Rubout (13 page)

“Hudson interrupted with ‘And you did a fine job. The damned kid’s a dropout and a drug addict.’

“She said, ‘Because his father was never home!’

“ ‘Oh, spare me the cheap psychology,’ Hudson said. ‘There is no money, and that’s that. You can’t get blood from a stone.’

“ ‘Turnip,’ Sydney said. ‘It’s blood from a turnip.
And if the business is doing so badly, why use it to lease a BMW and a Lexus, travel to Europe, pay our club dues, and buy season tickets to the Opera Theatre and the symphony?’

“ ‘Those are legitimate business expenses,’ he said, ‘but you’d never understand that because you’ve never taken any interest in the business.’

“Before she could answer, her lawyer, the gentlemanly Elliott, took her aside. He counseled her to accept Hudson’s offer and not upset him, or she would get even less. This made Sydney even angrier. Hudson was lying. He had plenty of money. She knew it and he knew it, but she would have to spend her money to prove it. Elliott was flapping around telling her not to get angry or Hudson’s attorney could use her blowups against her. You’d be surprised how many male divorce judges think women are unstable.

“Elliott’s advice only fueled Sydney’s fury. She’d been fired from her life, like a maid who dropped the china.

“Sydney left that meeting seething. She couldn’t believe Hudson had really canceled all her charge accounts. But then she called around. They were all gone. Except for one. Hudson forgot Botanicals on the Park, the fashionable florist on the South Side. Sydney was one Ladue lady who actually braved the city. She drove to Botanicals and bought six thousand dollars’ worth of fabulous things. There were so many, and I can remember only a few of them. I know she bought a dozen damask throw pillows at sixty dollars a pop. A Sheffield rug. Porcelain vases, bowls and plates, at one hundred dollars apiece. Rattan
chairs and ornamental tables. A pine cupboard—that was over a thousand dollars right there. Mirrors with gold-leaf frames, cut-glass rose bowls, a darling footstool trimmed with tassels. She thought of everything, even potpourri and scented candles, place mats and napkins. She had fun things, too. I remember a sweet little monkey lamp, lion sconces, and the most luxurious leopard throw.”

“Sounds like a real zoo,” I said.

“You’re laughing, but this was her revenge on Hudson: one last superb shopping spree. Then she drove up and down the streets on the South Side, until she saw an apartment she liked on Juniata, just west of Grand. She rented it on the spot. She had a little money from her trust fund, and Hudson couldn’t get that. She furnished her whole place from Botanicals, except for the bed and some other necessities, and Hudson had to pay for it. She even sent herself bouquets of fresh flowers—until the first bill came, and Hudson closed that charge, too. Many of her friends wouldn’t go to her new home because it was in the city, but I stayed there on a visit to St. Louis. I thought it was an interesting area, with lots of little shops, ethnic restaurants, and coffeehouses. Naturally, her lawyer had advised her against moving out of their house in Ladue, but Sydney had had enough of Elliott’s advice.

“After the spending spree and the apartment hunt, she went to Uncle Bob’s Pancake House, a few blocks away. She had read about this twenty-four-hour gathering place where interesting people eat themselves into a syrup-induced stupor. Sydney was determined to experience so-called real life.”

“Is that where she met Jack? I wondered how she stumbled across him.”

“She told me how she met him. She was in a rebellious mood. She went to Uncle Bob’s and did what no Ladue woman would do: She ordered a Belgian waffle, dripping with whipped cream and butter. That was more calories than Sydney eats in a week.

“Then, having committed the ultimate Ladue sin, Sydney flirted with this guy at the next table. He took her for a ride on his Harley. They literally rode off into the sunset together. Sydney was entranced. A week later Jack moved in with her. Jack sounded sleazy to me, even through her glowing descriptions. She may have even loaned him money, but she never told me straight out. It was just an impression I got. I didn’t care for Jack, but he had to be more fun than a stick like Hudson.”

I was beginning to have some sympathy for this Sydney. But what about the Sydney I saw? I asked Jane, “Your friend Sydney sounds like a fine person. Why did she behave like such a jerk at the Leather and Lace Ball, chasing every man there?”

“Have you ever been divorced?” Jane asked.

“Nope, I’ve never been married,” I said. Not likely to be, either. Jane hit my sore spot.

