Rubout (18 page)

“Can’t help you there, Francesca, I don’t know where he was after he left that night.”

“Do you know where he is now, so I can ask him?”

“No. Haven’t seen him. Haven’t seen anyone who’s seen him.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“Don’t know. Can’t help you with that one, either.”
Streak was clearly losing interest in the conversation. He was definitely gaining interest in a redheaded woman drinking beer out of a bottle. Some men were suckers for beer-drinking women. Lyle, for one. Wonder if his little college student drank beer out of the bottle. At her age, she probably drank milk out of a bottle. Wonder if I’d ever quit thinking about Lyle.

“That’s okay, Streak, you’ve been a big help already,” I said. Streak finished his beer and ambled toward the bar in the direction of the redheaded beer drinker. I paid my check and left. At home, I checked my answering machine. No calls. Not that I was expecting to hear from Lyle, but you’d think he might at least let me know when I could come pick up my clothes and stuff I’d left in his closet. I hadn’t moved in with him, but when you sleep over at a guy’s house a few times (okay, more than a few) things just kind of accumulate. Heck with him. There was nothing I needed there. If Lyle wanted my things out of his house, he could call me. Or he could throw them out. I didn’t care. Just like I didn’t care that he didn’t call. So why did my heart beat so fast when the phone rang? And why was I so disappointed when it turned out to be Jack, even though I’d just told Streak I really wanted to track him down?

“This Francesca Verling?” Jack said, mispronouncing my name. He spoke slowly and carefully. I wondered if he had a buzz on.

“It’s Veer-ling,” I corrected. “Where are you, Jack?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. I could almost hear the shrug. “I got some information about who killed Sydney.”

“Oh?” I used my most noncommittal oh.

“Yeah, I got some papers that will prove who murdered Syd.”

I wasn’t noncommittal anymore. I was excited. “When can we meet?” I said.

“When you got the money,” he said. “You can have them for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Incredible. This slob wanted to sell me the name of Sydney’s killer. “The
City Gazette
does not believe in checkbook journalism,” I said loftily. The
City Gazette
did not believe in opening a checkbook, ever. The paper made Sydney’s mother-in-law look like Donald Trump. Those cheapskates wouldn’t pay twenty-five thousand dollars for one reporter, much less for one story. They wouldn’t give that kind of money for Jimmy Hoffa’s body and Elvis’s current address. But I couldn’t say that, so I took the high road instead. “Are you selling me the name of Sydney’s killer?” I said.

“Yep. This will do it.”

“You have no shame. You lived with that woman. You borrowed money from her, and now you want to make money off her dead body. You’re disgusting.”

“Hey, Sydney didn’t mind having me commit a crime to get these papers,” he said. “It was me that got them, and it would be my ass thrown in jail if I got caught, and this time they’d throw away the key. But I did it for her. You can afford morals, Miss Newspaper Lady. You get a paycheck every week. Me, I can’t make a living with the cops buzzing around me like flies on shit. I owe my lawyer and I owe rent clear back to August, and if I don’t sell these papers, I gotta sell my Harley, and that I just ain’t
gonna do, not for Sydney or anybody else. This will be enough money to get me out of town for a while.”

“I don’t have any money, and I wouldn’t pay you if I could,” I said. Jack was a sleaze. I’d never figure out what Sydney saw in him.

“Fine with me,” he said. “I got somebody who’s willing to pay. We’re meeting Saturday at midnight. I just wanted to give you first crack at it, out of respect for Sydney and all. If you change your mind, give me a call.”

“Yeah, right. Don’t hold your breath underwater waiting for my call.” I hung up the phone. What an idiot. Did Jack really think I’d believe someone would give him twenty-five thousand dollars cash at a midnight meeting? Did he think I still read Nancy Drew? Jack was bluffing. If he knew anyone with bucks, Jack would have sold those papers by now, and he wouldn’t bother calling me. He didn’t have a buyer. How could he? The
Gazette
was the only newspaper in town. No local TV station would pay his price, and this wasn’t a big enough story to interest a network TV tabloid show.

The phone rang again. I was popular tonight. Maybe I was even popular with Lyle. But the next call made me forget about Lyle and Jack both. It was Monahan’s wife. “My husband died about an hour ago,” she said in a flat, emotionless voice. “I just wanted to let you know, because my husband thought a lot of you.”

“I thought a lot of him, too, Mrs. Monahan,” I said softly.

