Rubout Read online

  DEAD BY DESIGN

  Behind the Dumpster, a woman was lying on her side. She wasn’t moving. Her blond hair was damp and oozing big clots of something that looked black. Oil? Who would smear oil in her hair? As I got closer, I saw her hair was thick with blood. Her nose and cheekbone were strangely flattened. Blond hair and black blood were smeared across her eyes. A gold button winked in a puddle near her shoulder, and dirty gold braid trailed from one bloody wrist.

  I didn’t recognize the face—not in its current condition—but I’d know that outfit anywhere. It was Sydney, very dead in her designer leather. . . .

  Books by Elaine Viets

  Backstab

  How to Commit Monogamy

  Rubout

  To my agent, David Hendin,

  and my editor, Jacquie Miller

  Many thanks to the people who helped me with this book, from Ladue to South St. Louis and across the U.S.A.

  They include Pat and Roseann Brannon of the St. Louis Casa Loma Ballroom, Richard Buthod, Susan Carlson, Dean Engledow of Iron Horse Taming, Tom Finan, Jinny Gender, Gerald Greiman, Jane Gilbert, Kay Gordy, Karen Grace, Esley Hamilton, Debbie Henson, the Kirkwood HOGs, Marilyn Koehr, Cindy Lane, Robert Levine, Betty and Paul Mattli, Sharon Morgan, Donna O’Toole, Dick Richmond, St. Louis Police Officer Barry Lalumandier, the staff of the St. Louis Public Library, Janet Smith, Ron and Pat Steger, and Anne Watts, who has an amazing mind for murder.

  Finally, thanks to all those folks who must remain anonymous, including several divorced women and my favorite pathologist.

  “So, do you think the boots are too much?”

  Lyle, the man I semi live in sin with, looked at the black Italian suede boots that went almost to my thighs. Where they stopped, a pair of skintight black leather pants took over. Im six feet tall, so I was covered by a lot of cow. The outfit was finished off by a silver chain belt and a black blouse. Lyle’s expression was somewhere between lust and disgust.

  “Is that a joke?” the professorial Lyle asked.

  We certainly didn’t go together. In fact, that was the problem tonight. We weren’t going together. He was wearing a wheat-colored lamb’s wool sweater, khaki pants, and some fancy German walking shoes, although he wasn’t walking. His feet were propped on a leather hassock in front of the gray slate fireplace in his West End town house. A pale shot of single-malt scotch in a crystal rocks glass complemented the ensemble. On his lap was the latest New Yorker. He had settled in for the evening, and he was going to spend it without me. I thought I’d zing him a little.

  “Where I’m going,” I said, subtly reminding him I’d be parading around in this outrageous outfit alone, while he sat home, “this is as conservative as a white satin formal and twelve-button gloves.”

  I was heading for the Leather and Lace Bikers’ Society Ball, the most exclusive social event in St. Louis—if you’re a biker. I’d finagled a ticket, and it wasn’t easy, even for a columnist at the St. Louis City Gazette. Tickets are restricted to keep out sightseers and RUBs—rich urban bikers—and keep the dance for the real Harley riders. I’ve always had a thing about Harleys, but then again, I like anything fast. That’s why I drive a blue Jaguar X-JS. It shocks the heck out of my colleagues at the City Gazette. They think female newspaper reporters should dress like rumpled nuns, male reporters should drink like Mike Royko, and both sexes should drone on in news stories like they’re writing a doctoral thesis. Oops. I didn’t mean to knock all professors. Just one. I was peeved at Lyle, and I guess it showed. I wanted him to go with me to the biker ball, and he refused.

  “It’s not really my scene, Francesca,” he said. “Never play another man’s game.”

  Lately Lyle didn’t seem to be playing any games at all. I didn’t want to go to the ball alone. This outfit should have raised the dead, but it couldn’t even get Lyle up off his chair. Well, I was too proud to beg. But I’d been going to too many events by myself recently because Lyle didn’t want to bestir himself. I’d begun to wonder if maybe I’d be better off alone, without Lyle.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “Good night.”

  “Have a good time,” he said absently, already deep in his magazine.