“Then you can’t understand. You go through this period of about six months where you go crazy, absolutely crazy. Inside, you’re bleeding all over your soul. Outside, you’re acting like a slut, sleeping with every man you meet, including the dishwasher repairman, the meter reader, and guys you pick up in bars. You can’t believe you’re behaving this way, and you can’t stop. Then, one day, if you’re really lucky
and you don’t meet Mr. Goodbar, you wake up and wonder who you are, and who is this strange man in your bed, and change back into your old self.

“Sydney was still in the bleeding-all-over stage. She had this image of bikers as wild, and so she acted wilder.”

“She acted stupid,” I said. “She acted like a rich idiot. You don’t go after another woman’s date.” I sounded surprisingly bitter.

“Francesca,” Jane said mildly. “How would your friends act at one of Sydney’s perfect little dinner parties? In Ladue, their clothes would look just as garish as hers did at the biker ball. When they started drinking Busch beer and telling jokes, they would seem just as crude. She didn’t belong in their world, and they wouldn’t belong in hers. She was just in a stage, a passing phase. I knew in a few months Sydney the tough-talking biker chick would go away, and Sydney my sweet, sensible friend would return.

“Already, Sydney was starting to make good decisions. First, she fired her lawyer. Elliott had the nerve to send her a bill for five thousand dollars for two months’ work. Work! The man did nothing but cringe in front of Hudson and charge her for it. I knew a thing or two about lawyers’ bills. I noticed a lot of initials, and realized he’d put three other lawyers on her case. Then they charged her for sitting around and talking about her. I asked if she’d authorized three more lawyers, and of course she hadn’t. I got her bill cut in half. Then I talked her into retaining Susan Huddlan, a feminist attorney. Susan excelled at going after husbands like Hudson and
finding their hidden assets, and she wasn’t interested in dinner at the Vander Venters.

“Sydney and Susan demanded more information about the firm. Hudson insisted that it was privately held and he didn’t have to release anything. Sydney combed through old credit card bills and income tax returns, looking for clues. Two days before she died, she called me. She was so excited. She found out her husband had been making frequent trips to a safety deposit box at another bank. She couldn’t get into the box, but she had an idea he was using it to hide some assets. She had another lead, too. Hudson claimed that he was an employee and his mother was the principal stockholder in the firm. Sydney thought Hudson had used an elaborate series of devious transactions to transfer most of his shares to his mother, so he could be only a salaried employee. Sydney was on that paper trail.”

“How’d she find out about it?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. She said it wasn’t good for me to know. The last time I talked with Sydney was the day she died,” Jane said. “She said her problems were going to be over soon. She and her lawyer had this really tough strategy. They were getting ready to subpoena Hudson’s partners for their financial information. That would have been intensely embarrassing for someone as private as Hudson. He couldn’t stand to have his partners dragged into his marital problems. Sydney was sure he would hand over the financial information she needed for a fair divorce settlement. She said she had a ‘breakthrough’ thanks to her boyfriend, Jack. She thought that was funny.
She giggled every time she said the word breakthrough.”

“Do you think she meant break-in?” I said, remembering Jack’s somewhat doubtful occupation.

“I doubt it. Everything at Hudson’s firm was on computers. Jack was a whiz with engines, but I don’t think he knew much about computers. She didn’t, either.

“I told her to be careful. I thought she was playing a dangerous game. She wouldn’t take me seriously. She said, ‘Relax. It’s in the can.’ Those were her last words to me—‘It’s in the can.’ Then she laughed.”

“Do you think Hudson murdered his wife to avoid an embarrassing divorce?”

Jane quit cutting to consider the question. “Hudson? He was mean and cold, but I don’t think he had the guts to murder anyone—particularly not the way Sydney was murdered. Too messy. I could see him hiring someone to kill her, though. Hudson thought he could buy his way out of anything.”

Jane’s words seemed to carry more weight with a knife in her hand. But I had to cut and run. I had just enough time to catch my flight, if I caught a cab now. I thanked her and dashed outside into the cold.

My plane flew back through the same gray-blue clouds I had admired from Jane’s window. When I was in them, they quickly lost their appeal. The plane creaked, bucked, and bounced, and once it dropped like a stone, for I don’t know how many feet. People screamed, drinks spilled, and a baby cried. I wished I could howl right along with the kid. I was scared, and not afraid to admit it. The seat belt sign never went off the whole time. The flight attendants
quickly threw our overturned drink glasses into plastic bags and buckled themselves in for the duration of the seventy-minute flight. I hung on to my chair arms, as if that would hold the plane up in the air, and tried to distract myself by thinking about my talk with Jane. The interview was difficult, personally as well as professionally.

