Rubout (4 page)

“That only describes every third older woman in South St. Louis,” I said.

“I know. But we’ll look for her anyway. Maybe the woman—if she exists—saw something in the alley
and got spooked. But I’m not sure how reliable his description is. The condition Mitch is in, I’m surprised he didn’t see two old ladies walking a pink elephant.”

“If he saw any alcohol-induced animal, it would be a Clydesdale. Mitch was doing his best tonight to keep the Busch family in the style to which they’re accustomed.” The massive Clydesdale horses pulled the beer wagons in parades and commercials for the nearby Anheuser-Busch brewery.

Mark took a formal statement from me. He started with the questions he already knew the answer to: where I worked and what my address and phone number were. Then he asked what was my business in the alley.

“I wasn’t doing any business in the alley,” I said. “I just look like I was.”

“This is serious, Francesca. I need to know why you were in the alley.” So I told him about Dandelion and the fight with her boyfriend, and how she found Sydney in the alley.

“What was Sydney doing in the alley, anyway?” I asked Mayhew. “She had a fight with her boyfriend, Jack, and he refused to take her home on his bike. We figured she’d call a cab from the lobby. But the cab would have stopped by the front door.”

“She was probably going to drive herself home,” Mayhew said. “That’s her Jeep there.”

He pointed to a black Grand Cherokee parked nearby on a muddy lot at the top of the alley’s T. There was room for about eight cars, but only Sydney was naive enough to use that lot and walk alone to the building. Sydney died about fifteen feet from
the vehicle, and I didn’t have to ask if it was hers. Few bikers send their sons to prep school, and the Grand Cherokee had a John Burroughs sticker on the back window.

I felt my stomach lurch again. Maybe if one of us—no, I was standing right there—maybe if
I’d
insisted she call a cab, Sydney would be alive now. She certainly wouldn’t have walked into a deserted alley. But I didn’t know she drove to the ball.

“I was right there, Mark. I heard Jack say she asked him to bring his bike in the rain so she could ride home with him. Why did she drive to the ball?”

“That’s one of the questions we’d like to ask Jack,” he said. “But right now we can’t seem to locate him. We can’t find her husband or her son, either. No one was home at the Vander Venter house in Ladue at two in the morning.

“We heard Sydney was a busy lady tonight at the Leather and Lace Ball, making a big impression wherever she went: She had one death threat, one attempted rape, one fistfight, and one irate boyfriend in one short evening. We also heard she gave new meaning to ‘dancing cheek to cheek.’ And Crazy Jerry was missing for more than half an hour during the time she was probably murdered.”

“I have no idea where Jerry was,” I told Mark, “but from what I saw, all he’d do is love her to death.”

“I’ve seen that, too,” said Mark. “You got one drunk guy who can’t get it up and one drunk woman who says the wrong thing, and the next thing you know, he beats her to death for laughing at him.”

Sydney’s bloody, broken face flashed in front of me again. Whoever killed her had wiped her smile off,
along with most of her face. The killer could have been anyone at the ball tonight. A hundred people saw her leave. She was plainly drunk. So drunk she staggered down the steps. So drunk she walked alone into a dark alley.

“Why didn’t the off-duty officer escort her to her car?”

“He says he didn’t see Sydney leave. He was walking a couple of women to their cars in the far lot about that time.”

I wanted to get away from there. The cold, clammy air felt like it came from an open grave. The flashing lights and the mindless noise made it hard to concentrate. I handed Mark back his coat. “Thanks for your help,” I said. “I need to call the
Gazette
and then go.”

“You can use my cell phone,” he said, and handed it to me. Just briefly our hands touched, and there was a little electric shock that I don’t think came from the phone. We smiled stupidly at each other, like we’d been hit on the head with beer bottles. Then I heard the voice of the last person I wanted to witness this thrilling little scene. “Babe, you can use my cell phone, too.”

