Rubout (11 page)

I was primed to talk to Queen Elizabeth, but I was still surprised she agreed to talk to riffraff like me. She briskly told me I could have ten minutes at
eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. That was the only time she had available. Ever. She also gave me directions to her house on the St. Louis Country Club grounds. I wrote them down, turned off of Upper Barnes Road like she said, and got lost anyway. I expected that. It’s easy to get lost on the winding roads around there. I passed the country club, the polo field, and parts of the golf course several times, and even I had to admit they looked fabulous, as they say in Ladue. Nice, too, as we say on the South Side. It was another golden late-fall day. I enjoyed watching the sunlight through the Ladue leaves. I enjoyed it even more because I knew those leaves drove Ladue nuttier than a nest of squirrels. With all those trees, the city spent ungodly amounts on leaf pickup and collection.

Her house was typical for the area: a six-bedroom white frame colonial revival with black shutters and a lot of lawn. It didn’t look that rich. But I knew I was in a different world from the moment the door opened. Cordelia, the housekeeper, answered the door. She was a grandmotherly woman with mocha skin, gray hair, and a comfortable figure.

“I better take your coat and put it under lock and key,” Cordelia complained. “Coats are disappearing around here right and left. Right and left. The burglars track in mud, too. Come right in this house and take an old lady’s coat.”

There was Elizabeth, in another one of her formidable suits. But she wasn’t acting like a queen. She was trying to placate her “treasure,” Cordelia. “I am sorry your coat was misplaced,” she said to Cordelia. “I said I would buy you a new one.”

Cordelia was not afraid to talk back to Elizabeth. I guess she’d been with her too many years to be awed by her. She snapped back, “It wasn’t ‘misplaced.’ That coat was stolen. I thought I was working in a good neighborhood here, but I guess you can’t count on nothing no more.”

I stood there in the sunlit, slate-floored hall, while the two women bickered. I could have been a hat rack for the attention they paid me. It was funny. They were both about the same age and size, but Elizabeth had been surgically nipped and tucked. It didn’t make her look younger than Cordelia, just unnaturally smooth, like a statue.

“It could not have been a burglar, Cordelia,” Elizabeth was saying. “Nothing else was missing from this house, and I am sure they would steal more than your five-year-old winter coat.”

“Huh! There were some good years left in that coat,” Cordelia said, but she and Elizabeth finally remembered I was there. I hoped the five minutes they spent arguing didn’t count against my ten. Cordelia took me into a sitting room that had to be Elizabeth’s famous green room. It was painted pale green to highlight a pair of really ugly Meissen vases on the mantel. Endora had told me about those. She said I should also look for a Philadelphia highboy that may or may not be of exceptional quality and two late eighteenth-century tilt-top tables. I found them all. They were supposed to be from her husband’s family. Endora didn’t mention the two 1960s Waterford lamps with raw silk shades turning slightly yellow on the tables. She also told me that the rug on the floor was from Elizabeth’s family and it was “seriously
good.” She didn’t say anything about the serious hole in the rug. It was mostly covered with a three-legged table. Jinny told me to compliment the rug and see how long it would take Elizabeth to tell me it was a prized overall pattern. So I did.

“Nice Kirman,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” said Elizabeth. “It is not one of those with a center medallion but with a prized overall pattern.”

Less than two seconds. And the way she said it, I was sure her family climbed Mount Everest to buy that rug. The rest of the furniture was mostly Baker reproductions from the last time she had the house redecorated—almost thirty years ago, when her husband was still alive. I’d heard serious furniture collectors sneer at Baker reproductions, but they looked pretty nice to me.

I also noticed that the upholstery was worn and the curtains were sun-faded. My grandmother wouldn’t have had them in her living room. I know this was supposed to be old money, and Elizabeth was saying she didn’t need to impress me with expensive new curtains. But what’s the point of being rich if you live like you’re poor?

