Backstab (5 page)

Hadley was sitting behind his desk. He hadn't taken a chair in his conversation group by the Mergenthaler Linotype machine. Another bad sign. He did not want a friendly chat. Charlie stood alertly beside him. He was so short, his head barely came to the top of Hadley's tall leather chair.

Hadley did the talking. “You have done your best to undermine the management of this newspaper,” he said, his face pink with anger.

I thought the editors did a good job of undermining themselves. But for once I didn't answer back.

“This is the second time this month you've tried to sneak smut into a family newspaper,” he said, making it sound like I was corrupting little children. “It is bad enough that you write about perverts. But now you're insulting the African American community.”

“I am?” I said, genuinely bewildered. “How?”

“Chocolate Suicide,” said Charlie, helpfully. He was eager to elaborate. “We read your column and then looked at Jimbo's pictures. This Chocolate person is African American.”

“Yes?” I still didn't get it.

Hadley said, “At a time when the leaders of the African American community are demanding that their people be portrayed with sensitivity and dignity, you have featured a sexual deviant. In my newspaper. I am sick of your sick mind.”

His voice had grown higher, his face pinker. The guy really was a wimp. In two seconds he was going to start pounding his desk. It's the only trick he knows for looking strong. “I am sick of your smut, smut, smut,” he said, pounding his desk until he sent an avalanche of papers to the floor. Naturally, Charlie bent over and picked them up.

“Chocolate Suicide is a self-created work of art, and a performer with great energy and style,” I said. “I thought I treated her and the other female impersonators, black, white, and Asian, with dignity and sympathy. But if you're concerned, I can make whatever changes you suggest.”

“I am making one change,” snapped Hadley. His color turned from delicate pink to dangerous red, and his voice rose to a teakettle scream. “I am killing your disgusting column. Killing it, do you hear? Get another subject by six o'clock and make it a wholesome one. I'm putting you on notice now. I don't want you writing about perverts, smut, or sex. I want family values in my newspaper.”

“I'll make sure, sir,” said Charlie, and I could swear the little creep was smirking.

I left Hadley's office. The newsroom was
strangely quiet. People were pretending to type and to talk on the phone, but no one looked my way. That meant they heard every word Hadley screamed at me.

I sat down at my desk, dazed and furious. The phone rang. It was Georgia. “He killed your column, didn't he?” she said.

“Yes. You were right. Charlie used it as a chance to run into Hadley's office and start trouble. I know he's the one who got Hadley fired up. Tried a new tack this time—I'm guilty of writing smut AND insulting the African American community.”

“That is a new one,” said Georgia. “I'll have to watch the little insect. Offending the African American community is the newest newsroom witch-hunt. A few charges of racism and you're in trouble, whether they're true or not.”

“I have three hours to come up with another column, and I'm too angry to think straight,” I said. “What am I going to do?”

“Something will turn up,” she said. “It always does.”

She was right about that one, too. When I picked up the phone to make a call I heard the soft
boop boop
sound that means there's a message on my voice mail. It was Burt's wife, Dolores. I hadn't spoken to her in six months, but I remembered her as a salty, hearty woman who talked a blue streak. Now she formed each word slowly, as if she could hardly talk. Her normally cheerful voice was a dull croak. “Francesca. Dolores. It's Burt. He's dead. I hate to
bother you, but I need you to come to the bar. There's TV people runnin' around all over here. You know those people. You can talk to them. Please? For Burt?”

No. Not Burt. The room slipped sideways. I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut. I just saw him last night, and he looked fine. I knew he was seventy years old, and a heart attack could happen anytime at that age, but Burt looked so sturdy. He never missed a day of work. He was always there behind his bar, and as long as he was alive, so was a little piece of my grandparents' neighborhood, the South Side, the world I grew up in.

I knew the old South Side was dying. Some would say it was already dead. The tough old Germans who'd lived there were gradually dying off. The city called them the Scrubby Dutch, a corruption of “Deutsch,” the word for German, for their maddening habit of cleaning everything. For the Scrubby Dutch, cleanliness wasn't next to godliness. It was better.