  “I’ll make sure,” I promised, and slammed the door. The damp rainy night stuck cold fingers down my collar the minute I stepped out the door. I shivered as I unlocked Ralph, my blue Jag, and waited for his engine to purr. The sleek car was named for my favorite old-time sitcom character, Ralph Kramden, of The Honeymooners. Neither Ralph seemed to mind. Lyle’s neighborhood, the Central West End, was supposed to be the most beautiful part of St. Louis. Maybe it had the grandest houses. But I was headed for South St. Louis, where I felt most at home. There, the air smelled of city smog and beer, and the houses had more recliners than a Sears showroom. It looked especially romantic on a rainy November Saturday night. I passed rows of redbrick flats, silvered by the streetlights and glistening in the rain. The windows were warm with light. Evidently, even my section of the city agreed with Lyle—it was a good night to stay in.

  Until I got to Iowa Street. That’s when I saw the traffic for the biker ball: a line of shiny pickups, sedans, and stretch limos letting off passengers in front of the Casa Loma Ballroom. There were even a couple dozen bikes at this biker ball. It wasn’t a good night to ride, especially if you planned to drink and party. As the bikers hurried inside, wrapped in coats and rain gear, I caught interesting glimpses of black leather, chains, stretch lace, and skin. By the time I pulled into the Casa Loma parking lot, I’d quit brooding on my lagging love life. There was too much happening here.

  The Casa Loma was a city success story. The seventy-year-old ballroom used to host the best of the big bands. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman played there. A young and skinny Frank Sinatra sang there, and so did Bill Haley and the Comets. You’d never guess that by looking at the outside. It was one more slightly dingy brick building. What made it spectacular was the ballroom on the second floor. The dance floor was five thousand square feet of mellow, polished wood cushioned by rubber. A floor like that turned every couple into a light-footed Fred and Ginger. The balconied ballroom, with its clean, sweeping lines, looked like an ocean liner in an old movie. The Casa Loma had been slated for destruction in 1990. But it was saved by those who loved it. Two ballroom dancers, Pat and Roseann Brannon, took it over. Now the Brannons had ballroom dancing on Friday nights. Some Casa Loma couples had had the same table for forty years. They brought their dance shoes in bags, for real ballroom dancers’ shoes never touched a sidewalk. Saturday night dances were usually devoted to rock, Latin, or Mexican music. St. Louis has a large, loyal Hispanic population, and whole families, from grandparents to little kids, would go to the Casa Loma in their best dancing clothes. Other nights there were proms or private parties. And one night a year there was the Leather and Lace Ball.

  As I walked in the door, I was hit with a blast of sound from the band, the King of Hearts. It was a solid wall of rock. I saw four guys in leather wrestling a seven-hundred-pound black-and-chrome Harley up the ballroom steps. “Easy, now, easy. Almost there,” said a Harley wrestler in a leather biker cap with a chain headband, leather vest, and barrel chest. That was Sonny, head honcho of the South Side HOGs. HOG is short for Harley Owners Group. I waved and headed up to see him. Sonny got me into the ball, and I owed him a thank you. The Harley was now resting at the top of the stairs. So was Sonny. He was drinking Busch from the bottle. “Nice outfit,” he said, taking a swig from his beer.

  “Nice Harley,” I returned politely.

  “It’s the centerpiece for the ball,” he said.

  “Sure beats flowers and balloons for decorations, ” I said.

  I’d seen plenty of those. In fact, I’d been to so-called charity balls where most of the money
was spent on decorations. The bikers raised more money at their events than some charity balls that got kid-glove treatment in the paper. I’d had to cover my share of society events as a young CG reporter, and I hated them. The two worst, at least for me, were the Veiled Prophet and the Fleur de Lis balls, where St. Louis society made their debuts. The Fleur de Lis was the Catholic coming-out ball, and when I covered it fifteen years ago, rumor had it that the rich doctors and car dealers paid twenty thousand bucks for their daughters to bow before the cardinal. I was raised Catholic, but I lost what few shreds of religion I had when I heard the old gray cardinal tell the ballroom, “You are the backbone of the church.” I thought of my grandmother and her friends, working the St. Philomena’s bake sales until their feet hurt, to make two hundred dollars for the church. The cardinal had just wiped out their hard labor in favor of some guys who uncapped a pen. The cardinal must have forgotten that part in the Gospel about the widow’s mite.

