Rubout (20 page)

“Because I thought he was bluffing, Mark,” I said. “Meeting someone at midnight with twenty-five thousand dollars sounded like a bad movie plot—just the kind of thing Jack would make up. I thought he was trying to get money out of me with some kind of scam.”

Mark’s other questions, from “What time did Jack call?” (around 10:00
P.M
.) to “Was he drunk?” (probably), were easier to answer. I didn’t know where Jack was calling from, but since I didn’t hear any bar noises or car noises, I assumed he wasn’t calling from a saloon or a pay phone on the street. Which meant he was probably calling from a house or apartment, and my guess was it wasn’t his place. The police were looking for Jack, and he hadn’t been seen for a few days.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said, when he finally stopped asking questions. “What can you tell me about Jack’s death?”

“You know I can’t tell you anything about an ongoing investigation, Francesca,” he said. He looked sort of cute when he was serious.

“I’m not asking you to,” I said, just as seriously. I looked pretty cute that way myself. “All I want is what’s on the public record, anyway: the autopsy and the accident report. I can get them if I flash my press pass. It will save me a trip.” Actually, I don’t have a press pass. Reporters in cities like St. Louis usually don’t. All I had was my
Gazette
ID, which I’m supposed to show to get into the building, but never do. No one’s ever asked for my press pass.

“I guess I can give you that much,” he said. “The Illinois state police say the accident took place on a two-lane highway near Elsah that’s usually deserted late at night. It’s mostly farmland. There was a farm produce stand about a half mile north of the accident, but it closes after Halloween. Jack was heading in that direction. It may even have been the meeting place, if what you say is true. It’s about the only place to turn off on the road, except for a few farms. The state troopers found evidence that a car was parked on the side of the road about a hundred yards north of the accident, and they got one good tire cast. The accident was a bad one. The road looks like a roller coaster there, and it has a couple of sharp curves, the way farm roads do. Plus, there was fog that night. The Jersey County sheriff called in the Illinois state police, and they brought in their accident reconstruction team. They believe someone poured an oil-type substance on the road, to make it slippery.”

“Wait. What’s an oil-type substance?”

“Oil. Looked like plain, old motor oil. But the re
construction team can’t say for sure until the tests come back. The killer used a lot of it, too. Probably two or three cases of motor oil, although they didn’t find any empty oil jugs at the scene. There was the smeared imprint of a large rectangular object, probably a cardboard box, in the oil-type substance. They think the killer poured the oil-type substance on the road and waited until the victim came along. You can hear a Harley a mile away. Then the killer put the large rectangular object in Jack’s lane.”

“In English, that means the killer poured a lot of motor oil on the road and then stuck a big box in Jack’s way.”

“That’s what I just said.” Mark sounded a little impatient. “The accident reconstruction team speculates that Jack saw the box suddenly through the fog, threw on the brakes, swerved to avoid it, and skidded in the oil-type substance. The motorcycle flipped, he hit his head and died.”

I finished the rest for him. “The man who believed helmet laws suck died of head injuries. I’m surprised you can tell anything at all about that accident. Wouldn’t other cars driving on the road mess up the scene?”

“What cars? One or two other vehicles came by in the other lane. But the accident happened around midnight in farming country. Even on Saturday night, a lot of folks around there go to bed at nine-thirty. It wasn’t a road where the high school kids party or drag race. A drunk or two might take it to avoid the sobriety checks on the main road, but with the fog, Jack and his Harley would be hard to see. They both ended up in the ditch by the roadside.
Jack wasn’t found until around six o’clock Sunday morning, when a farmer and his wife were heading into town for church. The Illinois state troopers believe it was a vehicular homicide.”

“Jack was murdered?”

“That’s what homicide is.”

“Maybe the site choice in Illinois was deliberate, so he wouldn’t be wearing his helmet.”

“Maybe.” Mark shrugged. “But I bet he didn’t always wear it on back roads in Missouri, either. The state troopers think the killer’s vehicle was nearby, ready to finish him off if he survived the crash. Instead, the driver simply folded the box, stepped carefully to avoid the spilled oil, and put the box in the car. It’s probably in a Dumpster somewhere, miles from the scene.”

“Simple, easy, and neat.”

“Not that neat,” Mark said. “You weren’t at the autopsy.”

“You were?”

“I had a personal invitation.”

“Aren’t you lucky? How’d that happen?”

“The state police ran a check on him, saw he was wanted in serious connection in the Vander Venter murder, and gave me a call. We had some more questions we wanted to ask him about his girlfriend, but Jack stayed out of sight. We would have picked him up eventually. As it was, I got to see what was left of Jack. His brains must have been all over the road.”

