of my mouth, I knew they were wrong. Jamie's snicker confirmed it. “Cancel that sentence,”
I said. “Let me start over. Hi, Jamie. I need your help.”

“Hi, Francesca. What can I do for you?”

“Ralph left me some information about a female impersonator named Maria Callous. She has a roommate-manager named Todd. I need to know more about him. Ever heard of the guy, or Maria?”

“No,” said Jamie. “But if it's important, I can do some checking.”

“It's important. I think it may have gotten Ralph killed.”

Now I had Jamie's attention. Even though he was happy with his new partner, the doctor, Ralph was still important to him. “I'll start checking now. I'm out the door.”

“You can get me at my place,” I said. “I'll be here all night. Should I call the poultry welfare department and have someone watch your baby chicken?”

“Screw the baby chicken. Domino's delivers. So will I,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Two hours later, he was on my doorstep with a fey blonde in his early twenties—a discount David Bowie. His golden hair looked like a very expensive dye job, and
he
looked like a very expensive young man in a very old profession.

“This is Jordanne,” said Jamie.

Jordanne gave me two fingers to shake. I wondered if I'd have to kiss his ring, too. He looked aghast at my grandmother's decor: the Naugahyde recliner, the lamps with the shades still in the original cellophane wrappers, and the
slipcovered davenport. The eyes of the picture of Christ over the television set followed Jordanne around the room like store security on a shoplifter. I thought Jordanne's eyebrows would disappear into his hair at Grandpa's bowling trophies. Wait till I showed him Aunt Jemima hiding the toaster under her skirt in the kitchen. Unfortunately, Jamie ruined everything. “This is Francesca's grandparents' original decor,” he said. “A New York decorator said this was the finest collection of kitsch this side of a museum.”

“Or a garage sale,” I said.

Jordanne allowed himself to give me a smile, but it was an effort. Still, he made it. After all, New York had blessed this room.

“Tell Francesca what you saw the night before Maria died,” prompted Jamie.

“It was Underwear Night at a bar on Washington Avenue,” said Jordanne.

“What's that?”

Jordanne looked like he couldn't bear to explain it to someone so unhip, so Jamie did. “You get free drinks at this gay bar if you wear only your underwear.”

“I was with an older gentleman, trying to get him to go in,” Jamie said. “He was from out of town, from Malden.” Malden was a small, rich town in the Missouri Bootheel, an area not known for its tolerance of the gay lifestyle. I'd bet the gentleman had a lot of money. And a wife and kids.

“He said he wanted me to show him some fun, but he wouldn't go for Underwear Night. He
said, ‘Son, I'm fifty-two years old. At my age I pay to keep my clothes on.' I was trying to persuade him to try it, but he refused. He did agree to go in with me, and I could take off my clothes. About that time, I heard another couple arguing in the alley next to the bar, and their argument sounded so much more interesting than ours that we both stopped and listened.

“I could hear one person yelling, ‘You're giving it away! Giving it away! I could fix you up with plenty of people who'd be happy to pay for your company, but you want to give it away.' Then we heard weeping, and the other person said, ‘But I love him.'

“The first person said, ‘He can't love you. And certainly not for yourself. Which self would that be, Maria? Does your man know you're still a man?'

“Well, at that, we couldn't resist. My gentleman and I peeped around the corner. And there was Maria Callous—I'd seen her act—arguing with her manager. She was dressed in her blue suit. Too bad they saw us. That ended the fight. But my older gentleman was thrilled by the drama, and he tipped…I mean, he was very grateful. I didn't think anything else about it until Jamie called. I didn't realize Maria was killed the next night.”

Well, well. Maria's death was indeed a loss for her manager. And he was managing both her careers. I also guess that's why there was no address book. It was a trick book. Maria's manager/pimp got rid of that incriminating evidence
before the police showed up to search her things. It was time for another little talk with Todd, and this time I didn't intend to be so polite.

Maybe that's why I didn't call when I went back this time. Or maybe I wanted to catch him off guard. He was at home, eating popcorn and watching a Judy Garland movie. He answered the door and gave me a host's smile. “Well. Francesca. Twice in one day. What an honor. What can I do for you?”

“Try telling the truth.”