Damnation. It was Babe, the
City Gazette
gossip columnist. Mayhew took one look at Babe and simply dematerialized. Babe earned his nickname because he called everyone, male and female, Babe. Babe had a face like a cod and an unhealthy body. He was thin and pale and looked like he left his coffin at sundown. He even wore a tux, like a B-movie vampire. He really did come alive after dark. Babe loved to cover society parties, and he would go to five
or six a night. He worshiped the rich and powerful. “We’re having a wonderful time” was a bon mot for Babe when it came from blue-blooded lips. His excessive enthusiasm could be quite funny. Babe once wrote this gushy lead to a Veiled Prophet story: “There are balls and there are balls, but there are no balls like the Veiled Prophet’s balls.”

Babe had another valuable function besides his entertainment value. He was a company spy. He was uncanny at sensing power shifts at the paper, and he immediately became the rising stars’ new best friend, feeding them choice tidbits of gossip and shameless servings of flattery. The
Gazette
had gone through some dreadful upheavals recently, but Babe had managed to sniff which way the winds blew and stay on top. God knows what tale he’d take back to the new
Gazette
managing editor. I saw him sizing up my leather outfit. He’d probably report that I was into bondage. I tried to head him off, without actually seeming to give him a reason why I was hanging around an alley in leather.

“Nice tux, Babe,” I said. “Armani?”

“Yes,” he said. “That idiot on the copy desk asked me why it was so baggy. He didn’t understand drape.”

“Probably thinks drape is something you hang in a window. I can tell you’ve been somewhere important.”

He preened. “What a night,” he said. “The art museum had an opening for the Monet show, and the publisher flew in for it. Then the symphony gala. And the charity cigar dinner at the Progress Club.”

“I’ve been to a charity ball, too,” I said brightly.
“The Leather and Lace Ball. Are you covering it, too?”

He screwed up his face like I’d just offered him a cod liver oil cocktail. “No,” he said. “Those aren’t my sort of people. The
Gazette
beeped me because they heard the commotion on the scanner. The night city editor deduced that a prominent person had met with an accident and asked me to check it out. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

He seemed to feel I’d crashed his news event. The
Gazettes
promise of “24 Hours of News You Can Use” got a little thin in the wee hours. Our ads showed a bustling newsroom, but those pictures were taken during the hyperbusy late afternoon. Between about 1:00 and 6:00
A.M
. the tight-fisted
Gazette
didn’t even have a skeleton staff. It had a single bone. Maybe that’s bonehead. The paper used one editor to cover the entire city, usually an exile who worked the graveyard shift because he or she had screwed up big time. The night city editor’s miserable—and impossible—task was to monitor the scanner for major police and fire calls and watch the news wires. If something big happened, the night city editor would call the staff at home and try to make us feel guilty enough to come into work. Most of us monitored our answering machines and wouldn’t pick up, no matter how much the editor groveled. Some staffers saved these pathetic phone pleas and cruelly played them for the newsroom.

But this night city editor seemed destined to see daylight soon. He’d figured out that a night owl like Babe would prowl until almost dawn, and if he used the magic words “prominent person” he could get
Babe to cover the story without putting in for overtime.

“Who is the deceased?” Babe asked. For one instant, his eyes grew brighter and I swear he licked his lips.

“It’s Sydney Vander Venter,” I said.

“That bitch.” He spat. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer person. The way she treated her poor husband. She called me up after I mentioned her upcoming divorce and whined that Hudson had left her for another woman. She wanted me to print that! I told her that she drove him to it. I heard she was a dyke.”

“I’m sure the word you heard was bike,” I said. “Sydney was dating a biker, as in Harley, and they were both definitely straight.”

Babe was behind the times. He called everyone he didn’t like gay and thought that was an insult. St. Louis is a peculiar city. Its arts and education circles were surprisingly liberal. So were its middle classes. But the city was saddled with too many so-called civic leaders who were sexist, racist, and homophobic. Many men who were Babe’s age—fifty and up—still weren’t out of the closet because it could hurt them at their brokerage firm, law firm, or other old-line St. Louis institution. Most of these in-the-closet types were married with children. They played around on their wives with pretty boys.