I flinched and flashed on that bloody scene in my parents’ bedroom. It’s the real reason I didn’t go to Sydney’s autopsy. Mark must have seen my face. If not, he saw me grab the tabletop, as if I were seasick
and the room was lurching in a storm. Mark knew how my parents died. He didn’t mention them or apologize for what he said. He just changed the subject so smoothly I hardly noticed he was doing it. “Even if he had been wearing a helmet and survived the head injuries, he had a broken neck, crushed spinal cord, crushed ribs, lacerated liver and other internal damage, and broken bones, including two broken wrists.”

None of these happened to my parents, so they didn’t create any bloody pictures. I quit clutching the tabletop. “From the skid marks, the reconstruction team figures he was going seventy miles an hour—in the fog. An accident at that speed is like taking a dive off a seven-story building. Jack should have never been riding. He was so drunk, I was surprised he even made it to Illinois without an accident. I guess Jack was celebrating his twenty-five-thousand-dollar dividend from his Ladue lady early.”

“How do you know he was drunk? I thought it takes a day or two to get those tests back.” I’d learned a little hanging around Cutup Katie.

“I don’t think I’ll need to see the test results to confirm he was highly intoxicated. Did you know you can smell alcohol in a dead body, if the person’s really been drinking? There’s a strong alcohol odor when they open the body up. There’s a lot of other strong odors, too. But when they cut Jack open, it smelled like somebody had dropped a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Funniest part was one of the assistants—I don’t know if he was a doctor or not, but he was helping out the medical examiner—didn’t say anything about the smell. He just said, ‘By the way, are
we still going out for happy hour?’ Cracked us all up.”

It was hard to have any sympathy for Jack, but I didn’t want to picture him on the autopsy table, with his smashed head and the liquor stink that turned his violent death into a joke.

“I still can’t quite figure out how he died,” I said. “I guess I don’t know that part of Illinois very well.” Like most St. Louisans, I was largely ignorant of the state right across the river. You’d think there was a giant fence at the border to stop us. We rarely went over to Illinois, except late at night, when we were looking for some sin. To most of us, Illinois was nothing but the ugly strip of drinking spots, strip joints, and gambling boats along the river. My personal theory was that because we only went there late at night, we couldn’t find our way to Illinois in broad daylight, so we never knew that part of the state was full of tidy German towns and hundred-year-old family farms.

“I can show you where the accident occurred, if you want. For a story or something,” Mark said, just a little too casually. “We’ve been having some mild weather these last few days. It’s supposed to last through the weekend. We could take my Harley for one last ride this season. Or not.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said, just as casually. “I’d like to ride your Harley.”

“Wear a warm jacket and boots. Even on sunny days, it will be chilly this time of year when we get going. I have an extra helmet you can wear. You still live over Mrs. Indelicato’s store, right? I’ll pick you up at your place at three.”

“It’s a date,” I said, which created an awkward pause. I started talking again to fill the loud silence. “I’ll tell you something about Crazy Jerry that will clear him and Stephanie, but you can’t say you got it from me. You can’t even act like you know it, or Jerry will figure out how you got that information.”

“Francesca, I can’t make you a promise like that. This is murder. If you know something, you have to tell me, or I can throw you in jail.”

He was bluffing and we both knew it. “I don’t have to tell you anything. A reporter’s notes are privileged, and even if you got mine, you couldn’t read my handwriting. But if I tell you this, you can check it out yourself, if you approach the right people at the right time.”

Then I told him about Crazy Jerry and Bobbi, and how Stephanie was busy the whole time working at the poker run on the balcony.

Mark said, “Oh, I knew that.”

“You did? How?” So much for my big scoop.

“Hundreds of witnesses saw Stephanie working up there, and we talked to them all. As for Jerry, I figured it out when he wouldn’t talk to me in front of Stephanie. Every time I asked him something, he’d sort of slide a look her way and refuse to talk. That was a guilty man, but I didn’t think he was guilty of murder. So I got him when he was coming out of work at three-thirty. He talked real quick so his buddies wouldn’t see him with a cop. Even plain clothes, they know what I am. It could damage his reputation to be seen in my company.”

“Crazy Jerry didn’t say anything to me about talking with you.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No.” I wondered how Mark figured out so fast that Jerry was sneaking around on Stephanie. Maybe because Mark was smart. Maybe because it took one unfaithful man to catch another. Maybe I didn’t want to think about that. So I said, “And you know where Gilly was?”