Todd started to shut the door, but I stuck my foot in it. I'd had practice. “I found a witness to your fight in the alley off Washington Avenue. You were arguing with Maria. You accused her of giving it away when you could find her paying customers. You didn't want her giving up her career. You were making money managing both. You didn't want to lose your income. You didn't give her address book to her mother. You destroyed it so the cops wouldn't get it.”

“No. Yes. You don't understand.”

“I do. I understand it all.”

“No, you don't,” he said. “Yes, I burned the address book after she died. I didn't want the cops pawing through our life. Maybe they know anyway. I know they didn't seem to care much that a fag died.

“Yes, we had the fight. But only because I thought he was bad for her. He was only going to hurt her.”

“Sure. He was definitely going to hurt your income.”

“I loved Maria. I liked guiding her career. I didn't want her hurt. I was protecting her.”

“Oh, come on, Todd. If you were so concerned, why didn't you call the police when she didn't show up for the big number you'd been rehearsing? Didn't you realize something was wrong? Maybe you didn't go looking for her because you knew where she was: dead in a Dumpster. Did you murder her? Is that why you knew she wasn't going to call and tell you where she was—because she couldn't—she was dead?”

“No!” Todd almost shouted. “When she didn't show I thought she was still mad at me. I thought she was punishing me for our fight. I was mad at her for not showing. After months of work and that new outfit, it was all wasted. I was so mad I got drunk.”

“Where were you the night Maria was killed?” I'd always wanted to say that.

“Drunk in the Dungeon,” Todd said.

“The what?”

“The bar at the Louie the Ninth Motor Inn. I picked up a guy in the bar and spent four nights with him. We didn't leave the hotel. By then she was dead and buried.”

“A terrific alibi. Too bad you can't prove it.”

“But I can,” said Todd. “We were fooling around in the hotel's hot tub and we got a little rowdy. By that time, we went through a lot of white wine, and several condoms. A guest complained that we were engaged in ‘an inappropriate
public display.' I remember that because the hotel security person could hardly say it. We started laughing and that only made him madder. He wrote down a report of the incident, and we were so drunk we gave him our real names.

“It's true. You can check,” Todd said.

It was true. I had a friend who worked in PR at the hotel and she let me see the report, if I promised never to make it public. Hotel Security had problems spelling “inappropriate,” too, but he got Todd's name right.

Francesca solves the Case of the Gay Deceiver. Francesca solves everything except whodunit. Somebody killed Ralph and Burt and tried to kill me on the parking lot at Uncle Bob's. He tried to run me down the day after I talked with Marlene. Maybe we needed to figure out what we said.

T
om the Cook was waving to me at the window as I pulled into the Uncle Bob's lot at noon the next day. I was going to dare to be different. I rolled down the window and yelled as I went by, “Make me a toasted cheese sandwich.”

“Coming up,” he said.

Success! My lips were set for golden grease.

When I got inside, it was waiting for me, its greasy gold calling to me across the room. It was a wrong number. Marlene was carrying a fried egg to my booth. “I told the cook you never ate toasted cheese,” she said. “He must have heard wrong. And sure enough, that gentleman over there had asked for one. I told the cook you probably wanted a fried egg instead of a scrambled one.” I saw the man bite into my toasted cheese. There was no escaping an Uncle Bob's egg.

“Aren't you worried about cholesterol?” asked
Marlene, as she plopped the plate on the place mat.

“Nope. I'm not going to live that long. Especially not if people try to run me down. Someone tried to kill me, Marlene. We know it's not the Aryan Avenger. It's not Todd, Maria's manager. His alibi checked out. I have nowhere to go and nobody to suspect. I watch my rearview mirror constantly to see if anyone is following me. I don't get out in any parking lot unless at least two people are around. I can't go on like this. But I have no leads. The only thing I can say is that the trouble started after we had that talk here at Uncle Bob's, and Babe listened in. My guess is it had to do with that conversation Babe overheard. He repeated it to the killer, and that's who tried to run me down on your lot.”

“I can't see that we said anything to drive someone to murder, but let's try to remember what we said. I'm not real busy right now.”

We went back over the Babe conversation again. “First, I trashed Babe's writing and then said maybe he had a boy friend,” said Marlene. “I guess that was pretty nasty.”

“Nah, everybody says that,” I said. “I talked about his phone sex act.”

“Then Babe would want to kill you,” Marlene said.

