Rubout (5 page)

Thanks to my grandmother, I found cleaning therapeutic. Grandma’s family motto was “We were never so poor we couldn’t afford soap.” To her, a clean house was a sign you were part of the social fabric. She really believed you could wash your troubles away—as well as dust, vacuum, polish, and scrub them out. She lived in South St. Louis when it
was still the German section of town, and she was house proud. She starched and ironed her kitchen curtains weekly and scrubbed floors on her hands and knees. Compared to her, I’m a slacker.

Grandma and Grandpa ran a confectionery, which is what St. Louisans called an early type of convenience store. Neighborhood people would run in and buy cold cuts, cans of soup, Pampers, and milk. My grandparents made just enough to live on and send me to school. They worked six days a week, twelve hours a day. I admired their toughness. I miss them. I guess that’s why I still lived in my grandparents’ apartment and didn’t change a thing after they died twelve years ago. Well, I did rent their confectionery on the first floor to Mrs. Indelicato. But she ran it the same way they did. Upstairs, their apartment was a South Side classic, from the beige recliner and my grandfather’s bowling trophies, to the slipcovers on the sofa and the plastic runners on the wall-to-wall carpet. In the kitchen, the Sunbeam toaster sat under Aunt Jemima’s skirt. The bathroom had plaster fish blowing gold bubbles. The dining-room table had the same machine-lace tablecloth. The only change I made was to set up my computer on the table, but I put the pads down first, to protect the finish.

My apartment confused my friends. Some thought I was making a witty statement about kitsch. Some saw it as my own private South Side museum. Only Lyle understood that I kept it that way because I admired my grandparents’ good, ordinary lives. If your parents were as screwed up as mine, you’d value something ordinary, too. But that’s another story.

Anyway, my day at home alone was relaxing. I ended it by reading the
New York Times
—a paper I enjoy because I don’t know anyone who works there. I fell asleep in the recliner, wrapped in my grandmother’s yellow-and-brown afghan.

Monday morning I felt ready to face the world. And most of the world I was interested in went to Uncle Bob’s Pancake House. It was the perfect hangout for a newspaper columnist. Readers knew I would be there most mornings and brought me story ideas. I overheard fascinating things, too. Uncle Bob’s was the sort of place where people felt comfortable, and they would forget the booths only gave the feeling of privacy. The police ate there as well as local crime families, church people, lawyers, families with kids, senior citizens, and salespeople. It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I used it as my office because I didn’t like to make readers endure the rudeness of the
City Gazette.
The
Gazettes
phone system was chaotic, and callers were transferred endlessly from one editor to another, and God help the callers if they were transferred to a reporter like Jasper, who rejoiced in his rudeness. I’d actually heard him snarl at a woman, “Listen, lady, you wouldn’t know a story if it bit you in the ass. Don’t bother me again.” The editors seemed to find Jasper’s loutish behavior amusing, the way some homeowners enjoy a nasty, barking dog. But I wasn’t going to subject my readers to that treatment.

At a place like Uncle Bob’s, you pick your usual with the same care you picked your spouse, because
you would have it forever, for better or worse. A decade ago I declared that my usual breakfast was decaf coffee, one egg scrambled, and one piece of toast. Tom the cook grumbled. Marlene the waitress made fun of my meager meal, but it was my choice, and they honored it. Sometimes I got a little restless with my choice, the way any faithful person did, but I knew this was the only food for me. I no longer had to order it. By the time I parked my car and hung up my coat, it was waiting for me. I did, however, have to listen to Marlene do her usual riff on my boring breakfast. She was a generous woman that my grandparents would have called pleasingly plump. She considered my skimpy breakfast a personal insult to Uncle Bob’s bounty.

“Your usual,” she said, and plunked it down on the yellow placemat that also served as a menu. “Now, would you like to order some food?”