  The Veiled Prophet Ball was even weirder. This was supposed to be for the richest and most powerful families in the city. The Veiled Prophet was always an old white corporate guy who wore robes and covered his noggin with a funny-looking crowned veil. But nobody laughed at this getup. Young society women in white dresses actually had to bow down before him. Not just bow—prostrate themselves on the floor. Would you let your daughter do that? You didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see the symbolism. Especially when the sons didn’t bow. To me, it looked like the rich families were saying they were willing to sacrifice their daughters to money and power. I thought being rich meant you didn’t bow down to anyone, but Lyle, who had family money, said I missed the point. He didn’t go to either ball, by the way.

  The Veiled Prophet was weird from a news standpoint too. The Gazette never printed the name of the Veiled Prophet. Anyone who was anyone claimed to know who the veiled bigwig was, and Babe, our gossip columnist, always came back from the ball and told his friends. The VP’s name was supposed to be a secret from us little people. To know his name was a sign you belonged to the city’s ruling class. At a features meeting, I told our then managing editor, Hadley Harris III, we should print the Veiled Prophet’s name. He was as shocked as if I’d wanted to run nude photos of the Prophet’s Queen of Love and Beauty.

  “We have a city tradition to maintain,” Hadley said firmly, “and we will uphold it.”

  I thought it wasn’t a tradition. It was a promise in writing that the Gazette wouldn’t name the Veiled Prophet—and would extend the same courtesy to the area’s white ruling class. The old boys could make their backroom deals without accountability. The paper’s first loyalty was to the city establishment. The top editors all went to the Veiled Prophet Ball. Even the publisher, who lived most of the time in Boston, flew in to attend the silly thing.

  The only ball I wanted to go to was the biker’s society ball, and it was much harder to get in to. In biker circles, it didn’t matter how important your dead relatives were. Money wouldn’t help either. In fact, it might hurt. This society was based on skill. If you could handle a bike, you were admired. Tickets to the Leather and Lace Ball were twelve dollars. But you could buy them only at a HOG chapter meeting or a Harley dealer, and you had to act quickly. The thousand tickets were gone in two days. After that, Sonny had been offered a hundred dollars for a ticket to the ball. He always said no.

  A big hot Harley was not just the perfect centerpiece for this ball, it was the only centerpiece. The only other thing on the tables were bottles of beer. Anything else would have been a distraction. At the Leather and Lace Ball, the dancers were the decoration. Each new arrival was more incredible. Behind Sonny, I could see a tall blonde with long straight hair, wearing a lace body stocking and a fringed miniskirt loosely laced up the sides. Her guy wore the biker’s formal wear: a black Harley T-shirt, black jeans, and a panther tattoo. His black beard was braided, biker style, to keep it from blowing in his face while he rode. I had an almost overpowering urge to yank it. Most guys wore some variation on this costume. But there were notable exceptions. A big tawny-haired man in fringed buckskin looked like he’d stepped off the set of a Western. A broad-shouldered man dressed like a riverboat gambler in a black frock coat and ruffled shirt looked like he was still on the set. Verrrry nice. He was talking to a tiny brunette wearing a black lace blouse over a white lace bra, a scrap of skirt, and thigh-high boots with white bows up the back. Her friend had hair the color of cold beer, a black body stocking, red bra, and jeans with heart cutouts down the legs. I bet there wasn’t an unbought body stocking in a fifty-mile radius.

  I loved it. This was the only society ball where there wasn’t a tummy tuck or a face-lift in the whole room. Real biker women weren’t afraid of a few sags, lines, or saddlebag thighs. I saw a red-haired woman with her love handles boldly outlined by black lace. Her man, who sported a matching gut, couldn’t keep his hands off her overhangs. It gave me hope for when I turned forty, only three years from now. I was thirty-seven and holding, but my grip wasn’t as good as his.

  “Looks like your anti-RUB measures succeeded,” I told Sonny. “This isn’t the Malcolm Forbes crowd.” He smiled his crooked smile. “We tried to discourage the yups,” he said proudly. “Most of these bikers aren’t your ZIP-code riders.”

  He saw the puzzled look on my face.

  “Those are guys living in your desirable ZIP codes, rich guys who buy Harleys for status and take them out three weekends a year. The people here are mostly your big-mileage riders. They’ll put ten, twenty, thirty thousand miles a year on their bikes. They’re not afraid to get a few bugs in their teeth.”