“Nope,” I said. “Babe wasn't the driver. He's too tall. And Babe would never wear a black-and-red ski mask with a beige coat.”

“Then I talked about your editors coming into Uncle Bob's,” Marlene said.

“At great length. And it was very informative. I didn't know Hadley was a cheap tipper,” I said.

“I didn't say that.”

“Yes, you did. You said my editor was a cheap tipper.”

“I didn't mean Hadley, the managing editor. I mean that little squirt you work for—what's his name?”

“Charlie?”

“Yeah. Him. Sat in my station. This was a couple of weeks ago. Took up a booth on a Saturday night for two hours, drank coffee and left me a lousy fifty cents. I could have made ten dollars in tips during the time he camped out there. I should have charged him rent.”

“Charlie never struck me as a coffee drinker,” I said.

“He's not,” Marlene said. “He was waiting for someone. A little blonde I saw Hadley with later. The classy one who looks like Princess Di with a better nose. Never did figure out what she saw in Charlie, but then I couldn't figure out why Di married Charles. The man looks like a blind date.”

Princess Di? Suddenly, I could hear alarm bells going off. Was her Princess Di my Maria Callous? “Listen,” I said, “could this pretty little blonde have been a boy instead of a girl?”

“I doubt it,” said Marlene. “We get some trans-vestites in here, and I'm pretty good at figuring them out. Even when they're small-boned and have nice hands and feet, they don't hold themselves like women.”

I'd better let Marlene finish her story, before she got another rush of customers. “Anyway, Charlie and the blonde were fighting, but they shut up every time I came over with more coffee. All I could hear was that Charlie wanted her to come to his house because his wife was out of town, and she wouldn't.”

“You heard quite a bit.”

“Well, yeah. I wanted to hear more. But Hadley came in with a blowzy brunette wearing black flats, black lipstick, and some sort of sleazy flowered housedress.”

“That's the poetry editor.”

“Charlie introduced the classy blonde to Hadley. The next time Hadley came in here, he was with Charlie's blonde. I don't think that romance lasted too long.”

“They never do.”

“After that, I saw Hadley with a frizzy-haired blonde who had to be fifty if she's a day. She smokes tiny cigars and says ‘Fuck' every third word.”

“Sounds like the etiquette editor.” I bit into the yellow of the egg, and it gushed out onto my suit. I just got it back from the cleaners.

“Oh, fuck,” I said.

“Jeez, I can't take you anywhere. Let me clean it up,” said Marlene. She stuck a napkin in my water glass and began dabbing at the spot.

“So unless Babe wants to run me down for saying he has sex with a telephone, the only other thing we talked about was Charlie's latest
squeeze. And I can't see where that's a big deal. It's generally known he cheats on his wife.”

“She's prettier than most of the women I see him with,” Marlene said. “But he wouldn't keep that a secret. I'm surprised he didn't hang on to her longer. Would he pass on his girl friend to his boss to advance his career?”

“You bet. The man was famous for organizing summer float trips in the Ozarks. Charlie got the rental canoes, the beer, and the ‘sleeping bags'—the naive young women who were eager to sleep with newspapermen in the hope it would advance their careers. Needless to say, only male staffers went on Charlie's trips.”

“Did Hadley go with them?”

“Oh, yes. Then he'd write a column about how he felt closer to nature.”

“He felt closer to something,” Marlene said.

“Charlie would brag that he tried out Hadley's girl friend first. He wouldn't kill to keep it quiet. The blonde has to be the key. I'm just not sure how. I don't even know who she is, but your Princess Di is beginning to sound a lot like my female impersonator, Maria Callous.”

“I never saw her in here before—or since,” said Marlene.

“When did you last see her?”

“Early February.”

“About the time that Maria Callous disappeared. But that doesn't prove anything. Hadley and Charlie change girl friends as often as you change socks.”

Besides, it didn't seem likely that Charlie
would make the same mistake twice and date another Blow Job Betty. And if he did, he certainly wouldn't pass that mistake on to his boss, Hadley. But maybe he was so eager to score with his career he didn't keep Maria around long enough to find out what she was. Or maybe he found out a little too late, then had to kill her before Hadley discovered his mistake. But I didn't have a shred of proof. And that would be too devious even for Charlie. Wouldn't it? I had to ask better questions than that.