They were hardheaded, hardworking people with an earthy sense of humor. They staffed City Hall and ran the shops and saloons. They lived in small brick houses with neat zoysia grass lawns. They had character. They
were
characters. They were my people and I never felt at home around anyone else. Now the last of them were Burt's age or better. They were dying or retiring to Florida or moving into the Altenheim nursing home. Their children had left for the suburbs years ago. Their South Side houses were being bought by people never seen before
on the South Side—young married rehabbers, gay couples, Asian immigrants, and middle-class blacks. Those people gave the South Side a new richness and variety. But some of the newcomers weren't an improvement. They bought South Side houses and flats cheap, and turned them into rundown investment properties. These greedy landlords rented to drug dealers, muggers, and hookers, male and female. The safe, solid German neighborhoods were disappearing, especially in the area where Burt and Dolores lived. Dolores had been after him to move his bar to the suburbs, but Burt wouldn't leave his beloved city, no matter how much it changed.

“I was born here, and I'll die here,” he'd say. And so he did. The stubborn South Siders generally did what they wanted, no matter what it cost them or the people who loved them. I sighed. It didn't matter that I saw Burt maybe twice a year. I was crazy about the obstinate old guy. They didn't make them like Burt anymore.

I had to park two blocks away, there were so many vehicles in front of Burt's Bar: at least four police patrol cars parked at odd angles, six unmarked cars, a white police evidence van, an orange-and-white EMS ambulance, and three TV trucks. They must have picked up the news from the police scanner. Actually, the TV reporters and camera people were behaving very well, considering this was the murder of a newsworthy figure. They were shooting stand-ups and footage of the building and interviewing passersby. Plainclothes officers were doing door-to-door
interviews. Scene commanders—uniformed officers in blinding white shirts—were giving television interviews.

All the cameras swung to the front of the building as the door opened. They were taking Burt out of his bar as I walked up to the brick building. The man who loomed so large in life made a pitifully small bundle in the white body bag. I felt strangely numb watching them take him away. The blackness began closing in on me in an odd honeycomb effect, with red around the edges. Just before I slid down the brick wall to the sidewalk, I heard a voice call me from far away: “Francesca, are you okay?”

That brought me back. The blackness cleared away, and I saw that Homicide Detective Sergeant Mark Mayhew had me by the arm. An old-style homicide detective who looked like his wife bought his clothes on sale at JCPenney in 1977—just before she left him. Mayhew belonged to the new breed. He looked like an artsy monochrome ad in
GQ
: steel-gray cashmere jacket, a pearlgray sweater so soft you wanted to pet it, perfectly cut charcoal pants. Dynamite tailoring. Decent guy, too.

“I'm a little dizzy. I didn't eat any lunch,” I said.

We both knew why I had almost passed out. But Mayhew was a good man, so he didn't remind me. As for me, I would think about it later. Right now, I had to see Dolores. “For some reason, Dolores called me,” I said. “She said she
needed help with the TV people, but they don't seem to be a problem.”

“She probably didn't want to be alone with strangers. It will take a while for her son to get here from way out in Chesterfield,” said Mark. “But you know these old krauts—too proud to ask for help straight out.”

Mark steered me around the yellow Police Line tape, and inside the bar. I recognized the homey smell of chicken and dumplings, the day's special, still chalked on the board by the cash register. Dolores was sitting in one of the back booths, but the big, robust woman I knew wasn't there. She seemed to have shrunk. Her jolly round body looked flabby. Her face seemed to sag and run, like melting wax.

“I told him and I told him this neighborhood wasn't safe,” Dolores said to the two uniformed officers sitting with her. I could tell she'd been repeating this story, like a continuously running tape.

“But he wouldn't listen. He sent me home at one thirty when we stopped serving lunch, we only live a block away, you know, and he said he'd close up. Lunch is over at two and it takes ten minutes to close up. He should have been home by two fifteen. He always is. We reopen at four. He needs his rest in the afternoon, he's not so young anymore. When I didn't hear from him by two thirty I called over here and there was no answer. He could have been on his way home, but I just had a funny feeling, so I called 911 and came running. I found him in the kitchen with
my own butcher knife in his back. The stubborn old son of a buck.” She began to cry and the cops looked uncomfortable. Then she would wipe her eyes and blow her nose and start the tape again. “I told him and I told him this neighborhood wasn't safe….”