I was saved from trying to think of a snappy reply before eight o’clock. Detective Mark Mayhew came in the door and walked over to my table. I invited him to sit down. Marlene brought him his usual, which was a syrup-drenched Belgian waffle with a side of ham and hash browns, irrigated with gallons of black coffee. I wondered how long he would fit in that slim charcoal suit eating like that.

“Now,
this
is food,” she said with satisfaction, as she put his grease-soaked plates on the table. “Study it, Francesca. I know you’ve never had food before, but many people eat it three times a day. You might like to try it.”

“Nah, it would be a shock to my system,” I said.
Marlene laughed, poured me more decaf coffee, and left us to talk about the murder.

“I see Babe wrote the
Gazettes
front-page story on the Vander Venter murder,” Mayhew said. “He got a little confused with his facts, but we don’t want too much information out now, anyway.”

“You won’t have to worry with Babe on the story,” I said. “He said Sydney was beaten with a bicycle chain.” As soon as I said it, I felt guilty. What a bitchy way to talk about a colleague.

“Yeah, he heard somebody at the scene say she was beaten with a bike drive chain, and he decided that it was a bicycle,” Mark said, polishing off a syrupy hunk of waffle piled with hash browns. “In the next paragraph he quoted an unnamed source who said the killer was definitely a motorcycle gang member, probably the Hell’s Angels or the Saddle Tramps, and those folks don’t usually ride Schwinns.”

“Do you think it was a biker gang killing?” I asked.

“Are you going to write about this?” he asked.

“The
Gazette
took the story away from me and gave it to Babe.” That wasn’t a completely honest answer, but it satisfied Mark.

“She might have been killed by a biker, but I don’t know,” he said. “At this point, we have too many suspects. Most are bikers, but they don’t belong to a gang. It was true that Mrs. Vander Venter was killed by a motorcycle drive chain, and the murderer left it near her body.”

“A lot of people were mad at her,” I said. “Did you ever find Jack?”

“Yeah. Located him about three in the morning. He says he left Mrs. Vander Venter at the ball and
went driving around, but no one saw him from midnight till three
A.M.”

“Don’t forget Stephanie,” I said. “She was mad enough and strong enough to kill Sydney.”

“Yeah, Stephanie is in the running. So is Gilly, the guy with the gut who fought with Jack. He’s got a little past history with us, and he’s got an hour or so when no one saw him.”

“What kind of past history?”

“Small-time stuff. Possession of stolen property. Receiving stolen property. Nickel-dime dope dealing. A weapons charge: known to carry without a license.

“I haven’t finished my list,” Mayhew said. “We can’t forget Crazy Jerry, Stephanie’s boyfriend.”

“You
can’t forget the man,” I said. I couldn’t forget his fetching Harley G-string and lightly browned buns. “I keep telling you he’s a lover, not a fighter.”

“He was all too friendly with Mrs. Vander Venter,” said Mark. “But we found his handprints on the emergency exit door to the alley, a few feet from the crime scene. There were a million other prints on the door, but Jerry’s are flat on the upper panel, as if he leaned against the door. That’s not enough evidence to arrest him, but we’d like to know what he was doing back there and why he disappeared for half an hour.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. Says he didn’t hear the page,” Mark said.

“Find anything else interesting back there in the alley?” I asked.

Mark shrugged and pushed away his empty plate. “Nothing useful,” he said. “No one saw anyone, except Mitch and his vision of a little old lady. Besides
a ball with a thousand bikers, we have the usual family suspects. We always look at the husband when a wife gets killed, and if any husband had a reason to be relieved that his wife was dead, it was Hudson Vander Venter. Now that Mrs. Vander Venter is gone, Hudson doesn’t have to worry about an expensive, embarrassing divorce. He is free to marry Brenda, the lawyer he’s been dating. Not that we’re hearing this from him. Hudson refused to talk to us without an attorney. When he and his lawyer did come down to the station, we learned almost nothing.”

“Did he tell you where he was late Saturday night?”

