Rubout (6 page)

That night, about nine o’clock, I got another excuse. Sonny, the barrel-chested head honcho of the South Side HOGs, called me at home.

“Francesca, we’re pissed,” he said. I could tell. The usually chipper Sonny sounded as sour as a flat beer. “Every time we turn around, there’s another cop asking questions. They follow us around at work, at home, at the store, at the bar. It’s harassment, I tell you. It’s got to stop. We want to talk to you.”

“I’ll be glad to talk. But I don’t know what I can do.”

“We’ll tell you when we see you.”

“Want me to meet you at a bar tonight?” I said.

Sonny sounded shocked. “Of course not. We got work in the morning. We’ll meet you for coffee at Uncle Bob’s at five-thirty.”

“In the morning?” I said, horrified. I hate getting up early.

“Yes. Only time we can all talk to you is on the way into work.”

I rolled out of bed at 5:00
A.M
., threw on some clothes that might have matched, and pulled into
Uncle Bob’s at 5:28. God, it was cold. No wonder I never got up at this hour. My early appearance stunned the staff and, for once, my egg wasn’t waiting for me. All the bikers but Gilly were already assembled at a big round table, drinking coffee. They looked less exotic than they did Saturday night. Crazy Jerry looked sane and sadly concealed in a well-pressed khaki uniform. Sonny wore navy coveralls. Stephanie had traded her lace body stocking for jeans and a blue flannel workshirt over a white T-shirt. Jack, the late Sydney’s boyfriend, wore the same outfit except his T-shirt was black. Probably in mourning.

Just as I sat down, Gilly with the gut walked in. He was the only one wearing anything that looked vaguely like a biker outfit. He had on black jeans, biker boots, and a faded T-shirt. He started to take the empty chair next to Stephanie, but she snarled, “You are not sitting near me in that T-shirt, asshole.”

I couldn’t understand why Stephanie was so upset. The shirt had some sweat stains, but they were hardly noticeable. Sonny looked puzzled, too. Then Gilly turned around so we could all read the other side. It said, “If you see the back of this shirt, the bitch fell off.” Crazy Jerry made a manful effort not to laugh. Sonny snickered. Gilly sat next to him.

Sonny was the group spokesperson. “We’re being harassed by the police,” he began. “We can’t go anywhere without them stopping us and asking questions. They’re coming to our jobs, and that doesn’t sit well with my boss. They’re talking with everyone who knows us, and that’s also embarrassing.”

“You bet,” said Gilly. “They talked to my wife
and
my girlfriend. This bullshit is cutting into my income. How am I gonna sell anything with cops around?”

“What do you sell?” I asked.

“Uh, small appliances and such.”

Right. I bet he specialized in TV sets and CD players that fell off a truck. He fell silent and stared at his coffee. I broke the silence by asking Jack “Why did Sydney take her Jeep to the ball? You said she wanted to ride home on your Harley.”

“She did,” Jack said. “The cops asked me that question too. She had to see her lawyer, so she met me at the ball. I was supposed to take her home.”

“What about her car?”

“She thought we could pick it up the next morning. Stupid woman thought it would be there too.”

Jack must have remembered at that moment that Sydney was dead and he was supposed to be sorry. “Where were you and Sydney living?” I persevered.

“She left Ladue and had an apartment on the South Side—Juniata near Spring. Nice big place, new rehab, cheap rent. Moved right after her husband dumped her. I moved in with her a few weeks ago.”

“Is that where you went after the ball?”

“I just rode around until three
A.M
., going no place in particular, because I was so honked off. I mean, I’m sorry the woman is dead, but damn, she made me look stupid. And she’s still making me look bad.”

“Jack took a lie detector test and flunked it,” Sonny explained. “That’s why the cops follow him like Mary’s little lamb.”

“I flunked it because I’m on methadone,” said Jack,
saying each word slowly. He was angry and just barely keeping his temper under control. “I told them that when I took the test.”