I found this out the strangest way. Richard, a gay friend who worked at a society hair salon, came to me with a peculiar problem. He’d fallen in love with a beautiful male prostitute. At least, my friend Richard thought the boy was beautiful. To me, he looked like a pouty kid with a good body and a bad attitude.
Anyway, the beautiful boy lived in my South Side neighborhood and used to hold Wednesday night parties. He invited his other working friends, their clients, and Richard. “I went to a few,” Richard said, “and I saw some of the biggest names in St. Louis cruising. Prominent men with prep school accents standing around this dingy South Side flat, eating Kas potato chips and drinking Busch beer. They were so well bred they always showed up at the door with a bottle of wine. Imagine bringing a hostess gift to an orgy. But what really bothered me was that several were the husbands of my clients. I’m sure these women hadn’t a clue their husbands were gay. After all, they had children. It made me angry. My innocent customers could get AIDS because their husbands were too cowardly to come out. So now I’m asking you: Should I tell my women customers their husbands see gay prostitutes?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, although my instincts were to keep quiet. I was glad this wasn’t my decision. Richard agonized for weeks and finally decided to say nothing. He figured his clients would rather die than have someone else know their husbands were cheating on them with other men. One Wednesday night I went by the pretty boy’s flat and noticed the black Lexuses and BMWs parked nearby. Just for the heck of it, I wrote down the license plate numbers and ran them on the state drivers license program on the paper’s computer. The list read like the
Social Register.

Babe wasn’t through assassinating the good name of the Vander Venter family. “Well, if that bitch Sydney isn’t gay, her son is. I heard he was kicked out of
college for drugs. Now he’s living with another boy. Kid’s a fagola. But what can you expect with a mother like that?”

“It takes two to make a child, Babe,” I reminded him. “Her husband contributed half.”

“Hudson contributed more than his share,” Babe said piously, and I knew who had the major money in that family. I wondered why I was defending Sydney. The only time I saw the woman was tonight, and she acted like a jerk. Of course, if jerky behavior got you the death penalty, we’d all be dead.

Enough of this. I grabbed Babe’s cell phone and called the special city desk number, the one not hooked up to the answering machine that protects us from bothersome readers. I told the night city editor where I was and what I’d seen. “Just tell Babe, Fran-cesca,” he said. “He knows these people. He can handle this story. You go home and rest.”

This was a bright boy indeed. Smart enough to know I was currently out of favor with the management at the
Gazette.
This night city editor definitely would see sunlight soon. So would I, for that matter. It was after 3:00
A.M
. I was so cold and tired, I couldn’t stop shivering, even with the heat turned up full blast. I drove home, fuming at the idiocy of editors and the loss of my story. I’d find a way to write it yet.

When I got home, my thin suede boots were soaked through and probably ruined. I unzipped them and wiggled my toes to see if they still moved. My toes were dyed black from the wet boots. Lovely. I picked up a big stack of
Gazettes
from the floor and crumpled them to pack in my boots. I picked up one
wet boot and began to stuff it. Stuff it. That’s how I felt about the
Gazette
tonight. And Lyle, too. So there.

Sunday I slept in late. It was a sad and restless sleep. The bloody face of Sydney alternated with that other death scene, then awful scenes I can’t remember. I woke up feeling like I’d slept on a park bench. The thick gray clouds looked like dirty cotton and there was a cold mist. No reason to go out in that. I was too tired to do anything but putter around my apartment in my bathrobe. For lunch I ate tuna out of the can and a mushy out-of-season peach over the kitchen sink. This is the kind of disgusting behavior I can indulge in only when there’s no man around. Then I cleaned my apartment. Some of the women at the
Gazette
laugh at me because I like to do housework. They think being a slob is a sign of female intelligence. I heard one assistant city editor brag that a visitor unearthed a stale jelly doughnut from under her couch cushion. People never wore black to her house because it would be covered in dust and dog hair. Since she and her executive husband pulled down a total of two hundred thou a year, I figured they could afford to hire a cleaning service.