“I know you did,” she said, and I could hear her voice slipping. But Mrs. Monahan was as tough as
her husband. She fought back the tears and told me Monahan would be laid out Saturday and Sunday and buried Monday morning after Mass at St. Philomena’s, an old city Catholic church in my neighborhood. It was a good church for Monahan’s funeral service: traditional and dignified.

I drifted through Friday, stopping in at the
Gazette
just long enough to pick up my paycheck and check my messages. I had contributed twenty bucks for Louise’s going-away gift, but I didn’t have the heart to hang around for the party in the company cafeteria that afternoon. It would be sadder than Monahan’s funeral. I couldn’t believe that this was Louise’s last day in our department already. Monday she would be working in the morgue. Nobody claimed to know yet who would be taking her place. I left a message for the mystery receptionist that I would be at Monahan’s funeral Monday morning. I had a good excuse to leave the
Gazette
that afternoon. I planned to track down Crazy Jerry as he was coming out of work. And I was in just the right troublemaking mood to do it. The furniture factory was in a small, hidden-away industrial area at the foot of Utah Street. Unless you really knew South St. Louis, you’d never find it. It was a big pale-green aluminum building with a blacktop parking lot. I didn’t go inside. I spotted Jerry’s Harley parked near the side door and pulled my Jaguar in back of it, making it tough for him to get out. Jerry was one of the first ones out of the building, freshly showered and wearing his biker leather, this time with jeans under the chaps. A couple of guys whistled when I got out of my Jaguar. To get the best results, I’d worn a short
skirt and high heels. Jerry looked terrified. He knew he’d have a hard time explaining this meeting to Stephanie.

“Francesca, what are you doin here?” he said, looking around guiltily at the guys starting to pour out the door.

“I need a straight answer. What happened at the Casa Loma? The faster you tell me, the faster I’m out of here,” I said.

“Nothing happened,” he said.

“You asked for it,” I said, and unbuttoned one button on my blouse and moved closer to him. I heard another wolf whistle. Jerry looked around desperately, as if he could hide under his Harley. I took another step forward and reached for my blouse again.

“Don’t!” He yelped. “I’ll talk.”

Good thing. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I’d be hanging out all over if I unbuttoned anything else.

“You promise you won’t tell Stephanie?” he said.

I promised. It was easy. There was no way I could explain this encounter to Stephanie, anyway. She would break me over her knee like a piece of kindling.

“I was in the coatroom on the balcony,” he said. “It’s never locked. It’s used for storage. There’s a big old Christmas wreath, old booths, extra tables and chairs and portable coat racks, all kinds of junk.”

“Why would Stephanie object to that?”

“I wasn’t alone,” he said, and hung his head like a small boy who’d been caught. “I was with Bobbi.”

“Which one was she?”

“She’s blonde. She’s sort of big up here,” he said, sketching balloon breasts in the air. “She wears these skimpy-lookin’ halter tops.”

“That described a lot of women that night,” I said.

“You’d remember her,” he said, and suddenly I thought I did. If the woman I saw in my mind was Bobbi, she had a bigger endowment than Washington University, a skirt even shorter than mine, and black fishnet stockings with red bows up the back.

“We’d been having us a little fun on one of the black vinyl booths in the corner, behind the Christmas decorations. Nothing serious. Bobbi’s married and I’m living with Stephanie. But I couldn’t say anything about where I was because Bobbi’s got a real jealous husband, and Stephanie gets kind of upset.” I pictured an upset Stephanie hurling couches and refrigerators like a goddess throwing thunderbolts.

“I figured I was better off pissing off the police than either one of them.”

I figured he was right. “So explain how your handprints got on the door.”

Jerry squirmed a little and scratched his head endearingly, part of his little-boy-caught act. I kept staring at him. In ten more seconds, I was going for the blouse button again. But I didn’t have to. He talked. He’d already gotten past the worst of it. In another minute or two, he’d be rid of me. “I left the coatroom first, when I heard myself being paged for the contest. I looked around for Stephanie, because she was working on the poker run fund raiser on the balcony. I saw her way over on the other side, mobbed with people, so I just slipped over to the door to the emergency exit without her noticing me.
It’s real close. Bobbi waited a few minutes and then headed for the ladies’ room in the other direction. I went down the back steps to the alley. I was gonna come back into the dance by the front door and say I’d been getting cigarettes out of my truck. Except I came out the alley door and saw Sydney, and she was dead. Real dead.” Even now, his face turned pale at the memory. “I’ve seen dead before, but, man, not like that. I freaked. I leaned up against the door and I guess that’s when I left my prints. At first, I thought Stephanie had killed the woman. But then I realized she’d been working at the poker run, and that kept her too busy to slip out and kill someone and besides, she’d have been covered with blood. But it took me awhile to figure that out. I just sat in my truck until I calmed down and realized Stephanie wasn’t a murderer. Then I went back into the ball, where I got shitfaced. I wanted to forget the awful sight of that dead lady. I’d just been dancing with her and now she looked like roadkill. Streak took me home in his pickup, and I told him what happened. He didn’t tell you, did he?”