Might as well spread the fun. “What about you, Jerry?” I said. “The police say there’s an important time span you can’t account for.”

Jerry looked uneasy. He shifted in his chair, stared at his hands, and mumbled, “I was around. I didn’t hear them paging me. Musta been in the John or something.”

He was lying. I knew it. So did Stephanie. She said, “Hmpf. Have to be deaf not to hear them calling you.” Exactly my thought. Stephanie gave Jerry a look that would burn the hair off an ordinary man.

“Where were you, Gilly?” I said. “Cops said you were missing for at least an hour.”

“I was in the car with my wife, getting a little nooky,” he said.

Sonny snorted. Jack giggled. Stephanie looked at him like he was a loathsome life-form. Which, come to think of it, he was.

“It’s the God’s honest truth,” Gilly said, sounding like a liar.

“The point is nobody has a decent alibi,” said Sonny. “Stephanie was at the ball all night, but she could have slipped out for ten minutes and killed Sydney.”

“I wanted to murder the bitch with my bare hands. But I didn’t,” Stephanie said.

Sonny jumped into the conversation pool again. “We’re innocent, Francesca, and we want you to prove it.”

“What!” I said, finally fully awake. “I can’t do that.”

“You’ve got to,” Sonny said, and the others looked at me like Oliver Twist’s tiny pals. “We were set up. The murder was made to look like a biker did it. If a biker really did beat Sydney with a drive chain, he—”

“Or she,” said Gilly, glaring back at Stephanie.

“Wouldn’t be able to ride the bike home,” Sonny said, “unless the killer brought an extra chain. There were no bikes left after the ball. And none of us had a reason to kill Sydney beforehand, so we wouldn’t bring an extra chain. She and Jack were real lovey-dovey. Stephanie, Jerry, and Gilly didn’t even know she existed.”

“Yeah, but the cops think if you didn’t kill Sydney because you hated her, you killed her because her husband hired you.”

“No biker would murder a Ladue lady at the Leather and Lace Ball,” Sonny said. “We don’t want that kind of notoriety.”

“We’d have offed her at her South Side flat and made it look like a burglary,” Gilly said. “Could have picked up a new TV and a CD player, too,” he added wistfully.

Sonny and Stephanie glared him into silence. “We know you can do this, Francesca, because you solved the drag queen murders,” Sonny said.

I didn’t want to think about that. “I didn’t solve those murders, I stumbled into the middle of them and made things worse.”

“The killer got caught, thanks to you. Now we need your help,” he said. “You asked us for a favor and we got you into the ball.”

Payback time. “Okay,” I said. “Our new managing
editor wants me to do a Sunday feature about Sydney, anyway. But I’m not making any promises.”

“Thanks,” Sonny said. “I knew you’d do it.”

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “You don’t know how wrong I was last time.”

Dead wrong.

“G
o Away.”

I could read the words, but I couldn’t believe them. I looked again. They still said “Go Away.”

The
Gazette
actually wanted to call its new travel tabloid “Go Away.”

“So, what do you think of our prototype?” Charlie the managing editor asked me.

I thought it sucked. But I also thought I’d better not say that. I knew what I was supposed to think. Charlie, the little slimewad, was standing in his conference room beaming like a proud papa. The man almost looked human. He was wearing his best blue suit and most sincere tie. He did everything but hand me a cigar when I went to look at his newborn.

Six months of meetings and God knows how much money had produced this misbegotten thing on the long mahogany conference table. It was a mishmash of bold, clashing colors, busy layouts, and hard-to
read headlines. It violated every principle of newspaper layout and design. The pages bristled with pointless lines, boxes, takeout quotes, and other graphics gewgaws. Stories were jumped two or three times. Photos were small and skewed at odd angles. Text was squeezed into skinny columns, then stretched across the page for no reason.