“Yeah. The cigar smokers’ dinner at the Progress Club, with two hundred other people who will vouch he was there until two
A.M.”

“Babe told me their son is a gay drug user.”

Mayhew rolled his eyes. “I don’t think the kid’s gay. Hud Junior left home, the way kids do when they have a fight with their parents, and moved in with a friend who’s going to St. Louis U. The friend has an apartment in Richmond Heights. The place looks like your basic college kids’ pad: backpacks and Rollerblades in the hall, scrounged family furniture, bowls of old cereal, microwave popcorn bags, and pizza boxes all over, and absolutely the newest sound system. There were lots of attractive young women going in and out of there, and I don’t think Hud wore the lace panties I stepped over in his bedroom.”

“What about drugs?”

“I didn’t see anything visible when I showed up for a surprise visit, but he could keep it well stashed. He
and his Ladue friends have a lot of money, and that can mean a lot of drugs. I do know the kid had a definite drug problem six months ago. He was using cocaine, and when his mom found out and put him in a rehab clinic, he dropped out of college, probably to spite her. His father cut off his allowance until he went back to school. Hud had no money except what he made as a waiter. Now hell get the income from a trust fund that his maternal grandfather set up for Mrs. Vander Venter. The income passes on to her only child at her death. Two thousand a month isn’t much in Ladue, especially if you’re doing coke. And I suspect Hud needed money.”

“So did he kill his mother for his trust fund?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out. But the husband benefits even more from her death.”

I agreed with Mayhew. That was new. The last time Mayhew and I talked about a murder, we had very different ideas about who did it. This time we agreed. We were agreeing about a lot of things lately. In a strictly business way.

“So are you going to lay off the bikers?” I asked.

“Nope. There’s always the possibility that the son or husband hired one to murder Mrs. Vander Venter. That’s why I keep talking with your biker friends. And their friends. And their bosses, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, and drinking buddies. It’s going to cramp their style. I suspect they’ll be pretty pissed before this is over.”

Mayhew’s beeper went off and he left. It was time for me to go to work, too. The newsroom was quiet in the early morning. A few reporters were talking on the phone. A meeting of editorial department heads
was just breaking up in the glass-windowed conference room. I saw Wendy the Whiner, our new Family section editor, shoving papers into a battered beige folder. I tried to slip by unnoticed but that’s hard to do when you’re as big as I am.

“Francesca, you’re finally here. I didn’t know where you were,” she said. It sounded like an accusation.

“What do you mean I’m
finally
here? It’s nine o’clock, and I’m in before most of the staff.” The woman could put me on the defensive like no one else.

“You don’t have to get angry at me,” she said, giving me her most pathetic look. Wendy was a sad creature, a corporate nun who dedicated her life to serving the
Gazette.
She had a permanently martyred air and no life outside the newsroom. She even dressed like a nun, in shapeless, sexless suits and low heels. Today she had on a bunchy beige blouse and a sacklike beige suit trimmed with cat hair. Her sensible beige shoes were scuffed, and a run had popped out at the knee on her beige pantyhose. Even her hair was beige.

“You didn’t tell me what your next column is about. I’m so busy and you just run around and do as you please,” she said resentfully. Wendy whined constantly about how overworked she was, but I’d never seen her do anything but attend meetings.

“I sent you a memo with my column ideas two days ago,” I said.

“I lost it,” she said. “I can’t keep track of everything. Send it again. And in the future, flag it so I know it’s important.”

Somehow she’d turned her mistake into mine. How did she do it? I sat down at my desk and rewrote the memo, seething as I hit every key. Then I wrote my column and turned it in. It was time to get out of here. As I was leaving, I ran into our new managing editor, Charlie. We didn’t get along, especially lately, and generally I tried to dodge him. But this time I was glad I didn’t. Charlie asked me to do a feature on Sydney Vander Venter. This was right up my alley, so to speak. Gave me an excuse to poke around in something I was curious about anyway.