I looked over toward Dolores's domain, her spotless stainless steel kitchen, and the first thing I thought was that the place was a mess and she was going to be really mad. There was a puddle of blood on the waxed floor, and long streaks on the counter and the cream-colored wall. It didn't look like movie blood. It was the wrong color, too red and too bright. Besides the blood there was black fingerprint powder on everything, yellow Police Line tape blocking the entrance to the kitchen, a paper silhouette of a body on the floor, and footprints tracked all over Dolores's shiny clean tile.

Then I realized something else. Burt didn't die of a heart attack. He was murdered. Stabbed in the back, it sounded like, if my dull wits were working.

“How did he die?” I asked Mayhew.

“Stabbed. Several times in the back. With a butcher knife. My guess is the killer got the aorta. If you're pissed off, you can stab anyone and kill them. Whoever did this got a lucky hit along the left side of the backbone. At least Burt died quick.”

“Shouldn't there be more blood?” I thought if I kept talking, I might keep from thinking about another murder, a long time ago. There was a lot
of blood then, on the walls and the floor and even the ceiling, and some of it dripped off a light fixture. In my dreams, I didn't see the two bodies. I saw that drip.

“Most of the blood's inside the body, in the chest cavity.”

“Why would anyone want to kill Burt?” I kept rattling on, hardly taking it in.

“Money. They cleaned out the cash register. It was right after lunch, and the whole neighborhood knew he closed at 2:00
P.M
. The killer didn't get that much, either. Took the cash and change in the register—Dolores thinks it was maybe two hundred dollars—but didn't look under the money drawer, where Burt kept the big bills. Missed about seven hundred dollars that way.”

“How did they miss that much money?” I didn't think much of the local criminal class, but one thing they wouldn't miss was cash. Even I knew Burt stashed most of his tens, twenties, and fifties under the cash drawer. The local boys would, too.

“Probably got scared off,” Mayhew said.

I didn't think someone who would knife Burt in broad daylight would pass up a pile of dead presidents just because they heard a noise.

Also, Burt was a city bartender. That meant he was cautious. When he let out the last lunch customer, he'd lock the door, and he'd never open up for the tough-looking kids in baggy gang clothes who slouched down the street. And if he did, he'd never turn his back on them so he
could be stabbed with Dolores's own butcher knife.

Before I could say this, I heard Dolores call my name. “Francesca, honey, is that you?” She'd stopped the tape long enough to notice me. I went over to her table.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “Burt was a good man.” I wanted to say something else, something profound or something that could ease her pain. But there was no comfort for Dolores, and there wouldn't be. “He wouldn't listen,” Dolores said. “I told him and I told him….” The tape started again.

The two young, sad-faced cops turned her over to me. I sat with her in the booth and held her hand and patted her shoulder and listened to her say the same things over and over until her son Harry arrived from his accounting office in Chesterfield. Dolores and Burt had worked hard to give their kids the best, and all six of them had turned out well. They had nice families and good homes and solid businesses in the safest suburbs. The other grown children would be coming in now, one by one. I handed Dolores over to her son Harry, and she began to cry, hard, harsh sobs that sounded like parts of her were being ripped out. He held her. He knew what to do.

I did, too. I left. I wanted to give Burt one last gift—the obituary he deserved. I wanted to send him off in style. I wanted everyone to know that he was a fine man, and to understand that a
well-run bar took diplomacy, discipline, and hard work.

I didn't go back to the newsroom to write the column. I only had two hours until deadline, and I needed quiet. I sat down at my home computer, and I began to remember all the stories about Burt. Hadley would be happy with this column. Burt's life was as wholesome as you could get. He dropped out of high school to go to work in his family's saloon at age sixteen. He fought for his country in World War II. Heck, Burt was such a gung ho patriot, he'd lied about his age and gone into the Navy at age seventeen. He came back with a fistful of medals and married his grade-school sweetheart, and they worked together every day for the next fifty-one years, except for the one-week vacation Dolores made Burt take every August.