There wasn’t a staff-written story in the section, just empty words off the wires. One particularly embarrassing example began: “Hollywood has discovered the magic of Montana. You should, too.” The story named some movie stars with homes in Montana. It forgot to mention how much the natives hated Hollywood types. The illustrations were six postage stamp-size celebrity photos and one picture of the Montana mountains at night. “The
other
stars come out after dark in the magic of Montana,” the cutline gushed.

Advertisers would love it. Readers would do what the section advised: Go away. In droves. But they wouldn’t saddle up the family van for magic Montana. They’d cancel their subscriptions. Charlie was planning to turn the Monday paper, our lowest circulation day, into a tabloid with this special travel section as the lure to boost readership. It wouldn’t lure a canary to the bottom of a bird cage. The question was, why would Charlie, who’d tried a number of underhanded tricks to get me fired, want my opinion on his pet project?

I bought some time by staring thoughtfully at the prototype, but I had to say something soon. Charlie was still smiling expectantly.

“Is this a MacCreedy design?” I said.

“You can tell!” Charlie said, looking pleased.

I sure could. Only MacCreedy produced such empty, fussy work. He was a sour eggplant-shape man, who hated everyone who wasn’t as unhappy as he was. Fortunately for MacCreedy, the people working on his sections were absolutely miserable. He made sure of that. MacCreedy had already midwifed four sections. Two were dead, one was limping sadly, and one was gasping its last. We expected the plug to be pulled on the St. Louie Woman section any day. This was a new women’s section that looked remarkably like an old women’s section. It served up wire service stories on child care, fashion, and household hints. A “Look Inside” column had cute articles about how local celebrities decorated their houses, written by freelancers for thirty-five bucks. No wonder the section was dying. St. Louis women were too sophisticated to swallow rewarmed hash.

MacCreedy was never blamed for the sections’ failures. He was smart enough to get out after a new section was started. It was turned over to an eager but doomed editor. Then MacCreedy simply sat back and sniped at the poor sap with memos. “I want to call your attention to the following errors in today’s section,” his memos always began. “There should be a two-point rule under the masthead, not a one-point. The column should have a takeout quote, but it should not be boxed. The column on the facing page should be boxed without a takeout quote. In the story. . .”

Readers didn’t give a rat’s ear about the size of the rules. I doubt if they noticed. But the bosses did. They praised MacCreedy’s nitpicking memos for
their attention to detail. The new section editors were so bogged down in pointless—or one-point—graphics details they didn’t have time to worry about the content. They also didn’t have any staff. Most of these ballyhooed new sections simply had an editor, a copy editor, and all the wires service readers could eat. No money was spent on reporters. The budget had already been used for ads to promote the section. But maybe this time the
Gazette
would do it right.

“So, how many reporters will this new section have?” I asked.

“We’ll have a copy editor and an editor,” Charlie said. “The local reporting will be done by freelancers.” For thirty-five bucks. So the
Gazette
didn’t have to pay the staff overtime.

“The travel stories will be wire service. We’ll also take freelance from
Gazette
staffers,” Charlie said, as if he was handing out bonuses.

“We get thirty-five bucks to write ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’?” I asked. Oops. That sounded a little sarcastic.

“No,” Charlie explained. “We’ll pay
you
twenty-five dollars. But we’ll give you the opportunity to write off a portion of your vacation on your taxes.” The
Gazette
and the IRS. They made a terrific team.

“But no new staff,” I said.

“Francesca,” Charlie replied, “we have one of the largest news staffs for a paper our size in the nation. I couldn’t justify more people.”

It was true. We had an enormous staff. But we also had one of the highest ratios of editors to reporters. We had more assistant city editors than we had news
photographers. Photographers took pictures for the paper. Editors produced nothing but memos—and more confusion. But that was something else I couldn’t say. Charlie already hated me.

Instead I said, “The section name is unusual.” I thought that sounded remarkably subtle.

“We wanted to appeal to the young, hip reader,” Charlie said, patting his old, fat gut.

“I thought most travel was done by older readers who have money and leisure time. Are you concerned the Go Away name will offend them?”