“With his wife, he says. The trouble with Gilly is he says a lot of things. You just don’t know which ones to believe.”

“I think you can believe him this time. I talked with a source who saw him in the car with Mabel, but he’d never talk to you.”

“I’m not too worried about Gilly. I don’t really think he killed Sydney. He’s too lazy.”

“So who do you think did it? Jack was the only serious biker candidate, and he’s dead.”

“Is this off the record?” Mark asked, looking around to see if anyone was listening. The booths in front and in back of us were empty. Only Marlene was nearby, busy with the Bunn coffeemaker. Mark started talking. “I think it’s either the husband or the son. The son has no alibi at all. The husband, Hudson, seems to have an unshakable alibi: He was at a cigar smokers’ dinner at the Progress Club downtown, in full view of two hundred people at the head table at the time of the murder. Every minute of his evening is accounted for except fifteen minutes. Hudson says he was in the men’s room, but no one remembers seeing him there. Fifteen minutes is not enough time to get to the Casa Loma and back, but it is enough time to meet with the killer he commissioned. The question is: Who? Who did he hire to kill
his wife? Hudson says he’s innocent—of course, his lawyer is sitting right there the whole time we questioned him, stopping us every time we asked a question he didn’t like, so basically, all we have is his denial.”

St. Louis had a lot of private clubs. I didn’t belong to any of them, and I had trouble keeping them straight. “The Progress Club is the one at the top of the Petroleum Tower downtown, right? The one with the spectacular view of the Arch and the Riverfront? I was up there at a dinner once during a lightning storm. Greatest light show I ever saw.”

“That’s the one,” Mark said. “Forty-eight stories up. An express elevator from the lobby is the only way to the club on top, besides the fire exit stairs. The lobby is watched by a concierge, and security cameras are at all the exits. The concierge says he didn’t see Hudson Vander Venter in the lobby until the dinner broke up, and there’s nothing on the security cameras. He didn’t run down the stairs or take the elevator down to the lobby to meet anyone. He didn’t make any phone calls from his cellular phone. We checked the club phones and didn’t find any numbers outside the Clayton-Ladue-West County area for that time period. We found only a handful for the entire evening, and they checked out as staffers calling home. Nobody saw Hudson talking to anyone except other businessmen during the dinner. He didn’t even stare down the front of the Rams cheerleader who walked around with the eight-hundred-dollar humidor during the charity auction.”

“That sounds suspicious right there.”

“We’re checking to see if he has any possible connections
to the bikers or approached anyone for a murder for hire, but so far, nothing. I’m looking into any possibility for conspiracy, but nothing—” Mark never finished his sentence. His beeper went off. He checked it, excused himself, went to the pay phone, and made a call. “Sorry, Francesca, I gotta go,” he said, and headed out the door.

“How’s business?” said Marlene, coming by with the coffeepot.

“Mark and I were discussing the Sydney Vander Venter murders,” I said with great dignity.

“Mark now, is it? The last case you worked on together, you called him Mayhew. When did you get to be on a first-name basis?”

“When did you get so interested?”

“You’re the one who’s interested. Tomorrow you’re going riding with him on a Harley. Spend a couple of hours with your arms and legs wrapped around him. Very businesslike.”

“Marlene,” I said. “I don’t date married men.”

“Yet,” she said.

I didn’t get mad at her this time. She was just worried about me, that’s all. But I was a professional. Just because I found a married man attractive didn’t mean I would have an affair with him. I admit that Mark was handsome, and if he’d been single, well, things might have been different. But they weren’t. Anyway, this afternoon, I wouldn’t have any time for what the nuns at my Catholic grade school used to call impure thoughts. I was going to be trapped in a Voyage Committee meeting that would eat up my whole afternoon. When I finally escaped that colossal waste of time, I’d still have to write my column. Naturally,
I wouldn’t get overtime. I wouldn’t get home until after ten o’clock once again. I guess that’s why, on the way into work, I swung twenty miles out of my way and stopped at Nieman Marcus in Plaza Frontenac, where I bought two hundred dollars’ worth of fancy lingerie, including a couple of sixty-dollar bras, the lacy ones that give you a WonderBra figure without wires and padding. After perking up the top, I splurged on some silk bikini panties that were sheer in the rear. Sexy. You can always tell the state of a woman’s love life by her underwear, and I’d let mine get drab and dingy. I told myself I was buying sexy underwear in case Lyle came back. It had nothing to do with Mark Mayhew’s invitation to ride on his Harley.