There was nothing worn about Elizabeth’s manner. She was in full command of everything but Cordelia. “I agreed to see you this once,” she said frostily. “I wish to inform you that my son and grandson will not speak with you at all. I do not want to discuss my late daughter-in-law, except to say that her unfortunate end is what happens when you associate with the wrong element. The city is no longer safe for our kind of people.”

Wow. Talk about cold. That woman could flash-freeze beef. I didn’t think I’d ask her what she admired about her daughter-in-law. Oh, why the hell not? “I am sorry for your loss,” I said. “Perhaps you could tell me what you admired about Sydney for my story.”

“I prefer not to discuss my family in the newspaper. If Sydney had stayed where she belonged, caring for her home and family as a proper wife, this would not have occurred.”

She wasn’t going to tell me anything. She was going to throw me out in two seconds. Since I had nothing to lose, I answered back. “I thought Sydney tried to do that, until your son threw her out for another woman,” I said.

“Cordelia!” commanded Queen Elizabeth. “Please bring Miss Vierling’s coat and show her out.” The audience was over. Cordelia gave me my coat and the bum’s rush, and I was out the door before I knew it. I wondered why Elizabeth had me drive out there. She could have delivered that message by phone.

I went back to work at the
Gazette
and tried to call Hudson at his office. His secretary said he was in a meeting. I started calling every fifteen minutes, which must have driven the woman crazy. Finally, after two hours and eight calls, Hudson himself picked up the phone. “Miss Vierling, do not call here again. I will
not
meet with you. I
will
call your managing editor if you persist in calling my office and badgering my secretary.” He hung up. The boy got all his charm from his mother.

No point in calling the son, Hud Junior. I’d better try to track him down in person. It was, of course,
twenty minutes away, in Richmond Heights, an older brick neighborhood on the edge of St. Louis. I knocked at the door of the apartment where Endora said Hud was now living, but no one answered. Next I went to the Clayton coffeeshop where she said he worked. It was called Has Beans. It sold the usual array of coffee, sweets, and bottled juice. A long blond wood counter had a collection of crumbs and crumpled napkins and a pile of newspapers and magazines. The place looked like it had had a rush of customers but was suddenly empty. Hud was cleaning up behind the counter. He wore a black-and-brown Has Beans T-shirt. He was a handsome blond kid with dark circles like bruises under his eyes. He didn’t look like he’d been getting much sleep. His eyes were red rimmed, and so was his nose. He wiped the crumbed up counter with a kind of twitchy energy, but at the core he seemed listless. Was this someone in deep mourning? Or someone on drugs? I couldn’t tell. In the 1980s, I’d worked for an editor at the
Gazette
who was a cokehead. He was also a relative of the managing editor, so nobody did anything about him. The coke gave him a curious flattened personality. The cokehead editor finally went to L.A., to break into movies. Since he didn’t have any relatives there, it didn’t happen. It took me months to tumble to why my editor had these odd mood swings. I was never any good at figuring this stuff out.

“May I help you?” Hud said politely.

That was my cue. I told him I was doing a story about Sydney.

“Listen,” he said desperately, “you can’t quote me.
My dad would kill me, and he’s already mad at me now.”

“I’m sure he’s not mad at you,” I said, trying to be soothing. “This is a difficult time.”

Hud stared at me, as if weighing his options. “Talk to Aunt Jane in Chicago,” he said, scribbling a phone number on a coffee-stained napkin. “She’ll give you good stories. I can’t talk anyway. I feel too bad.”

For a minute, he looked like he was going to cry. “I never thought it would turn out this way. I was royally pissed at my mom because she put me in rehab, and I wanted to show her she couldn’t run my life, so I moved in with Eric for a while. But I always thought we would make up and I would see her again.” Then Hud couldn’t stop the tears. “She really did care about me. My father never gave a damn, but she did. Now there’s no way I can make it up to her. I wish I were dead, too.”