  As Sonny bragged, in walked the biggest, gaudiest RUB I’d ever seen. She entered the same way a roach strolls across your kitchen floor when you’re trying to convince a stuffy relative that you keep a clean house. This particular bug was an exotic breed. Her blond hair had been artfully tossed for about eighty bucks, and she wore at least three thousand dollars of designer leather. I recognized the outfit. I’d seen it in Vogue. It was by Escada, or Versace, or one of those designers who use lots of gold buttons and gold braid. She was wearing leather to the Leather and Lace Ball, but it was the wrong kind. Her outfit was soft designer leather. Real biker leather is hard because it acts as armor when you fall off the bike. Her outfit would have been stunning in her circles. But here she looked ridiculous, the way Marie Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess must have looked to a real sheepherder.

  As she walked closer, I recognized not just her outfit but her face. Holy cowhide! This was Sydney Van-der Venter. She really was a socialite, a former maid of honor in the Veiled Prophet court, and cochair of a half-dozen major galas and parties. Her picture was always in Babe’s column, but I bet she wasn’t too pleased with his last mention. Babe ran an item about her upcoming ugly divorce. Babe called Sydney “the bitter half” and said she was the estranged wife of local venture capitalist Hudson Vander Venter. Sydney and Hudson lived in Ladue, the richest suburb of St. Louis—at least they had when Babe announced the breakup. She had the underfed look favored by fashionable types. Sydney was fortyish, face-lifted, dyed, and dieted almost to starvation. What was this woman doing at a biker ball in low-rent South St. Louis?

  “How’d she get in?” I asked Sonny.

  “She doesn’t count.” He shrugged.

  “She does if you read Babe,” I said.

  “Gimme a break,” said Sonny. “Do I look like I read Babe? She goes out with a guy in our HOG chapter—Jack.”

  This was more incredible. Jack lived in my neighborhood. He wasn’t quite what Sonny called a one-percenter, but he was somewhere between an angel and a Hell’s Angel. Bikers have a dirty little secret: Even the hardest riding, toughest-looking were mostly family men and women who held responsible jobs, had nice kids, and went to church. They just liked to ride hard and look bad. The one-percenters—the rare ones involved in drugs, prostitution, mayhem, and murder—around on the edges added some glamour. Personally, if I was going to take up with a
bad biker, I could find one handsomer—and less hairy—than Jack.

  “I can’t believe Sydney Vander Venter hangs around a guy who wears a helmet that says ‘Helmet Laws Suck,’” I told Sonny.

  He took a thoughtful sip of beer and said, “Hey, she spent most of her life with prissy guys in suits. Now she wants to experience real life. Jack wants to experience real money. You can’t blame either one. If she . . .”

  I didn’t hear the rest. My attention went elsewhere. A couple strolled by in a jaw-dropping getup. She was wearing nothing but black leather boots and a black lace body stocking. It was obvious—in that outfit—that she was a natural blonde. It was also obvious she had serious muscles.

  “Who’s that?” I said, awed by the raw display.

  “That’s Stephanie, Ms. Gypsy Tour,” he said. “She’s the woman who handled her bike best at the trials. She comes by her skills naturally. She’s an over-the-road trucker.”

  “That’s quite a pair,” I said.

  “She is built like a brick shithouse,” Sonny said, and his crooked grin slipped into a leer.

  “I meant Stephanie and her escort make quite a pair,” I said.

  “Oh, him. That’s her boyfriend, Crazy Jerry,” he said, and shrugged. Crazy Jerry was nobody I’d shrug away. He had almost as many muscles as she did, plus a flawless tan. I could tell because he was wearing only a black vest, black leather chaps, and a black Harley G-string. I looked, then quickly looked away. Almost every woman in the room did the same thing. It wouldn’t be good for our health to stare too much at Jerry’s stuffed G-string. Stephanie looked like she’d decked more than one man and wouldn’t hesitate to hit a defenseless woman.

  I noticed Sydney couldn’t keep her eyes off the guy’s crotch, and she was pretty obvious. If she didn’t stop staring, Stephanie would boot her designer derriere all the way back to Ladue. Sydney had a flush on her face that didn’t come from her Chanel blusher. Judging by the drink in her hand, Sydney was chugging a biker favorite—Jack and Coke—a lethal combination if you’re not used to it. The sweet, strong Jack Daniel’s sipping whisky is hidden in the sweeter Coke. It tastes harmless going down. Then you try to stand up and realize you’re blitzed. Sydney must have been really drunk to stare at another woman’s man that way.