Jane had given me the clearest motive for murder yet: Sydney was about to embarrass her husband. She would hit him where it hurt most—in the wallet. Hours after she told Jane that she had the information to nail Hudson, Sydney was dead.

I was haunted by her story. Sydney’s husband had set out to destroy her after twenty-five years of marriage. He was a respected businessman. He could have made a decent settlement if he wanted to get out of their marriage, but he turned on his wife like a hungry rat. What made a man do that? How could a woman tell? How could I tell?

Lyle wanted me to marry him. I loved him, but how did I know he wouldn’t turn out like Hudson? What guarantee did I have? The promises made at the altar? They sure didn’t help Sydney. And Lyle wondered why I was afraid to get married. Sydney’s story just confirmed what I already knew: A wedding was an invitation to death and disaster. For my parents, marriage was a nightmare. My nightmare.

If you live in St. Louis, you probably know the story: When I was nine years old, my mother killed my father and then shot herself. I found them when I came home from school. I knew things were wrong because my dad’s car was in the driveway, and he never got home this early. Also, the back door was
unlocked. I walked in and heard this odd drip, drip, drip sound, like a leaking faucet. There was no one downstairs. That was wrong, too. Usually about that time of day, Mom was fixing dinner, and she had the TV or the radio going. I called their names as I went upstairs. The drip sound came from Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I wondered if it was a busted pipe.

I kept calling their names, but no one answered. I went in their room. The drip sound was blood, dripping off the light fixture. Dad’s, I think. They were both lying on the bed, and at first I thought Mom had a new red bedspread. Then I realized it was blood. Their blood. Dad had been having an affair with my mother’s best friend, Marcy, and Mom went kind of crazy when she discovered them together at a New Year’s Eve party. I thought when Marcy and her husband, Tom, moved away, Mom would stop screaming at Dad, but she only seemed to get madder. She screamed and screamed and . . . Suddenly I realized the person screaming was me, and I was running in the street and a neighbor came out and caught me.

After that the police came, and then the newspaper and TV reporters. My parents’ deaths became a big scandal—a suburban fantasy gone horribly wrong. There was even a picture of me that ran in
Life
magazine. It showed me at their grave, in my little blue coat. Everyone thought I looked heartbroken. My big secret was that I was glad they were dead. My mother took out her rage at my father’s infidelities on me. I learned early that the way to fight back was not to cry when she hit me. It made her crazy. Once she beat me with a hairbrush until it broke but I
never cried, not once. She did. When the brush broke, she threw herself on the floor and sobbed. I watched her. I felt triumphant. I knew I’d won. I also knew that the bond between us was broken forever. I was five years old.

I loved living with my grandparents. They didn’t drink like Mom and Dad, or have bad fights. Grandma never hit me like Mom did, or make me wear my cousin Linda’s castoff clothes. The South Side was much more interesting than the suburb I grew up in. So I lived with Grandma and Grandpa happily ever after. Except for the dreams that started with the dripping, dripping, dripping . . .

Something was dripping on me now, something warm and sticky, and I felt the scream rising in my throat. Then the sandy-haired businessman wedged in the seat next to me said, “I am so sorry. My bourbon spilled when the plane gave that last lurch. I should have turned in my glass when the flight attendant came down the aisle, but I needed a drink on this flight.”

I could tell by his glowing nose that he needed a lot of drinks. I told him it was okay, and it was. This suit was going to the cleaners, anyway. Then I went back to brooding. Lyle said everyone wasn’t like my parents, and our marriage could work. But what about Sydney and Hudson? He wanted to marry another woman, so he tried to ruin Sydney financially. He may have even killed her.

What chance did I have with Lyle, when better matches than ours fell apart? Sydney and Hudson had everything going for them: a common background, money, education, connections, plus a
bright, handsome son, and yet their marriage failed. Lyle and I were so different. He had family money and went to private schools. I had a blue-collar background, a state school education, and an ugly scandal in my past. How could we live together happily ever after after that? How could I give up my independence and my apartment? Okay, my grandparents’ apartment. I hadn’t changed a thing since their deaths. Even the plaster fish blowing gold bubbles in the bath were the same ones Grandma dusted. No matter how much I loved Lyle, that apartment was my retreat, my safe place, and I couldn’t give it up. Not even to marry him.