“I can't see what my Princess Di has to do with your murders,” Marlene was saying. “But then, I didn't think Ralph and Burt were murdered until you told me, and even then I didn't quite believe you. The next thing I know someone's trying to run you down in the parking lot—and we still don't know why.”

“All I've got are a lot of questions,” I said. “I need some answers.” I took the final bite of my fried egg. The last of the yolk that didn't wind up on my suit dribbled down my chin. Marlene laughed. “Just don't come away with egg on your face,” she said.

It was time for me to leave. After I paid, Marlene and Tom the Cook walked me to my car. I saw them standing at the kitchen door as I drove off.

I thought I should start at the beginning, with Burt. He was the first death. I called Burt's wife, Dolores, and asked if I could stop by her home in South St. Louis for a talk.

Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe it
was March, but the brick flat looked forlorn now that Burt was dead. The brown awning over the front door had sagged after a heavy snowfall, and no one had fixed it. Dolores's flower beds were muddy and clogged with dead leaves. Inside was worse. Most of the furniture was gone. The pictures, dishes, and knickknacks were packed away in boxes, and I saw how scuffed and scarred the walls were. The only thing that stayed the same was the bank calendar. Saturday was circled and marked “MOVING DAY!!!”

Dolores was leaving the old neighborhood. She'd lost weight since Burt's death, but she didn't look good thin. Nature meant her to be fat and jolly, and she wasn't either right now. But she tackled widowhood as briskly and capably as she handled the cooking at Burt's Bar. She sat me down at her kitchen table, poured us both some coffee, and told me her plans. “I've put the bar up for sale,” she said. “I'm renting the flat and moving to Sunset Hills in South County.”

“That's where South Siders go when they get rich,” I said, and smiled. But my mild joke didn't register.

“Burt left me well fixed,” she said seriously. “He heard enough stock tips behind the bar. After a while, he became good at investments. I can't stay here at the flat anymore. Every time I look around, I see Burt. I see him sitting in his big old chair in the living room. I see him at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. I see him in the hot tub.” I looked at her, remembering what Burt said about the good times they'd had in
that tub. She must have read my mind. She blushed.

“The new house in Sunset Hills is nice,” she said, but she didn't sound enthusiastic. “It's bigger than this place. I want enough bedrooms for my grandbabies, so they can stay overnight when they visit. I'm getting new furniture, too. I had the Salvation Army haul off the old living room suite. When they took it away, I felt like I was burying Burt all over again. But if I'm going to make it without him, I have to get away from our old life.”

Now the briskness was gone. Dolores seemed soft and sad and vulnerable. She and Burt had built a good life together, and someone destroyed it with a few thrusts of a knife. She missed Burt terribly.

“Dolores, what do you remember about the day Burt died? Was anything different? Do you know who was in the bar when Burt was closing for lunch?”

She shook her head. “It was just another day,” she said. “We had a good lunch business, but most of our customers are gone by one o'clock. They have to get back to work. At one thirty, I saw a couple of tables were still occupied, but they were just businesspeople having a last cup of coffee. I didn't get a good look at any of them. There wasn't anything special to notice. I'd cleaned up my kitchen and my wagon was draggin'. I wanted a nap. Burt said he'd close up and I should go on home. I slipped out the back door. That's the last time I saw him. I didn't even
say good-bye. I should have stayed. If I had, maybe he'd be alive. But I wanted a nap. Now it's all I do.” She began to cry. I felt like a creep asking more questions that would hurt her, but I had to know.

“Do you think he was murdered for the money in the register?”

“Why else would anyone murder Burt?” she said, snuffling and blowing her nose. “He had no enemies. He was a harmless old man. I loved him all my life, but he wasn't important in the great scheme of things. He wasn't what Babe called a mover and shaker. He poured drinks for the movers and shakers.

“We were both grateful for what you wrote. Before your Best Saloon in St. Louis contest, Burt was just a bartender in an old city saloon, and some of the kids were kind of embarrassed by him because they'd gone to college and everything. Then you did those stories about Burt and everyone came to his bar. The Mayor himself drank there, and an alderman who wasn't even running for office in this ward, and Hadley Harris and a bunch of other newspaper people.”

That got my attention. “Who else from the
Gazette
?”

“I can't remember his name, but he said he was an important editor there. He said he'd discovered you.”

“What did he look like?”