“No, Jerry, he didn’t. He’d never betray a friend. Thanks for telling me.” I left him there in the parking lot. It was a short trip home, but I spent it wondering why smart men did dumb things. Why couldn’t Jerry keep his pants zipped? Why couldn’t Lyle? If Lyle called, maybe I’d ask him. But he didn’t call all weekend. I brooded and ate pizza and cleaned the apartment and climaxed this exciting weekend with Monahan’s wake on Sunday afternoon. He was laid out at the old Grand Funeral Home on South Grand, a place where you expected Gloria Swanson from
Sunset Boulevard
to come vamping in the door any moment. The Grand had a slightly decayed (if I can use that word about a funeral home) 1920s Hollywood glamour: chairs as big as thrones, torch lamps, and paintings in heavy gold frames. A lot of my South Side relatives made their final public appearance at the Grand. Monahan was in Parlor A. I recognized Mrs. Monahan and two of their adult children surrounded by a flock of graying folks in their sixties: Monahan’s friends and family. These were his contemporaries. But where were his colleagues? There wasn’t anyone from the
Gazette.
I didn’t see Charlie or Wendy or Peggy. Not a soul from the copy desk. Not one of the writers whose copy he had so skillfully edited. Maybe they came earlier. I checked the guest book on an ornate stand by the door. Nope. Nobody from the
Gazette.
Unless they got here in the next hour, no one from the paper would be at Monahan’s wake. The walls were lined with floral tributes and prayer cards. The staff was well represented there. I found the flowers from the Newspaper Guild—a huge spray of orange gladioli. The bronze chrysanthemums from the Family department complemented the open bronze casket.

“Francesca!” said Mrs. Monahan, a slender, dark-haired woman in deepest black. “I knew you’d come. Nobody else did from the paper, but I was sure you’d be here.” She clung to my hand as if it were a life preserver.

“Nobody?” I said, and wished I could recall the word the minute it slipped out.

“Not one of those cowardly bastards,” she said, sounding amazingly like Monahan. “Not his pipe
smoking buddy Albers. Not Charlie, the new caring managing editor. Not his lovely black-haired boss, Cruella. None of the writers who used to sneak around and ask him to fix their copy after Cruella took a hatchet to it. He did it, too, even though there was hell to pay when Peggy caught him. Now that he can’t do any more favors for them, they don’t bother with him.” Her face looked hard and angry and hurt. Then she patted my hand and said, “I’m so glad you could come. Would you like to see him?” as if she were a hostess at a party.

I would rather do almost anything than see Monahan dead, but I said yes and she escorted me to the bronze casket. I got up the courage to look inside. Monahan’s hair was combed wrong. It was the first thing I noticed. It really bothered me. I hated the thought of someone as neat as Monahan having his hair combed wrong forever. A permanent bad hair day. I choked back a badly timed laugh. This couldn’t be Monahan, looking like a department store dummy in pancake makeup and a blue suit, with a black rosary wrapped around his hands. In his pocket, instead of a handkerchief, were a reporter’s notebook and a pica stick, the old newspaper method of measuring. My stifled laugh was in danger of turning into a sob. I knelt on the padded kneeler at the casket, crossed myself as if I still went to church, and stared at a small makeup stain on his white shirt collar for a minute or so. Then I stood up, told Mrs. Monahan how sorry I was, and promised to be at the funeral in the morning. She nodded vaguely, because a weepy woman wearing enough Poison to gas half the South Side had her in a hold like a lady wrestler.
I escaped to the parking lot. The cold air on my face felt good. Poor Monahan. The
Gazette
had used him and forgotten him. He meant no more than any other worn-out piece of equipment. Maybe that was my future there. Maybe Lyle . . . awww, screw Lyle. Unless his book baby was doing that.