He looked so miserable. I felt so helpless. He was right. Nothing could undo this. He could never tell that broken figure I saw in the alley that he loved her and didn’t mean it. But I didn’t say that. That would be stupid. Instead, I said something stupider: “The best thing you can do is go back to school and get your degree. That’s what your mother wanted more than anything.” Hud looked at me but didn’t say a word. He blew his nose and wiped his eyes. I felt like an interfering old lady. Two kids in black jeans and T-shirts came in and ordered double espressos.

“I have to go,” Hud said. I was glad for an excuse to get out of there. Back in my car, I realized that Hud had told me nothing, just like his father. But the
kid could be a lot slicker than Dad. I felt sorry for him, and wanted to leave him alone in his grief.

Endora said Caroline was Sydney’s best friend in St. Louis. I called Caroline first. She was so terrified I might ask her to come into the big bad city that she invited me to her Ladue home. She lived in Fair Oaks, one of the second-best addresses in Ladue, although it looked pretty snazzy to me. The house was a brick-and-stone fake Tudor about fifty years old. It had a slate roof and leaded glass windows and a yard with fair-size oaks, of all things. Blue pots of bronze chrysanthemums brightened the front steps.

Caroline answered the door. She could have been Sydney’s sister. She was blonde and very slender. I could count the bones under her tennis bracelet. She was wearing an outfit that would have better suited her daughter: Pappagallo flats, a silk T-shirt, skimpy A-line skirt that showed off her knobby knees, and a matching zippered jacket. It was a soft grayish color, so I guess she was in mourning for her friend.

At first glance, her living room seemed more impressive than Elizabeth’s, but even I knew the furniture wasn’t as good. It was just better pulled together by the decorator. It had an Oriental rug about the size of a school auditorium and a couch longer than a city bus, except buses weren’t upholstered in soft, silky beige. My South Side soul longed to protect it with some nice slipcovers. Caroline sat me down on the couch and asked if she could get me something to drink.

“Anything but tea,” I said.

While she went for Evian water, I struggled to get out of an avalanche of pillows on the couch. There must have been twenty of the things, some as small as a toaster, others almost the size of the couch cushions. After I fought my way free, I started counting all the knickknacks on the little tables nearby: three family photos in flowered silver frames, a Limoges basket filled with potpourri, two pairs of gilded wooden candlesticks, a blue-and-cinnamon porcelain bowl, a millefleur paperweight . . . I was still counting when Caroline returned with my water.

“I am sorry about your friend, Sydney,” I began.

“It’s been so horrible,” she said softly. “None of us can believe it. She was a neighbor, you know. We played golf and tennis at the club and car-pooled our boys to Burroughs. Last December we cochaired the Winter Gala for Greiner’s disease. Sydney had fabulous ideas for flowers, just fabulous. We had to have it at this hotel, and the room was dull, dull, dull. But she had the flower centerpieces cascading from the ceiling, and she took those awful hotel chairs with the metal legs and covered them with fabric and then tied the fabric on with contrasting colored bows that picked up the colors in the candles, and it was the most beautiful room you ever saw. Everyone commented on the transformation. It was a super success. Sydney was also good working with the caterers. You never had rubber chicken at any party of hers. And she knew where to buy super things. She bought me that little Moroccan treasure box.”

She pointed to a lacquered box on a table where I hadn’t counted the things yet.

“But then Hudson said he wanted a divorce, and everything changed,” Caroline said, sounding sad. “She wasn’t fun anymore. She was angry all the time. She couldn’t lunch or shop or anything.”

I guess not. If Sydney was being financially destroyed by her husband’s lawyer, she probably didn’t have money for pretty, pointless bibelots. That Moroccan box might buy a good chunk of a lawyer’s time. And if her husband had smashed her perfect life, then Sydney should be angry.

“And that’s when you stopped seeing her?” I said. Caroline must have heard the disapproval in my voice.

“I didn’t see her much after she started dating that biker,” she said defensively. “He had . . . tattoos.” Caroline said the word like it was a loathsome disease. “Then Sydney got herself killed. But that’s what happens when you go to the city.”